Crown of Thorns [Rings of Stones]

Rings of Stones continue our "Crown of Thorns" motif of vulvic circles of phallic points- [photo credits follow]

From Aubrey Burl's Preface, 1979- "In the years when Egypt was young, long before the pyramids, at time when the earliest forms of writing and numbering were being developed in the Near East and when pathless forests and swamps obscured most of Western Europe, at this time a group of people in the British Isles, somewhere, built a stone circle. Its very simplicity hinders our understanding of it. Upright stones as tall as a man around a space a person could stroll across in half a minute, a few bits of human bone, patches of charcoal, these are all that remain of a place that people struggled to build many years ago." -page 46, "It can be seen that the sacred circle, whether of earth or of stones [or of wooden posts - see next], had a long tradition behind it in prehistoric Britain, linked to cults in which human bones were used in rites so powerful that there had to be a barrier between them and the ordinary world of the living." -page 49 "At many megalithic rings. . .the circles had been found to stand on sites of earlier settings of posts, At the Sanctuary in Witshire four consecutive timber rings may have been put up and rotted before the concentric circles of stones were raised around 2300BC. Elsewhere in England other wooden rings have been discovered, at Woodhenge, at Arminghall and at Bleasdale. Others lie undiscovered, their postholes invisible beneath the grass." Citation: Aubrey Burl, Rings of Stone, Lincoln Publishers, 1979 isbn 0899190006 RINGS OF STONE


Which leads us to speculate, that in addition to the extremely necessary "rings of stones" by Tiffany for a mere $13,000usd, above right, popular culture still requires circles of vertical posts as a barrier between the dead and the living - new(er) and old(er) below.



Photos: left/top - Calanais, Isle of Lewis, Scotland by Chameleon; left/bottom - Swinside, Cumbria, England by Richard Mudhar; middle/top - Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, England by Nick White and drawing by English Heritage. Right above - "Celebration" diamond rings by Tiffany NYC. Second photo: cemeteries in Riverside, Californa and Silver Plume, Colorado by author.