This is the part where it gets awkward. Tell the facts straight, or tell how it felt? Either way, our conclusions will take some time to process. Some of the ideas sound so odd even to us that sharing them might need a new approach…though stranger things are published every day. Yet once again, on the surface, nothing happened.
Camera enthusiasts could doubtless explain the light and colour; I’m not sure that it matters whether there is a perfectly logical explanation or not. What we experienced opened up a new line of thought…new ideas… a better understanding, perhaps. As far as I am concerned, this was one of those times where logical reality takes second place to the magic of the moment.
We were in the inner chamber, looking out through the window that was never a window, having been beneath the earth of the original mound, at the carved stone that had also been buried and beyond it to the stone in the next field. I haven’t been able to find any measured information on that, but I would guess, from what we saw on site and from aerial photographs, that the two stones align with the passageway… and thus with the rising of the midsummer sun.
We experimented with sound once again, as we had at Presaddfed. Unlike our experience with the chanteater, though, here the chamber seemed to amplify and echo the sound, feeding it back as more a physical reverberation than a sound. They had buried a single, human earbone beneath the stone in the centre of the circle when it stood. Were they working with sound? As the ninth chant slowly faded, we stood in silence, hand in hand. To complete the circuit, I felt, I too had to speak, voicing a renewal of a long-ago dedication. And then it was done.
We stood a while, looking at the offerings. Almost at a loose end; the simple rite had changed the mood. I tried to take another picture through the ‘window’, but all I got was orbs…dust motes, perhaps, stirred up by the sound. It was while I standing in the light… while I was talking to them (“You can’t tell them that…””Why not? I talk to everything else…”) that my companion disappeared down the corridor behind me.
Shot after shot, just the dancing motes of light, changing colour from white to gold. “You have to see this…” He is standing with the camera, just outside the mound. His face is white, eyes wide, as he clicks the shutter. “The floor went red… and now look…”
I looked. The chamber is flooded with bright, golden light. As it streams out of the chamber, it meets the blue, casting shadows that bring the stones of the passageway to life. They look like statues, guardians… stone ghosts of the ancestors. High on the back wall of the chamber, there seems to be a boar painted, where there is no painting.
It was the strangest feeling, as if we were looking through a time tunnel or a rift in reality, seeing something that patently wasn’t there…or not any more… or not in this world. Yet we both saw and captured the same things. It wasn’t the sun… that was peeking over the top of the mound and not in line with the ‘window’. “Whatever it was came straight down the passage then, when it reached the entrance, it was just…gone.” Whatever it was, we were going back in…
There is a special atmosphere at this site. It is one of my favourites in Wales.
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Very special… we had been itching to visit for a good while.
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Enjoyed reading about this. Thx Sue
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It is a stunning site, Lucy, and well worth a visit if you get chance.
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wow, I wonder if you had slipped back into time or a place where time doesn’t exist. Perhaps through the use of sound. I believe that the ancients used sound to lift the heavy things, e.g. the pyramid stones. There is corroboration of this in the ancient vedic texts.
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I have a feeling that sonics were very important, Adele. Whatever was going on, it was pretty amazing.
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Reblogged this on Sun in Gemini.
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Thanks, Steve x
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Wonderful.
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It was 🙂
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A very strange experience. I imagine it still haunts your thoughts.
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I think it will for some time to come.
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Oooo! Seems to be the perfect word.
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Oh, so it wasn’t the sun? How amazing, on so many levels. Time is elastic, so perhaps you just… stretched it a little?
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The sun was only casting that small, triangular patch of light and then not directly. Whatever was going on there, we eventually came away having experienced something wholly unexpected.
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I’ll say! What good fortune to have been there in that moment. You could go further and say with all that happened that you were meant to be there… But I won’t do that 😉 Hope you’re having a lovely day x
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Wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing 😉
A lovely, quiet day here, Helen. 🙂 x
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Of course not 😉
Glad you’re having a lovely day – we are too xx
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I rather thought you might be 🙂
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This post is so weird because.. and I really have no idea how it relates…. but something tells me it does. Archeologists discovered New Grange was built to interact with sound waves such as drumming in the cruciform head chamber. The corbelled roof warped the sound waves amplifying sub-sonics, which act on the body like physical forces. One visual representation of this was they caused the loose sand floor to produce changing patterns, that are echoed in the carvings at the mouth. They speculated if the site was originally built for ritual purposes instead of burial – for example the ritual simulated death and rebirth of the fertility king, then as the king crawled through the passageway the sounds would produce states of altered consciousness. I wonder if this somehow fits in with the change in light? Humans are visual creatures- the only apes that see in colour. Pressure on the eyes or even vibrations in the skull might stimulate the pineal gland might producing unearthly visual effects. I learned about this many years ago and only have faulty memory to go on, so excuse me for putting it so badly. But one thing I am sure of, from all these recent wonderful posts, is the ancients knew what they were doing even if their explanations might be entirely different from our ‘scientific’ ones today
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Oddly enough, Paul, I have been delving into just that research sincewe were at Bryn Celli Ddu and I am sure that what they found with the soundwaves there has a lot to do with what we experienced.
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More chills. Those orbs are spectacular!
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It was that kind of place 😉
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Reblogged this on Stuart France.
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😮 No words. Incredible. Exquisite. Perfection…
This makes things interesting for September! Bring your best en-chant-er… we have a sonic theory to test. No pressure… 😉
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He will be there… 😉
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