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nigelswift N
nigelswift Jul 31, 2003 10:29:54
Replying to BrigantesNation

... and the greatest of these is Power.
Democract has always been, and still is, an aberration in the way humans behave. Absolutism rules! (ho ho). The French, who are supposed to have invented modern democracy started by simply substituting one absolute dictatorship with another. It took us until the American Constitution to even think of the idea of Separation of Powers, and ever since then the Presidency has worked to subvert the concept as much as it could. It's the way we are.

Your three things, power, religion and communication are an indivisiblre trinity to my mind, and if a monument displays one it is bound to have involved the other two as well. At least, if it's not the case, those people were very different to all we know of how people are these days.

B BrigantesNation
BrigantesNation Jul 31, 2003 10:53:32
Replying to nigelswift

Yes, but there must have been symbolism - a component structure.

The job of a causeway is to provide a link, a causeway lined with stones or totems becomes a symbolic one - the totems representing the ancestors perhaps.

For a symbolic causeway to work it must have things to link, the most powerful things will have symbolised power and religion.

Could it not be, that the burial mounds were the sybolism of power and the vehicle for the transfer of power? that the ritual involved visiting your dead leader during his transition to god-state and thus having their worldly power passed on to you? After that period of transfer, a procession was required - to show all who was in charge and to have that fact acknoweldged by the religious leaders.

I quite like this idea of barrows = power.