Silbury Hill forum 180 room
Image by thesweetcheat
Silbury Hill

Lame Ass EH druid @ Silbury lock

close
more_vert
nemeton N
nemeton Aug 4, 2004 15:02:10
Replying to nigelswift

blimey! went for a walk and the thread explodes!!

Some interesting comments, many of which I agree upon. However..... ( ;-0 )

the repeated use of term 'posing': This I think comes from a basic differentiation of views. I knosw this is very generalistic, but I feel that many members of this list (the ones I know certainly) are not of the type (in the psychological sense) to attend ceremonies, they perhaps have qualtatively different reasons for being 'interested' in ancient history and the like (whic is of course as valid as any other reason). This compares to people who go to places like ave or silbury for 'spiritual' ( or cosmic?!!) reasons. Therefore people will have different views on how we should approach thses sites and 'use' them. This is perhaps the root of the disagreements. Terry is a Druid (not getting in to THAT arguement!) who rightly or wrongly is doing what he believes to be the correct way. i.e. he is conducting ceremony.

Ceremony is a representaion, spritual, physical, and metaphorical; nothing more. Were the people whom conducted ceremony at West Kennet, Hetty Pegler, or wherever any less posing? Picture the scene, 3600BC at West Kennet (or thereabouts), man in full shaminic dress passing over the spirit and body (parts!) of a great leader to the afterworld, and keith from kennet says to his mate - oooh 'ark at 'im, all dressed up and waving his arms about - posing get.......... (please dont pull me up on historical accuracy, you get the picture...!!)

So - posing - maybe. Wrong -deserve to be lampooned? depends on your stanpoint i suppose.

As for disuading terry why? If I thought for one moment intentions were dishounarable or it is morally / ethically / spritually wrong, I would shot him down myself! I can see the arguments from both sides honestly. I guess I wanted to see if other people could too.

regards

Me too.
Tom, you are indeed a Wise Heathen (and there's only 104 of those come up in a Google search!)

The moral of the row, I think, is that if you really care for Silbury Nemeton, it would be good to discourage Terry from a repeat next year, and until the damn thing's fixed.

N nemeton
nemeton Aug 4, 2004 15:03:07
Replying to nemeton

sorry forgot to delete previous msg AGAIN!! D'oh

N nigelswift
nigelswift Aug 4, 2004 15:42:56
Replying to nemeton

Posing: c'mon, if he'd been wearing a mitre and you'd been passing by you'd have said "look at that posing bishop" wouldn't you?! I accept he was doing what he believed was a possible true replication, but guess what, shamans are the world's greatest posers! I don't mind that, we're all posers in our way, I do it in all sorts of ways, I just wish he'd do his away from Silbury for the next year or two.

Anyhow, 2 reasons to try to dissuade him just now:

Joe public associates him with the Silbury campaign. He IS part of it as he wants it fixed of course, but Joe Public is likely to dismiss him as a dope, like it or not, and the whole campaign with him.

EH would like to dismiss us all as dopes, and he's a convenient part of the campaign they can point at as evidence of our dopery. It's hard enough trying to have technical arguments about engineering issues with the top archaeologist in the country armed with the (unpublished) reports of professors of mining engineering as it is. We're doing OK, and have pretty much won the argument thanks to material they inadvertently sent us, BUT it's not easy, and Terry announcing to the world that Silbury was built to be an enormous fountain is noise we can well do without.

Take him up Snowdon for a year or two, until it's fixed. A natural hill is probably more authentic for Lammas anyway!