Silbury Mundi

Silbury Hill 180

Image by Spiddly

wideford Oct 27, 2007 14:09:11

Am also catching up on "3rd Stone". In issue 35 an article by R.W.Morell is based on the idea that a large chunk of oak found by the Duke of Northumberland's men is the remains (now lost) of a world pillar sticking through the centre of the mound. The comparison he makes is with pre-Buddhist stupas (for a moment I thought of the Egyptian ben-ben mound, but that is a different case, no Irminsul equivalent). Does anyone here know anything further ? If it were true, unless Silbury is completely unique you would expect similar poles to have been found elsewhere in Britain. Were there ?

Littlestone Oct 27, 2007 15:42:41

Replying to wideford

The comparison he makes is with pre-Buddhist stupas...

Ha! you beat me to it widford :-) When I heard about turf being brought from afar and laid on the primary mound at Silbury the first thing I thought was stupas. This from Wikipedia* on stupas, "The stupa is the latest Buddhist religious monument and was originally only a simple mound made up of mud or clay... They evolved into large hemispherical mounds with features such as the torana (gateway), the vedica (fence-like enclosure evolved from the vedic villages), the harmika (a square platform with railings on top of the stupa), chattrayashti (the parasol or canopy) and a circumambulatory around the stupa." Sounds a bit familiar ;-)

Hear tell by the way that 3rd Stone is coming back next year under a different name.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupa

Rhiannon Oct 27, 2007 15:48:01

Replying to wideford

this is an excerpt of where the stuff about the pole comes from:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/post/32849/miscellaneous/silbury_hill.html
It's on Google Books but not so as you can see it, irritatingly.

fitzcoraldo Oct 27, 2007 16:26:16

Replying to wideford

Howdo Mr W
Similar thoughts of Irminsul crossed my mind when watching the recent Silbury tv show especially as they dated the hole to the Saxon period. As Copey said 'Yggdrasilbury'.
As for similar poles. We have a round barrow on the North York Moors called Stang Howe. A stang being a pole.

cheers
fitz

moss Oct 31, 2007 07:05:56

Replying to wideford

"The riddle of Silbury, unsolved after 4,300 years"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/richard_morrison/article2771879.ece

Someone is having fun with foolish speculation....

"All that effort, planning and ingenuity, gone into producing a monument to a belief, a person, a regime, an event, that must have seemed frightfully important at the time, yet is now totally erased from human chronicle and consciousness. Few other places on the planet induce so profound a sense of mankind’s microscopic insignificance when measured on cosmic timescales. "

FourWinds Nov 1, 2007 06:48:37

Replying to wideford

There was a the void of a large trunk found at the centre of the mound at Navan Fort, Co. Armargh.

Some accounts tell of standing stones on the top of Newgrange and Knowth.

Then there's ... http://www.megalithomania.com/show/image/275 ... The mound is probably just a pile of post-glacial gravel, but noone's checked.