No doubt about it, Stonehenge is one impressive place. But what was it for? Was it an ancient sacrificial temple to the goddess? Was it a prehistoric computer and celestial observatory? Or was it something else?
According to Timothy Taylor, a lecturer in archeology at the University of Bradford in northern England, Stonehenge was a sexual monument. Taylor advances this idea in The Prehistory of Sex, his new book chronicling the sexual obsessions of Stone Age men and women. Taylor believes that during the Neolithic men were weaned early to be made into warriors. This situation, he says, left men so frustrated that they erected stone circles like Stonehenge "as a huge exercise in psychological compensation for the loss of
Though Taylor's theory is titillating, some experts find it naive. Engineer Donald Cyr, publisher of the periodical Stonehenge Viewpoint, for instance, finds Taylor's penetration theory "off by about 90 degrees." Cyr contends that Stonehenge was a meteorological observatory created to study halos. Since the climate of the Neolithic was different than the present (there were more ice crystals in the atmosphere, according to Cyr's theory) atmospheric phenomena like shafts of light and halos were commonplace. Cyr believes that the pillars of Stonehenge mark where these halos appeared at various times of the year.
"Just before the sun rose through a veil of ice crystals in ancient mornings," Cyr explains, "a great column of light seemed to be slowly erected upward. Then suddenly, just as the sun appeared, the rising column was topped by a 'vee,' or bottom half of a partial halo, suggestive of the naked female anatomy. Contact lasted five minutes. This explanation is purely scientific, involving floating ice crystals and halo configurations well known to meteorologists, and observed even these days from time to time."
Despite the theories, no one knows the truth about Stonehenge. The only certainty is this: While evidence for sexual obsessions among the Neolithic may still be scant, we've documented its rampant nature in modern humans for sure.
--Patrick Huyghe
Stone Age people regarded the Earth as female and believed in the regenerative power of the male organ, Taylor says, "and at places like Stonehenge they put it all together." The shaft of golden light that streams across the heel stone into Stonehenge uprights at midsummer, he adds, represents "the sun god firing his semen into the hollow space."
The mysterious -- and erotic? -- Stonehenge