AS a word, “discontent” borders on the farcical in attempting to do justice to what this winter means for many in the country. The long nights, the darkness coupled with the seemingly constant grey mantle during the day seem apt given the situation, the “financial situation” – a degenerative term of platitude and euphemism these days.
And yet there are moments of light. They may be counted only in the minutes sometimes, but they are there nevertheless. At a time of harsh realities, sometimes symbols provide the best source of hope precisely because the gombeen man cannot physically grasp it as he would the rood and perch, inflating it, rezoning it and boxing citizens into it as a newly constructed eyesore of glass and steel, a repository of damp and electrical problems.
There are those who like to keep faith – notwithstanding the fragility of the Tara-M3 debate – in the symbol of Newgrange as it is in midwinter.
There is a rule of thumb employed by those interested in Irish prehistory when one needs to remember the theological preferences of our ancestors, and beyond. As the Celtic people in Ireland looked at the earth for their gods, so those preceding them – the great stone builders – looked to the sky for theirs. There is no desire to wade into a debate on whether “Celtic” people really existed as an ethnic group or any such thing, but I am merely using this term for those we associate with the latter stages of our prehistory. These people had an economy based in the main on cattle. Thus, a female slave was measured in value as the equivalent of three milch cows, and the need to transport this most important commodity led to the building of roads – bóthar in Irish from bó for “cow”. Conditions on the ground were of immense concern to the Celtic people, theirs being a society reliant on the booley method of cattle-rearing. For them, the new year corresponded to our Halloween, when the first frosts hit the ground. It was welcomed by the building of fires on the now hard ground, the tine cnámh or bonfire.
The Neolithic people may have been partial to the odd steak themselves, but cereal crops were central to their own existence. Thus the patterns of the sun were monitored closely: sow after the spring equinox; have done with the harvest by its autumnal counterpart. The shortening days were of great importance to these people, of course. It is almost without doubt that the principal deity of these people was solar-based. Why else build such immense structures as those of the Boyne Valley corresponding as they do with the equinoxes and solstice. These passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. “Tombs”! Newgrange, with its estimated 200,000 tonnes of stones, its sods of earth stripped from hectares of pasture, its quartz from Wicklow and granite from Down, the 20-odd years of its construction. All this to provide merely for a final resting place? Hardly. To give an analogy posited by an archaeologist some years ago: imagine 4,000 years from now, some antiquarians are examining what remains of this past millennium – presuming the contemporary glass and steel constructions of today have gone quietly into the night. These antiquarians come across Christchurch. Or Canterbury, or Notre Dame; huge, fabulous constructions, elaborate and awe-inspiring, marvels and a complete puzzlement as to how the technology that permitted such buildings to remain standing was possessed so long ago. So the antiquarians wander inside, unsure as to the function of these buildings. Inside they find a tomb or two of the privileged few to be buried in the cathedral, Thomas Becket in Canterbury, for example.
So there is the answer: the great stone tombs of Christchurch, Canterbury and Notre Dame – replete with barrel-vaulting and flying buttresses – are only that, tombs. Sure they have some great tricks of the light what with the rose windows and stained-glass, but mere tombs nevertheless. To apply this term then to structures such as Newgrange does an utter disservice. Like the great medieval cathedrals, they served primarily to exalt that which was seen as being the life source to the society. We will be optimistic and not attempt a Marxist interpretation of a day in the life of the typical labourer on site or the power-struggles and esteem sought by the patrons of such cathedrals. One must acknowledge the absolute exactness of the lintel on the roof box as being testament to the value the construction of Newgrange was approached with – two centimetres higher or lower than its position and the magical midwinter display would not occur.
The precarious existence of those times is far removed from us now. But all those millenniums ago, perhaps like today, the privileged few would enter the Newgrange passage in the predawn chill. The general population waiting in trepidation; the sun being the source of existence. An atavistic fear of a reappearance of some great freeze maybe. A moment of bated breath. The sun, in decline since June, is at its lowest point: will it reappear through the sun box and ensure another year of harvest?
Survival rests on a transcendental reality, something in the realm of a symbol, yet all too real at the same time.