© Tom Lethbridge 1972 [1]
The standing stones of Callanish are in their way quite as remarkable as those of Stonehenge, for they form a strange pattern. In the middle is a single pillar fifteen feet high with a small and, probably later, rifled megalithic tomb at its foot. The central pillar forms the hub of a circle of stones enclosing an area thirty-seven feet across, or about the size of a tennis court. From this radiate one double and three single lines of uprights. They nearly form a cross, but do not quite do so. It is a strange and rather uncanny place to see in the usual pouring rain as it stands on a low hill. The double avenue heads almost true north for nearly a hundred yards.
Loch Roag is divided into two by the island of Bernara, which fits into it rather like a biscuit stuck in a dog’s mouth. On the shore of Bernara facing Callanish are two more standing stones, looking as if they once marked a path across to the island where now is sea. It was probably dry land when the stones were put up, for fresh water Bronze Age peats can be seen round the shore today for several feet below high tide mark.
Archaeologists as a whole pay little attention to Callanish. It does not appear strange to them that such a remarkable construction should be found in such a remote setting. If it had been in Kent or Gloucestershire it would be thronged, but in the Outer Islands nobody cares. Yet it is the very situation of the thing which is so strange.
It stands far out on the rim of the western ocean and there seems to be no possibility that there can ever have been a large population out there. Why should there be? The land must at the best of times have always been very poor. The Ring of Stennis in Orkney is not so strange, for the Orkneys are not so bleak as this stretch of the Long Island.
Not long ago it was suggested that Callanish was raised as a kind of substation of Stonehenge and both were intended as observatories to plot lunar eclipses. Even if this idea were correct, it implies a great organization far away who could journey to the distant north and either bring their labour with them or collect enough local men to do the work. I do not feel that it makes sense. Neither do I see how any great religious idea could have been called into play. Why put it there? There must have been more populous areas elsewhere, where such things could have been needed.
However, suppose that some survey party had been dropped off out there to look for minerals or any other purpose, it might have been necessary to construct a landing mark of identifiable shape so that supplies could be dropped, or the explorers could be picked up when their time was up.
Callanish in Lewis and Stennis in Orkney, could they not have been the identification signals set up by two exploration parties to draw attention to themselves so that there would be no doubt where their bases were situated? All this would be hundreds of years before another station, the bluestone ring, was transported to Stonehenge.
If this possibly absurd suggestion has any foundation in fact, was it all in vain? Were none of these stations ever collected again because something happened to their home planet? Did these pioneers work their way back to more developed lands and there, by their superior technical knowledge, become for a time sons of God? Did they naturally become kings and rulers and try to keep their stock reasonably distinct for thousands of years, until philosophers formulated the idea that all men were equal?
Probably we will never know the answer, but it is possible to ask the question now; first because men are beginning to make exploratory expeditions to worlds themselves and second because a very great quantity of information is being published suggesting that unknown flying machines may be coming from outside to examine our own planet. As I said before, I have had no experience of this, yet I find the mass of observed facts need an explanation.
There seems to be a considerable difference between the monuments on the outlying islands and peninsulas and others far inland. They may represent successive stages in some form of exploratory development. If I am right in identifying Tipperary as the original site of the Stonehenge bluestones, its situation is not unlike that of Stonehenge, being convenient to river systems and old trackway routes along both of which native labour could be called in to help.
Another famous circle, Avebury, could have been the original central point in the south of Britain before Stonehenge was thought of. If we are trying to plot the possible plan of exploration, then Avebury would come high on the list. But Avebury was less convenient by water though better situated for movements by land.
Of course the most dramatic of all these constructions in the west, for the later Stonehenge is in a different category, is Carnac on Quiberon Bay in Brittany. Here the remains of eleven long avenues of standing stones still survive, with parts of a great stone circle largely ruined by recent houses.
The stone avenues apparently once extended for several miles and over a thousand stones still remain in place. If there was a central base where power was generated to operate bio-electronic beacons, this would have been the place. Although much further south, it stands in a somewhat similar position to Callanish, with a drowned land surface beneath the sea in front of it.
The purpose of these great stone avenues is completely unknown.[2] There are many burial mounds associated with them as there are around Stonehenge; but that does not say that the rows had anything to do with burial. If there was any religious purpose in their construction, surely it implies a population much more of the order of that today than one of scattered and primitive farmers? One would have thought that the whole population of Brittany in those days would not have provided a fitting congregation.
We will leave Carnac for the moment and return to Britain. I have already mentioned the stone rows on Dartmoor. Of course these are in no way comparable to the massed avenues at Carnac, but they are reasonably impressive and there are quite a number of them dotted about the moor. I have taken the approximate bearings of eight of them and projected these lines to see what happens.
It was obvious at once that the one at Black Tor when projected cuts another row at Warren House, in an area seamed and scarred with very ancient tin workings. It may be a coincidence, but these two lines could have given you a cross-bearing on rich deposits of tin, long before maps are supposed to have existed.
In any case how did anybody know that there was tin in Britain without long and elaborate prospecting? I have never liked theories based on ideas of projected lines, but it is curious nevertheless. If there is anything at all in the beacon idea, this gives it some confirmation.
The two rows mentioned are not the only suggestive ones. That at Sharp Tor when produced runs very close to Avebury itself. Those at Fernworthy, Chagford and Higher White Tor hit the great monolith on the summit of Exmoor near The Chains.
None of this is quite exact according to modern measurements, but if you were making observations in an unknown and unmapped land, they would be remarkably good. It may all be nonsense, or it may not. But if it is nonsense something will turn up to show that it is.
It has been hinted that Carnac might be the most important place in the whole system. If so, and if there is anything in the idea at all, one at least of the stone rows on Dartmoor should give an approximate bearing on Carnac. Actually three do, the double row on Headland Warren and the single ones at Dartmeet and Butterdon.
I do not even suggest that this idea of bio-electronic beacons is the right answer. All I am trying to demonstrate here is that there is something here which could possibly fit into a picture of ancient exploration which we know nothing about.
However, to return to the spread of the remnants of bio-electronic knowledge, let us look at some of the traditions still handed on. The islanders of Easter Island believe that the great stone statues there were set up by the ‘mana’, that is the extra-sensory power of the king, who was especially trained to develop it.
This takes us at once to the world wide belief that such power was available and could be used. If such power can be utilised, surely that is how Stonehenge and other monuments must have been moved and erected? Merlin is said to have done it by marvellous power.
Is this very different, except in degree, to the almost universal stone-throwing trick of the poltergeist, which is frequently reported from all over the old world and the new? A poltergeist is apparently the involuntary mental movement of solid objects by what is now known as telekinesis. If the mind of a somewhat mentally retarded girl can somehow produce numerous wet pebbles from the bed of a stream and throw them about in a house, what could have been done by a mind specially trained to use this power?
What is known about telekinesis, if we must use this depressing technical term? It is probably much more common than most people suppose and frequently passes unnoticed. It may even take place at times in every family and simply be unrecognized as such, for the bulk of modern town-dwelling humanity is deeply unobservant.
How many people have not had the experience of a letter vanishing completely? Of course they usually put this down to carelessness on somebody’s part, or forgetfulness, or something of that kind. But very often there is no reason to suppose that this is the right answer. Yet it is usually so small a matter that it is passed over as an accident. It is only when poltergeist activity becomes really violent that anybody takes any notice of it and even then they often try to explain it by trickery. It was not so in earlier times. Everything out of the ordinary was carefully noticed.
But are we talking nonsense? Is there any such thing as mana? I must say that I existed for quite a long time with a complete disbelief in such a force; now I am not quite so sure. I rather wonder whether civilized man has not just forgotten how to use it through being so pleased with his other attainments. Even today people still say ‘thought is power’, although I doubt if many of them know what they mean by this remark.
Now it is possible to demonstrate that there is something in the theory of mana. We have, as I describer earlier, done repeatable experiments with pebbles picked off the beach at Seaton and tested them with a pendulum. If the pebbles are picked up with a pair of tongs and then tested one by one, they only react to their chemical composition.
But if I take one out and throw it against a wall, then it will respond to the 24-inch male rate. If my wife does the same, the answer is 29-inches for the female. This can be repeated as long as you can be bothered to do it. It is a scientific test, in that it is repeatable, and it shows that some unknown property of the man or woman passes from him or her to the stone. This makes the existence of mana a little less absurd.
The thing which surprised me most was that mana is extremely long lasting. I found the dates for the sling stones from the camps to be all around 320 BC. Was it then mana which gave the effect of an electric shock when my wife and I tested the stones of the Merry Maidens stone circle in Cornwall? It seems that it must have been. If so mana is apparently a bio-electronic force and it should be possible to learn a lot about it.
These experiments with pebbles differ from poltergeist phenomena in one important matter. The poltergeist operator does it involuntarily and probably has no idea that he or she is doing it. Our experiments were deliberate. We were trying to see whether we could put anything into the electromagnetic fields of the stones which could be detected. Call the anything mana if you like; whatever name is given to it, it appears to exist.
Now, if by using trivial objects such as pebbles off the beach you can show that it is possible to alter their electromagnetic fields by making use of them, what could be learnt if you really got down to years of study of the why and the wherefore of it all? Suppose many men through long periods studied it as closely as modern physics has been studied, might not the results be quite astonishing?
It seems to me that scraps of evidence all over the world appear to indicate that this has once been done. But was it ever done here? Is it not possible that what now survives is but a fragment of all that could be remembered of what was taught to the local people by our hypothetical explorers?
Were the local people not encouraged to build up the power of the stone circles and other beacon marks by dancing, and had not some explanation been given them of why it was necessary for them to do so? Of course this is just a guess, but where did so-called primitive peoples such as the Kahunas of the Pacific get their learning?
There is no anthropological suggestion that Pacific Islanders ever sat down to think out metaphysical ideas for themselves. The teachings of the Kahunas seem to have been derived from a far higher level of civilization than anything observed by Europeans when they first made their way into the Pacific.
Their control of fire, the forces of nature, of disease and so on and their beliefs in the different levels of man’s existence seem to argue a long period of deep reflection and study behind them. The higher self, for instance, is surely something which is only beginning to be glimpsed today by people working on extra-sensory perception; while the lower self seems to have been just touched on by modern students of the subconscious.
Your higher self, said the Kahunas, if you could get in touch with it, could do anything for you; but you had to be able to contact it. It was not God and you were part of it. In fact it was very like the group soul, whose existence was apparently reported by Myers and others, after their deaths, to the research workers of a generation ago and to the spiritualists of today. It is remarkable that something of the kind can be deduced from a study of the pendulum.
Endnotes
[1] Source: The Legend of the Sons of God. A Fantasy? By T.C. Lethbridge; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972, ISBN 2-283-98128-8.
[2] The Lethbridge Symposium in June 2010 discusses new discoveries by David Brandon.[Ed]
