An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Stones and Stone Circles

Because of their association with the rites of paganism, standing stones and stone circles became natural meeting places for witches.

Probably the best-known place in this connection is the locality of the Rollright Stones, in the Cotswolds. (See COTSWOLDS, WITCHCRAFT IN THE.) The legend of these stones associates them with a witch.

The story goes that they were once a king and his army, who had invaded the country with the intention of usurping the kingdom of England. When he got as far as Rollright, he met a witch. He asked her to prophesy if he would be king of England. She replied that he must take seven strides to the top of the rising ground that looks over Long Compton, and if he could then see the village, he would be king.

If Long Compton thou shalt see,

King of England thou shalt be.

This looked easy, so he strode out confident of success; but when he had taken the seventh step, he found that the green mound of a long barrow hid the village from his view.

The witch cried triumphantly:

Sink down man, and rise up stone!

King of England thou shalt be none.

Immediately the invading king was turned into the standing stone called the King Stone. His followers became the stone circle, sometimes called the King’s Men; while some of his knights, who had hung back to plot among themselves, became the further group of stones called the Whispering Knights.

This story was firmly believed in by the country people of olden time. Furthermore, it was said that at midnight the Rollright Stones might become men again. They would join hands and dance; and anyone who saw this would either die or go mad.

This latter part of the legend must have been very useful in keeping people away from the stones after dark. One wonders whether the witches themselves aided the spread of this belief. We know that smugglers used to spread gruesome ghost stories about some place they did not want outsiders to come near, because they were using it for their own purposes. Witches could have done the same thing.

The belief that old standing stones and stone circles have an uncanny life of their own after dark, is widespread throughout Britain. People who live near the great stones of Avebury do not mind them at all in daylight; but many will not go near them at night.

There are innumerable stories about stones being really people, who have been turned to stone. Very often, especially in Cornwall, this is said to have been a punishment for some impiety, such as dancing or playing games on a Sunday. Originally, however, standing stones may have been regarded as the effigies of the dead, who were buried underneath. In Ireland and some parts of Scotland, standing stones used to have the rather sinister name in Gaelic of fear breagach, that is ’false men’ or ’counterfeit men’.

There are also a great many stories about stones and stone circles being a favourite haunt of the fairies. Sometimes country folk would surreptitiously leave offerings to the fairies there, to gain good luck or to avert ill luck. A frequent form which such offerings took was a libation of milk poured over the stone. Here ’the fairies’ may be the lingering folk-memory of pagan divinities. Sometimes a cup-like depression is found in such a stone, which has been hollowed out artificially, for the purpose of receiving offerings.

The early kings of England issued a number of edicts forbidding pagan rites at stones, along with various other observances which they classed as witchcraft. As late as the time of King Canute, at the beginning of the eleventh century A.D., such laws were proclaimed. (See LAWS AGAINST WITCHCRAFT.)

Another group of standing stones associated with witches’ meetings is the Hoar Stones in Pendle Forest. Here the Lancashire witches used to foregather in the seventeenth century. The Bambury Stone on Bredon Hill also marks a traditional meeting-place of witches. The witches of Aberdeen in 1596 admitted to dancing round “ane grey stane” at the foot of the hill of Craigleauch.

On the Continent also, we find some old sacred stone associated with the place of the witches’ Sabbat. Pierre de Lancre quotes a confessing witch, Estebene de Cambrue, as saying in 1567: “The place of this great convocation is generally called throughout the countryside the Lanne de Bouc. Here they give themselves to dancing around a stone, which is planted in that place, and upon which is seated a tall black man.” Lanne de Bouc means ’The Field of the Goat’; the “tall black man” was the Man in Black, the Devil of the coven.

Solitary menhirs, or blocks of stone—whether natural or artificial-which have a striking and impressive aspect, often attract some legend which associates them with the Devil. This provides another reason for connecting them with witches, in the popular mind at any rate. When there is a tradition of actual pagan worship associated with the stone, the connection may well go far back through the ages. Also, some modern witches have deliberately sought out ancient stones, in order to revive the powers latent in them or in the aura of the place.

Before people dismiss such an idea as ’primitive superstition’, we should remember that in Britain there are some of the most wonderful stone monuments in the world. They are relics of an elder faith, about which very little is known, but which was capable of inspiring people, our own ancestors, to marvellous endeavours.

Stonehenge, the ’Hanging Stones’, is absolutely unique. There is nothing like it anywhere else. It is also a mystery; we still do not know all the secrets of its construction, or precisely why it was built. For many years it was believed to have been the work of the Druids; but we know today that Stonehenge was already very old before any Druid ever set foot in Britain.

The Druids were priests and philosophers, who belonged to the Celtic people of the early Iron Age. They revered Britain as being the sacred island, which housed an older Mystery tradition than theirs and from which their own tradition was derived. Ceasar tells us that the noble Celtic families of the Continent of Europe used to send their sons to Britain to be inducted into the Druidical mysteries, because here in Britain the traditions were preserved in their purest form.

Now, we know that the Druids Caesar encountered in Europe, the Druids classical writers refer to, came to Britain in the wake of Celtic immigrants. So the only way that the statement about the Druidic traditions being at their purest in Britain makes sense, is if Britain was the original treasure-house of arcane lore, which one could call Proto-Druidic. Such magnificent monuments as Stonehenge and Avebury are further evidence to support this theory. The people who built these were no ignorant, skin-clad savages.

We have had to wait for the day of the computer to arrive, to discover how wonderful Stonehenge really is. A British-born astronomer, Professor Gerald S. Hawkins of Boston University, U.S.A., decided to test out exhaustively the theory that, beside the well-known summer solstice alignment, Stonehenge has other astronomical alignments of importance. He therefore fed all available data about the possible alignments of Stonehenge into a computer. The results were amazing.

Professor Hawkins has given us the story of his work on Stonehenge, in his book Stonehenge Decoded (Souvenir Press, London, 1966). Briefly, the computer revealed significant alignments to the rising and setting of the sun and moon at the equinoxes and solstices; some of which had not previously been suspected. More than this, it showed that Stonehenge itself could have been used as a computer, for the purpose of predicting eclipses.

Professor Hawkins calculated the odds against these alignments being mere coincidence. They worked out at 10 millions to one. In any other country but phlegmatic Britain, his book would have created a sensation. As it is, those who have read it with an open mind have realised that its conclusions mean a complete reappraisal of our ideas about the people of Ancient Britain.

Another revolutionary thinker about Britain’s past history, as shown in its stone monuments, is Professor Alexander Thom. Professor Thom has approached the problem from the viewpoint of mathematics, as applied to the measurements of the stone circles. He gives his conclusions in his book Megalithic Sites in Britain (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967).

Professor Thom has discovered that the people who built Britain’s stone circles, about 4,000 years ago, had a far profounder knowledge of mathematics than has hitherto been believed possible. Perhaps his most striking discovery is the fact that they used a standard unit of length for their work, throughout Britain. This unit of length Professor Thom has called the megalithic yard, because it is just a little shorter than the yard now in use. The megalithic yard works out at 2.72 feet; and the builders of the stone circles liked to get as many measurements as possible which were integral multiples of this unit.

The existence of this megalithic yard, and its use throughout Britain, immediately suggests a far greater degree of organisation in Ancient Britain than was previously imagined. The country’s prehistoric past is an enigma; a dark treasure cave, lit by a few beams of light.

Present-day British witches believe that their Old Religion, the Craft of the Wise, has its roots in the very ancient past, going back to the Stone Age, in which these megalithic monuments were built. As we have noted above, the observances of the Old Religion continued long after this country was officially converted to Christianity. They were associated with trees, rivers, sunlight, moonlight, ritual fire—all the things still associated with witch rites; and also with the enduring mystery of the massive, silent stones, left by those races who had vanished into the past.