FROM STONEHENGE TO SEATTLE: ECO-PROTEST,
ARCHAEOASTRONOMY AND NEW AGE COSMOLOGY
NICHOLAS CAMPION
Bath Spa University College, 51 Bellevue Crescent, Bristol BS8 4TF, UK
ABSTRACT. The cutting edge investigation of Stonehenge’s celestial connections - which has played such an
important part in the development of archaeoastronomy – has usually been conducted by scholars of impeccable
credentials in their fields, from Inigo Jones to Alex Thom, taking in William Stukeley, Norman Lockyer and Gerald
Hawkins along the way. In the field of sacred architecture as a whole we should add Isaac Newton and Charles Piazzi
Smyth as seminal influences. Yet their work is generally shunned by their modern intellectual peers and has instead
found acceptance in what is generally known as the ‘fringe’, represented typically by New Agers. This paper will
look at the adoption of archaeoastronomical theories by the esoteric and New Age movements, particularly in relation
to the Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals of the 1970s and 80s, and consider New Age cosmology as it emerged as
a focus for radical alternatives in the 1960s down to the eco-protests of the 1990s.
1. Introduction
The study of astronomy-in-culture leads inexorably to exploration of the use that culture
makes of astronomy. My arena of discussion is therefore the politics of culture and the
appropriation of ideas, including astronomical theories, by different groups in order to
reinforce their own ideologies. This study opens up the discussion of the impact of
contemporary archaeoastronomy on New Age ideas (for the New Age movement see York
1995 and Bowman and Sutclifffe 2000) in the context of environmental protest .
The history of archaeoastronomy as a discipline properly dates back to William Stukeley’s
surveys of Stonehenge in 1719 and 1721-1724, which laid the foundations for most modern
opinions of the site’s function, in particular its presumed connection with the Druids. There
are five other names who are particularly influential in New Age works on archaeoastronomy,
Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900), Alexander Thom, Gerald
Hawkins and Fred Hoyle. Piazzi Smyth is notable for his work on the pyramids while the
others specialised in Stonehenge and British megaliths, although Lockyer began by surveying
Greek and Egyptian temples. We should also in this respect note Isaac Newton’s concern with
prophecy and his view that Solomon’s temple contained an encoded plan of history and
chronology. This is not the place to look at detail at these astronomers’ work; the best analysis
of recent developments is by Clive Ruggles (1999). The combined summary, though,
(excluding Newton’s work) is that in the second millennium BC or earlier the Neolithic
inhabitants of north-west Europe and the near east not only aligned their sacred sites to the
stars, mainly their seasonal rising or setting, as well as to solar and lunar cycles, and
particularly the eight ‘Celtic’ calendar festivals (the solstices and equinoxes plus the quarter
festivals, Imbolc, Beltane, Lamas and Samhain), but were also capable of doing so with
remarkable accuracy. Thom’s work implied that British megalith builders anticipated Greek
mathematics while Hawkins explicitly compared them to modern astrophysicists.
2. Contested Landscapes
Stonehenge is one of a number of sites in Britain which has both been imbued with sacred
significance and has become the symbol of a spiritual and political alternative to mainstream
society. It has been described by Barbara Bender (1998) as a ‘contested landscape’, a physical
symbol wherein contemporary power struggles seek advantage by appealing to different
versions of the past. Of the other similar locations the most well known is probably
Glastonbury, a town whose role as a mystical tourist destination dates back to the twelfth
century. More recently the nearby Vale of Avalon was the venue for the most celebrated of
the British free festivals, the Glastonbury Fayre, held over the summer solstice in 1971. The
Fayre featured such miraculous events as the appearance of a mock sun, alleged UFO
sightings and a visit from the Indian guru Mahara-ji, head of the Divine Light Mission, while
the musical focus was a pyramid-shaped stage constructed on what is believed to be the most
important ley line in England, the so-called St. Michael line, which is traced from St.
Michael’s mount in Cornwall through Glastonbury Tor and on to the round Templar church in
Cambridge.
The Fayre was, though, much more than a rock festival. Its stated ideology brought together
British romantic socialism, with its roots in the seventeenth century, with 1960s ‘alternative’
culture and a cosmology taken from belief in the Age of Aquarius and the latest
archaeoastronomy. The festival organizers explicitly acknowledged the importance of such
influences on alternative cosmology as Alfred Watkins, the originator of the theory of ley
lines, John Michell, Katherine Maltwood, who devised the ‘Glastonbury zodiac’, and the late
twentieth century’s two most notable archaeoastronomers, Gerald Hawkins and Alexander
Thom. In this pantheon of heroes John Michell deserves a special mention. He had been
writing on archaeoastronomy in the radical ‘underground’ newspaper, The International
Times, in the late sixties, introducing the evolving alternative society to the works of Watkins,
Thom and Hawkins. His first book, The View Over Atlantis, was published in 1969 and
became a seminal text in the late twentieth century New Age movement. Combining
pyramidology, prophecies of the New Jerusalem from Revelation, with the myth that Joseph
of Aramathea (who, legend claims, carried Christ’s cross to Calvary) visited Glastonbury, and
drawing heavily on Stukeley, Lockyer, Piazzi Smyth, Thom and Hawkins, Michell lodged the
former firmly in the New age imagination, introduced a wider world to the concept of ley
lines and pretty well invented the modern study of ‘earth mysteries’.
The View Over Atlantis was written at a critical point in archaeoastronomy’s development.
Thom, Hawkins and Hoyle had apparently conclusively demonstrated the megalith builders’
astronomical and mathematical capabilities beyond all doubt and leading archaeologists were
flirting with their theories. Michell’s presentation of their work to the alternative society was
accomplished before the reaction, and academic archaeoastronomy’s withdrawal from their
extreme position, set in the late seventies and early eighties. Michell’s major work was
published at the high point of acceptance of Thom’s work in particular, and before its
widespread academic rejection. Written within the context of sixties alternativism and New
Age eschatology, it was given an urgency by the feeling that the world was approaching a
critical historical moment, the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.
The Glastonbury Fayre’s commemorative programme was directly influenced by The View
Over Atlantis. It described a world of scientific forces known to the ancient and modern
mystics, but not to modern scientists, in which astronomically aligned monuments, including
the pyramid and the British stone circles, could transform celestial influences for the benefit
of humanity and the earth, and that these could be enhanced by shamanistic rituals. Both the
1971 Glastonbury Fayre’s timing (the summer solstice) and location (at the heart of the
‘Glastonbury Zodiac’) were seen by its organizers as profoundly significant and as the basis
of an overt political purpose. The Fayre’s political manifesto was set out in the
commemorative programme: ‘Man is fast ruining his environment. He is suffering from the
effects of pollution; from the neurosis brought about by a basically urban society; from a lack
of spirituality in his life. The aims of Glastonbury Fayre are, therefore: the conservation of our
natural resources; a respect for nature and life; and a spiritual awakening’.
So deeply was the memory of the 1971 Fayre ingrained in the alternative consciousness that
from 1978 it became an annual event, with one or two exceptions, up to 2000. The 1987
history of all the Glastonbury festivals to date softened its conclusion of the 1971 Fayre, but
made its political cosmology more overt, reporting that ‘many of the 12,000 who were there
enjoyed the experience and felt it to be a turning point in their own lives. They saw it as a
vision of what the Age of Aquarius could achieve with less emphasis on material possessions
and more on caring and sharing’. (Elstob and Howes 1987: 21). Although the Glastonbury
Festivals were conceived in an outburst of enthusiasm for peace, which they have by and
large managed to sustain, parallel developments have sometimes revealed the potential for
violence when the mainstream encounters the adherents of alternative cosmologies. The
conflict erupted not at Glastonbury but at Stonehenge where a series of annual free festival
conceived in the same spirit as the Glastonbury Fayre ended in violence in 1985 when a group
of travellers on their way to the festival were ambushed by the local police (Chippindale
1994: 250-261. See also Bender 1998). It was 2001 before the solstice was once again
celebrated peacefully.
There is an apparent direct lineage from the version of the alternative radicalism of the
sixties, epitomised at the Glastonbury Fayre and taking in the conflicts over Stonehenge, to
the eco-warriors of the nineties, a process paralleled in the USA by the progress from the
protests of the sixties to the anti-IMF and World Bank riots in Seattle in November 1999, one
permeated by New Age and neo-Pagan thought. (Harvey 1994, Stone 1996, Pike 1996,
McKay 1996).This radicalism is fuelled by the cosmological model in which humanity and
the cosmos are in a state of interdependence. The main difference between the sixties and
nineties was that while Hawkins and Thom were now less well known, they had been
replaced by James Lovelock, the much misunderstood author of The Gaia Hypothesis.
Lovelock captured the popular imagination by tying his theory of nature as a complex selfregulating organism to Gaia, the Greek Earth Goddess, unintentionally encouraging an
enthusiastic pagan spin on his ideas. In the ‘deep ecology’ that emerged in the USA in the
seventies the concern was with the planet rather than people and in the British anti-road
protests of the early nineties a common slogan was ‘Gaia told me to do this’ (Letcher 2000).
The four pagan quarter festivals that fall midway between the solstices and equinoxes which,
Lockyer argued, were celebrated by the megalith builders, were celebrated by the anti-road
protesters with music, dancing and sweat lodges. Influenced by such recent traditions, the
May Day protests in London in 2000 were held on what had once been a workers’ festival,
but as the demonstration began ‘a party of activists arrived in the square wearing costumes
designed to represent the pagan origins of May Day. A woman naked but for a tiny pair of
turquoise pants, followed by a group of drummers around the square as climbers strung
banners between lampposts. One of the protesters...said “the general theme is that people want
to have something of a say. No one has any free land any more. It’s always owned by
somebody else”’ (The Independent 2 May 2000, p. 3).
Thus we can argue for a direct link between the surveys of William Stukeley, Norman
Lockyer, Alexander Thom, Gerald Hawkins and Fred Hoyle at Stonehenge and the
cosmological ideology of the eco-protesters at Seattle in November 1999, London in May
2000 and Prague in November 2000. It would not be true to say that archaeoastronomy has in
any way produced eco-protest, for its rots lie deep in romantic socialism, but it has provided it
with a distinct cosmology.
References
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Chippindale, C.: 1994, Stonehenge Complete, Thames and Hudson, London.
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