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To: afraidfortherepublic; blam
Yes, I think that type of connection is likely.

I just leafed through one of Gimbutas' books I have for photo comparison. The spirals she includes closest to the ones I see in Post 13, though not identical, are some 5th-6th millennia designs from Eastern Europe, related to snake goddess imagery. I didn't see anything with the distinctive tri-spiral, though, which is an interesting feature.

The best books on decoding prehistoric symbolism I have read are Gimbutas' Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and Adrian Bailey's Caves of the Sun. I would tend to interpret the Newgrange stuff along Bailey's lines. He compares the structure of a number of megaliths and myths with ancient beliefs about parallels between the annual seasonal cycle and the birth-death cycle, arguing that dolmens and similar structures are designed to draw a symbolic parallel between death and the decline of the Sun during winter (to sum up a detailed argument without doing justice to the book).

And as a Tolkien fan I can't help being reminded of Helm's Deep when I read this part of the first post :-)

It would be a brave man that would come down one of these after you - not knowing the plan of it and not knowing at which corner he stuck his head round you'd be waiting on the other side with an axe or whatever.

39 posted on 02/25/2006 4:36:02 PM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora
Just FYI, Gimbutas has been pretty much discredited in the academic world due to her blind allegiance to the GAM (Great Mother Goddess) theory, for which there really is no support beyond wishful thinking. Ronald Hutton's Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles is a good overview of what is really known and not known about the neolithic structures and carvings found in Britain and Ireland - which isn't much.
50 posted on 02/25/2006 7:15:25 PM PST by DGray (http://nicanfhilidh.blogspot.com)
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