A Heart-Tugging Story from Stonehenge

From the Daily Mail (co.uk) online: Prehistoric child is discovered buried with 'toy hedgehog' at Stonehenge By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 9:42 AM on 10th October 2008 This toy hedgehog, found in a child's grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known - children have always loved to play. The chalk figurine was probably a favourite possession of the three year old, and placed next to the child when they died in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy - perhaps placed there by a doting father - is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history. The diggers were working to the west of Stonehenge in what is known as the Palisade Ditch when they made the remarkable discovery last month in the top of the pit in which the child was buried. Archaeologist Dennis Price said: 'It is not difficult to envisage the raw emotion and harrowing grief that would have accompanied the death of this child. 'Amid the aura of gloom that surrounds Stonehenge, it comes as a beam of light to find a child's toy lovingly placed with the tiny corpse to keep him or her company through eternity. 'I'm not aware of hedgehogs having any significance in pagan tradition so the discovery must rank as yet another unique and baffling aspect of one of the most famous and instantly recognisable prehistoric monuments on Earth. To my mind, the hedgehog possesses a real charm and an innocent beauty. ' Dr. Joshua Pollard, of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said: 'Representational art from this period is very rare and so far as I'm aware, if the identification is correct, it's the only known prehistoric depiction of a hedgehog from Britain.' Fay Vass, of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, said: 'We are very excited to hear about this find. It shows humans have taken hedgehogs to their hearts for a very long time. ************************************************************************* I confess I'm not exactly sure what a hedgehog looks like! At first I thought this resembled a "hippo" - but the ears aren't right for a hippo (they have little rounded upright ears) - this animal has floppy ears. Then I thought, perhaps it is a sow. Sows were a symbol of the Great Mother Goddess and the timing would be right (circa 1000 BCE) for worship of the Sow aspect of the Great Goddess in old England. Is it really a hedgehog - or is this a presumption imposed on a singular find? I don't know. I'd be interested to know if they can tell the origin of the chalk from which this was carved. That might not mean, though, that the piece was carved where the chalk came from.

Womb - That from Which We Come, That to Which We Go

From Barbara Walker's "A Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Legend." Womb The Sanskrit word for any temple or sancutary was garbha-grha, "womb."(1) The great annual festival of Aphrodite in argos was called Hysteria, "Womb."(2) The oldest oracle in Greece, sacred to the Great Mother of eart, sea, and sky, ws named Delphi, from delphos, "womb." Megalithic tombs and barrow-mounds were designed as "wombs" to give rebirth to the dead. [New Grange, for instance.] Their vaginal entrance passages show that Neolithic folk went to considerable trouble to devise imitations of female anatomy in earth and stone. tomb and womb were even related linguistacally. Greek tumbos, Latin tumulus were cognates of tumere, to swell, to be pregnant. The word "tummy" is thought to have come from the same root.(3) Womb-temples and womb-tombs point backward to the matriarchal age, when only feminine life-magic was thought efficacious. Rebirth from the womb-tomb was the meaning of the domed funerary stupa of the Far East, where the remains of the sainted dead lay within a structure called garbha, the "womb."(4) The parallel with barrow graves, Mycenaean tholos tombs, cave temples, and other such structures is now well known. Even a Christian cathedral centered on the space called nave, originally meaning "belly." [hence "belly button" - navel]. Caves and burial chambers were said to be sunk in the "bowels" of the earth - that is, of Mother Earth. The biblical term for "birth" is "separation from the bowels." Archetypal womb-symbolism is as common today as it ever was, though not always rcognized as such. Paul Klee said, "Which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion . . . from which all functions derive their life? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of creation, where the secret key to all things lies hidden?"(5) Notes: (1) Campbell, C.M., 168. (2) H. Smith, 126. (3) Potter & Sargent, 28. (4) Waddell, 262. (5) Jung, M.H.S., 263. **************************************************************************************** I was rather curious about this festival of Hysteria, so I did a little research. At this website, I found this statement: As a matter of fact Kallimakhos (or Zenodotos), in Historical Notes, testifies that the pig is sacrificed to Aphrodite: "The people of Argos sacrifice swine to Aphrodite and the festival is called Hysteria (Feast of Swine)." - Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 3.95f-96a "Feast of Swine" certainly doesn't sound anything like "(Feast of the) Womb" - but, curiously, that same web site said that pigs were called hus in Greek. "Hus" as in "husband?" VI) SWINE (Greek "hus") Aphrodite had a curious relationship with the pig. The goddess supposedly hated the creature because her lover Adonis had been gored to death by a wild boar. Therefore arose the proverb 'he sacrificed a pig to Aphrodite' used to refer to someone who gave an innappropriate or unwanted gift. However, in Argos and Kypros at least, pigs were sacrificed to the goddess during the Hysteria (of the pigs) festival. The sacrifice was probably to assuage her grief for the loss of Adonis, who was slain by a wild pig. In other cultures, we know the white sow was sacred as an aspect of the Goddess. According to Barbara Walker, "The white corpse-eating Sow-goddess represented the death aspect of the Great Mother in cults of Astarte, Demeter, the Celts' Cerridwen, and the Teutons' Frya. As a death goddess, Freya had the title of Syr, "Sow." Demeter-Persephone or "Demeter the Destroyer" was sometimes called Phorcis the Sow, mother of the Phorcids or Fatal Women [from which we derive the word "porcine"]. One of these was Circe, swine-goddess of Aeaea, who could turn men into sacrificial pigs. Her island Aeaea meant literally "Wailing," a reference to the ritual laments accompanying sacrifices of the god in pig form." Stringing this all together, perhaps Adonis' being gored to death by a wild boar was a later Greek gloss of his original sacrificial death as a sacred king/husband of the goddess Aphrodite. Instead of being killed by a "pig," he was, in actuality, sacrificed as a "pig" himself. Therefore, the connection of sacrificing pigs and the "Fatal Women" would make sense in the context of an "hysterical" celebration to the Goddess Aphrodite. The sacrificing of pigs at the Hysteria was a throw-back to pre-Greek goddess worship. Also from Walker: Hysteria "Womb," the orgiastic religious festival of Aphrodite in Argos, where the Womb of the World was adored and symbolically fructified.(1) [by offering sacrifice, in this case, pigs?] Hysteria was given its present meaning by renaissance doctors who explained women's diseases with a theory that the womb sometimes became detached from its place and wandered about inside the body, causing uncontrolled behavior. My good old Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has this to say about hyster- or hystero- comb form [French or Latin, French hyster-, from Latin hyster-, from Greek, from hystera] 1: womb. So, Walker was absolutely correct - the Hysteria at Argos was the Festival of the Womb. But what about "pig?" I did a quick search for an English-Greek dictionary and came up with these words: choiros, gourouni. However, I believe those are in modern Greek, which probably bears litle relation to ancient Greek. This may be closer - under my Webster's definition for swine is Latin sus - see more at Sow. Pay dirt! In my Webster's under the definition of "sow": Middle English sowe, from Old English sugu; akin to Old English and Old High German su sow, Latin sus pig, swine, hog, Greek hys [emphasis added]. 1: an adult female swine. So, hys means sow in Greek; and hystera means womb in Greek. A rather interesting connection. A few interesting tid-bits: Sows killed at Yuletide - possibly traced to worship of Freya. Animal worship in Ireland - scroll about half way down to find extensive entry under Pig. Lots of intesting information here on Pig, Sow and Boar.