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Steve Gray
Steve Gray
931 posts

Re: Significance
Mar 28, 2006, 23:01
Ancient people would have been well aware of the repetitive patterns of life - day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the coming and going of the seasons. However, anyone monitoring these cycles from one year to the next would notice that they were not synchronous. It's a common human characteristic that we like to feel in control and things in our lives that are unpredictable tend to worry us.

Most modern religions are founded on promises of some kind of afterlife to offer an alternative to the fear and uncertainty associated with death. In mediaeval times whole groups of people were branded as heretics and murdered in incredibly brutal ways just for having a slightly different view, sometimes within the same basic religious belief (e.g. the Cathars). So it's clear that the desire to be in control of their particular world view will motivate people to do just about anything.

I think it's very possible that stone monument building was just such an enterprise aimed at bringing order to the seemingly chaotic natural world. If you can erect a stone (relative to some other stone) and be able to say with certainty that the moon will never pass beyond it, then you might feel that you have gained control over the moon. Stone monuments may have been an attempt not just to map the movements of the heavens, but to control them. Perhaps they thought that the bigger the stones, the harder it would be for the sun or moon to escape their control.
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