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John Michell lecture
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Paldywan
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Re: John Michell lecture
May 10, 2016, 16:45
Rhiannon wrote:
In a small area crammed with ancient sites, wouldn't you expect a lot to line up by chance though? How are you deciding if those lines are meaningful and not coincidental?


Hello Rhiannon. No, the 'by chance' factor doesn't work - it was cooked up by someone thirtyish years ago, and it's a convenient get-out, but it's necessary to look closer at the evidence. Because, at least in Penwith, many alignments connect certain kinds of sites, and certain ages of sites, and they also follow a certain landscape logic in many cases. So these aren't just random points.

I humbly suggest that it's necessary to recognise that the neolithics and bronzies did this intentionally, and accurately too. Just because the modern mind cannot see why, according mainly to modern thinking, it doesn't mean that, because rational explanations cannot yet be found, they do not exist.

This is fundamental. It's a worldview and paradigm issue and, if one chooses to get involved in prehistoric sites, then it's necessary also to overcome the academically-conditioned need to try to fit ancient realities into modern intellectual frameworks. In particular, such modern frameworks posit that there cannot be 'earth energies', therefore there aren't. But the fact that science cannot measure or detect these is its own problem, not a problem for the ancients.

It needs to be the other way around: we need to fit the modern mindset to the ancient way of seeing things. (Actually, I think there seem to have been at least two - the mid-neolithic mindset seems to be different by degrees from that of the bronze age, the first being more intuitive-naturalesque and the second being more megalithic-scientific.)

The randomness hypothesis remains just that - a hypothesis - and it rests, imho, mainly on maintaining a distance from the data and evidence, and also on the support of a meme that claims rationality when really it is based upon an emotional predisposition which, conveniently, is also majoritarian, therefore comfortable to hold. Archaeo-astronomy didn't used to work either, but then there was the evidence.
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