Stonehenge

PREFACE.

These monuments, for their grandeur, simplicity, and antiquity, exceed any of the European wonders.

The fact that the doctrines and works of the Druids have until now received so little attention (since authors merely copy from one another the few remaining fragments found in classical writers) was an incentive for me to undertake the following work. At the same time, this neglect serves as my excuse and asks for the reader’s favor. I also lack the great advantages that would come from a knowledge of the surviving Celtic languages, books, manuscripts, and history—such as Cornish, Welsh, Irish, and Highland Scottish—which are now the chief repositories of their doctrines and customs. Thus, in my own opinion, I may well say with the poet Virgil:

And although a large volume was recently published on the subject of Stonehenge, we may truthfully say that nothing has yet been written on the matter. I have no other view of my own performance than that it is a first attempt to say something about those famous philosophers and priests, the Druids. They are never mentioned in antiquity without a note of admiration and are always ranked with the Magi of the Persians, the gymnosophists ancient Indian philosophers of the Indians, the prophets and hierophants of the Egyptians, and those types of patriarchal priests whose orders began before idolatry existed. From them, the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Greek philosophers learned the best things they knew. To clear away the rubbish and merely lay a foundation in this difficult and obscure work is to accomplish something. The method of writing I have chosen is a broad and descriptive one; I do not pretend to provide a formal, stiff, and scholarly proof for everything I say, which would be tedious and annoying to the reader as well as to myself. The knowledge I have acquired in these matters came from examining and studying their physical works. The proofs are derived from distant and different topics, and it would be very inconvenient to organize them into formal logical arguments original: "marshal them syllogistically" in a work of this nature. The proof emerges from the work as a whole. In matters of such great antiquity, the truth must be discovered by the reader; and to one who possesses proper insight and judgment, conviction will settle upon him gradually, if I am not mistaken. He will eventually admit that the evidence, in general, is as strong as the nature of the subject can support or requires.

It was very unpleasant for me to feel forced to argue against a book published in the name of the celebrated Inigo Jones, for whose memory I have the greatest regard. I wonder that the publisher of that work did not think of an easy way to convince himself that he was in error. If Stonehenge is a Roman work, it was certainly built using the Roman scale. Had he reduced his own measurements to that standard, he would have seen the absurdity of his opinion; for we cannot imagine that a temple—or an "elegant building," as he would have it—should not reveal its founders through the units of measurement by which it was formed. The measurements of Stonehenge result in fractions when measured by the Roman scale—undoubted evidence that the Romans had no hand in it. There is no meaning or design in the choice of the measures, neither in general nor in particular, which would be unworthy of a great architect or a grand design. But it appears very evident to me that Inigo Jones had little or no part in that work, especially in the form it is presented now. I believe I have reason to think he never drew the designs published there, because I would be unwilling to say he knowingly falsified them. I have significantly shortened my arguments against that book because I have no love for quarreling, and I have only mentioned what was necessary so that the reader may have a true understanding of this noble antiquity.