Mysterious Purpose of Europe’s Ancient Megalithic Sites Explained video

Lara, I can only comment on the two European cultures I know and it may not be worth much!

There is not much to say of Finnish pagans. The revival is mainly about folk customs or holidays and can be blended in with things like wicca and new age. Using sacred megalithic sites either at home or abroad is practically an unknown concept as we would worship in sacred groves or had sacred trees and most were eradicated by the church too long ago to feel much connection to it anymore. Reviving an ancient religion and practicing it is probably foreign to most, along with visiting ancient sacred sites for spiritual purposes. At least this would be very private and not something to talk about, for fear of ridicule.

In Bulgaria, also as Julian mentioned, a few sacred sites are used locally according to folk beliefs, like tying ribbons or crawling through stone passages for healing, but the folk connection to them is mostly severed. There is such a wealth of ancient Thracian sites, some more or less known within the country, and it is popular to visit them. Many do it purely for tourism, or for a bit of exercise in nature on the weekend, but many show their respect for them by leaving offerings or small orthodox icons, which I think shows that people feel and respect the spirituality in them in their own way. The ethnic revival group Threskeia still do ceremonies at a few regular sites, and I’ve seen signs of private ceremonies like crushed grapes in stone vessels or offerings of fruit in fire, and people meditating alone. There is a strong spiritual connection in Bulgaria and many people are really into their native culture and history, but I think the spiritual interest is mostly funneled into the teachings of local modern mystics like notably Petar Deunov (an esoteric Christian mystic) from the first half of the 20th century. In comparison, Threskeia for example is very small, or people reviving a purely Thracian ancient religion. But it is wonderful to see how the spiritual connection and interest is alive and natural in many people, compared to how things generally are in the west like Finland.

Hi Lara,

Maybe part of the answer lies in the not knowing of: ‘How does one even use an ancient site?’
What do I do there? How do I connect my
personal practice to it?

I’ve seen lots of people visit with a genuine interest in the mysterious, but don’t know what to do.
I’ve seen people go there but to do their own thing really with energies unconnected to the more original intentions.
In terms of the demographic and activities I’ve observed lots of things, quite similar to Julian’s informative (and some funny) anecdotes.

Mmh the popular and more well-known places are often managed. Like how Newgrange in the Boyne valley is more like a conveyor belt experience, a tourist attraction basically. Stonehenge similar.
Management can be well done and I understand its need. But it caters to a tourist/archaeologic interest, not as a place that can be used for practice or worship.

Some smaller activities, like what I saw at Ales Stenar, you wouldn’t really find reproduced online, or found on YouTube unless using specfic search terms.

Another question and one I don’t personally have a good view of (because I don’t follow the YouTube community leaders or anything) how many pagans are there that have a dedicated practice, of those – are there many groups (or is it more an individual thing) and organised in-person events, of those who know of the deeper & of the practical nature of sacred monuments.

Maybe there’s many factors in the answer to the question. For example (if even known about in the first place) the monuments are also regarded as basically disconnected from each other.

How to make a change in the awareness of them and their use is another question too.

From a North American point of view, I speculate that the old religion is not practiced as it would if there were sacred megalithic structures that would be easily accessible, as it is for many Europeans and other cultures with abundant sites.

I think those with European roots specifically don’t immediately associate the ancient sites in North/Central America, as a place for them to reconnect to their own spirituality/ journey/ ancient lore & tradition for them to build their faith around visiting them. In North America, it feels like there is a lot of lost knowledge on how to retrace and rekindle the practice of spiritual paganism, since much depends on the accessibility of what remains mostly being written sources, readings, mythology and folklore rather than travel to places abroad.
Otherwise, the traditional return to one’s roots perhaps remains in living a more quiet and traditional lifestyle, in nature and within the preservation of older customs within the family and household. I have watched a few pagan/Norse/Celtic/Slavic/Druid podcasts where living self-sustainably, and being in nature, growing one’s own food/natural remedies etc.. is believed to be big part of upholding one’s ancient cultural tradition. The ceremonial/religious part is often in the safety/privacy of one’s own home/backyard, or otherwise in other more private nature settings when with more people. From reading and looking into how modern pagans practice today, the spirituality thrives in the intimacy and wonder of being amid the elements of nature. Visiting an ancient site, specifically one in Europe, may be a special treat. Factors against this would be the high cost – as traveling cross-continentally can be financially challenging for average North Americans. From what I can tell, in North America compared to many Europeans who for instance have the whole month of August off, people work more, and travel less (unless its somewhere sunny!), with often only 10 days (including doctor’s appointments) of holiday allowance most employers permit if they work full time, which is slowly growing.

But it seems individuals adapt to what they have, and perhaps take on a more introverted/intimate approach to their reconnection, and strengthen their faith with what is at hand and makes the most sense on a surface level, such as being in nature.

As Julian mentioned, the rise of popularity of ancient sites is largely due to big budget documentary series, and best-selling authors that demystify ancient history, which has been basically annihilated from family heritage and the education system. My Polish parents for example, didn’t even know there were ancient spiritual sites in Poland. I have visited several ancient sites around the world, but the mound site in Odry Poland, was one of the most impactful, like stepping into another dimension. I would definitely return there to explore dream incubation and spiritual out of body experiences.

A bit late to the party on this sorry, but I have a few thoughts to share as well, some of which are similar to what other people have said. Very interesting to read other people’s thoughts!

I can’t comment on people in the US specifically and how things are viewed there, but I think there could be a number of factors that cause sites in Europe / the UK to be a bit overlooked.

It seems like in the UK / EU the major sites are well-known, eg. Stonehenge, Avebury, Callanish, Carnac and have some sort of presence in people’s minds because they are pretty iconic sites, similar to the Egyptian pyramids but on a smaller scale. They are sometimes visited by people with spiritual interests (particularly at Avebury I saw a number of people doing practices in different ways either individually or in a groups and met some interesting people – probably more of the wicca/new age type approach), but it seems the majority of people that visit these sites are tourists. Or in other bigger sites like Externsteine it’s in a huge, beautiful nature reserve so a lot of locals picnic / walk / ride bikes there and it’s very busy and popular. These feel like the type of sites that end up on group holiday tours, “must see” type of destinations when you’re visiting a particular area because they’re epic, sometimes really big, and impressive and sometimes they get busloads of tourists.

The information available at those sites (and ancient sites in general it seems in the UK and Western Europe) is fairly superficial, and feels like it’s geared towards giving quick answers for people visiting who don’t have much interest or time to dig deeper. It’s mostly info about burials, stages of site development etc. This info is then repeated by guides at the sites which I think reinforces the common perception of the sites being built by simple people for simple purposes.

Sometimes guides can be quite resistant to alternative views. Eg. at the Ring of Brodgar speaking with a lovely guide I asked her if the site had any solar alignments. She emphatically said no, there weren’t any, which surprised me. After spending some time there, it seemed there clearly were some alignments. I asked the guide if she wanted to see them but she was not at all interested and seemed stuck in the mainstream view of seeing things. This was a bit different at Newgrange, where the guide for the site there gave the normal spiel during the tour, but opened up afterwards when I asked her what the locals thought the site was used for and she basically said magic, but in a way where it seemed like she secretly felt that too, but that she had to follow the mainstream approach on the tour.

As a side note, it’s surprising how little solar alignments are spoken about at sites. When they are obvious they are sometimes mentioned briefly in info boards, but a lot of the time I suspect people haven’t looked for them at sites (eg. mound or dolmen entrances with very obvious alignments), or don’t look in the right way and overlook them. Eg. there’s a site at Knockroe in Ireland where apparently a photographer figured out it had winter solstice alignments (it has sunrise and sunset at the same site) just in the last few decades by being there to take a photo on the day. Or perhaps if alignments are known about they don’t know why a site would have an alignment and so they’re not mentioned because alignments are not considered important.

When there are alignments, they’re often spoken about as the sites being calendars for purposes like cropping even though that explanation doesn’t make much sense. Very occasionally sites are discussed as having religious / spiritual purposes. I think perhaps part of the problem is the entrenched idea that the sites were built by primitive people, and that previous civilizations were much less advanced than we are now, and so considering that the builders might have been very advanced in terms of engineering abilities and spirituality is quite a cognitive leap for people to make.

There are also some lesser known sites in the EU/UK that make it onto lists of top megalithic sites to visit in XX country, but you might not learn / know about them unless you specifically looked for them. Sites like Long Meg, Men An Tol, West Kennet Long Barrow, Castlerigg, the Rollright Stones etc. These seem to be known by locals and people who are more interested in megalithic sites beyond just the popular ones, and though they are still visited by tourists, there’s also different types of interests which are more obvious there. They also seem to be visited by people from the country they are in on day trips, holidays, or locals hiking or bike riding etc.

I think people with more alternative interests are at larger sites too, but they’re possibly just not as easily seen because so many more people visit them than less well-known sites so it’s watered down. For example, in terms of alternative interests being more prominent at smaller sites, at WKLB there was a group of about 8-9 women from Spain doing some sort of goddess ceremony in the barrow (with their husbands looking bored outside :D). I also ran into some ghost hunters with a youtube channel and a bunch of ghost-sensing devices there one night. At the Rollright Stones there were some people filming a doco on dowsing. At a different long barrow I met a woman who had done bachelors and masters degrees studying ancient sites and their modern day use, and who had an artist friend who would sleep in barrows and then use her dreams as inspiration for her artwork (I didn’t think to get the name of the artist unfortunately..!).

Beyond the somewhat-known sites though, there are also so, so many sites that are not as well-known or it seems not very well-known at all. Sometimes these sites can be really amazing, like mind-boggling large dolmens, but they’re barely known about it seems beyond people specifically interested in megaliths. These lesser known sites seem to be used more for practice and ritual by locals, perhaps because they are smaller, not as immediately interesting to most people, and less visited, or not as easy to get to as some of the bigger sites.

It’s fairly common at smaller sites to see remnants of offerings that have been left, eg. flowers, fruit, lentils, the ribbons mentioned etc. and sometimes you will see candle stubs at sites, eg. inside barrows and chambered mounds. Sometimes this is nice because it’s clear people are using the sites for something spiritual, but other times it seems a bit disrespectful too as people are leaving their rubbish in sites, like burnt out candle stubs, the leftover burnt out sticks from incense etc. I think hikers also like visiting them. I saw hikers at a number of sites and I met a lady at a fairly obscure site in Wales who said she’d spent 8 years exploring all the sites in Wales (she seemed a bit wicca/new age leaning). At another site in Wales there was an author from the US with an interest in alternative history it seemed.

I feel like these sites are probably never going to be popular enough to get on people’s radars internationally though, especially in a way that will effect search engine autosuggestions, as there are so many of them, they can be quite obscure and sometimes they’re in a state of disepair. It doesn’t help I think that they end up confused in Google too. Eg. sometimes people will put up photos of sites and mislabel them as a different site.

Sometimes quite simple sites can feel pretty amazing and in some ways are more enjoyable to visit than the bigger sites as they’re quieter and feel a bit more untouched, so I can see how people would be drawn to practice there. With bigger sites it feels like the tourist interest creates a bit of a barrier to connecting with the sites and getting a deeper sense of what they were used for. But on an initial look at pictures of lesser-known sites you might not think much of them. Eg. if they haven’t been studied or had info on them presented online / on youtube / in a doco, they might just look like a bunch of stones that aren’t that interesting.

For example, there was a site I visited in Scotland that just looked like a single standing stone, but turned out to have amazing winter solstice symbolism. From what I can tell it was barely known or visited at all – I only visited it as it was on the way to somewhere else and almost discounted it as not being significant when I first got there until it felt like I should look a bit deeper.

Often people don’t seem to spend long at the sites when they visit either, they just come, take a few photos and then leave, so I’m not sure how much interest there is in the deeper meaning of the sites overall – for the majority of people it seems like they’re just an interesting thing to see / visit, perhaps as they’re quite different from modern experience and they allude to a different time with a different way of life.

For chambered mounds particularly, I feel like they’re mostly quite unknown and it seems like people might not think they’re going to be that interesting. Or like you said they’re just seen as tombs. For example, there were a number of chambered mound sites I visited in the UK, all managed by the same heritage fund, and all the signboards had almost exactly the same basic info on them with exactly the same line about how they were used as burial chambers and as markers in the landscape. I’m not sure if it was just intellectual laziness, and not sure if it was malicious, but I saw the same wording enough that it started to feel like the heritage organisation was pushing a very specific view of what the mounds were built and used for, which only became obvious from visiting multiple similar sites.

You also don’t really see chambered mounds making it onto lists of top megalithic sites in XX country. They’re hard to take photos of on the inside, and they mostly just look like little hills on the outside :) I thought I would be more interested in seeing stone circles, but I ended up finding the chambered mounds much more interesting because of how they feel inside and because the solstice and equinox alignments at them tend to be more obvious. I had no idea just how many of them are still standing though until I started looking for them specifically as I don’t think they’re talked about much online.

I wonder if most people either don’t know about them at all, or see them and overlook them. I think this might also be complicated by the fact that they are known by so many different names in different places and across languages, eg. chambered mound, chambered cairn, long barrow, covered alley, hoj, hunnebede and a bunch of other names as well. To find them in a lot of cases means searching for the specific keyword for the type of mound in the country you’re interested in on a map, or digging through lots of sites on the megalithic portal. I also think when there is interest in sites in the EU/UK which is more widely publicised (eg. on Youtube) it tends to be more from an academic point of view, like videos from the megalithomania conference, or videos of people at sites just pointing out archealogical features and site history, rather than being from a pagan or spiritual perspective, so maybe it’s not in people’s understanding of the sites in that respect.

In terms of the Youtube autosuggestions, the way the autosuggestions work is based on recent search volume, so what you’re seeing there is probably indicative of what the majority of people are searching for recently, but it might not give the full picture. Eg. there are tools that let you see the full list of all the terms that are stored in Google / Youtubes autosuggest feature. Or tools that show search volume for specific search terms in specific countries, which would give a more accurate view of how many people a month are searching for certain terms. Perhaps more popular recent searches have pushed out suggestions from more consistent evergreen search terms for the EU/UK. Like other people mentioned, if there are shows like Ancient Apocalypse that have recently highlighted specific sites, that could create a lot of interest / curiousity and get a lot of people searching for them, which would definitely effect the most prominent autosuggestions.

Even based on that though, I suspect the search volume for EU/UK sites would be much smaller, and potentially also more watered down, eg. with the different ways sites are referred to across countries mentioned above. There also in general doesn’t seem to be a lot of content that people have created around sites in Europe on youtube. I wonder if sites in places like Peru, China, Siberia might also seem more exotic and intriguing to most people than sites in the EU/UK. Maybe people know about Stonehenge and feel like they already know about megalithic sites in Europe or something like that, as the most well-known ones are usually also the most visually interesting, biggest etc. so lesser known sites might not be as compelling.

In terms of interest from pagans, I might be wrong on this, but from what I can tell there’s not really a cohesive identity that people have if they consider themselves pagan. Eg. there is heathenry as well as paganism, and there are a lot of subsections of paganism people are interested in, eg. norse, celtic, greek, egyptian/khemetic etc. depending on their culture or what they feel drawn too. There’s a fair bit of crossover it seems with people who are interested in paganism and stuff like wicca, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a consistent practice.

From what I can tell from looking online a lot of pagan practice is considered personal praxis and doesn’t happen so much in groups, compared to revival groups for example. That could potentially water down the interest and how that’s being expressed in searches and autosuggestions if there are more varied interests. It’s great to hear from Julian there are more people practicing in groups though on the ground! Perhaps for people where there are a lot of sites in their country like in the EU/UK, they may already know about them, have favourite sites they visit, or find about them through other means and not be searching for them online so much.

In Sweden there is a revivalist asatru group who run blots at places they consider sacred in nature, and also at at least one dolmen site in Sweden. It seems like a lot of other revival groups which might be considered more pagan are very nationalistic in some ways, so they might not be as interested broadly in ancient sites beyond their culture or country so might not be searching for them.

In the UK I was surprised though that I couldn’t find pagan groups (or anyone at all!) advertising spiritually focussed events at ancient sites in the UK – I thought that because there were so many of them they’d likely get used a lot. Outside of the solstice events at larger sites (Stonehenge, Castlerigg etc.) the only events that were being advertised were for the major events in the Celtic calendar (Beltane etc.) and these didn’t seem to be at ancient sites. Often these events were online, which may have been a hangover from the last few years when a lot of things were happening online and not in person. Other than that I found pagan moots being run on a fairly regular basis in pubs, things like multi-day pagan festivals which seemed more like fairs, and one lady running a sort of pilgrimage hike between ancient sites. Overall though there wasn’t much being advertised online at all, and I didn’t see anything being advertised on noticeboards or at libraries etc.

I went to Castlerigg for the summer solstice and there wasn’t anyone there out of probably 120 people or so who I would have considered pagan – although there were some hippies, some anarchists and a lot of people who just came to have a picnic or hang out or party (or get drunk / take drugs). I assume that’s probably the same as the Stonehenge solstice but on a smaller scale, except there were no druids there. Perhaps though some of the people there would consider themselves pagan, but just dress in a way that didn’t reveal their beliefs. I’m glad to hear Julian’s experience in the UK was different though – maybe the practice at sites in general is kept more private and is not publicised.

Ireland felt a bit different than England in that sense. At Knockroe for the winter solstice it was mostly regular people / locals who came, but they had officially invited a small druid group to run a ceremony for everyone. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but it feels like the people in Ireland are somehow more tuned into their heritage and have more of a love or connection to the sites in some way than in England overall, and the atmosphere there in general out in nature is more mystical. I can’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but Ireland feels a bit more raw and perhaps a bit more untouched / undeveloped compared to England which could account for a large part of that feeling.

In some countries / places practicing at sites is discouraged in various ways which I think probably makes it a bit trickier for people to connect to ancient sites in general. Like in Malta the sites have been attacked by Christians trying to deface them and so are now fenced and guarded around the clock. Apparently people doing things like mantras at the sites are really looked down on too and you can get in trouble for doing it. Some chambered mounds have locked gates on them so it’s not possible to go into them (although there are lots and lots where you can go in and they’re not locked) and like Akira mentioned some sites like Stonehenge and Newgrange and even the Hypogeum in Malta are so popular or controlled it’s a bit like a conveyor belt experience where you have a very limited amount of time to visit the sites. At Goseck Circle there is a sign that specifically says you can’t conduct events or ceremonies/rituals (from memory) without prior approval and “costumes” are explicitly prohibited. Other bigger sites require payment to enter. These tend to be the bigger sites, the smaller, less well-known sites tend to be open access.

In general though I definitely feel like the sites draw people to them, from all walks of life and there are definitely people who are interested in them from more than a tourist / intellectual curiousity type perspective. Some of the time people bring their own practice or ideas to them which can be a bit off-putting (like channeling, or saluting the sun loudly with a bottle of alcohol at solstice sunrise etc.), but I think perhaps there are also quite a lot of people who use them to practice and worship who keep to themselves more and don’t publicise what they’re doing.