Mystery of the Megaliths

Mystery of the Megaliths – An Excerpt from Mystical France

by Nick Inman

All over France there are megaliths, great stones standing in fields and by roadsides, as if defying us to explain their presence. They were placed where they stand deliberately, thousands of years ago, for some reason that we do not know and, say the experts, we can never know.

The trouble for anyone looking into the secrets of the megaliths is that there is so little to go on. What can you say for sure about stones that have few if any distinguishing marks?

It would help if we knew who we were talking about – the creators of the megalithic monuments – but there is no living memory left of them. We have no connection to them. All we know about them is that they were anonymous people living during “the history of humanity before history began”.

Prehistory takes some imagining. It is an absurdly long and vague time comprising 95% of the time that humans have inhabited France. It is much studied but we can only know about it in limited, mundane ways. We can scrape through the remains of latrines but never know what they were thinking. It is as if the people have vanished, but of course they haven’t. Their descendants – us – are still walking the earth and our needs and thoughts may be much the same as thousands of years ago.

But there may be a way we can connect now with then. If we want to know what they were thinking and feeling, we need do no more than look at ourselves and ask how we experience life on the surface of this planet. Our perennial human preoccupations could be the key to understanding the megaliths.

What has changed between those ephemeral millennia and our own over-documented, over-analysed times? Everything and nothing.

We still belong to a universe that, like everything in it, is at once an indivisible whole and its constituent parts. All parts are interrelated and they interact. Sometimes we can see the mechanisms at work; often we can’t. Inevitably, we still us ask what humanity is doing here and how anything came to be. We look around for the answers and at each other but it is not in the faces of our equally mystified fellow beings. So we look up and wonder whether the solution is not in the sky that dominates our earth in its two different guises of day and night. What information could there be up there for us?