The Lords of Time

Our modern world is so ordered by time, our lives parcelled out by the ticking of the clock, that we forget that it wasn’t always so. We take it so much for granted: all of us humbly subservient to deadlines, timetables, alarms and schedules that it barely registers. Like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland we are betrothed to the ceaseless demands of time; foot-soldiers, as it marches towards an unknown conclusion. Yet, within scholarly minds a debate rages as to whether time even exists: is it a force majeure, or a construct of the human mind, a way to register and order the world around us? We may never know.

To us, time is linear and can only head in one direction – it has a past, a present and a future. This is our sense of it, and it may be built into us from an evolutionary point of view. We all have an internal body clock – we slowly age towards our inevitable demise, and we have the ability to contemplate that mortality and so ‘feel’ that passage of time. On a day to day basis, we understand instinctively when it’s time to wake up, when to eat and when to retire once more to bed. Over longer periods, we as hunter gatherers appreciated the changes in the seasons, something that becomes increasingly apparent the further north you go; and cyclical natural events like floods and famine were remembered from one generation to the next. However, it wasn’t until the arrival of farming into Scotland around 6000 years ago, and all the social re-arranging it brought did time begin to order and dominate people’s lives. And, consequently those who could command time, could command that new society.

Farming, or at least the farming revolution that would affect Scotland, began around 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of Egypt and the Middle East. The innovations, plants and animals slowly spread up the Danube Valley into Central Europe, and eventually to the British Isles. Switching from hunter-gathering to farming, requires a substantial re-ordering of the way peoples live and how they live. There are swings and roundabouts, but one of the results is the stratification of society, and the creating of niche roles. Farming increases the population of a community significantly, but requires specialisation – blacksmiths, leather-makers, a mercantile class to facilitate trade and above all a ruling class to organise, govern and protect all the diverse elements of this new set up. There is one other powerful element that draws its strength from this arrangement – a clerical class of priests that establishes, enhances and propagates the community’s religious beliefs.

To our ancestors the gods were everywhere. There were river gods, fertility gods, gods of the forest and the seas, gods that brought pestilence and flood, and other that commanded the heavens and provided the harvest. They all had to be appeased and worshiped through a complex set of rituals, feasts, festivals and daily observance. Failure to comply could only result in disaster – so ran the dogma. Belief in these unseen forces was huge, both from a survival point of view, but also from a social conditioning point of view – and at the heart of the process, then as now was power. Knowledge was everything, and the more you had in comparison to the layman in the fields and villages, the more influential, powerful and ultimately wealthy you became. Time was the most valuable of all that knowledge.

The source of the priestly power resided in their ability to commune with the myriad of gods controlling the lives of the majority of the population. Farmers, their families and the symbiotic traders that relied on farming were governed by the ebb and flow of the seasons and on the predictability of events, such as harvest. By incorporating this need to know into the overall religious settlement allowed the priests to punctuate the calendar with festivals and feasts. Ritual and ceremony was the way by which the ruling and clerical classes could demonstrate to the lay folk their covenant with the gods, and how best to appease them in order to guarantee good harvest, benign winters, fertility of spring and so on. This of course was the smoke and mirrors part of the trick, but the real genius lay with their ability to read the heavens.

Orion's Belt - One of the most obvious features in the night sky

The landscape of Scotland is littered with standing stones, ancient burial chambers and henge features; constructed and laid out with uncanny precision between approximately 6000 and 4500 years ago. Many sites were used virtually continuously throughout the period, others abandoned or reclaimed from time to time. Either way, they marked a significant presence in the landscape and took a hell of a lot of community effort to erect and maintain. What we see today in places like Kilmartin Glen or on the Orkney Islands is surely the tip of an iceberg – the remnant fragments of what would have been far larger sites. Perhaps less than 10% now survives from our Neolithic past. At first glance we can wonder from this distance in time at the ingenuity and effort of our ancestors to construct these incredible monuments; but, on closer inspection the true wonder reveals itself.

Most, if not all of the megalithic sites in Scotland are in some way aligned to major astronomical events – equinoxes, solstices, lunar stand-stills and eclipses. Some, such as the Maes Howe burial chamber built over 5000 years ago are perfectly aligned with these celestial moments that it beggars belief. We are but touching the surface in our understanding of their understanding – there are hints that some of the sites, like Calanais may have been built to predict solar eclipses, the transit of Venus and perhaps recurrence of comets. Many more seem to track various stars, like those on Orion’s Belt, or Sirius across the night sky. This is complex astronomical stuff – and this ability allowed the priests to calculate time.

From here, it is a case of pick your calendar. It takes approximately 365 days for the earth to go around the sun and return to the same point against the fixed stars, this equates to 12 to 13 moon cycles, giving us months. The symmetry however doesn’t quite work, and in order celebrate festivals consistently at the right times it is important first to understand the motion of the heavenly bodies, and then insert man-made adjustments (like leap years for example). That not only requires knowledge of astronomy, but phenomenal insight into mathematics and the ability to cater for things like procession, that can only be measured in hundreds of years. We can have no idea what sort of calendar ordered the lives of our distant ancestors, but it can be assured that there was one – and that the stones were aligned to help keep that calendar accurate.

How this wisdom reached Scotland is a mystery – but, both the early Egyptians and Babylonians were adept at astronomy and time measurement. It is likely that this knowledge was carried north by a select few, almost by osmosis until it crossed the North Sea. The nature of the sites seems to suggest that the knowledge came, but a home-grown way to interpret was devised. It would appear, for example that the setting of the sun on one particular day ended a ‘season’, and the rising on the next the rebirth of the new. This was a feature that may have been adapted to that greatest of mysteries – death. Various annual events were not only observed, but possibly coincided with funereal ritual – this may account for the lack of remains in so-called ‘burial chambers’. It is also possible that these communal chambers were holding units where the dead waited in limbo for the appointed moment in the year to ascend to the next stage. Again, this was a powerful hold on the people as a whole.

The great stones and henges thus had a dual purpose – one functional, the other ceremonial – after all, where better to keep the locals in awe than in the very place where the commune was happening (for commune read astronomical observation)? Similarly, medieval cathedrals were not only places of worship and thus built for maximum effect, but also the local headquarters of the biggest business in Europe – the Catholic Church: an institution propped up by power and wealth as well as faith. This was nothing new, and our ancestors were duped just the same – Stonehenge for example took 18 million man hours to build: that’s quite a commitment, that’s a lot of faith. The return on the deal must have been as equally impressive.

 The Stones of Stenness - Orkney

However, something went wrong – horribly wrong, around 2500BC. For millennia, the celestial clock had revolved with determined precision, and with each turn of the wheel events on earth reflected both the ability to read that clock and in turn to deliver on the promise that by being able to please the gods all would be right. When this part of the deal failed, the house of cards came tumbling down. It would appear that climate deterioration brought a sequence of failed harvests and extreme winters across northern Europe and that social cohesion broke down, paving the way for the advance new innovations from the Mediterranean. It is pure conjecture of course, but the evidence of the move from communal burial and cremations to more private interment, and to seemingly more defensive settlement enclosures would suggest a greater degree of self-reliance.

There is a suggestion through changes in artefactual remains, that the British Isles experienced a wave of new-comers known as the Beaker People around 2500BC; but the genetic evidence doesn’t bear this out. A change in technology and culture with the coming of metal work certainly occurred, but how much was local adaption and how much was via immigration is still unknown. Some settlements seem to be on the fringes of older habitations: that might reflect newcomers; while a dramatic change in burial technique and the total collapse of mega-structure building by the community seems to suggest a re-ordering of the native hierarchy. The likely scenario is that the native population growing ever more cynical of the old order adopted the new ideas and religions, and in doing so ushered in the Bronze Age.

The Bronze Age wasn’t just about the use of bronze, but the cataclysmic change from stone to metal use, from bone and antler for jewellery to gold and silver and all the social implications. We may never know how the change affected those who once read the skies, but the evidence would seem to point to more terrestrial answers, and perhaps the detailed knowledge of celestial movement was lost – the abandonment of the megalithic sites would seem to bear that out. The vast majority of people remained farmers, and relied on time as they had always done – you can’t farm without it. Perhaps now it was a universal wisdom: simplified, with religious implications removed; making it just another tool in the farming year. Religion still played a part in people’s lives of course, and the gods still existed: but, the Lords of Time were dead.