Enigmatic Lands ~ Sacred Sites
Europe
[This section remains under construction.]
Avebury Stone Circle
This ring of standing stones in Wiltshire, England -- within which lies a whole village -- may have been a prehistoric locus of earth energies. medieval Christians, fearful of its pagan aura, partially dismantled it.
Callanish Stone Circle
Legend has it that the tall boulders making up this prehistoric circle on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, are actually heathen giants who rejected Christianity and were turned to stone in punishment.
Carnac
Rows of erect stones near this Breton hamlet may have served as an observatory. The spot may also have been the center of a prehistoric cattle cult, echoed today by an annual blessing of local farmers’ cows.
Cumae
The Sibyl of Cumae described by the poet Virgil delivered her oracles in a cave beneath this Greek colony, twelve miles northwest of Naples, Italy. A Christian church was built on the site in the sixth century. See also The Cumaean Sibyl.
Delphi
This sacred site near Mount Parnassus, considered the center of the world by ancient Greeks, is thought be where Apollo slew the great serpent Python and established his famous oracle. See also The Oracle at Delphi.
Externsteine
First venerated in prehistoric times, these 100-foot-tall stone outcrops near Detmold, Germany, still draw pilgrims of many beliefs. Some say the stones afford access to powerful energies within the earth.
Glastonbury
Gotland
Mystical sites proliferate on this Swedish island in the Baltic. Bronze Age stone mounds, Iron Age forts, and ship graves -- stones set in the outline of ships, to convey souls to the afterlife -- dot its landscape.
Iona
Christians of all denominations come to the Inner Hebrides to worship on this sacred isle, home of the Celtic church founded by St. Columba and reputed burial place of 48 Scottish kings.
Lourdes
Each year, millions of pilgrims visit this town in southwestern France to bathe in the waters of a grotto where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to a girl in 1858. Thousands of the visitors have claimed miraculous cures.
Lyonnesse
The Seven Stones, exposed bits of rock in the waters between Cornwall’s Land’s End and the Scilly Isles, are supposedly all that remain of this land whose villages and farms, it is said, were engulfed by the sea.
Malta
Three Stone Age temples near Valletta, linked with caverns housing statues of an obese woman, suggest a Maltese religion venerating and Earth Mother. Its adherents had vanished by the Bronze Age.
Radiocarbon dating confirms that the ancient temples of Malta are the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world -- the oldest dates to before the building of the pyramids in Egypt. The temples were built by a race that left no written records and have survived because they were buried and forgotten until their rediscovery in the 19th century. No one knows to whom the temples were built or why.
Mont-Saint-Michel
The church crowning this prominence off Normandy sits on a site used for worship in pre-Christian times. Legend says the archangel Michael ordered the church’s construction in the 8th century.
Newgrange
The ancients may have placed their departed in this womblike tomb near Dublin, Ireland, to ensure their rebirth in the afterworld. The structure is aligned to catch a beam of life-giving sunlight at the winter solstice.
Stonehenge
Even after centuries of study, this ancient circle of massive stones near Salisbury -- thought at different times to be an astronomical observatory, a Druid temple, or petrified giants -- remains an enigma.
Aerial View of Stonehenge by Martin Gray.
Thera
Scientists believe this tiny island in the Aegean Sea is the remnant of a volcano active in prehistoric times. its eruption may have devastated the ancient Minoan civilization and inspired the tale of Atlantis.
Further Resources
Atlas of Holy Places and Sacred Sites
by Colin Wilson
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
by Nigel Campbell Pennick
Earth Memory: Sacred Sites
Doorways into Earth's Mysteries
by Paul Devereux
Power Places of Kathmandu: Hindu and Buddhist
Holy Sites in the Sacred Valley
by Kevin Bubriski
Sacred Sites of the West
by Bernyce Barlow
The Yucatan: A Guide to the
Land of Maya Mysteries
by Antoinette May
Continue to Enigmatic Sites in:
Travel to Uranus for Universal Myths.
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