Allyson Shaw
Surfing Avebury With the Woman in the Well
The Day of Bride, the birth of Spring,
The serpent emerges from his knoll....
The serpent will come from his hole
On the Brown day of Bride.
--Gaelic Poem quoted in Dames' The Avebury Cycle
The Stone Age monuments of Avebury are the most important in Britain. They contain the largest henge, artificial hill, and long barrow tomb, as well as two significant stone avenues. Archeologists argue about their purpose, and many believe since there is no written record of their use, we can never be sure. Other, more perceptive scholars believe that this emphasis on written record is a mistake, and that visual symbols, in repetition, as one finds in Avebury, are a proof enough for a read. On visiting the site, what you won't find in the National Trust narratives at the museum, is the powerful presence of women and female generative and destructive power implicit in the landscape, a presence that lingers with the visitor long after leaving.
On my return to the States, after visiting the site, I was recovering from jet lag. I woke from a meandering, but satisfyingly romantic dream. I was getting married. I don't think I knew him very well, except for some elaborate confessions of love. This guy I was about to marry knew where I was born, and had given me a trinket, something like a key chain in which he'd carved the name, Arlington Heights, the town where I was born. I was immensely touched by this, though suspicious, as in my weird dream logic, the move seemed too smooth. He was dark haired and tall, like Mike, my husband, and had a crushing glamorous power.
Alone in a crowd of people, I waited in an enclosure with a thatched roof, open in the middle. The roof was held up by several concentric circles of surfboards pushing into the ground, erected like pillars. These surfboards looked more like very long snow boards--unmistakably phallic. I waited with the others excitedly as it began to rain. I spoke to a man in board shorts next to me, who told me this is where we would wait for the rain to stop and the surf to pick up, that this is how it was done. So this wedding was to have the patient, cyclical timing of the ocean: radically in tune with the moon.
In the next part of the dream, I found myself in a wide open space, very white, filled with people who have come to watch. The transition between the two spaces, as usual in dreams, is lost. The company sat in elaborate Rococo chairs and were waiting for a group wedding to take place. I was a bride. There was a voice over, which I'm certain only I could hear. It spoke with the tone of a tour guide and explained that there was no worry if the bride had no money. The society prepared for this ritual, and the weddings were communal.
It was only then that I woke to realize I'd dreamed a SoCal version of Neolithic architectural landscape of Avebury, in Southern England, not far from the more famous Stonehenge. Only then did I see the profound psychic power the place had over me.
In the dream, I waited in the Sanctuary found at the beginning of the prehistoric West Kennet avenue, near the River Kennet. The surfboards of the dream were the wooden pillars, which are now only archaeological remains, small cement stumps on the site marking where they once were. The missing part of the dream is the walk down the West Kennet avenue of stones--huge stones erected in a serpentine avenue, leading processions thousands of years ago to the henge, a huge circle in the landscape, carved out of chalk. It once was a startling white, tiered like stadium benches, now it's covered in sod, grazing sheep and their dung, yet the sacred space still holds a great deal of emotional power, even in fragmentation. No doubt, in the dream, this was the wide open space where I was to be married, the community gathered around me, in the henge itself.
This dream was brought on by my visit there. As Mike and I arrived
on the bus from Swindon, we were dropped off in front of the pub there.
Immediately, I felt the small hill on which the town was built almost
swell around me. A few random stones, standing like eternal
residents, appeared to greet us.
The henge embraces
you as you walk out to it. It's unclear from the
road that this circle was once whole, disrupted by a church (now tourist
center), the pub, The Lodge and antique store, built centuries ago in
the middle of the henge. But one can feel that sense of completion,
which must have been the reason for so many pilgrimages
.
People still come to this site, though I would not use the word "flock," as they are few, individual and contemplative. I imagine it is different during the solstice, but we were there during the Autumn Equinox, and many older women walked the crest of the henge, in reverence, in private prayer. And there were some of what my dad would call fruitcakes out there: an American couple, color-coded in red and white, doing a dance with sequined capes. A man walking past condemned them as "blasphemers." Thousands of years later, after a Christian onslaught, the fragments that remain, and the emotions they bring up, are still contentious.
There were "regulars." In California they would be called gothic hippies, coded for their look rather than their beliefs, but over there they are, clearly, pagans. We met a particularly brave group while entering the West Kennet Long Barrow, which is a portal tomb just a short way from the Neolitic pyramid, Silbury Hill. The tomb is a kind of vaginal mound in the earth. Most Long Barrows are a manifestation of the Death Goddess, in some form. As I went inside the chambers, I passed the four small rooms flanking the passageway, and found, in larger room at the back, a group of matty-haired girls sharing a blanket, waking from sleep. It was not until they greeted me that I understood what I was seeing: not a magical bunch of wild beings, fairie folk, but a group of hippies camping out. One of them followed me out, and when we reached the vulvic opening of the tomb, a mangy, elegant greyhound pranced up to her. As she rubbed his ears, she decided to talk to me. She asked for the time, which seemed a strange concern for one who'd just slept in a tomb. But then again, maybe not! And then she offered this piece of information--she was to be married that evening, in the henge. I took it as the gift of meaning it was, and no doubt my subconscious took it in as well, later cooking it up as the fantastical surf-marriage dream.
The henge is the most charged
of architectural fragments at Avebury, next to the West Kennet Avenue
of stones. If you walk into the henge from the pub, you've
walked straight into the South West corner of the henge, what Michael
Dames (1977) argues is the unhinged, vulvic mouth of an archetypal adder.
And the standing stones are the teeth! In other words, a vagina
dentata gapes at the end of West Kennet Avenue. It's
impossible to know this, unless you've come at it walking up the snake-body of
West Kennet Avenue as people did thousands of years ago.
The
stones have individual presence, as if they are people. It's
beyond childish anthropomorphic daydreaming. This is how they
have been seen for thousands of years. It is interesting to
note that in the middle ages the stones were not destroyed as they
were in the 18th century, during the Age of "Reason,"
when they were cut apart and used to build most of the buildings in
Avebury. The Medieval Christian villagers were no doubt too
afraid of the stones to destroy them, and instead seemed to think that
if they were out of sight they would not hold the same power.
In this portion of the circle henge, the body of a medieval barber was
found, trapped under one of the stones, now called "the Barber
Stone". A barber during the middle ages was a medic of sorts,
bloodletting and pulling teeth. Dames offers a satisfying
explanation: this barber was perhaps hired by the villagers to somehow
let the stones, minister to them, remove some of their
power so that they would lie more safely in the ground.
In Dames' words, he was trying to defang the vagina dentata of
the henge jaws, making them into a "toothless worm".
Of course, he was crushed in the process. You can't
pull the teeth of an ancient snake and expect to live to tell about
it.
What those superstitious medieval villagers did, though, was preserve the stones by burying them. They were later excavated by a Mr. Keiller, the "Marmalade King", who used his marmalade fortune to restore some of the avenue and henge in the 30's. It is because of his work, and the work of his family, that the whole of Avebury is suggested to a contemporary visitor.
With this suggestion the place comes to life in the imagination. I was awed at the ever-changing iconography of the architecture, the mutable system of symbols which work together to combat existential angst and alienation. The powerful medicine of Avebury is maternal: vulva, womb, eyes/breasts, even the vagina dentata; the death-swallower. But the iconography is also androgynous: snakes, the vulvic-phallus. Dames' book, The Avebury Cycle goes into this inconographic system in depth, and there is much poetry to his analysis and associations. He argues that in Neolithic times, these icons were not placeholders for meaning, they were meaning-- No semiotic mediation necessary. In true prelapsarian style, the landscape was the thing.
During our two day visit, we stayed at the Lodge, with
the friendly proprietor Andrew, who is very knowledgeable about the
site and the history of Avebury. It is clearly his passion. He has collected
much work about the site, including work by the 18th century
minister and historian, William Stukeley, who documented the landscape
before much of its destruction. Andrew freely shares his knowledge and
wicked sense of humor with travelers. He suggested I sit in the
Devil's chair, a 40 ton stone in the south east corner of the henge.
The stone has a concave area, with a small shelf that makes a perfectly
comfortable seat. The National Trust tourism guides claim the "chair"
has been "used by the girls of Avebury up until the early 20th
century" presumably for fertility purposes, but I would guess that their
prayers may have been more varied and complex than that. As I sat in
the cavity I realized the crux of the drama: during Neolithic times,
one could sit here and watch the procession up West Kennet Avenue arrive.
Room had been made for the individual here. It was a great comfort to
sit where so many women before me had. In the tiny "eye" holes of the stone, which are
formed from tree roots growing in the volcanic mass, I found bits of
sage and flowers. There, it was impossible not to be in the mood for
wishing, and to feel particularly blessed.
At the Lodge we stayed in the "Egyptian Room," decorated with 19th European etchings of the grand and mysterious tombs of the Pharaohs. The first night there, a woman's voice prompted me from sleep. Wake Up, she whispered in my ear, with a kind of urgent teasing. I woke, shaken with her clarity and proximity. I was to follow her, but where?
The next day I found that Andrew has a well in his study that's over 35 feet deep, covered with tin. He supposed the well may be even deeper, maybe 75 feet, and medieval. One guest claimed a woman's skeleton had been excavated from his well, but he doubted it. If she was there, she had been drowned. How else do you meet your end in a well, unless you were killed beforehand?
Women are always staring up from wells; it's an old story that's still around. In the Avebury pub, the surreal, glassed-in well by the bar is marked with a sign that claims many a villager has met their end therein. See the Japanese Ringu , The Silence of the Lambs or read that certain chapter in Kingston's Woman Warrior. Of course, there is the Grimms' fairy tale,"Frau Holle", where a girl falls down a well and meets the crone-goddess figure who's feather bed makes the snow and who showers her with gold. In the New Testament book of John, the story of the woman at the well is often translated as "the woman in the well," who is no doubt a rebel of sorts, perhaps a matriarch in Samarian's clothing, going to the well when she shouldn't, having five husbands, and speaking openly to a strange man, Jesus. He asks her for a drink of the well water in exchange for "living water". Why not see this as an nice exchange between the father-mother god, sublimated by the church fathers? LIke the missing stones of Avebury, much of women's history has been stolen, destroyed, reshaped in contrary form. If we wait for a written record as proof of our power, we will wait forever. In the meantime, imagination must make due. I like to think that in the whisper of the half-dream, some semblance of the slighted goddess signaled, peering up from her imposed ignominy, prompting me to heed her, finally.
Dames, Michael. The Avebury Cycle. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1977.
A wonderfully comprehensive site: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/lithop/index.html
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