The word druid might conjure up for you thoughts of mystical, hooded people who perform cultic kinds of rituals and sacrifices among the standing stones in Ireland and England. In reality, that view of druids comes from a ‘Celtic revival in the 18th and 19th Centuries’ and is probably a gross misrepresentation of who and what the druids were. We know very little about them actually, because they left us no written records. While we were in Ireland, we had a close encounter with Druids on a tour to Newgrange mound. Newgrange was built in 3,200 B.C. – that’s about 5,200 years ago! It’s a large, circular mound nearly a hundred feet in diameter – all man-made- surrounded by tons of cool standing stones. (It’s actually older than Stonehenge!) To get inside the mound, you walk through a narrow passage of carefully placed boulders that leads to a center, high ceilinged space. Many of the boulders (in the passage, inside the mound and outside the structure) are decorated with intricate and delicate carvings of concentric circles and diamonds and triangles. It’s difficult to describe, but once inside, I got the feeling I was inside a cathedral. The domed ceiling is made with circular layers of boulders capped by one large stone. (Those boulders are covered with about 8 feet of dirt and grass above.) Even after over 5,000 years, the structure is totally waterproof.
If that isn’t enough to impress you, here’s one more thing: the passage into Newgrange is aligned perfectly with the sun’s rays each year on the winter solstice. We weren’t there for it, but the tour guide, using lights, showed us how on the first day of winter each year, the sun shines, for about eight minutes, in a perfect line through a small window above the passage opening, down the narrow corridor and directly into the center of the mound. It’s amazing. It’s astounding to think that people so long ago could build something with such precision that it would gather the sun into itself on that exact day, and that the whole thing is standing still today.
As we stood inside gawking, the tour guide said something that has made me think. He was talking about the Druids, admitting we know nearly nothing about them. Then he said that all religions of the world were in one way or another an attempt by man to reach out and grasp some kind of understanding of how we got here and what happens beyond this life. He went on to observe that clearly the druids saw some significance in the sun. That statement made me remember the Bible verse, (I’ve blogged about it before,) Romans 1:20. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” The druids built Newgrange 3,000 years before Jesus walked this earth. They lived far from the middle east and in all likelihood never heard about the Israelites or the Bible stories we know. Yet, they had the opportunity to know God. They had His sun.
As Karl and I walked around the grounds at Newgrange, I noticed a place that looked like a meeting spot defined by standing stones and pavers, in the shape of a cross. Hmmm.
