Myth itself caught in the act.

The Boyne Valley, north of Dublin Ireland, is home to a place called Newgrange. There, in the middle of a field, stands a tumulus. At two-hundred and fifty feet across, and forty feet high, it spans an entire acre and is thought to be at least five thousand years old. On the southeast side an entrance opens into a sixty-foot passage that leads to a beehive shaped chamber, twenty feet high, at the heart of the mound.

Each year at the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, the first rays of dawn strike a specially crafted window above the entrance, and the stones shape the light into a point on the ground. As the sun rises, this pointed band of light grows longer and longer, creeping along the floor of the passage until it reaches the chamber, sixty feet inside. There it proceeds to drive out the subterranean darkness with light bright enough to read by, and sustain the light for more than a quarter of an hour. Then, the chamber fades to darkness again, and the line of light recedes back down the passage just as it came.

To see the event on the day of the solstice you literally have to win a lottery. But I've twice been to Newgrange, twice followed the sixty foot passage to the chamber within to see the electric-light simulation. It makes the point and it leaves the imagination to feast on what the real event must be like.

Just building the tumulus was an act of mythic magnitude. There are ninety-seven stones surrounding the base of the mound, and each would have required a separate adventure just to find it, never mind bring it back. Each one weighs about eighteen tons and came from as far as twenty miles away. The quartz that adorns the entrance (literally tons of it) probably came from Wicklow, seventy-five miles to the south. All this at a time when Ireland was a vast primeval forest and it was dangerous work just hiking to the next village. And it would have taken at least three generations to plan and build the tumulus, so the visionaries never saw the completed project, and the people who finished it may never have known the visionaries.

All that effort. A one hundred year project that must have impacted the time and resources of an entire society, in a world where time was precious and resources hard won. Just to fill an underground chamber with light? I don't know what they meant by it, but Newgrange remains the greatest symbol for the mythical nature of human experience that I have ever come across. Better than any actual myth I've read. So simple, as basic as it gets, and yet so complete. There is no human situation for which the illustration is not relevant. Light literally penetrates the earth and fills the darkness with illumination. It is us. By taking the mythic path we enact this process in our own lives. We allow light to flood the inner self and bring into view that which was before hidden in shadow. And so much remains hidden.

Earth, stone, light and darkness. Human striving. Myth itself caught in the act.

Ever forward.

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