Knowth is a prehistoric monument overlooking the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland. It comprises a large ‘so-called’ passage tomb surrounded by seventeen smaller ones and was built during the Neolithic era around 3200 BC. It contains the largest assemblage of megalithic neolithic art in Europe. Knowth is part of the Brú na Bóinne complex, a World Heritage Site that also includes the similar passage mounds of Newgrange and Dowth.
20 March 2024
On the eve of the Spring Equinox, the Wild Geese Society met in The Three Fiddles, Nerudova for a presentation about Knowth and a discussion of its significance. The event began with a video about the site at Brú na Bóinne created by the Irish Office of Public Works and kindly shown with their permission. The presentation went on to consider the considerable effort and expense that went into building constructions such as Knowth all those thousands of years ago. It manifested clearly a sense of ‘something’ greater than mere physical survival.
St Patrick
St Patrick on his arrival was well aware of the respect held by people for the mystical and drew on it to spread his own message. He had lived among the Irish as a captured slave from Roman Britain for many years, so before he managed to escape he came to know both the language and culture of the pagan Irish intimately. He would have known well of the marking of the Spring equinox at Knowth with the lighting of a sacred fire to broadcast the event throughout the land. This was so important to the Irish that the Celtic druids had maintained the custom since their own arrival a thousand years previously. On his return with his mission to convert the Irish to Christianity Patrick introduced himself with a bang by lighting a fire on the adjoining hill of Slane, barely a kilometer distant from Knowth a few days earlier and thus claiming for himself and his God the scientific magic of the druids. As a result he was summoned to the seat of the High King at Tara to explain himself and his blasphemous impertinence. The rest is history!
The Human Need for Ritual
Knowth is truly ancient by comparison with Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, but it is thousands of years more recent than the world’s oldest known megalithic site at Gobekli Tepe in present day Turkey. To further the discussion, the group listened to the first chapter of Dimitris Xygalatas’s thought-provoking study into ritual and why it’s vital to our world – Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living.
In Conclusion…
Whether God created Man in His own likeness or Man created God in his own likeness it remains a fact that humans have, for many thousands of years shown a sense of spirituality, of something other than a struggle for basic existence, which has led them to undertake such fantastic works of creation at such great cost.
Report by Kayti Selbie
