County Meath, Slane, Ireland
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
—Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), American mythologist, writer, and lecturer
About 3100 B.C., prehistoric inhabitants of Ireland created the Newgrange Passage Tomb, a sacred stone circle with a passage leading to a burial chamber similar to other ancient stone circles that align the circle’s axis to the solstices. Here, a roof box allows the winter solstice’s sunlight to align precisely with the center of the tomb’s passageway. This sacred site might have been an ancient temple with ceremonial importance, but it has upright stones that are richly decorated in triple spirals, and outside the tomb, twelve of thirty-five stones that once may have encircled the massive turf-covered mound remain with a solitary carved kerbstone at the entrance.
If you feel a connection to Celtic beliefs or a reverence for Earth, come to see the Newgrange Passage Tomb. Visits to Newgrange are by guided tour only from Brú na Bóinne Visitors Center, located on the south side of the River Boyne 1.2 miles west of Donore. To get to Donore, take the M1 heading north and exit at Donore, near Drogheda, and follow the signs.
Find a stone that you feel attracted to; use it as a talisman to remind you that transformation can take millennia or it can happen in an instant.
Archaeologists say it probably took hundreds of people working twenty years or more to build Newgrange. The site is older than the Pyramid of Giza and approximately one thousand years older than Stonehenge.