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THE RETURN OF THE LIGHT
The rising sun enters the underground tomb at Newgrange, Ireland, on the morning of the winter solstice.
At Newgrange, about thirty miles north of Dublin, there is a dark stone vault, deep inside a manmade hillside, a structure older than Stonehenge, or than the pyramids in Egypt. Inside, it is dry, and cold, and so dark that you can hardly see anyone else standing in it with you. But this is no ordinary darkness: it was created for a purpose.
People began waiting in the darkness of Newgrange over 5,000 years ago, waiting for something both essential for life and beyond comprehension: the first light of the rising sun, as it begins once again to move north after the winter solstice. It is the cosmic promise, given in the depth of winter, that light and warmth will return and new crops will grow. We have so forgotten our dependence on the seasons that perhaps the closest we can now come to experiencing the anxious anticipation of our ancestors is when we wait not for something – but for someone. The experience is deeply personal, and there is no reassuring sense that what we are waiting and hoping for will happen. At Newgrange it always has.
Every year, at precisely 8.58 on the morning of 21 December – cloud cover permitting – a shaft of direct sunlight hits an opening above the entrance to this stone age structure, then moves, concentrated into a golden beam about fifteen centimetres wide, along a passage lined with great megaliths, until it penetrates the vaulted chamber deep inside the mound, lighting the back-stone of the space where the dead were once buried. For seventeen minutes, this narrow sunbeam illuminates the underground tomb. The light of the sun comes to the dead. Heaven and earth are linked. From this moment on, the sun will be nearer, the days will be longer, and new life will begin. This huge stone structure was devised, aligned and built for those seventeen ineffable minutes.
The tomb at Newgrange is obviously a great architectural achievement. Close observation determined its setting, skilled calculation its construction. But it is also an epic act of stage management, a triumph of sensory manipulation. As the sunbeam moves along the passage, it is impossible not to feel that the light is coming to seek you out in the darkness, to find you and to change you.
The narrow sunbeam creeps towards the heart of the tomb.
In English to this day we refer to mid-winter as ‘the dead of winter’, and for most of history that was no mere poetic conceit, but a lethal reality. Until well into the twentieth century, European mortality rates increased substantially in the winter months. For early farming communities anywhere between Ireland and Japan, every winter brought the same existential challenges. Would there be enough food and fuel to enable the community to survive, as the plants died, birds and animals migrated, and the cold set in? How many people would perish before those that survived saw the annual miracle of the crops returning to life? Individual lives would surely end, but if the sun returned, the community would go on.
The pivot of this cycle of death and life, the very moment of transition, is the mid-winter solstice. So it is not surprising that Newgrange is only one, spectacular, example of many buildings across Eurasia – including the megalithic tombs of Gavr’inis at Carnac in Brittany, or the temple of Ggantija on Gozo – that are aligned to the first rays of the returning sun, on which farming communities everywhere knew their survival depended.
We cannot know with certainty what beliefs or rituals led to the making of Newgrange, but all experts agree that there must have been both. Walking into the heart of this circular manmade mound feels like making a short journey into the mystery of life and death. On the east side is a narrow mouth, about a metre wide, leading into a passageway just big enough for one person to pass through at a time, a tunnel roofed and lined with massive stones, which sometimes jut into your path so that you have to stoop and squeeze your way through until, after nearly twenty metres of stumbling, you come out into a wide chamber. There, ten courses of large flat step-stones laid one on top of another rise and converge to form a corbelled pyramidal roof, an astonishing six metres high. In three small recesses off the chamber are large stone basins to hold the bones and ashes of the dead. You are now standing under 100,000 tons of stone, and the structure is essentially intact. Five thousand years after it was constructed, this chamber is still entirely watertight.
Clare Tuffy of the Irish Government’s Office of Public Works, who is a specialist in the history of the site, sees this as very significant:
Professor Michael O’Kelly, who excavated Newgrange in the 1960s, thought you would not go to so much trouble to keep a tomb dry if it was just a place for dead bones; but if that was where the spirits of your revered ancestors continued to live, then it would be important that the roof was watertight. It would be not so much a tomb as a house for the dead, a place where they lived on. It is easy to conclude that the beam of sunlight entering the underground chamber was contrived to reassure the spirits of the dead that nothing in nature ends in darkness and death, that there is always rebirth. Perhaps the sunbeam was also the pathway for the recently dead to join the spirits that had gone before.
We imagine 5,000 years ago that not everybody went inside, that there would have been special people – perhaps a kind of priest – whose job it was to communicate with the spirits of the ancestors. Perhaps they had a role in seeing them safely reborn, or perhaps the spirits had a message for the people at that time of year. For them, the solstice may have been a time when the barriers between life and death faded.
Aerial view of Newgrange showing the monumental scale of the manmade mound and the entrance
We can only speculate about the nature of those beliefs – although there can be little doubt that some complex structure of faith and ritual must lie behind the making of Newgrange – and the communal achievement which this building represents is beyond question. From the outside, the scale of the monument, and of the effort required to make it, is breath-taking. Sitting high above the River Boyne, it commands views over the rich farming land of the surrounding country and other smaller monuments nearby. The entire area within the bend of the river has been reshaped to serve as a theatre for rituals now lost, a prodigious imposition of human ingenuity on the landscape.
Newgrange itself is about eighty-five metres in diameter and nearly fourteen metres high. The dome of the mound is covered with grass, but all around the base are long grey stone slabs, ninety-seven of them, laid end to end, and each weighing up to five tons. Like the hundreds of huge stones that make up the passage and the chamber, all were brought from the coast and hauled or rolled up the hill. Hardly less striking are the tens of thousands of smaller white stones of sparkling quartz now reassembled to form a retaining wall around the entrance. Every one of these came from the Wicklow mountains over forty miles to the south. Beyond this tremendous physical achievement lies an equally impressive intellectual one. Newgrange could not have been built without many years being spent observing the sky and the sun, then marking the land, so that everything was perfectly aligned. This is clearly the creation of a highly organized community, one with enough people and agricultural surplus to devote a huge and impressively skilled labour force, possibly over several generations, to constructing such an extraordinary monument. Newgrange represents the same phenomenon as the Lion Man, but on a far greater scale: the investment of critical resources for existential rather than material advantage. Clare Tuffy describes the technical challenges:
The people who lived here 5,000 years ago are our direct ancestors. They were already farming in the valley for over a thousand years before they started building megalithic tombs. They began on a fairly small scale, but then something happened – we don’t know what – and they started building really huge monuments like Newgrange.
I imagine they had cadres of specialists. They had practised astronomical observers. They clearly had expertise in engineering and geology, because the stones they used on the outside of the monument are extremely hard-wearing: they knew which stones would last better than others.
The larger stones were mostly quarried over twenty miles away, likely carried on rafts along the coast and then up the River Boyne. But to walk from the banks of the river to the top of the hill where Newgrange is, even with your arms free, takes twenty minutes. They were transporting these huge megaliths, probably rolling them up the hill. They must have had expert groups planning the transport of the large stones. And all this highly technical knowledge probably had to be transferred to the next generation. Their lives were much shorter than ours, so a monument like Newgrange is unlikely to have been built in a single lifetime.
The gigantic patterned stone across the entrance at Newgrange
Although its builders have left us no records, Newgrange articulates with rare poetic power the pattern within which any agricultural community in Europe or Asia must live and die. The golden shaft of the sun entering and warming the dead in the winter earth is a compelling manifestation of the struggle to bring into harmony the life and death of the individual, the cycle of the seasons, and the continuing life of the farming community. The cost of that struggle must have been immense, demanding extraordinary resources. It can only have been a response to awesome religious beliefs, enshrined in complex rituals, and perhaps the terrifying visions of seers.
Emerging from the Newgrange passage tomb on the morning of the solstice, you walk straight out into the rising sun, and into a festive din of people greeting the return of the light with the liveliness and laughter it deserves. There are dancing, singing and the banging of drums. It could almost be a re-enactment of a scene regularly played out at the same moment of the year on the island which flanks the eastern side of the Eurasian landmass as Ireland flanks the west. In Japan too a group gathers at the solstice to celebrate and cajole the absent sun.
The winter solstice in Japan. Woodblock print (1830) by Utagawa Hiroshige, showing the attempt to lure the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave
We can see them doing it in a woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) now in the British Museum. But the Japanese way of imagining the winter solstice drama of death and life is radically and fascinatingly different from that of the prehistoric Irish, and this time, as you can see, we have a text. Here the sun is doing something very strange: it is not streaming into a narrow, stony fissure, as contrived by the builders of Newgrange. It is streaming out. On the left-hand side of the print, beams of pale sunlight pour from a cave into a world outside that has gone so dark that a fire has had to be lit. Dr Christopher Harding of the University of Edinburgh, a cultural historian of Japan, explains:
The Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, has had a big argument with her brother. And she’s hidden herself away in this cave, plunging the world into darkness. Outside, a group of gods and goddesses are doing everything they can think of to try to lure her out. Drums are banged, cymbals are crashed, a flute is played. A cock has even been brought along to try to crow her out. But none of this has worked.
Now, a mirror has been placed on a tree and a goddess has got up to perform what is in effect a dirty dance. Everyone watching bursts into laughter, and Amaterasu creeps towards the edge of the cave, eager to find out what all the fuss is about.
‘I’ve just plunged the world into darkness,’ she says, ‘so why are you lot all laughing?’ ‘Because there’s a new goddess out here,’ comes the reply, ‘who’s even more magnificent than you are.’ Amaterasu thinks, ‘Surely not’, and creeps closer and closer to the mouth of the cave. Just as she looks out, she will see herself in the mirror; for a moment she will be startled, because she’s never seen her own image before. Another god, who has just crept up to the mouth of the cave – the Strong-Armed Man of Heaven – will then grab her by the hand and pull her out. And the sun will be brought back to give her life-giving light to the world.
This story, of a cave pulsating with the light of the sulking sun, is told in Japan’s earliest written work, a chronicle called the Kojiki, completed in 712 CE. In our image, the dancing goddess Ama no Uzume – the Goddess of Mirth and Dawn – is shown fully robed. But in the original telling, she stands on an upturned tub, half-naked, to perform the bawdy, comical dance that finally captures Amaterasu’s attention. Christopher Harding comments on this difference:
From a Western point of view, we think of gods and goddesses largely in terms of solemnity, piety and respect. But here, it’s all about dance and play and laughter – that’s how you bring the light back in the middle of winter. It seems to us wrong, almost sacrilegious. But in Japan there’s a sense that religion doesn’t have always to be po-faced. There’s no reason why piety and playfulness cannot go hand in hand when dealing with the divine.
Although we don’t have a text to explain what happened at Newgrange as we do with this story of Amaterasu, in both cases we can be reasonably sure that what is going on is a powerful fusion of the religious and the political. The building of Newgrange clearly took vision, direction and co-ordination of the sort that needs strong leadership and competent administration. And at the time that the Amaterasu story was written down in eighth-century Japan, the country was starting to come together politically, its leaders staking a claim not only to earthly power, but to divine ancestry. The imperial family of Japan to this day claims to be descended from Amaterasu, the sun goddess herself: the good ruler, it is implied, like the returning sun, is essential for the stability and prosperity of the people. (Lesser, priestly families trace their ancestry back to some of the deities we can see standing outside the cave.) A ritual based on the scene shown in the Hiroshige print was for centuries performed not just at the winter solstice, but when the emperor was ill and his spirit needed reviving. And the mirror of Amaterasu is now part of the imperial regalia, still preserved, though never to be seen, at the goddess’s shrine at Ise. The sun of Amaterasu still casts a long shadow in modern Japan.
The emperor of Japan at a military review in 1887, with the flag of the Rising Sun, by then a Japanese national symbol
The centrality of the emperor in Japanese life has waxed and waned over the centuries. As Christopher Harding explains, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868 a modernizing Japan, trying after centuries of isolation to emulate the West, but wanting to escape its political and cultural clutches, breathed new life into this old fusion of light and life, of the nation, the winter solstice sun and the emperor:
If you look at the Hiroshige image, made around 1830, you are immediately struck by the sun’s rays emanating from the top left-hand side. If you think about that, you can see that it is almost the basis of modern Japan’s national flag: the red disc radiating beams of light. In the late nineteenth century, a new set of leaders took over in Japan and they wanted to use the emperor as a focal point for people’s loyalties, trying to knit their new country together. So they toured him around the country, reminding people of who he was – because for centuries he had been hidden away in Kyoto. Most importantly, they advertised his divine lineage and at the same time Japan adopted, as one of its main flags, the rising sun.
To a Western mind, the myth of Amaterasu is impossibly strange, yet its purpose, like that of Newgrange, is immediately comprehensible. To everybody, whether East or West, the power of the sun’s returning is fundamental to existence. It demonstrates quite literally that, for nature if not for the individual, there is life after death.
The myths and rituals of the winter solstice are still deeply embedded in Japanese national consciousness, and they seem to be making something of a revival in Ireland. Newgrange is now Ireland’s favourite national monument, attracting ever larger numbers of visitors – an aspect, some suggest, of a search for a new Irish identity, transcending centuries-old religious divides.
With all the greatest mysteries, the last word should be with the poets. In December 1999, Seamus Heaney stood inside the stone chamber at Newgrange and witnessed the last solstice of the millennium. His poem ‘A Dream of Solstice’ seizes the magic of the winter solstice, the waiting for a new beginning, the watching:
for an eastern dazzle
To send first light like share-shine in a furrow
Steadily deeper, farther available,
Creeping along the floor of the passage grave
To backstone and capstone, to hold its candle
Inside the cosmic hill. Who dares say ‘love’
At this cold coming? Who would not dare say it?