But this worship was in full swing in Egypt for thousands of years before we hear of it in connection with the Jews. It has left its temples at Ephesus, Athens, and other places, and with the opening of this year as well as of the solstitial one the custom of lighting fires is associated, not only on hills, but also in churches.
Here the sequence of cult cannot be mistaken. We begin with Isis and the young Sun-god Horus at the Pyramids, and we end with “Lady Day,” a British legal date; while St. Peter’s at Rome is as truly oriented to the equinox as the Pyramids themselves, so that we have a distinct change of cult with no change of orientation.
If such considerations as these help us to connect Egyptian with British worships we may hope that they will be no less useful when we go further afield. I gather from a study of Mr. Maudslay’s admirable plans of Palenque and Chichén-Itzá that the solstitial and farmers’ years’ worships were provided for there. How did these worships and associated temples with naos and sphinxes[4] get from Egypt to Yucatan? The more we know of ancient travel the more we are convinced that it was coastwise, that is, from one point of visible land to the next. Are the cults as old as differences in the coast-lines which would most easily explain their wide distribution?
[3] In Babylonia the spring equinox was the critical time of the year because the Tigris and Euphrates then began to rise.
[4] See Dawn of Astronomy, Plate facing p. 182, for the lines of sphinxes at Karnak.
CHAPTER V
CONDITIONS AND TRADITIONS AT STONEHENGE
After Mr. Penrose, by his admirable observations in Greece, had shown that the orientation theory accounted as satisfactorily for the directions in which the chief temples in Greece had been built as I had shown it did for some in Egypt, it seemed important to apply the same methods of inquiry with all available accuracy to some example, at all events, of the various stone circles in Britain which have so far escaped destruction. Many attempts had been previously made to secure data, but the instruments and methods employed did not seem to be sufficient.
Much time has, indeed, been lost in the investigation of a great many of these circles, for the reason that in many cases the relations of the monuments to the chief points of the horizon have not been considered; and when they were, the observations were made only with reference to the magnetic north, which is different at different places, and besides is always varying; few indeed have tried to get at the astronomical conditions of the problem.