Abury, A Temple of the British Druids, With Some Others, Described

by William Stukeley

If an artist produces an admirable and curious piece of mechanism, he is said to make it; if he produces a person or being altogether like himself, he is rightly said to generate that person; he begets a son, ’tis an act of filiation. So the like we must affirm of the supreme being generating another being, with whom only he could communicate of his goodness from all eternity, and without any beginning; or, in scripture language, in whom he always had complacency. This is what Plato means, “by love being ancienter than all the gods; that the kingdom of love is prior to the kingdom of necessity.” And this son must be a self-existent, all-perfect being, equally as the father, self-origination only excepted, which the necessary relation or oeconomy between them forbids. If he is a son, he is like himself; if he is like himself, he is God; if he is God, an eternity of existence is one necessary part of his divine nature and perfection.

If the son be of the same substance and nature as the father, an eternity of being is one part of his nature; therefore no time can be assign’d for this divine geniture, and it must be what we call eternal. Or perhaps we may express it as well by saying, it was before eternity; or that he is coeval with the almighty father. In this same sense Proclus de patriarch. uses the word προαιώνιος, præeternus. For tho’ ’tis impossible that creation, whether of material or immaterial beings, should be coeval with God; yet, if the son be of the same nature with the father, which must be granted, then ’tis impossible to be otherwise, than that the son of God should be coeval with the father.

If goodness be, as it were, the essence of God, then he can have no happiness but in the exercise of that goodness. We must not say, as many are apt to do, that he was always and infinitely happy, in reflecting upon his own being and infinite perfections, in the idea of himself. This is no exercise of goodness, unless we allow this idea of himself which he produces, to be a being without him, or distinct from himself; and that is granting what we contend for. A true and exact idea of himself is the logos of the ancients, the first-born of the first cause. And this is the meaning of what the eastern and all other philosophers assert, “that it was necessary for unity to make an evolution of itself, and multiply; it was necessary for good to communicate itself. There could be no time before then, for then he would be an imperfect unity, and may as well be termed a cypher, which of itself can never produce any thing.” Agreeable to this doctrine, Philo in II. de monarchiis, writes, “the logos is the express image of God, and by whom all the whole world was made.” It would be senseless to think here, he meant only the wisdom of the supreme, the reason, the cunning of God, a quality, not a personality.

What difficulty here is in the thing, arises merely from the weakness of our conceptions, and in being conversant only with ordinary generation. A son of ours is of the same nature as his father. His father was begat in time, therefore the son the like. Not so in divine generation. But as the father is from eternity, so is the son. This only difference there is, or rather distinction; the father is self-existent, and unoriginate; the son is of the father.

Further, we must remove, in this kind of reasoning, all the imperfection of different sexes, as well as time, which is in human generations; and all such gross ideas incompatible with the most pure and perfect divine nature. The whole of this our reasoning further confirms, that the son is necessarily existing. It was necessary for God to be actively good always, and begetting his son was the greatest act of divine goodness, and the first, necessarily. But the word first is absurd, betraying our own imperfection of speech and ideas, when we treat of these matters; for there could be no first, where no beginning. And the very names of father and son are but relative and oeconomical; so far useful, that we may be able to entertain some tolerable notion in these things, so far above our understanding.

But tho’ it be infinitely above our understanding, yet we reach so far, as to see the necessity of it. And we can no otherwise cure that immense vacuum, that greatest of all absurdities, the indolence and uselesness of the supreme being, before creation. And all this the Druids might, and I may venture to say, did arrive at, by ratiocination. And we can have no difficulty of admitting it, if we do but suppose, there were obscure notions of such being the nature of the deity, handed down from the beginning of the world. Whence in Chronicon Alexandrinum, Malala, and other authors, we read, for instance, “in those times (the most early) among the Egyptians reigned, of the family of Misraim, Sesosiris, that is, the branch or offspring of Osiris, a man highly venerable for wisdom, who taught, there were three greatest energies or persons in the deity, which were but one.” This man was Lud, or Thoth, son of Misraim or Osiris, and for this reason, when idolatry began, he was consecrated by the name of Hermes, meaning one of those divine energies, which we call the Holy Spirit.

This is a short and easy account of that knowledge which the ancients had of the nature of the deity, deduc’d from reason in a contemplative mind, and which certainly was known to all the world from the beginning, and rightly call’d a mystery. For our reason is strong enough to see the necessity of admitting this doctrine, but not to see the manner. The how of an eternal generation is only to be understood by the deity itself.

The Druids would pursue this notion from like reasoning a little further, in this manner. Tho’ from all that has been said, there is a necessity of admitting an eternal generation, yet the person so generated, all-perfect God, does not multiply the deity itself, tho’ he is a person distinct from his father. For addition or subtraction is argument of imperfection, a thing not to be affirmed of the nature of the deity. They would therefore say, that tho’ these two, the father and the son, are different divine personalities, yet they cannot be called two Gods, or two godheads; for this would be discerping the deity or godhead, which is equally absurd and wicked.

That mankind did formerly reason in this wise, is too notorious to need my going about formally to prove it. ’Tis not to be controverted; very many authors have done it substantially. And when there was such a notion in the world, our Druids, who had the highest fame for theological studies, would cultivate it in some such manner as I have deliver’d, by the mere strength of natural reason. Whether they would think in this manner ex priori, I cannot say; but that they did so think, we can need no weightier an argument than the operose work of Abury before us; for nought else could induce men to make such a stamp, such a picture of their own notion, as this stupendous production of labour and art.

As our western philosophers made a huge picture of this their idea, in a work of three miles’ extent, and, as it were, shaded by the interposition of divers hills; so the more eastern sages who were not so shy of writing, yet, chose to express it in many obscure and enigmatic ways. Pythagoras, for instance, affirmed, the original of all things was from unity and an infinite duality. Plutarc. de plac. philos. Plato makes three divine authors of all things, the first or supreme he calls king, the good. Beside him, he names the cause, descended from the former; and between them he names dux, the leader, or at other times he calls him the mind. Just in the same manner, the Egyptians called them father, mind, power. Therefore Plato, in his VIth epistle, writing to Hermias and his friends, to enter into a most solemn oath, directs it to be made before “God the leader or prince of all things, both that are, and that shall be; and before the Lord, the father of that leader or prince; and of the cause: all whom, says he, we shall know manifestly, if we philosophize rightly, as far as the powers of good men will carry us.” And in Timæus he makes MIND to be the son of GOOD, and to be the more immediate architect of the world. And in Epinomis he writes, “the most divine LOGOS or WORD made the world,” the like as Philo wrote; which is expressly a christian verity.