A ten-minute journey from Stromness, on Orkney, lies an ‘isthmus’ which recent excavations have shown to contain one of the richest archeological concentrations in the world… It is nothing less than an ancient spiritual city, lost to time until the early years of this century.
(1200 words, a ten-minute read)
An ‘isthmus’ is defined as ‘a narrow strip of land with sea on either side, forming a link between two larger areas of land’. It’s an old word, not seen often these days. Scotland – land of lochs, lochans and vast waterways has many of them. But this is a land beyond Scotland, yet just a few miles off its north-eastern coast.
We were in the final few days of the Silent Eye’s exploration of the land of the Picts, having reached the tip of the mainland and journeyed to the beautiful archepelago of Orkney – a place so far north you are on a line of latitude with southern Norway.
The arial image above, from the official archeological dig site of the Ness of Brodgar – one of several sites on this isthmus – says it all. It is a land within a land, a place whose location has such intense beauty that you can imagine why the ‘stone’ age priests who came here stopped and stayed to make it not just a home, but a spiritual city.
We have largely lost the sense and meaning of the word ‘Priest’. A priest was a wise one; a teacher of life, a way-shower to relationship. And that relationship was with the world around us. The heart of that relationship was our own individual sense of self, an ‘I’. Later, understood more deeply, the ‘I’ became an ‘I am’ and bore a deeper relationship with the beauty around us. Over time, organised religion has the unintended effect of taking away our relationship with what should be the vivid edge of our own existence. When that happens, we lose the chance to dissolve that barrier…
It is only with the advent of ‘object relations’ psychology’ that we are finally understanding the many facets of the ‘I’, and its importance in the development and maturity of the individual, transiting through separation to maturity… and for a ‘priest’, beyond.
The ancient priests of Orkney did not have the psychology of object relations; but they did have stories and myths; and for those of emotional maturity, they had ritual, an action they knew spoke to a deeper part of themselves, individually and collectively. It took a giant of psychology, Carl Jung, to show our modern age what we had lost in not talking and listening to our deeper minds, to translate the need and usage of ritual into modern language.
We can imagine families, grouped around a fire beneath a sky full of stars, sharing the wisdom stories that would act as a reliable canvas for the experiences of the maturing child, guiding her or him through play, then puberty and into sexual and societal maturity – each aware of their powers and their responsibility to the tribe, the land and, above all, to self. From that, all else flowed.
Thousands of years later, Shakespeare was to encapsulate that thought in Hamlet:
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man…” (my italics).
For the ancient priests, the truth was written by nature into the world – as experienced by a self-honest human. The land had the properties of earth: it was solid and held the seeds of that which fed them. These were farming people, and the seasons of growth, fullness, harvest and fallowness were profound truths, whose existence was self-evident. Their own bodies were sustained by the air and the earth and the earth in turn was sustained by the seasons, powered in shorter and longer cycles by the moon and sun. The moon was strongly linked with women, the sea and the shorter cycles of sex and fertility; the sun controlled the longer cycles of life-giving energy that flowed from the sky onto the earth… and specially for humankind, into the daily miracle of fire, something no other creature seemed to possess.
The great story of this relationship with nature was told in the heavens. The priests, as with any civilisation, were deeply concerned with the constantly unfolding saga within which life on their given and fertile ‘earth’ was set. People’s natures were indicated – though not entirely – by the placing of the mysterious ‘wanderers’ in the sky – what we now know as the visible planets – ending with Saturn, the limit of unaided sight without magnifying lenses.
Within the city of learning that was built here, the isthmus, surrounded on nearly all sides by a soft and gentle sea, had a special relationship with the constellation of Orion – the hunter, which is bright and easily visible at these latitudes. The symbolic link, and the stories told of its significance to the ancient people of Orkney is lost to time…
The Ness of Brodgar is the name of the isthmus that separates the lochs of Harray and Stenness. The name derives from the Old Norse nes – headland; brúar – bridge and garðr – farm, and translates roughly as the “headland of the bridge farm”.
Within this small area of land are several ancient archeological sites. The image below gives an idea of the sheer scale of what has been recently uncovered.
The Ness is the centre of the Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. The Ness is covered in, and surrounded by, ancient archeology. Until the start of the 21st century, this was best known as the location of the Ring of Brodgar. That changed in 2002 when, on the south-eastern end of the Ness, excavations revealed a massive complex of monumental Neolithic buildings along with associated artwork, pottery, bones and stone tools. The design of the dwellings here closely resembles that at Skara Brae, and hence my suggestion that they may have been tightly linked.
The Ness is only open to visitors at specific times of year. The Covid restrictions meant that it was closed during our visit. But the websitehttps://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/about-the-ness-of-brodgar/ is rich in information.
The Ring of Brodgar is an open site and was not subject to Covid restrictions, apart from social distancing. Situated on the isthmus between the Lochs of Harry and Stenness. It is one of the best stone circles in the world and originally comprised 60 megaliths, of which 27 remain upright. It is a perfect circle, 104 metres in diameter. In the next post, we will examine it in detail.
To be continued.
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, This is Part Three.
The preceding Pictish Trail weekend blog posts:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine
©Stephen Tanham, 2020.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a distance-learning program to deepen the personality and align it with the soul.
Thank you, Sue x
The Ring of Brodgar wow, how can I put into words how that place is so special, so spiritual. The stones speak to you, place your hand on them and they sing. I have always loved this place and was lucky that an Aunt and Uncle lived within walking distance.
It’s spectacular. I hope to do it justice on the Tuesday blog!