Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Solstice Serpent Eye


   “This stone chamber in Kent (NY) is aligned with the sunrise on the winter solstice. In this photo taken a few years ago, the sun shines directly through the opening on to the rear wall. This year's winter solstice will occur on Wednesday, December 21st, (2016) at 5:44 am EST.” ~ Highlands Historic Preservation - https://www.facebook.com/highlandshistory/photos/a.477694434198.257919.357070209198/10155693421034199/?type=3 { See http://www.highlandspreservation.org/ for more - and note the link to: http://www.cellarwalls.com/}
    I think about Indigenous Sweat Lodges when I see stone chambers – and now, lately, the Great Serpent who was modeled after a rattlesnake. I’m starting to think that at least some of these “Mysterious Chambers” are not Colonial root cellars or pigpens, although many were appropriated and reused as such, doubt some Celtic monks (or the Celtic equivalent of monks) built them without leaving any forensic evidence at any of the hundreds of similar structures, and I am just about certain they aren’t connected to extra-terrestrials.
(I was happy to find this on the Highlands site:

     And yes, the Upton Cave or Upton Chamber, shown below, has been dated to sometime between 1200 and 1600:
    Note the long “lintel stone” above the door-like entrance in both photos. Also note the larger stones used on the left, the smaller on the right in both. Not all chambers are made this way, but here’s a third chamber in Littleton MA that is: 
     That last one is the “kicker,” so to speak, while the first photo from Kent “sheds light” on the subject, so to speak. The stacking method is an Indigenous style of stacking, based on the scales and markings of a Rattlesnake (and is composed sometimes of other effigies including smaller snakes and, of course, turtles). That lintel may double as the scale above the eye of a rattlesnake, the superocular or supraocular, other scales represented in stones of similar shapes and relative sizes:
      Look at this fine image I lifted and compare the scales to stones, stones to scales:
(In the comments of the above at Flickr, someone even says, “The scales look like stones.”)
Back up to The Solstice photo, and consider this: When the Winter Solstice Sunrise lights up this snake's eye, the days begin getting longer. I wonder if when you walk directly east is there anything suggesting where it may have been viewed from at a distance. I’m guessing there may (or may not) be a “long view” that might add to the overall snake impression – the Great Serpent slowly opening its eye for a few days around the Solar Stand Still as the event is sometimes called. Is there any other event that lines up with the Equinoxes, a stone or a distant hill or something?

Stone Chamber, Kent NY Winter Solstice Sunrise 2010 http://www.panoramio.com/photo/66095070
Stone Chamber, Kent NY Winter Solstice Sunrise 2010 http://www.panoramio.com/photo/66095061
    Upton again, with an “eye overlay:”
     Here's another image of a "chamber" that exhibits some of the same choice of stones and stacking, the “Old Pigpen,” in N. Madison CT (or just over the town line of Killingworth), courtesy of Andrew Pighills, a stone mason who does “not necessarily agree with any comments therein (this post),” and who creates some beautiful stonework, mostly in the English style (http://www.englishgardensandlandscaping.com/stonework.html).

   A long view of this one shows a sort of connection to stone walls (or are they the body of this particular Great Serpent?):
      So, there’s my Solstice 2016 offering, a suggestion that some chambers are really snake heads, and some, maybe even the one you watched the sunrise at this morning, mark the return of the light, the beginning of longer days, shorter nights...

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