Sleepers Awakened

As the gigantic bus full of drowsy college students rolled quietly through the hills and dales of the British countryside on the morning of February 7th, 2010, I opened my copy of The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley to a chapter that spoke of the rise of man, from his prehistoric origins to his earliest civilizations. It detailed his descent from the trees to the plains, his taming of fire, his mastery of language, and his increasing distance from the natural forces that formed him. The fields that we drove past, pale green despite the frigid weather, and their accompanying farmhouses illustrated man's motivation to domesticate plants, and later, animals. I imagined that the people waking up inside of them led pleasant and simple lives, eating hearty food, and living in one place without the worry of having to uproot or face great change. I looked around and saw fatigue in the faces of my peers, and I knew that if a mirror appeared in front of me that same tired look would shadow my own expression. We had just crossed an ocean, entered into strange culture, and scurried around a strange city for a week. We were tired. We were being shuttled to the middle of nowhere to look at a neolithic pile of stones. The prospect wasn't as exciting as it might be under different circumstances.

The bus passed silently into a bank of fog as I read:

As man entered upon a wild new corridor of existence, some part of himself passed into a hypnotic slumber, but, in the diverse rooms of his mind, other sleepers awakened...

Around me, many of my classmates slumbered, not hypnotically, but in that shallow, interrupted manner that characterizes the process of sleep in a moving vehicle. We were in our own sort of foggy corridor- one that stretched out indeterminately from Bath to Salisbury, England to America, February to May. All of these things are alternately starting points and destinations in relation to the "alternate existence" of our time in England. They linger somewhere ahead of and behind us, under us and under the foundations and feet or our original homes and families. I realized this as we passed, wraith-like, through the mist.

Stonehenge itself is only impressive considering its origins and the lengths that people 5,000 years ago went to in order to construct and place its enormous stanchions. The various rings of stones were quarried dozens of miles away (some even in neighboring Wales), and it took the effort to 200 men almost two weeks to convey the giant rocks to their present location. It was a project that showed advanced planning and social skills. It meant that people were working together for a common purpose, worshiping the same gods, and all of this in the year 3,000 B.C. I don't know where human civilization stood at that particular point in time, what the historians and archaeologists considered ground-breaking, but these facts were impressive to me.



We got off the bus, listened to a brief explanation of the history of the religious site, and were set loose to take pictures and admire the ring of standing stones for a bit. My friends and I took one loop around the place, taking pictures from various sides, but not really gleaning anything magical from them. It is a novelty, I suppose, to have a picture of oneself in front of someone else's accomplishment, like standing next to the World Series Trophy when it comes to the local mall. After a few minutes, most of the students in the program (myself not included on account of being a country boy) were taking pictures of the sheep in the field next door.

When we returned to the bus and headed off to visit one of the many Cathedrals that we Americans flock to Europe to see (and not without reason, for they are impressive), I wondered about Eiseley's "other sleepers." What had awakened when man fell into the sleep of collective thought, the written word, and complex tools? What was it that slumbered peacefully through all those thousands of years of evolution, only to wake up and see a ring of colossal stones? And as I remembered the words of our tour guide, Andrew Butterworth, I began to understand. Amid the mechanical hum of highway travel, the other sleepers began to stir in my memory.

Recent archaeological discoveries, Andrew had said, his voice dampened by the gray and the fog, indicated that Stonehenge was a burial site. It was a place to celebrate the winter solstice, the darkest time of year, when shadows leaped and men shivered, and to inter the remains of the dead. The remains that were analyzed were not bones, but ashes, implying that the ritual may have involved burning- a release of the souls into the frigid and shelterless skies of the plain. Perhaps, I began to think, these men had awoken other sleepers within themselves. Perhaps the distance from the sheltered wood of their simian beginnings and their sudden recognition of a certain hugeness of the universe had roused those parts of our minds that tell us how homeless we are, how far we've yet to travel.

And yet, all of this occurred to me because the early folk of Salisbury burned their dead. It might have been an attempt to prevent animals from desecrating primitive grave sites, or a method of appeasing some vague, early goddess, but I preferred to look at the cremation as a form of supplication, a human yell in the desert places of Britain. These simple people, despite their lack of technology or culture, came with the remains of people they had known and released their spirits into the blackness at the annual height of its power. They saw the brown dampness of the earth and the slate walls of cloud that blocked the sun and released the life forces of their most loved and honored kin to infuse life back into a desolate landscape. These people knew somehow that there were magic things at work beyond their control, indeed, the positioning of the stones implies that they could calculate them, even anticipate their movement. And yet they sought to touch these powers, if only briefly, through the souls of the dead. Perhaps they merely wanted to ask for warmth, a turn of season, or a blessing on the land. Perhaps they thought that their past comrades would join the universal forces and look down favorably upon them. In either circumstance, the days gradually grew longer and warmer following the ceremony on the solstice, and the memories of the dead faded gently into the pale green fabric of the Salisbury Plains.

I closed my book. The people around me were less drowsy, reinvigorated by sleep or coffee, and we all watched the countryside unfold on either side of us, rolling toward Cathedrals, and warm pubs with good food. The day was a good one. We had awoken, as from a sleep.