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Wearing Your Symbol about Your Neck

07/01/2009 01:05 PM

It's been a week and a half since I posted? This whole summer thing is wreaking havoc on my blog schedule. (The beach is such a homey place, though... I just can't stay away! Thank goodness for review books that are portable "work" that isn't on my laptop.) The big news is that Serenity Adventures won an Origins Award this weekend! I'm really thrilled -- the competition was very stiff, I thought -- and I wish a huge congrats to editor Jamie Chambers and the other contributors. Good work team!

I've been pondering a number of posts since I was last here, and the one that's been sticking with me is similar to a post I wrote after coming home from Greece and Turkey last year, about alignment. I suspect I recalibrate my spiritual life a little bit every time I come back from a study tour, because I always learn something about myself while I'm away. Sometimes I learn even more when I come back.

When I first went to England as a student on the Myth in Stone tour in 2000, Mark Vecchio advised me that if I wanted to buy a cross necklace for myself, I should look in Glastonbury. At the time, I wasn't a cross-wearer. I'd been a Christian all my life (raised United Methodist, which is what I am still, though I don't currently have a home church), but I didn't wear the symbol. In part, it was an effort to go incognito. In my four years at Simon's Rock, I'd learned that wearing a symbol meant people would have expectations before they new you -- they'd associate everything they already had in their minds about what that symbol meant and put up barriers before you said word one. For many of my peers in college, their first association with Christianity was being judgmental; hypocrisy followed pretty closely behind. That fast judgment is certainly true of more than college students: when I lived in Detroit, I had the fun of watching a couple of friends realize that Christians didn't have to be "stupid"; before, they'd always assumed it was a religion for the ignorant.

So I wasn't terribly interested in wearing a cross at that moment in my life. I've gone back and forth on this, because I do have a family cross that I wear on occasion. In that case, it is a symbol of the religion, but also a symbol of family. It was worn by women before me, so there's a connection there that's more than faith. At this point in my life, I'm less concerned about those first impressions than I used to be, and so I don't have any objections to wearing the symbol of my religion, but I still don't feel particularly drawn to wear it every day.

On this Myth in Stone tour, I thought, well, maybe I just don't feel drawn to wear a cross daily because I don't have the right one. I'd be returning to Glastonbury, so I might as well look around and see if a cross particularly resonated with me. So I paused and looked at the Celtic crosses in the different shops, waiting for one to just seem right. (I had found an enamel cross I particularly liked in Ireland, but foolishly didn't buy it, thinking, "Oh, I don't need to spend the money." I've regretted it since. I was looking for that same feeling to strike me again.) You may guess at this point in the story that I did not come home with a cross necklace. You'd be correct. Nothing called out to me and wanted to be worn.

Instead, a necklace that I'd owned before I began the trip, one that I wore nearly every day I was there, reestablished itself as my proper daily wear. A few years before I got married, I was looking for jewelry that would remind me of Glastonbury. I thought I'd particularly like something that showed the Vesica Piscis (the design I use as an icon whenever I'm talking about British mythology) or something with the image of the Tor. On a small Web site called Celtic Attic, I found a little bronze pendant of St. Michael's tower atop Glastonbury Tor, with radiant lines coming out from the tower to the circle that shaped the pendant. It looks a little like a Catholic medal -- it's obviously a design that's intended to evoke a religious significance. At the time, there were only two of the piece left at the shop, and I hemmed and hawed over whether I should spend the money. I asked the advice of two friends (one of them my current husband), who agreed -- I didn't have the money to spend. I saw two days later that the pendant had sold, and I mourned a little, realizing I had wanted it quite a bit, and my mistake had been in not buying it when I saw it. (You'd think I'd have learned from this experience, but alas, I do continue to make the same mistake sometimes.) Luckily for me, my sneaky now-husband, in advising me not to purchase it, had bought it for me, so that Christmas, I got Glastonbury Tor, all wrapped up in a tiny box.

I've never seen a piece like this pendant since, and every time I wear it to Glastonbury, people (usually pilgrims like me) know it for what it is immediately -- and then say that more of them ought to be made! The more I wore it while I was in England, the more I thought about St. Michael, who seems to be both a destroyer and a redeemer. In the chapel at St. Michael's Mount, there's a sculpture of St. Michael, reaching one hand out to a defeated Satan while he holds his sword like a cross above his head. It seems to suggest that the only way to defeat Lucifer is to redeem him, to bring him back into the fold. Like Apollo, Michael kills or defeats a serpent, and there's a moment of union between the warrior and the serpent when the spear or sword pierces its side. In Apollo's case, the serpent grants him the powers of prophecy -- he becomes like her by having defeated her. With Michael, it's harder to say what that moment entails, but the comparison between the two stories is intriguing to me.

Glastonbury Tor itself is said to be a hill which, entered, is the gateway to the Otherword/Underworld. It may have a labyrinth both across its surface and inside the hill. (There is archaelogical evidence for the former and legend for the latter.) St. Michael's Tower serves as a capstone, something that keeps the energy within the hill (fairy or otherwise) from running wild, but also directs that same energy to the heavens. The Tor and the tower are a unity of forces: the pagan and the Christian, the feminine (hills are often thought to be feminine) and the masculine (the tower symbolism here is obvious), chaos and order. That sense of balance appeals to me (I'm a good Libra, after all.)

So, now that I'm home, my daily-wear necklace is once again St. Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tor. While it's not recognizable at first glance, it does symbolize some of the complexities of my faith while reflecting my Christianity -- St. Michael's Tower was part of a monastery before the dissolution of the Catholic church in England by Henry VIII. It also carries memories of my relationship before I was married (and my sneaky husband's gift-buying savvy) and of the trips to England when I've worn it, both my tour with my sister in 2003 and this most recent journey. It is clearly just an artistically done piece of bronze that is also a symbol. But a symbol becomes its meaning, rather than just the sum of its parts.

Guest Blog: Geoffrey Ashe (excerpt)

06/19/2009 11:44 AM

I've had the good fortune, since my first trip to England in 2000, to have stayed in contact with Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe and his wife (a scholar in her own right, and former professor) Pat. When I first began working at Gale, I was given the project that I now manage as a freelancer: coordinating the autobiographical essays to be featured in volumes of Contemporary Authors and Something about the Author. (As an assistant editor, I wasn't given charge of the whole project: I only worked on one end of the content spectrum, while another editor and mentor of mine, Motoko Huthwaite, did the actual solicitation; I took that work over after her retirement. Still another editor handled all of the image work.) I want to say that it was only three or four volumes into this work that I had the privilege of editing the autobiographical essay by Geoffrey Ashe. When my sister and I traveled to England together in 2003, we returned to Glastonbury and met the Ashes for church and Sunday roast. It was a great joy to get to spend time with them again this year.

Geoffrey's work spans mythology, history, literature, and fiction. He has written a biography of Gandhi, The Encyclopedia of Prophecy, and the occult novel The Finger and the Moon, as well as numerous other titles, the majority of which delve into the history and legend behind King Arthur. On the study tour, our most used text book was The Mythology of the British Isles, the preface of which provides today's excerpt.

P.S. I'm trying something new by linking to an assortment of booksellers rather than falling back on B&N (where I do the majority of my shopping). Any thoughts on that?

--

(Here, Geoffrey addresses use of the word "mythology" in the title:)

Is "mythology" justified here? Much of the material is unlike myth in the classical sense, being more miscellaneous and often closer to history of literature. Yet when all these things are assembled and considered together, it seems clear to me that they have an interrelatedness which is seldom realised, and that their significance goes beyond entertainment or weaving of individual yarns. Whatever their precise nature, they have mythic dimension. They express ideas about a certain territory and how it came to be as it is: about is place in the world, its landscape, its inhabitants, their society and government.

The time-span of the survey extends from prehistory to the ninth century AD. It ends where it does, not because there are no myths applicable to later times, but because, with the movement into better-recorded history, their character alters. We get tales that simply embroider the lives of well-known persons, such as the heroes of Scottish independence, and Francis Drake. We get conscious fictions, such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The difference is sometimes one of degree rather than kind, and with Robin Hood, for example, the older type of myth-making is still at work. But a line must be drawn somewhere, and I hope the ninth-century ending will be seen as a logical conclusion, beyond which it would be difficult to go without a loss of consistency.

It may be objected that most of the matter is retrospective. It is what has been believed or imagined long afterwards, not what was believed or imagined at the time or anywhere near it. But the same is true of the Greek myths as well, or any other. Mythology is long-term creation.

Geoffrey Ashe with the Myth in Stone tour, 2000, at the site of Arthur's Grave at Glastonbury Abbey.

Geoffrey and the Myth in Stone tour, 2009, at the same site.

Future Contest: Here @ MtU&E

06/17/2009 06:06 PM

Two things have been keeping me away from livejournal: 1) a copious amount of copyediting, and 2) figuring out what to read. I've noticed that some really good books make you just want to read more and more of the same, and some really good books make it hard to pick up the next good thing. For example, when I finished Magic Strikes (by ilona_andrews), I wanted more Kate Daniels, as soon as possible. When I finished Street Magic (by blackaire), I picked up three or four different books (including one of blackaire's earlier ones) and just found I wasn't in the mood for them. Not because they weren't good (to be fair, one of them really wasn't, but luckily it was a library book and not something I'd already bought), but because they just weren't quite what I wanted. Thankfully nalini_singh's Angel's Blood got me through. I can't say I loved it as much as her Psy/Changeling series (to which I'm addicted), but it's clear she's doing something different in the Guild Hunter series, if only because from the preview of the next book, it looks like the protagonists are the same -- not the usual for a series that appears to have the framework of a traditional romance. The world she's building is intriguing, I'm eager to see what she's planning for the rest (though I'm looking forward to Branded by Fire more).

The copyediting has been going, though not as smoothly as I'd like. I have four different copyediting projects bouncing around right now, all of them demanding attention. Today I moved the autobiographies project back to the top of the pile, since I'd really been wanting to get work done on that while I was in England. Herbie Brennan's essay is just wonderful; I'd known him predominantly from the "Faerie Wars" books before, and was tickled to see he also writes nonfiction books about paranormal experiences. Learning about how he came to write both his nonfiction and the "Faerie Wars" books (not to mention his foray into D&D!) was great fun, and the essay is going to be a really excellent addition to the Something about the Author series.

So now, back to one of the other projects. I have a gig copyediting some literature essays and I get to read about Ivanhoe and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which are pretty fun titles to read criticism of (or so I hope!). The other copyediting projects are very short essays, there are just a bunch of them, so I'm wading through, getting as many done as I can between the larger projects.

In the meantime, I've come into some very fun duplicate books that I'd like to use as prizes for a contest. (Not telling what they are yet -- it's a surprise!). I'm just not sure what type of contest to have here, at the moment. tltrent has just started a monthly contest over at Eudaimonium, asking readers to post the answer to a question or topic of discussion (this month: name your favorite strong female character). Given the content of this blog, I feel like I ought to either go with something having to do with mythology or having to do with taking photos of novels at different outdoor locations (since that's been so much fun for me). If you were going to enter a contest here, what type of contest would you be most likely to respond to?

Novel Tourism (Year 2)

06/14/2009 05:05 PM

Picking the novels to come along with me as international travelers this year was a challenge. I packed course books and extra resources and had to hem and haw over which novels I would take along for this project. I also have a tendency to buy books while I'm abroad, so along with the large number of books in my bag, I knew I'd come home with more. Such is the way of traveling readers!

Before we even got on the way, I was tempted by the bookstore displays in Boston's Logan Airport:

There's blue_succubus and melissa_writing right on the shelf together. One stop shopping!

And there's mistborn's series, all in paperback. Tempting, tempting...

But despite those and other tempting titles, I made it through the Boston airport without any additional purchases. Whew!

Our first stop was London, of course. As I mentioned yesterday, months ago, Caitlin Kittredge (blackaire) sent me the e-ARC for Street Magic, the first of her Black London series. Taking a photo of my laptop in London seemed silly, but luckily, I had another of Caitlin's titles in hand:

Night Life is an excellent title for London, as well, since it's certainly the location we traveled to that had the most night activity of any of our stops. (Possibly, the only location with night life. I admit, I don't go clubbing much and would be oblivious to most of the nightlife around me, anyway, unless it involved star gazing.)

From London, we traveled to Salisbury, from where we made our journey to such locations as Stonehenge (where I failed to bring a book!), Avebury (a town that exists inside the largest stone circle in England--probably in the world), Old Sarum (an old hill fort, used by Celts, Romans, and eventually William the Conqueror), and Salisbury Cathedral.

For Avebury, the location of such notable landmarks as the Avenue of the Dead (or so I've come to call it -- its archaeological name is the West Kennett Avenue) and the Devil's Chair, devonmonk's Magic in the Blood seemed almost morbidly appropriate.

With circles inside of circles in Avebury (there are two smaller stone circles inside the larger one, which is inside a defensive ring of earth), the location has an otherworldly feel, like it's a place where time moves slightly out of joint. Devon's heroine suffers from amnesia, making it so that time moves oddly for her as well. The correlation between blood and magic also seems appropriate at a place like Avebury, that seems designed nearly as much for the dead as it is for the living.

Old Sarum is a fortress. There's no mistaking it for anything else. And Kate Daniels, the heroine of ilona_andrews's series, is a warrior above all else. Old Sarum seemed like her kind of place.

Also, she has a magic sword -- not much like Excalibur (which would have made me pick an Arthurian location for her), but one that drinks blood. I can imagine a story in which William the Conqueror had similar gear...

Salisbury Cathedral is both a church and a graveyard. There are tombs scattered throughout, some with effigies, some with monuments, others just tucked into the floor stones with names and dates and epitaphs. While I don't think that Carrie Vaughn's Kitty the Werewolf is really the type to stalk graveyards, the title of one of her recent adventures (two came out this year) seemed awfully appropriate:

See what I did there? The grave has the effigy on top and so she's next to a dead... Well, okay, you got it. Moving on.

From Salisbury we made a long and arduous drive (filled with many adventures) to Penzance in Cornwall. While in London, I made my first book purchases (some at the Rudolf Steiner bookstore, one at Atlantis, which I mentioned in another blog entry, and some at Waterstones). I'd brought along Susan Cooper's Greenwitch with me, but this seemed even better:

The whole "Dark Is Rising Sequence" in one book! Much of the action takes place in Cornwall, so photographing the novel collection at Boscawen stone circle (which is an amazing off the road place with one of the stones in the circle made of quartz, and a leaning center stone) seemed like bringing the novel home. One of my students protested that I should photograph it at Land's End instead (where we traveled later that day), but I was happy with thinking of the magic in stones (and comparing that, in my mind, to Will's Sign of Stone and other things).

The same day we found the stone circle and went to Land's End, we traveled to St. Michael's Mount, a castle on an island across a causeway. Talk about liminal space! An island that's only an island half of the day is pretty amazing of its own accord. Also, St. Michael's Mount was our big site for our stay in Penzance, and when I think Penzance, I think pirates. Only The Fox by Sherwood Smith (sartorias) worked on both the pirate level and the mythopoeic level.

We were very lucky, of all of our sunny days, that the day we were at Land's End and St. Michael's Mount was the day that everything was cloaked in mist, and you could hardly see the difference between the sea and the horizon. Liminal space indeed. (I imagine that such weather might be good for Inda's pirate hunting!)

We left Penzance for Tintagel, birthplace of King Arthur. Wouldn't you know it, like Stonehenge, I neglected to bring the book I'd intended for the site up to Tintagel Castle! Luckily, the town of Tintagel has a wonderful museum and meeting hall called King Arthur's Hall, where Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson might have felt at home. (As listgirl said in the comments awhile ago, King Arthur must have been a half-blood!)

(I wasn't about to leave The Last Olympian at home, since it came out right before I left! I can usually wait awhile to read series installments, but not the final installment!)

After Tintagel we made our final stop: Glastonbury, which is my favorite place in the world. There are several sites in Glasbonbury where I didn't take photos, but I did bring books along to visit the three that I find most important:

Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge's superhero/supervillian novel, Black and White made a trip to Glastonbury Abbey. I think it's in The Dark Is Rising that Susan Cooper does a riff on how churches don't block out evil, because churches are actually a place where evil is discussed, so they're places of balance -- maybe even places of neutrality. (Someone who's more up on their Cooper, feel free to correct me!) Glastonbury Abbey also has sort of a tumultuous history: it may have been a holy site before Christians arrived, and Glastonbury legend says they arrived early, on the boat of Joseph of Arimathea, a tin trader who settled there and started a church. When St. Patrick arrived, there was a healthy community of hermits on the site, and Christianity was already quite healthy in the area. The abbey thrived for centuries, and in the middle ages, monks found the grave of King Arthur and his second wife, Guinevere, in their graveyard. But things stopped running so smoothly for the church when King Henry dissolved the monasteries, and the last abbot was hung from Glastonbury Tor (see below). The last part of its history makes it seem a perfect place to discuss both darkness and light -- and what's left of the main cathedral, those two tall pillars, could represent two main characters, two authors, and all sorts of other duality. (You can tell this was the hardest correlation for me to make, but I hope I've convinced you!)

The Dimension Next Door, (an anthology that features antonstrout, was a perfect title to go see the Tor, the place in Glastonbury where "the veil is the thinnest." The Tor is reputed to be a fairy hill, a labyrinth, and the original Avalon (the tallest of the hills of Glastonbury, all of which were once surrounded by water). St. Michael's Tower is the cap on the energies of the Tor, keeping them from running rampant. Or so Glastonbury legend goes! If the bridge between this world and the Other are thinnest at the Tor, then the next dimension is certainly nearby! (Not that this has anything to do with Benjamin Franklin being a necromancer, as in Anton's story, but the title certainly worked.)

Last is jimhines's The Stepsister Scheme visiting Chalice Well, a place that's known for its association with the feminine (chalices and grails being female symbology, according to Jung, if I remember correctly). The well water runs red, due to iron content, which began the assocation between the Well and the Holy Grail (which Joseph of Arimathea was said to have buried under Chalice Hill). Not only is The Stepsister Scheme a quest book (not for a grail, mind you), but it's full of women taking charge of their destinies, something I think the folks at the Well would embrace.

So that's this year's tour. Now back to uploading more of my photos for the students!

Back in Action

06/14/2009 12:09 AM

All right, one week to get myself back on my feet, and here I am, returning to ye olde blog. (I was delayed in turning in my short story to my editor, and one of the things I forbade myself from doing was blogging before it was finished and ready to turn in.) But a couple of cool things happened today, and I wanted to make sure to blog about them, and update you guys on my goals from the trip, before Saturday turned into Sunday. (Hopefully, the novel tourism post will go up tomorrow!)

So, first cool thing: my review of Caitlin Kittridge's (blackaire's) novel, Street Magic, went up on Flames Rising. Matt was kind enough to post it for me on a Saturday, because the book has just hit the shelves, and I didn't want to have gotten an advanced reader copy for nothing! It's a really, really excellent novel, which I expound upon in my review. Check out what I had to say, and look for the novel at your local bookstore!

Second cool thing: I finally got to meet Anton Strout (antonstrout) (who is, for the record, the most beloved low-to-midlist urban fantasy writer in America, or so I hear) live and in person. He did a book signing up in Pittsfield, his home stomping grounds and not distant from my college stomping grounds. So finally, I have my books signed. Hooray! I decided that bringing him a PEZ dispenser would border on creepy fangirl, so I decided to eschew it and just bring books and questions and a big smile. He did a reading from the first chapter of Deader Still, which was brilliantly creepy and got wonderful reactions from the audience (including me -- I'd forgotten how vivid, and, frankly, gross, that scene was!). The best part, however, was his commentary -- as he was reading, he'd interrupt himself and tell us little bits about the characters or his word choice or things that he liked about the scene, which was a huge enhancement to the story for me. Also (and I hope I'm not blowing his cover), he is super nice in person. Based on his blog and his books, I was expecting more snark, but he was totally gracious and sweet. (And I'm not just saying this because he might find this entry later. These are honest impressions here!)

The Barnes and Noble in Pittsfield is pretty darn great. They didn't have Pandora's Closet in stock, sadly, but I did pick up Red Headed Stepchild by Jaye Wells and Angel's Blood by Nalini Singh. The staff was really great, too, but my favorite part was walking in and seeing a young woman reading manga with this huge grin on her face, totally oblivious to anyone walking by. Seeing the power of reading in person like that gives me a little thrill.

So, those are my good things. As for how my goals went while I was abroad, as it turned out, we didn't have nearly the kind of time to read or sit still and get work done in England that I'd had in Greece and Turkey -- and even in Ireland (weirdly, because I think we traveled more in Ireland with less stationary time). The England tour only has five cities, but at each of them, there are a ton of things to see within driving distance. So not only did we not have ferries to get us from place to place -- and create novel reading time -- but we spent a lot of time just being places. Given that, I'm not too upset about falling short!

Here was my checklist:

Take photographs
Check! I've already uploaded more than 100 to facebook so the students can access them. I think I have something like 600 left... I may have to weed!

Read 7 books
Nope, didn't make this one. Including my catch up week, however, I have read three full novels: The Last Olympian, The Stepsister Scheme, and Magic Strikes, as well as two ARCs: Caitlin's, and one I can't mention here. I also read five short stories from different sources (which should totally count as a novel equivalent) and almost all of the course reading (I wasn't getting graded, but I did try to keep up). So, technically, nope, didn't make it. If I stretch my definition of book, though, I got pretty close!

Finish one short story
I finished "Good Company" in London (something about being in England made me want to write about the American Revolution, apparently -- go figure), and finished my second short story in the world of Crown upon getting home. So, this one got accomplished in spades!

Compose a photo essay for Journey to the Sea
I have the photos, and I've started writing the essay. I also bought some source material there that will make the photo essay work better. I just have to put it all together!

Copyedit one autobiographical essay
I didn't even touch this one.

Blog at least once
I think I made it four times.

So, not too bad! I need to remember to follow Devon's (devonmonk) guidelines better next time, though, and remember that the Reasonable Goal should be something that's easy to get done, an absolute minimum, so that you know you can have success! I'll do better next time.

Guest Blog: John North (excerpt)

05/22/2009 08:30 PM

A funny thing happened at the beginning of the trip. Mark bought a new course book for all the students (and one for me as well), since he discovered it after the initial course books had already been ordered and figured it would be easier just to procure them instead of having the students do it last minute. At the airport in Boston, he distributed the books to everyone, and I decided to take mine on the plane, so I could get ahead on the reading. The title, Stonehenge, by John North (which is also in my sidebar), is a discussion of astronomy and the alignment of ancient monuments and barrows not only to the sun and moon, but also to particular stars at particular times of year, accounting for the precession of the equinoxes (or the movement of the earth's rotation that accounts for the change in angles at which the stars appear over thousands of years). When I opened my copy to begin reading, however, I discovered not an investigation into alignment and ancient thought, but a novel of the same name by Bernard Cornwell. This, of course, was not entirely helpful (although possibly a more lighthearted read!). Some bookseller stuck a copy of the novel inside the jacket of the nonfiction title and thought all would be well -- but of course, it was not. We spent a good chunk of our first day in London tromping around to every esoteric book store (and several major chain stores here) in our general area trying to track down a copy of the North book to replace my novel. We didn't find one until the second day, when I poked my head into a store called Atlantis expecting the same result of "not in stock, but we can order it for you." Instead, the bookseller showed me to the section where she thought it would be, and lo and behold, there was a copy!

After I purchased it, one of the students asked, "So, did you check to make sure it's the right book inside the jacket?" Doh! I hadn't, but it was, indeed, the right book. I'm still catching up on the reading, having lost the flight and part of my opportunities on the first day to get some reading done, but at least now I have it. The excerpt below is from North's apologetics section -- he speculates quite a lot in his book, but comes to some pretty reasonable conclusions that support his hypothesis of star alignment, which he backs up with some interesting numbers. This has less to do with myth directly than most of my guest blogs do, but it gives you a taste for what we're discussing in the course these three weeks, and also offers a peek into what might have been important to people thinking inside a mythic consciousness.

--

It should now be clear that there are very many different types of initial assumption. A skeptic might argue thus, taking fairly wide limits for the ranges mentioned: 'I do not believe that long barrows were placed in relation to the stars. If I were to drop a typical long barrow on the landscape at random, the chances are eight in ten that I should be able to find a date within a plausible period of prehistory at which your roughly opposed lines of sight would align accurately on bright stars'. ... Following this line of argument in a very crude way, and multiplying probabilities, the chances of finding solutions for two barrows would be 64%, of finding three 51%, of finding seven 21%, and so on. One might reduce still further the chances that the claims against which the unbeliever is arguing are illusory--for instance, by appealing to multiple solutions for the same epoch (usually in close agreement with radiocarbon dating), especially solutions paired at right angles, and having relations with the surrounding landscape--but all this is unlikely to convince resolute skeptics, who are used to having figures in millions quoted against them.

So much for the 'generic barrow on the landscape'. A more reasonable approach is to take a single known long barrow, say Wayland's Smithy, and to ask about the likelihood of finding a solution by chance. It may be supposed, for example, that the long barrow is placed at random on the landscape, with appropriate closely limited characteristics. ... What then are the chances of finding a precise solution involving bright stars in both directions between 4000 BC and 3000 BC?

To take this specimen case, even after adding five more bright stars ... to the previous list, there are only three distinct solutions, each with two orientations (interchanging rising and setting), making six in all. Without giving the lengthy calculations, one can say that for the opening decades of the period, the barrow could be dropped into one of only six narrow sectors of the compass, each covering about 1.4 degrees and 3 degrees. with time, those sectors drift somewhat ... and one pair eventually ceases to be useful, but another takes its place. The details are not important, but it can be said that at a very generous estimate, the barrow could have been assigned an azimuth falling within sectors totaling 54 degrees of the whole compass. In short, a randomly placed Wayland's Smithy has a three in twenty chance (15%) of accommodating a pairing of bright stars in the way explained in the present chapter. This is generous, and on another count far too generous: the thousand years could have been narrowed down appreciably, greatly increasing the odds against finding a random solution. And even with odds of 15%, to find seven solutions--if they happened to produce the same odds, which of course they would not--would mean odds of less than two in a million of finding the whole set of solutions by chance. ... The odds against consistently hitting a solution by chance are very great indeed, and the conclusion must be that astronomical activity at the long barrows is not an illusion.