Seeing things ...

Two more bluestones get made today, 61 and 68. Analysis of the real stone 68 at the beginning of the 20th century showed that it had been set into the rubble which supports stone 56 in its own hole, thereby proving that the large sarsen trilithons were put in place before the smaller bluestones.

Brian and Lizzie Sanders have explained the answer to the riddles of the antlerless deer and the shielded man. Here I have photoshopped some lines onto the Cardhenge stones, to show how it all works. The deer with no antlers is stone 3:

and the man with the shield on his back is stone 58:

It's possible to see shapes in some of the other stones too. Today we tend to assume that these are happy accidents, but were these shapes visible to neolithic humans too, and were they the reasons why these particular stones were chosen, rather than others?

The caves of Lascaux and elsewhere in France are full of instances of animal-shaped outcrops of rock being painted as the animal itself. The most convincing theory of the creation of paleaolithic cave art (a.k.a. the theory I like best...) is that the ancient cave dwellers believed that real spirit animals lived in the walls of the caves, and that shamans could engage with these animals during their drug-fuelled visions. Whereas today we see cave walls as being seriously solid objects, in the neolithic mind they may have been paper-thin membranes, through which the visible world and the spirit world touched... Could the same be true of the stones in the stone circles of the British Isles?

Here is my impression of how Cardhenge stone 3 may have looked thousands of years ago, when its Lego builders painted it to commemorate the Lego deer god they believed slept within, and which could be freed during terrifying shamanic rituals.

At Cardhenge, of course, the faces of the stones literally are paper-thin. Are there spirit beings living inside, waiting to be freed? The packaging does not say.