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Updated: June 22, 2025
I will take you to-morrow and show you twenty thousand of their menhirs, and then we will sail away to an island where there is an altar that the serpent worshippers built ages before Christ." Lisa laughed. He was not often in this playful mood. She panted as she toiled up the dark little street, a step behind him, but he did not think of giving her his arm.
In these crypts, too, the dead were piled up on each other, and the relics found with them justify us in assigning them to the Neolithic age. Beneath the menhirs of Finistere, cinders and stones charred by fire bear eloquent witness to the cremation of the dead. "Whenever a dolmen has been opened in Finistere," says Dr.
The alignments of Erdeven, which succeed those of Carnac, extend for a length of more than a mile and a half. They originally included 1,030 menhirs, of which 288 are still extant. The archaeologists of Brittany, carried away perhaps by their patriotic enthusiasm, claim that when these monuments were intact they included two thousand menhirs.
These stone cromlechs contain the bones of the dead, and the menhirs and table-stones are intimately connected with them, inasmuch as memorial stones to deceased ancestors are erected when the ceremony of depositing bones in the cineraria has been completed. The cineraria are built of blocks of stone, sometimes on stone platforms, and sometimes resting on the ground.
The Spanish Peninsula abounds in megalithic monuments. With the exception of a few menhirs, whose purpose is uncertain, all are sepulchral. Dolmens and corridor-tombs are numerous in many parts, especially in the north-east provinces, in Galicia, in Andalusia, and, above all, in Portugal. There is a fine dolmen in the Vall Gorguina in North-East Spain.
Patrick; and, as we have already remarked, some of the Breton menhirs are surrounded by crosses.
These are, however, but exceptions, isolated facts, and it would certainly never do to argue from them that menhirs were connected with the worship of the generative flowers of nature. It is extremely difficult to get at the statistics of menhirs. A great many have been overthrown, and yet more have disappeared altogether.
However, we are a little fed up with dolmens and menhirs and we have fallen on fetes and have seen costumes which they said had been suppressed but which the old people still wear. Well! These men of the past are ugly with their home-spun trousers, their long hair, their jackets with pockets under the arms, their sottish air, half drunkard, half saint.
The best example is perhaps the dolmen of Saint-Germain-sur-Vienne, which was transformed into a chapel about the twelfth century. Similar transformations have been made in Spain. In many cases, too, crosses have been placed or engraved on menhirs in order to "Christianize" them. Remarkable powers and virtues have been attributed to many of the monuments.
The Khassias of India make cromlechs of large, flat unhewn stones, some six to seven feet high, and the Angami-Nagas of the extreme north of British India set up extensive alignments of menhirs, similar to those of France. Inscriptions in the old Irish cipher writing, known as ogham, prove that megalithic monuments were erected in Ireland after the time of St.
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