Prehistoric Monuments as Numinous Sites of Spiritual Tourism
The Rollright Stones
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.37161Keywords:
spiritual tourism, Rollright Stones, folklore, Paganism, tourism, pilgrimageAbstract
Prehistoric monuments in Britain are sites that have "drawn" people throughout history, due to their impressive size, dramatic location in the landscape, and the sense of permanence and timelessness they convey. The religious attraction of such stones for modern Pagans has been studied in some detail, particularly in terms of renowned circles like Stonehenge and Avebury, but the appeal that Neolithic monuments have for "spiritual tourists" has not been assessed to date. This article focuses on the Rollright Stones near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, a relatively accessible group of monuments that has an established body of folklore attached to the site, a profile in popular culture, and a recent history of use by modern Pagans as a ritual site. The author's fieldwork at the Rollright Stones in 2014 produced three interrelated hypotheses: first, the primary appeal of prehistoric monuments for "spiritual tourists" is aesthetic; second, that responding aesthetically to such monuments is an experience that feels "special" and often involves an experience of the "numinous"; and third, this "specialness" is linked to ideas about what it means to be human, the relationship of the past to the present and future, and to the process of identity-construction and the search for wellbeing that spiritual tourists typically engage with in their travels.
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References
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Mercadante, Linda A. 2014 Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931002.001.0001
Meyer, Birgit 2010 Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms. South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4): 741–63. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2010-015
Mortimer, Neil 2009 Pulp Archaeology: Megaliths in Popular Culture. In Parker (ed.) 2009: 93–99.
Norman, Alex 2011 Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
----- 2012 The Varieties of the Spiritual Tourist Experience. Literature & Aesthetics 22(1): 20–37.
Otto, Rudolf 1923 [1917] The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parker, Joanne (ed.) 2009 Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Prior, Malcolm 2004 Angry Druids Hunt Down Vandals. BBC News Online, Oxfordshire, 5 April. Online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/3600417.stm (accessed June 11, 2018).
Richards, Mark 2005 [1999] Walks around Great Tew and the Rollright Stones, rev. ed. Cheltenham: Reardon Publishing.
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Ruse, Michael 2013 The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226060392.001.0001
Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018 Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Shapiro, Lynfay 2014 The Haunted Lotus: Application of the Phenomenological Method in Apprehending an Exhibition’s Religious Aspects. Literature & Aesthetics 24(1): 67–84.
Taunt, Henry n.d. The Rollright Stones: The Stonehenge of Oxfordshire, with Some Account of the Ancient Druids and Sagas Rendered into English, Illustrated with Camera and Pen. Oxford: Henry W. Taunt & Co.
Taves, Ann 2009 Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Turner, Victor 1972 The Centre Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal. History of Religions 12(3): 191–230. https://doi.org/10.1086/462677
Voss, Jerome A. 1987 Antiquity Imagined: Cultural Values in Archaeological Folklore. Folklore 98(1): 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1987.9716398
Wallis, Robert J. 2000 Queer Shamans: Autoarchaeology and Neo-Shamanism. World Archaeology 32(2): 252–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240050131225
----- 2001 Waking Ancestor Spirits: Neo-Shamanic Engagements with Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Shamanism, edited by N. S. Price, 213–30. London and New York: Routledge.
Wallis, Robert J., and Jenny Blain 2003 Sites, Sacredness and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism. Folklore 114(3): 307–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587032000145351
White, Ethan Doyle 2014 Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft. Folklore 125(1): 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2013.860766
----- 2016 Old Stones, New Rites: Contemporary Pagan Interactions with the Medway Megaliths. Material Religion 23(3): 346–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2016.1192152
Worthington, Andy 2005 Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. Avebury: Alternative Albion.
----- 2009 Mystics and Mavericks: The Pagan Reinvention of Avebury. In Parker (ed.) 2009: 100–110.
Aucott, Paula, and Humphrey Southall 2008 Using “A Vision of Britain Through Time” to Investigate an Oxfordshire Village. Great Britain Historical GIS Project. Online: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk (accessed March 15, 2018).
Blain, Jenny 2001 Shamans, Stones, Authenticity and Appropriation: Contestations of Invention and Meaning. In A Permeability of Boundaries: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, edited by Robert J. Wallis and Kenneth Lymer, 47–55. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
Blain, Jenny, and Robert J. Wallis 2004 Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past. Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 237–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183504046893
----- 2006 Pasts and Pagan Practices: Moving Beyond Stonehenge. Public Archaeology 5(4): 211–22. https://doi.org/10.1179/pua.2006.5.4.211
----- 2012 Negotiating Archaeology/Spirituality: Pagan Engagements with the Prehistoric Past in Britain. In Archaeology of Spiritualities, edited by Kathryn Rountree, 47–68. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3354-5_3
Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord 1972 Mysterious Britain. London: Garnstone Press.
Campbell, Colin 1972 The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5: 119–36.
Casey, Edward 1997 Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden History of Place. Review of Metaphysics 51(2): 267–96.
Chare, Nicholas 2011 Writing Perceptions: The Matter of Words and the Rollright Stones. Art History 34(2): 244–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00818.x
Cohen, Erik 1979 A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences. Sociology 13: 179–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857901300203
Cope, Julian 1998 The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain. London: Thorsons.
Cusack, Carole M. 2012 Charmed Circle: Stonehenge, Contemporary Paganism, and Alternative Archaeology. Numen 59(2): 138–55.
----- 2013 Religion-Making and Art-Making: Identifying Convergences between Cognitive Evolutionary and Social Constructionist Models of Human Evolution. Literature & Aesthetics 23(2): 97–110.
Evans, Arthur J. 1895 The Rollright Stones and their Folklore. Folklore 6(1): 6–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1895.9720276
Ezzy, Douglas 2016 Religion, Ethics and Moral Ontology. Journal of Sociology 52(2): 266–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783314521884
Gray, William Gordon 1975 The Rollright Ritual. Cheltenham: Helios Book Service.
Grinsell, Leslie V. 1977 The Rollright Stones and their Folklore. St Peter Port, UK: Toucan Press.
Hazard, Sonia 2013 The Material Turn in the Study of Religion. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4: 58–78. https://doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2013.040104
Heidbrink, Simone, Tobias Knoll, and Jan Wysocki 2014 Theorizing Religion in Digital Games: Perspectives and Approaches. Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 5: 5–50.
Hutton, Ronald 2001 [1999] The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
----- 2009 Megaliths and Memory. In Parker (ed.) 2009: 10–22.
Lacey, Alice 2013 An Exploration of Meaning at the Rollright Stones. Master of Arts (Honours), University of Edinburgh.
Lambert, Yves 1999 Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms? Sociology of Religion 60(3): 303–333. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711939
Lambrick, George 1983 The Rollright Stones: The Archaeology and Folklore of the Stones and their Surroundings. A Survey and Review. Oxford: Oxford Archaeological Unit.
Lively, Penelope 1987 [1971] The Whispering Knights. Harmondsworth: Puffin Books.
Loomis, Laura H. 1930 Geoffrey of Monmouth and Stonehenge. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 45(2): 400–415. https://doi.org/10.2307/457800
Lucas, Phillip Charles 2007 Constructing Identity with Dreamstones: Megalithic Sites and Contemporary Nature Spirituality. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11(1): 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2007.11.1.31
McFarlane, Jenny 2012 The Agency of the Object: Leadbeater and the Pectoral Cross. In Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production, edited by Carole M. Cusack and Alex Norman, 133–51. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004226487_007
MacWilliams, Mark, Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Deborah Sommer, Cybelle Shattuck, Kay A. Read, Salva J. Raj, Khaled Keshk, Deborah Halter, James Egge, Robert M. Baum, Carol S. Anderson and Russell T. McCutcheon 2005 Religion/s between Covers: Dilemmas of the World Religions Textbook. Religion Studies Review 31(1-2): 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2005.0001.x
Menefee, S. P. 1975 The “Countless Stones”: A Final Reckoning. Folklore 86(3-4): 146–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1975.9716017
Mercadante, Linda A. 2014 Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931002.001.0001
Meyer, Birgit 2010 Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms. South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4): 741–63. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2010-015
Mortimer, Neil 2009 Pulp Archaeology: Megaliths in Popular Culture. In Parker (ed.) 2009: 93–99.
Norman, Alex 2011 Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
----- 2012 The Varieties of the Spiritual Tourist Experience. Literature & Aesthetics 22(1): 20–37.
Otto, Rudolf 1923 [1917] The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parker, Joanne (ed.) 2009 Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Prior, Malcolm 2004 Angry Druids Hunt Down Vandals. BBC News Online, Oxfordshire, 5 April. Online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/3600417.stm (accessed June 11, 2018).
Richards, Mark 2005 [1999] Walks around Great Tew and the Rollright Stones, rev. ed. Cheltenham: Reardon Publishing.
Rickett, F. C. n.d. The Rollright Stones: History and Legends in Prose and Poetry. Chipping Norton: Percy Simms & Son.
TripAdvisor 2018 Rollright Stones. Online: https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Attraction_Review-g186359-d194968-Reviews-or10-Rollright_Stones-Chipping_Norton_Oxfordshire_ England_ html (accessed July 11, 2018).
Ruse, Michael 2013 The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226060392.001.0001
Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018 Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Shapiro, Lynfay 2014 The Haunted Lotus: Application of the Phenomenological Method in Apprehending an Exhibition’s Religious Aspects. Literature & Aesthetics 24(1): 67–84.
Taunt, Henry n.d. The Rollright Stones: The Stonehenge of Oxfordshire, with Some Account of the Ancient Druids and Sagas Rendered into English, Illustrated with Camera and Pen. Oxford: Henry W. Taunt & Co.
Taves, Ann 2009 Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Turner, Victor 1972 The Centre Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal. History of Religions 12(3): 191–230. https://doi.org/10.1086/462677
Voss, Jerome A. 1987 Antiquity Imagined: Cultural Values in Archaeological Folklore. Folklore 98(1): 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1987.9716398
Wallis, Robert J. 2000 Queer Shamans: Autoarchaeology and Neo-Shamanism. World Archaeology 32(2): 252–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240050131225
----- 2001 Waking Ancestor Spirits: Neo-Shamanic Engagements with Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Shamanism, edited by N. S. Price, 213–30. London and New York: Routledge.
Wallis, Robert J., and Jenny Blain 2003 Sites, Sacredness and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism. Folklore 114(3): 307–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587032000145351
White, Ethan Doyle 2014 Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft. Folklore 125(1): 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2013.860766
----- 2016 Old Stones, New Rites: Contemporary Pagan Interactions with the Medway Megaliths. Material Religion 23(3): 346–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2016.1192152
Worthington, Andy 2005 Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. Avebury: Alternative Albion.
----- 2009 Mystics and Mavericks: The Pagan Reinvention of Avebury. In Parker (ed.) 2009: 100–110.
Published
2018-10-15
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Cusack, C. (2018). Prehistoric Monuments as Numinous Sites of Spiritual Tourism: The Rollright Stones. Fieldwork in Religion, 13(1), 61-80. https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.37161
