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Stones, Stars, Mazes, and Placentas

Robert B. McFarland
Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 1999

Many stone age temples and stone circles are oriented to the sun, the moon and the stars. Most stone circles resemble placentas more than the sun because they are not perfectly round. Placenta-like designs are sometimes carved into the stones. As humans we have often looked to the sky for inspiration and information and from this we have developed both science and religion which were once the same but are now divided against each other. As humans we also have an attachment to our placentas that persists long after our umbilical cord is tied and cut. This fixation had been obscure and covert until deMause published "The Fetal Origins of History" in 1982.1 Placenta comes from the Latin, placenta, meaning cake and from the Greek plaku¢eis meaning flat cake or mallow seed. Our placenta nourishes us for the first nine months of life, and we are grateful. However, we rarely recognize the widespread use of placental and umbilical symbols in architecture, such as columnar buildings, sacred crosses, flags and mazes. This is not surprising, since in modern, civilized society, only midwives, nurses, doctors and farmers have seen a placenta.

THE DISCOVERY OF ARCHEOASTRONOMY

Studying the sky (or the Heavens) has enhanced our knowledge of the universe in many ways. Mathematics and the very concept of time developed from watching the sun rise and set every day. Otto Neugebauer, one of the leading students of the history of science, wrote, "The fact that ancient astronomy is to a large extent, 'mathematics' has far reaching consequences for the history of civilization."2

Stone age people probably looked at the stars and sky more than we do, and unless you live a long way from a city you can no longer appreciate how beautiful the night sky is. What we now know of the sky results from both the ancient oral myths and the scientific writings of a small group of observers. Norman Lockyer, a 19th-century astronomer, discovered helium in the sun, founded the journal Nature in 1869, and edited it until his death in 1920. In 1890, when on a holiday in Athens, Lockyer realized that the Parthenon and the temple of Eleusis were built on lines of astronomical orientation. Later he went to Egypt and learned that his ideas of astronomical orientation of temples had been anticipated earlier by Professor Nissen in Germany and also by Egyptian builders 6000 years before. When he published The Dawn of History: A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians in 1894, the professional Egyptologists dismissed him as merely an astronomer and his book dropped out of sight, to be republished by MIT seventy years later. In the preface, Giorgio de Santillana wrote,

Sir Norman Lockyer's merit lies in the kind of questions he dared to ask, in his unshakable awareness of a veritable technical language hidden in the myths, in his astronomical capacity to decipher it by investigating on the spot.3

Lockyer's work led to the science of archeoastronomy, a discipline still struggling to define itself. The Pyramids of Giza are the most famous examples of structures oriented to the sky. The British had known that Stonehenge was oriented towards the summer solstice sunrise for centuries. Gerald Hawkins published Stonehenge Decoded in 1965, and apparently expanded our awareness that it had been constructed several thousand years ago to track the stars and the moon.4 John North recently published an extensive analysis of Stonehenge in which he points out that the long barrows were important parts of the monuments, "built by people in whose spiritual lives the stars, Sun, and Moon played an important role."5 In 1974 Hugh Harleston, Jr. described the astronomical and mathematical orientation of the Pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City, which had been built more than a thousand years ago.6 And in 1974 John Eddy described the astronomical alignments of the simple stone structure of the Big Horn medicine wheel on a 10,000 foot mountain in Wyoming.7 In 1992 Bill Spain recognized a somewhat damaged medicine wheel in the middle of Boulder, Colorado. It is oriented to the winter solstice sunset and was officially recognized as a sacred site by the U.S. Department of Commerce after prolonged discussions with Indian people in 1997.8

In 1992 Linda Schele and her co-workers were in the process of translating 1500-year-old Maya stone inscriptions in Yucatan, Chiapas, and Guatemala. She realized that every major image from Maya cosmic symbolism was probably a map of the sky. The Cosmic Monster is also the Milky Way. Paintings of the Maya creation myths feature umbilical cords in the sky.9

I realized that the Big Horn medicine wheel resembled the placenta only because I had read Foundations of Psychohistory and learned how often the placenta is used as a symbol, in flags and flagpoles, in the tree of life, the May pole, the swastika, and the sacred cross. When I first read deMause's book I was skeptical and had to look up some of his medical references on fetal arterial blood oxygen and placental physiology, in an effort to substantiate his many amazing assertions. No one was regularly measuring arterial blood oxygen levels in adults when I went to medical school in the 1950s - much less fetal blood oxygen. I knew enough to check his medical references, but I wouldn't begin to review the 800 historical references in the first chapter of his book. After learning that our first love-hate relationship was with our own placenta, I was ready to recognize it in a circle of stones with lines radiating to the center.

Our fetal attachment to our placenta is essential for life, growth and development. Our continuing relationship with our placenta was studied by Alessandra Piontelli who observed the fetal behavior of eleven babies with ultrasound followed by psychoanalysis for another three years. A twin fetus regularly used the placenta as a pillow and another fetus often licked her placenta and continued licking the mother's breast after birth. Piontelli's book, From Fetus to Child, gives us a better understanding of the relationship between fetal life and early childhood.10

UMBILICAL MONUMENTS

The fetal side of the placenta looks like a tree, with the umbilical cord resembling the trunk and the blood vessels on the pancake-shaped portion looking like the roots of the tree (Figure 1). Some might think the columns on ancient temples such as the Parthenon are phallic, but they don't stand alone, they support a roof. I think they represent the umbilical cord, which supports a human at one end, and are therefore omphalic or umbilical. The Greeks believed Delphi was their omphalos - the central point of the earth - and they built a temple to Apollo there. The actual omphalos at Delphi was a spherical rock with a column or pillar extending upward from the center, clearly resembling the navel and umbilical cord.11

Egyptians and Romans erected columns that stood alone, much like an upraised middle finger. One such example is Trajan's column which honored a Roman general and emperor, clearly a more phallic symbol. We have continued this custom by copying Egyptian obelisks with the Washington monument to our first general and president.

THE PLACENTAL LABYRINTH

Very little attention has been paid to the maternal side of the placenta which looks like a maze or labyrinth on the surface, and even more so if one cuts into it with a knife (Figure 2). Clyde Keeler recognized the placenta was the model for the labyrinth while living with the Cuna Indians in Panama from 1950 to 1960 and realizing their creation myths were similar to those of the Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Greeks, Hebrews, and Hindus.12

The origins of the word, maze, are obscure and the first meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary are delusion, delirium, disappointment, vanity, vain amusement, dissipation, trick, deception, a state of bewilderment, and a winding movement, esp. in a dance. In the early examples it is uncertain whether "amaze" or "a maze" is intended. W.H Matthews (in 1922) and Graham Webster (in 1993) wrote about Mazes and Labyrinths, but didn't notice the resemblance to the placenta.13, 14

The Greek word, labyrinth labu¢pinq-us is of uncertain, probably non-Hellenic origin. The OED definition is "a structure consisting of a number of intercommunicating passages arranged in a bewildering complexity, through which it is difficult or impossible to find one's way without guidance, a maze." This certainly describes the way the maternal blood vessels interdigitate with the fetal blood vessels in the placenta so that oxygen-rich blood from the mother can pass oxygen into the fetal blood supply, and carbon dioxide and other poisonous products of fetal metabolism can be passed back to the mother.

The word labyrinth may come from labrys, the double axe of the Minoans, but more probably comes from the royal tombs and mortuary structures built in Egypt about 5000 years ago.15 The Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911 used the definition, "buildings entirely or partially subterranean, containing a number of chambers and intricate passages which render egress puzzling and difficult," and suggested the word derived from lau¢ra "passage of a mine." The early Egyptian kings built their tombs out of stone which remain while the palaces they lived in are gone. Their royal seals used for identification developed as shown in the diagram. By the time the pyramids were built, the seals looked like labyrinths, and similar contemporary seals were found in Crete. These designs were modified, expanded and preserved on Cretan coins about 2400 years ago (Figure 3 after Deedes).15

The first labyrinth of significance was supposedly built by Amenemhut III next to his tomb, and was later visited and described by Strabo and Herodotus. O. Kimball Armayor published a witty and serious critique of the claims of Strabo and Herodotus, and I think their description of the first labyrinth can be discounted.16 During this period about 4000 years ago, there were close commercial relationships between Egypt and Crete, and Cretan workers probably helped construct Amenemhut's labyrinth, which might have been the model for the Cretan labyrinth at Knossus.15 There is a 3500-year-old fresco of bull-leaping and a labyrinth in the city of Avaris in the Nile delta that was probably painted by Cretan artists.17

The Egyptian religious ceremonies that occurred in these labyrinths or mortuary temples involved ritualistic killing and rebirth of the king, or god, who was often represented by a bull. There was ritualistic dancing associated with the ceremonies which was continued in Crete and later in Greece. These events might be considered healing ceremonies because dancing and drumming often produce a trance-like state. From Foundations of Psychohistory we learned that all children 5000 years ago had early traumas as severe and frequent as modern combat veterans, and everyone needed frequent healing ceremonies. Our Vietnam combat veterans developed rap groups as healing ceremonies to help with their post-traumatic stress disorders. Judith Herman in her book, Trauma and Recovery and Jonathan Shay in his, Achilles in Vietnam, help us understand some of these issues.18

The story of Theseus finding his way out of the labyrinth built by Daedalus for King Minos in Crete, after killing the Minotaur or monster (half man-half bull), was first written by Bacchylides around 2500 years ago but is probably much older. This helps us understand why the placenta or placenta-like symbols often represent monsters in current myths and cartoons. The enormous building excavated by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossus in the first decades of this century was probably a labyrinth and a temple, rather than a palace as Evans believed. Rodney Castleden discusses the ongoing excavations at Knossus, including the finding of child sacrifices.19

The ritualistic dancing that was part of the Egyptian death and rebirth ceremonies spread to Crete and Greece, and dancing became part of the developing Greek theater.15 The theater at Epidaurus is typical of many theaters in Greece and resembles the mother's birth canal, much like the kivas of the Southwestern Indian tribes. The Incas built a similar structure at Moray which is terraced for agriculture, another nourishing activity.20 The labyrinthine and spiral patterns that probably were derived from the maternal side of the placenta are found all over the world, such as the concentric circles and spirals carved in stone at Newgate in Ireland21 (Figure 4).

Another connection between mazes and placenta is the small labyrinthine sign that has been found on coins from Minoan Crete, on the Hollywood stone in Ireland, in the Italian Alps, in Rocky Valley, Cornwall, and in several locations in Arizona (Figure 5).

In The Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters wrote,

The whole myth and meaning of the Emergence is expressed by one symbol known to the Hopis as the Mother Earth symbol. The Pimas call it the House of Teuhu, Teuhu being the gopher who bored the spiral hole to the surface of the earth for the Emergence, thus being the spirit of the Placenta.22

Waters also quotes Clyde Keeler who said the Cuna Indians in Panama had this symbol. Because the symbol is the same in many locations, the usual explanation is that the coins from Minoan Crete were carried far and wide by seafaring people, such as Phoenician, Lybian, and Spanish adventurers.23

LIFE IN THE WOMB

All of our studies and speculations about the placenta lead us back to Lloyd deMause's axioms about life in the womb.

l. That mental life begins in the womb with a fetal drama which is remembered and elaborated upon by later childhood events.

2. That the fetal drama is the basis for the history and culture of each age, as modified by evolving childrearing styles, and

3. That the fetal drama is traumatic, so that it must endlessly be repeated in cycles of dying and rebirth, as expressed in group-fantasies which even today continue to determine much of our national political life.24

The English, Irish, and Scots have studied the stone temples on their tight little islands more than anyone else. Gerald Hawkins and Alexander Thom followed Norman Lockyer in creating the field of archeoastronomy. They popularized the belief that some of their prehistoric ancestors were very skilled mathematicians indeed.25 The topic is controversial and their critics are sometimes caustic.

God-like, we try to make ancient man in our own image, and the preferred image varies with the changes of taste and preference of our own society. We desire to find admired qualities in the past, and mathematical and scientific qualities are admired today. If ecstasy and shamanism were more highly regarded than these, this is what we might be looking for - and doubtless findingÑin prehistory.26

Aubrey Burl, a prominent English archeologist and prehistorian, has studied the many lines of stones that are often found with the stone circles. He believes the circles are sometimes oriented to the solstice sunrises or the cardinal points of the compass, but doubts that stone age Britons had highly advanced mathematical abilities. Sometimes, parallel lines of stones or avenues lead to the entrance of stone circles. Burl argues convincingly that these are part of the religious aspect of the circles and were used for processions.

Even more obvious, especially in the later avenues, is their function as paths that joined stone circle and death together, sometimes from a funerary monument to a ring, more frequently as a stone-lined way to a later circle that contained a human burial within.27

Burl sometimes fails to remember that birth and death ceremonies are often linked together. I think these stone avenues resemble the umbilical cord leading to the stone circles that resemble the placenta. Graham Webster14 noted that Tony Cyriax in 1921 and Maria Gimbutas in 1989 have pointed out the similarity between Stone Age burial sites, such as passage graves, and the female genital tract, implying that rebirth will follow death.28, 29 Martin Brennan, in his book, The Stones of Time, has described and illustrated the prehistoric Irish stone temples and the corresponding megalithic art more extensively than anyone else.21 His illustration of a rock engraving, found deep in the west entrance to Knowlth, which is older than NewGrange and Stonehenge, resembles the maternal side of the placenta (Figure 6).

Trying to understand the movements of the stars was one way for our stone age ancestors to bring some sense of order and predictability out of the chaotic surplus of information our sensory systems offer us. Today, psychohistory seeks to understand and bring some sense of order and predictability out of our chaotic political world. Because the placenta is our intrauterine bridge between the inner and outer worlds, I think we need to investigate the probability that many of the world's stone circles are modeled after the placenta, as well as serving as celestial monuments. The placenta may also be the model for labyrinths, spiral designs, concentric circles and other prehistoric rock art pictures, as well as the model for the tree of life.1, 8, 30, 31 Learning more about how ancient people viewed the universe can remind us that our life before and right after birth is more important than we usually realize. The birth trauma is the major trauma of our lives, and if we can lessen this trauma or heal it with therapies, we can improve our world.

Robert B. McFarland, M.D., is Manager of the Rocky Mountain Branch of The Institute for Psychohistory, 2300 Kalmia, Boulder, CO 80304.

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1. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, New York, Creative Roots Inc. 1982.
2. Otto Neugebauer, Astronomy and History Selected Essays, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1983, p 101.
3. J. Norman Lockyer, The Dawn of Astronomy, A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians, Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1964, vi-xii.
4. Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded, Garden City, Doubleday, 1965.
5. John North, Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos, New York, The Free Press, 1996.
6. Peter Tomkins, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, New York, Harper and Row, 1976, pp. 226-281. Hugh Harleston, Jr, "A Mathematical Analysis of Teotihuacan," Mexico City XLI International Congress of Americanists, Oct. 3, 1974.
7. John A. Eddy, "Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel," Science, 184, June 7, 1974, pp. 1035-1043.
8. Robert B. McFarland, "Indian Medicine Wheels and Placentas: How the Tree of Life and the Circle of Life are Related," Journal of Psychohistory, 20(4), 1993, pp. 453-464.
9. David Freidel, Linda Schele, Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousands Years on the Shaman's Path, New York, William Morrow, 1993, pp. 59-107.
10. Alessandra Piontelli, From Fetus to Child: An Observational and Psychoanalytic Study, New York, Routlege, 1992, pp.40-68, 112-128.
11. Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religions, Cambridge, Univ. Press, 1925, Vol. 2, pp. 169-193.
12. Clyde Keeler, Secrets of the Cuna Earthmother: A Comparative Study of Ancient Religions, New York, Exposition Press, 1960. Clyde Keeler, Apples of Immortality From the Cuna Tree of Life: The Study of a Most Ancient Ceremonial and a Belief That Survived 10,000 Years, New York, Exposition Press, 1961.
13. W.H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Developments, London, Longmans, Green, and Co. 1922.
14. Graham Webster, "Labyrinths and Mazes," from In Search of Cult, Archeological Investigations in honour of Philip Rahtz, edited by Martin Carver, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993, pp. 21-35.
15. C.N. Deedes, The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World, edited by S.H. Hooke, London Soc. for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Macmillan, 1935, pp 3-4. H.H. Hall, "The Two Labyrinths," Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 25, 1905, pp.320. He also has a long discussion of the origins of the word labyrinth.
16. O. Kimball Armayon, Herodotus' Autopsy of the Fayoum Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth of Egypt, Amsterdam, J.C. Gieben, 1985.
17. Vivian Davies and Renee Friedman, Egypt Uncovered, New York, Stewart Tabori & Chang (British Museum Press) 1998 p.120.
18. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Basic Books, Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 26-29, 199-200. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, New York, Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1994.
19. Rodney Castledon, The Knossus Labyrinth: A new view of the "Palace of Minos" at Knossus, London, Routledge, 1990. Hans Georg Wunderlich, The Secret of Crete, New York, Macmillan, 1974. J.A. MacGillivray, "The Early History of the Palace at Knossus" (MM I-II), Chapter 3 in Knossus: A Labyrinth of History: Papers presented in honor of Sinclair Hood, Oxford, Oxbow Books, 1994, p.55.
20. William Harlan Hale, The Horizon Book of Ancient Greece, New York, American Heritage, 1965, p. 23. Michael Coe, Dean Snow, Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America, New York, Facts On File Publication, 1986, p. 155.
21. Martin Brennan, The Stones of Time: Calendars, Sundials, and the Stone Chambers of Ancient Ireland, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1994, pp.169, 106.
22. Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi, New York, Viking Press, 1963, pp. 23-4.
23. Campbell Grant, Rock Art of the American Indians, New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967, p. 66. Harold Sellers Colton, "Is the House of Tchuhu the Minoan Labyrinth?" Science, Vol. XLV, No. 1174, June 29, 1917, pp.667-668. Fewkes, J. W. "A Fictitious Ruin in the Gila Valley, Arizona," American Anthropologist, N.S. IX, 1907, p. 510. Barry Fell, America BC, Times Books, 1976, New York; Bronze Age America, Little Brown, Boston, 1982; Saga America, Times Books, New York, 1983.
24. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, p.244.
25. Alexander Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain, Oxford, 1967.
26. Stuart Piggott, "Concluding Remarks" in The Place of Astronomy in the Ancient World, Hodson, F.R ed., Phil Tr Royal Soc, London, p. 276.
27. Aubrey Burl, From Carnac to Callenish: The Prehistoric Stone Rows and Avenues of Britain, Ireland and Brittany, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1993, p. 72.
28. Tony Cyriax, "Ancient Burial Places: A Suggestion," Archaeology Journal, 78, 1921, pp.200-215.
29. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1989, pp.151-157.
30. Robert B. McFarland and Will Schaleben, "Placentas and Prehistoric Art," Journal of Psychohistory, 23(1), 1995 pp. 41-50.
31. Campbell Grant, Rock Art of the American Indian, New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967. Alex Patterson, A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest, Boulder, Johnson Books, 1992, p. 143.

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