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  1 The rocks

  I am an animist or pantheist myself. I believe all Nature to be God, and like Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago I reverence the forces of earth and sky as my own ancestors. Years ago I found myself profoundly moved by Dafydd ap Gwilym’s great Welsh poem ‘Offeren y Llwyn’, ‘The Woodland Mass’, which imagines a forest as a place of worship, with the golden leaves as a chancel roof, and the nightingale raising the host ‘a charegl nwyf a chariad’ – ‘with a chalice of ecstasy and love’. So I have always been moved too when, all across Europe, I have found relics of the religions that preceded Christianity. In this continent people were exploring the mysteries of theology for several millennia before the news of Christ came out of the East, and when they were not contemplating the sacred wonders of the sun and moon, or the numen of forests, or idols of one sort or another, it seems to me that they were generally venerating rocks. In Malta and Orkney, Ireland and Corsica, from the myriad menhirs of Carnac in Brittany to the grand ensemble of the English Stonehenge, the rocks were elevated into sanctity. Sometimes they were given priestly significance too, as intermediaries with the heavens; but while the arcane powers of the heavenly bodies have unfortunately been discounted (nothing could be much less magical, it turns out, than the moon), the rocks themselves defy geological analysis to retain their enchantments still. To my mind they are the holiest things in Europe. Reverently indeed, and affectionately, I place my foot into the sacred footprints incised in stones in the west of Europe – supposed now, of course, to be the footprints of Christian saints or pilgrims, but to my mind the stamps of far older divines. I love the texture of the old stones, roughened sometimes by lichen. There are some rocks which seem to me warm to the touch, as if there is a gentle fire inside them – nothing as savage as flame, more a meditative smoulder of wood-ash. Also some, especially near my home in Wales, have a sweet and comforting smell to them, like the smell of donkeys.

  2 Touching things

  Surrounded still by pagan legend, many a sacred boulder has lingered into our own times as palladium or public charm, and the passion for touching things, a favourite form of modern European mumbo-jumbo, undoubtedly descends from the reverent caressing of such significant stones, by way of relics of the Cross. Nowadays most of the objects people publicly touch for luck are made of bronze or some equally wearable metal, and are visibly polished or worn down, but they are all of stony pedigree. I enjoy watching people perform the touching process (when I am not performing it myself). In some places they touch the lucky object as a matter of course, without thinking about it; in others it seems to be a genuinely spiritual experience; in others a semi-joke.

  ¶ The figure of the mythical Cuchulain in Dublin’s General Post Office, a focus of the rebellion against English rule in 1916, has been a talisman only since then, and is less than a century old anyway, but has already been given the gloss of sanctity by much credulous fingering (regular customers touch it with a sort of intense matter-of-factness, rather as they dip their fingers into the holy water on their way into mass). ‘Who is that figure?’ I once asked a woman as she joined me in the queue for stamps, having made her ritual touch. ‘Sure I don’t know his name,’ she said, ‘but he’s a well-known lucky feller.’

  ¶ Till Eulenspiegel, that archetypal rascal of German myth, is the personage to touch at Mölln in Schleswig-Holstein. He sits in bronze below the church in the old market-place of the town, a setting of such fairy-tale picturesqueness, with its gable roofs and half-timbering, that the whole thing might be an illustration from a children’s pop-up book. Till has only been there since 1951, but such is his tactile allure that already two of his toes, and one of his long fingers, have been rubbed through to the brass.

  ¶ At Dijon in France women touch the little figure of an owl on the Rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove – except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations,

  ¶ On the other hand people in Brussels seem a little self-conscious as they approach the reclining figure of the local fourteenth-century hero Everard ’t Serclaes, off the Grand’ Place. They look around and smile rather defensively as they stroke it – even more so, I fancy, if they reach up to touch the little dog in the plaque above the champion’s figure, which is almost as worn as he is.

  ¶ Almost all visitors touch the lucky figure of St John of Nepomuk on the Charles Bridge at Prague (he was martyred in 1393 by drowning in the river below). This is one of the supreme tourist icons of Europe, and it is entertaining to see how anxious they all are to proclaim their scepticism: ‘It’s only for fun,’ they one and all seem to be saying as they pose for the camera; ‘of course we don’t take it seriously …’ But I have seen young Czechs at twilight touching it with real reverence.

  ¶ Outside the Rathaus in the city of Dresden there stands a large bronze of the god Bacchus, riding what looks like an extremely drunk small donkey. One of the god’s toes gleams with the wear of devotees’ fingers, and I am not surprised: through all the horrors of war and miseries of Communism this merry figure, on his cheerfully inebriated ass, must have offered some symbolic reminder of happy times and irresponsibilities.

  ¶ Nobody sniggers, nobody looks self-conscious, nobody’s mind is elsewhere when they pause to touch foreheads with the bare bronze head of Maestro Mateo, the architect of Santiago Cathedral in Spain, who kneels for ever beside its western door. Santiago de Compostela is one of the supreme pilgrim sites of Europe, and Mateo is the gatekeeper at the end of every pilgrimage – the gatekeeper of fulfilment. Who would be foolish or ungrateful enough not to bump heads with him, there at the door of his magnificent building, with the gleam of its altars waiting inside?

  ¶ I have noticed that in Bucharest, on the hill which leads from the Patriarchal Cathedral to the concrete modern quarters below, many people touch a particular lamppost. I don’t know why. When I asked one citizen why he did it, he asked me if I would care to change some US dollars at extremely favourable rates.

  3 The old religion

  Many of the old stones are totems of the megalithic faith, whatever that was: the most widespread of the religions, it seems, that gives some specious cohesion to the idea of Europe before Christianity arrived – specious, because modern scholarship seems to show that it did not after all constitute any grand unitary system. There are said to be almost as many megalithic monuments still extant on the continent as there are Christian churches. Nowadays they are ever more vulnerable to archaeology and tourism, two disciplines about equally immune to reverence and numen which have done more than time itself to take the magic out of megaliths. I cheer when their arcane virtue triumphs anyway! For instance I know a rock near Reguengos, in the Alentejo country of Portugal, that has merrily survived all scholarly or bureaucratic attention. It is a very tall and flat-topped fertility symbol. Lovers who succeed in throwing a stone to the top of it can be assured of a happy romance, and the Rocha des Enamoradas is littered with successful pebbles, and frequented by scores of weekend couples who, having parked their cars across the road, throw their stones up there only half in self-mockery. At Riga in Latvia some phallic-looking stones stand on the banks of the River Daugava, in the heart of the city: I don’t know if they are themselves of any ancient sanctity, but I do know (because I have watched them from my hotel window) that two or three times almost every day brides go there all in white to be photographed beside them, honouring if only unconsciously the lusty rites of their forebears.

  Once I stopped for a picnic lunch off the road between Vitoria and Pamplona, in the Basque country of Spain: and as I spread out my cheese, wine and bread-hunks on the grass, I caught sight of five or six little cypress trees, planted in formal gravity upon a nearby mound. I wandered over to see why they had been planted there, expecting to find some florid Catholic shrine or memorial of the Spanish Civ
il War. Instead I discovered in the hollow beyond the mound an inexpressibly ancient stone cromlech. It looked rather toad-like – greyish, speckled with lichen, squat. Authority had fenced it with those cypresses as if to reduce it to a more prosaic status, like a cemetery or a commemorative slab: but the wind whistled superbly through its great ugly boulders that day, and made the line of trees seem a finicky irrelevance.

  4 The Paladins

  For my tastes the grandest and strangest of all the megaliths are the tall menhir-statues of Filitosa on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. They are called the Paladini, the Paladins, and they have a majesty all their own. The archaeologist Dorothy Carrington, who first made them known to a wider world, claims that they are ‘perhaps the earliest portraits of individual human beings in western Europe’, the predecessors of a hundred thousand equestrian marshals, marmoreal statesmen, bronze Lenins and anonymous mourning soldiers. Dr Carrington thinks they are probably about 5,000 years old. When I discovered them for myself in the 1970s not much had been done to temper their arcane authority. A track led through the fields to them, but it was muddy and slippery and unwelcoming to tourist groups, and the fields themselves were unkempt, with brambly bushes here and there, a few clumps of neglected olives, and a smell of the sea. It felt essentially an ordinary, workaday place, which ought to have had cows in it, and perhaps sometimes did: but the five pillars stood there marvellously recondite, maybe a little sinister. They looked aloof and scornful. Were they really human heroes? Were they gods? Were they phallic emblems? Were they good or bad? Nobody knew then; nobody knows now. While I was considering them a mist came drifting off the sea, and for a moment they looked like so many twisted and time-worn crucifixes.

  5 Światowit

  I suppose you could always see in those Paladins what you wanted to see, and they may have been idols all the time. The line is thin between a simple megalith and a graven image, as you may see if you ever visit the archaeological museum at Kraków in Poland. There lives Światowit, the very last survivor of the pagan gods of the Slavs. He is about a thousand years old, and none of his comrades has ever been found. He stands in an alcove of his own in the museum, against a photographic background of a birch-wood, and at first sight he may seem no more than another standing stone, seven or eight feet tall. When you get close to him, though, you find he has crossed the line between rock and idol. His body is no simple pillar of stone after all, but is carved all over with mystic images of animals and people: his head has four faces, one on each side, and is crowned with a bowl-like hat. A copy of this arcane divinity stands at the foot of the hill that leads up to the castle and cathedral of Kraków, the stateliest place in Poland: and especially when there is snow on the ground, and Światowit stands there silhouetted grey and enigmatic in his bowler, looking all ways at once, you may think he has not lost his powers even now.

  6 Cheerfulness creeps in

  Enigmatic in a more cheerful way are the queer stone maze-games which the ancients have left, here and there across the continent, to intrigue us still. Sometimes they are large enough to walk through, sometimes just scratches in a rock. They are traditionally associated, nearly everywhere, with the city of Troy, and are sometimes named after it. Just outside Visby, the capital of the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland, there is a famous example which has always been known to the islanders as Trojeborg – Troytown – and is as casually accepted by the people as an amusement park. It seems almost new, and to this day hosts of children entertain themselves by following its paths, their laughter echoing through the woods and up the hillside behind. I did it myself, all on my own one bright spring morning, and felt remarkably close to the prehistoric designers, who, whatever their reasons for making it, surely had fun trying it out.

  In Gotland there are also many ship-graves – graves of prehistoric notables laid out in the shape of galleys. These too, though clearly sacred sites, possess none of the melancholy one rather expects of megalithic monuments. They lie dreaming on woodland glades, clambered over delicately by flowers and creepers, or bask in a self-satisfied chieftainly manner in grasslands above the sea, inspiriting all who visit them. I like to think this is because they retain some of the boisterous convivial temperament of the nobles buried in them, and the confidence of their beliefs. Prehistoric places can feel much less reassuring when they have clearly lost their holiness, when their gods and ghosts have gone. I was decidedly disturbed by my only visit (one was enough) to the cave called Idheon in Crete, on the slopes of Mount Psiloritis. This was an extremely sacred place in ancient times – Zeus was said to have been born in it – but it did not comfort me. Dusk was falling as I reached the place, but it was not the high loneliness of it or the greyness of the scene that chilled me. It was the feeling that, for all the faith and reverence expended there down the centuries, not one shred of emotion lingered. The wind had scoured it all, and the cave was just a hole in the rock.

  7 Old music

  Music must always have echoed around these holy places and their rituals, and in northern Europe there still exist some of the instruments played by the priests or acolytes of long ago. In Denmark they have hauled out of bogs some thirty examples of the lur, the bronze horn that sounded among the rocks at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. They have long wiggly worm-like tubes, carefully fashioned mouthpieces and decorated flat bells, and, since they were evidently sometimes used as war-trumpets, loose metal plates that jangled to make the general effect more terrifying. At the National Museum at Copenhagen several of these things are strung on wires within a glass case, their convoluted tubes twisted this way and that, looking like so many sea-snakes or amoebas. Sometimes pairs of them are removed from the museum and played on ceremonial occasions, producing then what must be the oldest sound in Europe. Opinions seem to differ about its nature. The National Museum calls it deep and plangent, rather like the sound of a trombone. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1940 edition) thought it rough and blatant. The French writer Marcel Brion called it a sombre, tragic call. A frank Danish lady told me it was horrid. But we are at liberty to imagine for ourselves what the lur sounded like in the hands of its original masters, and I prefer myself to think of its call as hoarse, breathy, gusty and intermittent, like the sound of a sea-wind through a crevice in a cliff, or the voice of a Corsican paladin.

  8 Two magical stones

  I visited two of the most magical of European stones on a single afternoon in London. First I took a cab and went to see the London Stone. ‘To the London Stone!’ I theatrically cried, and the driver understood me, although nobody really knew what the London Stone was, or ever had been. Perhaps it was something very holy once. Perhaps it was something lewd. Perhaps it was the central milestone of Roman Britain. Perhaps it was a column at the gate of the Roman governor’s palace, a symbol of his authority. By medieval times the legend had arisen that its possession guaranteed mastery of the capital itself – ‘Now London is mine!’ cried the rebel Jack Cade when in 1450 he struck it with his sword – and it was eventually built into a wall of St Swithin’s church in the City of London. This was bombed in the Second World War, and an office of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation now stands upon its site, almost opposite Cannon Street railway station. In a wall of the bank a last fragment of the London Stone was carefully preserved. My taxi-driver knew exactly where to find it. I could only just see it from the street, half-hidden behind an iron grille, but inside the building the Chinese bankers displayed it with some reverence behind a sheet of glass. It looked like an ancestral totem there, or perhaps something to do with feng-shui.

  Next I went to Westminster Abbey, and among all the cluttered paraphernalia of English historical pride, the shadowy statues, the flowery memorials to poets, statesmen and generals, the jumble of royal mementoes, the daily multitude of tourists, glowering for all to see I found the Stone of Scone, 335 pounds of rough-hewn limestone also known as the Stone of Destiny. Its prehistory was stunning. Was it not the ver
y stone upon which Jacob rested, when he saw the angels coming? Did it not reside for a thousand years upon the Hill of Tara, mystic seat of the high kings of Ireland? Its history was extraordinary too. For several centuries it was kept at the Scottish village of Scone in Tayside, and there it became so revered a symbol of Scottishness that the kings of Scotland were crowned upon it. When the English invaded Scotland in the thirteenth century they took it away to London and built around it their own coronation throne, upon which kings and queens of England were consecrated ever after. Farcical muddles, contradictions, misunderstandings and escapades attended the Stone of Scone, and some Scots believed that it was only a copy anyway, and that the original was hidden somewhere in Scotland. When I went to Westminster to see it, whether or not it was the true talisman, it lay there beneath the seat of the throne as a broodingly charismatic emblem of historical dreams and resentments. But hardly had I made my pilgrimage that day than the British Government, inspired less by altruism than by expediency, after 700 years returned the Stone of Scone with preposterous flummery to the Scots (who prudently deposited it this time in Edinburgh Castle, the most secure of all their fortresses, and charged visitors of all persuasions £5.50 to see it).

  9 Chimerical aspects

  There were chimerical aspects to the old beliefs that I greatly enjoy, bridging as they do the gap between intellect and instinct. They call it crypto-zoology nowadays, but the Loch Ness Monster is distinctly holy to me. Whether it exists in the flesh or only in the mind, it is undeniably a truth of some sort, peering at us from the murky past like the goggle-eyed insect in cuckoo-spit. Some cynics say it is no more than an unconscious memory of the dinosaurs, but I do not doubt that it was once a religious conception, a figure of good or evil, born out of the rocks. All over Europe such creatures are remembered – lakes and rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea boil, hiss and steam with their legendary thrashings. The last of the Welsh dragons spent his nights in the dragon-chamber high in the church tower of Llandeilo Graban, and beside the doorway of the great cathedral of Kraków there hangs a bundle of queer, crooked, immemorial bones to remind the faithful of the holy animals of long ago.