Is Stonehenge a Temple?

How do we know that Stonehenge was a Temple? Asked Steve this morning in a comment on my rant about a Garudian blog's oddly right-wing diatribe against the people celebrating the Solstice yesterday.

What a good question. Not least because the Altar Stone never was an altar. Or, at least, it wasn't. Not until Tess of the D'Urbervilles lay upon it awaiting her sacrifice to the Chief of the Immortals). It used to stand upright, making it awful difficult for sacrificing victims on. The High Priest, Archdruid or whoever would keep falling off.  And the Beaker People who built at least part of the monument, and rearranged it for good measure, left no writing. The Celts, of course, had no part in it. They preferred to worship in Oak Groves like the savages they were. Or at least that's what the Romans tell us.

I suppose there's the following considerations.

It's in what is described as a "Ceremonial Landscape". It is surrounded by barrows in which are (or were, till scientists got there) buried hundreds of people. We can only draw analogies with what we know, but a wide-ranging burial landscape is likely to have had religious significance.

There's a "cursus" associated with it. Unfortunately, we don't know what a "cursus" is. To say it was "probably ceremonial" in Archaeological Language means "we don't know anything about it".

You can't ignore the solar alignment (feel free to ignore every other alignment, in my opinion - this doesn't meant that there weren't any, but over hundreds of years, as the angle of the inclination of the Earth's axis moved,  almost any alignment could mean something). But like many stone circles around the British Isles, eg the lovely Rollrights, Stonehenge is aligned north-east to south-west - Summer Sunrise to Winter Sunset. That's not a coincidence. In a primitive society the sun was the most important thing - heralding a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to shear sheep and a time to batten down the hatches through the winter storms with a jug of mead. No wonder so many Indo-European religions (and others) had a sun god.  Knowing, of a dark and frozen 21st December, that from now on the light is coming back - that would have been worth something. A day to thank the sun god for his/her kindness in returning, I reckon. By the way - there is another set of related buildings that share a rough alignment (approximately east-west in this case) and that's the historical churches of these islands. And they also appear to have a religious connection.

And the site was in use for thousands of years one way or another. Not during Celtic times - and not from then until relatively modern ones, when neo-paganism (or its great-uncle, dodgy Druidism) was invented. But those stones, set in their burial landscape, with their probable processional relationship via the Avenue down to the river Avon - they could be pomp and circumstance, they could be the Neolithic/Bronze Age equivalent of Crownhill Crematorium - but even Crownhill has its religious connotations. I reckon, however you look at it, it was a religious structure. And a religious structure that big has a right to be called a "temple".

Some have asked whether Stonehenge was a temple or a solar (or other astronomical) observatory. I suspect that in fact an original Beaker Person would answer by asking another question - what's the difference? A structure that regularised and predicted the movements of the heavens - that gave you confidence of where the Sun stopped every solstice - that meant you knew when the days were starting to get longer - that's going to have been both. A way for you to tap into the mind of the sun god, and join in with what he was up to.