Description

Preface

At a time when the media tell us how to perceive the world, I adopted a 5000-year old Orkney monument, the Tomb of the Eagles, to experience our Neolithic past with my own vital senses. I made it my task to find out if the sun’s light would ever reach into the dark interior of the cairn. This included e.g., blocking the three modern skylights pf the tomb to feel the velvety darkness inside, or hiring a plane to circle over the cairn and its surroundings, not to mention getting up all year round, mostly at crazy hours, to observe the sun rising. and watching, listening, breathing, feeling, thinking, sensing – recording in photographs and notes. Did the intimate experience of monument, landscape, nature, wind and weather, probably not much different from the material world of 5000 years ago, enable me to glimpse the ancient people’s world view? Did they envisage a cosmos in which the threshold between reality and myth – perhaps for them simply different qualities of the all pervading unity of being – could be easily crossed?

Questions sparked and I responded from within my own life’s fabric, e.g. suddenly remembering the Egyptian Sun Hymn (read at school) or creating visual art works. The emphasis in the book is not to increase factual knowledge but to refine perception, to create awareness. At the same time it is not an entirely subjective narrative either. Interwoven with the essential information at hand my account establishes and documents a new facet about the tomb: its relation to the rising sun. I hope it will encourage Orcadians and visitors alike to interact with the impressive monuments of Orkney’s past in their own personal and unique ways.

Ilse Babette Barthelmess

Orkney, May 2004