From Stonehenge to Seattle

Nick Campion
Bath Spa University College

The cutting edge investigation of Stonehenge's celestial connections - which has played such an important part in the development of archaeoastronomy - has usually been conducted by scholars of impeccable credentials in their fields, from Inigo Jones to Alex Thom, taking in William Stukeley, Norman Lockyer and Gerald Hawkins along the way. Yet their work is generally shunned by their modern intellectual peers.
Instead it finds acceptance in what is generally known as the 'fringe', represented typically by Druid orders and New Age travellers. This paper will look at the adoption of archaeoastronomical theories by the esoteric and New Age movements, particularly in relation to the Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals of the 1970s and 80s, and consider New Age cosmology as it emerged as a focus for radical alternatives in the 1960s down to the eco-protests of the 1990s.