Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 49

was to bring them all into apparent line. It isn't possible because the
positions are actually calculated using spherical triangles in which
one apex is the celestial pole, and one side is the co-latitude of the
observing site. If the tilt of Earth's axis altered in such a way as to
produce an alignment at Ballochroy, say, which wasn't there before,
then all of the other sites would be affected differently.
(Some New Age believers maintain that Earth's axis under-
went a major shift around 1000 b.c.; if it were true, the whole
of megalithic astronomy would be invalid. Their belief in both
remains unshakeable. Isaac Asimov pointed out that if this had
happened, the consequences would be like the ending of The Man
Who Could Work Miracles : at the very least, stalactites, thou-
sands of years old and fragile, would have been shattered all over
the world [ 4A ]. At one New Age conference a well-known speaker
- allowed to remain anonymous here - said, to great applause, that
Western civilization's record of violence in the twentieth century
would cause the planet's spirit to revolt and destroy us with a polar
shift in 2011-2012. Reminded afterwards that earlier in his talk he
had mentioned the Aztecs, successors to the Maya, who lived in a
state of permanent war to generate enough captives whose living
hearts they could tear out in ceremonies they believed essential if
the Sun was to rise and the rain continue to fall - “Yes indeed,” he
replied, “but I have to give the audience what they want to hear.”)
In Megalithic Lunar Observatories , Thom reinterpreted
the Mid Clyth stones, showing that they could also be used for
detailed lunar observations [ 4B ] ; and even if they were set up to
observe Capella, that's not to say that they couldn't be used in
other ways. But Thom's lunar interpretations consisted of mul-
tiple sites nationwide, working accurately with a fixed standard
of length (the 'Megalithic Yard'), moving northward to spread the
events further along the horizon and observe the Moon's motion
with still greater precision - perhaps realizing that in effect they
were discovering the circumference of the spherical Earth.
Many experts found it impossible to believe that such an
advanced society could have existed in prehistoric Britain. The
picture they painted was of a tribal society where social groupings
consisted of a few families at most, and strangers were routinely
killed on sight. But even by the late 1970s, circumstantial evidence
for an advanced society was beginning to show in other areas; for