352 Ahury. 



stood, indicates a boundary of that awful regard that was paid to 

 them."i 



The Rev. Wm. Lisle Bowles in his 'Hermes Britannicus,' 1828, 

 argues for the dedication of the temple at Abury, to the worship 

 of the Celtic deity Teutates or Mei'cury. He says, ..." I should 

 thus designate the intent and character of the whole work at 

 Abury. The vast pile, in the first place, I consider as sacred to 

 that great instructor, symbolised and worshipped in Egypt, who 

 unfolded the heavens, and brought intelligence of one infinite god, 

 and of eternal life to man: which knowledge, in remote ages, was 

 communicated to the Celtic Druids by the Phoenicians. The inner 

 circles, represent, severally, the months, the year, the days, and the 

 hours, included in the great cii'cle of eternity, representing the god 

 over the heavens, stretching on each side in the form of the 'ser- 

 pent,' the well known emblem, both of the course of the stars and 

 of restoration and immortality; whilst, if we admit the single stone 

 within one of the circles as the gnomon of a vast dial, according to 

 Maurice,^ the shadow of passing life is Still more obvious. Exactly 

 in the middle, {i.e. on Silbury Hill, p. 21, &c., and scq.) and upon 

 a line with the two extremities of the serpent's body, and opposite 

 the great circle, in front, stood, according to my conjecture, whe- 

 ther right or wrong, the simulacrum, such as those of which Caesar 

 speaks — the simulacrum of that sublime Teacher Avho will appear 

 hereafter as the awakener and restorer of the dead, now sleeping, 

 each in his silent grassy heap, at his feet; whilst he, pointing to the 

 tracks over the waste and wildeiing downs, stands thus to be con- 

 sidered also as the guide of the darkling travellers along the ways 

 of life, and the awakener and kestorer of the dead, when the 

 various ways of that life shall end in the forgotten dust of the bar- 

 row or the tomb; such is the moral lesson taught by this mysterious 

 monument, the dark adumbration of the only hope of the Celtic 



' Munimeuta Antiqua, 1799, vol. i. p. 202. 

 * Eev. T. Maurice. iBdian Antiquities, 1801, vol. vi. p. 118. In liis " Disser- 

 tation," in this work, " On the Indian origin of the Druids," Mr. j^Iaurice appears 

 to have been the first to insist on the astronomical significance of the numbers of 

 the stones in the circles, &c., at Abury, and in other megulithie mouuuients ; 

 a view which, by such writers as Higgins and Duke, has been so greatly 

 ftbusod. 



