By William Long, Esq., M.A. 355 



of Holy Scripture ; that the Moon is represented as the Satellite of 

 the Sun, and passing round him in an epicycle, is thus supposed to 

 make her monthly revolution, while the Sun himself pursues his 

 annual course in the first and nearest concentric orbit, and is thus 

 successively surrounded by those also of the planets Venus, Mer- 

 cury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; that these planetary temples 

 were all located at due distances from each other ; that the relative 

 proportions of those distances correspond with those of the present 

 received system; and that, in three instances, the site of these 

 temples bear in their names at this day plain and indubitable re- 

 cord of their primitive dedication. Now, further, as to the four 

 temples constructed of stone, I shall be able to shew that they con- 

 sisted of a certain definite number of stones, and by an analysis of 

 their details I shall show, that these details are resolvable into every 

 known astronomical cycle of antiquity, whilst the other appendages 

 attached to, but not forming component parts of three of such 

 temples, are resolvable only into numerical cycles ; and that these 

 planetary temples taken synthetically, and as a whole, were inten- 

 ded to represent the magnus annus, the great year of Plato, the 

 cycle of cycles, when the planets, some revolving faster, some slower 

 in their several courses, would all simultaneously arrive at the 

 several points from whence they originally started, and that then 

 the old world would end and a new woi'ld spring into being."^ 



In connexion with this system, he considers that Silbury Hill 

 represented the Earth ; the serpent, ranging from east to west of 

 Silbury Hill, and embowed to the north, represented the northern 

 portion of the ecliptic ; and that the temples on that ecliptic re- 

 presented the Sun, and the Moon, as his satellite, revolving around 

 him. He considers the 30 stones of which each of the two circles 

 was composed to have represented the cycle of the days of the 

 month ; the inner circle of 12 stones the cycle of the months of the 

 year; the single stone in the Temple of the Sun, the cycle of the 

 entire year; and the three stones in the interior of the temple of 

 the Moon, the cycle of the seasons; of which earlier nations than the 

 Greeks and Romans reckoned only three of four months each, viz., 



' 'Druidical Temples of the County of Wilts,' 1846, pp. 6, 7, 8, 186, et seq. 



