246 STONEHENGE AND THE STARS 



brought the patriarchal religion whatever that 

 may have been with them, whilst another writer 

 says that the Druids were certainly Brahmins and 

 that " Stonehenge is evidently one of the temples 

 of Boodh." 



Another effort explains it as a monument 

 erected to Boudicca, whom we used to call Boad- 

 icea in the uninstructed days of our youth, and 

 the convincing arguments by which this claim is 

 established are (i) that the battle in which that 

 ill-fated queen was killed was fought upon a 

 plain, and (2) that Dion Cassius, the historian, 

 tells us that the Britons " intombed their Queen 

 with solemn and magnificent pomp." These 

 arguments are quite in the style of some of those 

 set forward in our own day for the establishment 

 of the theses of the wilder kind of folk-lorist. 



Stonehenge has been called with no shred of 

 reason a Mithraic shrine, and it has been also 

 suggested that it might have been a sort of British 

 " Tower of Silence," where dead bodies were laid 

 to be devoured by birds and insects, wild beasts 

 being kept off by a kind of zareba of thorns in- 

 serted between the upright pillars of the trilithons. 



Stukeley, an imaginative archaeologist who 

 assigned reasons and names for ancient objects 

 because it struck him that such reasons or names 

 were pretty and attractive, thought that Stone- 

 henge and other like edifices were consecrated to 

 snake-worship. He gave the name of Dracontium 

 to such an edifice and has a pretty but largely 

 imaginative rendering of Avebury that greater 

 Stonehenge in Northern Wilts as a snake, with 



