The Lughnasa Triangle: Astronomical Symbolism in the Ancient Irish Sacred Landscape

摘要

In a medieval compilation of Irish place- name lore that amounts to a sacred geography of pre-Christian Ireland, there appears to be a pattern in the choice of places associated with the festival of Lughnasa, marking the beginning of harvest. These form a triangle on the landscape whose corners are three royal sites identified in other documents. This triangle seems to have been deliberately planned to incorporate astronomical alignments to the solstices and cross-quarter days. Ronald Hicks received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a professor of anthropology at Ball State University, specializing in landscape and cognitive archaeology (including archaeoastronomy). He has been carrying out archaeological research in Ireland for more than 40 years, focusing on pre-Christian sacred sites and the archaeological remains found there. In recent years his work has been devoted to identifying places mentioned in Irish myth and gaining an understanding of the relationship between those places and the ritual calendar. The goal of this research is to better understand the nature of the pre-Christian religion of Ireland, which seems closely linked with the annual agricultural cycle.