Stonehenge a fertility monument built to cast penis shadows, study says

Stonehenge is a fertility monument built to cast penis shadows, a study suggests. Photo / Getty Images

The UK's world-famous Stonehenge has been attracting tourists for thousands of years.

Not only is it protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site — for its status as the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world — it has also mystified people for centuries.

Archaeologists believe the megalith was constructed from 3000-2000BC, but the pattern in which the stones are arranged is still being explored today. Theories about its origin range from the academic worlds of archaeology to explanations from mythology and the paranormal.

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According to Professor Michael Parker Pearson of University College London, who has studied the sacred site over the last 10 years, Stonehenge was the land of the dead. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr Parker Pearson said early Britons gathered at Durrington Walls — another stone monument in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, about 3km north of Stonehenge — to feast before proceeding to Stonehenge to honour their ancestors.

But now a new study suggests its meaning may be a little more... salacious, news.com.au reports.

Experts already agreed that the monuments were aligned on the solstices but archaeologist Professor Terence Meaden believes that the builders of Stonehenge, and other megalithic circles such as Avebury, had in fact created a "play without words" in which one special stone cast a growing phallic shadow which penetrated the egg-shaped monument.

The professor examined nearly 20 stone circles across the UK and filmed their changing silhouettes at sunrise on ritually important days.

"My basic discovery is that many stone circles were built at a time of a fertility religion, and that stones were positioned such that at sunrise on auspicious dates of the year phallic shadows would be cast from a male-symbolic stone to a waiting female-symbolic stone," he told the Telegraph.

On certain days of clear sunrise, the study concluded, the shadow of the phallic Heel Stone penetrates the great monument during the summer solstice before arriving at the Altar Stone, which is symbolically female.