Many riddles and puzzles exist even today which are yet to have any logical explanation. Science still ponders on these strange occurrences and mystical locations. Many more mysteries may well still be in the hiding. With the passage of time nature may by itself reveal them to us.
When our early ancestors outlined their own hands with pigment on the walls and ceilings of caves, they were making the first conscious statements of personal identity. Much later their descendants began to make their mark on the landscape itself, sometimes echoing the scale of their surroundings with massive sculpted earthworks and huge incised figures. The message was now more complicated, expressing the relationship between human beings and the gods and spirits they believed inhabited the land.
These early expressions of the supernatural fascinate us with their primitive potency. Some, such as the Nazca lines of Peru and earth-mound effigies of North America, are doubly mysterious, for many are animal pictures only recognizable from the air.
Today some investigators believe that the Neolithic stone arrangements at Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France are astronomical observatories, representing the flowering of the first human science. Prehistoric astronomers could predict with great accuracy the turning of the seasons and the longer cycle associated with the Sun and Moon. Eager to ensure that spring growth would follow the long winter, the farmers of many cultures developed mazes and maze dances into symbolic rituals, which eventually the Christian Church took over, and a fertility ritual became a substitute for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The Great Pyramid, Shangri-La, Mount Kilimanjaro, Uluru, the world abounds in places that are wreathed in wonder and shrouded in mystery. Some were sculpted by the awesome forces of nature, some are triumphant expressions of the human spirit while others have existed only in the imagination. But all are touched by magic.
Though the names of many of these places may be familiar, secrets still lurk behind them. How were they made? Who discovered them? Why do they evoke such feelings of awe and wonder? Did they ever exist – and if so, where? In Search Of Life, we will try and find answers to such questions, as well as acknowledge the power of such places to fuel the curiosity, fire the imagination and thrill the senses.
-end-
