Newgrange stone age builders first to believe in life after death says new book

We should see things as they are not as we want them to be.

"There is no such thing as a soul and no evidence of a human life after death." This is an absurd statement and presupposes that a metaphysical concept will ever be proven by mechanical science. Most of the degeneracy in Western European society can be traced to this type of materialism/phyicalism.

jacersagain;- issues with more than your memory. Just to explain to you how it all connects. You mentioned Druids in relation to Newgrange and I said that they came 2500 years later. Druids - Tara - St Patrick. Perhaps you are not aware of that connection? Sorry if you have not heard of it. The most recent development at Tara - in the landscape across National Monuments a twice tolled motorway. Seamus Heaney described it ( on BBC - not reported in the 'Republic') as a desecration - of an ancient site assiociated with Druids and St Patrick. In case you are not aware only 6000 vehicles a day in each direction. Traffic Guarantee ...Poor Paddy tax payer having to borrow money to subsidise Spanish owners. Not distorting at all. Facts are facts - "my kind " like facts. Meath Heritage Capital of Ireland is a joke.

Mollie is right. Yep, I do have issues with my memory and with my memory of some of my old school History lessons on Druids and Tara. Yes, it was Neil Oliver’s “A History of Ancient Britain”, the BBC’s TV programme (a brilliant one; I was fascinated watching that series of programmes) and yes, it was a pig they burned to replicate a human body smoking up to the sky (science has decreed that our human bodies are that so-akin to a lump of pork that it is used by science-based TV shows to demonstrate just how “pig snort-snort” we all are; apologies to all gentlemen and gentleladies of all police forces). Actually, I correctly referred to Neil’s programme in another post on IC a few weeks ago, when my memory was good. Though what Mollie’s reference to poet Seamus Heaney and a motorway has to do with Anthony’s book or Jane’s article above beats me… Wait a minute! No it doesn’t beat me at all! It’s just typical of women to distort the essence of a story, or of anything to meet or introduce their own agenda. Mollie and her kind, like old friend Portia777, hate sights like the “up-yours” Maiden’s Finger. Excuse me *chuckling laugh-racking cough* Terrible!! … Aren’t I??

Erm, I’d like to qualify my earlier agreement with Will Hamilton to limit it specifically to his comment that Anthony wrote his book on “muddled superstitions” based on childish insecurities (except that I wouldn’t have used the word ‘insecurities’; I’d have used ‘fantasies’ or ‘folklore’. I have to completely disagree with his assertion that “There is no such thing as a soul and no evidence of a human life after death”. Will must be an extra-terrestrial, living on another planet, if he doesn’t know of, or accept, all the evidence of at least 3000 years that contradicts this assertion of his. Everybody has a soul, even he does - whether he recognises that or not - and there are countless records - of written and filmed evidence - going on even in this present day world of ours - that few of the world’s media doesn’t bring to our attention as news that is good (the Good News) that there is some form of life after death, though it is not in human form as he supposes…

jacersagain;- oh dear! You do have issues. The British TV programme you mention was Neil Oliver's A History of Ancient Britain. H. e visited Newgrange and Knowth with Professor George EoganThey burned the body of a pig - I think at Knowth- to replicate a human cremation. Newgrange Knowth and Dowth date back 5000 years. The Celts and Druids are Iron Age more recent only 2500 ago. Tara of course comes to mind with the Druids..I wonder what they would make of the motorway? Seamus Heaney called it a desecration.

I wish Anthony the best in his world of journalism but please, he shouldn’t have written this book… from the synopsis of it that I’ve read, it has little basis in facts and is full of childhood fantasies and local folklore and should be read with a pinch of salt. He's run the risk of ridicule in writing and publishing it, though I admire his enrepreneurial spiritin doing so. He should stick to local journalism and editing local newspapers, which he is not bad at, like his journo colleague, my son, and others like Jane, Niall O’D and his cohorts aren’t bad at either. I’d suggest that Anto’s well-meaning but false misleading book be shelved in the “honestly-believed-but-truthfully-nonsense” section of our world’s giant library store. I wouldn’t bother to buy it or borrow it from my local library. No sorry’s or apologies to Anthony for these posts… he needs to get real on real things, to stop being a pseudo-archaeologist, pseudo-historian and pseudo-author on things he knows nothing little about and stick to being a good slogging journo lad.

(… more) (Aside: The clients were parents of a child who would have been a subject of the Children’s Referendum held yesterday in Ireland; I was going to vote ‘No’ on behalf of parents like my wife’s clients of back then but a prayer to the Holy Spirit of Wisdom made me tick ‘Yes’ literally at the last pencil-over-the-ballot-paper second). Anyways, Antony Murphy’s theory about the Maiden’s Finger is simply fantasy. The structure is a strong structure, built of stones with mortar between the joints of stones. Anthony’s attempt to associate the builders of the Maiden’s Finger at Mornington with the builders of the mound structures at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth falls flat on its face - because of the use of mortar in the building of the ‘Maiden’s Finger’. Mortar is not found anywhere in the original Boyne Valley natural stone-built mounds and so they cannot be associated with the Maiden’s Finger. As to the why it’s called the Maiden’s Finger, given it’s...erm… “up-yours” shape, is anyone’s guess! (Google or Bing “Maiden’s Finger, Mornington” to see pictures of the stone structure; better still, go visit it on your Gathering Home event next year and have a chuckle over its shape).

(… more) Anthony, in his mid-twenties, still embellished with his childhood fascination about Newgrange (and probably his daddy’s and uncles’ and cousins’ and all their wives’ and children and his daddy’s friends like Niall O’Dowd, as well as me and everybody else who has ever visited Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and been as fascinated as Murphy46 below was), wrote this piece published by his daddy’s permission in his daddy’s-controlled local newspaper about what he declared - to the whole world of Ancient Irish Archaeology - to have discovered: that the Maiden’s Finger at Mornington was aligned by the Irish Sea’s rising sun towards the mounds at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and their rising sun’s enlightens. Well now, while reading (thanks to my son) what young Anthony wrote about in his daddy’s newspaper … d’yez know what??? I spluttered me Saturday morning coffee slurp all over me late wife’s new casual morning dress. My Social Worker wife raged at me for that and never forgave me for it; she was heading out to meet “important clients” that day. (more…)

(oh yes! there's more!) Now, listen up... Anthony wrote a piece in his daddy’s newspaper, a piece that my son drew my nonchalant attention to, wherein Anthony drew attention to an old structure near the mouth of the River Boyne, where it enters the Irish Sea at a place called Mornington, beside Bettystown, a beautiful beach that Niall O’Dowd and I know well, having taken many a run, jog or walk on it, as he has rightfully written of its beauty here before on IC (no, yez eejits, don’t mix that name of Mornington up with the old Seekers’ song that goes # Morning Town, many years ago #... pardon me while a I have chuckle). *Note to self “jacers, stop that chuckling… this is serious stuff, jacers! You’re about to talk about the Maiden!”* - Ok, right… now I’ll get seeerriousss!! (more...)

(Something wrong w/ Sign-in) (…more; pls read below first to get the wider picture background) So the article above says that Anthony has researched the Boyne Valley and Newgrange stuff for 15 years or so. Given the 15 yrs or so that my son has known Anthony since, that would place the start of Anthony’s research at about… hmm... lemme guess: around 20 yrs of age, possibly earlier. Now in his mid-thirties, Anthony decides to publish a book to lend his 15 yrs of experience and early amateur kiddy-interest and his later journalistic talent to the in-depth world of Newgrange archaeology that extends back to some … er… 5000 years, older than the Egyptian pyramids. Ohhh-kayy... right, great! I love entrepreneurialism at such a young age as Anthony’s now! Except when it thwarts truth with bad journalism (more…)

I agree with Will Hamilton. Take the following with a pinch of salt and a lot of truth. Anthony Murphy is first and foremost a journalist, who by wont of oul’ Irish nepotism was employed by his daddy (that would be Mr. ..erm… Murphy) who ran the local ‘big’ newspaper in the Newgrange/Boyne River area of Ireland. I’ve never met Anthony but I know of this because my son, who is a fellow-journalist of Anthony’s age, knew Anthony from around about the time they both started out in journalism. Niall O’Dowd, from the same close-knit community of the River Boyne’s areas, would have known Anthony’s dad, and thereby, his son Anthony; so we can safely assume that this little splurge above on Anthony’s book is at the instigation of ICentral’s owner, using Jane Walsh as the writer (or she’s licking up to him as Chief Owner). It’s a classical Irish trait of a “word in your ear for a favour” kind of stuff. It smacks of a form of communal journalistic nepotism IMO. Anyways… (More from this jacers: this is might wake up not a few people).

A fascinating recent British TV show visited Newgrange and the Boyne Valley as part of a wider study of ancient monuments around the UK and Ireland, much of Celtic origin involving its priests and priestesses (or druids). It found that the ceremonial burnings of bodies on pyres made at Newgrange were intended to send the person being cremated into the afterlife. The smoke arising from the pyres' buring body wafted skywards and represented the departure of the person into the sky, where the sun and moon are. In other words, they believed in life after death in the presence of the eternal sun and moon. So Anthony’s book says nothing new. But this has got me going to tell yez all something of Anthony…

A book of muddled superstitions based on childish insecurity. The gullible people who buy books like these are just clinging to immature yearnings for life after death. The people who built Newgrange might have believed many things. No one will ever really know. To say they "realised" this or that is unfounded nonsense and says a lot about the author and nothing about the builders of Newgrange. Mr Murphy has wasted 15 years looking at a passage tomb only to end up seeing what was in his head in the first place. I've been in it dozens of times. Any "spiritual feeling" exists only in the minds of people who went in with the preconceived notion that there was such a thing. He goes on to make the wild and ludicrous claim that the tribe who built it may have been "the earliest people to realise that the human soul survives physical death". There is no such thing as a soul and no evidence of a human life after death. On top of that humans have been walking around for at least 100 thousand years. Claiming that a people who built a tomb only 5 thousand years ago were the first to believe anything is just book sales talk. This is just a guy trying to sell a book to people gullible enough to believe the BS he's swallowed himself. It's €30 online or at your nearest bookshop, he has five kids.

Having just visited Newgrange in the Boyne Valley,I felt some of the same things .To be in the inner chamber was pretty cool ,especially when they turned out the lights and simulated the entrance of sunlight at the Winter solstice!