Sacred. Interesting concept, isn't it? What do people hold as sacred? In some countries cows are sacred. In other countries water is sacred. Some peoples even hold the song of the land to be sacred. Sacred implies a value beyond measure. The dictionary says that a sacred thing is consecrated, devoted, set apart or dedicated to religious use, entitled to veneration or worship, something that is not to be violated or breached (my emphasis). It becomes more interesting if we compare this to the word sacrosanct, which describes something that is inviolable, protected by sacred or quasi-sacred rules, is something so valuable that it is, in effect, untouchable.
What is it that can produce this sense of value? Nothing concrete. Concrete things have concrete value. The most valuable of things are those things that are abstract, those things upon which a price cannot be realistically placed in an objective fashion (although the current consumer economy has led some people to try). Abstract things have a value that is equal to that which people are willing to pay for it. Van Gogh's paintings do not sell for six figure sums because that is the value of the materials, they sell for six figure sums because that is the money with which people have to part in order to ensure possession.
Price and prize are but one letter apart, as my Father used to say.
So what is the abstract thing upon which we can place no sum? What is there that we cannot buy? For that thing that is so valuable we term it sacred there is no sum, no concrete price that we can pay. These things are abstract qualities that cannot be manufactured, nor bought, nor produced by genetic modification. These are things that touch something within people in a way that is profound.
Sacred does not necessarily mean inviolate. Remember that there is a difference between sacred and sacrosanct. This, I think, is the major difference between non-experiential religions and the various forms of paganism.
What is sacred? Sacred is a connection with the universe. It is love, it is friends, it is family. It is all those things that cannot be bought - it is life itself. It is our expression of life, it is the price that cannot be paid by anything other than surrender of the spirit to the experience. If that price cannot or will not be paid, then a thing is not sacred, for sacred is, above all, a personal thing. It is experiential. One cannot hold a thing to be sacred unless one is at least drawn to make that surrender of the spirit.
Perhaps then, it is not the thing itself but the experience that is sacred. A thing is sacred if people hold it to be, for no one has the right to deny anyone else that experience of spiritual submission. Stonehenge will still produce that feeling in me if it is razed to the ground, for the experience is still there. It will be altered by horror at the callousness and monetary focus of others, but even that will be part of it. Joy will turn to grief, awe will turn to horror, love will turn to pain for the short-sightedness of humanity, but I will still be called to surrender my spirit to the experience. Sacred does not necessarily mean pleasurable.
A place becomes sacred when a person goes there and feels the call to submit. I might have said "when a person goes there and feels loved," but not all places held to be particularly sacred produce feelings of being loved. Some of them can push a person to the brink of terrified insanity. The more people in whom a thing can produce such a profound response, the more likely it is that it will be generally held to be sacred. In recent times we have had various vegetables becoming sacred as the followers of Allah see his name written in the insides of tomatoes and aubergines. When I look at pictures of these fruit I feel no call of the spirit, no joyousness or awe, but Allah is not my Prophet. To some of those for whom Allah is a call to worship, those tomatoes and aubergines are sacred. They have that right.
How long can a thing be sacred? When a thing is deemed sacred, the definition lasts as long as the memory or as long as the effect. If the effect is common to many, and continues through the generations, then a thing will be sacred for a long time. If the effect is on just one person and that person changes so that he does not feel the effect any more, perhaps it would be less than a year. Perhaps only as long as it takes a candle to burn out. Sacred is an abstract, experiential thing, and humans are experiential creatures. In stories there are tales of the Old Gods dying, of the Old Religions being subducted by the glamour of the One God. Merlin speaks to Morgan Le Fey of the end of magic. But we experiential pagans know that the Old Gods did not die. For a while their relationships with humanity ceased to be sacred, but to many of us they are sacred once more. So things can even cease being sacred, only to become sacred again.
Thus we come to the question I was originally asked to address. Why are prehistoric monuments sacred to so many of us? Why is it, indeed that the entire Earth is sacred? I stand and say "Why is it sacred to you?" A monument is sacred to me because it has been there for such a long time - I do not agree that these things are sacred per se, we simply do not know that. We do not know with any certainty that the Rollrights were not simply a place where people gathered to sell goats, but that does not stop the site being sacred to me and many other people now. These places are connections with our past, with the great thread of humanity as a cultural, thinking people. They are, if we allow them to be, connections with our future, with the children of our children who will stand there and experience the same feelings of awe that we experience now. They are places where the modern tendency towards separation has not yet reached (we will not mention visitor centres and car parks) and it is still possible to stand in spiritual footprints of the Ancestors and imagine. They are places where it is still possible to hear voices in the wind and the movement of the leaves.
They are not the only places. The wild places are the places of the Earth, of the Land, and the effect they produce, that sense of abandon, of dispassionate power and passionate energy, is just as sacred. Ancient monuments are reminders that we too were once defined by the Land on which we lived. To some they are not sacred, and perhaps some sites have even ceased to be sacred for no one has visited them and been called to submit to the experience of Spirit. That does not mean that they are not or cannot be sacred to others.
Why is it that the Earth is sacred? For many it is because the Earth can be seen as one great organism, Gaia, Mother Earth. In the end, without the planet we would not be here to experience, and without experience we could hold nothing to be sacred. The planet is life, the birthplace and home of our peoples, and without life there is no experience.