PORTRAITURE

Carnac, France - Wandering in the land of Magic

There’s a saying that goes something like: “If you need a reason to go to France, maybe you shouldn't go”.

Since France has become my main country of residence for the last 7 months, I need not scratch my brain to find a reason, but simply flip through a tourist Guide and let my imagination run wild. Everyone has a couple of loose rules that they consider vital to good vacationing: Avoid Western Europe in mid-summer, bring hand sanitizer, don’t overdose on local delicacies that you can’t pronounce and don’t forget to pack the all-time savior Pepto-Bismol. Since my interest in the unexpected or out-of-the-ordinary drama do not include regular trips to the emergency room, I decided to settle for a destination which, while still very popular, might be considered slightly off the beaten track for most vacationers coming to France or Europe for the Summer: I decided to go to Brittany.

Brittany is a beautiful piece of land located in the North-West of France; it is a region that abounds with legends of King Arthur and Merlin or other myths about druids and knights. It is a region that offers its own Celtic language, Breton – or Brezhoneg – that appears on street signs along with the French names of towns. Whereas throughout much of France you will find toll roads crisscrossing the countryside in a vast network – leading, usually, to Paris – this is not so in Brittany. Here you can enjoy over 1000 km of toll free motorways. If you want to drive to Paris, you need a GPS – or a good old map – as there are no signs on the Britton roads indicating the way to the capital. Brittany appears, to us outsiders anyways, to foster a tenacious desire to remember regional traditions and legends, to celebrate a connection to the sea, and to recall a time when Brittany was…well…not part of France.

A former independent Celtic kingdom and duchy that was incorporated into France in 1532, Brittany is also famous for its megalithic monuments. These can be found scattered over the peninsula and more particularly in the area of Carnac, where you can muse over row-upon-row of ancients menhirs (single standing stones) and dolmens (multi-stone arrangements supporting horizontal slabs), hewn from local granite and erected at different periods from early to late Neolithic (c. 4000-1500 B.C.). It was exactly to these stone alignments, which spread over a 4 km long stretch near the village of Carnac, that I decided to drive to spend a couple of days.

It was on a Wednesday, around 1p.m., that I departed from hot and sticky Bordeaux for the 4h50min – 490 km (305 miles) drive to Brittany.  The great advantage in taking a toll road is that unless unusual circumstances prevent you from keeping up with the maximum authorized speed limit, a large distance can still be covered within a reasonable amount of time. The greatest disadvantage, however, is that those roads rarely offer prime seat viewing of the magnificent and dramatic French coastline. It is not without a little envy that I considered the signs for La Rochelle or Les Sables d’Olonne, knowing that my 48 hours of free time didn’t leave much room for unplanned visits. In fact, it wasn’t until I reached the area of Marzan, South-East of Vannes, that I started to appreciate my surroundings. I began to discover along the road a new type of architecture typical of the Morbihan and also to realize that France still, to this day, offers a great diversity of ‘espaces verts’, be it greenbelts, woods or forests, amid a dominant and varied agricultural landscape.

Drained by my afternoon of driving (and gas tank refueling), I reached my hotel, where I decided that a small walk in the large garden of the hotel property after a light dinner would be the perfect ending to my day. I would keep the excitement of discovering the town of Carnac for an early start the next day.

It is always surprising to me why a small country hotel in one of the most self-admittedly chauvinistic regions of France would offer for breakfast such exotic fares as palm tree jam, ginger jelly and banana bread spread. Where are the famed salted butter, les galettes bretonnes or even the right down-to-earth celebrated crepes of Brittany? Obviously not in my bread basket or my butter jar. However, the friendliness of the owner  – who was eager to impart with his knowledge of the celeb alignment spiced up with local facts, as soon as he noticed my opened local map next to my coffee cup – made up wonderfully for my slight disappointment.

It took only a 10 minutes drive from my hotel to reach the village of Carnac, where I decided to first stop at la Maison des Megalithes to buy my ticket to the 11 am guided tour of one of the sites. The fact that it was pouring rain that morning didn’t take away any of my excitement. In fact, I decided that it was only under such weather that my trip back to the Neolithic era should take place and that the three-shades-of-grey sky was the only sky under which one visitor should first set foot in Brittany. Rain here is not part of the legend in the same title as Merlin or King Arthur. Rain with a capital ‘R’ is a commodity that most Brittons are used to, as opposed to most members of a large group of German tourists that were reluctantly getting out of their tour bus, while looking miserable in their open Birkenstocks.

My tour ticket in hand, I decided to cross the road to take my first look at the Carnac alignments, which are composed of four different sites: Le Ménec, Kermario, Kerlescan and Le Petit Ménec, all sites going from west to east over a stretch of 4 km total. Les Alignements du Ménec, just across the road from the ticket office, was the site that I planned to visit later that morning with a tour guide. It is composed of 1050 stones dating back to the 5^th and 3^rd millennia, spreading over 950 meters in length. As I approach Les Alignments du Ménec, I am filled with wonder at the sight of this vibrant, but still enigmatic, testimony of a long gone era. I am looking at these erected stones, perfectly aligned over 12 rows total, stretching from the southwest to northeast, starting and ending with flattened stone circles. I read that the average height of the stones is 1 meter, but 1.5m at the east end and 3m at the west end. From what I had gathered from the internet prior to leaving Bordeaux, and from what I was now reading in the brochure given to me earlier by the  ticket office lady, it is still difficult, to this day, to determine the exact reason for these alignments, or to even know for certain the role played by each and every stone. As the tour guide would remind me later that morning, men, women and children from that era didn’t even know how to write and therefore left behind very little explanation as to what these alignments meant to them and their culture. It is this great, unsolved mystery that gave birth to legends and erroneous information, based on which books have been written, movies have been made, and the great Asterix and Obelix, the heros of the fame Goscinny-Uderzo’s cartoon, were born. It also this unsolved mystery that retains a great deal of appeal to this day, as in this time and age, most of us find it necessary to question the core of our mere existence, and the role that we are meant to play in this world or the next. This doesn’t mean that understanding the men and women of the Neolithic and Monolithic era would help us to fill in all the gaps of our questioning minds. However, I, for one, have the feeling that since some men and women took the time to extract giant stones from the local granite found all over the region, without the use of any metal tools or modern machinery to lift them, and then transported them and erected them on the ground, they must have had a very valid reason.

As I drive along the D 196, up to the site of Kerlescan, the last site on my map, I am taken by the beauty of these stones and their symmetrical alignments. Walking near the sites produces even more excitement, as I start to feel what I can only describe as palpable energy, a fact that will be confirmed just a little later on during my guided tour that very morning

At 11 am, a small group of tourists gathered around the entrance gate of les alignments du Ménec. I am a little late as my trip back to the Neolithic made me lose track of time. It is therefore by running that I made it back from the parking lot to the site, just in time, as the ticket taker was about to close the gate. I joined the small group of tourists, mostly couples, and was led by one lady tour guide up to the center of the site. She immediately proceeded to tell us straight off what we were allowed to do or not do while in the presence of these magnificent stones: wandering around away from the group was not permitted, nor was leaning against the stones, which was of course a big no-no. How about touching them lightly? I was reminded that my hand might erase some important elements of that stone, something that could well provide some vital information to archeologists studying the site. I was sorry for asking such a stupid question while feeling, naturally, very disappointed, as touching a stone was the first thing that I wanted to do – of course, hoping to feel its energy. However, I did understand her argument and respectfully kept my hands in my pockets. As our guide went on to impart to us what is known to this day about the site and the stones, which amounts to very little, everyone couldn’t help but notice a guy wandering slightly away from the group, while holding in his hands a pair of sorcerer’s wands. I thought it very amusing when our guide repeatedly warned us about making incorrect assumptions about this site and any other similar sites, as she said it was very easy to let our imaginations run wild in such surroundings, but it wouldn’t make any of our beliefs any truer. At this point, of course, all that I wanted to do was walk over to the guy with the magic wands, whose looks held an air of mystery like the kind of “I-know-something-that-you-idiots-don’t” that made me want to ask questions even more. Therefore, like a child who needs to act on her every impulse, this is exactly what I did.

I slowly let the group follow the guide to another area of the site, but not so far away that my being a bit behind could be qualified as wandering alone. I approached the guy and found out that he was a British geologist who didn’t speak a word of French. He didn’t say, but clearly thought, that he didn’t care for our guide’s history lessons, anyway. When I asked him about the kind of energy he was looking for, he positioned his wands in his hands and asked me to follow him around the stones. As soon as we started circling a stone, the wands started to shake and spread out – suddenly, as if an invisible hand had just pushed them away from each other. As soon as we walked to the other side of that stone, the wands moved back in the opposite direction, as if operated by two magnets. Meanwhile, I could feel, as I walked around those stones, some slight shift of energy within my body. I asked him point blank what he thought that meant, to which he replied that the stones were all interacting with each other, each face of each stone giving off an attracting or repulsing energy. He continued on, saying that his research had led him to believe that these alignments, as well as the rest of the alignments found in the region, were in fact acting like an electrical power plant – that the energy forces that came from each stone formed a sort of power grid covering the entire field. It was like a power grip made of yin and yang energy…and, of course, I thought the guy was completely right.

When one thinks of the yin and yang energy, one thinks also of the Feng Shui world, where everything both living and unliving has two opposite sides. If matter is Yin, energy is Yang. Similarly, if earth is Yin, sky is Yang. The same goes for the sun and moon, as well as man and woman – one cannot be without the other. When talking in terms of energy and matter, energy can’t exist without matter, and matter can’t exist unless it has energy to keep its structure. These stones are, of course, no different. I thought why wouldn’t these men and women, who couldn’t write and had yet to discover metal, be tuned into some energy source of some kind as the base of their practical and spiritual existence? It is also an obvious statement to say that, while these stones were firmly planted into the ground, they were also erected directly to the sky. While I let my imagination run wild, I also remembered an Arthurian legend that says that the alignments of Carnac were, in fact, an entire army of Roman soldiers that Merlin had turned to stone.

If I trust what I felt in the presence of those stones, and what I had learned from my new friend the British geologist-magician, these stones – if not composed of ordinary matter – are a little like human beings, possessing both positive and negative energies. This is exactly what I came to Carnac to find – a little story that feeds into the great mystery. If a trip to ancient Carnac might not reveal anything new to the historian and archeologist in you, it might open the door to the world of legends, where the child in you can rediscover how it feels to wander in the land of magic.

Isabelle Assante

 © 2009