Love of the Land, the Earth, the Wild – with a reverence for Nature.

Often when the combatants are ranged face to face, and swords are drawn and spears bristling, these men come between the armies and stay the battle, just as wild beasts are sometimes held spellbound. Thus even among the most savage barbarians anger yields to wisdom, and Mars is shamed before the Muses. (Diodorus Siculus Histories, circa 8 BC)

This book is about a way of life that can help us to find this universal dream in our hearts, and that can also help us to live it – so that, in however small a way, we can contribute to changing the world around us.

We are finally able to unite our artistic concerns with our environmental and spiritual concerns. The Bard, Ovate and Druid are one person standing on the earth – poet and shaman, healer and philosopher – spiritual and earthy.

Others found that they ‘seem to live in that golden worlde of whiche the old writers speake so much . . . the golden worlde without toyle’.

From about 700 BC some of the descendants of the Urnfield people have been labelled the Hallstatt culture, which can safely be regarded as fully Celtic, as opposed to proto-Celtic.

The problems arise when this ability to create frames of reference is not counter-balanced by the ability to transcend these frames and open oneself to the transrational – the inexplicable in words but no less true.

The Ovate as master or mistress of prophecy and divination needed, and still needs today, a reorientation in relation to time.

This truth was expressed by the alchemists (and there is a strong tradition of alchemy within Druidry) and later by Carl Jung (whose work first began to influence modern Druidry through Ross Nichols).