Sublime

The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral. The circle is one of the oldest and most powerful symbols. The world is a circle; the sun and moon are too.

THE SOUL AS TEMPLE OF MEMORY THE CELTIC STORIES SUGGEST THAT TIME AS the rhythm of soul has an eternal dimension where everything is gathered and minded. Here nothing is lost. This is a great consolation: the happenings in your life do not disappear. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. Everything is stored within your soul in the temple of memory.

Mythology is the authentic record of those periods of transition when the diviner sparks were gradually assuming the bodies of mortality.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over

Ecstasy is a time-honored method of transcending our ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not attain otherwise. An element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or myth, we are for that moment taken “out of” and “beyond”