Sublime

To the primitive mind trying to figure out what caused the pain and sorrow of human existence, an obvious answer was that a powerful and unpredictable supernatural agency was responsible. It made sense, therefore, to keep it sweet by offering it gifts and tributes.

“Rather than having women in the control of men,” says Dr. Fiachra Mac Góráin, a classicist at University College London, “this cult is putting young, impressionable men under the control of women.”41 In a staunchly patriarchal society like Rome, that was an act of war. So the authorities made the flood of magical wine slow to a trickle.

This new-found pride in ancestry coincided with the movement away from imperialism and towards nationalism.

By degrees, as this old religion lost its hold, the voice of blood spoke louder, and the relationship of birth was recognized in law.

The central theme developed in this book is that psi, the paranormal, and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to destructur-ing, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries. In contrast, the phenomena are repressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, regularity,

Carter noted that the roots of the contemporary skepticism of religion are essentially modern, beginning with Freud perhaps, who viewed religion as a sort of obsessive impulse.

It was clear that Iron Age burial rites varied considerably across Britain. That even seemed to fit quite well with the picture of the political landscape that the Romans give us, both before and after much of Britain becomes subsumed into that huge, literate empire. They tell us that Britain was divided up into territories, a different tribe

There’s a house fire inside many of us,14 Vincent had come to believe, and we’ve been concentrating on the smoke.

DURING ITS LIKELY beginnings in Neolithic times, Druidry was probably at first animistic and shamanistic in nature, until gradually it evolved into its three separate streams of Bardic, Ovate and Druid practice described by the classical authors. This period of sophisticated, even complex, spiritual practice continued probably for at least a