Sublime

There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christi

Some scholars suggest that the saint was inspired by the Druids, who still flourished in Hilary’s third-century Brittany and who organised their ideas in triads and worshipped Goddesses grouped in threes.

LUGAID THE FIRE MAKER

Religion, in other words, underwrote Roman power.

if there is a modern analogy to the medieval monastery where the world of classical thought was saved from oblivion, a place where the guttering flame of psychedelic knowledge was assiduously fanned during its own dark age, that place would have to be Esalen, the legendary retreat center in Big Sur, California.

Cultural Druids, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, have found little problem in reciting Iolo’s Druid’s Prayer

Like Cú Chulainn, in the Irish myths, then; but here was a whole population, a tribe, who seem to have been known as ‘the Hounds’.

Druidism was often the subject of their researches, and their work provided much of the source material for numerous writers on Celtic mythology, the Grail, Druidry and Paganism, and succeeded in fuelling a widespread interest in Celtic spirituality in Britain and the United States.