Blood & Mistletoe: the History of the Druids in Britain
Ronald Hutton
Yale University Press £30 

 

In January, 1648, Wiltshire landowners gathered at Marlborough Castle, seat of the Seymour family who were ardent royalists worried about the political crisis that would lead to the execution of King Charles I. 

    Among a party riding out to hunt hares on the downs was a young man called John Aubrey who had grown up in Wiltshire with a love of ancient and medieval remains. The chase took him to the village of Avebury where he found a huge earthwork containing stones that appeared to form circles, and he went to explore. Later, in a book about Avebury entitled Templa Druidum, he argued that such stone circles had been religious structures associated with the rites of the Druids.
    And so the movement that led to modern-day Druidry began, the idea of ancient Druids gradually becoming bound up with issues of British patriotic identity and national self-image with, as Prof Hutton's scholarly and enlightening work reveals, the historical record being so opaque that it presented a convenient canvas on to which a variety of aspirations could be projected.
    In the 18th century, Aubrey's work was built on by the Lincolnshire antiquarian William Stukeley who linked Druids with Stonehenge and cemented them as major figures in the public imagination.
    Stukeley influenced John Wood, the architect who made Bath one of the most celebrated of Georgian cities, and who, jealous of Stukeley's 1740 book on Stonehenge, surveyed the Stanton Drew stone circles, near Bristol, and declared them the Druids' chief temple. Within half a century, Druids and their presumed monuments were virtually everywhere, says Prof Hutton: "They loomed out of books, strutted in plays, and peered through shrubbery."
    By Victorian times, they had come to dominate the English perception of ancient Britain, with various orders of Druids being formed and, in the 20th century, their famous "colonisation" of Stonehenge, although nowadays their presence at the summer solstice celebrations is swamped by the thousands of revellers.
    But Prof Hutton points out that by far the most important source for images of Druids produced in Britain has been unreliable ancient texts, and not a single artefact or image has been unearthed by archaeologists that can be connected with ancient Druids. The picture of the Iron Age Druid was selected from Greek, Roman and Irish or Welsh texts, many contradictory or invented, combined with archaeological information, and including such lurid practices as human sacrifice and the ritual use of certain plants - hence the "blood and mistletoe" of the title.
    It's clear that modern Druidry is based on a chimera, on only a historical idea, and not on historical fact. Although any representations of an ancient Druidic tradition therefore would seem to be bogus, the fact that a modern tradition dates only from the 17th century does not detract from its worthiness, particularly in terms of its reverence for literature, nature and the environment.
    Prof Hutton is an associate member of the Council of British Druid Orders but says Druidry is not the central spiritual tradition of his own life, and not even his favourite among today's "alternative" spiritualities. 
    "Still, I find its tenets attractive and exciting because they (Druids) are deeply concerned with two phenomena, the natural history and prehistory of Britain, which are old and enduring loves of my own," he says. "They have a capacity for generosity and a gift for friendship which at least matches that of any other group whom I have encountered in a fairly long and adventurous life."

 

This is a book that represents a triumph for independent research into ancient mysteries. Robert and Olivia Temple, pictured below, reveal that the Sphinx was never a lion with a human head but a giant statue of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal god, set in a moat.
    They conclude that the face of the Sphinx was that of a Middle Kingdom Pharaoh, Amenemhet II, a re-carving replacing the head of the original jackal which had probably been damaged by vandals when the Old Kingdom collapsed. A later king of Egypt, Thothmes IV, who excavated the Sphinx from the sand hundreds of years later, falsely claimed that it had the body of a lion, ignoring the fact simply because the lion was a "royal beast" and that was what he wanted the monument to portray, so launching a misconception which has survived to the present day. "It is amazing how effective propaganda can be," Robert wryly comments, having tackled "consensus reality" - what we all agree to believe - head on.
    The disproportionate size of the body to the head could not be seen prior to the excavation of the Sphinx in 1926 so that was why there were no earlier suggestions of the re-carving of the head.
     Photographic evidence of ancient sluice gate traces show that, during the Old Kingdom, the Sphinx as jackal/Anubis sat surrounded by a moat filled with water from the Nile - called Jackal Lake in the ancient Pyramid Texts - where religious ceremonies were held, and Robert also shows how the exact size and position of the Sphinx were geometrically determined in relation to the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, and that it was part of a pharaonic resurrection cult, making Giza a unity.
    "Truly this plan is magnificent and beautiful," Robert says.
    And crucially, he demolishes the theory which has been promulgated by certain popular authors since the 1990s that the Sphinx is much older than conventionally thought, perhaps dating from as far back as 10,500BC, and was the product of an early advanced civilisation destroyed in a global catastrophe. 
    While evidence for such a lost civilisation continues to grow in other areas, Robert proves that the Sphinx was built at the same time as the Pyramids, about 5,000 years ago, "crouching as the guardian of the sacred necropolis at its entrance".
    The 10,500BC date was arrived at because it was thought that water erosion at the Sphinx could have been caused only by a wetter climate thousands of years before the height of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation. But Robert points out that this involves 7,000 years of "missing" archaeological remains, and demonstrates that such erosion was caused by changing water levels in the moat over centuries.
    Robert and Olivia - she translated early French reports on the Sphinx and took many of the photographs for the new book - have lived in their farmhouse on the Somerset Levels near Glastonbury for 30 years. See Resources page for link to their Sphinx website.

 

Central in Colin Wilson’s vast body of work is the question of how people can achieve those strange moments of inner freedom, of sheer delight, of “peak experience”, or “ecstasy”, when we feel our energies are more than adequate to cope with any challenge; those moments of “pure joy in which we experience an almost god-like sensation of power or freedom”.
    Such brief occasions of intense well-being are in stark contrast to normal consciousness, in which we seem to sense our energies are never quite up to the mark, or feel ourselves to be in the grip of impersonal forces which are much stronger than ourselves. 
    In the 1960s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow took up the study of transcendent or “intensity” experiences, to which he gave the term “peak experience” and, in subsequent decades, Wilson, pictured, built on Maslow’s work to establish a theory for the attainment of an intensified or higher consciousness and the inducement of the peak experience.
    Now, for his latest book, veteran author Wilson, 78 this year, and who lives in Cornwall, has drawn together all the various strands from his work over the years which have dealt with the peak experience. It is a remarkable undertaking and, with its important implications for human evolution, a book that I feel he just had to write, sooner or later.
    Throughout the history of literature, art and philosophy there are references to and examples of the value of the intensity experience, which suddenly triggers increased awareness of life and the universe, and which is bound up with the attainment of selfhood, that quality that constitutes one’s individuality.
    William Wordsworth spoke of “spots of time”, Thomas Hardy of “moments of vision”, James Joyce of “epiphanies” and Virginia Woolf of “moments of being”.
    Wilson’s view is that our personal development depends very much on such experiences of heightened perception and, interested to know how they can be made to happen at will, he describes his own attempts to increase his own consciousness to hitherto unattainable levels. At the end of the book, he suggests some techniques for achieving this, with the potential of transforming our everyday lives.
    Wilson has written extensively about the paranormal, the effects of which he is sure are linked to the mind’s untapped potential, and one finds the essence of his work in the fusion of its two major strands, existentialism and occultism. He is one of the few thinkers who has stood out against the endemic pessimism and defeatism of our times, and the tendency to reject substance and meaning in favour of image and ephemera.
    For him, meaning – which shines through powerfully in the peak experience – is the antidote to pessimism and to the sense of the absurdity and pointlessness of existence.
    Meanwhile, it’s full marks to Wilson bibliographer Colin Stanley for producing an indispensable guide to one of the most important series of philosophical and psychological works of the 20th century – the seven books written by Wilson from 1956-66 from The Outsider, the classic study of alienation, in 1956, to The New Existentialism in 1966 – to which the collective label of the “Outsider cycle” is applied.
    Colin Stanley gives each of the titles close critical appraisal and includes exhaustive bibliographical details, showing how the seven books relate closely to one another – indeed, they must be taken as a whole for a full understanding of Wilson’s ideas – and reveal a formidable commitment to the evolution of human consciousness to sustained higher levels.
    Wilson has supplied an afterword, looking back over his epoch-making oeuvre 45 years on. His “new existentialism”, a philosophy of intuition which counters the pessimistic and fatalistic Continental school of existentialism of the mid-20th century, has set down the foundations for fresh paths of philosophical and psychological inquiry in the 21st century, and offers a paradigm for a renewed humanity.
    Underlying all Wilson’s works is an optimism and a faith in the power and potential of the human mind to rise above the mediocre or the malevolent to new and higher levels of awareness, and to press against and challenge the limitations of everyday consciousness.

 

The great affliction of our times, endemic in all our strife and conflict, and troubling us individually and socially, is the loss of soul. When soul is neglected, it doesn't just disappear somewhere; it re-emerges in the world symptomatically in violence, lack of meaning, obsessions, addictions and preoccupations with image over substance.

"It's a way of allowing soul into the world," she says. "I seriously fear that the soul is under threat at the moment, and I think that civilisation is suffering because we are so disconnected from our spiritual core."