This is brilliant, inspiring stuff. We are Britains! We are not Celts, (this is a fantasy based around the misuse of a linguistic term to suggest common ethnic traits) Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings or Normans. Our very DNA is the stuff of the palaeolithic ice age hunter gatherer, the very first peoples to explore and inhabit this island after the last ice age. Those many invasions and influences from other european and Scandinavian cultures only touched us at the very apex of our social and political structures, the ruling elite. It is tremendously exciting and evocative to me to know that I, along with the majority of the British population, am directly descended from the first ice age explorers, a true indigenous, aboriginal Britain. It is also a revelation to discover Francis Pryors conviction of how unfairly Britains pre roman history has been treated, in particular by archaeological orthodoxy. The Romans did not 'civilise' a barbarous peoples. Ceasars' invasion was not a civilising act, it was a brutal act of suppression, as the historian Tacitus remarks in his observations of the effects of roman occupation in Britain.
We were not a ragged and disparate group of tribes of 'primitive bog people' living in misty isolation, but as the evidence clearly informs us, a sophisticated maritime civilisation with an indigenous system of farming and land management, and a religious structure built around the henge and the sacred circle and the veneration of ancestors. This gave birth to massive construction projects taking place over thousands of years that saw henges and circular stone and wood structures utterly unique to Britain springing up across the length and breadth of the land.
Pryors' wonderfuly articulate and evocative descriptions of the Druids and thier power and influence on the ancient Britains at the time of the roman invasion is also, at the same time, somewhat saddening, as a purely oral tradition was systematicaly eradicated from the map of the future of this land, and we are instead left only with the bombastic, delusional, bearded, wholemeal buffoons of the new age traditions to remind us of these remarkable people from the ancient past.
The druids were not slaughtered because they were pagans who committed savage acts of sacrifice, they were massacred because they were an alternative political structure. The rest is roman propaganda and new age nittwittery.
A wonderfuly articulate and passionate programme.
We were not a ragged and disparate group of tribes of 'primitive bog people' living in misty isolation, but as the evidence clearly informs us, a sophisticated maritime civilisation with an indigenous system of farming and land management, and a religious structure built around the henge and the sacred circle and the veneration of ancestors. This gave birth to massive construction projects taking place over thousands of years that saw henges and circular stone and wood structures utterly unique to Britain springing up across the length and breadth of the land.
Pryors' wonderfuly articulate and evocative descriptions of the Druids and thier power and influence on the ancient Britains at the time of the roman invasion is also, at the same time, somewhat saddening, as a purely oral tradition was systematicaly eradicated from the map of the future of this land, and we are instead left only with the bombastic, delusional, bearded, wholemeal buffoons of the new age traditions to remind us of these remarkable people from the ancient past.
The druids were not slaughtered because they were pagans who committed savage acts of sacrifice, they were massacred because they were an alternative political structure. The rest is roman propaganda and new age nittwittery.
A wonderfuly articulate and passionate programme.
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