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Heart of Albion Press
publishers of books and booklets
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NEW from Heart of Albion
May 2005:
Sacred Places: Prehistory and popular imagination
by Bob Trubshaw
This book looks back at the days of At the Edge and other 'Earth Mysteries' 'zines and provides detailed discussions of many of the topics outlined here.
If you like the content of
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and
At the Edge / Bob Trubshaw / bobtrubs@indigogroup.co.uk
http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/
March 1997
Contents
- Leslie Ellen Jones
- The evolution of the eighteenth century Druid
The image of the druid, the priest of the pagan Celts, has held a grip on both the popular and scholarly imagination for over 2,000 years. However, the way in which the druid has been interpreted has varied consider- ably over time. Part of the reason for this enduring fascination is, ironically enough, the lack of information about what druids were up to. Reading the accounts of the earlier classical ethnographers - references to Posidonios, the works of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Caesar, Tacitus - provides a picture of a priest- hood at the centre of Celtic society, determining the course of government and war, educating the youth, as well as constructing theology and conducting religious ritual. Later classical commentators, such as Pliny and Lucan, depict a less ubiquitous organization relegated to dark groves and grottos, practicing whatever they did practice in secret. Medieval Celtic Lives of saints depict druids making a last-ditch effort to hold onto their status as advisors to kings and educators of the young, but the Irish law tracts of the same era class druids with other undesirables such as werewolves and vagrants, and assume that what a druid would be up to was small-scale magic and witch-doctoring. Thus, writings from the period from c.135 BC to c.900 seem to show the druid on a course of downward mobility, beginning as the companion of kings and the regulator of elite culture, and ending as a figure of folk medicine, folk religion, and folk lore.
- Alby Stone
- A threefold cosmos
1930 was to prove something of a landmark year for mythologists and Indo-Europeanists. In the Journal Asiatique for that year, Georges Dumézil published an article on social structure in ancient Indian and Iranian cultures. He asserted that the early Indo-Iranians were formally divided into three social classes. To those of us raised in a notoriously class-conscious society, in which the Hindu caste system is also now a feature in some places, such a statement might seem fairly innocuous. But Dumézil’s article was the beginning of a major reappraisal of Indo-European myth, legend and social tradition, and sparked a debate that continues to this day.
- Bob Trubshaw
- Cosmic homes
Every house is built on the earth. Each house is under the sky. The traditional materials of construction are taken either from the earth or the plants growing on it. Further, in many traditional belief systems, the creation of the earth and the plants is closely linked to the ritual dismemberment of a primeaval human or giant.
An Indian story relates how the gods created the world by performing a sacrifice with the body of Purusha, the first person. The sky rose from his head, the air from his navel, the earth from his feet, the moon from his mind, the sun from his eye, and the four quarters of space from his ear.
- Mike Parker Pearson and Colin Richards
- Late neolithic Orcadian houses
The Orkney Isles lie off the most northern tip of the British mainland. The archaeological evidence which characterizes the Neolithic period of Orkney is the presence of a number of well-constructed stone buildings and monuments. These include houses often clustered in ‘villages’, passage graves, and henge monuments enclosing large stone circles. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of these constructions is the use of the local, easily laminated, sandstone slabs both to create extremely sophisticated masonry and as furniture and partitioning within the structures: hence the almost perfect survival of the most famous Neolithic settlement in Britain, Skara Brae.
- Jeremy Harte
- Hollow hills
Few archaeologists have been as skilled at identifying earthworks as the late Leslie Grinsell. But sometimes even he met with the unexpected. In 1934, during a survey of Surrey he called on Lord Camrose’s place at Chertsey and mentioned a prior arrangement to view some barrows. Yes, they could be seen from out in the yard. He walked round the corner and there, lined up against the wall, every wheelbarrow on the estate stood ready for inspection.
After a few words of explanation, Grinsell strode on in his inimitable way (he never bothered with the temptations of private transport) towards Barrow Hills on the Chertsey-Egham border. Here three mounds had appeared as threm burghen in a charter of 672-4, and so they were duly scheduled in the county list as Chertsey nos.1-3. But ironically, inspection later on showed them to be natural hillocks - landmarks which were no more archaeological than the wheelbarrows in the yard. Grinsell, like the estate workers, had been misled by a similarity of name.
- Bob Trubshaw
- ‘Far away is close at hand
in images of elsewhere’
A peep at TAG 96
The Theoretical Archaeological Group conference 1996 - TAG 96 to everyone - raises the daunting prospect of about 200 lectures in under three days. It is physically impossible to attend more than a small proportion as most of the time no less than six sessions are running in parallel. This article attempts to summarise some of the papers which stimulated me - although I am well aware, from talking to other delegates, that I missed many equally good presentations.
The quotation in the title of this article is intended to reflect the emphasis of a number of different papers given at TAG 96, which all revealed an increasing importance of the ‘Otherness’ of the past - a recognition that other cultures do not share the same ways of thinking about, say, place or time as modern Western society.
Full text of ‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere’
- ‘Far away is close at hand
in images of elsewhere’
PLUS:
- summaries of articles in academic journals, newspapers, etc.
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Created February 1998; updated August 2001