reflection.eleusinianm.co.ukSeeking to explain some weird tales from the Middle Ages

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Perhaps there was an ancient Bronze Age barrow nearby, an old burial mound containing the cremated remains of someone who may once have thought just like you and who died nearly four thousand years ago. Or perhaps you live on the other side of the world from Britain and feel the same way sometimes in the pine woods or the mountains; a sense of wishing to peel back the perplexing Christianity that has puzzled you since you were an adolescent and to rediscover a truth that may once have lain at the very heart of Christianity. A magic which seems to hide itself near the banks of a woodland lake or at the end of a hard climb, but never in the harsh echoes and soft carpeted aisles of a church. Perhaps the landscape of the British Isles remembers an ancient belief; a belief that existed before the birth of Christianity and Islam. But what was that belief? It must be that well over fifteen hundred years of Christianity have eradicated it completely - right? Can we really try to cast a line across waters muddied by nearly two millennia and reel in a doctrine that British and Gallic druids of the first century BC forbade even to be written down? A belief that was guarded with absolute secrecy and spoken of as ’the mysteries’ by ancient Athenians in the fifth century BC? Can we try to reconstruct a system of religious belief whose core values may once, in the European Bronze Age, have stretched from Sicily to Sweden, from Britain to the Balkans? Where can we possibly begin to look?’ In ancient Athens a festival was held every year in celebration of the god Dionysus. The raison d’être underlying this festival may have been understood fully only by those who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, or the mysteries of Dionysus. Its initiates were sworn to secrecy, in the same way that British druids in oak groves on the banks of the River Thames only twelve hundred miles from Eleusis were reluctant to make their core understandings explicit. Pythagoreans in Italy were inclined not to explain their beliefs. But miraculously, clues to the nature of this lingering belief system may exist to this day, in the most unexpected places. The mythology of Ireland and Wales, of course, and stories that look back to pagan times in the medieval literature of Iceland. But less expectedly, perhaps, in medieval Christian writings and hagiography. Archaeology. The plays of ancient Athenian dramatists. Hints given by classical authors; more than hints, possibly, as you will see. And then there are the really unexpected places: the medieval Arthurian literature of England, Wales and France. Breton lais. Medieval romance in general. Hannah Scot was burned alive by the Christian Church in 1509 for reading medieval ’Romans’ in her step-father’s library and guessing at the truth. A student in a druid College fifteen hundred years before Hannah’s birth might have spent up to twenty years in such intensive study, memorising hundreds of tales, allegories and figurative adventures and epics in order to facilitate her understanding. Could some of these stories still exist? Some strange medieval stories Hannah thought they did. She copied dozens of works of medieval literature and legend over the course of about thirty years, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the clear belief that many of these stories betray an antique creed. The six existing...