An exploration of the Lost Religions of Pre-Christian Britain
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My work concentrates on ancient belief - specifically that of Pre-Christian and Prehistoric Britain. While my books have looked at so-called 'Celtic' and Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs, my PhD thesis sought an answer to the function of the mysterious henge monuments of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
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The use of the henges, I argue, is roots in rituals involving the night sky and the changes in the seasons - rites that can be uncovered through an examination of folklore and myth in conjunction with archaeology, combined with the use of modern astronomical software that enables us to reconstruct the night sky as it appeared in past eras.
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Reconstructing a Lost Mythology
My work aims to improve our understanding of the nature of the forgotten beliefs of the past through a reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (P.I.E.) mythology - the lost progenitor of the later Greek, Celtic and Norse myths, amongst many others.
This reconstruction turns on its head many assumptions about P.I.E religion - its nomadic, male-oriented origins, for a start - and instead proposes a Near-Eastern origin, developed amongst farming cultures - with a cosmology centred around a celestial goddess, associated with the Milky Way, a male god of the earth, and a female sun-goddess, whose midwinter rescue, associated with the rising of the constellation of Orion, lay behind the rites performed in the enigmatic henge and so-called 'burial' monuments of the British Isles...
This reconstruction turns on its head many assumptions about P.I.E religion - its nomadic, male-oriented origins, for a start - and instead proposes a Near-Eastern origin, developed amongst farming cultures - with a cosmology centred around a celestial goddess, associated with the Milky Way, a male god of the earth, and a female sun-goddess, whose midwinter rescue, associated with the rising of the constellation of Orion, lay behind the rites performed in the enigmatic henge and so-called 'burial' monuments of the British Isles...
