View from the Big Hills

Over the years I’ve often struggled to find or indeed give myself a compelling and brief description of what being Celtic is really all about. However, this afternoon while reading Mike Scott’s autobiography, Adventures of a Waterboy , I found a nice little summary: What did it mean to be Celtic? Being Celtic was a way of seeing and feeling, of interpreting and inhabiting the world. The Celtic domain wasn’t simply a physical landscape spanning Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other regions on the Atlantic rim – it was a dream-space, a kingdom of the imagination with a coherency, a taste all of its own, ‘Room to Roam’, as the George Macdonald poem said. And this dream-space was inside me too. Nail on the head stuff! Scott’s autobiography is hugely readable and it is not surprising to find that Dion Fortune, another person touched by the Celtic Ray, has been one of his most enduringly favourite and inspiring writers. Scott describes the influence on some of his earlier works in ...

“Unevolved man is, notoriously, a destructive creature, and is loud in asserting his "right" to be so. Have not those who can see a little further and think a little more deeply at least an equal right to defend and preserve? It is not only animals that are in question here: is the fashion for redwood fences and garden furniture really an adequate reason for thinking beings to exterminate trees of age-long growth? We do not wish to do more than touch upon this matter, for its significance must already have impressed many. Not only this or that living species is in danger; there is also that fabric of which each is a component, that web of mighty vibrations and of subtle echoes...” -          Robe and Ring, The Magical Philosophy, Denning and Phillips     It was the late 1980s just as my Charlton House Green Circle group came to the end of working through Denning and Phillips’ “Magical States of Consciousness” over th...

Like a deleted scene from Robin Williams' film, “The Dead Poets Society”, I was first introduced to the work of George William Russell at the age of 17 by an inspirational school teacher who also managed to turn me on to WB Yeats, Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard amongst others. Since that first lighting of the candle I’ve enjoyed delving back into the depths of AE’s work time and time again for inspiration, insight and illumination. George William Russell was a seer and mystic as well as gifted painter and poet. In addition to these things, he was also a vocal Irish Nationalist and prolific writer who has left a lasting legacy for the world.      Russell was born in the grey town of Lurgan (Irish “ an Lorgain”) in County Armagh, Ireland on the 10 th of April 1867. At the age of eleven his family moved southbound to Dublin. A few years later as a young man, he developed enduring friendships with W B Yeats and Art O’Murnaghan. Somewhat simi...