Decline of the Goddess Cultures of Ancient Britain

Godrevy Head and Lighthouse from St Ives, Cornwall, with St Agnes Beacon behind

Here’s one of my podtalks, recorded in early August, Lughnasa, at the Oak Dragon Camp in Somerset.

It’s all about our prehistory in Britain, and how and why people built ancient sites, and their advanced shamanic-magical culture, and sympathetic, sustainable societies, and the creation of gods and religion, and a few other wee matters such as these.

A sweep over the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze ages. 90 mins.

It’s to be found on Spotify here
or on my site at www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Especially good for when driving boring motorways and ironing endless socks and underpants, or as withdrawal therapy from the BBC.

With love, Paldywan

Godrevy from Trencrom Hill, Cornwall

Cornish Ancient Sites

Cartographic Delights

Ancient sites of West Penwith

If you’re resident in Cornwall or a Cornwall fan, or you’re likely to visit here this year, and if you’re into visiting ancient sites, these maps are useful.

The last five days, since it has been rainy a lot and quite often really white-out foggy, I’ve been doing my six-monthly updates of the ancient maps of Cornish and Scillonian ancient sites that I’ve been working on since 2015.

There are two main maps:
1. ancient sites
2. ancient site alignments

These are not just maps but also rather encyclopaedic databases. That is, if you click on an ancient site symbol, a popup give you information and links to other sites where there’s more info about that site.

The location of ancient sites is very accurate and these maps can be used in the field, so that you can find sites when tramping around.

However, before entering ancient sites, please switch your phone off completely, so that you don’t pollute the site and you feel and experience the site more clearly.

If you live in Cornwall or are visiting this summer, or if you’re a fan of Cornwall, these maps are very useful!

Click one of these:
All of the maps
Map of the Ancient Sites of Cornwall and Scilly
Map of the Ancient Site Alignments of Cornwall and Scilly

Key to the map symbols

And the rain has stopped (mostly), and the map updates are complete!

With love, Palden

Ancient Site Alignments

Archiving

The past commutes toward the future

I’ve just done another upload to my audio archive of talks from former decades. It’s taking shape, gradually – my wintertime project.

This one is about ancient British time systems and the way they are built into ancient remains from the neolithic and bronze ages. It discusses key issues such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar maxima and minima, the rising and setting of stars, zodiacs and subjective inner time.

I’ve just listened to a rather inspired one, which I did in Byron Bay, Australia, in 1992, shortly after writing the book ‘The Only Planet of Choice’. If you’re a TOPOC freak, you might be interested in this one. It’s called ‘An ET View of Terrestrials and What’s Happening on Planet Earth‘. Trivial, mad, timewasting stuff, of course…

I’m learning a lot from these talks – it’s funny, that. But when you’re in life’s last chapter, it’s really fascinating trawling through old stuff, just to get a balanced view of things you’ve been involved with through life. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the scales to see how it all balances up. You gotta look at the plusses and the minuses.

When I was 24 I had a near-death experience that changed my brains and removed a lot of my memory and capacity to remember the events of my life. This is why, if I haven’t seen you for over a decade, I might look vaguely at you while a memory is slowly emerging (sorry about that).

So it can be quite a surprise, actually, to hear myself rabbiting on from around thirtyish years ago – and I’ve come across some gems – but the thing is, was it the same life?

And that’s just some of them

We have hundreds of crows living down in the woods below our farm. They assemble after autumn equinox and spend the winter together, dispersing around Penwith around spring equinox. In the evenings they get worked up, crarking a lot until, around dusk, they go into swoopy formations and an impressive tribal synergy process.

It’s like the corvid tribe has an identity and mind of its own, which the individual crows plug into as they do these dusk rituals, before they all settle in the trees to spend the night together, as one tribe – all of them probably related.

This is one of the blessings of my life at present. Another is the little birds, robin and tits that feed at the feeder hanging in the dogrose bush outside my door.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

The two top photos and this one are from St Loy, in West Penwith, Cornwall