Welcome to...
Congratulations! You've found the secret entrance to "Gwydion's Hollow
Hills", the web page that delves below the surface of reality. This is the place
where Celtic history, mythology, philosophy and theology all merge into a single
cohesive world. This is the Axis Mundi of Celtic mysticism on the 'net.
In other words, this place is cool.
Where else can you read articles on the works of writers such as R.A.S.
Macalister, Damian McManus, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade?
Who else brings you reviews, summaries and outlines of the books you
should be reading? On whom do the cattle of Tethra smile?
Click here
for some background information on Gwydion and the Hollow Hills.
Click here for a listing
of articles.
Click here for my
links.
ARTICLES
This is a list of articles and things I've written or collected. They are on
a wide range of subjects and are in no particular order. Watch out for new
additions whenever I feel like it. To make things easier I have separated the
links into on site
material, or material I offer here, and off site material, or
material not on my own page. All articles are written by me unless otherwise
stated below. As always, if you find a bad link please tell me.
ON SITE MATERIAL
THE SPIRAL
CASTLE: The Spiral Castle is where I keep all my information and links on
Robert Graves' book The White Goddess along with other sources of
information on Ogham. I have a partial bibliograhy of White Goddess, my
own reflections on the book, and articles on Ogham by Kevin Jones and A. Gorham.
Not to mention other stuff. Many people get the impression that The Spiral
Castle is a separate page but it's actually part of Gwydion's Hollow Hills.
INTRODUCTION TO
THE BOOK OF IRISH POETRY: This is the introduction to Alfred Perceval
Graves' The Book Of Irish Poetry (1914). I thought it would be
interesting to include something on my page from Robert Graves' Father and this
4043 word introduction is short, informative and to the point. It covers the
field of Irish poetry anthologies between the years 1789 and 1914. Early ideas
of druidism influenced writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance such as Yeats,
Lady Gregory and A.E. Those writers went on to influence the druidic revivals
and recreations that still exist today. So a good understanding of these Irish
sources is recommended.
GWYDION'S AE PAGE:
Just for the hell of it, I started a page for George William Russell, better
known as AE. His material can be hard to find and he's not on the same level as
his friend Yeats, but he shouldn't be forgotten. He was an artist and poet who
continually struggled to express his Celtic visions in his work. You have to
admire a full grown man who wasn't afriad to admit to seeing fairies.
GUNDESTRUP
CAULDRON: If you're serious about Celtic studies then you know what the
Gundestrup Cauldron is and have probably seen a couple of its cryptic pannels.
Here is my page of thumbnail images along with some personal insight into what
they mean. This is probably the only collection of Gundestrup Cauldron images on
the 'net so check them out while you can. I'll be adding even more material to
this page over time. This page is actually on my Fortune City account so sorry
about the banners and spam when you go there.
RECOMMENDED
READING: This whole 6000 word article is actually a reworking of 3 different
articles I wrote about what sort of books a new pagan should and should not be
reading and why. I name about 30 good books for starters and mention several bad
books to be avoided. I also lay out some guidelines for setting up your own
reading program if you're a total newbie and try to explain some of the dangers
of suggesting books to newcomers.
ETERNAL
RETURN: Click here to read my notes of The Myth Of The Eternal Return
by Mircea Eliade. A highly recommended book if you want to understand the
relationship between myth, ritual and religion. Required reading in my
opinion.
MONOMYTH:
This is an article I wrote after reading several books by Joseph Campbell and a
couple of Jung's books. It explores the meaning, function and symbolism of
mythology, both ancient and modern. It draws parallels between ancient myths
(like The Odyssey and The Mabinogion) and modern movies/books that
are based on the same theme (like Star Wars, Mad Max, A
Clockwork Orange and Dune). I'd suggest this article to anyone who
wants to start reading Joseph Campbell's works, especially Hero With 1000
Faces.
PAGANS &
WICCANS DEFINED: This is something I wrote to answer a few questions on the
difference between pagans and Wiccans. This subject seems to be a never ending
debate and I hope to expand this article sometime in the future to cover the
issue in more detail. I'm sure my views here will upset some people but that's
true of anything.
EXCERPT OF
THE MYSTERIES OF BRITAIN: Here's chapter 4 from The Mysteries Of
Britain (1931) by Lewis Spence. Spence wasn't the best researcher in the
world and was influenced by early ideas from Frazer, Tylor and writers of the
Celtic revival. Regardless, this chapter is one of the best commentaries on
Barddas that I have found so far. It helps to read this chapter before
you attempt to read Barddas. Just be aware of Spence's bias.
OFF SITE MATERIAL
THE
BARDDAS ON-LINE: I finally finished scanning the entire Barddas into
JPG format and once it was done Searles O'Dubhain offered to post it to his web
site so I turned it over to him. Between the two of us we finally managed to get
the entire book scanned and on-line. You can finally read the whole book
from the page he created. Be sure to visit his homepage, The Summerlands, as well because it's an
excellent site. There will still (eventually) be a finished HTML version of
Barddas but it's not done yet. To see my unfinished HTML version of the
text click
here.
A
Consideration Of The Iconography Of Romano-Celtic Religion With Respect To
Archaic Elements of Celtic Mythology by Kevin Jones. This also comes from
Searles' page, The Summerlands. This
excellent dissertation was written by our common friend Kevin Jones. Kevin has
been challenging the assumptions regarding Celtic paganism for a few years now
and he doesn't disapoint us here either. In this article he calls for a much
different interputation of Celtic symbolism than the one which has been offered
for the last few decades.
OUR DRUID COUSINS:
An excellent article by Peter B. Ellis, author of several books on the Celts and
chairman of the Celtic League (1988-1990). Ellis explores the links between
Celtic and Vedic culture in this article, comparing the druids to the brahmins.
This article originally appeared in the Feb. 2000 issue of Hinduism Today.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
So who the hell is Gwydion and why did I pick the name?
Gwydion
is a Welsh name and there have been a few famous Gwydions in history. However,
most of them were probably named for the most famous Gwydion of all, Gwydion Ap
Don. Gwydion Ap Don ("Gwydion Son of Don") is a character from medieval Welsh
legend. He's a wizard who makes his most famous appearance in The Mabinogion, a
collection of medieval Welsh tales that include the earliest Welsh Arthurian
romances. Gwydion is a central character in the fourth "branch" of the
Mabinogion, where he is called "the best story teller in the world". He was also
one of the Tuatha De Danann or "Children Of Danu", a race of magical people whom
supposedly fell to the Earth in a flash of lightning. Combine his story telling
ability with his magical power and you'll find that The Mabinogion is actually
implying that Gwydion was a druid. However, since The Mabinogion was written
well within the Christian era, the Welsh scribes were at pains to deny him any
pagan associations or divine status. His magical feats included prophecy, shape
shifting, resurrection of the dead and (in one version) the creation of the
Milky Way.
So why did I want to be known as some obscure Welsh wizard on the
internet?
Because of the simple fact that he is so obscure.
Merlin has been used to the point of clich� and even the older spellings such as
Myrddin are becoming common place. After the made for TV Merlin movie, Merlin
wanna-be's are sure to skyrocket on the internet. There was always Taliesin but
even his name is becoming more and more common on the internet, especially with
the SCA crowd and RPG players. Gwydion was more interesting and more obscure. I
had more of a chance to be original...or so I thought. Little did I know that
Gwydion is only slightly behind Taliesin in popularity on the cyber-highway.
There's several Gwydions floating around the SCA from what I understand. There's
also the Gwydion who makes the chat rooms known as Gwydion's Great Getaways.
Lastly, there is also the enigmatic name of the highly technical "Gwydion
Project"....which is some sort of computer programming project that I have yet
to understand, or care about. Combine all that with the fact that Celtic
mythology and culture are a big fad at the bookstores right now and I'm
surprised I hadn't seen a Gwydion on the internet sometime before myself.
So what is my real name? For those who are
interested, I am Mark Carter of Bloomington, IL, USA. In the past I was wary of
letting my real name and identity all over the internet and I'm still a little
wary of it now. However, I was recently encouraged to use my real name here for
2 very good reasons. #1: I recently became interested in genealogy and you just
don't get very far up your family tree if you don't give people your real name.
#2: It has been pointed out to me that any web site worth its space should site
its owners name, date updated and any sources it drew on if it hopes to stand up
in the scholastic world or ever be used as a source by anyone else doing serious
research. For the record, most people on-line still call me Gwydion, especially
in chat rooms and in Email. Either way is fine with me, although Gwydion is more
interesting because it implies someone who is a student of Celtic mysticism and
has a somewhat tricky and cocky nature. Anyone who knows me personally can vouch
for those traits.
Why is this site called Hollow Hills? This
is another reference to Celtic mythology and all around British legend. Most of
Britain and Ireland once entertained ideas of the "hollow hills" or the places
where fairies, witches and wizards lived in secret. In Irish mythology the
Tuatha De Danann were eventually beaten back by the Milesians, a less divine and
more human race of people. As the Milesians advanced and captured more and more
of the Danann's land the Tuatha De Danann retreated into caves, springs and
magical hollow hills to live in secret under the ground. Here the once divine
pantheon of pagan deities slowly decayed into medieval ideas of fairies, goblins
and other malignant creatures out to frighten or do harm to humans. Thus "the
gods of the old church became devils of the new" as the saying goes. It was only
a few generations ago that British mothers warned their children to be home
before dark, not to walk circles around a hill and especially not to fall asleep
on any of the artificial mounds, dolmens or cairns that dotted the landscape.
These were the homes of the old gods and they would wisk you off to the land of
the fay "for violating sanctity of supermen's hills", as the Bauhaus song
claimed. As recently as 1971 an informant told the Irish Folklore Commission,
"My own Father and Mother always told me 'twasn't right to be out late at night.
Especially in the hills at night...especially in the hills around here. He said
we'd get some kind of fairying out of it." This was the price to pay if man
wanted to inhabit the "Isle of The Mighty". (Click here to read
the lyrics to Hollow Hills, the Bauhaus song that inspired this
websites name.)
What is this site about? Well, for those of
you who haven't figured it out yet this site is mainly about Celtic mysticism, a
tricky subject in itself. It's especially about the druidic beliefs of the
Pre-Christian (and early Christian) Celts. It also branches out into some of the
so called "Celtic revival" material such as Yeats and George William Russell
(AE) wrote and which influenced slightly later writers like Robert Graves. From
there we might branch out into mysticism and occultism in general and maybe
touch on things like the Golden Dawn, Crowley and the like. Lastly, we'll spend
a little time showing how survivals of druidic ideas have diffused into modern
Wiccan practice. I'm going to be posting articles written by myself (and some
guest writers), notes I've taken from various books while writing these articles
and links to book reviews I've written on Amazon. I'll also post anything else
that I think is on topic.
This site is not meant to be the definitive site for these issues so you may
find information repeated here that is on other people's web pages as well.
However, this page does serve as the center to my own study and as such I hope
to offer a fair amount of new material. The notes from Eliade, Macalister,
McManus and Graves and my on-line Barddas are all things that I feel belong on
the 'net if it's truly to become the "information highway" it's intended to be.
When it comes to Celtic culture, the 'net seems to be a lot of hype and very
little actual subject matter for the serious student. I hope to change at least
a little of that here. The Hollow Hills is the cauldron of inspiration from
which new ideas are always flowing.
When are you going to finish The Barddas
section, the Robert Graves bio or (insert whatever here)? Also, I found typos
and/or mistakes on your page. Gwydion's Hollow Hills is always
growing and not always growing in an ordered way. The Barddas is slow
going due to problems with Fortune City, the morons who are hosting that page
for me. I have sent them multiple Emails regarding technical problems with their
system and they have refused to answer me or rectify the situation. I will
continue to work on the HTML version of The Barddas in my spare time but
I can't promise it will ever get done. For those who can't wait, I have turned
over all the scanned images to Searles O'Dubhain and he has posted them to his
page. So you can read the whole book in JPG format by clicking
here.
The Robert Graves bio is an ongoing project I work on when I have time and
when I feel like it. Other pages come, go and are renamed and moved as time,
space and inspiration demand. I may leave a page � done or a draft not spell
checked before moving on to the next page and this is for 2 reasons. #1: I'm not
in the mood for doing the hard stuff at the time. #2: I'm in a hurry to get
certain material on my page and therefore off my own hard drive. I feel it's
more important to post 3 pages of draft with typos than 1 perfect copy and leave
out the other 2 pages of data. 1st and foremost with this page is "make the
information available", even if it's only a draft. However, should you find
errors in spelling or facts anywhere in Gwydion's Hollow Hills feel free to
Email me regarding them. I may or may not already be aware of them.
I'm a member of (insert non-tolerant and/or fanatical
religion here) and this page offends my limited sense of intelligence and
understanding. You just need to understand the loving power of (insert your
religion's savior here)........If the material on this page offends
you don't waste your breath, don't Email me and don't leave rude comments in my
guest book.
Hey! I work with you off-line and in real life you
never talk about any of this stuff. In fact, you hardly talk to anyone at
all. Yes, I'm well aware that a handful of my co-workers come to this
page and are totally surprised (and probably confused) by it's content. There
are 2 reason I don't talk about any of this stuff off-line. First of all, I only
know one or two people off-line who are interested in it. Secondly, most of the
people I do know in person aren't intelligent enough to follow the conversation
anyway so I don't waste my breath on them. If you're one of those people that I
brush by at work without saying "hi" to, then you're probably in the second
group. I don't like talking about sports, cars, drinking, who's fucking who at
work or what is wrong with our jobs. If that's the limit of your thought process
then I don't bother speaking to you and the reason I read so many books at work
is to avoid being exposed to that sort of stupidity.
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Gwydion's
Hollow Hills
Last updated 3-20-02
Created by Mark
Carter