Pagan Britain Quotes

“Very ancient human beings, being closer to the fount of creation, had been possessed of sublime truths concerning the nature of the cosmos which had degenerated or been forgotten by subsequent peoples.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“This caused him to condemn archaeologists (in general) as ‘stuck in the past’.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“Archaeologists recover the material evidence, date it, and identify the different portions of it. Heritage managers and curators protect sites and objects, display them to the public and provide information on them. Historians act, likewise, as national experts on locating, understanding and translating written texts, and explaining what they seem to say. All should be prepared to stand back and let the public dream its own dreams, make its own uses, and tell its own tales.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“On Herne the Hunter: “Like Ceridwen, therefore, he is essentially a literary figure whom modernity has back-projected into the pagan past.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“Religion is characterized as belief in the existence of spiritual beings or forces which are in some measure responsible for the cosmos, and in the need of human beings to form relationships with them in which they are accorded some respect. When a group of people operates it in the same way, it becomes ‘a’ religion”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“Now that modern Western culture is itself starting to abandon rigid gender divisions and polarities, to challenge its customary sharp distinction between animal and human, and to admit to fluidity in the making and remaking of individual identity, it is beginning to perceive the same patterns in the creations of the Palaeolithic.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain