User:Rodolphe Bresdin

Just trying to help people get some information they might find useful.

this is the part where I talk to myself as if someone is actually listening. but seriously.

I have no interest in 'neo-paganism'or 'Wicca', and know little about Ogham (and knew a lot less about Celtic culture when I read it). I accept that his theories on Ogham and the 'tree alphabet' are probably at best an inspired conjecture. However his links between Hellenic cultures and Dravidian/Sanskritic ones seem lucid and credible. I found his etymological work profound and convincing, and I think anthropologically much of what was controversial about the work has been vindicated by the recent rise in Dravidian scholarship, which provides clear evidence for the dispersion of central myths from India, through Crete, to Christianity and Celtic cultures. He openly asked for help with the Celtic elements, but was refused it, largely because of these now vindicated suppositions he had made based purely on poetic anaysis. I think it's still probably the only book of poetic analysis written in the spirit of poetry. Back then people too often took classical history at face value, and rarely thought about the class and state pressures which defined how, for instance, anti-State, pro-nature democratic/anarchist religions such as the intricately linked dionysion and early christian cults were portrayed. The book is also scattered with innumerable asides on everything from Sappho to Ramakrishna to Plato ( the Plato analysis hilariously brief and utterly effortless, also provides an excellent refutation of the kind of anthropologically redundant analysis of myth as a kind of chinese-whispers ignorant peasant form of history which is now so in vogue with popular atheist figures like Dawkins.