Sacred Land - Pagan perspectives on barrows and ruins

Anglo-Saxon pagans appropriated the Celtic burial mounds and Bronze age burial mounds in a new religious context, using them to bury their own dead and also for meeting places. The Christians later adapted these burial places for yet another context, as an execution ground and a designated haunt of devils and demons. Pagans today often worship at Neolithic monuments in an anachronistic way quite incongruous with their original purpose, but this does not make it less authentic paganism when we consider how historic pagans themselves appropriated monuments of other peoples for their own purposes. Ancient structures inform our sense of the past within our ancestral spaces and this helps us to contextualise time, allowing us to understand the past and our relation to it through our relationship with the land.

This talk was delivered to the Tiverton Pagans
This channel depends on your support:
Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/survivethejive
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/survivethejive
https://www.subscribestar.com/survive-the-jive

Source: Semple. S., A Fear of the Past: The Place of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-Saxon England. (1998)
Theme: Wolcensmen