PAGANISM - SURVIVAL OR REVIVAL?

I have been thinking for many years that the simplest questions are the most profound - "who are we?", "Where do we come from?", "What am I doing?". In striving (even without success) to answer such questions I believe we can come closer to our "true spirit" and our "true nature".

One of principles of my own journey towards the truth (whatever THAT is) has been to strip things back to their essence, origins or fundamental principle parts in order to learn about them. Having performed such non-physical surgery on myself back in my past and found that, after many years of not realising it, my spirituality was at its core that of a "pagan" (which I will try to define in my talk) and my "religion' (which I will also examne the nature of) was, for the most part, something I understand now as "witchcraft", so I felt that I should look at paganism and the craft itself and see where THEIR absolute origins are and where THEY came from while trying to answer some of the more fundamental questions like "what is the nature of truth?", "what is reality?" and how have the answers (and the questions themselves) informed the human spiritual and religious journey?

Researching the origins and historical journey of paganism got me thinking more about ancestors and some interesting chanelling of information encouraged me to think more personally about the people and events I was describing. (Privately I named a few cavemen - they are mostly "Smith"!) Thus I found myself with subjective insight into the historical questions of whether modern pagan practices bear any real relation to what ancient pagans did and if so, how and why . . . .

My presentations are based on some of the evidence and ideas that I collected in trying to answer these interesting question by approaching them (properly, in my view) from an historic/accademic point of view but with the additional spiritual insight of personal experience I could not ignore or exclude. Thus I am able to give a range of talks on both the fundamental principles of indiginous human religion/spirituality through to a more focussed presentation of modern paganism in light of the extraordinary events of the middle of last century that brought witchcraft (Wicca) from an underground cult to one of the world's fastest spreading new religions and lit the spark that became what they are calling the "modern pagan revival".

The talks can be accompanied by a slide presentation using an overhead projector (which I can supply) and can be tailored to audiences of any age or interest group, from adults to children, atheists to people of faith.

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