Author Description

From the earliest days of human life on earth, humankind has had a feeling for the sacred, a desire for contact with the divine. Each age has had its own distinctive expression of the reality beyond sense-experience: the cave bear worship of Neanderthal man in the Ice Age; the animal magic of the shaman as depicted in cave paitings in France; the identity of the spirit with the earth herself as shown in barrows and stone circles; the great Mother Goddess who was worshipped as the seas formed around our coasts, revealed in a rock-engraved language of spirals and lozenges, eyes and circles - and so on, up to the flowering of the medieval Christian mystics against a background of war, plague and persecution. By examining the symbols for the sacred from 250,000 years ago to the tenth century AD, as seen in the microcosm of western Europe, this book shows how other humans at other times have asked the same questions that we ask, and what they have found as man progresses towards a more intense awareness of his own nature and place in the universe.