“The new religion [Christianity, which was NOT our’s] destroyed almost all trace of the old [which was].”—Catherine Hills, The Anglo-Saxon Settlement of England, from The History and Heritage of Northern Europe

Paradoxes, conundrums, and riddles. Or Quackery.

We’re referring to a time between one thousand and fifteen hundred years ago, but, as with an individual who has suffered trauma in the early stages of their lives, the wound lives on psycho-spiritually, festers, and colours every aspect of the mature adult. Events and experiences almost lost, buried and forgotten, unbalance the outwardly composed being.

But, people will say, Christianity is one of the very foundation stones of Western Culture. That and the old outworn meme that we ‘learned’ our Democracy from the Greeks. My son came home from school with that one several months ago. How do you tell him that, ‘no son, what they teach you in school is all wrong. The word is Greek, but the spirit of democracy blossomed in our own hearts?’

Best keep your mouth shut at times.

The Truths at the heart of the Cafe are for individuals alone. They are seeds for a better tomorrow. My generation? (I’ve passed the half century mark) They’re done. They’ve been ‘taught’. These are for a younger crowd, fresh and open, not closed, fixed.

Christianity was the consolation of a dying Rome. It was imposed on a nascent North Western European peoples, who would go on over the next fifteen hundred odd years to spread their ways across the globe. As Zenon has said: “Christianity was a foreign body lying heavily across the soil and the soul of Western Europe.”

That is a Truth so fundamental to our most essential being, that without it we are doomed to repeat the errors of the past, to fumble and fight and tear this fragile planet to pieces in our ignorance and hubris.

And it is a Truth that I hear spoken nowhere else but here. Scour the libraries, the internet, wherever, and I draw a complete and utter blank.

So why should anyone believe what I say? Just another internet nutbar craving his little podium, right up there with those that would have you believe that the pyramids are interstellar radio antennae.

Fair enough. Be skeptical.

There’s is only one other person I know of who fully grasped this fundamental Truth. One. And he’s gone now. (Zenon Reade is a figment of my imagination.)

His name was Joseph Campbell, he of the ‘follow your bliss’ meme. Sure, I’ve known a few people who have glanced through The Power of Myth, plenty treat Campbell as something of a guru, but I’ve never met anyone who has read or even heard of Creative Mythology. Granted, I don’t hang around in New Agey or Academic circles, but I read and my eyes are open. Nothing. Blank.

It is plain and simply one of the most toweringly important books of the twentieth century. A work of pure poetic genius, and I hate saying that. Mostly because everyone has their little bugbear book to trumpet.

I’ll leave it at that.

Who is educating, and who are speaking Truths so soul searingly powerful that they stop you in your tracks?