"The sleeping place of the Age of Gold is in the depths of every human heart."
___ John Cowper Powys, "Morwyn"
Within Celtic belief, the Golden Age is a paradigm of the living otherworld, where there is no winter, no death, no disease, no want, no work. In every age, we look back to times that we judge to be less imperfect than our own. Grandparents remember better times than they see ahead for their grandchildren; traditional craftspeople remember times when their craft was truly valued, before mass-produced goods; soldiers envy troops who could fight on horseback or hand to hand without facing mass annihilation. The grass is always greener and the times always rosy in retrospect.
The Edenic principle of Paradise has replaced the picture of the classical Golden Age within our own times, growing out of a story of disobedience that bruises the human heart and echoes after us. becoming the pretext for ideological brutality to all living beings, animals, and people. The reaction this has created other Golden Ages: the Matriarchal Golden Age, when women were supreme and the Divine was seen predominately seen as goddessly; the Pagan Golden Age, when all ancestral doings were good, wise and true. Our longing for a Golden Age is not a fantasy or a historical reality; rather, it is a real remembrance of something profoundly, mythically true. Its images shimmer upon our inner sight like a mirage - a recognition of the eternal, living otherworld whose lands we travel to when we dream, meditate, or make soul-flights to its regions, a realm to which we instinctively belong.
"What is your vision of the Golden Age? How does it sustain hope in you?"
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]
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