"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 paradign 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 we judge to be less imperfect than our own. Grandparents remember better times than they see ahead for their grandparents; 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 more 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 against this has created other Golden Ages: the Matriarchal Golden Age, when women were supreme and the Divine was predominantly seen as goddessly; the Golden Age when all ancestral doings were good. wise, and true. Our longing for a Golden Age is not a fantasy of 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-flight 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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