Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspiring, 25 Nov 2005
By A Customer
A stimulating read for those who need something more sophisticated than the Da Vinci Code.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb, a thought-provoking and compelling piece of work., 30 Jan 2006
Mike Baillie and Patrick McCafferty offer a key to unlocking the ancient Celtic myths.
Dendrochronologist Mike Baillie's superb 1998 work "Exodus to Arthur" challenged historians, archaeologists, even art historians, to look for evidence of cometary impacts or cometary imagery in our ancient past. In the course of his work he had identified periods of very significant environmental downturns both in Irish bog Oaks and worldwide tree ring chronologies, which, using ice core data, could not be explained by volcanic activity. Could impacts from cometary debris and be the answer? It certainly seems so.
In Celtic Gods, Baillie and McCafferty have themselves examined ancient Celtic myth, looking for cometary imagery and searching for evidence of what was taking place in the skies above our ancestors.
What they have found is startling, thought-provoking and compelling. This is a must-read for anyone interested in our past, in myth, or even our future survival.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lugh of the Long Arm, 31 May 2008
Given that I have read (and reviewed here) a number of Mike Baillie's books it should be obvious that I am comfortable with his main thesis - that at least some of the severe climatic events recorded in the tree-rings over the past few millennia have been caused by close encounters with comets. In this latest book he and his co-author suggest, pretty plausibly (to me) that many of the Irish myths (most obviously Lugh), Arthurian legends and even Beowulf should be interpreted in this light. For an archaeological and mythological poltroon like myself the book is a delight, making sense of much that previously seemed fantastical.
It does however have its flaws. I would have liked to have seen full colour artist's impressions of the celestial events proposed, and some of the technical explanations and diagrams were rather confusing. In fact I would like to see the book used as the basis for a TV documentary, with plenty of computer generated graphics. Such a documentary could also tackle something else I missed - any informed criticism of the whole idea. We can't expect authors to rubbish their own proposals, but it would be interesting to see what experts on mythology have to say about the comet thesis.
Even as a lay reader I could spot a couple of weaknesses. Many of the legends appear to show two comets doing battle. While a single close encounter with two comets simultaneously could conceivably have happened once, it is difficult to imagine it happening repeatedly. And the suggestion that myths and structures assumed to be associated with the solstices are really connected to meteorite showers that occur around the solstices fails Occam's Razor. After all, the solstices occur every year, unlike serious cometary events, and marking of the years and seasons would be enormously important to agricultural societies.
I was also unconvinced by the idea that the key human-like figures - Arthur, Patrick, Brigid, Setanta - were purely anthropomorphic representations of comets and didn't refer to any historical humans.
I've a couple of suggestions of my own. We know that the ancient Egyptians believed that their kings on accession actually became Horus and Osiris, and that they personally became part of the myths, and yet we don't have any problems accepting Ramses II as a historical figure. Surely something similar could have happened in Britain and Ireland - mere mortal kings and priests could be linked in the imagination to celestial figures.
And we also know that the Roman Mithras cult has Mithras doing battle with the sun, but the two finally merge to become Sol Invicta. Mithras is traditionally represented with his cloak streaming behind him - as clear an image of a comet as you can get. Perhaps when we see two "comets" doing battle in the British and Irish stories, what we should be thinking of is a cometary god doing battle with a sun god?
Mithras is also linked to the constellation Perseus. Interestingly the Perseid meteor showers are at their most intense in early August. Or Lughnasa.
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