[[christianity]] --- - "The sanctity and symbolism of water continued into the Christian tradition." [[green-mi1990]] - Some of the earliest Christian geographies made use of prehistoric burial mounds (Knight, Meaney), referring to or claiming the existing ritual space. In Lincolnshire, a stretch of the River Witham used of votive deposits since the Bronze Age was given into the keeping of early monasteries which presided over continued votive deposition until the fourteenth century. 'Rather than destroying individual artefacts and structures belonging to the indigenous ideologies, the success of the Christian church in the seventh century lay in its concern to appropriate and 'convert' them to serve the causes of the new religion' (Stocker and Everson)…In the ninth-tenth century stone monuments were used as the boundary markers of the ecclesiastical estates in western Ireland (Ó Carragáin), in south-west Scotland (Crowe) and Cornwall (Turner)…In early Britain the inscribed stones of the fifth-seventh centuries may already have marked earlier territories or vistas yet to be defined. The stones were splendid with gilded letters and colored backgrounds, the inscriptions more iconic than literal (Okasha). Highlighting personal names of the famous dead, they were analogous to monumental tombs (Higgitt). In the seventh-ninth century, the new generation of ornamental stelae, 'many brightly colored with paint and inset with paint and inset with paste glass and metal', carried iconographic scenes which were rich in metaphor and learned allusions - 'sacraments in stone' celebrating a privileged link with God (Hawkes). From The Cross Goes North Ed. Martin Carver - · "...the story contains considerable elements of myth: he ([[pryderi]]) disappears on the eve of 1 May, the great spring festival of Beltene; and his earliest life is closely associated with that of the foal, which is also taken on May-eve. (This affinity with horses is linked with that of his mother.) Finally the kidnapping of Pryderi when three nights old is precisley similar to the fate of the young Mabon, the Welsh hunter-god of Culhwch and Olwen...Celtic conception tales such as this, surrounded by curious events, may be symbolic of the trancendental meaning of birth--a child born of earthly parents but also the incarnation of supernature essence--expressed by myth. (Similar mystery...surrounds the birth of Christ.)" [[green-mi1990]] - "The Christian monks who wrote the Book of Invasions gave this story...a resemblance to the biblical Book of Exodus" ## Noah "Arrival of Noah's granddaughter Cesair (or of Banbha, one of the eponymous queens or symbols of Irish sovereignty) before the Flood....which destroyed all of these first invaders except for Cesair's husband Fintan (the Ancient White One) who, according to some, saved himself by changing into a salmon. The myth claims Fintan survived into the Christian period as a source of knowledge about the past." Sources: [[green-mi1990]] or From Olympus to Camelot by David Leeming