Notes and Additions to Chapter Two
What does Druidry Come From?

1. The word 'excarnated' means defleshed.

2. This paragraph has been questioned, and rightly so. While my words may be evocative, they are perhaps too poetic and therefore risk being generalised and overdramatic. While hunter-gatherer culture lacks many of the advantages of settled and civilised society, it lacked many of the disadvantages too, being more fluid, flexible and for the most part requiring much less intense labour. The language used by our ancestors of this time may have been far from 'rough'. Many diseases entered into human society through close contact with animals through farming.

Furthermore, the term 'dependant on instinct for survival' is rightly questioned. Genetically we have barely changed over tens of thousands of years; the content of what we learn may be different now from that which we needed in the Neolithic, but the amount of learning needed for survival is probably not.

3. In this paragraph, I am referring to the development of agriculture in Britain. Not only were these islands colder than those further south in Europe and Asia, where agriculture developed many thousands of years earlier, but there were fewer plants that stood out as natural contenders for developing agriculture. As a result, the shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming, and the consequent development of larger communities, happened a good deal later.
 
4. Both archaeologists and seers have spoken of Stonehenge having been built by a powerful ruling group or culture. While many stone circles, such as Avebury in Wiltshire, are clearly open enough to be gathering grounds of bands, clans or tribes, perhaps for trade, exchange of women, the witnessing of vows, the circle of Stonehenge is very small and enclosed. When it started being used, all other stone circles in the area appear to have gone out of use. Many also speak of the land informing the people who create temples and other monuments; that Salisbury Plain, on which Stonehenge stands, is largely now owned by the Ministry of Defence and populate by the military, seems an expression of the landscape's ancient and ongoing song. However, the nature of Stonehenge may be a point of debate, worth considering and discussing.
 
5. The 'barbarians' who determined the final fall of the Roman Empire were Germanic tribes. However, in some sense I use the term here to refer to all non-GraecoRoman peoples, reaching back to the roots of the word which meant anyone who wasn't, in Greek eyes, civilized and spoke an incomprehensible language (their words being no more useful than - in modern parlance - blah-blah-blah).