This book, published under my pen name of Mael Gwynedd in 1991, is alas out of print.  Because of this I have lent my last personal copy to many with the result that it is now becoming quite dilapidated.  Owing to further interest of late, I have decided to put excerpts from Part 1 of the book on site.  Part 2 covered all the festivals and other ceremonies of this Keltic system and links to some of these can be found here.

As much of the historical section is but a précis designed as a short teach-in to the subject, the book was for the embryonic seeker not for the specialist.
 

Back cover blurb

The author has noted with dismay, over the last four decades, how many individuals who search for the roots of so called Neopaganism in Britain, usually find themselves erroneously accepting that Wicca is the spiritual heritage of these islands.

Although possessing family traditions which are entirely Keltic, he has made a study of the various branches of Wicca (the root of which was a Hispano-Semitic cult imported into East Anglia in medieval times), and has been quite saddened by its contents.  Although various pseudo-Masonic, sado-masochistic, Greco-Roman and even Qabalistic elements were grafted into this 'bastard child' by a glib opportunist - the late Gerald Gardner, little, if any, of a British nature was incorporated into this spurious amalgam.

Many families in Britain, like that of the author's, maintain a Keltic or Gaelic tradition and continue to function independent of the aberration of Wicca with its Saracenic Horned God and Mediterranean Goddesses.  A few of these encouraged Mael Gwynedd to publish not only a short historical survey of what is know of the British religious heritage (together with the evil brutalities of Christianity over four centuries), but also a number of his own Keltic ceremonies, in an attempt to portray the indwelling spiritual core of British myths and legends - the vehicles by which beliefs traverse centuries and generations.