The establishment views history as a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. If only we could dig them up, find another parchment hidden is the cloister of a Irish monastery, then the full picture of our past would come into view.

It has becomes increasingly clear to me that such a quest, while laudable, is doomed. Even if we could complete our jigsaw, we would not understand it.

Consider the gods of the great fallen civilizations. For millennia we have mocked them, reducing the once terrifying Olympiads to little more than a joke. An English pantomime. We cling to Cicero’s scepticism like a terrified child, we ignore Socrates’ final request of a sacrifice to the gods.

In short, the glorious history of Zues et al. is absent from our psyche.

Yet they were real once. In the minds of countless men across countless ages. As real as the pen I hold in my hand. If only we could see what is was to believe in such beings, to live in a world where vain, capricious, superhuman beings ruled our lives. How much clearer would the picture of history’s jigsaw be then?

This is why the cult of the mysterious woman is so critical. If she, or rather the idea of her, survived the onslaught of Christian and Islamic monotheism (as the fragment of al-Khwarizmi suggests), then she knows. Somewhere hidden in the forests of Germany, the traditions of Isis and Venus survives through her opposition to them.

Critics say I look for a place that does not exist, but it must. Just as heaven has its hell, so the ancient gods had She Who Rests. I do not pretend that I will discover some Tartarusian tomb full of eldritch magic. I am not mad. I am a historian, searching for the remains of a lost culture – our own past.

I pray that there are good men who share my desire? I appeal to those who do not wish to remain eternal in Plato’s cave. Let us discover her together.

Prof. Powell, 1974