An Introduction to The Isles of the Many Gods
from the Foreword
(an extract from the Author's Foreword, The Isles of the Many Gods, by Sorita d'Este and David Rankine)

This book was a labour of love - both in that we felt the need for such a book for use by those interested in the Gods and Goddesses worshiped and celebrated by our ancestors in Ancient Britain, but also because we enjoyed doing the research so much! In fact, though this is true to a certain extent for all projects we work on, we found it very difficult to stop adding new information and rewriting parts of this volume more than we have ever done with any book we have worked on in the past. So much so that it was more than six months late in going to print and contains around 30 more deities than it did when we first thought it was "all done"!

This book looks at the deities which were worshipped in the British Isles during the first millennium through to the Middle Ages. These include indigenous Gods and Goddesses, as well as many foreign ones which immigrated to these isles with waves of invading cultures. It is also worth considering that though we think of Christianity as being a religion which has been the dominant European religion for fifteen hundred years now it was slow at taking root in these isles and existed for many centuries alongside the older Pagan religions and practices.

Many of the Gods and Goddesses included in this book are immigrant deities who came to the British Isles from other parts of the world. This book is concerned only with the known evidence for their worship in the British Isles and as such we have not included details of their worship or the way in which they were viewed other than this. This should be kept in mind when reading through the entries of deities that originate in other parts of the world.

It is our hope that the information we have brought together in this volume will help provide inspiration for those readers who are interested in exploring the historical spiritual traditions of the British Isles in more depth. Throughout you will find footnotes and at the end a complete bibliography of all the materials we consulted whilst compiling this volume. We hope that this will help provide points of reference for those wishing to explore a particular subject in further depth.