Itinerarium Curiosum 1776 (William Stukeley’s Enlightenment)
“When the druids, Phoenicians, Chaldeans and the Tyrian Hercules are all confusedly worshipping in a Dracontium in an imminent expectation of the Messiah, it is time to stop.”
Stuart Piggot, William Stukeley: an 18th Century Antiquary
For breakfast, William Stukeley eats a hard boiled egg. He’s daydreaming about mistletoe and Greek vases. William Stukeley once walked into a tailors and asked for ceremonial robes in the ſtyle of the ancientſ and does not know he’s wearing a tailor’s old curtains. He invented the druid’s cubit and half of his papers. He went mad in the way of anyone loving something deliciously irrelevant. William used to say the word “druid” with the softness of longing, a hand reaching for the past. Oh, baptize them, Druids of Sermon, Druids of the Christ-not-Born. Oh, Druids of Heaven. Mad and Pagan saints. You know, their temples, like a snake eating its tail in accordance with the moon? We are making a country that is our past: mostly imaginary. We’re going out of fashion like a Birrus Britannicus. We’re loving everything mad and Pagan and irreverent.
Kym Deyn is a writer and fortune teller. Their work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, Popshot and Butcher’s Dog. Their micro-chapbook Fee Fi Fo Fum is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books, and they have been selected for Nine Arches’ Primers Vol. 6. They are one of the winners of the 2020 Outspoken Prize for Poetry.
This poem was previously published in Occulum.
