The Secret Island

This is a book of secrets. In unique journeys around the world, from Ireland and England to Taiwan and Hawaii, Arthur Versluis explores the archaic myths and traditional lore of sacred islands and their ancient cultures written in stone. Megaliths, standing stones, stone spheres, cairns, all are ancient markers for understanding sacred landscape in new and profound ways. More than a book, this is a series of portals into new ways of understanding who we are in relation to the sacred earth and waters and air around us.

This book is both an odyssey and an alchemical quest around the known world, a pilgimage to those numinous places marked with megaliths, dolmens, menhirs, and great stone spheres. They bear witness to another world of primordial presences that still hold an initiatic power for those attuned. Most moving is the author's return, like Odysseus, to find what he sought on his home turf.

-Joscelyn Godwin, author of Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, Upstate Cauldron, and many other books.

Praise for other books by Arthur Versluis

Dr. Arthur Versluis, one of the world's foremost esoteric scholars, takes us on a journey to the fabled Aegean isle of Samothrace, a center of the ancient Mysteries. This book is a travelogue, and not just in a physical sense-Dr. Versluis guides us on a journey through realms of myth and history to uncover the secrets of ancient Western spirituality. At journey's end, the author steers us home to who we really, deeply are. 

-Leonard George, Capilano University, author of Crimes of Perception and Alternative Realities

A beautiful book that I have enjoyed reading right through-simple, luminous from beginning to end. I found myself thinking of my school-friend's recent books at first (Peter Kingsley), but you really have your own unique voice and it wins through magnificently. Each chapter-a separate meditation-enactment that adds such a cumulative experimentum in such an accessible way. Easy, perhaps, to dream of, but so difficult to pull off.

I wish I had had this book in England when I was growing up!

-Kevin Corrigan

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities

Emory University, author of Reading Ancient Texts, and many other books.