Sissinghurst was no longer a magical place for people to be immersed in, absorbed and entranced by, a little "Grand Meaulnes" otherworld, but a "visitor attraction" — is there any phrase in English more oxymoronic?
"The state-of-the-art 3D technology draws us in, but it is the vivid weirdness of Cameron's luridly imagined tropical otherworld that keeps us fascinated.
Space ships are not miracles of technology, but psychic conveyances, serving the same purpose as Dorothy's whirlwind-borne house in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the trance of the traditional shaman: they get you to the Otherworld.
It's an astonishing piece of work that lurks in the strange otherworld between score and sound effects – a brooding, scraping, pulsing aural undertow that perfectly accompanies the on-screen weirdness.
It comes either from Bres, the son of Eriu, a mythical goddess who gave her name to Eire, or Bresal, a high king in Welsh and Cornish myths who made his home in the Otherworld "which is sometimes called Hy- or I-Breasal in his honour".
The hide was usually covered with figures of deities, tutelary spirits of the noiade, and otherworld localities, painted on with the juice of alder bark.
The idea of crossing water en route to the otherworld, which first appears in Egyptian eschatology, occurs in the eschatological topography of other religions, as was noted above.
This initiatory death, like that of the Siberian shaman, has two specific marks not found elsewhere in combination: first, a series of operations performed on the candidate's body (opening of the abdomen, renewal of the organs, washing and drying of the bones, insertion of magical substances); second, an ascent to heaven, sometimes followed by trance journeys into the otherworld.
Nevertheless, as a shamanic specialist, the tietäjä's main task was still to act as the community's first line of defense against hostile supernatural forces, whether they originated in the otherworld or with sorcerers and other evil-minded people.
During the Samhain festival the souls of those who had died were believed to return to visit their homes, and those who had died during the year were believed to journey to the otherworld.
The otherworld is viewed as two-storied and consists of first, a graveyard hades, or underground village of the dead in a holy forest near the village; and second, a distant hades, far in the north behind the burning stream (with an admixture of paradise concepts).
