And did those feet in ancient time:Meeting the Lost Gods of London.

"And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England's pleasant pastures seen?" - William Blake.

Long before William Blake penned those words in the early 19c, and long before humans made up God and invented Christianity, there were, in London (and elsewhere of course - but this is a story about London) other Gods, other stories, other stuff and nonsense - and I was upstairs in The Old King's Head for a SELFS talk all about them. Following their wonderful talks concerning David Bowie, love, and the river Thames my hopes were high.

I was not to be disappointed. Washing down a rather mediocre veggie burger from the Gourmer Burger Kitchen on nearby Clink Street with a regulation pint of Doom Bar, I listened intently as speaker and South East Londoner (for twenty-five years - two longer than myself) Robert Kingham led us through a brief, but informative, half hour tour of THE LOST GODS OF LONDON. Capitals - SELFS own!

This would be followed by both a brief beer/toilet break, the usual 'parish notices', a short Q&A (which touched on the Mithraeum - a site I've recently enjoyed a visit too), and then something of a treat as Robert ran through all twelve of the short films about pagan London that he's made for, and are still available on, the Londonist YouTube channel. They're worth checking out.

Psychogeorgaphers get off on ideas of a dark and weird pagan London but, viewed through the eyes of your average Victorian observer, paganism is quite simply anything that isn't/wasn't Christianity and it was in the late Victorian period, the 1880s/1890s, that it became a not uncommon disposition among experts to consider that Christianity itself was nothing more than a veneer, a very thin veneer that was used as a polite cover masking true folk religions.

Religions of horn dances, labyrinths, green men, and sheela-na-gigs. Religions, perhaps, of horror and death. But Ronald Hutton, the respected English historian, professor of history at the University of Bristol, and author of several revered tomes about shamanism, witches, and druids dismissed this idea. All of these things had their roots in Christianity, a religion with more than its own amount of horror and death.

Pre-Christian Roman belief had it that all places had a spirit, a kind of genius loci, and in the writings of Peter Ackroyd, too, we find an opinion that, through the centuries, certain London locations (not least Clerkenwell) have occult tendencies shot through them like the writing in a stick of rock.

Kingham's films and talks touched on some of these locations. The Shepperton Henge, in Surrey but within the M25, is no more than a circular ditch to look at now but between the end of the Ice Age and the start of industrialisation, when this area was still forested and its people led a more nomadic existence, it is believed that the Henge (five hundred years older than Stonehenge), was a spot were families could meet, eat, and convene with their Gods.

It's speculative (much of it is - Kingham takes his work seriously but he also very much enjoys it, he comes across as a less up himself Ben Elton at times) but it's plausible and it's certainly true that antlers and the skull of a wolf have been found buried there. The Stanwell Cursus, near the Iron Age village of Caesar's Camp, was lost by ploughing in the nineteenth century and now sits almost directly under Runway One at Heathrow Airport.

Nearby, in Hounslow, in 1864, labourers unearthed a Celtic cross associated with the worship of the sun leading us to believe that the Cursus, like the Henge, was an ancient site of ritual and religion. Springhead in Kent, over the route of the old Roman road Watling Street (and now near to the HS1 rail link between London and the Channel Tunnel) has got almost everything your edgelands observer would expect, even hope, to see during their investigations.

Pylons, fields of corn, car boot sales, some serious level of fly tipping, and a Roman site of no less than seven former temples. Less obvious to the casual observer's eye is that the bodies of decapitated children have been found buried beneath one of the temples. Following the emperor Constantine's adaption of Christianity in the fourth century, archaeologists have found the graves of infants who Pliny (the Elder or the Younger, I'm not sure) reports were not permitted the cremation rites of adults at this time and were, therefore, often buried in temple eaves. Why they had their heads chopped off is a macabre mystery.

Kingham touched on Fenning's Wharf (a huge warehouse near the present day London Bridge at a time when Bermondsey and Rotherhite were eyots) and how that burnt down in 1836 revealing evidence of riverside burials (London Bridge itself burnt down so many times they made a song about it), he spoke briefly about the Roman well found beneath Southwark Cathedral in which they discovered funerary relics and the remains of cats and dogs, and he mentioned, briefly, the occasion archaeologists chanced upon a wooden box beneath the ground in Elephant and Castle that had inside it some second century pottery and two dead dogs.

There are mysteries and myths in and around London still to be explained and there are others, surely, still to be discovered. With quotes by William Blake and Dostoevsky, diversions into the popularity of The Green Man as a pub name in London (there are seven currently open and six, according to the Beer in the Evening website, have closed in recent years. There was even one in the basement of Harrods where one could, joked our speaker, enjoy an authentic London pub experience for just twice the price it would cost you to go to the pub itself), and a further digression into how both Thomas De Quincey and Arthur Machen would use stories of labyrinths and minotaurs as metaphors for tales of London itself we'd been treated to a fantastic, funny, and inspiring evening and the film show hadn't even begun yet.

The films were absolutely fascinating and they touched on subjects as diverse as druidism, wicca, folk horror, Bloomsbury bookshops, EIAPOE's evergreen Madame Blavatsky (not had her in one of these blogs for three whole months), Emmanuel Swedenborg, face pots, satyrs, iron phalluses, the London Stone, tools for castrating priests, the cargo cults of Vanuatu, the pagan significance of the banks of the Walbrook, and goings on at the confluence of the Colne and the Thames.

It was bitty in places, sure, but this just made it more ripe for further exploration. Kingham managed to weave in quotes from the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, and even one from Spinal Tap. He nicked Peter Ackroyd's favourite adjective - noisome, he spoke of the Dagenham Idol dug up in Rainham Marshes before the construction of the Ford Motor Works but a thousand years older than Stonehenge (clearly the benchmark for measuring old things), and he told us of the Strand Maypole that was over ten storeys tall and saw many flock to its fertility dances in 1661 following the Restoration of the Monarchy.

There was still time for stories of how the obelisk of Ra, better known as Cleopatra's Needle, was first erected in Heliopolis on the orders of Thutmose III (the sixth pharoah of the eighteenth dynasty)  more than one thousand years before Cleopatra was even a glint in Ptolemy XII's eye, of Christopher Wren digging beneath the foundations of the burnt down old St Paul's Cathedral to find evidence of Christian burials following Diocletian's persecution of said Christians but only finding periwinkles and sand proving the area had once been underwater (incidentally this is believed to be the former site of the Temple of Diana, another Diana married a prince there in 1981), and of a less famous great fire of London. The one of 1212 that killed over 3,000 Londoners.

We were even treated to a painting of a later conflagration at Westminster by JMW Turner and, best of all, a quiz. Is the famous statue in Piccadilly Circus?

(a) Eros
(b) the Angel of Christian Charity
(c) Cupid
(d) Anteros

It's a big fat Mr Babbage noise for any of you who said Eros because it is, contrary to popular belief, his younger brother Anteros. In Greek mythology, Eros represents unrequited love but Anteros is the god of requited love, "love returned" or "counter-love", and also the punisher of those who scorn love and the advances of others. He sounds like a harsh, but fair god, my kind of god (despite being a little bit pushy) - and this was my kind of talk too.

It was good to bump into Carl (who I'd met last month on my LbF Lea walk), it was good to learn about McFadden's Cold War (Google it), and it was good to learn a new euphemism for boozing - "have a suck at the monkey", but, best of all, it was good to be in a room full of like minded Londoners and London lovers, sucking on a Doom Bar (instead of a monkey), and breathing in the stories of those who've gone before me.

I won't be here long, none of us will, but the best I can hope for is that one day after I've gone somebody somewhere will be reading this and feeling the same about me as I do about my forebears. In creating a city they created a mythology too.