Ceremony

In pre-Christian Britain, Calan Gaeaf was the feast of ancestors: a time to honour our beloved dead, sit in soft darkness and make ourselves available for guidance. Over time, older practices were overlaid with folk superstitions and later with customs such as jack-o’-lanterns used to scare away spirits. Beneath those layers, however, remains a deeper invitation: to restore our relationship with death, soul, spirit and an animate, ensouled world.

Across the British Isles, beneath layers of invasion, migration, empire, religion, rationalism and modernity, older ways of knowing still glimmer: in story, song, place-name, ritual landscape, poetry, lore, language and the instinctive ache many of us feel for a deeper relationship with the living world. The Brythonic tradition is one of those surviving threads of spiritual tradition. It is the ancient British wisdom tradition rooted in the ancient cultures of mainland Br

As we tip into polycrisis, we will need more of our ancient, tried-and-tested human technologies to keep us sane and keep us bonded, and thankfully, many are already reinvigorating them: from the exponential rise in pilgrimage to the adoption of fire-centred circles as spaces for convening community conversations, counselling and mental health support groups, and progressive business strategy meetings. As we feel the overwhelming, natural urge to escape those self-imposed ivo

Deep is the magic of fire-tending through dark hours, of giving a night’s sleep as an offering: a sacrifice for a prayer’s flight. It effects change. Things that were ordinary are no longer so; we commune with a night and its fathomless wisdom, with all its tides, hoots and howls.

This is an old way of belonging, though that word doesn’t really hit the meaning - our Welsh word ‘perthyn’ is better, retaining an older remembering of the relationship available between people and place. It means ‘related’ - I am related to this place, the beings of this land are my kin, and I am theirs. This quality of belonging is being lost in our fast paced ever mobile lives, but our bodies and souls remember, and it takes so very little if we remember how, to plant roo