magic

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

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.

I find myself in a recurring conversation about the grinding tectonic plates of old paradigm and new; the struggle to let go of outdated ways of being and doing, and the creativity and courage it takes to reach new solutions. This re-shaping of our world is played out in the intimate spaces of life as much as in boardrooms and on global political platforms. It’s brutal and confronting; it brings up our ‘stuff’ and asks for heroic acts of humility and an almost super-human cap