Angharad Wynne

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 Britain.

How can I express what this great Ash means to me? This English language I share with so much of the world has lost the animacy that once suffused its vocabulary. In my mother tongue, Cymraeg, words survive that honour interbeing and the delicate sensations of our connection with all life; by using them, like spells, they bind us anew.