Enfolding!

Wanton Green has just been reviewed on the lovely, thought-provoking and often challenging site "Enfolding". The opening paragraph follows, you can read the rest here

A key feature of contemporary Paganism is our relationship toplace. Curiously though, there seems to be little in the way of in-depth exploration from within the Pagan community of how we make and sustain our relationships with places, nor of place-making as a social or political practice. There are some excellent scholarly books examining place-making – such as Corinne G. Dempsy’s Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion (which I reviewed
back in July) and Adrian Ivakhiv’s Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona which argues that “sacred spaces” are heterotopic – where meaning is created, contested, and negotiated by different groups. Hopefully, The Wanton Green (Mandrake Books, Oxford, 2011, 222pp, p/bk) – an anthology of contemporary Pagan writing on our relationships with places – will inspire further explorations of Pagan approaches to place-making.

Touchstone review

Review from Touchstone, the journal of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Thanks, folks, the positive reinforcement is much appreciated!

THE WANTON GREEN ed Gordon McLellan and Susan Cross

ISBN 978-1-906958-29-9 

Gordon, a.k.a. ‘Gordon the Toad’ is widely respected as an educational ecologist and shamanic practitioner: and what’s in this book is from people similarly worth listening to. The approaches which this collection of contemporary pagan writings on place covers are; personal journeys and intimate connections; river, well and sea; exploring - mud on your boots; step back and consider; where are the wild places?; and urban wilderness.

There is something for every thinking Druid here, served from individual perspectives of those who walk their talk: its breadth is inspirational.                 

The ethos is sound: Pagans, far from feeling ‘ownership’ of the world, ‘recognise a symbiosis where we are simply a part of the whole and certainly not the most important part of it all’ and the book is, ultimately, about knowing and belonging, in the profoundest sense. The editors are active in working for change, but this is not a strident or uncomfortable read; the pieces are celebratory, intimate, praise songs to beloved landscapes, gentling us into a mindset to open to just being part of it all. Not just the pretty bits; all. ‘I spoke up on behalf of trees and hills, grubby backyards and windowboxes...’ A deeply enriching read. Recommended.Penny Billington

Honouring the Ancient Dead

We are giving all the royalties arising from the sale of The Wanton Green to this organisation, so it seems right to offer some more information about HAD...

Honouring the Ancient Dead is a British network organisation set up to ensure respect for ancient pagan human remains and related artefacts. HAD was established in May 2004, initially in response to negotiations following the Public Enquiry into proposed road developments at Stonehenge, Wiltshire.

HAD's main aim is to be a rational voice for those Pagan groups and individuals who are concerned about the care of ancient human remains in Britain, ensuring inclusion in any consultation and decision-making processes.  Key areas of interest are how archaeologists, museums and government departments care for ancient human remains, through exhumation, study, storage and display, with a parallel focus on issues of repatriation (within Britain) and reburial.

The full text of HAD's Statement of Intent may be found at  http://www.honour.org.uk/node/5

Whom HAD represents
HAD is fundamentally inspired by and rooted within the modern British Pagan community and its many spiritual, religious and philosophical perspectives.  As such a diverse community, however, it is difficult for any organisation to claim that it represents Paganism.  Addressing this issue, HAD does not represent a membership of individuals or groups for whom it speaks and to whom it is then accountable.  Instead HAD is representative of British Paganisms.  It achieves this through its structure: its Council, its advisors, its volunteers and its ability to access and listen to the many networks of Pagans whom it consults.  It is the weaving of all these voices that gives HAD its clear strong voice.

A personal note; a group of us were involved in a ceremony at Manchester Museum a couple of years ago to honour one of our Unburied Dead. Lindow Man, an Iron Age Celt found in the peat bogs of east Cheshire in the 1980s, was brought back to Manchester for a year from the British Museum. The story of that ceremony is for another time but, this image of the offerings brought by the company can close this entry with brightness and the promise of growth and life. Gordon 

HAD website

Up, out and running about!

Wanton Green is now up, out and running!

Order a copy today, tomorrow or maybe the day after you read this!

For a modest £11.99 ($23) and whatever the postage costs, you can mull over the full versions of the extracts teasing in this blog

Dive in! Have a read and a think. Let us know how you feel

You can order from Mandrake

Creeping Toad (me)

or from your local, delightful independant bookshop

or big chain bookshops or an on-line store….we don't mind, you can gauge any Brownie Points incurred for yourself (or by negotiation with relevant Household Goblin Authorities)

The authors and editors of Wanton Green have all decided to offer any royalties growing from sales of Wanton Green to Honouring the Ancient Dead. In considering how we deal respectfully with our ancestors' remains, we must question our own current relationships with people, legacy and land. 

HAD keeps asking questions of us as individuals, as communities and as part of a wider society

Wanton Green is out!

Besiege Amazon! 
Support your local bookshop! 
Get out there and buy your own copies, 
give them away,
read other people's copies, 

buy some more,
loiter excessively in shops, on street corners, at bus stops praising this book loudly 
be found weeping on park benches over choice punctuation

Or just order a copy and enjoy it!

Full title and other stuff:
The Wanton Green: contemporary pagan writings on place
ISBN: 978 1  906958 29 9

Price: £11.99

You could also order your copy direct from the publisher: Mandrake

The authors and editors of Wanton Green are donating their royalties to the Honouring Ancient Dead group. More details to follow 

Hills of the ancestors, townscapes of artisans

And unless I've missed someone out (which is entirely possible) this beautiful beginning from jenny Blain marks the last of our "chapter postings' for this Blog...We haven't posted the poetry pieces as posting half a poem feels a bit pointless and if we posted the whole piece y'all might not buy the book!


Jenny has a blog, here: Landscapeself and you can find out about Jenny's books there


But there is more to come, so after this taste of Dundee cake, do come back for more appetisers

Hills of the ancestors, townscapes of artisans

Jenny Blain

For the last ten years, or thereabouts, I’ve been working on papers looking at how people and place interact and the meanings developed there. Much of this has been about the ways that Pagans inscribe sacredness in landscape (or does landscape inscribe sacredness in them?). But this developed in association with another passion: the hills and towns of my recent ancestors and why they ‘matter’ to me.

These thoughts provoke a series of seen and heard representations to me. Not only do the memories of places matter, but how these memories are given. And so, immediately, there are two, which both relate to my childhood in Dundee, and both hold much wider appeal beyond my associations with place.

The landscapes of Angus, painted by James McIntosh Patrick, matter to me. Not because they are copied and re-copied in people’s living rooms and over the Internet, and hence are all that many people know about this countryside, but that he was a family friend and I grew up with his name as a component of family discourse and family identity. ‘Pat’, my mother called him. There is an ‘Angus-ness’ inherent in the quality of light and in the detail of composition, which means the images are instantly recognisable wherever they are found. In pursuit of my ‘Blain’ ancestors from the other side of Scotland, I walked into a bed-and-breakfast in Stranraer and said, ‘That’s a McIntosh Patrick’ of a picture on the wall. Which it was.

The poetry my father recited included verses which still make my heart pause and my imagination fly to the braes of Angus: not least those of Violet Jacob, on ‘The Wild Geese’. Again, the impact is not only that of the poetry, but of knowing the landscapes that the poet summons. I will use those words to pace this chapter.

"O tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norlan' Wind,

 As ye cam' blawin' frae the land that's niver frae my mind?

My feet they traivel England, but I'm dee'in for the north."

 "My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth."

---

and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows!  Wanton is as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

Natural Magic is art

Natural Magic is art
Greg Humphries.

There’s No Place Like Home

How do you get to know a place and how does it get to know you?

Time is a factor certainly, a sense of belonging built up from accumulated memories and feelings. You need to sit and listen. Hear its breathing hear its voice. Listen to its rhythm and pace. “Why are you here?” it says and I have no answer. Yet.

There seems to be a yearning in the soul of the Western individual to re-connect with Nature. The devices we create continue to dissociate us from our surroundings. Just turn on your iPod or computer and tell me you are connected to the wind in the grass outside your window or the pigeons on the roof across the street. The more devices we create to fill the gap, the further we move away from a sense of belonging in this world, the greater and stronger walls we build against the natural world we rely on for our survival. A dangerous route to follow, as the further we retreat from it the less we understand it. The less we understand it, the more we see it as something useless and redundant, or even threatening.

How do we reverse this trend towards isolation? There needs to be an acknowledgement that we depend on this place for our survival. Without clean water and food we would be reminded of this very quickly, but we are insulated by the systems and devices we have created through the use of fossil fuels. Our food is flown in from all over the world, our water comes from electrically powered, chemical based treatment works. Without cheap and available fossil fuels, these things would very quickly become expensive beyond the means of most people. And the fossil fuels are running out fast.

and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows!  Wanton is  as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

Approaching mugwort

And today's tasty bit is not to be eaten lightly (if ever)! Mugwort is a wonderful plant, those feathery, silver-grey leaves hold a strength and a legacy that always captivates me. It's one of those plants, people stop seeing a ubiquitous "weed" of urban wastegrounds. Maybe that's part of its magic, to stand unseen in full view?

A Heathen in Place: working with Mugwort as an ally

Robert J. Wallis        

A journey: introducing Mugwort

I’m walking past an unkept verge on my way home from the train station, having commuted to the city, and a raggedy plant catches my eye. It is Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris, outwardly an unassuming plant but, as I now know, with hidden, extraordinary qualities. The encounter is a markedly special one, albeit in a very ordinary place, at the end of a very typical day - and I smile at the fact. I offer a discrete salute to Mugwort and whisper a respectful greeting in Old English:

Gemyne ðu mucgwyrt hwæt thu ameldodest

hwæt þu renadest æt regenmelde

una þu hattest yldost wyrta

Continuing on my way, I spot a young sparrowhawk circling above the woods near my home, something I’ve not seen before.  While I would not be so arrogant as to think this sighting was ‘meant for me’, for Wyrd’s pattern is not so fatefully reliable, I recognise the beauty of the moment and offer the bird a ‘waes thu hael’. Arriving at the cottage, I unload my pile of essays for marking and, with a very welcome tankard of cider in my hand, offer the first draught in a libation to the house wight[1]: I sign the hammer of Thunor over the brew, then spill some of the liquid over a large flint offering-stone near the front door, which produces a satisfactory fizz.

A proposal: a Heathen in place

I open my essay with this personal narrative for three reasons: first, to introduce you to Mugwort, a plant ally I am going to treat in detail; second, to make the point that my Heathenry begins at home and is something that permeates every aspect of my daily life; and third, because all of this is firmly rooted in my relationships with places – both local and further afield. For me, this is both ordinary and extraordinary, at the same time, what I might term a Wodenic paradox[2]. Of course I take my Heathenry with me wherever I go: to work in London, to the picnic spot in the woods that we cycled to last weekend, when on pilgrimage to sacred sites some distance away from home, such as Danebury Hillfort, Avebury stone circles, and further afield yet - last Summer, to the rock art site of Ekeberg and Viking burial mounds at Borre, near Oslo. But in my heart, my Heathenry begins at home and in place, for the place that I am in, this land, is at the centre of my ontology and epistemology, and shapes who I am. My Heathenry is inseparable from the place(s) in which my life unfolds, and in many of these places, I encounter Mugwort.

---

[1] A complex term, here used to mean something like a ‘non-human agent’.

[2] See Johson & Wallis 2005.

and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows!  Wanton is  as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

Standing at the crossroads

we hope that the collection of essays in wanton green will offer food for thought and emotional challenge to our readers. The final chapter, however, offered our authors a new challenge of “what should we do/ might happen next?”. The following piece came in after we’d gone to final settings, so we offer it in full here.

Standing at the crossroads: Melissa Harrington

As Pagans we seek an intimate connection to the Earth.  But how do we the face environmental challenges that appear to be fierce and immediate? For me, I have given up activism, given up direct debits to green charities, with whom I have become disillusioned, and everything begins at home - recycling, eco householding, beach clearing,  litter picking, composting, writing to MPs and newspapers, and furthering local causes as much as possible. Perhaps it's my age.

The zeitgeist of the 21^st century is Pagan friendly; we are now at a point where our faith makes sense to members of the wider populace. But it will move on, a new zeitgeist will surely come when morals and values change once more, and perhaps the green issues will be ignored in the rougher, tougher harder times that are ahead, and Paganism's gentle enchantments will seem less relevant.

I believe that whatever  we do the earth will go on, and one day the sun will die, and so will our planet; but whether humans will be here then is another matter, for we are part of her evolution as were the dinosaurs. We may have reached the stars from whence we are drawn, we may have annihilated each other, or  live in a post apocalypse survival state where all this means nothing, and we scrape our living as hunted- gathers once more.

In the meantime we need to husband the Earth, to try to keep her as the Eden into which we were born. In Europe we need to develop the use of her natural resources via water turbines, solar power, ground source heat pumps, geothermal energy etc. We also need to make realistic political solutions to pollution and energy requirements, without falling for green hysteria such as the increasingly shaky presumptions and solutions regarding global warming, that now appear to have been based on bad science and pointless propaganda.

As Pagans, as humans, we can only do our best, for ourselves, for our planet and for the future, and that surely has to be a commitment that goes for all people of all races and creeds. It goes beyond beliefs in the supernatural domain, and right to the heart of our place in nature herself, and in that we are joined with all of humanity, whose simplest will it to survive. We in the affluent West cannot presume that third world countries will stop producing pollution, nor that we continue to ship our unsorted recycling to their landfill sites, where children pick at it for pence to survive. We have to get a world wide solution, involving huge changes to our industries, commerce, power systems, banking and foreign aid.

One of the most influential people I know, who makes these changes happen, is a banker; a pagan banker who works with banks to try to write off third world debts, and look at ways to make their economies flourish. He is not in any group, nor follows any particular pagan path, but he has been committed to this since he was at school, and his wife is a leading environmentalist and Wiccan priestess. One of the difficulties for us as Pagans maybe to leave the Other worlds where we often feel most at home for the real hard human worlds, and make effective changes there, to be truly part of it and its most mundane, capital and commercial systems. For a people who are often mystics and dreamers, more often found as activists sitting in trees, or on greenfields in eco protest,  many who spend years immersed in the arcane world with little career or political ambitions, doing that could be one of our greatest challenges of all. 

Stone in my bones....

and this week’s taste of Wanton to come is from Sarah Males, writing about the dales of the Peak District of England where several of our writers live. A fiercely quarried and harried land of limestone and gritstone, high, bleak moors and rich deep dales, this place commands reflection and draws the wanderer into deep and abiding relationships with the landscape around her…

Stone in my Bones

Sarah Males

How do I tell you how I relate to the land? Where do I begin? With the past, with myself or with a vision of the future? How do I speak of my affair with the earth, the stone and the water that holds me like a child? Of the elemental forces at work within me and around me? An earthly resonance. A shock, a resounding rushing of blood through my veins as energy flows through, around, in me and without me? Of my knowledge that my future lies inextricably entwined with this place?

When I speak of place I am referring to the larger world, to everything, each part, place and particle of existence. Those traces that skim the surface of physical being, that speak truths of past, present and future. Place that is more than just physical, place that sings with both harmony and discordant voices, a cacophony of communication from distant spheres or whispers of half formed utterances from those that are yet to come.

How did this happen? How did I reach this place of enormity, this vast and infinite space with which I feel deeply within my very being? Again and again I reconsider this change in my perceptions, for I was not born to this way of being. Or I was not born able to immediately recognise this relationship, whilst I suspect this is in some way an innate aspect of our nature and an aspect that has been pummelled out of us through centuries of attempts to control and exploit the natural world. For whatever reason, this understanding was not easily and immediately accessible to me.

and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows!  Wanton is  as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

Our first thousand views!

Thanks everyone! we've just passed our first thousand views. Hoorah for us! I invite you all to go and bake a cake, live it up, it's going to be a long winter!

Then come back, read another chapter opening or two, post a comment, mutter a little......

And for this week's treat...(part 2)

The lovely Graham Harvey contributed an introduction that managed to encompass just what we were up to and why and left us, the editors, feeling almost redundant....


Foreword

Graham Harvey

“What is your favourite colour?” might not seem the most urgent or profound question that you will ever be asked. However, those who have seen Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail (Gilliam and Jones 2002 [1975]) will remember it as the decisive question asked of King Arthur and his Grail knights at the Bridge of Death. Failure to name his own favourite colour proved fatal to Sir Galahad (who had instead parroted Lancelot’s reply). Wanton Green is not about favourite colours. But it is about the preferences, affections, relationships, rituals and responses that make the authors who they are, inform their understandings of the world (quite literally), and prompt their further acts towards living places and communities. It is not only a book about senses of place, feelings of belonging, or romantic longings to be somewhere. Far more than that, it is about the absolute centrality of belonging. Radically, it contests the idea that humans are separate from “nature” or “the environment”. It insists that our bodies and all our senses, feelings, emotions and thoughts, are rooted in our relationships to places and the other beings with whom we co-inhabit places, the world and the cosmos.

Ecology, the story of the world, is not about somewhere else. Nor can it only speak about animals, plants and other beings — it cannot leave us out. We humans are members of place-communities. Ecology is about those who dwell in places, and those who shape and affect places. This includes us. It cannot properly ignore us. Sometimes it is almost all and only about us, especially now that we have had such dramatic and widespread effects in our world. The chapters that follow arise from the preferences and experiences of particular authors. Their cumulative effect is the rising of a powerful wave of recognition, celebration and active engagement with the world. We are subtly invited or provocatively propelled to honour the places of our dwelling and our influence. Especially when in a celebratory mood, these might include our homes and their immediate surroundings, or those places where we step aside from the demands of human-focused living to seek presence within and among the wider, larger, more diverse community of earth-dwellers. Particular places matter to us, they manufacture us from their matter, and our bodies are part of their intertwined relationships and busy communities. Our connections to place(s) are not accidental. And all of this is true whether or not we like the places where we are right now.

and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows! Wanton is as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

And for this week's treat.....(part 1)

Finding the space, finding the words: The Charge of the Horned God.

Rufus Harrington

In the early 1990’s, while a member of the Bricket Wood Coven, I was stirred up to perform a magical quest, to seek a vision of the Horned God. I was living at the time in Hampstead Garden Suburb, thanks to the kind generosity of Fredrick Lamond, who has supported and helped many people in the Craft in his own private way. His house has a lovely garden backing onto woods. For three days, I fasted and meditated daily, both in the garden and in the woods. In my meditation, I deliberately evoked every memory and experience I had had of working with the God. I evoked thoughts and images, emotions and every experience I could remember of being invoked upon in Craft circles in many previous years. Then I just relaxed, tuning into the natural world around me, sinking into the experience of nature, of the sun shinning through the trees, of warm grass and earth.  I felt warm sunlight on my arms, now brown from the time spent outside. At night I relaxed into the starlight, warm evenings carrying me as I drifted in reverie, sometimes sitting, sometimes walking.

By the third day, my body had passed the hunger stage and this was no longer a distraction. I drank water and was not uncomfortable. I did not spend every minute of every day in meditation, I approached the quest in a most relaxed way. In the circumstance, I didn’t have to worry about anything, there were no significant distractions, I could slip away from the everyday world ......


and, as ever, if you want to read the rest of this piece, contain yourself in patience, and watch for The Wanton Green (the book) as the leaves fall, or with the first frosts or maybe when the snow hits...who knows! Wanton is as Wanton does, but the moment draws closer!

Because we have no imagination…

Because we have no imagination…

Susan Cross

The archaeologist is talking, pointing at the four panels that interrupt my view of Knowth and this landscape of  ‘passageway tombs’.  “Passageway tombs,” he says, “were created by ‘passageway tomb-builders’ – we call them that because we have no imagination”.  We laugh, hollow and echoing.

I look beyond the introductory speech, behind the barricade of panels. An Irish hare leaps onto one of the cairns. No one else sees. It is easy to be invisible, it only requires people’s attention to be directed elsewhere.  My attention, however, rests with the sitting hare. At this moment, misled by the shorter ears, I am thinking ‘rabbit'. I watch, wondering how many generations of rabbits have grazed this turf and whether, when they burrow, they kick aside human bones and molars. Then it unlooses long limbs, and lopes easily down the cairn slope, becomes a hare. It gains speed, runs over another cairn and threads a line away through the field towards the River Boyne.  I watch the hare run, follow the thread in land and time, until it is out of sight. I sense other long ago watchers, seeing the hunt and the magic of the animal and am nearer to a deep that may be past.

He is still talking.  He is trying to connect us, to tie us in to this ancestral place.  Sand martins sweep around the curved mound, their tunnels surround the western entrance and small faces look out. They are more comfortable than we with their ancestors in this mound. They have a continuing blood-line to the ones who first built into the hill, who created this place of pilgrimage, of rebirth. They return year and year, on small graceful wings and know just what they are doing here. Their rhythms of flight and return are unbroken in time and in space, like an easy heartbeat.

Pagan Ecology

two pieces this week from the "Step back and consider" section of "The Wanton Green",  firstly a from Emma Restall Orr and then a reflection from environment and heritage interpretation consultant Susan Cross. These are just extracts - to read full pieces you will have to buy the book when it comes out!

Pagan Ecology: on our perception of nature, ancestry and home

Emma Restall Orr

When asked for a concise definition, the majority of British Pagans would probably describe their religion as a nature-based spirituality.  It’s a simple phrase.  Yet as three words, a catch-all, a sound-bite, it is one of those wonderful phrases that may actually be saying nothing at all. 

After all, what on earth is meant by nature?  The notion is vigorously and often emotively debated, and rightly so, for it has been used as a political tool in countless ways by governments, corporations, protest groups and religions.  How broadly one might extend it, and what might be included within its embrace, has changed over the centuries, as cultures have considered the natural and unnatural, seeking to describe the ungodly, the uncivilized and dangerous, or that which should be prioritized, protected and treasured: nature has been defined equally as the acceptable and the unacceptable.

Perhaps because the breadth of possible definition is so broad, even where other brief descriptives are used to sum up Paganism, the essential focus on nature is often still there.  Expressed in countless ways, a gentle process of distillation brings us back to those three words.  Pagans might, and freely do, wrangle over the precise meaning of key associated terms, such as spirituality, deity and sanctity, and the implications for each definition with regard to religious practice, but these too boil down to the basic question of how our understanding of nature is foundational to our ethics and daily behaviour.

Indeed, in many ways, it is this individual fervour of self expression, often so protective of the validity of personal experience, with its inherently rich diversity and dismissal of any universal truth or certainty, that so often expresses – or even defines – modern Western Paganism, as much as its focus or basis on nature.

Museum or Mausoleum – A Pagan at play in King Solomon’s House

Museum or Mausoleum – A Pagan at play in King Solomon’s House

an extract from Mogg Morgan's contribution....unlike other extracts, this one comes form the middle of the chapter, you can decide for yourself (or better still, buy the book when it comes out!) what went before

...Which all made me think about museums and what are they for? I work and study in Oxford, and now and again I lead a tour of its ‘Hermetic’ campus. “Hermetic” in this context means the ancient Pagan doctrine, a synthesis of Babylonian, Greek & Egyptian wisdom. This is often encoded into its neo-classical buildings. Thus the central area around Oxford’s Bodleian Library is said by some to be laid out on Hermetic principles. Here for instance is a bijou science museum designed by Christopher Wren as a house for the magus Elias Ashmole. In the recent renovation the curators unearthed in the basement his original alchemical laboratory and a name for the collection as King Solomon’s House.

Museum or Mausoleum ?

The surrealist Marcel Duchamp felt that museums are where art goes to die. Museums were for him too insular and exclusive as venues for art viewing. For him art was a shamanic activity that should be everywhere, on the street, on the sides of buildings, etc. There is a great affinity between Surrealism, Paganism and magick. But perhaps the beat in the museum is just lacking in that tribal vibe?

But there again for those with a more melancholic disposition, the sepulchral nature of the museum can be very evocative. Kurt Schwitters is hardly a household name but he was an artist/shaman who thought of the museum as “cathedrals of erotic misery”.  He no doubt related to them as the old style “Cabinet of Curiosities”, what he called Wunderkammer, “archives of the time and space”.  In his vision the museum is a “space for mysticism, sexuality and autobiography in the production of art and architecture”. 

Wild, wild water......

Wild, wild, enchanted water …

Lou Hart

They come here for healing, from all of their ills

A draught of well water is better than pills.

We help with both childbirth, and eye complaints

With seizures, convulsions and all sorts of faints.

(Song of the Water)

Have you ever heard singing in a waterfall or in a stream or the sea?  Who are the singers? Ancestors? Spirits? Forgotten gods?  In streams, rivers and waterfalls if you listen (absently rather than closely) you can sometimes hear music; calling and singing, sometimes the same three notes over and over.  And you will not be the only one. The singers are quite often referenced in local myths and stories and are known in many places including Rostherne Mere in Cheshire, on the Mermaid’s Rock in Lamorna at the far end of Cornwall, and at Llanllwchaiarn in Ceredigion, West Wales.  Are the voices related to some mythical, legendary, historical event or people, or to something more natively intrinsic, to water itself?

Have you ever washed your hands of something you no longer wanted to be involved with?  Have you ever put coins in a fountain and made a wish or thrown them into a well or river? Have you ever purified yourself with water? If so you are part of a long tradition of sacred interaction with water.

(image: St Nectan's Glen by Anthony Cox)

So where did this Wanton stuff come from....

 Extracts from the introduction to The Wanton Green…the thoughts from the editors that sort of explain what set this whole Wanton occasion into movement

a) Gordon MacLellan

At first: provocation

I had been sitting through (yet another) well-intentioned but essentially saccharine “interfaith and environment” conference. Sitting there, wondering what I would contribute beyond being the wild-card, the barefoot, painted-toenail weirdo at the end of the dais. Asking myself what was it, why was it, that I thought British Pagans could contribute to these discussions…

So I listened, and bristled appropriately, and spoke up on behalf of trees and hills, grubby backyards and window-boxes and realised that I was tired of listening to ownership. It may be blatant “ownership”, it may be couched as “stewardship” or “custodianship”, but the language one hears in so many environmental debates is of management, is of humans making the decisions. “This world is our world. We own it. It was given to us.”

Pagans speak of communion and partnership and recognise a symbiosis where we are simply part of the whole and certainly not the most important part of it all. We have grown into this world, evolved out of its earth and stone, flesh and blood. Proponents of Deep Ecology, permaculture or atheist scientists may use similar terms but perhaps we Pagans add a dimension of shared consciousness. Pagans live in a world that watches us, comments upon us, and is quite likely to turn round and slap us.

b) Susan Cross

And then:

So, how do you tell the story of a pattern or find a start in the waves on the shore?  This introduction may well be your entry point to this collection, but I am writing it looking back.  I am on the brink of leaving the Wanton Green project, setting it free to find its way into your, and other, hands, minds and spirits.  It has enriched the pattern of my life: I hope it does yours.

I don't know why Gordon asked me to join him in this Wanton work nor how I knew so clearly that it was an invitation to accept instantly and completely and explore what that commitment meant afterwards.  

Gordon knew almost all of these contributors, I knew one or two personally, some I had heard speak or read their books, others I had never heard of.  So I came to know them though what they said in answer to that question of connection and passion.The pieces came in gradually and, to start with, each stood alone, individual.  As more arrived, the cross connections began, and the shared voice emerged.  Each was like a root, sometimes tentative, always purposeful, seeking, probing, and questing. Together, they were like a taproot driving, over and over, in different words and imagery, into depth and mystery.

Fumbling in the Landscape

Over the next few weeks, we'll offer teasing tastes of what The Wanton Green will hold. Your appetiser for today is a morsel from "Fumbling in the landscape" by Runic John

Not too long ago a childhood friend I hadn’t heard from in years got in touch to say that he had been walking near the river we used to play in together as children and was horrified to see that Grasshopper Island had completely disappeared and he was wondering if I was aware of its disappearance!

Strangely enough, I too had been revisiting that path a couple of weeks before and I had to tell him that I too had been shocked to find our illustrious and joyful island was now nothing but dark swirling waters.

As children, Grasshopper Island was a magical and wondrous place, where, once we had climbed the great cliffs that surrounded the main approach to the island and had managed to navigate the treacherous rapids that separated the island from the mainland, we were totally isolated from the rest of the world. Here, in the sweltering summer sun, to the background songs of ten thousand grasshoppers (which gave Grasshopper Island its name) we would spend blissful hour upon hour adventuring. Amongst numerous other achievements, we discovered the fossilised remains of the earliest life that had inhabited the island and unearthed the fossilised footprints of an unknown (at that time) species of dinosaur, we found the site of the ancient city that once occupied the island and discovered the graves and lost treasures of the long overthrown royal dynasty that ruled there. We mapped the Island from end to end.