Re-enchanted England: Exploring Paganism and Folklore

It’s Fri­day 3 May and a sharp driz­zle is stir­ring the tan­gle of rivers and streams that weaves over the land­scape of Stroud. Cher­ry blos­som lines the tops of the cars, but the Som­er­set town, often described as the birth­place of Extinc­tion Rebel­lion, seems tired from its week and the gloomy month that came before it.

Dot­ted along the grass verge of a round­about, but­ter­cups and wild gar­lic flow­ers bend under the weight of the heavy, cold drops. But like a field of yel­low rape­seed beam­ing beneath a grey sky, a pecu­liar car­ni­val is about to bring fresh colour to the town.

At around 8 P.M. a mul­ti-coloured pro­ces­sion begins to wind its way through the sod­den streets. Among the way­far­ers are a band of teens with unset­tled skin, a six­ty-some­thing in a pink coat and a woman bear­ing a strik­ing resem­blance to Char­lotte Gains­bourg. Also part of the assem­bly: a group of frogs wear­ing tights, a duck in a tutu and a white fig­ure lay­ered in a snow­storm of old lace like a decade of spent can­dles. Ahead of its sur­re­al excur­sion, the crowd has been split into three groups: deep voic­es, high voic­es and those some­where in between. Each has been giv­en a round to repeat on a con­tin­u­ous loop. Led by Moina Walk­er, the sec­tion head­ing the march chants: ​“It’s Beltane! It’s Beltane! It’s Beltane!”

Speak­ing from beneath a mush­room-shaped hat, Walk­er, one half of elec­tron­ic duo Mer­maid Chunky, describes Beltane as an ancient Celtic fes­ti­val mark­ing the start of sum­mer. Inci­den­tal­ly, she adds, it is also a time of the year when the morn­ing dew is said to have mag­i­cal prop­er­ties which, accord­ing to tra­di­tion, would prompt ​“maid­ens to get up real­ly ear­ly and roll around on the hill­side.”

In the past, Walker’s ances­tors would have col­lect­ed the Beltane dew in jars before leav­ing it to rest in the sun then fil­ter­ing it. The result­ing potion was said to pre­serve youth­ful­ness and beau­ty, increase sex­u­al attrac­tive­ness and pro­tect the skin from sunburn.”

This scene is just one of a tapes­try of curi­ous tableaux described in FOLK, a new book explor­ing the wave of re-enchant­ment cur­rent­ly rip­pling through the Anglo-Celtic Isles.

In the age of cli­mate change, more and more are turn­ing to folk­lore, pagan­ism and so-called ​‘Earth’ reli­gions — ones with stronger ties to land and nature com­pared to the monothe­is­tic tra­di­tions of the major reli­gious groups. Accord­ing to the lat­est ONS cen­sus, at least 74,000 peo­ple iden­ti­fied as ​‘pagan’ in 2021 in Eng­land and Wales, com­pared to just 51,000 in 2011.

But this data doesn’t unveil the full scale of the phe­nom­e­non with folk­lore, myths and leg­ends steadi­ly mak­ing their way into art, activism and even the polit­i­cal sphere. For some, it’s noth­ing short of a spir­i­tu­al revolution. 

Artist Ben Edge, who has been doc­u­ment­ing the cal­en­dar cus­toms and folk­lore of the Anglo-Celtic Isles since meet­ing with a druid order in Tow­er Hill in 2016, explains: ​“It’s in the zeit­geist […] These kinds of things are on everyone’s minds. Because we are all think­ing, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, that we need mean­ing, that the world is in trou­ble.” In a coun­try where every­thing is over­priced and noth­ing works, peo­ple are engag­ing in cus­toms to make sense of lives that, as if by mag­ic, are being trans­formed into freer, stranger and more mys­ti­cal ver­sions of the exis­tence being sold to us — with increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty — by British consumerism.

From a druid cer­e­mo­ny held at the foot of a giant to a rit­u­al led by crows and a cup of tea with the neo-pagan founder of Extinc­tion Rebel­lion, writer Thomas Andrei and Huck pho­tog­ra­ph­er Theo McInnes attempt to explain how.

This extract from FOLK was trans­lat­ed from French to Eng­lish by Chloe Ander­son.

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