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The Summer of Love, 50 Years On: Part Three: Sunshine Superman
Donovan Leitch is a forgotten superhero of ‘60s music, so deeply attuned to the era that when its core messages were abandoned by mass media and fashion in the 1970s, he was abandoned with them. In the...
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The Summer of Love, 50 Years On: Part Four: Timothy Leary, January 18th, 1967
Today’s recollection from the first Summer of Love comes in the form of a talk given on January 18th, 1967, by Dr. Timothy Leary at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. Born in 1920, the...
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Finding Spirit Animals
“Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall...” This opening line of Philip Pullman’s ‘The Northern Lights’ introduces us to one of the core concepts of the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, that...
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Midsummer in Sweden with Sjamanistisk Forbund June 16th – 18th 2017
Arriving at GaiaGarden in Sweden on Thursday, there was much to be done, including putting up awnings around the ceremonial area, and to cover the place where food would be served. There were also...
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Tewkesbury 2017, Bardic Heaven!
Since around 2005, the British Druid Order and friends have been holding a blessing ceremony for the Tewkesbury Medieval Festival, the largest historical re-enactment event in Europe, which takes place...
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I Gotta Chrotta!
Hallstadt Iron Age bard with chrotta, circa 800 BCE. About a quarter of a century ago, I became fascinated by a musical instrument called a chrotta, a type of lyre played in Iron Age Europe from at...
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The Summer of Love 50 Years On: ‘Pirate’ Radio Lives!
At midnight on Monday, August 14th, 1967, the Marine Offences Broadcasting Act became law in the UK. This draconian piece of legislation, brought in by Harold Wilson's Labour government, made it...
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Making an Iron Age Lyre Bridge
In the summer of 2010, archaeologists working on the Isle of Skye at a site called High Pasture Cave discovered most of the charred bridge of a lyre in amongst charcoal that had been scraped to one...
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Archaeoacoustics at Avebury
Archaeoacoustics is a fairly new branch of archaeology that studies the acoustic qualities of caves inhabited, or used ritually, during prehistory and ancient buildings such as the Newgrange...
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Once upon a winter time
Sometimes, waves of sadness wash over us, regret comes by unbidden, sorrow for what was lost or might have been. For no particular reason, this happened to me this afternoon and I wrote this poem, the...
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The Roundhouse: Managing the Compost Heap
The roundhouse, May 2010 When the first thatch layer on our reconstructed Iron Age roundhouse in Shropshire was finished, we stood with John Letts, the expert on medieval thatching techniques who had...
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The Summer of Love 50 Years On: My Summer of ’67
Rye Grammar School was not a good place in which to be a hippy in that halcyon summer of 1967. While Dr. Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, was in the USA, encouraging the world to “turn on, tune...
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A Merry Midwinter
In the late 1970s, I was asked to compose a set of seasonal ceremonies for the Alexandrian Wiccan coven of which I was a member. One thing that struck me as soon as I started researching for Midwinter...
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Cool Britannia?
A new TV series called Britannia takes as its setting the Claudian invasion of Britain in 43 CE which began almost 400 years of Roman occupation of England and Wales. In the community at large, the...
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The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, by Ronald...
Yale University Press, 2017 ISBN 9780300229042 xv, 360 pages, illustrated ‘The Witch’ is a work of huge ambition, spanning tens of thousands of years and taking in every inhabited continent. The title,...
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Animism, Science & Druidry
After twelve years work and having nearly reached the halfway point in the last of our three courses, the realisation came to me that there's a single idea underpinning them all. In essence, this is to...
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Re-Forging Spirit Connections
Many of us who work with spirits, guardian spirits, power animals, whatever form they take and however we perceive them, regard their willingness to work with us as a gift and a blessing for which we...
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Beside the Brook (May Day 2018)
It being May Day and the weather cool but fair, I wandered through the woods and scrambled down to a hidden hollow by the brook, where water tumbles over rocks and makes a magical sound that eases...
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Medieval Literature: Why Should We Care?
Commenting on a recent post on the BDO facebook page, someone described the Mabinogion stories and Taliesin poems included in our courses as ‘filler.’ I was somewhat taken aback by this. To me, this is...
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Druid Hedge Schools at Avebury
A few years ago, I came up with the idea of Druid Hedge Schools, loosely based on the hedge schools held in Ireland following the passage of legislation by the English authorities in 1695 outlawing the...
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