It’s pre-spring, the second half of winter, the season of nothing-happening, when it’s mostly grey and rainy or cold. For me, this was always a blank time of the year until I discovered, through researching British neo-paganism, Imbolc, the festival that lies halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox and is celebrated at […]
January 17th – the old Twelfth Night – is traditionally the time for wassailing, the Anglo-Saxon custom of visiting the local orchard to awaken the apple trees and scare away any evil spirits who might threaten the crop. From ‘waes hael’ meaning ‘good health’, wassailing is basically a drinking ritual aimed at fostering fruitfulness in […]
Forget Star Wars; may the Yule be with you. People have been marking the winter solstice throughout history, the Romans with the revelry of Saturnalia, the early Scandinavians with the Feast of Yule. I love the different and strange ways humans have of marking the fact that, once a year in the northern hemisphere, the […]
The Paris attacks have brought with them their inevitable consequences for Muslims. It’s sad to see that, even in the midst of Britain’s largely successful multiculturalism, they are already feeling the change in the wind. Western Muslims are up against that doubt again, the one raised by the question: is Islam a religion of peace […]
In my exploration of religious dissent in The Secret Life of God, I conclude that nonconformity – once such a force for change in British society – has lost much of the muscle that comes from swimming against the tide. But there’s one area in which these latter-day dissenters have shown me the way. Attending, […]
When I started researching The Secret Life of God I was really just following a hunch. I had been spending time in the Middle East, where – despite the headlines about sectarian conflict – different faith groups have long lived side by side in the atmosphere of pervasive religiosity that the Arabs with most of […]
I love the autumn equinox. It’s the only time of the year when, along with the spring equinox, day and night are of equal length (not quite true – it’s complicated … ) and the earth is straight on its axis! Catch the brilliant BBC documentary ‘Orbit’ to see scientists explaining this with globes next […]
There’s nothing like visiting a monastery for a good day out. At least, that’s what they think in Lebanon, where mountain-top monasteries are a popular visitor attraction. Go to one of the big, Maronite institutions, and you’ll find families and coach parties circulating between the various chapels and shrines, making votive offerings to saints and […]
Lammas – the festival of the first harvest, the bringing in of the grains from the fields – is here. From now into August, pagans celebrate a season that our more agricultural ancestors would have marked with feasting, wheat sheafs and corn dollies. Largely now forgotten by the mainstream, it’s a festival redolent with the […]
High summer. During this, the hottest time of the year, when the birds have done their nesting and mammals keep to the shade, it’s easy to assume there’s little for the nature-lover to observe. Traditionally, the Dog Days are a period of stagnation when the heat hangs heavy over drooping seedheads, signalling the degeneration that […]