-
The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists

My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to […]
-
Spring Traditions and Celebrations: The Past, The Present and the Future of Farming

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Introduction Eleanor Parker writes in her book, Winters in the World, that “in Anglo-Saxon poetry winter is often imagined as a season when the earth and human beings are imprisoned, kept captive by the ‘fetters of the frost’. Naturally enough, then, spring is […]