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In the northern hemisphere, the autumn equinox normally falls on September 22nd, 23rd or 24th. This year it’s on Sunday 22nd. Equinox means ‘equal night’ because day and night are of equal length at the spring and autumn equinoxes.
Equinoctial alignments at Neolithic sites in the British Isles are less common than those relating to midwinter or midsummer but some sites do have them. Near where I live is the West Kennett Long Barrow (below). When first constructed, the eastern end of its passageway was partially covered by large stone slabs that left only a narrow aperture just big enough for a person to crawl through. On the morning of the equinox, the Sun shining through this aperture would have illuminated the rear chamber of the tomb-shrine. It would have been quite a sight.

All five of its chambers and its central passageway contained the long bones and skulls of numerous ancestors, initially placed there in around 2650 BCE with a few more added centuries later.

The eastern entrance is now as it was reconstructed in the 1950s by a team of archaeologists led by Stuart Piggott, now best remembered for his book, The Druids, a large part of which is devoted to his strong antipathy towards modern Druid revivalists, whom he describes as “misleading and rather pathetic.” Thanks, Stuart, we love you too. Piggott’s team removed the slabs that had left the small crawl hole because the Ministry of Works wanted there to be easy access for tourists. They also rebuilt the collapsed sections of the central aisle and side chambers, although their reconstruction does follow the orientation of the original passageway. Unfortunately, they left in place the huge blocking stones erected when the barrow was taken out of use in around 2000 BCE. These completely block the rising equinoctial Sun from shining into the barrow.
There being two equinoxes each year, one in the spring on March 20th or 21st, the other in autumn, it is hard to judge which was most significant to our ancestors. In the case of the West Kennett Long Barrow, I tend towards the autumn equinox because of a vision I had there of what was clearly a harvest-related rite being carried out in a wheat field a little to the west of the barrow mound. That said, I feel that both dates were and are of ritual, mythical, practical and agricultural significance.

The Welsh name of this festival, Alban Elfed, aptly translates as ‘Birth of the Ripe Quarter,’ for this is a celebration of the safe gathering in of the harvest and the abundance of fruit on trees and bushes at this time of year. Many of its ancient customs have been transferred to the Christian festival of Michaelmas on September 29th.  Being a celebration of harvest, many of these customs revolve around communal feasting and sharing food with less fortunate members of the community. Scotland is a rich source of folklore and folk customs associated with Michaelmas, dedicated to Saint Michael, an other-than-human saint who is an archangel.
In his Carmina Gadelica (vol. 1, pages 200-217), Scottish folklorist, Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912), describes the festivities as follows:

“To the young the Day is a day of promise, to the old a day of fulfilment, to the aged a day of retrospect. It is a day when Pagan cult and Christian doctrine meet and mingle like the lights and shadows on their own Highland hills.
“The Eve of St. Michael is the eve of bringing in the carrots, of baking the ‘struan,’ of killing the lamb, of stealing the horses. The Day of St. Michael is the day of the early mass, the day of the sacrificial lamb, the day of the oblation ‘struan,’ the day of the distribution of the lamb, the day of the distribution of the ‘struan,’ the day of the pilgrimage to the burial-ground of their fathers, the day of the burial-ground service, the day of the burial-ground circuiting, the day of giving and receiving of the carrots with their wishes and acknowledgments, and the day of the ‘oda’ - the athletics of the men and the racing of the horses. And the Night of Michael is the night of the dance and the song, of the merry-making, of the lovemaking, and of the love-gifts.”

This pleasing description makes it sound as though Michaelmas combines favourite elements from all the other calendar festivals, from the games, merriment and licentiousness of May Eve and Midsummer to Hallowe’en’s concern for the dead. Note also the decidedly pagan presence of animal sacrifice, in this case of a “male lamb, without spot or blemish.” The struan cake, Carmichael tells us

“… is made of all the cereals grown on the farm during the year. It represents the fruits of the field, as the lamb represents the fruits of the flocks. … The struan should contain a peck of meal, and should be baked on ‘uinicinn,’ a lamb-skin. The meal is moistened with sheep’s milk, the sheep being deemed the most sacred animal. For this purpose the ewes are retained in milk till St. Michael’s Eve, after which they are allowed to remain in the hill and to run dry. The struan is baked by the eldest daughter of the family, guided by her mother, and assisted by her eager sisters. As she moistens the meal with the milk the girl softly says -
“Ruth agus rath an treo. 'Progeny and prosperity of family,'
“Run Mhiclieil, dion an Teor. 'Mystery of Michael, protection of Trinity'.”

Many websites, Wiccan and Druid groups refer to the autumn equinox as ‘Mabon.’ Mabon (‘child’), son of Modron (‘mother’) features in the Mabinogi tale of ‘How Culhwch Won Olwen.’  His name derives from that of a youthful Roman-British hunter god, Maponos (left). The link between Mabon and the autumn equinox was made by an American Wiccan, Aidan Kelly, in the early 1970s (he explains his reasons here). There is no evidence for such a link prior to that date. The Coligny calendar ascribes Mapanos, who may or may not be the same god, to the date, 15 Rivros, usually reckoned to be in late July, so close to the usual date of Gwyl Awst/ Lammas/ Lughnasad, i.e. August 1st, rather than the autumn equinox six weeks later.  The Mabinogi tales represent Mabon as a hunter, born at Midwinter, taken from his mother when three nights old, imprisoned until sought out by King Arthur and his allies with the aid of the world's five oldest animals. There is no hint of any link with the harvest, although the Stag hunting season in Britain traditionally ran from July 1st to October 20th, a period that encompasses both Gwyl Awst and Alban Elfed. In the story of Culhwch and Olwen, Mabon hunts a giant Wild Boar called Twrch Trwyth. I'm not sure what the Wild Boar hunting season was in medieval Britain and they had been hunted to extinction by the 14th century, but in modern Europe the season seems to run from early October through to late January, again suggesting Mabon may be associated with winter more than autumn and harvest.

Blessings of the Season,
Greywolf /|\

This festival is fortunate enough to have a massive tome dedicated entirely to it: the 700-page The Festival of Lughnasad: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of Harvest, by Máire MacNeill, first published in 1962. If you're lucky enough to find a copy that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, I highly recommend it. The reason it warrants such a weighty volume is that there are so many survivals not only in every part of Ireland but also in Scotland, Wales and England. It survived in so many places because the harvest was, for thousands of years, a pivotal point of the year on which survival depended. If the harvest failed, people and animals starved, therefore our ancestors took ceremonial action to ensure that the harvest was well and truly blessed. MacNeill concludes that the modern folk festival is a survival from an earlier pagan rite that included the following elements:

"[A] solemn cutting of the first of the corn of which an offering would be made to the deity by bringing it up to a high place and burying it; a meal of the new food and of bilberries of which everyone must partake; a sacrifice of a sacred bull, a feast of its flesh, with some ceremony involving its hide, and its replacement by a young bull; a ritual dance-play perhaps telling of a struggle for a goddess and a ritual fight; an installation of a head on top of the hill and a triumphing over it by an actor impersonating Lugh; another play representing the confinement by Lugh of the monster, blight or famine; a three-day celebration presided over by the brilliant young god or his human representative. Finally, a ceremony indicating that the interregnum was over, and the chief god in his right place again."

In the British Druid Order, we primarily know the festival by its Welsh name, Gwyl Awst, 'the August Feast.' It is centred on the traditional date of August 1st, by which time much of the harvest has these days been gathered in, providing for the feast. In our ceremonial cycle, drawn from the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi, that of Math, son of Mathonwy, Gwyl Awst sees the marriage of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, young lord of light, to the flower maiden, Blodeuwedd. He represents the fertilising rays of the Sun, she the burgeoning forth of vegetation from the Earth. Our ceremony includes the singing of that famed harvest song, John Barleycorn:

There were three men came out of the west,
their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.

They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
‘til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all.

They let him stand ‘til Midsummer’s Day
‘til he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard
and so become a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
to cut him off at the knee,
They rolled him and tied him by the waist,
serving him most barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
who pricked him to the heart,
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he’s bound him to a cart.

They wheeled him around and around a field
‘til they came onto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath
on poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crabtree sticks
to cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he served him worse than that
For he’s ground him between two stones.

And it’s little Sir John in the nut brown bowl
and it’s brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut brown bowl
proved the strongest man at last.

For the huntsman he can’t hunt the fox
nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle or pots
without a little barleycorn.

Just about every folk band in Britain has recorded a version of this at one time or another and many are available online. My favourite, and not just because it was the first I ever heard, is not by a folk band at all but by jazz-folk-rock fusion pioneers, Traffic, from their 1970 LP, John Barleycorn Must Die. Here it is in a stunningly brilliant live performance by the band featuring Steve Winwood on guitar and lead vocal, Jim Capaldi on tambourine and backing vocal and Chris Wood on flute:

May your harvest be blessed,
Greywolf /|\

A few years ago, a group of BDO members revived a lost ceremony of Toad blessing I’d learned about while researching for the British Druid Order’s distance learning courses. A reference to it appears in Cotton MS Claudius B VII, a manuscript in the British Library that was assembled from earlier materials for Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504 - 1575, right). Its contents include (1) legal proceedings; (2) Roger of Howden, Chronicle, (3) Pseudo-Turpin, De gestis Karoli magni; ‘Prester John,’ Epistola ad Manuelem imperatorem, etc.; (4) extracts made in the time of Matthew Parker; (5) Pseudo-Dares Phrygius, De excidio Troie historia; Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophetiae Merlini; (6) legal proceedings. It runs to 242 pages, the first half on paper (ff. 2–113), the second on parchment (ff. 1, 114–242).
In 1574, Matthew Parker left a large collection of manuscripts, mainly rescued from former monastic libraries, to his college at Cambridge. The Parker Library at Corpus Christi bears his name and houses most of his collection, with some volumes in the Cambridge University Library. Parker was the college’s Master between 1544 and 1553. He also served as chaplain to Anne Boleyn, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559–1575. He was particularly interested in collecting and preserving manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England as evidence of an ancient English-speaking church independent of Rome. His bequest to the college consisted of about 480 manuscripts and around 1000 printed books spanning the 6th to the16th centuries.
Section 4 of the MS Claudius B, ‘extracts made in the time of Matthew Parker,’ includes the following:

“In Oxfordshire on the first day of December each year is celebrated a Feast called the Blessing of the Toad, in which libations are offered to the spirit of that ill-favoured creature which, at that season, does burrow into holes in the earth, there to remain until the sun’s increasing light stirs all Nature back to life in springtime. This barbarous custom is of uncertain origin and antiquity but is said by those partaking of it to bring good fortune not only to the toads but also to those humans who engage in this antique revel in their honour. In drinking health to the beast they do cry ‘Wassail!’ and ‘Hail to the Toad!’ and other such heathen things as though the words of scripture are to them entirely unknown. In former times it is said that all orders of society, from the wealthiest lords to the lowliest peasant, observed this pagan rite. In latter years, however, it seems confined to the scholars of the colleges of Oxford town itself. Some colleges preserve the dried body of a Toad that is passed from hand to hand around the table while its health is drunk. That otherwise learned men should engage in such an idolatrous practice must surely inflame the sensibilities of all good Christian men.”

As a dedicated Cambridge man, Parker perhaps included this passage, the original source of which is not identified, in his ‘extracts’ because of the poor light he perceived it as casting on the rival scholars of Oxford.
The existence of the feast itself should not come as a surprise since Toad people have figured so strongly and persistently in British and European folklore, belief and practice. There is, for example, the existence in Wales of ‘Toad Men,’ which I first heard about in a documentary on BBC Radio 4 in the 1980s. As described in the program, the prospective Toad Man had to bury a dead Toad person in a hidden place until only the bare bones were left. Gathering those together and keeping them tightly in his hand, he sat atop a prehistoric burial mound for a whole day and night. At sunrise, he took the bones to a fast-flowing river or stream into which they were cast. All but one would be drawn downstream by the current. The one that floated against the current was caught and kept about the person. Its possession gave the owner power over all animals and entitled him to be known as a Toad Man. I subsequently found an almost identical rite existing in Germany.
Toads regularly feature as ‘familiars’ in the Witch trials of the early modern era. Mummified Toad people are sometimes found secreted in old buildings where they presumably acted as spirit guardians. The Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft has a number of them in its collection, though some were sadly lost in the flood of 2004. Then there’s the Toadstone, a jewel supposedly found in the skull of the Toad that offered protection to its owner.
Since the 16th century, Toads have been reported found alive encased in flint nodules, lumps of coal or other stones, some millions of years old. Experiments have shown that Toads can survive in small cavities inside plaster or limestone blocks for up to three years.
A ceremonial celebration of these remarkable creatures seemed well worth reviving and so we did, at Wild Ways in Shropshire during a feast held on December 1st, 2018. Elaine, our host, had a mummified Toad which was reverently passed around the table as we drank toasts to the Toad and bid it Wassail.
Our ceremony was evidently effective as several of those present, myself included, saw toads in the days immediately following. First was Adam who, while driving home that night, was amazed to see a huge Toad person, the largest he’d ever seen, leap across the road in the beam of his headlights. I saw a Toad the following day outside the front of the house where the feast was held. Three other celebrants had Toad encounters either that day or the next.
So, Hail the Toad! Wassail!
Greywolf /|\

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 equivalent to a Jew, Christian or Muslim describing the Torah, Bible or Koran as ‘filler.’ How is it that people in other traditions and cultures first learn about the gods and heroes of their ancestors? Through stories. Always through stories. And next come poems. Why poems? Because rhyme and rhythm are wonderful aids to memory.

In the British branch of Druidry, we are blessed to have a whole library of ancestral stories and poems, mostly gathered together and committed to writing in the 12^th century. There has been much argument as to whether, and to what extent, this medieval literature retains enough of the pagan past to be of interest to us as modern pagans.

Brief diversion: Yes, pagans. I know a lot of modern Druidry, taking its cue from 18^th century revivalists, is not pagan. I have always been a pagan Druid and the British Druid Order is openly and proudly pagan. It’s hard to argue that classical Druidry was anything but pagan, and it’s the archaic forms of the tradition that interest me more than the recent revivals.

As for the tales and poems containing anything that survives from the pagan past, it seems blindingly obvious to me that they do. Take the deity from which the whole Mabinogion may well take its name, the Mabon. In the tale of Culhwch and Olwen, the Mabon must be found in order to hunt the Twrch Trwyth, a gigantic wild Boar person who is ravaging the land. Why the Mabon? Because he is recognised as the greatest of hunters, and the only one capable of handling two magical hunting hounds. Mabon means ‘Son,’ and he is the son of Modron, meaning ‘Mother.’ Roll back in time a thousand years and an altar is erected and dedicated to the god Maponus near one of the Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall. A badly worn scene on one side of it represents Maponus as a hunter, armed with a bow and accompanied by a hunting dog, and an adjacent side shows two Deer. Maponus is the Romanised form of the native British Maponos, which evolved into modern Welsh Mabon and retains the same meaning. Five dedications to him occur in the same area, as also does a large boulder called the Mabenstane, formerly a meeting place for the local population. It is impossible to compare what we know of the native deity with the medieval tale and not conclude that Maponus and the Mabon are the same figure.

Likewise, Gwydion, the foremost enchanter and magician of the Mabinogion, is recorded in a much earlier genealogy as Guidgen, and in Roman-British inscriptions as Mercury Uiducus. Comparing the classical character of Mercury with Gwydion as portrayed in the Mabinogion, their natures are so similar that the native deity, Uidicus, can only be the same being as Gwydion. The Horse goddess of the Mabinogion, Rhiannon, was earlier Rigantona, ‘the Great Queen,’ Manawydan is the same as the Irish sea god, Manannan, and so it goes on. These are pagan gods, of this I have not the slightest doubt, and if we are pagans, surely we need to know the nature of our gods and should revel in their tales?

While editing our courses, it became increasingly clear to me that the bardic colleges of the 12^th century were spurred into what amounted to a pagan revival by the same events that led them to gather together the oral literature of our ancestors and cause it to be written down. The events in question were Norman attempts to conquer Wales. This 12^th century pagan revival caused the bardic colleges to adopt the extremely witchy goddess, Ceridwen, as patroness of the bardic order.

My own Druid path began in 1974, a time when there were no courses or how-to books, indeed precious little available at all from which to construct a walkable path. That first summer, I had Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Stuart Piggott’s The Druids, Alwyn and Brinley Rees’ Celtic Heritage (borrowed from Hastings Library), and a slightly battered copy of Lady Charlotte Guest’s Victorian translation of The Mabinogion, found in a second-hand book shop. Graves is justifiably criticised for his wild flights of fancy, but his book propelled me onto this path, so I retain a great affection for it. He quotes liberally from The Mabinogion and the poems of Taliesin, hence my delight at finding that pocket Mabinogion. Unlike most modern translations, it includes the Story of Taliesin in which, on first reading, I recognised a threefold cycle of death and rebirth by which the child, Gwion Bach, ‘Little Innocent,’ is reborn as the ultimate enlightened Druid sage, Taliesin, ‘Radiant Brow.’ This story is central to our understanding of British Druidry, which is why it is the first to appear in our bardic course.

In the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, that of Math, Son of Mathonwy, I found a mythic cycle dealing with the birth, growth, life, death and rebirth of a young sun god, Lleu Llaw Gyffes. On subsequently joining a Wiccan coven, I used this cycle as the basis for the eight seasonal festivals we celebrated. That coven became the basis of the British Druid Order. That same cycle of myth forms the basis of the festival cycle introduced in our bardic course and greatly expanded upon in the ovate.

The whole edifice of the BDO is, therefore, built on the foundations of the Mabinogion and the poems of Taliesin, the weirder of which expand our understanding of the Story of Taliesin and his strange relationship with Ceridwen, brewer of the cauldron of inspiration. ‘Inspiration’ is the common English translation of the Welsh word, ‘Awen,’ and Awen is, as I describe it in our bardic course, the Holy Spirit of Druidry, that spirit of creativity and inspiration that flows from the tales and poems of our ancestors, through us, and, from us and our stories, poems and songs, to future generations. Awen ultimately lifts us from the mire and gives us the potential to dance with the gods.

I am constantly finding new levels of meaning in this literature. One of the best known of the Taliesin poems is the Cad Goddeu, the ‘Battle of the Trees.’ I’ve known it for about 40 years, but it wasn’t until preparing a version of it to be performed with harp accompaniment in our Iron Age roundhouse that I realised the whole poem is actually about healing. It has distinct parallels with the Anglo-Saxon ‘Nine Herbs Charm.’ This realisation confirmed another I’d had while putting together the material on native healing techniques healing for our ovate course. Thus, again, these ancestral poems and songs continually work to increase my understanding of our tradition.

‘Filler,’ then, is not a term I recognise.

Having been a Druid for 44 years, it’s often puzzled and, I confess, bothered me, that so many British Druids give so little heed to this extraordinary treasure trove that has come down to us from our ancestors. In putting our courses together, then, I hoped to correct this by presenting it in a visually pleasing form that might help persuade people to read it. I know the gorgeous period font I found has proven a pain for folk who are dyslexic, but we do provide plain text versions as an alternative.

In the bardic course, we offer some indications as to why we see specific poems and stories as of particular importance. In the ovate and Druid courses, we continually refer back to them to enhance our understanding of the nature of the gods and of how our ancestors walked the Druid path, understandings I believe we need if we are to fully immerse ourselves in the path and live it as central to our lives. They are the heart of the British Druid tradition.

Having said all that, even if you skip all the medieval texts in our course material, you’ll still be left with a word count higher than that of any comparable course, so you needn’t feel you’re being short changed. And, in terms of quality rather than quantity, you have Ronald Hutton’s stated view that our bardic course is “the most intelligent and erudite sequential introduction to Druidry available.” Given that Ronald has a thorough knowledge of more Druid courses than anyone else I know, and probably anyone else alive, I’m happy to take his word for it!

I’ll leave you with a short quotation from the Taliesin poem, ‘The Cattle-fold of the Bards:’

“I am song to the last; I am clear and bright;
I am hard; I am a Druid;
I am a wright; I am well-wrought;
I am a serpent; I am reverence, that is an open receptacle.”

And if that’s not convinced you, go and read the piece I wrote some time ago on Awen, the Holy Spirit of Druidry. It’s full of quotations from the writings of our ancestors, writings we are blessed to have access to and that, to return to an analogy I used earlier, are the nearest thing British Druidry has to a Bible, in that they are a collection of ancient, sacred writings intended to provide an introduction to the pagan gods of our lands.

Many blessings,

Greywolf /|\

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 taught us how to thatch, and he told us that a thatched roof has been described as “a managed compost heap.” Over the years, the truth of this has become clear. Our roundhouse is built in a wood, meaning that the roof doesn’t get as much sunlight as it should to dry the thatch after rain, therefore it rots more quickly than it otherwise would. Because of this, we have to renew the thatch more often than we would like. We completed the roundhouse in the spring of 2009. Eight and a half years later, we have just completed our third thatch layer.

Rather than stripping off existing thatch and staring again, renewing a thatched roof usually entails putting a fresh layer of thatch on top of what’s already there. Our latest layer is a spar coat, meaning that the thatch is fixed with long hazel ‘sways’ held in place by twisted hazel ‘spars’ pushed and hammered into the existing thatch.

The roundhouse is thatched with long straw as being more period authentic than the now far more common ‘combed wheat reed.’ Long straw thatching requires considerable preparation. The straw must first be layered into ‘beds,’ each layer being thoroughly wetted. The beds are then ‘drawn’ or ‘pulled.’ You grab a few ends of straw from somewhere near the bottom of the bed and tug firmly. As the straw slips out of the bed, it is straightened out and most of the leafy bits that will prevent rain from running smoothly down the thatch are left behind in the bed. More handfuls of straw are then pulled with the left hand and transferred to the right. When the bundle in the right hand is thick enough, you grab it firmly at one end and give it a shake. Then you run your fingers through it like a comb, stripping out more of the leafy bits. Then turn it over 180 degrees and do the same again, shake and comb. The cleaned straw is then laid across a length of string on the ground. Then you pull some more.

When your bundle of straw on the ground has reached a size where you can just about get two hands around the end of it, you tie the string around it. This bundle is called a ‘yealm.’ This preparation is hard, time-consuming work, and we were very glad to have such a great group of people arrive to lend a hand.

At John’s advice, the lower three layers of thatch were stitched in with tarred twine, tarred so that, in theory, mice won’t chew through it. In practice, they must have a hardier breed of mice in Shropshire, and we’ve had to replace some of the stitches with spars. Ah well…

Ideally, you need a ladder with nice, wide rungs for thatching. This is because the ladder lies flat against the roof and you need a wide rung to give your toes something to stand on. One of our ladders had rungs only half an inch across. Ah well, all along the line, since 2006, when we planted the seed for the straw with which to do our first thatch, we’ve had to make do with whatever tools we can find or make, and whatever time we can spare from other work. Under the circumstances, we’ve done pretty well.

The other-than-human inhabitants of the grove in which we built the roundhouse have been open to us from the start, when I found a deer skull on the first day we started clearing the ground.

We had wrens nest inside during the build, and there are still wrens who nest under the eaves. Buzzards have circled overhead, deer visited at twilight and, during this last thatch session, we were entertained one day by a group of wood mice who were remarkable friendly, strolling around our feet while we ate lunch and posing for Elaine’s camera.

We completed all the thatch we could on Sunday morning. We had used almost all the last batch of straw Elaine had bought in. We didn’t go right to the top of the cone, because, in the spring, we’re going to remove this part of the thatch, exposing the roof timbers again. Then we’re going to erect a new timber structure consisting of a downward-bending roof pole at either end of which will be a triangular opening to let out the smoke from the central fire.

Roundhouse reconstructions have, until now, followed Peter Reynolds, who built the first such reconstructions at the Butser Hill Farm in Sussex. Reynolds copied African roundhouses, but decided not to include a smoke hole in the belief that the smoke would permeate out through the roof. If the thatch is thin enough, a lot of it does, but a lot more doesn’t. It then depends how big your roundhouse is and how high its roof as to whether the resulting smoke layer is above or below head height. Our roundhouse is only 22 feet internal diameter, and that’s not quite big enough, so the smoke layer comes down to chest height, which means that unless you build the fire with very dry wood and keep it burning strongly, you’re breathing smoke whenever you stand up. Having had pleurisy a few years ago, I’m reluctant to expose my lungs to too much more smoke.

Fortunately, I don’t have to. It turns out that roundhouses had not one, but two smoke holes. Our evidence for this comes from little clay or metal models of roundhouses dating from the late Bronze age and early Iron Age and known as Villanovan hut urns. They seem to have been used as incense burners. Their roofs clearly show two triangular vents at either end of a downward-curving ridge pole. The same style of roof is being used in the Baltic region to this day. Given that it has been in use for 3,000 years or more, my assumption is that it works. In the spring, we’ll find out. Many thanks to Corwen Broch for drawing my attention to this hopefully elegant solution to our smoke problem in this excellent blog post.

A bonus in this year's thatching session was that Amanda, Ariana and Pete re-whitewashed the roundhouse and added spiral decorations on either side of the doors (see photo below).

Huge thanks to everyone who has worked on the roundhouse over the years. Between us, we have created an amazing, magical place, filled with ancestral voices, woven with music, poetry and ritual, a perfect venue for ceremony, journeying between worlds and communing with the spirits of the place and of the old gods of these lands.

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 tomb-shrine and Stonehenge. Studies sometimes include the use of instruments contemporary with the sites themselves.

I visited Avebury last weekend with my friends, Amanda and Pete, taking with me the newest of my Celtic lyres, wire strung and made from Oak. Towards the end of the day, we arrived at the huge southern entrance stone known in local folklore as ‘the Devil’s Chair’ due to a natural cleft, the base of which forms a comfortable seat in the southern face of the stone, the face that greets people arriving into the henge from the processional route along the West Kennett Avenue. At Amanda’s request, I broke my usual protocol against sitting in the seat so that she could photograph me with the lyre. It was then that we made a remarkable and surprising discovery.

Sitting in the notch in this enormous sarsen stone, I began to play the lyre. As I played, I moved the instrument across my lap until it was facing into a hollow depression in the stone beside my right thigh. I don't know what prompted me to do this, presumably the spirits of the place, but I noticed as I did so that the volume of the lyre increased dramatically when the soundhole was aligned with the hollow and pointing at it. The amount of amplification was quite startling. So much so that I decided to explore it further. Standing up, I held the lyre as far away from the stone as I could lean and still manage to play it, then, continuing to play, moved it towards the stone. From about a foot and a half in front of the stone’s face, the increase in volume was very marked indeed, maximum amplification being achieved when the soundboard of the lyre was almost inside the hollow ‘seat.’ Such was the acoustic feedback coming off the sarsen stone that the last note played on the lyre sustained for much longer than the instrument was normally capable of, continuing to ‘ring’ for several seconds. I didn't count, but I'd guess a good ten seconds longer than usual, probably more.

I thought the effect might be extremely localised and that you’d need to be right on top of the instrument, as I was, in order to appreciate it. Thanks to Amanda and Pete, I quickly learned that this was not the case. They were standing five or six yards away, between the sarsen and the busy main road that runs through the henge. When the lyre was facing away from the stone, any passing traffic drowned it out completely. When it was played facing into the stone, it was clearly audible, even over the sound of large lorries going by. We found that the effect varied depending on where you were standing in relation to the face of the stone, with particularly strong effects heard when standing at a shallow angle to it and at some distance to the side.

I tried calling into the ‘seat’ hollow and found the same effect, my voice being considerably amplified and thrown back at me. This led me to wonder if the effect might have been used to project sound towards the gap between the banks where the West Kennet Avenue reaches the henge. I would imagine that an instrument like a bull horn would have had considerable impact on anyone entering the henge at that point. The fact that the sound was being thrown from the entrance stone would have made its source hard to identify. I’ll have to try it on my next visit.

It’s amazing that I’ve been visiting Avebury for more than forty years, have taken part in ceremonies that have included the southern entrance stone for more than twenty years, but had never previously noticed this acoustic effect.

Pete made some recordings, and if they came out OK, I'll add them to this post.

Incidentally, I don't mean to suggest that an Iron Age lyre, played in Europe from at least 800 BCE, was contemporary with a Neolithic henge constructed between 2800 and 2200 BCE. Clearly it wasn't. The lyre just happened to be the only instrument I had with me. Next time, I'll take a bull horn and a clay drum...

Blessings of Caer Abiri,
Greywolf /|\

Today’s recollection from the first Summer of Love comes in the form of a talk given on January 18^th, 1967, by Dr. Timothy Leary at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles.

Born in 1920, the clinical psychologist, Timothy Leary, was one of the leading voices of the hippy era, a proponent of consciousness expansion through the use of psychedelic drugs, combined with more conventional spiritual techniques. He drew on Tibetan mysticism, Hinduism, Yoga, Meditation and other techniques and traditions, merging them into a form of spirituality suited to the young people he taught at Harvard University and talked to elsewhere.

In 1960, he and Richard Alpert began the Harvard Psilocybin Project to research the effects of that natural hallucinogen on prisoners and on students. This was continued in the Concord Prison Experiment. They found, among other things, that recidivism rates among prisoners dropped dramatically once they had undergone psilocybin ‘trips’ in controlled conditions that encouraged them to have revelatory spiritual experiences. Leary and Alpert were both fired from Harvard in 1963. This began a long period during which various American authorities, including the CIA and the FBI, worked extremely hard to shut Leary up. He spent time in prison, escaped, fled the country, returned, got arrested some more. His life and philosophy, not surprisingly, appealed strongly to young people in the 1960s.

Personally, I found that hallucinogens can help people to, as Jim Morrison put it, “break on through to the other side.” I was, however, delighted to discover techniques such as rhythmic drumming, by which it is possible to achieve states of altered consciousness without drugs. Why? Simple. Because, as Leary admits in this talk, hallucinogens confuse the mind and the non-drug techniques don’t.

In this talk, Leary speaks engagingly, often amusingly, and in some depth about his personal history and philosophy, including his famous exhortation to young people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He explains that “Dropping out means gently, invisibly, beautifully finding what’s inside and expressing it slowly in a cellular fashion around you.” I like the way he addresses his audience as “Beloved robots.” I love his advice on how to start a new religion. His is a voice that still has relevance and resonance today and it’s good that, although Timothy Leary is dead, through the magic of virtual life, he is still on the outside looking in.

Peace and love,

Greywolf /|\

Here's a rather beautiful seasonal song from Thea Gilmore:

For more on the celebration of Midwinter, see my blog on Huffington Post's Religion page:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-greywolf-shallcrass/a-merry-pagan-christmas_b_8845638.html