Like a Labris we are staying in the middle of the Time,

At the center of the Fluid Light,

And like the Sun today experience and realize

The kingdoms of the Red Mother and the White

– two faces of the Oneness.

Polina Gerdjikova   

I am sharing here some of Bulgarian artist Polina Gerdjikova’s recent exhibition Light – A Metaphor of the Spirit. The exhibition celebrates UNESCO’s International Year of Light 2015. Here Polina talks a little about the inspiration for the exhibition, illustrated with  some of her lovely paintings:

The Geometry of Light : The Tree-Priest Before Belintash, Tatul, Sveshtari by PolinaGerdjikova

As the image of the One Single Consciousness, the ‘Light’ connects modern theories of physics and philosophy with symbols of ancient archaeological monuments, all our sacred heritage is illuminated by it – because in the spiritual space of Bulgaria, the different religions are just different languages ​​of Light and its interpretations through the centuries.

The paintings of my exhibition at ” The Mission” gallery reflect these views. The Light and its emblems in the world of form present as a metaphor of the spiritual experience, aspects of civilization from ancient times right up to the present day.

In many of my works The Light is a symbol of faith, materialized in cult/sacred sites on our lands. Some of them have been declared World heritage sites from UNESCO – the Madara Horseman, the Rila Monastery, The Tomb of Sveshtari, the Old Nessebar, The Ancient Roman theater in Plovdiv, the Red Church in Perushtitsa.

Orpheus – The Healer with Light by Polina Gerdjikova

The basis of other of my paintings is a sign that in mathematics is called a clothoid, and in semiotics – torsel (spiral ornament). A swirling fluid S is a symbol of the most defining characteristic of the world we live in – from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the gravitational to quantum interactions. In modern science it is accepted that matter exists in two major forms: matter and field (in particular light). On the other hand modern art historians and researchers believe that these two forms were understood by Neolithic people and identified as The Great Mother – One, but with two manifestations: Light and Matter. They both are expressed by two mirror-inverted S signs, used alone, linked by a meander or covering the entire surface. These images present themselves in many examples of civilization in Bulgarian lands – on ritual gold and pottery dishes, on the altars of sanctuaries, on menhirs and even on traditional Bulgarian costumes.

History knows many examples of how in the states of Enlightenment,the human psyche perceived the Universe as a living stream of Light, in which everything is connected to everything else – a light world which is a living organism. It is believed that such an experience reflects the Neolithic worldview.

Chromlech in the Rhodopa Mountain by Polina Gerdjikova

We can all here-now embrace both the enlightened states of the our ancestors and the insights of the modern scientists to share the Light. ~ Polina Gerdjikova

We had one of the best Lughnasadhs ever at the last White Horse camp to be held at Westmill Farm in Wiltshire – completing a cycle of 21 years of OBOD then White Horse camps held in that beautiful part of the world.
In wonderful synchronicity a band that the record producer, musician and DJ known as Youth has helped put together, played their very first gig at the camp. Called CelticVedic, their music celebrates a fusion of Indian and Celtic music in an upbeat dance style that you just can’t help jumping to whatever your age, or however tired you might feel!

An enormous yellow full moon rose behind the stage, bizarrely an illuminated drone flew above us like a UFO, and the band played its dazzling new work.

This photo shows only three band members, there were more – but I was too busy dancing to take pictures! CelticVedic express in music what the Order’s One Tree Project is all about. See here.

Two of the band members will be playing at our next One Tree Gathering this Saturday in the Midlands.

From our camp CelticVedic went on to play at the Ozora festival in Hungary – photo below:

An incredible seven million people have signed a petition to ask Shell to stop drilling in the Arctic. And now they are playing a new requiem outside Shell’s headquarters in London – A Requiem for Arctic Ice. The music is poignant. Have a listen here on this clip. And you can read about the project and add your signature here.

To what extent is Paganism inherently political? Is it possible to exclude politics from the Sacred Grove?  OBOD members are hosting an academic seminar in Cambridge to explore these issue:

Generation Hex – the Politics of Contemporary Paganism

Convenors: Jonathan Woolley, University of Cambridge; Kavita Maya, SOAS, University of London; Elizabeth Cruse, Druid Elder and Activist.

Venue: Seminar Room, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RF.
Date: 10th September 2015.

Themes: Paganism and Nature Spirituality; Goddess Spirituality and Feminism; Theology and Thealogy; Cultural Appropriation; Feminist Theory; Gender and Sexuality; Ecopolitics and Environmentalism; Activism; Politics and Religion.

Disciplines: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender and Religion, Study of Religions, Social Anthropology, Intellectual and Political History, Gender Studies, Queer Studies.

Call for Papers: Contemporary Paganisms have had a conflicted relationship with modernity throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Pagan ideologies are interwoven with the political, from the feminist eco-anarchism of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, to the conservative racial essentialism of Stephen McNallen. How these representations translate into ethical/political commitments is open to question.

This workshop aims to explore the political discourses of contemporary Pagan religions, whether Witchcraft, Druidry or Goddess spirituality. Questions we offer for consideration include: Is 21st century Paganism oriented towards social change? Is it possible to speak of a unified, coherent Pagan political project? Is there a single moral framework within Pagan thought, or are the ethical implications of different traditions conflicting and contradictory? What challenge might the politics of feminism, postcolonialism, or queer theory represent for Pagan beliefs and practices? How does Paganism respond to global capitalism? And what would a Pagan politics that meets these challenges look, sound, and feel like?

In addressing these questions, this workshop will unite community engagement with an interdisciplinary academic approach, bringing together scholars from social anthropology, critical theory, history, cultural studies and the study of religions into dialogue with activists and authors within the Pagan community.

Convened by a new community of pagan scholars, Generation Hex will seek to examine these issues in the course of a day-long workshop.

Lunch and refreshments provided.

Format:
The one-day workshop will include the presentation of at least four papers (solicited via an open Call for Papers) given by academics who have expertise in the themes mentioned above. Each paper will be followed by a roundtable discussion on the topics raised in the paper by both academics and community activists.

Lunch will be served in the Division’s common room, and will be provided as part of the workshop.

Access:
We hope to provide an accessible and welcoming space for all participants. Information on the accessibility of Division’s buildings is available here; please also contact the conveners directly with any requests for information or assistance.

Workshop Aims:
        To provide critical insights into the present political agency of Britain’s pagan community, informing broader academic debates about the relationship between the political and the spiritual.
        To create an opportunity for junior academics with a background in Pagan Studies to present their work, and receive feedback from their peers and contributors.
        To promote dialogue between Pagan activists and scholars.
        To create a forum for in-depth discussions regarding the future of British Pagan communities, including established figures, future leaders, and academics.

Outputs
        A special edition of a suitable journal (such as The Pomegranate).

INFORMATION FOR SUBMISSIONS

Please submit one abstract of no more than 150 words by 25th August 2015. The talk itself should be no more than 20 minutes. Your talk will be grouped with other, similar papers, and the discussed in a plenary after all the papers in your session have been presented.  Please submit proposals to Liz Cruse at the email below.

Contact Details:
To book a place, and to submit proposals for papers please email genhex15@gmail.com. Places are limited, so please do register with us if you would like to attend.

I’m giving some talks and workshops on both sides of the Pond in October. They are all in rather nostalgic settings.

In London, I’m giving a talk on a Friday evening, 9 October, and then a day workshop the next day at the College of Psychic Studies. You can find details here. I don’t think I’ll use the ‘Spirit trumpet’ shown in use here at a séance – examples can been seen at the College – but you never know!

Then in the US, on 17-18 October, I’m giving a two day workshop on ‘Druid Magic & Healing’ in the wonderfully atmospheric village of East Aurora in Upstate New York. This was where the spiritual writer and Arts & Crafts entrepreneur Elbert Hubbard started a ‘New Age’ community whose buildings can still be visited. The workshop is almost full, but you can find details on it here. And do have a look at this clip about Hubbard and East Aurora. It’s near the spiritualist village of Lily Dale too, which we’ll be visiting, so rather fittingly as we move towards Samhain, Stephanie and I will be in two places in the UK & USA associated with communication with the Otherworld.

Islam, Christianity and Judaism – the three Abrahamic religions – all tell the story of Abraham being told to sacrifice his son as a test of Abraham’s obedience to the will of God. At the last moment, as he raises the knife, he is told he has passed the test and should slaughter a sheep instead.

It’s a horrific story, which some believe is echoed in the New Testament, when a son is killed – hence: “Behold the lamb of God” which refers to Christ.

Is this a story that holds the key to a great mystery, or is it indicative of an awful pathology that affects all the Abrahamic faiths?

When the devil urged Abraham to protect his son and not kill him, was he really ‘the evil one’ or the voice of Compassion?

Stephanie and I have just returned from Berlin. There we visited an art installation that takes up 15 rooms in the Jewish Museum. It’s entitled ‘Obedience’, and has been created by the artist Saskia Boddeke and film director Peter Greenaway. It combines film, dance, music, installations and artwork. I cannot overstate the impact this installation had on us both. It was devastating – deeply emotional and powerful.

‘Obedience’ is art that shakes you to the core, touches the soul and cracks open the heart. I would encourage anyone who is concerned about the way we as humans seem to cause so much bloodshed on this Earth to visit this exhibition, which closes on September 13th. Unfortunately I cannot find plans for it to be shown elsewhere, and the representations on the web do not adequately convey its extraordinary nature.

If you can’t get to it, you can get a sense of it (but only very partially sadly) by watching the following three videos in sequence. In a meditative mood, imagine you are walking through fifteen rooms, with the music in the clips playing, huge screens showing films like this, and the whole room being painted and decorated, with installations in each room. If you are interested in the story itself and how it can be interpreted, you can find a pdf that discusses it here.

The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney. Photo: Mark Woodsford-Dean

‘The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.’ George Mackay Brown

I gave a talk at the library in Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital, a few weeks ago. 25 people turned up, and about 20 of them said they had come to live on Orkney because they had ‘heard a call’, or had been ‘drawn to’ the islands. Now that’s an extraordinary statistic by any standards, and even more so when you consider the fact that it’s cold, windy and dark up here for a lot of the year. They say there are only two seasons on Orkney: Winter and July. And this year, we were told, July hadn’t happened. They’ve had a tough time: so much rain that cattle had to be sold because they couldn’t be fed. And there are very few trees. Stands of sycamore or pine here and there, but otherwise only fields, peat bogs, barren hillsides, and wild angry skies. And when cabin fever strikes, it’s expensive to leave ‘Orkatraz’, as friends called their home. The return flight to London can be over £300, to Glagow £250. You can escape on the ferry, but that isn’t cheap either.

The Shhela na Gig in St.Magnus Cathedral Kirkwall. Photo: Mark Woodsford-Dean

So why had so many people been drawn here? One family had even sold their house in England and moved up without ever having visited the islands. Perhaps the answer lies in the words of one of Britain’s most gifted poets and novelists, George Mackay Brown, when he wrote ‘The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.’ If you want to get away from the incessant reminders of transience that the busy south provides, come here to this time-laden land, to these islands which were once at the centre of a great culture. The pilgrimage here then becomes one, not to a set of far-flung islands on the periphery of civilization, but to the heart-lands, to the place where the Ancestors traveled on pilgrimage, from Stonehenge and beyond.

Kirbuster Farm. Sleeping area to left. Photo: Mark Woodsford-Dean

There is an extraordinary sense of continuity here. At the ancient settlement at Skara Brae you can see that a drainage system was created to provide en suite (or perhaps beer-making) facilities 5,000 years ago, and there are stone sleeping areas, that are very similar to the bed areas you find in use until 200 years ago, on display at the Kirbuster farm museum a few miles away. In Skara Brae the great slabs of stone that create the sleeping areas are laid horizontally. At Kirbuster they stand vertically. But what a sense of continuity you get!

When Jamie George, of Gothic Image Tours, and Linda Marsden, of Global Spiritual Studies, invited us to travel to Orkney, I thought we were making a pilgrimage to a place far away, but although I didn’t feel ‘called’ and couldn’t imagine living in such a wind-swept land, I did feel deeply moved, as if I was a salmon swimming upstream to the place of the oldest animals (to use an image from the Mabinogion), to the Place of Beginnings.

In addition to being guided around the ancient sites of Brodgar, the Ness, Stennes and Maes Howe by our knowledgeable guides, Helen and Mark, from Spiritual Orkney, they took us to Happy Valley, a haven of trees and rushing water, and we stayed at a magical guest-house/retreat centre – Woodwick House. With its falls of water coloured gold by the peat, and its tall sycamores which ran down to a tranquil seashore looking out to the island of Gairsay, I thought of that beautiful Druid blessing that goes: “By the beauty of the fields, the woods and the sea, by the splendour that is set upon all that is…”

A big thank you to all those who made this journey possible!

The documentary below will fill you in on the details of Orkney’s early history, and you will learn about the latest findings in archaeology which show that our pre-Christian megalith-building culture spread from the north south and not vice versa. If you’re planning on visiting Orkney, have a look at the services offered by Helen and Mark, which include guiding and even arranging a hand-fasting in the Ring of Brodgar.

Get Your Plant Consciousness Early Bird Tickets Before They Sell Out! Book Here.

A guest post by Maria Ede-Weaving…

Nature never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little she achieves her work. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you noticed how our perception of time directly affects how much time we have? When you have a million things on the go and a ‘to do’ list that seems endless, observe that when you respond to the situation with a sense of panic or rush, time starts to whiz by alarmingly fast. Conversely, when we relax and go slow, time slows too and we get things done with less effort. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Slowing down and relaxing into the moment is a magical process. As Druids, we come to know the value of grounding – our spirituality teaches us the importance of feeling the tap root of our body and psyche secure within the earth. Sometimes we when start to explore spirituality we can become overly enchanted by flights into spirit or the otherworld; we can find ourselves working solely in our heads, reading and thinking about a path but not actually committing to the work of manifesting that path in our lives. Druidry reminds us we are matter; we exist within a material universe that requires that we feel the value of gravity, the way it shapes and strengthens us. It encourages us to celebrate and embrace the limitations and boundaries of earthly life and to recognise that all those exciting flights of spirit and inspirational thought can only benefit ourselves and others when we ground and manifest them here in the material realm.

A great part of Druidry is learning to perceive energy. We do this by tuning in to our environment and ourselves. Some energies are light and have a faster frequency, others have a greater density and are slower moving – the energy of a dragonfly feels very different to a boulder on the beach. As we develop sensitivity to these differences, we can also begin to sense the energy frequencies of our own being. I am a huge fan of the chakra system because it understands that the various levels of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual makeup are composed of energy centres resonating at different speeds, each with its own qualities and purpose but all working together as (hopefully) a healthy, functioning whole. No one centre is more or less important than any other and to place too much of a focus on one or two at the expense of the others can bring us some challenges and even impact on our health. Balance is key.

To go back to our earlier example of being stuck in our heads, we know that thought resonates to a faster frequency. We don’t experience it as having the same limitations or boundaries that our physical bodies are subject too. However, if we spend too much time in our heads without tending our physical needs, an imbalance will occur – we cannot live by thought alone, we need food, water, exercise, cuddles, a roof over our heads… In short, we need to ground ourselves in Mother Earth and our bodies; feel our roots within her, enjoying the soil’s denser, slower energy, allowing it to steady and energise us.

The root chakra – Muladhara – is the place within us that has an extraordinary and magical capacity to take our creativity and manifest it here in the material realm. It is not afraid to take it slow because it has stamina, strength and endurance – it knows the patient power of consistency. It takes one look at our ‘to do’ lists, shrugs and goes about them one simple step at a time, utterly rooted in the present moment, no rush, no panic.

As one chakra opens us to the next, being thoroughly grounded in the root can then lead us to the ease of movement, flow and flexibility that comes with the second chakra, a centre of joy and creativity. As we become rooted in our bodies and the earth – as we feel at home in the moment – we can then explore the uncertainty of change, learning to respond to its ebb and flow with grace and joy. It is so much harder to do this without our tap root deeply secured.

When you feel stressed, rushed and overworked, slow down; enjoy being in your body, nurture it, feed it, give it pleasure, let it rest, feel the worry drain into the earth and watch as it transforms into peace and renewed strength.

Remember, when you ground, time is always on your side.

The Stones of Stenness, Orkney. Photo: Mark Woodsford-Dean

Sometimes it helps to look at things upside down, and when it comes to maps, there is of course no such thing as upside down, as enterprising kiwis have realized who sell maps of the world with New Zealand centre-stage up at the top. ‘Great’ Britain then becomes a little island down at the bottom.

There’s nothing like perspective for gaining perspective!

And so, when we were up on the far-flung islands of Orkney last week, our wonderful guides Helen & Mark Woodsford-Dean, who run Spiritual Orkney.co.uk, pointed out that in earlier days these islands were at the centre of a flourishing world – surrounded by the now-named Scandinavia, Iceland, Scotland, the Faroes and further afield Greenland. Turning the map the right way up helped us appreciate this. More on what we found there next week!