Beltane

So here we are again, Beltane, the eve of May, one of my favourite times of year, and I'm gearing up to take the Whirly Band and the Bosky Man out onto the streets of Oxford first thing tomorrow morning (I've just written my latest Spiral Earth column about May Morning).

It's been a funny old spring. Midsummer weather in March followed by a month long deluge. April showers are one thing but the weather of late has been of a different order. Great galleon clouds hoving in and blasting us with thunder, hail and stair rods. The wind has spun round in so many directions that even weather cocks are giddy and green at the gills. No, I fear that this is all yet further intimation of a climate irredeemably buggered.

Of course, weird weather aside, one of the great myths about Beltane is that it was a fertility festival and that people went out into the woods and fields to, ahem, encourage the crops to grow. I've got a chapter coming out in the forthcoming book, Pop Pagans, in which I explain why the fertility myth is one that contemporary Paganism would do well to be rid of, but for now, here's what Ronald Hutton has to say on the matter of people frolicking in the fields, in his Stations of the Sun.

 

It took until the late twentieth century, and the patient labours of demographic historians, to reveal that there was in fact no rise in the numbers of pregnancies at this season [May], in or out of marriage. The boom in conceptions came later in the summer. In practice early modern people seem to have found the night of the 30 April generally too chilly, and the woods generally too damp.

Whatever else our ancestors were, they weren't stupid. Nevertheless, come rain or shine, we'll be out on the streets tomorrow, celebrating the (eventual) overthrow of winter by summer, giving nature her full dues at this time of growth, hope, and expansion, and generally stirring up the spirit of revellion. I hope to see you there but whatever you do, may it be large. Up the May!

Wod at the Ashmolean Museum

As part of last weekend's Folk Weekend Oxford, Wod were booked to play an acoustic, Sunday morning set at the Ashmolean museum.

Playing acoustic is always better than through a PA but the acoustics and the setting of the museum were simply fantastic. We sat in front of an ancient, one-legged statue of a Greek fisherman, but there were equally extraordinary statues from Antiquity all around. Given his famous antipathy towards bagpipes, I'm not sure what the statue of Apollo would have made of it, but I hope he felt as moved as we did.

We all got rather lost in the music, as is the Wod way, but when we finished, we looked up and saw that people were listening and applauding all the way up the stairwell. Others just wandered by or sat on the floor and listened awhile. It was a great privilege to have been there.

Have a listen here (thanks to Nomi for photos and video).

Homo narrans

I went to see Rupert Sheldrake speak at the recent Oxford Literary Festival, and a very good speaker he is too. Sheldrake is the heretical biologist who claims that genes have very little to do with morphology; rather it's all to do with habit or what he calls morphic resonance.

I've never read any of his books but it's fair to say that I've yet to be persuaded by his theories. And yet, as a speaker he is very persuasive.

He was promoting his latest book, The Science Delusion, in which he challenges materialism, the unproven dogma at the heart of modern science.


I found I agreed with much of what he said. For example, I've never understood why we have faith in the idea that there are immutable scientific laws. How could we possibly know, from our limited perspective in time and space, that laws have never, or will never, change? It's a funny kind of religious, yes, religious faith right at the heart of science. Laws, after all, are a human creation, an anthropocentric metaphor flung out onto the universe. Maybe what we observe really are just tendencies or habits?

But even I found myself baulking at his challenging the first law of thermodynamics, that matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed. In fact, I found myself spluttering with indignation: how dare he? Everyone knows it to be the case. It's one of the fundamental cornerstones of science. It was drilled into me from an early age, and has stayed with me as one of those unquestionable truths.

And yet the more he spoke the more I realised that I'd completely taken it on trust. No one has ever demonstrated to me why it is the case. Indeed, if Sheldrake is to be believed, no one has ever proved it. It stands there defiantly but remains dogma.

And that got me thinking. For along time I've held the view that we are fundamentally storytelling creatures. Telling stories (and yes, arguing or even fighting over them) is what we do. We are indeed Homo narrans.

Stories make us. We know that from psychotherapy. But I think more than that, and as my trusting internalization of the first law of thermodynamics reveals, stories make the world. It's stories all the way down. The art, I suppose, is learning to defy what we have been told and thereby to script and tell our own stories. Whatever his faults as a scientist (and as I said, I can't really comment not having read his works), Sheldrake at least has been brave enough to do that.