Green politics, philosophy, history, paganism and a lot of self righteous grandstanding.

Sunday 16 January 2022

Liminal Places of England

 If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite' 

William Blake

A liminal place is a threshold between the mundane and the numinous. It is somewhere where you can be 'between the world's'. The Romans used the word 'numinous' for the divine or the supernatural, and Tolkien would later use and adapt it for his Atlantis-like island, Numenor.

In 1972, the year after the first Glastonbury Festival, Janet and Colin Bords produced a book called Mysterious Britain. It was a guide to Britain listing a smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects: ley lines, UFOs - which were so popular at that time that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land - as well as stone circles, holy wells, ghosts, 'pagan' folk customs and King Arthur.

The book was part of the 're-enchantment of Britain', a second era of romanticism, when hippies and flower children, fed on the vibes emanating out from San Francisco, sought Avalon in England's green and pleasant land. In doing so they linked up with the Celtic revival movement and the rebirth of paganism in the British Isles.

The publication of similar books persists to this day, and it seems I own most of them. As a result I have now been to enough of these otherworldly spaces to write my own blog. So here are the places that have moved me most. Whether it is their history or their beauty, their use by pagans old or new, their importance to Celtic culture or the counter-cultures; what they have in common is that they are places for retreat or spiritual contemplation.

Visit them yourself, please, but follow these rules: be reverent to the genius loci of the place, travel wisely, litter not, and leave only your footprints behind you.

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