Opening the Time Traveller’s Herbal
Step into the time slip with herbal storyteller Amanda Edmiston, Botanica Fabula as we enter the world of The Time Traveller’s Herbal.
Why you need a bit of folklore in your life. Or feel the folklore fear and do it anyway…
Between St Distaff’s Day 2020 and Twelfth Night 2021, I practiced ritual year folklore every day, my experiences becoming Everyday Folklore: An Almanac for the ritual year, a practical guide on how to engage with folklore all year round.
Courting the Wild Twin
I first caught the perfume of my wild twin by walking with muddy boots through wet grasses to my scrubby woodland den as a six-year-old. As the trees swirled I caught a scent and started to cry without understanding. I wove a pheasant feather in my hair. I hear it now in the owl court who hoot across the frost grass and moon-touched lawns of my cottage. There’s more than book smarts in that chill delirium. These are not domestic tones, not corralled sounds, but loose as Dartmoor ponies on the hill. They give me ecstasy. Not safety, not contentment, certainly not ease, not peace, but ecstasy. It’s almost painful. Makes me restless.
Welsh Mythology and Storytelling: Telling the Mabinogion
In the nineteenth century, Lady Charlotte Guest (with a team of Welsh scholars) translated a series of stories from Welsh into English. It was she who gave them the collective title ‘The Mabinogion’.
Five Extraordinary Goddesses
The first witch of Western literature, Circe lived what appears to be an idyllic, solitary life on the island of Aiaia. She spent her time honing her enviable magic spells, collecting herbs from the thick forest that fringed her land and doting on her magically docile pet lions and wolves.