My thanks to Anthoney Hart for finding a Youtube of my appearing – with Simon Bisley – on the BBC Omnibus programme ‘The Return of the Green Man’.
Omnibus was a legendary BBC One arts documentary series. I wrote a sequence about the Green Man in Sláine: The Horned God, specially for Omnibus and you can see Simon painting it on the show. If you want to skip ahead to our section, it starts at 16:52.
Omnibus filmed us both at Rollright Stones, near where Simon lived, and I explain the premise of the Green Man, the consort of the Goddess.
They also asked me if I knew any pagans who would be filmed performing the rites of the Green Man. Of course I did. My best friends. Hereditary pagans whose lineage traces back to Alice Kyteler, after she escaped from Ireland and went to England.
According to Wikipedia:
Dame Alice Kyteler (/ˈkɪtlər/;[1] c. 1260 – after 1324) was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland.[2][3] She is believed to have fled the country to either England or Flanders, but there is no record of her after her escape from persecution.[4] Her associate Petronilla de Meath (de Midia, meaning of Meath, her first name also spelt Petronella) was flogged and burned to death at the stake on 3 November 1324, after being tortured and confessing to the heretical crimes she, Kyteler, and Kyteler's followers were alleged to have committed.
So I introduced my friends to the Omnibus producer.
My friends debated long and hard about whether they should appear on camera. Magical rituals are not a spectator sport. It’s too easy to sneer at or find fault at others as they let go of inhibitions at Beltane, although there’s nothing prurient about the ceremony. Finally they decided, with some reluctance, to take part. Omnibus addressed their concerns and I think their sequence is very well done and tasteful.
It ties everything together well because my friends also provided some of the inspiration for The Horned God.
In more recent years, I attended another of their Beltane ceremonies with the Green Man. This provided the inspiration for a sequence in another Sláine saga, drawn by Simon Davis.
As they would tell me, ‘You’re welcome to come to our ceremonies. But don’t bring your notebook.’
Looking back, it’s sad that Christianity – the apex Patriarchal religion – has ripped us away from our connection to the Earth and a time when pagan rituals like the Green Man were commonplace across Europe.
It’s worth remembering that the pagan religion was finally wiped out by the Christians in the Burning Times with the slaughter of men, women and children with a savagery that made Christians the Nazis of their day.
Exact figures of the deaths involved are highly contested, especially by Christians, but the complete absence of the Old Religion today, except in small surviving pockets like my friends, indicates it was a genocidal event
According to Wikipedia, in the film documentary The Burning Times, Thea Jensen calls this period in history a "Women's Holocaust". She notes that a total number of victims is unknown but that the high number often given is nine million deaths, over a period of 300 or more years.[1] Otherwise, scholarly "high" estimates range around 100,000, with estimates around 60,000 more common.[2] The nine million figure, according to modern scholarship, originates with a 1784 article by Gottfried Christian Voigt, in which he estimates the figure of 9,442,994 executions between AD 600 and 1700 - a period of 1,100 years - unsupported by any evidence.[3][4]
In mainland Europe and Scotland, Christians burned witches, with the peak period between 1580 and 1662 often referred to as The Burning Times. England and its colonies in North America preferred hanging.
These figures do not take account of earlier waves of slaughter of pagans by the Christians, certainly from 400 AD.
Nor the massacre of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa for following their tribal, neo-pagan religions. Christian pogroms against native peoples were still being carried out in the 20th Century.
I’ve heard Christians refer to their genocide as, ‘it wasn’t killing. It was cleansing.’
And now, four hundred years after the Burning Times, today, the Christians are, supposedly, a force for good and holiness in the world.
Not in my first-hand experience. But they are very good at pretending to be holy and brainwashing their sheep-like flocks.
If, in four hundred years time, the Nazis declared they were reformed and were now a force for good and we should forget their evil past and their terrible atrocities, would we do so?
Well, we do with the Christians.
I used to live in a village just outside Bury St Edmunds. I should know the museum. The mummified cat rings a bell. Witchfinder General was filmed in Lavenham nearby.
It would be tempting to write,too! I think Philip K Dick probably said it all in The Man in the High Castle. But it would be interesting to try, too