As the country gears up to buy witches’ hats and zombie eyeballs, Britain’s pagans view Hallowe’en – or rather, Samhain – in a more meaningful way. ‘It is the equivalent of our Christmas,’ says Mark, a retired Army reservist and the high priest of a witches’ coven in the South West. ‘The biggest ritual of the year. It’s the time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest. So you can speak to your ancestors and they can speak to you.’ He plans to commune with his grandmother who died in 1992, and Delyth, his late beloved cat of 22 years.
Paganism is entrancing more people than ever before in the modern age. On the 2021 census, 74,000 people declared as pagans, up from 57,000 in 2011 (an additional 13,000 described themselves as Wicca, up by more than 1,000). But the true figure may be higher. ‘Pagans don’t like telling the Government what they’re up to,’ said one. And that may not allow for the growing tribe of younger followers – including DJ, broadcaster and writer Zakia Sewell – who may not be part of a coven but define themselves as an ‘instinctive pagan’. The Green Man, the ancient pagan icon of fertility, was even pictured on the invitation to the Coronation of King Charles.
Paganism is an umbrella term covering many traditions, paths and beliefs. Modern pagans include Wiccans, who follow a structured form of witchcraft; heathens, who worship the gods of northern Europe; druids, who respect nature as a sacred source of wisdom; and shamans, who work with the spirits of nature, especially animals. Most pagans follow the ‘wheel of the year’: four ‘sabbats’ – Samhain (31 October), Imbolc (1 February), Beltane (1 May) and Lammas (1 August) – plus the two solstices and two equinoxes. At the core is a connection to the land, and a belief that every stone, tree or plant has a spirit; a world still seen as offering a magic of its own.
The latest rise is paganism is a response to the climate crisis, according to Liz Williams, author of Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism. ‘A lot of people are becoming more concerned about protecting the environment, and that pulls people towards land-based religions,’ she says. Moreover, these are economically tough times. ‘And often that generates an interest in magic, because people are desperate, looking for a way out, and turn to sources of power beyond their own economic and social power.’
Ask 10 pagans what paganism is and you’ll get 10 different answers. But then, paganism, says Owen Davies, in Paganism: A Very Short Introduction, ‘always has been an expression of the imagination, and it continues to excite’.
Although Samhain falls on a Tuesday, Andrew Pardy will have the day off from his job at Hertfordshire Police Constabulary. He now has the right to take this and six other pagan festivals off. He uses his leave but is allowed to take it whenever they fall, which took about a year to get approval on. He is also able to wear a valknut, a symbol of bravery and sacrifice, at work. ‘I am fortunate to work in an inclusive constabulary,’ he says.
Pardy was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness, but rebelled in his teens and is now a heathen: the branch of paganism that follows the worship of the ancient Norse and Germanic gods such as Thor, Odin and Loki. ‘Some people believe in the deities as actual physical beings. Others, like myself, believe them to be archetypes of humanity – either aspirational or cautionary figures.’
He likes heathenry because it has a code of conduct – including honour, discipline, courage and perseverance. ‘Basically, your deeds are your reputation. There is also an element of helping people less fortunate than yourself.’ Pardy is by nature a nerd, with a strong desire to do public good, and appreciates a set of standards.
When he joined the police in 2001, aged 24, he kept quiet about being a heathen. Now, he is the force’s figurehead. In 2009, he founded the Police Pagan Association, ‘to develop good relations between the police and pagan communities’, and he now heads up a membership of more than 250 pagan police officers. And that doesn’t include those pagan officers who worry about identifying themselves. ‘We’ve got members in every force across the UK,’ he says. The Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police are particular hot spots.
Pardy says he’s been lucky and hasn’t had much flak from other officers. ‘I’ve only ever had polite enquiry: “Tell me more? Is it true you guys dance naked around trees and have lots of sex?” My answer is always: “If it was, there would be a lot more of us, wouldn’t there?”’ But there are more worrying stereotypes. Social workers and child-referral agencies still flag up pagans as a risk to children, he says, because of paganism’s association with the occult and Satanism.
For Samhain, he will put on a navy blue wool and hemp tunic, build a small hearth fire in the kitchen, which has an altar above it, and hold a ceremony with his family to remember ‘ancestors’ who have passed. These include two close colleagues lost to Covid.
He will also join in with Hallowe’en, which in his view is ‘a legacy of paganism that exists in our culture today, so it can’t be a bad thing, even if it’s lost some of its direction’. His house has a side door leading to an alley. ‘If anyone comes trick-or-treating, I jump out and scare the kids!’
Anna Price is a priestess at the Goddess Temple, a snug of incense and cushions situated on the first floor of a century-old building in Glastonbury, Somerset. The temple is dedicated to serving the Lady of Avalon, the goddess who dwells on the mysterious Isle of Avalon – believed by many pagans to be where Glastonbury Tor is now. She is portrayed in temple murals by the artist Jonathan Minshull as young and lovely with flowing blonde hair, an ethereal Stevie Nicks.
‘She is not necessarily a traditional goddess, but she is the energy of this land,’ says Price, who can often be found in the temple wearing a purple gown (the Lady of Avalon’s colour) and an antler headdress. She was ‘the ancient deer mother’. Many priestesses have the moon tattooed on their forehead, ‘but I am not a tattoo-type person,’ she says.
Price talks a lot about goddesses. She has a particular affinity, she says, with the Egyptian goddesses Isis and Hathor. But Price explains that all goddesses are manifestations of one single Great Goddess, the divine mother.
Goddess worship is about a ‘re-emergence of feminine energy’, she says. ‘It shapes how I live my life – compassion for all beings, care of the environment.’ She sees her role as that of ‘bringing the light, love and energy of the Goddess’ to the world. ‘It’s just wanting everyone to feel happy.’
Price came to follow goddesses from the New Age. She grew up in Taunton, and after studying performance art and sculpture became a New Age traveller, going from festival to festival as a performer and reiki healer. A turning point came when she came across the name Saqqara in a book on reiki massage at Glastonbury Festival in June 1999. By now a reiki master, she adopted it as her ‘spiritual’ name. She soon discovered it was the name of a temple in Egypt. She jumped on a flight to Cairo and became fascinated by Egyptian goddess myths and stories. ‘It really resonated on a deep soul level.’
The Goddess Temple was registered as a place of worship in 2003. Price became friends with its founder – Kathy Jones, a former BBC science researcher. She completed the priestess of Avalon training course (eight weekends over three years, at a cost of about £3,240) in 2012. She is now one of five priestesses and around 30 melissas (volunteers, from the Greek word meaning worker bee) who run the temple. They include a cardiac physiologist and a nurse. Price is paid £80 a week for managing the melissas, and her priestess rate is £100 for a 90-minute ceremony. ‘I support myself as a priestess. I never thought that would be possible!’
Because the temple follows the wheel of the year, the decor is changed every six weeks or so. The red and orange of the autumn equinox will soon become black for Samhain. ‘We pull down the blinds, turn it into a beautiful black cave only lit by candles and a few fairy lights. It’s like coming into a cave of the Great Mother, a place of nurturing and peace,’ she says.
Occasionally she encounters prejudice. Just the other day, she was walking through the street for the community festival and someone yelled: ‘What about God?!’ In response, ‘You just smile and say, “Honour to you and your path.”’
‘I would say every town and city in the country has at least one coven, and probably two or three,’ says Mark, who lives in the South West. But under the radar (Mark himself prefers not to give his last name). ‘You have to be careful. When I’ve told some people I’m a witch, they’ve gone, “Oh my God,” and never contacted me again. People still look on it as something dark and satanic. We don’t sacrifice anything.’
In addition to following the wheel of the year, his coven meets each full moon and runs various lessons, such as ‘how to make a wand, how to bless a chalice, lessons on herbalism, mushroom foraging’.
Where possible, the coven meets outside. ‘There’s a lovely spot we’ve found in the centre of woodlands where two rivers meet, which is a very special place – the power of the energy of the water and the earth mixing together. It’s traditional to wear a black robe, but if we meet outdoors we just wear ordinary clothes. You don’t want locals going, “Oh my God, there are strange people in robes in the woods!”’
He has a portable altar for outside: a stang, a forked stick. ‘It’s symbolic, in the way the cross is.’ Tools include candles, a chalice or cup, a blunt knife, bells ‘for dispelling or calling things in’, an incense holder and a staff, a long sturdy branch used to attract spirits by striking it against the ground.
Though he was raised Catholic, Mark says the best days of his childhood were spent with his grandmother, who was a witch, ‘picking herbs and learning about the countryside’.
His most treasured possession is her Book of Shadows, a compendium of spells, plant-based magic and palmistry; eight leather-bound volumes written with a quill pen. She died in 1992, aged 92. Spells include: ‘To cause an enemy to leave’; ‘To return a strayed lover’; ‘To create strife’; and how to put a hex on thieves.
‘Never let the book out of your hands…’ she writes. It was a criminal offence to practise witchcraft until 1951.
Mark trained as a nurse and was a member of the Army Reserve for 18 years. He retired after his left hand and lower arm had to be amputated when a dog bite became infected.
He is blind in one eye from an incident in the Army that he would rather not discuss. He now lives with his partner, a druid, a cheerful woman with glasses, along with three cats. He is known as a witch doctor on the estate where he lives and is regarded with a mix of affection and fear. ‘It gives them bragging rights over the other streets. But everyone knows, if you can cure, you can curse.’
In Zakia Sewell’s inner-city school in London, the word ‘pagan’ was a slur. ‘It’s like you can’t be trusted, you’re a snake,’ she explains. She quotes a song by the grime artist J Hus. ‘Dem boy paigon/ I can’t stand them/ I don’t trust you if you ain’t mandem/ They wanna do me/ I’mma do you…’
And yet Sewell, an NTS Radio DJ and University of Oxford graduate, now finds herself drawn to it. When she visits ‘sacred sites’ such as Avebury, the Neolithic stone circle in Wiltshire, she ‘communes with the sacred streams and spends time meditating’. And when she goes for a walk in the woods in Wales, ‘I make an attempt to reach out and connect to the forces alive in the natural world, whether it’s hugging trees or imagining there are beings out there you can communicate with.’
Sewell likes the ecological aspect of paganism: ‘a yearning to reconnect, reanimate and re-enchant the landscape’ – rather than ‘using it as a resource to pillage infinitely’. There is also its ‘punk’ ethos, she explains: ‘It’s a rejection of the institution of religion. There are fewer rules and codes and conventions that you must follow.’
Despite being a devotee, she doesn’t like to refer to herself as a pagan – as she worries about how her ‘half-in, half-out’ paganism would be seen by hardcore followers.
Born in Hounslow, west London, she spent much of her childhood back and forth between London and Wales, where her grandmother had a home. It was as if she had two parallel lives – ‘freedom and fun’ roaming ‘a magical, mystical landscape’ with cousins and friends in rural Wales (Zakia’s uncle is Rufus Sewell, the actor, most recently known for The Diplomat); then back to a flat in Hounslow, under the roar of Heathrow’s flight path, where she was only allowed to cycle around her block of flats.
In 2008, when she was 15, her father took her to see Pentangle, the folk band, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. By now, she was a ‘rude girl, listening to grime’. Nevertheless, ‘I was just blown away by the music. This sense of an older Britain echoing through the generations to the present day touched me,’ she says.
In 2020, she wrote and presented a four-part documentary, My Albion, the poetic name for ancient Britain or England, for BBC Radio 4, in which she discussed how pagan spirituality offers a way for us to connect to the natural world.
‘So much of our current myth of Britain is tied up with the idea of greatness, superiority and the legacies of empire – and a lot of people of colour like me, and also white British people, don’t want to be associated with that,’ she says.
‘They are reaching for what was before – for British folk culture and other symbols and stories that don’t have anything to do with empire. What are the other aspects of this culture that I can feel proud of, that I can feel at home in?’
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