The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/siobhan)
Siobhan Ball is a writer and archivist living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Siobhan has degrees in information management and medieval history, making her lots of fun at parties. She’s written for Autostraddle, Broadly, and Diva, and is currently working on a book on the supernatural women of Ireland for Wolfenhowle Press.
“Made up of a mix of all the grains, legumes, and edible seeds grown in any given area,” writes Siobhan Ball, “polysporia belongs to that most fundamental class of agricultural ritual: the kind that gets down to the bare bones of the relationship between man and gods, expressing plainly what we want and what we’re willing to give in exchange.”
Siobhan Ball celebrates the end of apple season with the myths and folklore surrounding Pomona, the Roman goddess of apples, and includes a frustrating but authentic recipe for a Minutal of Fruit from Apicius, the ancient Roman gourmand.
Siobhan Ball introduces TWH’s readers to the folklore of the blackberry – including why you need to eat them before the Faerie Folk claim them for their own – and also offers a delicious recipe for a blackberry and apple crumble.
Whatever you think of the taste and its position in the culinary hierarchy, parsley’s role in folklore and magic is significantly more dramatic, bringing together life, death, love, and demons like the very best of operatic metal albums.
There’s something about the solstices that seems to connect with a deep, fundamental part of the human psyche. The solstice is a moment where the world seems to hold its breath, the sun hung motionless overhead or hidden below the horizon, before it dives across the threshold of one side of the year to the other: light to dark and dark to light.