The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/history)
The woods around my home in Arctic Norway were few and far between, mostly small birches barely taller than your average adult. Here in Åland, I met with real woods: tall bone-white birches, spruce, thick pines, bushy walnut groves. This vibrant life was everywhere, and all the while I was searching for graves.
Exhausted, sweaty, and painfully hungry, I take my back into the gravel road of what must be Sōdra Ugglarp. On the horizon a long earthen-colored brick building stands against the deep blue sky, like a wall. In front of it, I notice a concrete-pit filled with horse manure. Closest to me, nearly as long as the barn, lies the stone ship, shaped by dozens of massive standing stones, like teeth of a giant rising from the green earth.
Ed Simon reviews Tabitha Stanmore’s new book, “Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic.” “Stanmore enumerates the sorts of practical rituals that cunning folk offered in the plying of their trade. A thief might be discovered, for example, by making suspects eat chunks of cheese in which various charms had been carved, whereupon the guilty party would choke on their morsel. (This must be hard cheese, Stanmore emphasizes.)”
After all, isn’t contemporary Paganism somewhat akin to this very church? A relic from ages past that fell or nearly fell out of used, only to be rediscovered and refitted in order to conform to both the needs of a new age, and the idea we modern men have of a sacred past?
“Even after one thousand years of Christian influence and spiritual control, the wealth of ancient religious heritage sites found in this small stretch of countryside acts as a witness to the resilience of the Old Religion.”
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