EdKarshner ☕ 🫈

ALT Full moon closest to the autumn equinox – Heading the Corn Part of the cultus in St. Urith in the county, but clearly also part of much older harvest festival traditions, the heading of the corn is the name for the ritual of the first sheath of corn cut being bound and taken to the nearest church so that the spirit of the saint could live in it to the next harvest. The sheath is traditionally taken on a cart, crowded with reapers, often wearing masks made of sack, shouting: ‘Hooky! Hooky! while the cart is led by an extravagantly dressed couple referred to as the Lord and Lady of the Harvest. Before the procession gets to the church to deliver the sheath, they will be met at a crossroad by a figure personifying death who will let them pass only after the shedding of blood (usually done by the nicking of the hands of the Lord and Lady of the Harvest). When the sheath has been delivered and a thanksgiving mass given, a usually somewhat riotous harvest supper is then held.

ALT Folklore can ignite enchantment within us. Enchantment that fuels our imaginations. Enchantment that shifts our consciousness, allows us to envisage new and better worlds. It begins the process of manifesting the changes we desire. Re-enchanted, the world is full of new, feral possibilities. Re-enchanted our imagination is an accessible superpower. The stories we intentionally absorb, the stories we select to tell ourselves, they allow us to live in the world differently. They allow us to make and remake the world differently. Folklore is often the wild frontier of belief, the place where wonder may still live. Here be Woodwoses, here be Harrowhounds, the ghosts which whisper wisdom. We need this space. We ache for the sublime. For re-enchantment is an assertion of wonder and the numinosity of our relationships with landscape. Re-enchantment is an assertion of our collective ability to both imagine and experience better worlds. As a refusal of despair, as a lensing of hope. In re-en

ALT What is Hookland? Hookland is England as seen from the ghost train. It is a fierce refusal to let psychogeographers tell you that when you talk about spirits of place you can’t really believe in them. It is all the books you borrowed time and time again from the library as a child – encyclopaedias of horror films, Usborne’s Worlds of the Unknown UFOs and Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle. It is walking home through the woods in November mist and feeling that the place has monsters, not the sort they made into Aurora model kits, but old, nameless things that are fed by the fear you’ve had of this place since that murder a few years back. It is the terror of living in a haunted landscape. It is the delight of living in a profoundly haunted landscape. Hookland is the place that you can almost allow yourself to believe in magic again before realising it is a territory you already inhabit. Shared space where all the broken memories of childhood are resuscitated and walking alongside