ACFM - ACFM Microdose: New Weird Britain

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

Are we living through a new era of British weirdness? Keir and Jem mark the start of spring by taking in the weird-left politics of leylines, weird walks and standing stones. Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is acid man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert, and today this is one of our microdose episodes, a supplemental episode, and I'm joined only by my good friend and comrade Keir Milbert. Hello. You can probably guess, given this just me and Keir today, we're going to geek out a bit today. And we're going to be talking about a theme which Keir proposed. which is, well, is it weird Britain or is it new British weird or is it new Britain weird? What are we calling it?

Let's decide that at the end, I think. If we want to put a question, it would be something like, is Britain getting weirder? Is there a weirdness revival in the UK at the minute? If so, how long has it been going on? One of the qualifications of that would be, isn't it just something that's quite continuous, something that's been going on for quite a while? Or is it something that that has cycles of revival, etc. Is Keir just very susceptible to the hype cycle, which is may well be true, as Gem has suggested in the past, etc?

So I think that's sort of what I'm sort of interested in. And if you want to do that, there's a couple of tasks, one of which is to sort of lay out some of the evidence that there's something going on at the moment, and then perhaps to go through the history of what we might call British weirdness, specifically British weirdness, British sort of folklore, etc., these sorts of things, in order to come back at the end and then assess whether this is new,

how much of it is a continuity, is there something new about it, or is this just the latest wave in something which is either continually occurring or is in fact just continually there in the background, and that perhaps new people are noticing it, something like that. I think that's the sort of way I would frame what I've got in my head anyway. We should just generally explain what we mean, because people would interpret this in any way. We're responding to phenomena like the popularity of the weird walks.

Yeah, yeah. So weird walks is, it started off as sort of like a fanzine, and now there's been a book, which is a real bestseller, called Weird Walks. Yeah, and it's mostly basically walks to standing stones that you do in Britain. There's people going to standing stones. It's people being interested in folklore. It's people embracing folk horrors, an aesthetic in some way, which seems to be more comprehensive than just a sub-genre of films they like to watch.

It's possibly development in music or possibly just people noticing persistent themes in some strands of music making. And it's the question, and it's, you know, we might find that all of these things emerge to some new British weird, or we might think that there are, as Keir said, there are kind of continuity of some quite specific themes in British culture going back however long. What do we want to start talking about in terms of the phenomenon? Well, I just finished, there's a new book out by Zachia Sewell called Finding Albium. She also did like a podcast series. I know actually it's a radio show if it's on radio. It's not a podcast, is it?

On Radio 4. Or exploring her attraction to like to folklore, mythological stuff. And in that Finding Album, there's a couple of things where, which she is exploring. So one of them is a series of like, either invented or reinvented or reinvented, sort of festivals, communal festivals or communal rituals, linked to what she calls the Pagan Wheel of the Year. So a whole series of festivals linked to either sort of harvest, times, or the sort of like equinoxes or the solstices, etc.

We're just recording just after the vernal equinox, the official start of spring, and there was, you know, there's a big festival down at Stonehenger on that time, etc. that's sort of been called the sort of folklore revival. And so there's an artist called Ben Edge, who's got a book out called Folklore Rising, which are like, you know, basically paintings of these sorts of phenomena. Basically, there's sort of a renewed popularity of those festivals and ceremonies

that mark out the year. Weird walks, I think you're right. So weird walks is definitely a phenomenon of a re-emerging interest in megaliths, basically. on like the big standing stones, etc. And incorporating them into walks, etc. People going there and contemplating, the meaning of that is up in the air. I think that whole folk horror aesthetic,

I think that has got a little bit to do with it, basically. The whole folk horror revival starts around the beginning of the 2010s when, in fact, the whole term, folk horror sort of gets invented there. Mark Gattis, there's a hot, there's a TV series called The History of Horror. He interviews the director of Blood on Satan's Claw, which is a horror film for the 1970s,

who used the idea, the term folk horror to describe what he meant. And Mark Gattis or Mark Gatis links that up to other films from a very similar era, The Wicker Man and the Witchfinder General and says, you know, this represents a genre of folk horror, and that sort of really takes off, basically, and it starts a folk horror revival, so lots of themes around folk horror. that sort of played itself out to some degree, I think, as in new folk horror,

it can't escape a sort of 70s aesthetic in some way. And so that sparked a whole interest in weird 70s TV and film, etc. That revolved around sort of like the English countryside, like the idea that the English countryside there are these sort of like mythological or primitive rituals, etc. The classic folk horror sort of arc is somebody from the city goes to the countryside, discovers these dark hidden secrets, etc. Or some artifact is uncovered in some sort of way

and sparks are haunting these sorts of things. And then the other thing you might put into that is this, yeah, this phrase, New Weird Britain comes from John Doran, who's a music critic. He writes a column for The Quietest and has also done sort of like a radio show as well. I think that might be on radio. It's on BBC radio somewhere.

Who has this proposition that there's a resurgence of weird music quite often in the countryside, on coastal areas, these sorts of things. His sort of thesis is that that is a sort of reaction to the homogenisation of mainstream music because of algorithms, etc, these sorts of things, I think. Whether you want to put all those together, well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it does all sit together. I am sort of convinced there's some sort of new attitude around it. One of the reasons it's interesting, I think, is,

In that Zakia Sewell book, Finding Albium, she's going to these festivals, she's visiting Stonehenge, etc. And she's specifically putting it forward at this idea that she thinks there's something going on where people are trying to find, perhaps invent or rediscover some sort of mythological basis for a new conception of Britain or perhaps England, basically. More specifically, England. Well, Albion itself, if we should explain, the term to people. It's ambivalent term because it's the oldest known word for Britain.

It was the Greek word used by geographers. In like the fourth century BC, the first writing of Albion. And it's thought to derive, because it's related to the word for white, and it's thought to derive from the whiteness of the cliffs of Dover. Then later on it ends up being applied to more specifically to England. So the question of whether the Scotland or Wales are in our part of Albion is always a little bit. linguistically ambiguous there. But that's why the word album has these connotations, like the idea of Britain as this very ancient place

and this place whose history or prehistory past a certain point is quite mysterious compared to that of other parts of the world where you had literate cultures much earlier. You can see the attraction of like that mythological origin and also of like, you know, the standing stones and megalifts, etc. because the more modern myths around Britain, around empire and royalty and all these sorts of things, you know, they're the things that have been problematized, particularly after Black Lives Matters,

etc., these sorts of things. And of course, megaliths and myths around Albium, if they're historical, tall of the myths, certainly the Megalus predate any conception of Britain or England. There was no England because the Angles hadn't arrived, the Anglo-Saxon hadn't arrived, etc., these sort of idea. That's the proposition that Zaki Assyril puts forward. There's some sort of grasping for a post-empirial sense of Britain, but more specifically England, and there's a proposition in the book that, in fact,

English identity as opposed to like Welsh and Scottish identity, English identity was never developed because it was just rolled into the concept of empire, basically. And so English identity was rolled into a conception of, domination over others and domination over the Welsh and the Scottish and the Irish, first of all. It's a sort of idea. So it's a massive, it's a big, big discussion about whether you can have a progressive Englishness. And I think that's one of the things, certainly it's going on in Zachia Sewell's book, but I think it could be one of the things for this renewed interest in sort of folklore, etc.

Yeah, I'm sure all that's true, but I mean, I suppose I'm going to keep, this is going to be on my refrain throughout this episode, I think. Like, none of that is new. using the word Albion, appealing to an imagined and mythic past, getting really into Druid and Stone Circles, that's the first instances of that on record are like the late 18th century. It doesn't even mean it's not connected to all those things you're talking about, because it's partly people are already getting pissed off about industrialisation and slavery.

People like William Blake, already want to find a different way to think about, like, what it means to be British and what it means to be English. And immediately they're getting into kind of this mishmash of like contemporary mysticism, invented mythologies, self-consciously invented mythologies, and attempting to mythically reconstruct, you know, druids and stuff. Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you look at all of the terms that have been used,

where that is like the folk horror revival, the folklore renaissance, there's also talk of like a weird renaissance around weird walks, etc. You know, it's specifically seen as like this reinvention or this re-discovery of these things. do you know what I mean, this re-emergence of these things, but of course that's also the temporality of, like, myth. Mythic time is also the temporality of loops. One of the ways you might start to think about a new character that this might have taken on is,

one of the things I found interesting in Zachia Sue's book is that she talks about her interest in paganism. She uses a phrase, it's mostly tang-in-cheek, she says. That's a direct lift. Mostly tang-in-cheek is my interest in paganism. It's not completely tang-in-cheek. That was all around in the 90s. Like I had friends who, in this group called

the radical fairies who were queer pagans in the 90s. And they would have said exactly the same thing. Yeah, no, no, but I just think it's much more widespread now, that approach and that interest in folklore, etc. Yeah, it might be, yeah. I think, but I think you can say of almost any specialist interest, like almost anything that was like a kind of niche interest at one time that took a bit more effort to learn more about,

you can say now there's more people into it, because you can just look it up on the internet. I was really fascinated by this whole range of stuff, from like Wicca to standing stones to druids and all that stuff. I was really fascinated by that stuff when I saw 13, 14. I spent loads of times in the libraries of West Lancash here at Sefton. Looking up all this stuff and looking back, there were loads of books around then. They had been published between about the mid-70s and the very early 80s. So there was obviously this big, there was this big wave of interest.

that stuff then, really as an sort of extension of the long 70s and the long 60s. But like it took effort. Like if I'd been able to just like look it all up on the internet, and I'd have been totally, I'd have been even more into it. You know, most of my friends, like, most of my friends, like, were casually interested. If I said, oh, do you know about Stonehen? Did you know, like, the, the, so, no one knows why they've built it, and the sun on the summer solstice, like the sun comes up. People, like, everybody thought that was casually interesting. Like, nobody, nobody didn't think out of that. that's interesting, but it was a big hassle to learn about it.

You had to go to the library and look for these special books. So it's not a value judgment. I just think it's an interesting, I think it's a feature of sort of internet culture, that loads of, for good and bad and neutral in all kinds of ways, like it's just much easier now for something that's sort of interesting, but for people to like learn loads about it

and for some people to get like really into it, to assemble sort of whole aesthetics out of it. I mean, in a way, to me, like structurally, doesn't really seem that different from, you know, like people being really into hyperpop or something or like people who haven't been to vapor wave. It's like people talk about these as like micro scenes and stuff, but it's sort of a feature.

In many ways, a good feature of internet culture that those things can emerge. But it doesn't mean it's not interesting. It doesn't, you know, if it's just a matter of people getting into this stuff who wouldn't have got into it 15 years ago because it would have been a bit too high effort to get into it, that's still a thing that's happening.

That's not to dispute, like it's a theme that's happening. When we were sort of discussing the show and getting ready and sort of researching it, when we found there was a link to this festival, this neo-ancientist festival, which Weird Walker sort of involved with, which is a kind of festival event, kind of involving a lot of this, you know, it's basically talks about all these kind of issues, and it's some art and some film and music from people like Shovel Dance Collective. And yeah, I think obviously the specific,

The absolutely exact configuration you're going to get of those elements now is going to be slightly distinctive compared to what it would have been like 20, 30 years ago. But also, none of it seems radically unfamiliar to anyone who's been to Glastonbury or Totnes any time in the past 50 years. So I think both things can be true at the same time, though. I don't forget, it should be unfamiliar to people because it's like a revival, isn't it? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So there's a couple of ways into it.

I think there might be something distinctive about the way people are treating this stuff. We could probably go through the history of like weird Britain and try to work it out a little bit, basically, about how people have related to this stuff in the past and what's the history of all of these sort of these rituals and these sort of like myths, lots of which were just like just invented, reinvented or invented in the Victorian time. The other thing that I wanted to just to put in contact before we get into the history is like whether it's a widespread phenomenon, whether it's not a widespread phenomenon,

and whether it's new or not, there are definitely people who are thinking about this stuff in terms of a search for, like, conception of Britishness or more specifically conception of Englishness. Because, like, there's a couple of things that are going on at the same time.

You know, one of them is, like, a really almost hysterical reembrace of, like, of a sort of dominant form of Britishness. Britishness, as in, like, Great Britain. You know, all last summer there was this thing raised the banners where people went and put up Union Jacks everywhere, basically. what is the conception of Britishness you're embracing there?

We can talk about like invented rituals, etc., these sorts of things. Most of the rituals we associate with Britain around, you know, the royal family, etc. They're all invented in a Victorian era specifically to attach the working class to conception of empire. Benedict Anderson's imagined communities is the place you go to talk about that, do you know what I mean? And all of those are kind of real fucking pressure. Do you know, would you have attachment to the royal family? When Queen Elizabeth the second dies, I think some people had attachment to her, particularly older people, I just don't think that's the attachment to King Charles in that same way, basically.

And then at the same time you have like the artist previously known as Prince Andrew, I don't know what was supposed to call him anymore. Andrew, Mountbatten, Windsor. I was that weird. I've preferred my formulation. Basically, an Epstein Island paedophile, where paedophilia is basically really is about proving your superiority above the, the masses who don't count. That conception of Britishness linked to the royal family is under real pressure, I would put it that way. And like the idea of Great Britain has still a great power in the

world, I think that's under pressure because because of the way that Trump runs his presidency, the subservience of British foreign policy to the US is never being clearer, basically. Like the absolute lack of any sort of like any sort of conception of Britain is a great international power. that's just, sorry, but that, you know, and that's a holdover from Great Britain from, that's all gone as well. So, like, what is it? What is it that the race, the ban, is it the patriotism, the pride in Britain? What is that based on? I think I know it's based, it's based on racism and, like, great replacement conspiracy theories, these sorts of things, do you know what I mean? But it's not obvious what the rituals and the traditions,

perhaps the England football team, I don't know, but two world wars and one world cup, I don't know, but you don't even hear that so much these things. I think Second World War probably does play a role in that, I suppose, as like the idea of Britain as a force for good in the world. Yeah, that's true. And it's also significant we've got a Labour government. And historically, Labour governments in Britain have been pretty much defined by their particular answer to the question. What does it mean to have a modern Britain, a progressive vision of Britain?

Yeah, the most interesting example is the Italy government and the project of the festival of Britain. which is a very, very specific, very explicit project to put forward an idea of Britain as a country that's defined by its historical commitment to being at the leading edge of industrialisation and urbanisation and understands the continuation of that project as being a broadly socialistic, social democratic project, a project to be at the leading edge of social democracy. It's really scary to the right, the right hate it. the Tories in the 50s can't really come up with a version of what Britain's supposed to be. They themselves actually are quite conscious of this. Some of the most interesting Tory thinkers and politicians in the 50s. Like they themselves are quite anxious that they don't have a vision. And then Harold Wilson, you know, becomes associated with the Beatles and his most famous speeches about the white heat of the technological revolution.

And Tony Benn is like the key figure in the Labour government charged with like leading the technological revolution. and when it looks like the logical destination for that is a socialist Britain. That's one of the things that drives the ruling class into a total panic of reaction in the 70s and 80s. But even Blair, the Blair government, has the Cool Britannia project, the idea that Britain's going to be the ultimate post-forwardist engine of the creative economy and the consumer culture. And even that was like a revivalism of Cool Britannia, isn't it?

Not Cool Britannia, of the swinging 60s, basically. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was vapid. It was kind of vapid at the time, and it was also not able. It couldn't connect with any of the forces that obviously would have given it

some real legitimacy just aesthetically. Like, Colbertania, it couldn't be about jungle and drum and bass. It had to be about oasis, because if it'd been about jungle and drum and base, you'd have had to do something about racism in the Metropolitan Police, and they didn't want to go there.

The NHS as well. Do you remember the opening of the Olympics in 2012? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thing and all that, you know, the NHS goes marching through. It's been the problem. a problem for those sections of the British state and establishment, including the more conservative sections of the Labour movement,

who do not want the project of Britishness to become a socialist project. They've had this problem since the early 50s, well, actually, the single institution that did the most good for most British people, and their most proud of is most socialist institution in the NHS. And you can see, I think you can see a lot of things, including like the shit labour government like royalism in the 70s like the Queen's Silver Jubilee

and things like that you can see a lot of those things I would say as attempts to deviate from that as attempts to find some other question because of course the obvious answer the question everyone knows well what is there in Britain the people are proud of what makes us proud

to be British like what should we celebrate well everybody knows it's the NHS but also everybody knows well as soon as you really allow that to be stated very clearly explicitly. People are going to start saying, well, like if universal services free at the point of use pay for from general taxation have produced the only popular institution in our history, why don't we try that with education? Why don't we try that with universities? Why don't we try that with local government services? Why don't we try that with

everything? And they don't want to go there. It's the magical forces of the bond markets, you see. That's an evil wizard called the bond markets. The great giant Albu. battles it across the 20th century and loses. The Great Giant Album is the loyal vassal of its Leeds Law, the Bond Market. Team field team must be offered at all times. It would be completely, it will bring down the curse upon the land. It will bring darkness upon the land from which we'll never recover if we break field team without Leeds laws, the bond market.

You know, that post-war period is also the period of decolonisation, of course, which is why you would have to start to rethink of what a post-imperial Britain would look like. And you can sort of see that whole Thatcherite period and like, you know, right-wing culture since that period has been about trying to re-establish pride in empire, etc. You know, that's what anti-woke culture is

in this country and all this sort of stuff. The other interesting thing is that like that white heat of technology, that conception of modernism is the thing that breaks down in the 1970s. And it's so it's not a surprise that like when that conception of linear times, the linear time of modernism doesn't seem as to be as persuasive is when you get revivals of like, you know, this resort to like myth and circular time and these sorts of these sorts of things. Because, yeah, the place we'd look, if Blair was reviving the sort of like swinging London, swinging 60s, you know, this sort of folk law revival, etc. It's a revival of the 70s, which is a revival of elements of the Victorian era, etc., etc. Well, that's all true, but I'm not going to stop talking about William Blake on this episode.

I'm going to say there's basically a direct through line to William to Blake here. And Blake is such an important figure because he seems to subsequent generations to have been somebody who really grasped something that was really deeply problematic about the logic of industrialisation and the logic of capitalist industrialisation. And its connection to a whole politics of knowledge, for example, which regards knowledge production as driven by kind of the instrumental goals of industrialisation and capital accumulation. And Blake seems to have grasped all this

and he seems to have been offering a kind of imaginative critique of it and a sort of imminent critique of capitalist modernity and Blake and everything that flows from Blake, it becomes an imaginative resource for people to draw on when they're making critiques of the logics of capitalist industrialisation and modernity, but from the right and the left actually. It remains one of the great challenges. How do you both acknowledge the power of those critiques

and deploy their mythic capacities, like without collapsing into reaction and without ignoring the fact that we're not going back to a mythic past and we wouldn't want to go there if we could. But again, like I'm always saying, this isn't really new. It's something Martin Engels are aware of in the Communist Manifesto with their statements about the country and the city. they're aware that we're not just saying, wipe out of the peasant past and build the shiny urban future.

Because that's, I mean, I think Martin Engels already can see quite clearly in the 1840s. I mean, that's the logic of a certain kind of fascism as it becomes with the Italian futurists in the early 20th century. So it's always a question for it. It's always a question, what do we do with all this stuff? We've got all this stuff that maybe it's residues of a real past, maybe it's just imagine. and aesthetic resources, and, you know, and we sort of know that there's something really powerful, if only aesthetically, about these, like, big stone monuments. And we sort of know that there was something really shitty going on with people being prosecuted

for witchcraft, and it had something to do with forms of misogyny. And we also know that, like, a thousand years before that, well, there were, you know, people do seem to be, like, worshipping nature gods, like, before they got, they got proselytized by Roman Christian missionaries. So what do we do with all those knowledgees? What do we do, all those little bits and pieces? How do we put them together into a package which somehow exploits or deploys their aesthetic power, their affective power, without just becoming, you know, creepy fascists, without just sort of dismissing it or that sort of nonsense?

What do you do with the Enlightenment is one way to put that? But let's not go down that part. I just wanted to say that. Blake is like just a really interesting figure, because if England was going to have a national anthem, rather than just have God save the king, it would be known, which is a fucking terrible anthem. And like, you know, that really does figure that conception of Britishness or Englishness as like domination. I just linked to the ruling class, basically, these rituals of the ruling class, etc. Or rule Britannia would be the ever the other one, wouldn't it, basically.

Britain rules, the waves, etc., etc., etc., but that, you know, the other thing, the song which would be put forward would be Jerusalem. Do you know what I mean? I know it's a poem that then gets put to music. Billy Bragg's choice for the national anthem. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The only other one would be Swinglow Sweet Chariot is what England rugby union fans as sing.

But of course, in our previous episode on hobbies, we've already dismissed English rugby fans as Beyond the Pair. Rugby Union, to be clear. Rugby Union, we should be clear. Not fans of proper rugby. Yeah, so, yeah, Jerusalem is the sort of Blake's conception. It's almost like the er romantic sort of like source for, like you said, different conceptions of Englishness,

but you can certainly get a sort of radical conception of like Englishness out of it. One of the facts in this Finding Albion book is just the rapid pace of like industrialisation, but also of urbanisation. So in 1800, only a fifth of England's population lived in towns and cities, and then by 1911 it was four-fifth. So that's like an incredible transformation. There was no other country with that proportion until after World War II as well.

So there's a reason massive. And that's why you have to invent, do you do these imagined communities and like, you know, you have to invent Britishness in the Victorian era, if you're the ruling class, etc. Because all of these people are coming from like different parts of the country, etc., moving to cities and towns, all of these sort of like rural folkloric traditions, etc.,

getting lost or flukeloric songs getting lost or not even getting lost but in a it's like a process of creolization isn't it basically i'll be mashed together in a in a city upon which a new culture emerges except you shouldn't just romanticize you know you can see what somebody like blake is responding to with his romanticism but you can also see why people like cecil sharp etc suddenly feel this massive urge to go go and record some of this stuff before it gets lost to history do you know what i mean we've talked about cecil sharp his project to record English, Welsh, Scottish folkloric, etc. This attempt to sort of like

find some sort of folkloric and mythic roots for England at this time of like incredible change basically. Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I mean, at some point we're going to do, we're maybe going to do for a Christmas episode, a weird 19th century episode. We might need a whole microdose or something about Blake. Blake is such a kind of,

he is sort of acid communist, citizen, really. For me, like the next key moment in the story of this emergence of the British weird that we're talking about today. It is like you, said, Kear. It's the late 19th century. It's the moment of what, I can't remember the name of the historian now. It was such a great book called The Imagined Village.

It talks about the way in which part of the project of British imperialism and the conservative reaction to the rise of the Labour movement is to have to foreclose the idea that what defines Englishness and Britishness is its modernity, which has been the widely accepted view around the world and in Britain. really up until the 1890s because why wouldn't it be?

It's the first industrial country, the first urbanised country. It's also the country that's widely seen as being ahead of the rest of the Europe in terms of having parliamentary democracy and stuff like this. And that's why Marx and Engels assume the socialist revolution is going to happen in Britain. Sections of the ruling class are really worried they might be right. So you've got to have a different story about what it means to be Britain. So you have this totally absurd thing. We've said this on the show lots of down before.

I know, but it just can't be said enough. It's so absurd that the idea of the idea of, Britishness and Englishness becomes associated with the kind of bucolic pastoral, because it's literally the least pastoral place in the world by that point. But what's also going on in the 1890s, though, is the kind of esoteric revival. It's things like the Order of the Golden Dawn being created, like people getting interested in the idea that there's these, there might be these ancient occult traditions that can be revived.

And I sort of think there's lots of reasons for it. But to me, I think it's partly as much as any. anything, it's a reaction to the great technological revolution of the period. Because this is the period during which, within the space of one generation, electrification, telephony, powered flight, cars, internal combustion engines, cinema, radio, and phonography, all get invented. And these things, and they're just, these are just extraordinary technologies. If you think, well, it's like to live in a world in like sort of the 1860s, right?

The only one of these kind of technologies of rapid communication that define the modern world that exists at that point is railway. And then basically by the 20s, you've got almost everything that we think of is defining technology today, apart from the high-speed computing, what that makes possible. So it's really extraordinary. And I think the whole way in which magic starts to get to imagined

in like fantasy literature, which has almost nothing to do with any historic idea of like the occult or magic, which is really usually more like some kind of animism, you're summoning spirit and demons. The whole idea of magic, like, really, it's basically like a kind of imaginative response to electricity, to electrification, like, to the fact you're living in this world

where suddenly you can send messages across time and space because there's this mysterious currents of energy running around your house and stuff. So that partly starts getting people interested in the idea that, oh, yeah, well, maybe magic's real, and maybe magic is like, is actually what it is, is like tapping into ancient sources of power. Maybe we can revive it, maybe we can recover it.

And that becomes part of the imaginary of people. And of course, you get these anthropologists and sort of historians and archaeologists starting to speculate about the idea that there might have been this kind of survival of actual pagan religion, like from the Bronze Age, through the Middle Ages, right up to the present day, which, again we said this on the show before, that there's no, the consent is among historians now is that this isn't true, like it's just not true. There were still probably people practicing

something we'd recognise as pagan religion up to about the 9th, obviously about the 10th century, but there's just no evidence of it after that. There's no evidence that that's what was going on with the witch trials in the 16th and 17th century. There's no good evidence for people practicing an ancient pagan religion in like Dorset in the 9th,

late 19th and early 20th century, but loads of people, including like really respectable academics like Margaret Murray, who are regarded as the world authorities on the subject, do totally believe that is all true in like the 1910, 1920s and a publishing books about it, and widely circulating the idea. And it's in that context that you get Gerald Gardner and people like this appearing in the 30s and 40s, like claiming to be the representatives of these ancient, religions. And all of this is partly, I think this is also partly responding, the kind of imaginative, it's at an imaginable level, to the simple fact that if you are a student of classical civilization, which basically the whole British ruling class has to be, because that's what you study at school

and mostly at university, for like more than 100 years. Like that's the case. And you are someone who lives and has grown up in Britain, it does become completely, sort of maddeningly sort of tantalising, that there are all these little hints from the classical sources about what's going on in Britain, what's going on with Stone circles, what is going on with Druids, like what is going on with Druids? What are the Jews? We hardly know what the Druids were. What we actually know about Druids is hardly anything. It is that the Iron Age peoples, that are sometimes called the Celts, seem to have had this kind of fairly well-established network of religious specialists that does seem to have stretched across not just Britain, but what is now France and

parts of Belgium and Germany. They seem to have been these networks of people in communication with each other. They seem to have had some sort of common religion and some sort of cast of religious specialists and kind of knowledge specialists who had a strictly oral tradition and had no written tradition and were very secretive. And the Romans seemed to have felt compelled to completely white these people, like to basically genocide these people in a way they basically didn't do to anyone. They didn't do this to any other religious group. That does. wasn't how the Romans did stuff. And the Romans seemed to have decided, yeah,

we've got to, we've basically got a genocide this whole class of people in this culture. And they claimed it was because they did human sacrifice. And the historiography has really gone back and forth on this, onto saying, oh, it was just Roman imperial propaganda, justifying

this colonial barbarism, like claiming the Jews were doing loads of human sacrifice. There's no evidence. And then other experts have come back on that. And yeah, well, they didn't, they didn't say that about anyone else, really. They didn't really do this to anyone else. So maybe they just were doing those of human sacrifice.

Maybe that was a thing. And like, we just don't know. Like, it was just, and it's kind of, and I think that is incredibly frustrating, actually. Like, you're, like, studying, if you're sort of studying that period of history, you've got all these classical sources, and you've got these really well-attested accounts of the kind of customs and practices of different peoples from across, Eurasia and it's so, it's so annoying. And this has provoked people to try to imagine,

what were they doing, like, what were they up to? And obviously, it provoked a lot of romanticisation, the idea, though, there must have been this ancient, there was this ancient, magical, like, practitioners, and they were anti-imperialists. They wouldn't stand for any kind of Roman imperialism, and they refused to bend the knee to the colonizers, and they were really cool for all those reasons.

It's probably not true. It's probably not true. As far as what we know about those iron age societies at the Romans colonised, is they were massively cast ridden themselves, they were massive slaveholding societies, they were really into chattel slavery, quite likely were into human sacrifice.

So they're like probably weren't, it probably was quite a shit of having to live in one of those places if you weren't a druid or an aristocrat. But still you can see why, is that and the presence of these ancient stone monuments in the landscape are so often provoked a real desire to fill in these gaps

imaginatively. You can still see all of that, this idea that like, basically in the countryside there are these traditions which survive from like pagan times. That is like one of the earth sort of myths behind loads and loads of folk horror films and folk horror sort of ideas and these sorts of things. There's a real compulsion to want it to be true, isn't it?

Like we want it to be true. This is the thing. And again, loads of people, people listening now, there will definitely be people listening, and you're not stupid if you're one of those people who are going to be thinking, oh, wait, but isn't it true? Isn't it just well known that, like, Maple dances and Morris dancing were like, survivals of ancient fertility rights?

I'm afraid the current state of historical thinking on this is no, that's basically not true at all. Most of those things, like Maple dancing had been going on for a few hundred years, but it was basically just like a fun thing to do. I don't think that's true, actually. I think dancing around the Maple was invented by John Rusking in in 1836 basically. Maples had been around for a long time, but he invents that. And then, like,

the idea of, like, a May Queen is invented in a poem by Alfred Tennyson. And these people are consciously trying to create a myth of Mary England, basically, you know. Yeah. I think that's one of the other things that, like, you know, this sort of right-wing conception of Britain or the roots of Britain, is this other myth, basically, this mythical idea of Mary England? and that there's a sort of like pastoral, pre-industrial utopia base, where everybody knows their place as well, I think, is probably in that Merry England idea. You know, the peasants were happy,

and they knew that they were at the bottom of the park. Well, that's true, but it's not only reactionary, isn't it? Because then people like William Morris, who's a socialist, also appeal to that idea. And it's partly used as a way of critiquing, like the brutality of Victorian liberalism. Yeah, yeah, no, that's true, yeah. I mean, even that idea of everyone knowing their place,

well, it's better than the kind of Victorian bourgeois saying, yeah, it's basically fine if loads of poor people die. Like, it's not my problem. Yeah, I don't know if I'd associate Morris with Mary England. Initially, arts and crafts, they've got all this medieval and feudal imagery. Like, it's all this romantic medieval imagery. Yeah.

And it's coming directly from Ruskin. Like, he sees himself as a student of Ruskin initially. Like, he matures out of it to become, like, he's the mature William Morris. It's just a revolutionary Marxist. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's why, you know, the wallpaper design and stuff, have all these kind of pseudo-medieval things.

And, like, you know, like J.R. Tolkien's, like, when J.R. Tolkien's art, for example, is mostly sort of copying William Morris initially. And it's something Raymond Williams writes about in culture and society, that like the line between a conservative, nostalgic, like, view of this rural medieval utopia and a leftist, like, critique of capitalism, it's not always that clear. A leftist sort of conception would be more of, like, common lands, etc. And, you know, basically people having to help each other out, that sort of idea, do you know what I mean? They're sort of like some idea of like a moral economy before

a money economy, that sort of idea, do you know what I mean? We should get back to the point about it like not being true that those are ancient fertility rise. I think that's really interesting because it is that time when folklore, like that's a period when folklore traditions, etc., are being re-examined and like written about and basically reinvented, you know, by people like Ruskin and Tennyson and these sorts of things, do you know what I mean? But, you know, there have been waves in which they're interested in these things have just revived, basically. That's certainly what was happening in like the 1970s. I think that's sort of, it's been happening for the last sort of, I don't know how long,

perhaps 10 or 15 years. I'm not, I'm not quite sure. I went up to the Paceg last year. I went up to the Paceg, which is like a mummer's play which is put on every year up in Hepton Stoll, just above Hebden Bridge. And I was talking to one of the people there. They were going on about how, like, it basically had been reinvented or invented or started in the 70s, basically, this Paseg thing. You know, there was a tradition going back further, but it just ended a long time ago. Basically, a mum's play where the sort of St. George is fighting a load of moors, etc., and they recite some poems and these sorts of things, basically. And they start off, they do the first one at like nine o'clock. they have a drink before the first one

and then they go back to the pub and every couple of hours they do it and so by the time I saw it in the afternoon they were absolutely pissed out of their heads basically. So there's this practice like in a lot of villages in Britain. So it takes place at Easter time as well we should say. Yeah, usually around Easter

and they're plays that are in costumes that look like you could have made those costumes in like the 1400s if you wanted to and that they seem to feature characters like St George or Jesus or a dragon and characters that could have been in kind of in medieval plays, which we know people, we know they were medieval plays. People put on plays, like locally, like amateurs and, you know,

later in the middle-aged professionals would be putting on plays. And, you know, when we were kids, we were basically told quite casually. Like, I mean, kids, oh, yeah, these are these ancient traditions, like, these people have, like, been doing these plays, like, for hundreds of years in these contexts. And in almost all, basically all cases, if you actually dig into it, it's not true. Like someone started doing it. I mean, like you're saying, in this case, the 70s, but I think, like I say, there was a kind of fad for this stuff in the 1890s, 1900s.

But there was also, there was a wave of this stuff in the 20s and 30s. That's when you get organizations like the kindred of the Kibbo Kiff. That's when you get the idea of laylines is first invented in the, is it the 20s or 30s? The old straight track book gets probably. Yeah, 30s enough. think. Yeah, it's in the 30s and that's connected to the things we've talked about on the show before, like the right to Rome movement, the growth of rambling culture. Have we got up to laylines now? Maybe we have now got up to... Let's do laylines, yeah.

The idea of laylines offers port forward in a book called The Old Straight Track. Alfred Watkins published in 1925. And basically, the claim in the old straight track is, if you look on a map and you find the location, there are loads of ancient monuments. It's probably worth keeping in mind that it's not really relevant that at this time, like carbon dating wasn't really a thing. And so they weren't totally clear how old like Stonehenge was or how old all the burial mounds and stuff where.

And so Watkins is talking about a whole range of different ancient monuments, which would include stone circles, which are mostly from the Neolithic period. So you're talking about, you know, three to five thousand years ago. and Iron Age Hill forts, which will be much more recent. There will be from like 2000 to 1,000 years ago, and also old churches and wells and all sorts of stuff. Then you can see that many of these are all, that many of these are actually aligned in straight lines with each other. And his initial proposition was that ancient people had used them as trading routes.

The ancient people had used these as monuments along these trading routes. And then over the course of the 20th century, this gets mixed up with interest in the occult and neo-paganism and esotericism. And there's a very popular idea emerges that laylines are not just trading. They're actually currents through which some kind of mysterious like earth energy like travels like between one part and another. And these sites were sites at which magical practitioners of some kind were able to tap into. sort of the energy of the earth. And I think some of this is partly influenced by the kind of popularisation of ideas like chakra and internal energy in the human body, which is coming from things that which are

being borrowed from Chinese and Indian medical and quasi-medical traditions and traditions like tantra in India. It's partly being influenced by Chinese geomancy, sort of Chinese sort of earth magic, which is the origins of feng shui. One of my favourite ever iteration of this is a book I read in the early 80s as a kid which had this whole theory that actually, based on Chinese geomantee, like earth magic, earth energy is real, but it travels in currents and spirals. It doesn't travel in straight lines, but these laylines constituted some sort of an artificial

grid through which ancient people were tapping the earth energy and they exhausted it, which is why magic doesn't work anymore. And they had all this energy, they had all this evidence based on lots of folklore, lots of folk tales and myths about places where either a dragon who they said represented the earth energy had been killed or an ancient cow had gone, a magical cow had gone dry. And that represented the energy had been exhausted. I thought it was a really ingenious idea. I was very taken with this.

My interest in all of that stuff was for a very long time, like completely killed the day I read. I can't remember where I already it was this really basic critique which said, forget about the Earth energy thing, the whole old straight track layline thesis was wrong and it's wrong simply because if you pick enough points on a map then there's going to be straight lines between them

just by laws of geometry, just arbitrarily. And then if you look at the number of different points on any given map, Watkins was finding, is that enough if you just scattered object, if you get some dice or something and scatter them on a paper map at random, and there's that many of them in that smaller space that you'll get straight lines. And the answer was totally yes.

I remember the feeling of it. I remember I was about 14. I was like, I was sort of disappointed, but I was also somehow massively relieved. I thought, I don't have to worry about all this stuff anymore now. I don't have to worry. This was total bologues, like from beginning to end. But it remains this really powerful idea, and the idea of laylines is still there. It's there in Alan Moore's book, From Hell, Alan Moore's Last Great,

work in my opinion before we got too into magic to be able to write properly. It's important to kind of psychogeography people. And my point in telling this whole story, this amount of detail, is this thing that's become this really powerful park and a contemporary mythology and a mythology of ancient weirdness in Britain, the idea of laylines. Originally, I think it basically just, it does come out of the emergent rambling culture. It comes out of, you know, the Watkins was into hiking. He was in turn, he was noticing on his walks

that you could draw straight lines between all these little monuments. And in a way, that illustrates something about this whole process, I think, actually, that takes us all the way through to the popularity of weird walks today. One reason these things like stone circles and standing stones excite our imagination so much

is because, well, we are, it's incredibly urbanised country. Like, there isn't that much rural space left to walk around in any way. And frankly, the landscape is, boring, like especially in England, but like, you know, compared to the great mountain ranges of continental Europe or North America, like, you've got Snowonia, but it's even that, it's basically got one mountain by anybody else's standards internationally, and you've got

the West Highlands, but it's pretty boring, like the weather shit most of the time, and so it's one of the things that makes it interesting, you know, gives it a bit of interest, gives it a bit of animation, gives you, if you're out for a day for a hike, like walking to the stone circle, will both take you somewhere interesting, give you something, interesting to look at. Well, they're often in these really impressive locations. It is a way of like hanging onto something. I was going to say about this whole question of like, well, why do people want to believe in sort of pagan survival? Why do one of people want to believe that? Why do people want to believe in the earth energy? Like it rather than just looking at the standing stones.

I do want it to be true. I wish it were true that an ancient religion had survived, you know, endorse it in the new forest, like for thousands of years. Like I wish it were true that there as a sort of, the stone circles were basically like chakras, but for the earth and not the, not the yogic body. And I wish it were true, because it is, it's genuinely horrible, the extent to which British rural life, British rural life and culture was like totally destroyed by the enclosures and the industrial revolution in a way which wasn't done to the rural population, hardly anywhere else in the world. We've talked about this on the show before. it's the reason why British food become so bad

is because peasant culture gets just basically genocided. It doesn't get slowly eroded the way it does in Italy or Germany or France. It gets, you know, it gets completely destroyed. And so that sense of loss, there's a real deep sense of loss, like loss of our relationship to the land and a loss of the land itself and a loss of our kind of our access to nature and a loss of our access to any kind of, of continuous traditions and ways of life that is real. It is real. Like it has shaped our culture, like practically more than anything else. It's that very tragic loss. And it is, you know,

it is a response to that genuine sense of tragedy, I think, that we wish things had survived. We wish things could still be there that were taken away from us. So we imagine alternatives to you. I agree with you, actually. I do think it is that that sense of loss. I mean, if you look at like rambling culture, you know, that emerges from, well, there's a line of it, which emerges from like, you know, the industrial working class wanting to get out into the countryside, you know, and you have like, well, you have all sorts of things. You have like Clarion Cycling Clubs, etc., just to get out of the cities and these sorts of things. It's that whole weird walk sort of phenomenon.

It is like we need a good excuse to get out into the countryside. Plus the fact that these places, they quite often need you to really spectacular views, basically, and you stand there with the stone circles and you think, well, yeah, I know why this was a place of meaning. I don't know what the meaning was. There's no way for us to know what the meaning people attach to this, but I can see why they put it here. One of the ways in which we can find to think about how we incorporate into our lives is that the story of Earth energy is being spiral and the lay lines being a way of tapping them,

that came up in our conversation because we were incorporating into one of the role-playing games that we play. That's part of how we access the weirdness, basically, is that we incorporate them into our imaginative games. Greg Stafford is one of the great heroes of Roebling Game culture. invented Glarantha and wrote Pendragon. Yeah, yeah. He was really into shamanism. Yeah.

We should talk about a little bit more about megaliths and standing stones. You know, we could talk about Stonehenge as well, which does play a weird role, isn't it? And it's definitely like a symbol of Britishness, but it doesn't fit into the sort of conception of Great Britain at all, basically, because it precedes anybody who may think of themselves as English, basically. The actual construction is something like 2,500 BC I think, but there have been

excavations all around Stonehenge which shows that there were structures there dating back to like 8,000 BC, something like that basically. So this is like really long sort of history. The latest news is wild as well. So they found out relatively recently the load to the stone was brought from stories in Wales but the latest thing is some of it seems to have been brought

from Orkney. Yeah, so basically the big sort of blue stones are being quarried and brought from South Wales, which is like a huge distance. And then he did some carbon dating. And it's the capstones, basically, the capstone on the sort of inner circle are like, yeah, it's brought down from Scotland. Is it Orkney?

I didn't know it was Orkney. It's not even, it's an island. People don't know, that's like an island in the north of Scotland. But it's also like a real centre. There's loads and loads of megalics. Because that would give you a different idea of what stonehenges, isn't it? And so the person who discovered that, he, I can't remember his name, but he put forward this, the meaning of behind this, the fact that like stones were brought from Wales, they were brought

all the way down from Ork, and this huge distance, particularly at that time to transport something, that this, that heavy, that distance is a huge undertaking. And so, you know, the person who discovered that started to theorising, this is a way of, like, binding together the people of the islands, basically, you know, this is sort of like a central place. We don't know if that's true or not, but there's been huge amounts of speculations or meaning placed upon Stonehenge. One of the earliest is from the 12th century, so it's Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was like a great inventor of British myths, basically. You're a sceptic that the first people, the Britain was surrounded by Trojans.

Yeah, no, no, I am a descendant of the great giants who lived in Britain before, of these Isles before these bloody Trojans games. Well, that means you're my natural enemy. That's why I'm so tall, Jen. We should do that the whole Alibbean thing then. Jeffrey of Monmouth has this idea that, like, these aisles, way before they were British, were inhabited by a race of giants.

And then is it Brutus? A Trojan Brutus comes and kills them all. And a load of, like, Trojans and basically Syrians come on small boats, and they found Britain, basically. Just before Jayes. for Arimathea brings Christianity. That all sounds pretty robust to me. But his conception of what Stonehenge is,

for Geoffrey of Monmouth, he thinks that the stones, he doesn't know that the stones come from Wales and come from Scotland. He thinks the stones come from Africa, and that Stonehenge is erected by the Wizard Merlin, which is quite something, basically. I'm not sure how seriously, people take that. I know James still takes it pretty seriously, but I don't know if like people in this in the 13, 14, 15, 16th centuries were, we're taken with that. But then like in the late 18th century,

you get antiquarians come and start doing like calculations that works out that the structures of stonehenge seem to line up with solar activity basically and that the sun, is it that the sun rises through one of the centre stones on the summer solstice? It's something like that. isn't it? The first raise of the sun on the day, the summer solstice, will hit the heel stone, this special stone, like, positioned to the back and will hit immediately. And then on the winter solstice,

I can't remember that the sun hits a different stone or is something else happens, but something happens on the winter and the summer solstice because of the way the stones are aligned. Which has been, I mean, it seems to have blown people's minds, like the ancient people could have done that. I remember when I was learning about this as a kid, he's thinking, doesn't seem like that hard.

You just figure out, you just put a stone in the right place, right, on the day. You know when the special day is. You put a special stone there. Yeah, that is true. But, you know, in some ways, it's obvious, isn't it? You really are going to have to be attuned to the seasons. Either your hunting and gathering or your agriculture is absolutely dependent on it, basically. So you're going to realize the sort of solar movements and the lunar movements, etc.

And these sorts of things. The sort of sense of meaning that gives is that, like, perhaps this is not the result of some barbaric race, but is in fact, you know, some wise, ancient, wise civilization. So Stonehenge is erected roughly about the same time as the, well, some of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, of course, those were erected over thousands of years, so they don't line up exactly. But like, you know, that sort of civilization in Egypt, which has got writing, etc., which can later be translated, et cetera, these sorts of things, you know, the idea that like, that's a civilization, there were ancient civilizations, but Britain was outside of that,

and it was like a place of druids, etc, etc, etc. Then there's a proposition, in fact. I can't remember who proposes this, that Stonehenge was directed by the druids. There's druidic orders, which are people trying to revive, kind of imagine the druidry,

start in the early 1800s, and they're part of that whole romantic moment that Blake is part of. I think they actually start in London, because London is the only place you've got a concentration of enough freaks to want to pretend to be druids. Yeah. And then at some point, the ancient order of druids,

which is basically a kind of quasi-Masonic, a sort of fraternal order of the kind. There are so many different versions being invented in the 19th century. They start holding ceremonies at Stonehenge at some point. And the assumption that the druids had some association with Stonehenge, well, they built Stonehenge. It was understandable for a long time, just because, you know, the only thing anybody knew, really, from the ancient sources

about any form of British culture before the Roman occupation was there were these people who were Jewish, who were the priests, and they were spoken, and they did some sort of nature issue. That was as much as you had really told by the Greek and Roman writers. And so it was totally understandable, really, before you've got carbon dating, showing that, well, actually, the Stonehenger was built by a totally different group of people. So there's an idea of like these wise scientists, these ancient scientists, these ancient ancient, wise, almost scientists taking these astronomical measures, etc., are the ones who built Stonehenge. Other excavations have just excavated huge amounts of animal bones, etc.

builds up this conception, but actually it's a place of festivity. Yeah, and there are loads of different theories from archaeologists and paleoanthropologists with different political and ideological orientation. So there's a theory that the people who built Stonehenge were like, they were actually hunter-gatherers who didn't want to have to participate in the agricultural revolution because they could see where that was going to end. And then there's a theory, you know, obviously the dominant theory has always been. It was something to do with the coming of agriculture because it was about tracking the cycles

of the year by having built this thing, which, you know, shows you what time of the year you're in because of where the sun hits the stones. And, yeah, there's been so many, there are just endless theories. I mean, it is obviously in its way. it's this kind of blank slate onto which people will try to write whatever kind of political mythical meanings they want. I mean, it's true. I mean, it is true. I mean, it's just worth saying, like, the whole question around the meaning of ancient monuments in archaeology is the sort of dominant view in archaeology has always been that the emergence of ancient

monuments must go in time with the emergence of these very hierarchical cultures because only a very hierarchical culture can have like somebody able to say to a load of other people I put in this amount of work for something other than getting food and having a good time. That's the story of the pyramid, isn't it, basically? It's like, you know, you have pharaohs who organise huge, well, craftsmen and slaves, basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But of course, I mean, it gets politically contested by people who say, who want to say, well, actually, actually there are ways of getting stuff done without just having a big boss at the top, and they're always getting of stuff done without slaves. The current view on pyramids is there was no

slaves involved. It was a sort of big national project that workers actually got paid really well and got loads of extra beer and stuff. But the reason it's political is because it basically involves a set of assumptions about what human societies are like. And if you assume that human societies as such, if they have any degree of complexity above that of, you know, technology free hunter gathering are necessarily hierarchical, then you associate the emergence of large-scale monuments with the emergence of hierarchy. If you don't assume that, then you don't. I agree, yeah.

The problem with pyramids is that they are built so that they can hold the remains of pharaohs, which does seem to be hierarchical. Whereas with Stonehenge, I think it's different. I much prefer the idea that this is feasting and festival in order to hold together disparate communities who don't encounter each other or encounter each other quite rarely outside of that.

I mean, I'd much prefer to have this idea that having a place to have communal festivals that brought these things into being. I am, of course, projecting my own as a communist predilections onto that. Yes, for sure, yeah, no. Of course, the other reason why we might find that sort of attractive is because in the 1970s

Stonehenge does become the site of a really big free festival, basically. And we've talked about that. We did an episode on festivals, a few summers ago, etc. But, you know, this is a free festival. It's high point tens of thousands of people just turning up, people turning up, you know, with their own stages, etc.

You know, there is an economy there based around cheap drugs, etc. But yeah, so you could see that as some sort of recurrence of the original purpose of Stonehenge. And of course, we've done that, we did this story as well, you know. English heritage, who owned this site, who have a very, specific, particularly in the 1980, a very specific conception of what English was and what sites such as Stonehen should be used for, you know, and they basically banned the festivities and then the police ambushed what was known as the peace convoy of people who lived in their vehicles, etc. ambushed them and smashed them to pieces, basically, in a great scandal

called the Battle of the Beanfield. We've done all this story before, but like we can come to it from a different angle now because perhaps they're the ones who were, who were actually treating Stonehenge as it was originally meant to be treated rather than as a reverent monument to the British nation. We don't actually know, but that's what I'm choosing to protect onto the blank slate myself. It's an interesting point, isn't it? Because you used to be able to just go to Stonehenge, walk around in, touch it, go home again. I think the reason I've never visited Stonehenge is because I was really fascinated by it.

As a kid, I grew up in the north, and I had a big poster of Stonehenge and more wall. I couldn't wait to go. Before I ever got to go, the festival got shut down, and the fences got put up around it, and I found it too sort of heartbreaking. Well, I've got good news for you, Jim. You are allowed to go next to the stones

and touch the stones during the solstices, so. No, I know, that's what I was just going to say. To the extent that people's practice fulfills some kind of criteria, a sort of formal religion, like it's allowed, but you're not allowed to just go and, you know, play music there and take drugs there openly,

and like the festival. So that does say something about ideas of respectability. That history, which kind of leads up to the Stonehen Free Festival, being really the kind of centre point of British counterculture in the 80s. Obviously, there's a really important moment in the 60s, but I think it's always worth keeping in mind that there's this fairly continuous history going back into the interval period. I think it's in the late 50s.

Maybe it's the early 60s, maybe it's 62. You get the foundation of Finderall. which is the first intentional community in Britain, it sometimes said, is community in Scotland, which is still there, which is very much tied to the emergence of a kind of ecological consciousness, in some ways tied to the emergence of green politics, actually, relating to things we talked about recently on the show. Some of the kind of founders of that community, Dorothy McLean and Robert Crombie,

for example, have both written about and talked about what they regarded as their encounters with nature spirits, fawns or fairies like in that kind of area. Of course, interest in fairies, interesting the idea that fairies are some sort of nature, some sort of nature spirits, which are real in some way, that people can have encounters with. It's been part of the kind of narratives of this kind of weird Britain,

at least since the occult revival of the 1890s. And it's also, of course, that's happening in Scotland. And I mentioned Orkney, and I think it is important, I think it is important to say this isn't just an English phenomenon. You know, Wales becomes a hugely important place for hippies to go to and be weird. And, you know, there are standing stones in Wales. There are loads of ancient monuments in Wales. For years and years in mid-Wales, there's like the TP villages,

where people are living, literally people live in T-Ps. This getting back to nature idea, which is a phenomenon of the 60s and 70s, but again, you can really trace it back to the land, back to nature, romanticism, through the early 20th century and arguably all the way back to early 19th century romanticism. With Wales as well, a lot of the traditions associated with Wales,

they were also sort of invented. There's this guy, Yolo Moganug, who basically claimed to have rediscovered a load of ancient texts. I'm not saying he put it through chat, GBT, but basically, he did the equivalent at the time.

He sort of made him up, basically. And then you could sort of like get the invention of things such as, the Ested-Ford, et cetera, that really comes out of that Victorian sort of period where they're looking for meaning, basically. And like, Stedfother is like, so it's very linked, actually, to like, to the Welsh language and revival of the, or the English suppression of the Welsh language. I was always told at school, I grew up in Wales, went to school in Wales, and we were always told that, you know, just, you know, 20 years before, if you spoke Welsh in school, you'd be made to sit in the corner with a Dempsey's hat on, etc. and there was a real sense that the Welsh language had been suppressed and it's had a really big revival.

And the Ice Steadford is like a big festival that takes place every year which is sort of focused around Welsh music and Welsh poetry, basically. It's basically competitive poetry resource. When I was in junior school, we went to the Ice Stedford's, and we were playing a song on the recorder, and I wasn't very good at it. So the teacher said, Kea, don't blow, just through the fingers. until we researched this show, I thought the Order of Druids was a Welsh thing.

I thought it was tied to the Ice Dead Fort. I only learned that it was actually started in London, like when we were researching this. But obviously, like, the Istedfords do like to involve, they are quite tied to that kind of reinvention of the idea of druidism. And this idea of this ancient bardic tradition. I was very disappointed to realise all that stuff had been invented, actually. As someone from the north-west of England, who had spent a lot of time, in Wales and quite romanticised or that Welsh stuff. I kind of realised, I realised all the English

stuff was nonsense. I was 14. I think I was 18 before I realised. The eyes deadfods were just invented as well. That's all made up. It's a good example of how these things are incredibly ironic because that stuff is all tied up in people's imagination now with kind of neo-paganism and some idea of a druidate pre-Christian past, which is not at all the actual historical role played by Welsh language culture, in British culture, Wales and Welsh language culture was the one last redoubt of Christianity

after the Anglo-Saxon kind of invasions kind of drove Christianity out of what is now England. So Wales was like the bastion of Christianity in Britain. Before Ireland, before anybody even asks, no, Ireland, no, St Patrick was from Wales. So Wales, like,

Wales sort of understood itself, as this bastion of Christian, of like, sort of post-Roman Christian civilization for centuries, like before, until the Romans came and, you know, converted the Angles and Saxons to Christian. The association of Wales with like the harp, etc. And then the traditional Welsh dress, etc. For girls, that would be like a tall black hat and a shawl, etc. And on St. David's Day, which is a patron saint of Wales, girls would dress up in traditional Welsh dress.

boys could either wear a daffodil or a leak. I used used to wear a leak because you could eat it during break time. A raw league. A raw league, yeah. There were hard times in rural worlds. That's all invented by this aristocrat called Augusta Hall, you know, during a late Victorian time. The whole idea of nations is a recent mythic invention, do you know what I mean? So all sorts of countries have to invent national myths, sometimes out of local myths.

I bet you could find a connection as well to the sense that aristocrats have completely lost control over the church. The churches have still got this real moral authority in late, Victoria and Britain, but they're really autonomous from the aristocracies, and the aristocracies start getting interested in the idea of Druents and pagans, older forms of modern theocracy. Carrying this forward into the 70s and 80s, I think quite a lot of listeners would be disappointed if we don't mention the work of some sort of really sort of children's fantasy writers,

actually in the sort of 60s, 70s. I think really planting the seeds of a lot of what is still part of the kind of new, the weird Britain and imaginary. So the person who always gets mentioned here is Alan Garner. Alan Garner is a writer from Cheshire, which is in the, well, people claim Cheshire is in the northwest of England. As someone from Lancashire and Merseyside, I'll tell you it's actually in the Midlands, of course. His family, like supposedly, have been there for hundreds and hundred of years.

So he writes these books which are all about. about, you know, these kind of, some of them are just children's books, some of them more kind of adult or young adult books, and we don't really have time to summarise them, but they often treat with themes of, like, people in the present encountering these kind of mythic elements from the Celtic past or the kind of ancient past. One thing we've talked about before is one of his most famous book, it's called The Owls Service, and it's also a 70s, like a classic sort of 70s TV children's series, etc.

one of the things Alan Garner is associated with is that the countryside sort of like embeds sort of like mythic structures and so that our service is all about these three young people who are in the 70s in Wales who find themselves reliving the myth from the Moggin

I can never say the Magen Mabenegiog so anyway these three people are sort of like they're caught in, because they're in this valley because of they're in this particular place they're sort of forced to rehearse and recreate this. It's a love triangle, yeah. And like they're basically, you know, he's really, he's really associated with

this idea that like particular places have particular like mythic loops in them. One of his other famous books is Redshift, once again, a famous sort of like a film from the 70s based in it as well, which is all about, you know, these three looping time loops, like one Roman, one from the 70s, one from the English Civil War, you know, and they sort of overlapping on each and there's particular items that link them together, and it's that sort of idea of, like, looping mythic time, basically. I'm somebody else who you'd associate a little bit with a similar thing who's got is Nigel Neal, who's a writer for TV primarily, etc.

Most famously associated with Quatermas, but he also wrote a load of plays for today's, these one-hour plays, experimental plays, quite often from the 1970s through to the 1980s. And one of the ones he's most associated with, or most famous for, is something called The Stone Tape, a film called The Stone Tape in which this ancient manor house and the whole of like scientists from this company are trying to invent a new material for recording things, you know, beyond just tape. They basically discover ghosts and they discover that ghosts are actually recordings from like really horrific, intense times,

which basically get repeated and played in particular circumstances, etc. So once again, it's that idea of like linking. in particular places to like, you know, mythic looping time, etc. Something you could really see in that. It's like a reinvention of folklore, basically, in the 1970s of it. Quite often gets looped into folk horror. It's not really folk horror, but it's something quite related to it. I mean, this is all happening in the 70s, of course, partly because that's the moment

when the sense of post-war progress stalled. And so the whole question of historicity, like, what does it mean? What is our relationship to the past? it comes into question for people in a way that it is not in question the same way if you can think of yourself is on this kind of linear track or from a regressive past

into a progressive future. I just want to talk about one more play for today. The themes of it are really interesting for our discussion today, which is a film called Pender's Fen. Once again, it's looped into this idea of people link it to folk horror. It's not a horror film at all,

but it's this very strange play for today written by a guy called David Rudkin. it's basically the story of this young man who is really, really conservative, basically. It's about his transition away from, like, being really conservative, wanted to join the army having this like conservative, nationalistic conception of identity, etc. The problem is he's gay and he's repressing it, etc. And it's his journey through, like he meets people from history and he meets this ancient Anglo-Saxon king called Pender, etc., who finally sort of lead him to this revelation that,

When he says these lines I'll read out, which are great, says, I am nothing pure, my race is mixed, my sex is mixed. I am man, woman, light with darkness, mixed, mixed, I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame. And it's that, which I think is great. I'm going to get the words, I am mud and flame tattooed on myself at some point. It's like, it's a fantastic scene. But it's that idea of like there are different conceptions of what Englishness are.

One of them is this idea of like hierarchical order and identity. and clear distinctions, etc. And the other one is this sort of mixed one. And in the play, very much so, it is linked to a conception of a much more pagan roots underneath Christianity, basically. It's a really interesting way in which we can think about these different conceptions about what Englishness might mean

and how, like, different myths or different mythological assemblages are constructed around them. But the other thing to think about as well is this play, this really, like, lots of it is like just people talking about theological, having theological discussions, etc. It went out and there were, there'd been about two other channels at that point, weren't there? BBC 2 and ITV, etc. It goes out peak time, with the idea it'll never be seen again.

It's just, it's sort of incredible. So people also hold this up as like, you know, the change that's taken place in the BBC or, you know, on broadcast TV, which has been dumbed down to such a huge degree that's something like that is utterly, utterly unimaginable. Yeah, well, this end up, coming, like one of Mark Fisher's sort of claims in the 2010s, is that somehow, is that what's

gone with the passing of the golden age of public service television is that it is a certain kind of capacity for weirdness in public culture, in public media. I mean, it's sort of true as an argument, but it's pretty under-theorised in terms of what it's grasping about the specificity of that conjuncture. There's also,

the beginnings of the satanic panics, There's a kind of folk horror and satanic horror in kind of both pub fiction, like prose fiction and films. The idea that the place is crawling with like devil worshippers actually doing magic. It's something that becomes a real theme in things from, you know, horror stories to regional news. And that all, that is all the sort of, you know, that is all the sort of feature of that's mid-70s culture. It ends up infusing big elements of heavy metal culture. culture, it's, you know, that there's, you know, there's lots of, like, you know, I remember

there, I remember as a kid in the 70s. It was like, there were kind of, you could buy occult magazines in W.H. Smith, in a big enough brand. Do you know what I wanted to raise, actually, just as like, just to go from my own biography and from that late 70s, early 80s thing, it's the role at 2000 AD played, and particularly Pat Mill. So he's a writer for 2000 AD comic. I used to read then. I still read now. and he invented this character slain, basically, this whole series around a sort of like mythological sort of warrior character,

but it's like it's absolutely based in pagan myths about the horned god and the earth goddess, etc. You're reading that as like, you know, an 11, 10, 11 year old kid and you don't realize what it is. It just imbues in you all of this sort of like paganism. And then later on, he invents a character Finn who is like, you know, a sort of like pagan left-wing action.

activist, eco-terrorist sort of character. That sort of link of like paganism as part of a sort of like mythological history, then linking it to like left-wing activism, etc. You know, it sort of seeps in. Sure, yeah, yeah, that's really true. We were talking about the Green Party on our, what will have been our previous microdose. And I listened back to that recording. I was listening to me talking about all this stuff about green politics and peace

in the early 80s. I was thinking, hang on, I was like a. 11. How do I even know all this? How do I remember all this? I was precotious. I wasn't that precotious. And the reason actually is something would quite have often happen at a weekend, I'd be with my dad. We go into Liverpool for the day. And one of my dad's favorite place to go to Liverpool is News from Nowhere, bookshop, which is still there now, although it's in a different place. Because it's a radical left-wing bookshop, which has always been run by women. It's a radical feminist bookshop. And quite often, you know, and I would just, and we just, and we just,

just said my dad would be browsing or he'd be like, you know, my dad would be browsing or he'd be talking to the people in the bookshop about stocking some CND leaflets he was helping distribute or something and my sisters would just be sitting drawing or something. I'd be like reading all these pamphlets and books. So I got exposed to quite a lot of this kind of radical feminist stuff and I'd be reading peace news and trying to understand what this cartoon strip was referring to with people describing themselves as green and red. And that's where I was getting. getting about stuff from. I remember one of the things, I remember reading all these kind of pamphlets in news from nowhere about what people were calling the Celtic revival. And it was this

idea that there was this kind of cultural political zone which stretched from sort of Irish republicanism and Welsh nationalism through to emerging green politics, through to some sort of peace politics and it included elements of, but it also included elements of New Age, like it was drawing on bits of the Celtic revival of people like WBH, which is very conservative in character. But it also, it had become infused by this kind of feminist take on paganism and wicker, which is something, you know, it's always important to stress that neo-paganism, I guess, I think it's only really from the 60s and 70s onwards. You start to get versions of neo-paganism, which are claiming that the religion there

inheriting is a religion which had its roots. in a matriarchal culture and a matrilineal culture was actually based on goddess worship rather than the worship of this imagined horned god, which again, the idea that Celtic religion had revolved around the worship of a horn god is this totally made up thing. It's based on like one single central European artifact that was found. It's really not based on anything else, but it becomes part of the cultural vernacular. That's like you were saying here in the 70s and 80s, it ends up in four. the popular TV version of the Robin Hood stories that was on TV when we were 12, 13.

This idea that Herm the Hunter, who's this archaic figure, who's really a kind of pagan god, is like part of ancient English mythology, which is almost completely made up, completely made up based on nothing. But there's this feminist version of all this. It becomes associated with versions of radical feminism, this Celtic revival stuff. So all that stuff is part of this kind of matrix. in the early 80s, like in ways which then over the course of the 80s, they end up manifesting themselves in sort of elements of free festival culture,

elements of squat culture. I remember it was like a really normal thing. I'm remembering now, like at the very early 90s, I moved to London, and I was like nearly everyone I knew lived in squats. It was a really normal thing for people to decorate their squats by painting, like, what was supposed to be like Celtic knots and designs all around. the fireplaces and stuff. I mean, that was very much a sort of antecedent

of the contemporary weird Britain, wasn't it? It's not really surprising. Like, people went from being into that stuff to then getting into, like, Terence McKenna, the American mushroom proselytiser, and his idea of like an archaic revival, his idea that what human culture needed to do to survive industrialisation and avoid nuclear war

is to rediscover the shamanic practices of eating loads of mushrooms. And then it becomes really, it becomes part of sort of folk belief, folk history by the early 90s, that what druids were into, it was worshipping an earth goddess and doing loads of shrooms. Obviously, it's like there's no evidence for. It's not based on anything at all. But for example, in Jez Butterworth's relatively recent TV show, Britannia,

which is this sort of British fantasy show set during the Roman invasion of Britain, mostly from the point of view of Jewelians and Celt, that's the whole deal. Like, Celts are basically sort of 80s crusties. They're sort of 80s like punks with loads of tattoos and shaved heads, and they're really into doing mushrooms, and that's how they do their magic and communicate with their spirit beings. And, you know, and some of them are men, but if they're men, they're a little bit trans,

and they're obviously, there's a lot of, obviously the real power of magic is somehow associated with some positive notion of nature femininity. So all those themes get kind of woven together, kind of imaginatively, in this way, which is obviously really powerful and meaningful for people, but there's no historical base. There's no historical. I know people are always very upset to learn this these days. Historical evidence, literally, there is no historical evidence of anyone constantly consuming a Liberty Cap mushroom in order to induce psychoactive effects in Britain before the second half of the 1970. Well, that's not true because I know that.

the pics used to paint themselves blue, strip naked, and take a lot of mushrooms to berserk out. I'm taking this history into the 90s. Also, that kind of festival culture really comes to informed strands of club culture. One of the great British clubbing institutions, I think, is a club night called Worley gig, which really has its roots in the early 80s festival scene, but is a big influence on some elements of British club culture in the 90s. And it's a kind of, it's a of psychedelic world music, very self-consciously hippie, sort of scene. To me, all that is interesting, partly because I can see real kind of echoes of some of those things we're talking about, like Worley Gig. It's sort of pastoral, British, hippie engagement with rave culture. I can see that

being echoed in things that are happening today that we're quite close to. I think, for example, producer Matt's own label and sort of, club nightclub seems like, the wrong word for it, a sort of night, music, performance, dancing, sometimes project called Circle Dance. I mean, Circle Dance obviously has real echoes of Wordy Gig. The names even mean something similar. The name Wordy Gig referred to the idea that a wordy gig. It can mean just like a roundabout, but it can also mean like a Circle Dance. Wordy gig was famous for people doing this big dance where everybody holds onto the edges of a parachute and jumps underneath it. So you can see these flashes into the present. We cannot mention in this whole story. I think we can't avoid mentioning

a figure who is kind of weird that we don't mention, given his weird position in British weird culture. We don't remember very often as Julian Cope. I mean, lots of older listeners will know who Julian Cope is. A lot of younger listeners might not even know who he is. He's a completely bizarre trajectory Copey, isn't he? Because he starts off, he starts off as a public figure. as the lead singer of a band called Teardrop Explodes who are kind of, they're sometimes described as post-punk, they're more sort of new wave, in to far as there was such a thing as British New Wave bands,

coming out of Liverpool in the early 80s, but they're already, they're really notable compared to any of their contemporary, like New Order or the fall from Manchester, places like that, in that they're notorious for, like, he's notorious for taking loads of acid. Yeah, this was a feature of kind of drug culture in Liverpool, like, you know, in the 80s,

because there was all this really cheap acid that scallies would go and buy in huge quantities at these hippie free festivals and then sell on the counter the state where cheap blotter acid became a slightly safer alternative to sniffing glue if he wanted to get massively out of your head. So there was all this kind of cheap acid around. But Copey was sort of known as an acid head,

even though the music he's making was this sort of new wave pop, really. But then he has a genuine massive hit with World Shire. him out in 1983 basically. Yeah. As a solo act as Julian Coe. But he was like a huge, I don't know where it reached on the charts, but I remember it, it was a, you know, a song that everybody would know, basically. And then after that, having, you know, got to the kind of lower reaches of top pop status in the kind of mid-80s

and kind of getting Radio One airplay and sort of top of the pop appearances and stuff, he then just sort of spends the rest of his career, as far as I know up to the present, mostly being this sort of professional hippie. So it becomes really influential in popularizing kraut rock, popularizing early 70s like German, sort of psychedelic rock, but bands like Cannes and Noy, who are much less well known then than they are now,

partly because he published this big book about them, one head's guide to the great cosmic music, cosmish music, which sells quite well in the 90s. He has this website where there's loads of stuff about like stone circles and megalifts, I know at one stage he claims to be he's not just a pagan, he's a neo-heathen, which means he worships the Norse gods. And that usually means you're a fascist, but being a good scouser, he's not a fascist.

He's a left-wing Odinist of some kind. So for a few years in the 90s, if you wanted to know about any of this sort of stuff, like this continuum of stuff from like European acid rock through to snow where to go, where to find British stones, circles through to like, you know, what to do with magic mushrooms. If you found them, then you'd go to Junio and Cope's website, wouldn't you? He also published a book called the Modern Antiquarian, which is also what his website was called, I think. But anyway, you wrote a book called a Modern

Antiquarian, which was specifically about visiting stone circles, etc. really sparked a wave of interest in visiting, you know, not just Stonehench, but like loads of these meganets, which are all over the country, really. Yeah, yeah. He was like, he was the god. He was the go to an obscure little stone circle and do mushrooms there, guy. Yeah, yeah. To me, it's partly, it's having lived through all that history that we're talking about in ways I'm talking about, I would have to say that, for example, in the 2010s, when Mark Fisher starts going on about hauntology and the haunted nature of the landscape and the concept of the weird and how interesting that is,

that I completely understand why it was like super important to loads of people. To me, it already seemed like, well, I felt I could be hearing this stuff for my life really. I'm not saying anyone else should have felt that way. There weren't that many 12-year-olds sitting in, in news from nowhere reading about the Celtic revival in the early 80s. That's something specific about my experience. But it all seemed familiar and like I'd kind of been through several waves of it. I do think Mark plays a linking role, I think,

into like this current Renaissance or revival, basically. You know, they all cite him. The weird walks book I've got has got, you know, talking about hauntology and Mark Fisher and all these sorts of things in this conception of the weird, you know what I mean? I think he plays some sort of role in either the revival of it or framing how people look at it, just as Julian Cope did, you know.

We haven't even really talked about the concept of the weird yet today properly. We have talked about the weird left before, but we've never really gone into the difference between the version of the weird, which is Mark Fisher reading H.P. Lovecraft's essay on weird fiction and telling his blog readers about that. and on the other hand, like keep Austin weird in the States and that kind of weird America thing,

which is completely different, is the almost totally unconnected. Do we just do it really quickly, though? Mark writes this book, The Weird and the Erie, which talks about quite a lot of this stuff. It's got a chapter of Armangana, isn't it, and stuff like that? His definition of the weird is sort of a sense of wrongness because there's something there which shouldn't be there,

and he contrast that with the Erie, which is like, you know, a sense of wrongness because something that should be there isn't there. So it can be associated with the new, basically. Something that shouldn't be there is there, basically. Something new is there. And so our ways or frames of thinking about the world that are disturbed or something like that.

And so weirdness could be seen as, you know, associated with the development or some sort of transitional state that linked to the introduction of the new or to change or to transformation or something like that. Then the ear is more linked to that sort of like hauntological. of thing. Something we thought would be there is no longer there, basically. One way to think about that is like there's an eerie silence in the British countryside because songbird populations have absolutely collapsed, basically. And so the whole tradition of the English countryside with songbirds,

you know, which we might associate with Mary England, that's gone. Should we return to this idea that there, is there or is there not some sort of folklore revival or weird renaissance or whatever? and what is the level of continuity and novelty that goes along with it. I listened to a few of John Doran's sort of New Weird Britain, so it's just playing music from various parts of Britain, etc. There did seem nothing new about the sorts of music that are being created, basically. If there's a revival, it's a revival of the weirdness that went along with, of the liberation that went along with post-poens, something like that,

industrial music, etc, etc. One of the things that did seem different to me is that, like, loads of people were talking about, when they talked about why they made music, it was really was within a therapeutic frame. Do you know what I mean? Of like trying to maintain yourself to deal with like past traumas, etc. You know, and I do think that is a frame that's sort of like using a therapeutic narrative about your life, basically. That's not something that's like we're making this music because we're part of a counterculture.

This is a project to like create a new world, etc. It's not a narrative of liberation. It's a narrative of like repair and maintenance, something like that. That is a really good point. I think there's a sense, I mean, a lot of music that draws on kind of pastoral themes, a lot of music, you can trace it back through the kind of folk revivals of the 60s and 70s. You can trace it back to the influence of like sort of the ultimate weird Britain band, really, the definitive weird Britain brand of all time, the incredible string band.

I think it definitely is the case that at some point, like in the early, 70s, that stuff, even though a lot of it sounds now, from our perspective, it sounds sort of conservative and romantic and its appeals to some mythicized idea of British, like pre-modernity. Like it was absolutely associated in the minds of the people making it and listening to it with like campaign binocular disarmament, you know, growing workers militancy, the student movement and a kind of really kind of revolutionary politics. And from that, the moment that were always sort of appealing to really as a historical market at the mid-80, the great defeats of the left. Like from that moment on, I think people continue making music like that. But yeah, it seems

to have, it feels like it has more of a therapeutic function. Is that the way you describe, that's not to denigrate it at all, because I think it's quite, you know, it's powerful in that way. I think, have we said on the show notes of times, like it's, like it's okay. It's okay to do stuff that isn't making immediate contribution to raising revolutionary consciousness. Partly because a preconditioned for even things that are doing that being effective is people just being able to not feel, not feel chronically depressed all the time. I mean, it's a big, big thing that we've gone over and over and over about the link between therapeutic and like basically go beyond the therapeutic into something about.

That's always the importance of Marx's contribution, really. But the central thing that makes our contribution so important, I mean, even in capitalist realism, he's really talking about depression. And he's trying to give people tools through which to get through depression without just like drugging themselves. That's what makes it so important. I mean, we could also think about like this whole folklore revival of like people wanting these communal rituals basically. Do you know what I mean? Partly it's like wanting these communal rituals to mark the year, the changing of the year out because we are so separated from nature basically.

Obviously there's like climate change in the background there. this sort of like, if there is a linear progression in history these days, it seems to be one towards disaster and decline because of climate change and probably economic stagnation as well. Decline is never a good framing for the left. Let me think about the recent book The Politics of Feeling by Ben Anderson and Anna J. Sequel. They try to outline three different structures of feeling from the three dominant political formations that they think is out there now and the three dominant political. formations is right-wing populism, what they call left progressivism, and then contemporary

liberalism. And part of what I find interesting about them is quite a lot of those structures of feelings that they outline. What's really interesting about that, all three of them have like, one of the definitions of them is their relationship to the past, basically. And so the progressive structure of feeling, the argument is put forward. It's got a really complicated. conception of relationship with the past. Because whereas, like, contemporary liberalism has a relationship to the past, which is, if we could just go back before 2016 or perhaps 2012 or something like that, we can get back to where we were, which was high point neoliberalism where everything was

fine. And all of this stuff is just temporary and when we get back there, basically. And it's like got a melancholic feeling because that turns out never to be true, basically. They cannot, they cannot, like, mourn the passing of that time. so they can't move past it, et cetera, et cetera. The right-wing conception is like there's a golden age that we can get back to,

but we can only get back to it by having a rupture with the present, which is dominated by liberalism, something like that. But the progressive sort of structure of feeling has a really complicated relationship to the past because progressive is like the idea that you're moving towards a better future. Very hard to do that in a period in which

decline is a dominant sort of feeling. The future seems bleak because of, you know, the impending climate catastrophe, etc, etc, etc. But it's also, like, the dominant way in which the left has dealt with history is this unveiling of the dark side of like these contemporary myths, etc.

So, you know, the whole sort of like stately homes sort of idea of Britishness, etc. What's the relationship of the left to that? To reveal that, like the lot of the money for a lot of those stately homes came from slavery, do you know what I mean? We can't valorise that, you know what I mean? even the post-war period, you know, we have to link to the creation of the NHS, etc.

We can't just purely celebrate because we, you know, we have to understand that Britain was in an imperial relationship, et cetera, and we were getting the benefits of our situation within a global sort of economy, etc., these sorts of things, colonialism, near colonialism, the extraction of resources, etc., these sorts of things. And so the conception of the progressive structure of feeling, the conception of history that's associated with it is there are moments in the past that could have gone a different way. There are moments of the past that we can go back to and think about they could have ended up in a different place to where we are now.

And the fact that they could have ended up in a different place and where we are now is not inevitable means that then in principle we can go some or else basically if we can develop the social forces to do that. And that is sort of the way that I think there's a dominant conception of like relationship with like folklore and even perhaps myth, basically. We have to accept that these myths were invented in the past, which means we can invent them now for the present conditions. We have to accept that the myths that we've embraced, etc.,

are corrupted, etc., and that means we can create new myths. It's something like that, I think, is like the way we can think about how the contemporary sort of like attitude towards folklore and myth, etc., etc. Yeah, I think you're completely right. I think all that it raises a couple of really important questions, which are always important. Partly it's a question, well, how does our shifting conjuncture? How does it change, like, the vanity of some of these things? I mean, things that might seem relatively trivial at one moment

come to seem important to a lot of people at a different moment. And I think this theme of loss and how you deal with a sense of loss, like without just capitulating to despair, is sort of important. Maybe in fact, like even if you know that you're sort of lopping, sort of lie back to role playing, like by maybe participating in sort of rituals, whether they're formalised neo-pagan rituals or it's just going for a walk to a stone circle, that they're kind of mythicised. Maybe it is, like, it's a way of dealing with climate grief. The venancy, a lot of this takes on now, right now in 2026, it is connected to the question of the Green Party, maybe becoming the dominant party on the left, because there were a lot of the things we've been talking about

other things that would have intersected with sections of like the Green Party, like going about decades in ways I think we've described today in the Green Party episode. So maybe that's part of it. And it's also the question of like, well, how do we acknowledge the power of the imagination and what is sometimes called the imaginal without just compitulating to just a kind of volunteerism,

a sort of naive volunteerism? And I think that is a really important question because, I mean, this term the imaginable is sometimes used by theorists and philosophers and commentators to try to capture the sense that the notion of something just being imaginary, like implies a kind of unreality or a non-functionality or a triviality, which isn't really appropriate to thinking about the ways in which things which are going on in your imagination and in a collective imagination still have a real kind of force for people, a real power. So this idea of the imaginal, I mean, it does part, it does, I mean, the imaginal does partly

as a concept, it comes out of the thinking of people who are really interested in like Jungian psychology and magical practice and esotericism and sort of comes to the conclusion that, well, you know, magic doesn't actually quote unquote work in the way that it might do in stories or kids imagine it, but it has a kind of psych, it's a kind of psychological, it's a kind of psychosocial technology, which has a certain efficacy. but the question of how you acknowledge that without just capitulating to sort of volunteerism

just so you can just think it and make it true which is the absolute pure form of idealism of philosophical idealism which is always conservative I think that's always a really difficult question I think that this sort of like the invention and reinvention of folkloric rituals and festivals etc one of the ways out of that is that like those are collective things

do you know what I mean they're all about binding with bonding collectivities together. Yes, I think it's true. I think that's true. This is also one of those types of areas where some old-fashioned sort of cultural criticism is quite useful, I think, in terms of like being careful about,

what are the political implications of the myths you're creating and recreating and not defending. For example, I would say in the past few decades, like there have definitely been plenty of examples of people getting into, usually after reading too much Nietzsche or something, and getting into the idea that, yeah, you can just create,

completely create yourself and create your own reality. And then a bit further down the line, it turns out the reality they're trying to create is some kind of, you know, cyborg fascism. So I think you've got to exercise some sort of critical faculty. So I suppose from that point of view, I'm thinking about why. I'm very sympathetic to people wanting to have kinds of paganism, which imagine that they're inheriting some lost ancient, some lost, you know, prehistoric tradition of goddess worship and nature.

worship because I can see that is, you know, on the one hand, there might be like zero basis for that historically. On the other hand, they can see why, you know, it's a powerful myth and it has a real kind of value. I can see a value to it. I can also see why, you know, someone like Donna Harroway just hates it and thinks it's a form of essentialism which can't actually help emancipate women, but I can see how for particular groups in particular times, it's been really empowering in a really important way. I mean, one of the, one of the warnings you'd have is like the perhaps the thing that goes against this sort of like new weird Britain, if there is possibility of access in progressive myths or progressive weirdness,

is like the cosmic right, basically, which is, you know, which we've done an episode about a long time ago, in which, you know, this whole scene around wellness culture and, like, you know, coming out of sort of like new age scenes, embrace first conspiratorialism and then through to, like, you know, anti-Semitic and racist conspiratorialism. I mean, in a way, We're coming back. This is our foundational theme of the whole ACFM project,

is on the one that we reject a certain tradition of left secularism and rationalism, which says any of this stuff, the imaginal, the romantic, the mythic, it can only lead to fascism. Forget it. What you need is hard scientific reality and socialist realism in art. Everything else is bullshit. But then we also want to reject. We also want to reject the rejection. We want to negate the negation and say, well, you know, even the... they're not totally wrong, those guys, that stuff often does lead to fascism.

You have to be really careful. It's only under specific historic circumstances. It doesn't just lead you into weird authoritarian bullshit. And I think, I'm sure there will be listeners to the show to whom I apologize, who think, yeah, you've been saying this, like, fine. You're saying the same thing every show. Why do you keep saying it? I'll tell you why I keep saying it, because, for example,

I was asked to comment on a book proposal a couple of years ago, by some book about sort of psychedelic culture and philosophy. And it cited me and Mark Fisher as people who had apparently said that psychedelics are inherently radical and always, always revolutionary. And like, which is like the opposite. It's the opposite of the whole project. It's that, no, there isn't an inherent political meaning to all this stuff. So it's up to us to kind of assemble these things into a culture,

like to assemble these things, these elements, and find ways of like, protect. protecting ourselves from their reactionary potentials. I mean, of course, that's partly why, you know, Matt's Circle Dance project is so kind of interesting, actually, because Matt's, you know, quite self-consciously. You know, the music he produces, he calls like Pastoral House sometimes. And, you know, the thing is called Circle Dance,

and, you know, it partly draws on Matt's personal, like, route in the West Country. But the events include, like, live music performances, they include screenings, and they've included us and other people organising, like, consciousness-raising sessions. And it's a conscious act of, like, putting together elements to create something that does have, that has a self-conscious political orientation, like without thinking that has to mean all you do is sit around and talk about political

economy for hours. And that is the whole kind of ACFM project in a way. I think it's probably a good place to end on, actually, because part of the problem with that progressive structure of feeling about, you know, where do you have your effective attachment base? You have effective attachment to the lost possibilities of past moments, etc. That's quite a sort of baroque structure. It's like a difficult thing to explain or to manifest in some sort of way.

So I do think there's a project of like trying to develop rituals and practices. Practices are events or something which does sort of like tie it together into things which are like effectively meaningful, basically. It likes sort of like a circle dance or like these communal rituals, folkloric rituals and all these sorts of things. You know what I mean? We can approach them in a way

which we understand that they're invented and that's fine with a project to reinvent them for more open purposes. This is Aspen.