Last month my neighbour hosted a wassailing event; an annual tradition for the blessing of the orchards to ensure a good harvest for the coming year. This, she said, was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get a decent crop of apples. Having tried and failed with other methods, she hoped this Anglo-Saxon ritual might do the trick.
Rituals are curious things. They are strings that hold a collection of sanctified acts together in a certain order, which are then repeated. During the wassailing ritual we drank warm cider and wore crowns made of branches. We literally toasted the oldest tree in the garden: we took slices of bread, toasted them on a pit and then hung them on the tree’s branches. Our toast was an offering to the birds. We then all danced around the tree in unison.
I like dancing, but usually to house music and hip hop. Dancing with my neighbours from the valley felt like it was my first real dance, the dance of dances. During this rhythmic communal movement, I felt like I was tapping into the most primal part of me. We were worshipping nature and acknowledging that we’re at the mercy of it, much like we are of God. Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher, famously identified God with nature itself. He saw God not as a part of some distant other world but all around us, in all that we see. Both God and nature are omnipresent.
Earlier in the year I was introduced to another new ritual, another new way to worship nature. It was responsible for the strangest entry in my diary for many years: “1st Jan: 4pm, danced around cauldron.” On New Year’s Day, my friend Hara—a sound healer from the valley—placed a lit cauldron in my garden. After reading aloud a prayer to nature and all that’s good, we threw pieces of paper into the cauldron, on which we’d written things we wanted to relinquish in the new year. On separate pieces of paper, we wrote down all that we hoped for. We then twisted this paper tight like a bud and planted it in the garden. We hoped that, like flowers, our wishes would bloom.
Ritualistic dancing is not unique to the human species. Out in the wild, it is often how male birds seek to impress their potential mating partners, which is why many of them are far more resplendent in colour than their female counterparts. The red-capped manakin, found in the forests of Central and South America, has a mating ritual that involves moonwalking along branches. This is mirrored by the men of Chad and Niger’s Wodaabe culture. Wodaabe men perform the Yaake dance as part of the Gerewol, a week-long courtship ceremony to attract a female sexual partner.
Knowing about the dancing rituals of birds and the Wodaabe men made dancing around a cauldron in my garden seem not so odd. We were joining the dance that started before any one of us was alive. We were simply keeping the beat going, tuning into to the reverberation on the soles of our feet. It’s natural to dance and sing. Perhaps Spinoza would view our failing to continue the dance as akin to not worshipping God?
After the wassailing ritual, I feel somewhat altered. When I go for a walk, I pass a house with an inscription carved into its stone. It is part of a poem, by Dorothy Frances Gurney:
The kiss of the sun for a pardon, the song of the birds for mirth—
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.
I have read the inscription many times, but only now have I felt it.
Taking part in these rituals has allowed me to start to understand Spinoza’s God more fully. I’m not a religious person, but I feel there is something holy in nature. Something I found through dancing around a cauldron with bare feet.
