Lammas 2021: Festival Cancelled
Since I first went to Druid Camp, a tiny esoteric festival held near the River Severn, early August has been a special time.
Growing up in Gloucestershire, late summer had always felt special. But up until a decade ago I never had a name for it, much less a festival to mark it. Roaming the lanes and fields with my friends in the freedom of the school holidays, we would half-notice the turning of the crops, suck the ‘flour’ out of a wheat ear and be surprised by the arrival of the combine-harvester. We were bored-happy, a natural pre-pubescent state that perfectly mirrored the season, with its mixed mood of fulfilment and lassitude.
Decades later, researching neo-paganism for a book about British spirituality, I discovered Lammas, an ancient festival celebrating the first harvest in the northern hemisphere. Midway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, historically Lammas was a time for agricultural communities to pause in their labours and come together in easeful appreciation of what the season had to offer. Gaelic communities celebrated it as Lughnasadh — an assembly (násad) for the god Lugh with ritual, dance and trading.
We know that ancient people gathered at summer, not least at Stone Henge at Solstice. And so do we moderns, — or did, until 2020, typically with music festivals. It’s no coincidence that the biggest of them, Glastonbury, takes place in Somerset, the land where ‘the summer people’ used to come together.
Personally, I’ve always had a problem with the modern British music festival. I’ve been to Glastonbury and a few others, but they all feel too big, corporate and regulated. Perhaps unconsciously I crave something closer to what the ancients did: a kind of tribal gathering that would allow me to get away from ‘normal’, housebound life and get, quite literally, closer to the earth.
Ten years ago this summer, I discovered Druid Camp in the course of an interview with its founder, Druid priestess Emma Restall Orr. With only about a hundred and fifty people, Druid Camp is like a tribal gathering. Instead of the rounds of drinking, shopping and gig-going that make up the mainstream festival, there is a multitude of different things to do, all day, every day. You can go to a talk, take a workshop or have a healing treatment. In the evening there might be a Druid ceremony, followed by a series of bands and dancing. With the insight it afforded into Druidry, I quickly decided that I liked modern British paganism, with its relationship to place, strong sense of the past and — in contrast to much of the Christian tradition — its willingness to confront the dark side of life, with the death and suffering that make up the human condition.
I went a couple more times than I needed to for research purposes and until I felt ready for something, well, less esoteric. The Green Gathering hit the spot: bigger, bringing together a broad constituency of people keen on camping and nature, it is at the centre of the alternative festival scene, presenting itself as ‘beyond hedonism’. I joined the volunteer team and managed a vegan diet for a week, only walking off-site to meet a sugar craving. (Vegan ice cream just doesn’t cut it.)
Such modern gatherings provide very different experiences from camping with family or friends. There’s automatically a relationship between everyone present, a sense of shared purpose and belonging that you don’t get on a campsite. Much of their pleasure comes from walking around the site, having odd conversations — just what is the greenest form of burial? — and watching the temporary community gradually uncurl itself during the first hours of the day.
For northern Europeans, festivals fulfil the need to store-up-the sun ahead of the coming winter months. One year, walking across Druid Camp after a terrible, rain-soaked spring, a friend stretched his brown torso and remarked, with a mixture of pleasure and relief, how he much needed that feeling of ‘the sun tightening your skin’.
I’d hoped to go to the Green Gathering this year. Even in Portugal where I now live, I’ve been carrying the memory of that week on a hill overlooking the Severn through the dark months. But when the organiser got in touch to ask if I was coming I had to tell him, because of travel restrictions between the two countries, that I wasn’t.
I was even sadder to learn that the festival was cancelled just a few weeks before it was due to take place. This is the explanation:
Surely Druid Camp, taking place on English soil, and organised by people with a deep appreciation of humanity’s connectedness with the rest of nature, would be going ahead? Curious, I went to the website to check.
In the summer of 2021, when some of us are increasingly concerned about the way authorities seem to be using their new-found ability to impose restrictions on the things humans normally do, the future of the festival seems in doubt.
Because Covid, of course. Caution is built into the ethos of modern western government, and it’s easy to see why. We live in an age when people spend most of their time in houses and offices protected from nature, with all the discomforts and dangers that it brings. As a result, society expects a lot by way of protection from government, and government, for its part, doesn’t like to be blamed.
From that point of view, even without the thread of infectious disease, it might be helpful to have a population that’s quiet and doesn’t get together in large numbers. The early closing of bars and nightclubs might, on the face of it at least, reduce crime and public disorder. In the context of a greater social concern for safety post-pandemic, wouldn’t the end of the festival make for both easier governance and a safer world?
What would we lose? In the first of a two-part essay, Charles Eisenstein tries to work this out. Drawing on the work of French philosopher René Girard, he suggests that the festival — understood broadly as a public celebration that includes everything from Halloween to a street party — is essential for the maintenance of social coherence. Suspending the rules of everyday living for a short period, they act as a kind of psycho-social pressure value that allows destructive energies to discharge without causing damage to the social fabric.
Online won’t do. Taking part in a festival is a lived, bodily experience which requires that the group be physically present.
‘Much as the organizers are doing their best to keep the idea of the festival alive, online festivals risk becoming just another show for consumption. One clicks into them, sits back, and watches,’ write Eisenstein. ‘They are not of the same order as crossing a stream on slippery rocks, or walking in the heat, or hammering in a nail. Because conventional reality is artificial, the human being needs regular connection to a reality that is non-conventional in order to remain sane.’
In the absence of a festival, he goes on, ‘the pent-up need erupts in spontaneous quasi-festivals … one name for such a festival is a riot.’
Eisenstein’s thinking puts me in mind of the Black Lives Matters protests that took place in central London in the summer of 2020. Week after week, they went on and, as I was volunteering nearby, I passed them often. Most of those attending were in their teens and twenties; it was clear that, after months of confinement to their homes, this was a chance to let off steam. It was summer in the city, and the youth were hanging out in Whitehall. The air was full of weed and the pavements beer bottles. The atmosphere was cheerful, upbeat — only on one occasion were we aware of a clash between the demonstrators and the police.
Summer 2021, and the first big gathering permitted after sixteen months of restrictions, to watch football, erupts into violence in the West End, formerly the place of festival-as-entertainment.
Without the festival, we go mad.
