Every year, on the first Monday of May, the people of Hastings parade a man made of leaves through the streets of their town. The leaf-man spins and dances all day, wearing a crown of flowers and followed by his drummers and musicians. The people all wear green. They put garlands of leaves and flowers in their hair. Eventually, the leaf-man is taken to the top of a hill overlooking the sea, where he is slaughtered in front of the townsfolk. This ritual is a piece of hoary old seasonal magic, rooted deep in the green fields of England, and it’s been going on for a very long time. Longer than I’ve been alive, in fact. It dates back all the way to 1983.
Most of Hastings is just like anywhere else in England. You see it as soon as you arrive. Like every provincial train station in the country, the station in Hastings is surrounded by lots of glassy office buildings, housing a gym, a Sainsbury’s, and the local college. Across the street there’s another glassy office building, but this time the glass was all put in at some point in the 1960s and now it’s rapidly falling out again. The door is barricaded shut; the sign above it says QU N BURY HOUS. There’s one of those in every town in England. Every town in England also has a big shopping centre just across from the train station. This place was built in the Blair years and it has a name that captures the globular optimism of that era, back when the power of public-private partnership was about to sweep us all into a glorious post-historical era of just going shopping all the time. The Pulse. The Beacon. The place is looking a bit more weathered now than it did when it was built, but the Poundland is still open. Down on the beach the drunks sprawl out in clumps, grinning toothless with their tins of Tennent’s Super. And because this is the English seaside, not far away, junkies crouch in the underpasses. They don’t come out much. They’ve seen enough of the wide open sea, the hills, the retail opportunities, the starry, bird-strewn sky. Drool to yourself in the dark, as numb as possible, until it’s over.
Unlike most medium-sized towns, though, Hastings is the birthplace of the current version of England. A thousand years ago, under the sign of a comet, William the Bastard landed here with ships full of French and Flemish mercenaries to seize this land for himself. (The actual location was Pevensey Bay, a flat expanse of beach houses, caravan parks, and funeral directors just west of town.) He had a castle built in Hastings, then set off north to kill and then become the King of England. But Hastings was already old when he arrived. The Haestingas were a tribe who lived here; Saxons, maybe Jutes. For a while they had their own tiny kingdom, independent of the kings of Sussex and Kent. Their wealth came from the Roman iron mines, which let them hold out for a while against the bigger states around them, until eventually it didn’t. Haestingas means Haesta’s people. We don’t know who Haesta was. Some kind of warlord. Nothing the Haestingas left has survived, but William’s castle is still there. It stands over the Old Town of Hastings, which is very beautiful. Medieval churches wrapped in ivy, narrow stairs meandering through secret courtyards. But the castle itself is a wreck. A few low walls on a crag, half-swallowed in greenery. You can see them when you come out the train station: this shape up on the hill, jagged like a pulled tooth.
There’s always some crisis with the water in Hastings. Sometimes thousands of houses have unexpectedly lost mains water supply. Sometimes thousands of houses have been flooded. In between, the water company pumps huge volumes of raw human shit into the sea, just along the coast from the beach. Every so often they pump so much human shit into the sea that they’re fined by the government, and they pass the costs on to their customers, which I suppose makes sense. After all, it’s their shit.
The Hastings Fishermen’s Museum is in a deconsecrated church. Stained glass in the windows; hands holding slippery fish up to God. There’s an entire fishing ship in the middle, the Enterprise, black-keeled, pitch and sailcloth. Kids clamber over the deck and the old pines creak. Portraits of fishermen line the walls. These were tough men, salt-cured, strong as rope. You had to be, to go out into the hugeness of the sea in a rocking wooden bucket like the Enterprise. A lot of those proud hard men died bringing the nation its fish dinner. Fathers and sons drowned together. Their names are on the walls. That used to be the world; now it’s indentured slaves on Vietnamese bottom-trawlers. One little corner of the museum is dedicated to Hastings fisherman Alfred Mills Stonham, better known as Biddy the Tubman, who lived from 1878 to 1964. A blunt, lumpy, weatherbeaten face. After he’d retired from the fisheries, he entertained beachgoers by floating in the sea with his feet on the edges of a big washbucket. He’d do tricks, handstands in his bucket, spinning the tub at crazy speeds with a single oar. He’d invite kids to sit in the tub while he spun it. When he wasn’t in his bucket he sold shrimp out of a cart, or crewed the lifeboats. He’s reckoned to have personally saved forty-six lives out at sea. In 1904, Edward VII presented him with a silver medal for bravery. In 1940, he took part in the evacuation from Dunkirk. I feel a lot of shame before Biddy the Tubman. Here is a man who might have done more good for other people in an afternoon than I’ll ever do in my life. And now he gets a little corner of the museum, and his sea is full of turds.
The town is secretly governed by the Winkle Club—or, as it insists on calling itself, the ‘internationally famous Winkle Club.’ The rules of the club state that every member has to carry a winkle in their pocket at all times. One member can, at any point, challenge another to ‘winkle up,’ at which point they have to take out their winkle. If they don’t have a winkle they have to pay a fine, and the money goes to local charities. Winson Churchill was an honorary member; so was the Queen Mother. As far as I can tell, it’s a kind of East Sussex Bohemian Grove. Local businessmen, councillors from every political party, the cops: they’re all in it up to their elbows, secretly governing the affairs of this town from behind closed doors. They’re laughing, playing with their winkles, while everything decays. They treat us like cattle. They’re rubbing our faces in it. There’s a traffic island at the bottom of All Saints Street called Winkle Island, featuring a big chrome sculpture of a winkle, and you expect me to believe this is a coincidence? Perhaps if you are brave enough you will descend into the engine of the earth, and you will see whose foot lies upon the treadle of the loom; you will want to know what it was all for, this world in which you must live and die, but an indifferent coral-crowned face will halt you before the final sense of everything and a voice from the whirlpool will issue its challenge to all mortal men who vanish like sea-foam on the sands. Winkle up.
At the Hastings Shipwreck Museum, one of the volunteer staff came up to me and started explaining, apropos of nothing, what had happened to the fisheries. He said that British boats were legally prevented from fishing in British waters, while big Dutch and Spanish multinationals could trawl whatever they wanted out of the seas. Even after Brexit, which he thought didn’t go nearly far enough. The traditional fishing communities had been hung out to dry, a way of life that had lasted for thousands of years was over, reduced to a few trinkets in museums, and now the grandkids of the tough old fishermen were shooting up in underpasses. At first I wasn’t sure if I should believe his line about British boats not being able to fish in British waters, but it’s actually completely true. Small inshore boats under ten metres long make up 79% of the British fishing fleet, but they’re allocated less than 2% of the UK’s quota, and each boat is forbidden from bringing in more than 350 kg of fish a year. Meanwhile, a single Dutch corporation called Cornelis Vrolijk Holding BV is allocated 24% of England’s fisheries. The plight of the fishermen was a major theme during the Brexit campaign, but when it came time to actually negotiate a deal everyone suddenly stopped caring.
Despite the destruction of English fishing, the beach near the Old Town is still a working beach. Boats under tarps, big spools of blue nylon rope, other nautical-seeming detritus. Some of the old fishermen’s huts are still in use. They’re strange buildings, narrow and windowless, huddled together on the edge of the beach like black crystals. Some have been turned into fish shops. A miniature railway threads between them. For the kiddies. Every time it clatters past one particular fishmonger’s called Mick the Fish, there’s a friendly blast of the whistle. This is because the Mick the Fish and the train driver have, for the last few decades, been locked in a terrible feud. They hate each other. Mick the Fish doesn’t like the noise. The driver doesn’t like Mick the Fish’s smell. And so the kiddies get to experience two grown adults slinging insults at each other while one drives past very slowly in a tiny steam train.
It’s nice. Hastings is nice. We’re all supposed to be isolated now: our communities have vanished, there’s an epidemic of loneliness, we’ve replaced the company of other human beings with the act of looking at our phones. But in Hastings, all that stuff is still there. Plenty of places are the same. If you really want it, you can move to a town where there’s still enough community for people to really hate each other.
Another thing that’s survived in Hastings is ritual. Supposedly, that’s all gone now: the turning of the seasons, the liturgical calendar. We can eat strawberries in December if we want. We’ve replaced it with a shapeless glob of time. But in Hastings, the year still has a form. On Good Friday, everyone comes together for a fairly gory re-enactment of the Passion. They gather in St Clement’s, one of the lovely medieval churches, to demand Barabbas; then a local bearded hippie playing Jesus is whipped through the streets. The bulldog-faced cab drivers playing the Romans try to mostly just whip his plywood cross, but they don’t always hit the mark. Some of the welts on Jesus’s back are real; some of his cries of pain must be too. In the end he’s crucified in front of All Saints Church, which features a gorgeous but almost entirely faded six-hundred-year-old doom painting on the chancel arch. There’s a figure seated on a field of stars who looks a bit like the Longest Beard in Sussex contestant strapped to a cross outside. Those scratches to his left are the towers of the New Jerusalem. To his right, a spiky stick-figure of a devil drags the unclean souls to Hell.
Meanwhile, on Pirate Day, everyone dresses and talks like a pirate. That’s fun too. Bonfire Night is held in October here so it doesn’t clash with the one in Lewes, but there’s a full torchlight procession, along with the obligatory big fire and fireworks show. (When I went, they’d accidentally pointed a bunch of the fireworks downwards, which made it a lot more thrilling but somewhat less spectacular.) Every August, there’s a ritual in which an assortment of clergy bless and sanctify the sea. On Mardi Gras, all the Old Town pubs host a music festival for local bands so you can discover why they’re all still local. The really big day though, the highlight of the calendar, is the first Monday of May, and the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green.
For days ahead of the JITG, frenzy builds. Houses up and down the procession route are decked out in green bunting, ribbons, real and plastic flowers, real and plastic leaves. The town is suddenly infested with morris dancers. Little nests of them in every corner, slapping their wooden sticks and pirouetting around their hankies. Special services in the churches. Folk acts in the pubs—or acts performing guitar and fiddle covers of 90s UK garage bangers, which are the real vernacular music of this island. Thousands of people fan out into the green hillsides to collect their stock of leaves. On Sunday night they’re all busy in their homes, twisting, braiding, applying florists’ tape. Tomorrow, everyone casts off their flesh and blood. For one day they will belong the other, older, silent world, the green and growing earth.
On May Day itself I saw one solitary person trudging against the wind down the promenade with a placard hoisted over his shoulder. I don’t remember exactly what it said. ‘WORKERS RISE UP—SMASH CAPITALISM—SMASH THE BOURGEOIS-IMPERIALIST STATE.’ Something like that. One of those signs mass-produced by certain Trotskyite sects. The plain, determined face of someone who will always uphold the cause of the masses, even if the masses won’t. I admired him and felt bad for him in equal measure. All around him, the workers were putting up maypoles, decorating their hair with flowers, preparing to worship the blind and unreasoning forces of nature. Never mind capitalism, never mind the bourgeois-imperialist state; it’s something much closer you’ve got to deal with now. Already International Workers Day felt like an atavism. A relic from that brief moment in history when we were modern.
Once, I might have been the guy trudging with the placard. This time, I made a costume out of leaves and twigs. I gave myself a beard of ivy and two horns coming out my temples. I was pretty proud of how it turned out.
Monday began drizzly. A fine spray of tepid water that didn’t even seem to be falling from the sky but just hung around in the air, making everything clammy. It’s good for green and growing things. I trudged down to Winkle Island, where they were releasing the Jack at ten in the morning. The streets were already well-lined with onlookers, all in their pagan coats of leaves. Rainwater beading on green facepaint. Someone had dyed their dog green. The procession started with drummers and dancers. I’m not sure what kind of person you’d imagine taking part in this sort of thing, but whoever it is, you’re probably right. On one end of the spectrum are the earnest folklore types, people who look like they spin their own thread, pinch-faced thirteen-year-olds who are very seriously into traditional dance, lovers of the land, some of them hippyish, some of them very discreetly fascist, maybe so discreetly they don’t even realise themselves. On the other end, people dressed up like videogame monsters, goblin things, wizard things, steampunk top hats and goggles, renfaire girls with their tits bulging out their corsets, people waving pride flags or psychedelic swirls.
But most of them were somewhere in the middle. People like to be creative. Lots of them had puppets. The really big ones are the giants, like Hannah the Witch, gulping in her menacing coif, or the knight with his bushy beard. But others were clearly private projects. Thrown-together, looking like creepy ethnographic objects, like the corn-husk man. Or clearly assembled over countless nights with the sewing machine. The toothy eel. The man with a sickly-yellow sun glorying from his head. Or the seagull god. Hastings, like everywhere on the English coast, is still ruled by its seagulls, big mean birds that collect their tax out of every portion of fish and chips. In 2020, a decorator in Hastings battered a seagull to death after it seized his sandwich. There were no criminal charges, but the entire town turned their backs on him. Seagulls are sacred. They’re meant to be the souls of lost fishermen, come back to land at last. The seagull god had magnificent hard yellow eyes and a small shrub growing out of its head. I felt an urge—a small urge, but a very real one—to worship it.
Everyone was here for one reason, though, which was the Jack. The Jack is a conical wicker structure tightly planted with thousands of leaves. It takes months to make, and on May Day the human being inside has to keep dancing and twirling under its weight for six hours. He also can’t see anything from inside there, so his way is guided by a team of helpers called bogeys. But eventually, after his six hours are up, he comes to the top of West Hill, near the old Norman castle. There are more live folk acts up there, plus a bunch of souvenir stands and food trucks. People drink prosecco out of plastic cups; if the ground’s not too damp they’ll have a picnic. This year, the ground was too damp. I milled about up there for an hour, huddled under someone else’s umbrella, until the Jack finally arrived. A sudden frenzy. His drummers beat around him. The crowd chanted. Jack! Jack! Jack! Jack! They surged towards the tottering cone as it went up onto a raised plaform. The morris dancers in white surrounded him. Someone read a short rhyme:
Jack, old Jack, our Jack in the Green Today your triumph we have seen. Now comes in summer by your power In tree and leaf, in field and flower. Oh Jack, it’s time for you to leave us, but never fear We know you will return next year.
But now the people were chanting something else. Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! Out of nowhere. Kill him! Middle-class bloodlust, screaming through the grey of the world. Kill him! A player struck up a tune on the accordion, and the dancers hopped about. The rain poured down. The sea vanished in the fog. The Jack danced happily, as if thousands of people weren’t suddenly roaring for its death. And then, as the music came to its climax, one of the morris men struck the Jack with a stick. He toppled over. A little pop of green confetti. His blood, splattering out of his neck, green with new life. The bogeys tore the Jack’s corpse to shreds and flung them into the crowd, and we all scrambled for a piece of the sacrificed god.
I got my leaf. They say you only need one. They say it’s good luck.
Question: what, exactly, is going on here?
You might not think this is much of a question. Isn’t it obvious? What’s going on here is obviously a pagan fertility ritual.
Thousands of years ago, the Celtic people who inhabited this island worshipped plants and trees in the springtime. They understood that the days getting longer had something to do with the leaves growing back on the trees, which had something to do with men’s cocks getting hard, which had something to do with women’s wombs swelling, which had something to do with grain growing out of the furrows, which had something to do with the gods of the earth and the sky, and all of it was holy. Eventually the gods took names, but it all revolved around the trees. The word druid might have literally meant tree-knower. When the Romans came the trees were still there, and when a new god arrived a few people continued to secretly worship the piece of wood he was crucified on instead. The old religion survived the Saxons and the Normans and the Church and the Reformation and the Age of Reason, bubbling away under the surface. Because God and science are invisible and abstract, while the days getting longer is tangible and real, and fucking is real, and grain growing out of the furrows is real, and all of it is holy.
There are a few other weird relics lying around in England that make this story seem plausible. For one, there’s the Green Man. In thousands of medieval churches across this island, you’ll find the same architectural motif. A man with a face of leaves, or disgorging leaves; sometimes the foliage comes out of his forehead and gives him antlers; sometimes he seems to be painfully transforming from man into plant. I have a nice coffee table book called Gargoyles & Grotesques, published in 1975 by the New York Graphic Society, that contains dozens of photos of these leaf-men. ‘Here,’ it says, ‘we are indeed in the presence of ancient pagan belief in the power and spirit of the tree.’ It dates the Green Man image to the La Tène culture some 2,500 years ago, which ‘often depicted a head or mask so intertwined with foliage that sometimes it is hard to see where the head ends and the branches and leaves begin.’ It adds that this image was kept alive by ‘May Day rites, with their pagan origin and fertility connection. May Day was one of the great calendar festivals of the pagan Celtic year, and the genuine celebrations survived in England even into modern times. In the Middle Ages the cult must have been even more widely practised, and the Church was always fighting a losing battle against tree-worship.’
If you need more, there’s the medieval poem Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written in the fourteenth century and survived in a single manuscript until it was finally rediscovered and published in 1839. I’ve talked about Gawain here before, but only because it’s the best piece of narrative fiction ever composed in English. The weird figure at its centre is a knight with green skin and green clothes riding a green horse who bursts uninvited into King Arthur’s court one Christmas and challenges someone to cut off his head. When Gawain does, the Green Knight simply picks up his head and carries it off, instructing Gawain to meet him in one year at the Green Chapel so he can return the blow. The Green Knight doesn’t live and die like a human being; he lives and dies like a plant. In cycles, budding where he’s been pruned. After various homoerotic adventures, Gawain makes it to the Green Chapel, which isn’t a chapel at all. It’s a long barrow, ‘a lawe as hit were, a balȝ berȝ bi a bonke þe brymme bysyde.’ A vastly ancient structure, a remnant of the Stone Age, something the fourteenth century could not even begin to conceive. But somehow they knew that these old, old places had something to do with the cult of the trees.
That’s the story, at least. It’s a nice story, so maybe it doesn’t matter that it’s not true. The medieval Church might have worried about people backsliding into rustic idolatry, but there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that they were ‘fighting a losing battle’ against an organised remnant of an ancient tree-cults. (If they were, then why would they allow the symbols of these heathen gods inside the churches?) Those foliate heads have no meaningful link to pre-Christian religion. Yes, Ancient Celts depicted men surrounded by leaves—but you can also find designs that look a lot like the Green Man on Hindu temples in India and Nepal. Maybe there’s a primordial Indo-European tradition remembered across continents. Or maybe different people in different times latched on to the same basically decorative motif. My nice coffee table book briskly skips over the two thousand years between the Celtic heads and the leafy faces of the late middle ages, but two thousand years is actually quite a long time. Some things have survived that long—the Analects, Jewish circumcision, a few fairy tales—but here the argument seems to be that the Green Man symbol disappeared entirely, leaving no cultural traces, before suddenly springing back two millennia later, among a totally different people speaking a totally different language. This feels unlikely.
And none of this is even slightly related to the Jack in the Green. That particular May Day celebration doesn’t have a pagan origin; the earliest it can be traced back to is 1795, which makes it significantly less ancient than the mechanical computer, the steam engine, the electric capacitor, fizzy water, and the United States of America. And it doesn’t come from the peasant backwaters of olde England, where people still lived according to the eternal cycles of nature. It comes from London.
The emergence of this tradition was actually recorded by the young Charles Dickens in one of his Sketches by Boz. He complains that once you could spend May Day engaged in ‘merry dances round rustic pillars, adorned with emblems of the season,’ but all this has been ruined by an annual near-riot of chimney sweeps, and while ‘sweeps are very good fellows in their way, and moreover very useful in a civilised community, they are not exactly the sort of people to give the tone to the little elegances of society.’ (Dickens was in his early twenties, and hadn’t fully developed his famous social conscience.) Instead of those little elegances, Dickens describes their new and unwholesome innovations. A woman with her head ‘ornamented with a profusion of artificial flowers,’ and a ladle in her hand to receive donations, ‘two clowns who walked upon their hands in the mud, to the immeasurable delight of all the spectators; a man with a drum; another man with a flageolet; a dirty woman in a large shawl, with a box under her arm for the money’—and, the centrepiece, a ‘green,’ a framework covered in leaves, animated by a man in a tarpaulin suit inside who makes the whole structure roll about, ‘pitching first on one side and then on the other.’ Coarse, newfangled stuff. Dickens is outraged.
When you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense that the Jack in the Green would have begun with industrial-age chimney sweeps. Everyone else might enjoy the summer, but for sweeps it’s the lean season, since no one is really using their fireplace any more. So right at the start of summer they try to drum up some extra cash by putting on a show. There are some clowns, some drums, some flageolets (it’s a type of flute). They also want a big central attraction, but they’re not exactly rolling in cash, so when it’s time to pick a material for the costume they go for leaves. Why? Because they literally grow on trees. That’s it. No ancient fertility cults. No ritual slaughter. Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf.
If that seems a bit miserable, there’s another way of looking at it. The fertility cult and the ritual slaughter are totally real folk traditions. They’re just recent folk traditions. They date back to 1983.
That was the year the first Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green was held, organised by a traditional dance troupe called Mad Jack’s Morris. (Morris dancing, by the way, is usually imagined as the height of deep-rooted hey-nonny-nonny autochthonous folksy Englishness, but the clue’s in the name. It’s Moorish dancing, the exoticism of another age, once usually performed in a court rather than a village setting. This is why some performers still have the habit of blacking up. There’s no conclusive evidence linking morris to the Sufi practice of dhikr, or devotional meditation through dance. But maybe.) The Jack in the Green began as a few weird friends doing weird things with leaves; the first ceremony was attended by barely a dozen people. By 1985 there were a few curious townsfolk coming out to watch them; by the 1990s it had already become a local institution. People noticed it was fun. But I think a big part of the fun comes from the idea that you’re participating in a hoary, gory fertility rite. There are other Jack in the Green revivals dotted around the country, but only in Hastings is the Jack ritually slaughtered and dismembered, which might be why this particular revival is so much more popular than any of the others. But none of that stuff appears anywhere in the chimney-sweeps’ festival. So, again: what’s going on?
I think I have the answer. There’s a reason it makes sense to imagine that the Jack in the Green might be an ancient pagan remnant, which is that while you might not have personally read all twelve volumes of JG Frazer’s 1890 masterwork The Golden Bough, it’s sunk down into the water table of our culture. In the same way that everyone’s basically a Jungian now whenever they have to think about their psychology—discovering yourself, getting in touch with your feminine side, blah blah blah—everyone is an instinctive Frazerian when it comes to anthropology. Through books and films and video games, this academic theory has turned into a new kind of folk knowledge. We take it for granted that myth is calcified magic, and it all ultimately has to do with ensuring a bountiful harvest. Something about sacrifice, right? You have to sacrifice someone, preferably a king or a god, so the crops will grow. So when a troupe of morris dancers decided to bring back a nineteenth-century festival, they gave it a heavy extra sprinkling of agricultural magic. Because that’s what ancient folk traditions have always been made of, ever since 1890.
Actual anthropologists tend to be very embarrassed about Frazer, this relic from the bad old days of the field. Nobody wants to claim him as an ancestor. Not just because the things he says aren’t true, even though they really aren’t. Half the myths he describes are invented or exaggerated, but we all do that; it’s pretty low down the list of complaints. The real problem is that he was a dyed-in-the-wool cultural evolutionist. A lot of great anthropologists have used words like primitive, but when Frazer said it he really seems to have meant it. His works were not kind to ‘the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind.’ He saw a single magical principle animating ‘the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere.’ And anyway, he never even did any fieldwork; he thought he’d solved the world from a book-lined study in Cambridge. When he was a child, he ran in terror from a fake savage in a circus tent. The whole thing smacks of racism. So Frazer ends up becoming the primitive that we, who are more civilised now, recoil from. Academics can’t think of him without picturing a bone through his nose.
For what it’s worth, though, I love Frazer. I love his vast, daft attempt to synthesise all the world’s religions according to tenuous lines of resemblance, because this is itself a kind of sympathetic magic. I love his mad ecumenism, mixing bits of African myth and Breton peasant custom with scraps from the Aeneid, because in what was like ours a stuffy particularist age he understood that the human material is everywhere the same. I think he’s an intellectual hero on the level of Freud or Marx. I think he deserves better than the prudish awkwardness he currently gets. (Did you know that Wittgenstein’s famous turn away from the sterile positivism of the Tractatus and towards the more sociological thought of the Philosophical Investigations was partially occasioned by reading The Golden Bough?) But he is, maybe like Marx, a tragic figure. Marx wanted a philosophy that would change the world instead of simply describing it. What he actually gave us was an utterly invaluable theory for understanding the development of history. There have been some prominent attempts to change the world based on his insights, but none of them have gone very well. Meanwhile, Frazer really did just want to describe the past. His central idea was that the whole history of religion was based on an error: people thought they could do magic, and that magic was necessary to ensure their survival, but they were wrong. They just didn’t understand the principles of agronomy yet. And what came out of his theory? As history it’s bunk, but it ended up accidentally forming the framework for a brand-new myth. You get TS Eliot in The Waste Land, moping over his slain king. ‘If there were water…’ You get Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, elaborating on Frazer’s theory until it became the blueprint for every shitty fantasy movie from now until the end of time. Frazerianism is now the default language for people who are engaged in the very modern project of re-enchanting the world. People who want to find their roots, to get rid of the agronomy and go back to sacrificial gods.
After the Jack was slain, they had a screening of The Wicker Man in the charming twelve-seat arthouse cinema in the Old Town. The streets were full of teenagers in green tracksuits, spilling out of all the ancient pubs, snogging and getting in fights. The middle classes go up the hill to conduct their ritual sacrifice; the working classes stay below and have a piss-up. Their festival is much closer to the original.
The Wicker Man is an incredibly prescient film. Anthony Shaffer read The Golden Bough while he was writing the screenplay; he instantly understood that this book had nothing to do with the past, it was all about the future. What distinguishes The Wicker Man from ordinary folk horror is that the ancient folk traditions it depicts all turn out to be fake: they were made up by an entrepreneurial Victorian agronomist. If they think they need to kill a virgin with the power of a king to make their crops grow, it’s because the first Lord Summerisle read something like The Golden Bough. And while there’s an opposing principle to the islanders, with their neopagan dances, their free love, and their blood rites to the nameless gods, it isn’t scientific rationality; it’s the detective’s fanatical Free Church Presbyterianism. Summerisle is a direct product of techno-modernity, but it’s consumed its parent, swallowed it whole. Now the earth is dying, the crops are failing, and no one can even say why.
Tradition is boring.
I don’t think the Jack in the Green is worse because it’s not really an ancient fertility rite, but I do think it’s a little worse because it pretends to be.
Tradition says that all images are immutable and the meanings of all symbols are naturally determined. A leaf must signify the exact same thing, whether it’s in Hastings or Hyderabad, now or three thousand years ago. Tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time: it turns the past into eternity. The opposite of tradition is invention.
Tradition is fake, and invention is real. Most of the human activity of the past consists of people just doing stuff. The fourteenth-century stonemasons who filled English churches with faces made from leaves weren’t referring to an ancient Celtic tree-cult, they were just doing stuff. They were exploring the world, its wealth of possible forms. The stonemasons two centuries before them who carved the La Tène heads were also just doing stuff. The London chimney-sweeps who started tottering around in a cone of leaves were just doing stuff too. They didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun.
Just doing stuff is beautiful.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the seagull god. That’s my name for it, obviously; really it’s just a puppet of a seagull with some foliage sprouting from its head. Unlike the Jack, it doesn’t make any claims towards antiquity. It’s not associated with any great tradition. It doesn’t even have any particular meaning. Hastings is a town on the English seaside, and towns on the English seaside are the haunts of gulls. Fierce, fearsome, screaming birds. They make circles in the sky. They steal chips. They attack pensioners. They’re big; their wingspans are big; their beaks are hooked and pointed with a red blotch that looks like blood. They live between land, air, and sea, kings of three worlds. The world in Hastings is seagull-shaped, so when someone wanted to make something interesting for the parade, they made a seagull. And in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it. I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.
