England is a mystical place, and its epicentre is Glastonbury, known by its pagan residents as Avalon, the mythical island of the Arthurian legend. It has sacred springs, the supposed tomb of King Arthur, the Tor and ruined tower, proximity to Stonehenge and now a thriving, sprawling community of pagans, with dozens of denominations from druid to water-witch.
Once dismissible as mere woo-woo fringe, paganism has become a religious force that demands serious consideration for the simple fact that it is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. In the 2021 Census, 74,000 people in the UK referred to themselves as pagans, up from 57,000 in 2011, with a further 13,000 people calling themselves Wicca. But this is a fraction of the full number, since pagans aren’t the types who have much truck with government form-filling. They do, however, embrace social media, where ritualistic accounts can command millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram.
In Glastonbury there are dozens of events and workshops every day, everything from reiki for menopause to Avalonian permaculture
To explore the weirdness of Britain’s new religious landscape in the run-up to the major pagan festival of Halloween (Samhain) I went to Somerset, to feel the rub of the the contemporary shamanic heartlands of Glastonbury against the thousand-year-old centre of Christianity in Wells, just seven miles apart.
According to the Somerset census, Glastonbury has four times the national average of people calling themselves pagan or pagan-adjacent and has become an international hub: Americans are particularly numerous. There is nothing hidden or subcultural about Glastonbury’s paganism. At the Covenstead, the witchiest B&B in Glastonbury and set up by a late witch, we found on entrance a shrine room full of runes, candelabra and tarot cards, free for the taking to one’s room, plus a dining room packed with masks, stuffed owls and sundry mystical objects. Pilgrims to Avalon need day jobs: rooms at the Covenstead cost £115 per night. At breakfast we met some fellow guests including a witch who regularly sees wood nymphs: she is also a property developer in Cornwall.
Our first stop was the White Spring, a cavern full of shrines ‘in honour of the ancient energies and spirits of Avalon’. Lit by candle-light in what was once a Victorian well house and which is said to funnel sacred, calcite-enriched water from the Tor, the spring honours ‘Brigid [a Pagan goddess associated with poetry and healing] as guardian, Our Lady of Avalon [the inspiration for the Holy Grail] and the King of the Realm of Faery’. As we entered, much to my boyfriend’s delight, two beautiful young women, tattoos down their back and naked as the day they were born, began ululating and walking majestically through the pools. I stripped off and stepped in too, disconcerted to find a young man in heavy woollen garb staring straight at me. But in a scene as masterfully set as this, I felt if not goddess-like, then at least quite womanly. On the way out we met a volunteer from Oregon: a water witch and author who, under the handle Annwyn Avalon, has 64,000 followers on Instagram, putting her firmly in lucrative influencer territory. She said that Glastonbury had ‘called’ to her.
Pilgrims also worship at the Chalice Well, two minutes from the White Spring, which is iron-rich and red (one can buy bottles for its drinkable sacred water, which tastes pretty dodgy). In Christian mythology, which pagans seem to accept alongside their own hodgepodge of beliefs, the well is where Joseph of Arimathea out the chalice in which fell Christ’s blood at the crucifixion.
Later that evening, we met Tor Webster, a local tour guide, in the George and Pilgrim, a 15th century inn, to try to grasp the attraction to this way of life. Webster said he had grown up ‘loosely Christian’ but that he his his mother were more ‘interested in Christ consciousness and a kind of more kind of cosmic Christianity, you know? So that’s what brought me to Glastonbury to connect to.’ Webster said he didn’t feel pagan or Druidic now, but ‘gnostic’ and had lately been thinking of himself as a ‘mystic’ – both generic terms for those with esoteric knowledge of spiritual mysteries.
We soon found that concreteness or coherence are not worth sweating: there is no clear theology and no clear politics (apart from being sceptical of science, institutions, and thus, of course, everything to do with Covid). Webster summed up his spiritual MO thus: ‘just kind of like getting people to access that questioning inside themselves, you know? That’s what it’s about. It’s about searching for inner truth, you know.’
The next day, we explored the eternal feminine through an audience with Kathy Jones, a chief ‘priestess of Goddess’ at the Goddess Hall, now officially recognised as a place of worship for ‘Goddess-loving people from all over Britain and the world’. Jones, a handsome, sharp-eyed woman of 76 years old, moved to Glastonbury in the 1970s as part of the women’s liberation movement but became more interested in spirituality. She reminded me that activism at the Greenham Common peace camp against American storage of nuclear missiles in the early 1980s was full of signage and slogans channelling motifs of Mother Earth and the divine feminine.
Jones was impressive: anti-men in the way the old guard used to be (‘I’m sorry,’ she said to my boyfriend, ‘but I think men on the whole are pretty stupid’), though she is married to a man who manages the accounts and legal affairs of the Goddess Temple. She was clear about who she is and what she’s doing. ‘We teach people to become priestesses and priests… I am a Priestess of Avalon. I am a teacher. I’m a writer. I’m a ceremonialist. I’m a healer. And many things in that kind of world. Goddess for me is the source of everything. She is the creator of everything. Goddess is a word that includes God. Priestess is a word includes priest. She is a word that includes he, not the other way around.’ Jones’s coherence evaporated in print, however: we were disappointed to find her book Motherworld is a mix of birth narratives and generalisations.
Wet with the southernmost fringes of Storm Babet, we ducked into the Goddess Temple shop off the Glastonbury High Street for a double appointment with a shamanic tarot card reader. A woman in her 60s with cropped orange hair took us up to a small room where she asked me to select a card. I chose ‘Unknown’, which suggested I was at the ‘beginning of a new adventure’ and should ‘ripen the receptive void like womb accepting a seed’.
It was strangely soothing, if pricey at £40 for half an hour, but after a tangled web of almost-generalisations, almost-warnings about my path, and those of my boyfriend’s (including the ‘stagnation’ he was experiencing in one of his important relationships), the shape of this belief system and its immense appeal to young people today began, for the first time, to be clear. Paganism, lacking any clear moral framework apart from naturism, resides in symbols, have-a-go ritual, and the vast generalities of a recycled New Ageism that jives perfectly with social media. It is replete with signals of virtue – talk of ‘love’ and ‘truth’, respect for Mother Earth – but is brazenly commercial (Glastonbury has 26 crystal shops, all selling expensive spells, wands and scents) and promotes a harsh, 21st-century form of individualism. I watched askance, if not downright frightened, as the tarot reader told my boyfriend to quit his job because it was dragging him down, to stop being so empathetic and such a good friend because it was draining his ‘energies’, and to cut out those who sapped his ‘source power’.
Still, this is a busy community, a homely, pastoral spin on well-being and therapy culture that must keep many people from loneliness. Unlike in the spas and yoga studios of Notting Hill, you can be as chubby and as loosely attired, and as old, as you like. You can’t be dirt-poor but you can scrape by. In Glastonbury there are dozens of events and workshops every day, everything from reiki for menopause to Avalonian permaculture to multiple priestess trainings and a Samhain (Halloween) ‘singles temple’ event with ‘deeply nurturing sisterhood and brotherhood circles’. Sites like Pagan Village promote an exhausting range of options throughout the UK.
But we breathed a sigh of relief the next day, seven miles away in Wells, a Christian stronghold since Henry VIII destroyed and plundered Glastonbury Abbey. We sheltered from the rain in the cathedral, one of the most exquisite in the world, and listened to Evensong, finding a more straightforwardly friendly host in the cathedral verger than in the wary women of the Goddess Temple and the cackling gnostic Tor Webster. Runes were exotic, but I preferred our Wells B&B, a 19th-century vila called Beryl Country House, full of 18th-century antiques and genteel live-in owners. It turns out some pagans do too: over breakfast, we learned that the Beryl is a popular retreat for witches.
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