Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

A couple of weeks ago on 18th March, something happened that has not happened for a good while: the holy seasons of Lent and Ramadan began on the same day. Both are seasons of prayer, fasting, almsgiving and self-examination in their respective religions of Christianity and Islam, both commemorate times of prayer in out-of-the-way places by revered religious figures, and both culminate in an important feast (Easter and Eid al-Fitr). This week, I made use of a public "comtemplation room" in my hometown of Bradford to pray silently alongside Muslims, each according to our own tradition. But as a member of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, I feel another form of connection with my Muslim neighbours. Both Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (d.651 AD) and Saint Hilda of Whitby (614-680 AD) lived in the same century as the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) (c.570-632 AD). They inhabited the same world, with many of the same cultural norms, even though the first two were in the British Isles and the...

  In August 2021, I wrote a blog about Mother Shipton and St Robert of Knaresborough entitled Witch or Saint? A Fine Line.   Today, I am returning to similar territory in order to answer my own questions: Why are so many Queer people drawn to witchcraft or witchy vibes? How much difference is there really between the practice of witches and my own practice as a Celitc Christian drawn to the mystical tradition? I have been helped considerably in my investigations by the BBC's podcast Witch  and Sacha Coward's excellent book Queer As Folklore. Regarding my first question, Sacha outlines a number of reasons in his book, some of which he discovered through responses to an online callout, asking for people who identify both as witches and LGBTQIA+ to share their thoughts on the correlation between the two. There is an obvious comparison to be made between historic witch hunts and the persecution of Queer people. Morover, both in previous centuries and more recently, there...

  CS Lewis famously wrote:  Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.  As a Christian mystic, an amateur folklorist and a livelong Lewis fan, I've long agreed with this line of thought. I would go so far as to say (and I believe Lewis would have, too) that all myths are true in a certain sense. Those of us in the folklore and fantasy world find ourselves banging our heads on a virtual brick wall every time someone uses the term "myth" or "fairy tale" to mean something that is untrue. Myth is a way of looking at and understanding the world by means of story and symbol. That's why I like listening to Michael Meade's podcast, Living Myth , that looks at current events from a mythic perspective. This approach is every bit as valid and vital as the empirical approach, if not more so. In fact, the more I learn about the likes of quantum physics (n...