The Art of Enchantment, with Dr Sharon Blackie

Please note that the Zoom link for our live gathering (August 22, 16.00 UK time) can be found at the bottom of this article. Welcome to Month Three of Myth Summer School, 2026. For this final month of our ‘celebrating Arthurian women’ series, I’m going to focus in on two strong women who are little-known and very often overlooked: Ganieda, …

I have a dear and very old friend who’s prone to regular existential meltdowns, and who is always asking me why I’m not.

Mythology is very much up there in the UK news cycle at the moment, with all the endless commentary on Christopher Nolan’s film based on the Odyssey.

Please find the video recording of the Zoom gathering for month two below, and many thanks as always for those of you who came along yesterday to make it such a rich conversation. Please read/ listen to the material provided in last week’s post before watching the recording, as the content wasn’t repeated in the session. The discussion won’t m…

Please note that the Zoom link for our live gathering (June 20, 16.00 UK time) can be found at the bottom of this article. I’ll also send it out again next Saturday morning. Welcome to Month Two of Myth Summer School, 2026. We continue our celebration of Arthurian women by delving into the stories of the various ‘Ladies of the Lake’ in this…

So, here the dog days of summer are, in all their full, frantic flow. Which is the main reason why I find it such a tiring season, and I’m well into seasonal affective disorder mode now. It’s lovely of course to see all the life, and the green and the growing and the flourishing, but I’m exhausted by it already, if the truth be told. Everything is in such a hurry. Birds, in a hurry to raise a brood and maybe, for some of them, to squeeze in a second lot before autumn falls.

You’ll find a Zoom link below for today’s live gathering to discuss ‘Tragic heroines and unrequited lovers’. For clarity, this will take place on Saturday, June 20, 4pm – 5pm UK time. (And if you’re uncertain, please do use World Time Buddy, a very good website for time zones, to check the equivalent start time in your region.) As always, the …

Please note that the Zoom link for our live gathering (June 20, 16.00 UK time) can be found at the bottom of this article. I’ll send it out again next Saturday morning. Welcome to the first month of Myth Summer School. We begin with one of the most challenging feminine character types in Arthurian myth: the tragic, unrequited lover, as exem…

Image by Elena Ray Over a decade ago, in If Women Rose Rooted, I wrote about the then-lost or forgotten stories of the divine feminine in Britain and Ireland which deeply connect women to the natural world. Because goddesses and Otherworldly women in our native traditions are not only guardians and protectors of the natural world: they’re quite literally forces of nature. They’re immanent in the land, and they’re immanent in the waters.

Please read on for news of this year’s Myth Summer School, which begins next weekend, and a 25% discount on annual paid subscriptions to enable you to take advantage of it. There’s a list of my live appearances for the ret of the year – and a final chance to support the Crowdfunder for the glorious musical incarnation of my book Foxfire, Wolfskin. This email is likely to be cut short by your email provider – so do click on the title to read the full thing in your browser.