About Otherwold
Otherwold is concerned with ‘otherworld studies’. It explores new paradigms for understanding, and coming into relation with, pre-modern landscapes and the ancestral minds who devised them. This is based on a belief that we can nourish our humanity by forming deeper bonds by doing so; by going beyond archaeology’s study of the tangible aspects of culture towards a method of learning from our ancestral legacies, rather than simply creating knowledge about them.
But to do so we must develop the tools to understand ourselves as porous, composite, ancestral beings, and to understand the land as possessed of personhood and agency. In other words, to develop an archaeology of the imaginal; an anthropology of consciousness; techniques for re-enchantment, interfusion, sacralisation.
These are articulated in my book Avalon Working, which invites readers to actively participate in the land’s unfolding destiny, to co-create its mythopoeia through experiential methods: pilgrimage, ceremony and ritual, poetic & creative expression, visionary practice, psychogeography, introspection, intuition and personal phenomenology.
My own locality includes the city of York, where the past constantly asserts itself, and the Yorkshire Wolds, home to some of the most significant prehistoric monuments and ceremonial landscapes in Britain, yet it remains largely unknown. Both will loom large in Otherwold, but we’ll also roam further afield across the UK and beyond.
Related areas also of interest include: geomythology, archaeoastronomy, paraphenomena, sky lore, folklore, performance theory, earth mysteries and symbology.
The name, incidentally, is a pun: on the term ‘otherworld’, used and abused by scholars to approximate the immaterial realms of prehistoric, early medieval and indigenous cultures; and on the assertion that an ‘other wold’ exists beyond the Yorkshire Wolds as it is understood in mainly modern science-led terms; a Wolds that is personal, subjective and phenomenological; rooted in sense, memory and symbolism; a Wolds that resonates deep in the psyche.
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