The Gathering Fire
Essay written for the Fire volume of the Center for Humans & Ecology Elementals’ series. On the technology of the eight ceremonial fires of the year, as explored in the Dark Mountain year-long creative workshop We Walk Though the Fire.
Cover for the Fire edition, Elemental series by Mere Montgomery
The people are coming down the street, bearing torches, giant puppets are swaying, firecrackers exploding at our feet. After the procession moves past, we move on to a dark field on the outskirts of town where house-high stacks of wood are set alight, and their flames leap into the night sky. Everyone is whooping and cheering as effigies of politicians are burned by groups in different- coloured striped jerseys and a maelstrom of fireworks is unleashed. It is a world turned upside down, total mayhem, and I am laughing. The controls of our lives are bursting open, and we have been suddenly hurtled out of modern times.
This is Lewes Bonfire Night in Sussex: anarchic, vernacular, strange, a remnant of an archaic practice that once rooted us into the earth. It takes place on Guy Fawkes Night in November, when where bonfires are lit across the land and people gather round them. Like other “civilised” seasonal events, such as Christmas and Easter, it veers close to the original fire ceremony of Samhain that heralds the winter, the darkening of the year, a hinge time when our ancestors come to speak with us should we be listening.
Something beyond history happens in these topsy-turvy moments—a crack in time, a glimpse into another way of being human. The fire is a bridge.
The Uncivilised Fire
When I look back now, there were always fires: the fire in Spitalfields as we jumped over banging saucepans on Leap Day, just before lockdown. The fire by the Thames that cracked the tarmac open, just after the storytelling company had left. The fire in the Oxfordshire hills, where the road protesters cooked a vast cauldron of soup and sang songs. It was a time of fires and gathering differently, of small lights in jars that were carried across a bridge or lit a path through the woods. Of people pressing together in the darkness, of hearing stories from the ancient world being spoken under stars, of people in masks, of small rituals, of conversations that were out of time, where it felt that the animals and the trees stood behind us. When I waited in a stony alcove altar at the winter solstice, with Deepak, my fellow activist, close beside me, the night wind blew through the orchard trees and guttered the candles. Even though we were far away from the fire, you could hear people singing and the fire crackling, and it was then I realised: the ancestors could hear us when we gathered in this way. And in that moment you felt them, and you didn’t want to be anywhere else.
And maybe that is why a fire can sometimes be a homecoming in ways you do not expect. Twelve years ago, when I sat in the darkness under the stars and a man in a bear mask came out of the woods and began a folk tale from Siberia, something jolted awake in me. That storytelling fire was at a Dark Mountain Uncivilisation festival held in the Hampshire woods. I had been part of a grassroots community-based movement responding to climate change and fossil- fuel dependency, but in that moment I knew what I had been missing. Here it was! People converging in a way that felt ancient but also like the future. They were facing the same existential difficulties, but instead of trying to fix and control them, they were allowing a space for a creative and Earth-based culture to emerge, to make a web of connections that could hold us together when things fell apart.
I changed tracks that night, and joined the band of writers and artists that is the Dark Mountain network.
In the following years, we held fires across the land, gathering at strategic points in the year: in Newcastle Upon upon Tyne, in Reading, in the Cumbrian and Cheshire hills, on Rannock Moor and Dartmoor. There were book launches and performances, stories and songs and laughter, and bottles of whisky passed around. When the pandemic came, we asked ourselves: How can we meet when we are pushed apart from one another? The fires were unlit, and it seemed for a long time they would never happen again. But they did.
They just took another form.
How We Walk Through the Fire
In 2022, we took an ember from a cancelled Dark Mountain spring gathering, and blew on it. Its name, “How We Walk Though through the Fire,” would become a series of workshops revolving around the eight fires of the ancestral solar year. These would be hosted online but involve encounters in real life. The idea was simple: we would build a cultural practice together that could weather the storm of converging crises using the “stone clock” of the equinoxes and solstices and four stations of the growing year, known by their Celtic names—Imbolc, Beltane (or May Day), Lughnasadh, and Samhain. Each “fire” would be a marking, a celebration of our local wild and feral places, and a way of reconnecting ourselves with our bodies and imaginations, and each one another. After the first introductory meeting, we would collect sticks on a walk into our territory and build a small fire to mark the shift of season. For the second meeting we would bring back a firestick fire stick and relate what happened when we held those fires: how we made them, or failed to make them, what occurred in the wind and rain and snow, what which creatures came, the glowing shapes the embers made. And then, as if gathering round a real fire, we would “show and tell” a piece of work, created from our encounters.
The workshops set out to host a regenerative culture that could both navigate uncertainty and lay the tracks for a more “biospheric” relationship with the planet, a practice that was both modern and ancestral. Each of the fires explored different approaches, but all aimed to foster resilience and to strengthen our creative voices within an ensemble. They also provided a container for the rigorous inner work of relinquishment and restoration: what the poet Gary Snyder once called “hard yoga for planet Earth.” At each of the eight “doors” of the year, we “walked through the fire,” letting go of what no longer served, and discovering what might bring repair and regeneration to a world—and a culture—in crisis. Above all, we voiced and celebrated what we experienced.
The shape of these fire-based meetings took the shapes of a ceilidh and a kiva, which is to say that above ground, they mirrored the social gatherings of Scottish and Irish tradition: the convivial sharing of songs, poetry, and stories. But below these festive convergences was a deeper meeting was going on, in what we called the “kiva” attention—named after the underground ceremonial chambers of the Southwestern Pueblo people where spiritual and cultural meetings are held, linked with the cycle of the year. To paraphrase the storyteller and psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes: this was “the fire beneath the fire,” the bones of the mythos that underpins the narrative body of any transformative story. So although our meetings were creative and celebratory, there was an acknowledgement that their meaning was being played out in another dimension: we were making moves in our collective and inner lives, aligning ourselves with the movements of the sun and Earth.
It was this double-banded attention that the rowdy and edgy Lewes bonfires did not contain, in spite of their lively flames and burning tar barrels, or indeed any spectacle will lack which requires us to be the audience rather than the players. These ceilidh-kiva fires were not there to entertain anyone: they keyed us directly into the fabric of the world.
Into the Lexicon of Earth
Something happens when you sit outside by a fire with other people that would never happen if you were sitting inside a room, or simply in the dark. Our kinetic, physical, feeling bodies, repressed by industrial mechanical living, break free; we tap into our bones, into our deep memory. You enter into the lexicon of the Earth, a multi-stranded dimension, made of sound and shapes, position and feeling, that our senses immediately recognise. This “dreaming” language is hard to access without some kind of tool or container. Most of the time in our ordinary lives, we are trapped in what has been called a “left- hemisphere” attention: a focus on looking at the world from a distance, controlling and editing what we observe, categorising it in terms of data and numbers and “facts.” To get to the feeling, immersive, all-connecting, right right-hemisphere attention requires a bridge. You can debate and describe the world for a long time using words but never find a way to speak with it. A fire cuts through the blocking vocabulary of the clever rational mind and puts you directly in touch with life. You sit in the darkness with your fellows, human and nonhuman, and feel at home.
One of the hardest liberating moves to make, trapped as we are in the labyrinth of modernity, is to connect with the deeper ancestral part of our beings. No matter how well-meaning or smart we might be, this cannot be done in your head, sitting in a room or in front of a machine. You have to go out. You have to have a task in mind. You sit, you wait, you come back. You tap into the creative fire within your being, into the place “where memory meets imagination in the dark,” as the great nature metaphysician Annie Dillard once wrote, and turn what you have experienced into a physical or creative form. Then you share it.
The encounter is key. In a prototype workshop I held between lockdowns, one woman related how she left the task to the very last minute: after a terrible row with her family in the evening, she stormed out into the howling night and drove up into the Downs above the town and stumbled towards a stone barrow that was way off the track. Somehow the storm inside of her became the storm outside of her, and she sat down by the stones, in the wild and the wet and the dark, and she laughed. I felt the ancient spirit of the place all around me, she said, and felt totally liberated in that moment.
We are held mute in our civilised cocoons, and need a force from the outside to break us out of our restriction, germinating the seeds of the future we hold inside of us. For some, our husks are broken open by storm, some by a gentle persistent rain, or water. But some of us are cracked open by fire. By a big fire that comes unexpectedly and scorches us awake. However the germination comes, it feels like the end of something old, and a beginning of something new.
In our Eight Fires series, held on two weekends, those breaking moments were shared in our stories in the second of the two-hour sessions. Everyone said no matter how they celebrated them—by themselves or with invited company—they felt emboldened knowing that there were others doing the same ritual in the wilds of Alaska and Finnmark; on the riverbanks and rooftops of Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, Chicago; on the edge of an Indian forest or Hebridean coastline; in the Indigenous lands of Australia, New Zealand, and California. They brought their charred sticks and told the stories afterwards of what had happened as they went through the fire. Of the creatures, or trees, or rivers that had accompanied them. Everyone was listened to and witnessed.
How do we “stay with the trouble” if we do not have a container that will hold us? If our feet are not on the earth? If there is not a ceremony that can bring us together in our endeavour to get to a future we might want to live in, no matter how challenging?
How do we connect with each other when we live continents apart?
What we discovered was that our frame of ecological and social breakdown, rather than turning people away, drew us out, and together. As we reported back from the fires we had held in deep winter or high summer, we shared stories about the birds we encountered, the waters we honoured, the winds we named, the plants we connected with, and the mythic layers of the earth beneath our feet. It felt, despite the current state of collapse, that this shared attention to place and time helped us engage in what the Aboriginal academic Tyson Yunkaporta describes as an “increase ceremony”: to increase, not the reach of a culture but its mycelial strength, to thicken the web of correspondences between place and people, ancestors, and the more-than-human world. An invisible network that you could feel in the online sessions, even though we were not meeting in the physical world.
Title page for Halcyon Days by Candace Jensen from Dark Mountain: Issue 24 - Eight Fires
The Eight Fires
The fires are held at the eight points of the “stone clock,” which are the ancestral points of the year that mark where the seasonal shifts are marked: the four cardinal points of the equinoxes and solstices. These Earth and sun calendars have been observed throughout the world for thousands of years, and in Britain they take the shape of two crosses, the cross of the sun (+) and the cross of the Earth (×), and much of our island folk dancing reflects this geometry interweaving these crosses in different combinations, from Maypole dancing to Scottish reels. In the Americas, these circles map the eight directions in space, and are used as guides and medicine wheels for the changes human beings need to keep themselves in right balance. In Britain they are connected with time.
Being in time and space aligned with the Earth and the sun are radical acts in a global consumer culture that does everything in its power to keep people deracinated and hostage to the drive of the 24/7 clock, forever caught on a whirligig of deadlines and desperation. This practice is a way to resist those forces, to connect with our ancestral knowledge and put us in synch with the Earth’s rhythms and metabolism. The practice breaks us out of the hyperdrive of modernity, brings space and time within the mindset we are forced to live in, and liberates our imagination. It takes us out of the thinking (timeless) mind into the body and the heart (which holds the tempo of Earth); it takes us into deep time to connect us with our human and nonhuman lineages and the elemental building blocks of earthly life. And although this fire keeping can be practiced solo, it is interconnected with a mycelial network, tapping into the thousands of people who are holding fires and doing this work at the same time.
Each door marks a shift, a “technology,” if you like, that allows whoever takes part to tune into these moments as a way to transform ourselves, following a road map that is ancient and trans-global, and has been practiced for millennia. As modern industrial people, we may be untutored in the way of Indigenous or archaic people, but that does not mean we are not able to do the work, wherever we live, or whatever our age or circumstances. We still live in the same bone houses, with an intelligence that can communicate with a sentient planet in its many languages, so long as we are willing to uncolonise our imaginations and open to the inner and creative tasks that lie ahead.
One of the shapes we have been working with in the series is the figure of eight, or lemniscate, which goes out into the world and returns with riches. It is the basis of many of the Underworld myths we told during this year of fire practice, the shape the honeybee dances as she signals to her sisters where nectar and pollen can be found and brought back to the storerooms of the hive. Engaging in these feedback loops means we do not, as the ethnobotanist Frank Cook once warned us, become “end users.” This is not only the shape that informs our encounters (going out into our territories and returning with testimony and medicine);, it also is the shape we remember when we attend the fire. We feed the fire with the dead wood of ourselves, parts of our beings that no longer serve; we bring nourishment and sweetness to the collective with our songs and art and stories. These loops bring regeneration to the damaged fabric of Earth; create right relationship with lands that have been grievously harmed by centuries of extraction and exploitation; provide the set and setting for becoming a different kind of people.
Why does attending to fire matter? Because the ceremonial fire is a microcosm of the sun in the solar system, and also in ourselves, our core beings that act like the sun in our bodies, radiating outward and warming all who come near and gather. The act of making and attending to it connects worlds. When we align with our fiery star at these times, we get back into balance, in time and place. Our modern urban societies raise us to be cold, competitive, and mean but when we gather by these fires, our natural conviviality and generosity is brought out. The fire is a focal point, not only reminding us not only of the light that lives in the dark, but also of warmth. In that radiating warmth we open like flowers; we are no longer hostile.
That’s what I first noticed at that initial Uncivilisation Festival when I sat down by the storytelling fire under the summer canopy of stars. I had been struggling, working as a writer and editor in grassroots groups for years, trying to convince strangers to decarbonize their lifestyles, trying to fit into communities where I was an outsider. Suddenly, I was among fellow writers and explorers, lovers of myth, creativity, and the Earth, in company, at home. That was a good feeling. I did not go back.
Of course, there is not always a convivial fire when times are hard. “Staying with the trouble” is not just a phrase we might use in passing; it is a work, a task we do, an undertaking of inner alchemy and reconnection. The fires come as markers in time, so we can funnel whatever is going on in the micro- and macro macro narratives of our lives into a hermetic space, where things can be revealed, reworked, and acted on by the light of the sun and the dying and birthing cycles of the living Earth. Where we can undergo the tempering of our souls and spirits that makes us into real human beings, not just consumers of resources. Where we can come awake to and restore the damage done to ourselves, our fellow human beings, creatures, plants, and the places we live.
We can do this knowing that going through this fire is not a one-off moment but a life-lifelong practice, a process, a decision, and that we are not alone in our task; that sometimes this passage is very hard indeed in ways that are difficult to articulate, as the rigid and unkind structures of civilization are broken up within us. Endurance and courage are needed, but the honing of creative work and sharing it, listening to and being witnessed by our companions, and the lightness we feel having gone through the fire, will anchor and connect us. The practice brings a depth and a resonance into our ordinary lives that cannot easily be described in words.
Looking at the converging social and ecological crises we face on the planet, at the rising carbon in the atmosphere, at the karma of centuries we carry inside us, a collective cry goes up by all those who feel powerless to counter its trajectory: What can we do?
We can change the dance. We can remember. We can relinquish. We can start again.
We can make fires.
The Eight Fires by Linda O’Hanlon for Dark Mountain: Issue 26
The Sessions
In our series of workshops, we focused on different aspects of this regenerative practice. Our discussions and teachings revolved around six main areas, with the technology of the practice and reflection on the process at the winter and summer solstices. The subjects were as follows:
Halcyon Days (Winter Solstice, 21st December). Our first fire gathering revolved around the 14 fourteen days that surround the winter solstice, when it was once believed that the mythic Alcyone, transformed into a kingfisher, would nest by the shore in peace because her father Aeolus, the god of the winds, had calmed the waves. This practice offers an invitation to pause at the turning of the year, to enter a contemplative space and to create a piece of work from within it. The series began in the dark transformational moment of solstice, following the track of worldwide archaic and Indigenous cultures that have always looped back to their ancestral beginnings in order to know how to proceed towards the future.
Kinship with the Beasts (Imbolc, February 1st/2nd February).This collaborative journey started by looking at our core human relationship with the animal kingdoms. Imbolc traditionally marks the first stirrings of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and as amphibians begin to move and the plant world unfurls, we asked what it means to re-enter kinship with our fellow creatures. And and find ways to articulate and to strengthen that archaic relationship in this time of emergence.
Walking into the Wind (Spring Equinox, March 20th March). As the year shifted, we stepped out and connected with the elements, and especially the wild wind, in times of storm and climate breakdown. By tuning into the weather systems of our local territories, we examined the art and practice of liminal walking, as we crossed the bridge from the dark watery realms of winter into the light and air of spring.
Plant Dialogues (May Day/Beltane, 1st May and Summer Solstice, 21st June), These two celebratory fires heralded an immersive voyage into the growing world of plants to discover how we might re-entangle ourselves with its intelligence and beauty, working with the key leaves, flowers, and trees of spring and midsummer. We experienced how plants help root us in place and time and remember the role human imagination plays in communication with the sentience of the planet.
Waterland (Lughnasadh,1st/2nd August). This time of harvest is often celebrated by visits to springs and holy wells in to give thanks for water’s powers of restoration. As the summer’s heat intensified, we focused on the joy of our physical connection to water and how it runs through our lives in our language, our myths, our stories, our poetry, and our dreams. We explored bodies of water local to us—lakes, rivers, streams, and seas—in a time of ecological crisis.
Mythos and Mycelium (Autumn Equinox, 23rd September) An exploration of what it means to make art that engages with myth and the underground networks of Earth. Myths threaded themselves like a mycelium through the series, from the shapeshifting Suibhne (Imbolc) to Olwen of the White Track (summer solstice). As the year shifts towards the Underworld, we went in search of the myths and stories held in our own local territories and ancestral memory and the mysterious role fungi play in the fabric of Earth.
Honouring the Ancestors (Samhain, 31st October). At the hinge of the ceremonial year, as the light descends towards the dark months of winter, we looked at how to maintain a dramaturgical practice. Our year-yearlong journey deliberately engaged with a time frame that goes beyond this civilization’s history, towards a past that is held in the planet’s rocks and its many life- forms, as well as in our own human “bone- knowledge.” In this time of unravelling, we turned to our ancestors who can teach the creative moves we need to make in our everyday lives.
Gathering Sticks for a Samhain Fire
(This practice of gathering sticks can be used as a basis for any of the fires, adjusting the questions to the seasonal cycle).
Find a time to walk into your territory, bearing the time of Samhain in mind, taking note of the shift of season, the change of mood and temperature, the scent of the wind, the colour of falling leaves, the sounds of the insects around the last ivy flowers, birds gathering in the skies at twilight.
Make time to lie on the Earth earth and look up at the sky, and to notice the clouds and the change of light. Tap into how this makes you feel. On your way home, gather some sticks for your fire. Make sure the twigs or small branches are dry (unless they are ash, which burns when it is green).
As dusk comes at Samhain, you can make a fire using your bundle of twigs as kindling, either in the territory itself or at home. This can be as small or large as you like and will depend on where you live, but even if you don’t have a place available, a small twig fire in a can or metal dish on a balcony will do just fine!
Once lit, whether a solo or convivial fire, sit with the fire and tend to it for at least 15 minutes to tune into in to this moment of the turning solar year. Engaging in the eight “doors” of this year is an imaginative practice to help reflect on our life in sync with the season and the times we live in, to rekindle the ancestral knowledge we hold between us and our relationship with the sun.
In the growing, birth, and death cycle of the year, Samhain marks the energetic shifts from the autumn harvest toward the underground roots of winter. As the leaves wither and fall, the composting of the summer’s growth begins, a process that feeds back to life on all levels. As the months darken and we enter into the spirit of winter, this it is also a moment of treasuring what matters, of contacting the deeper parts of ourselves, the bone knowledge we can trust to help us weather the challenging times ahead, not just for ourselves but for the Earth we are all part of.
As you watch the fire, you might like to consider and/or speak out loud what you are letting go of and what you are stepping into.
You might ask: What can I relinquish that will feed the fire, the spirit of the world? What is being required from of me in these times of downshift? Who are the ancestors who can help us remember who we really are? What does the fire tell you/me?
Make sure the fire is well out before you go indoors.
At daybreak the next day, go out and greet the sun as it rises.
Fire books: (left) Title page for Halcyon Days by Candace Jensen from Dark Moutain: Issue 24 - Eight Fires: (centre) Fire stick pctogram by Caroline Ross for 'Eight Fires'; (right) The Elementals series ed Gavin Horn,
BOOKSHELF
EIGHT FIRES PRACTICE If you would like to read further about how to maintain a fire practice in the coming year, all the tools, examples and stories can be found in the full colour 2023 autumn edition Dark Mountain: Issue 24 – Eight Fires.
The Center for Humans & Nature’s new series on the Elementals is a five-volume collection of essays, poetry and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. More information about the books can be found here.