Nottingham Pagan Book Club Reads ‘the Dead Of Winter’ by Sarah Clegg

About this event

Five Leaves hosts the Nottingham Pagan Book Club, a reading group for those interested in Pagan literature, both modern and classical. The group is open to anyone who would like to discuss books from a pagan perspective, be they long-time pagans or just curious about exploring pagan spirituality.  

Get ready for yuletide with this brilliant book on midwinter traditions, including ghost stories, masked dances, unruly horse skulls, and Krampus. We’ll use the book to start a discussion about how folk traditions can inform our pagan spiritual paths, and maybe tell a few ghost stories of our own along the way.

The book is available from Five Leaves Bookshop for 15% off but feel free to get it elsewhere (including the library) if you’d prefer. To access the discount, email your order to [email protected] or come by the shop.  

From the publisher:

As winter comes and the hours of darkness overtake the light, we seek out warmth, good food, and good company. But beneath the jollity and bright enchantment of the festive season, there lurks a darker mood – one that has found expression over the centuries in a host of strange and unsettling traditions and lore. Here, Sarah Clegg takes us on a journey through midwinter to explore the lesser-known Christmas traditions, from English mummers plays and Austrian Krampus runs, to modern pagan rituals at Stonehenge and the night in Finland when a young girl is crowned with candles as St Lucy – a martyred Christian girl who also appears as a witch leading a procession of the dead.

At wassails and hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by ghastly, grinning horses, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors, we discover how these traditions originated and how they changed through the centuries, and we ask ourselves: if we can’t keep the darkness entirely at bay, might it be fun to let a little in?