Channelling the spirit of life

[Plus audio version]

On May 1 of this year I attended, for the first time, the May Day celebrations in Padstow.

This was a magnificent occasion in the old Cornish fishing port, on a beautiful spring day.

Two teams of local people of all ages, the red team and the blue team, paraded for hours on end through the streets, each accompanying their own “obby oss” – a totem horse that is in fact a large black disc with a head and a tail attached.

The Day Song (I wasn’t there for the Night Song!) is sung throughout, accompanied by massed accordions and drums.

Unite and unite and let us all unite,

For summer is acome unto day,

And whither we are going we will all unite,

In the merry morning of May.

The trance-inducing repetition of the May Day melody, the white costumes in the bright sunshine, the smiles, the vitality, the greenery decorating the streets… I found it a deeply moving occasion.

Later in the month, back home in France, I was able to attend – again for the first time – an annual event in Saintes-Maries de la Mer in the Camargue, Provence.

The town is named after three saints – Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary of Clopas – who are said be the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

After that, the Marys supposedly set sail from Alexandria, Egypt, with Joseph of Arimathea and ended up across the Mediterranean at what is now called Saintes-Maries de la Mer.

An additional element is the role of another saint, Sara, who some claim was the Egyptian servant of the three Marys.

Sainte Sara (pronounced Santa Sara with the local accent) is venerated by the Roma people and is represented as a dark-skinned woman in the Black Virgin tradition.

Her name, Sara the Black, is expressed in Romani as Sara e Kali, providing an obvious link to the goddess Kali of India, whence the Roma are believed to originate.

Each May thousands of people from all over the place, including many travelling families, descend on the town for a weekend of pilgrimage.

The Roman Catholic nature of the event is mixed in with a popular festive atmosphere.

As I waited in the crowd in the square in front of the beautiful thousand-year-old church, the music of the ceremony inside, relayed by loudspeakers, was mixed with the sounds of merry melodies from a nearby café.

Yet another ingredient was added to the cultural dish by the arrival of twenty gardians mounted on their traditional white Camargue horses on which they herd the black Camargue bulls used for bull runs in the region.

Under the scorching Mediterranean sun, we all waited for the priest to finish his address, which focused on the need for peace, following an unfortunate shooting incident earlier in the day!

Finally, it got underway, with the horsemen accompanying banners including the Romani flag.

The focus of the day’s activities took longer to show herself and there was a throb of excitement as the statue of Sainte Sara herself came out of the church, her tiara glinting in the sun.

Vive les Saintes Maries! Vive Sainte Sara!

We paraded through the streets of the town in the direction of the beach – slowly, because judging from the sweat on the brows of the burly statue-bearers, Sara is no lightweight saint!

Running the gauntlet of a thousand smartphone cameras, we eventually reached the seafront and poured down the beach and, footwear removed, into the sea behind Sara.

I couldn’t resist reaching out to gently touch the saint as she came out of the water.

Those who rule over us have always hated these popular festivals and would love them to disappear for ever.

Both manufactured world wars advanced their globalist technocratic agenda by heralding the start of new “post-war” eras in which old customs and festivals were no longer considered relevant or “modern” enough.

And, needless to say, both the events I attended were banned by our overlords for two successive years during their “Covid” assault on our lives and our freedom.

They were probably hoping that their Great Reset would finally kill off the few remaining remnants of our collective past and sense of belonging.

They despise folk traditions because they belong to us and not to them.

They are not something they have sold to us, rented to us or imposed upon us, but are organic expressions of our independent existence and flourishing beyond the cultural, psychological and physical cage in which they want to imprison us.

Folk events like these are not rigid affairs, sterile and unchanging re-enactments of some fixed ritual.

For instance, I was reliably informed at Padstow that the participation of two teams was a recent affair – or relatively so anyway, in the context of the celebration’s centuries-old existence.

The blue team, it seems, was initially formed as a “temperance” non-alcoholic alternative to the original beery band, although that distinction has now disappeared.

And Sainte Sara was this year marking only the 90th anniversary of her procession to the beach in Provence, although the history behind the event is obviously much, much older.

Folk customs and celebrations, whether inherited, revived or invented, are the expression of who we are and, even more importantly, who we are together.

Social cohesion and its expression are the enemy of the demonic cabal that would enslave us.

When we come together to celebrate our shared belonging to nature, to the land, to the sea, to this magical world, we are channelling the life spirit itself.

It is this life spirit that our satanic overlords want to destroy and it is also this life spirit that can empower us to rise up and destroy their death grip on our world.

As they sing in Padstow: “Unite and unite and let us all unite!”

[Audio version]