I am in love with this pagan portraiture series from photographer Henry Bourne—and frankly a little jealous! While we Americans are left with trace amounts of pagan iconography like Easter bunnies and Christmas trees (all retrofitted to modern Christianity, of course), in the UK, Celtic, Germanic, and early Christian rituals are still celebrated with weird costumes and face paint! I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve manage to avoid the hippie raver trappings of something like Burning Man—it all looks very “Leigh Bowery does the English countryside.” The amount of work that must go into these seems considerable.

The fascinating thing about these festivals and rituals is that people don’t really remember much about them, or even how old the traditions actually are. For example, the use of black face paint is said to be a reference to chimney sweeps—but that’s a somewhat modern profession—post-industrialization, actually. And one festival makes inexplicable use of reindeer antlers, but no one knows why. The whole thing seems to just be an excuse for (at least seemingly) normal people to do something avant-garde under cover of “tradition.” Bourne’s pagan series has been compiled into a book, Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore Portrait.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Hyperallergic