Description

‘Insightful and bracing: a personal and political journey through the seasons’ Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley

‘A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep’ Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

‘This book is a precious and life-affirming gift to our hearts and intellects’ Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires

At festive gatherings celebrating summer’s peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamas began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist.

As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamas sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow’s May Day, she found in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world.

Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.

Publisher Review

A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep. The Book of Mysteries reminded me of the current that runs beneath everything, and that, if we are open to it, can transform us — Amina Cain, author of ‘Indelicacy’ Whenever I read Rebecca Tamas, I find myself enormously grateful for the suppleness of her mind, and for her prose writing that is as lucid as it is lush, and as useful as it is beautiful. The Book of Mysteries left me facing down the year feeling newly attuned to wild time, and perhaps apter to the sometimes-impossible seeming task of wriggling out from beneath the dragnet that capital casts over the world. I will be recommending this book to everyone — A. K. Blakemore, author of ‘The Manningtree Witches’ A delicious exploration of the ritual year, ripe with the uncanny — Katherine May, author of ‘Wintering’ Insightful and bracing: a personal and political journey through the seasons — Melissa Harrison, author of ‘All Among the Barley’ A searing exploration of the ways in which capitalist time restricts and defines our lives. In reaching towards wild time and capturing the embodied, living experience of ritual and community, this book offers a sense of possibility. It gives us different ways to inhabit our world, minds and bodies, so that we might live more freely — Jessica Andrews, author of ‘Milk Teeth’ Rebecca Tamas has written a manifesto for our times. This is a riveting book that’s also deeply intellectual and well-researched. In lucid, lyrical prose, Tamas reminds us to look past our office calendars to pay attention to the natural world, and shows us what we may discover by acknowledging our kinship with the non-human — Deepa Anappara, author of ‘The Last of Earth’ Rebecca Tamas powerfully expresses the contemporary experience of a time out of joint, and embraces a wildness that lies outside the logic of capital, and beyond the narrow casements of our own minds. Passionate, devoted, clear-sighted and lyrical, this book will take you through the changing seasons and toward the promise of a better world — Helen Jukes, author of ‘Mother Animal’ One of our most powerful, poetic and radical writers on ecology and the mystic; the world we see and that which is unseen. Rebecca Tamas shows us that, in all the ways that matter, the two can and should be connected. The Book of Mysteries came to me exactly when I needed it, lifted me out of an imposed sameness and re-introduced me to a wild, abundant, strange time: the wheel of the year and its rituals. I know that it will do the same for many, many readers to come — Roisin Dunnett, author of ‘A Line You Have Traced’ This book is a precious and life-affirming gift to our hearts and intellects! As Rebecca Tamas journeys on a quest for joy and a connection to nature through participating in seasonal rituals across the UK, I felt that rare feeling: the return of hope. Each encounter with an exquisitely eccentric ritual – made vivid thanks to Tamas’s powers as a writer of poetry – showed us life, as ebulliently vital and anarchic as it should be. The Book of Mysteries immerses the reader in the tempo of the earth and reminds us that we too can tune into it, and begin to dance. A text to fend off the banal fascism that ravages our times — Rebecca May Johnson, author of ‘Small Fires’