What’s Fertility Got To Do With It?
In my youth I spent a lot of time in the company of Morris dancers. From dancing to the rising sun on Mayday, to touring pubs performing the guising play in the run-up to Christmas (raising money for the local hospital) Morris dancers are an eclectic bunch creating a sort of melting pot of folk history, tourist attraction, hobby, exercise, historical reenactment and a tapestry of inherited traditions and imagery, all wrapped in dance, drink and revelry.
I remember one time a somewhat enthusiastic tourist approached my Side’s fool and asked about his ceremonial pigskin (an inflated bladder tied to the end of a stick used for playfully ‘bopping’ people on the head. “Is it true,” she asked, “that these dances originated as a sort of fertility ritual?”
He gave her an abbreviated history of folk traditions, especially around the importance of marking certain points of the year like harvest and Mayday and midwinter and how dancing was historically a key part of these…then he paused and offered her the handle of the pigskin. She took it in her hand and our fool said, “But that's the kind of fertility you were thinking about?”
Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this!
There can be a bit of a tendency towards over simplification and reductivism when exploring craft, faith, and ritual.
For example, Wicca has sometimes been described as a fertility cult. Whilst it's certainly true that some notions of fertility are in Wicca, it forms only one part of a much wider practice working with nature, the seasons, and cycles of death and rebirth.
It's also important to to get too narrow minded on what we mean when we talk about fertility, especially in a ritual context. Fertility can be looked at as a generative force that can take many forms, as can acts of fertility and fertility worship. This could readily include things like dancing, sowing crops, harvest rituals of sacrifice and giving offerings to the needy. Fertility, I'd argue, can be understood in as broad a sense as life in general.
It's not just about fucking
And as a caveat to that connecting with nature and fertility doesn't have to have anything to do with cis heteronormative perceptions of sex.
It's 2025 how are folks still having to clarify stuff like this?!?
And fertility is only one part of Wicca.
One of the things we love to do with seekers is help them explore a range of potential paths that lie before them. In the UK we're blessed with a rich heritage of different traditions and practices and it's genuinely so exciting to see someone on their path be that one that ultimately lies with us or elsewhere. Maybe someone's path lies with Druidry or ceremonial magic, or traditional witchcraft outside of initiatory Wicca. Maybe they may find themselves ultimately moved towards Catholicism or Zen Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism.y point is simply that no traditions are just one simple thing, nor are they bound to the most reductive possible interpretations of them.
Life is complicated, people are complicated, the least we can do is embrace this
