From Etchings of a Whaling Cruise by J. Ross Browne

There’s a whale on the cover of our forthcoming issue so let’s speak about how to unmake a monster. For centuries, whales were regarded as sea monsters and associated with devilry and deception. How did we come to reappraise them, and why do they elicit our sympathy in ways so many other animals do not?

In the sixth century AD, a large whale was reputed for sinking ships in the waters off the Constantinople. For over fifty years, he terrified seafarers who navigated the inland Sea of Marmara. Fear was tinged with admiration. The Byzantines called him Porphyrios – possibly owing to the purplish tint to his skin (deriving his name from Imperial purple, porphúra in ancient Greek) or after contemporary celebrity charioteer of the same name, or the mythological giant Porphyrion who fought against the Olympian gods.

Emperor Justinian sought to capture and kill this whale – a near impossible feat. Yet one day the great whale chased dolphins close to shore. He swallowed some of them whole while others fled, but still he pursued the rest, “either still impelled by hunger or by a contentious spirit”, as 6th-century Roman historian Procopius puts it in History of Wars VII, and beached himself near the mouth of the Sakarya River. Local people came out with their axes, hacking away at the whale’s flesh but failing to kill him. Then they cut him into pieces – some devoured the meat on the spot.

Porphyrios was perhaps a large sperm whale, like Moby-Dick, or a large orca. Ancient people, like most of us, would only catch a glimpse of these colossal barnacled creatures who rise, island-like, from the great deep and then return there. There was the worry such creatures might drag us down with them.

The very word ‘cetacean’ – referring to mammals such as whales who have made the sea their home – stems from the Ancient Greek ‘Kêtos’ and its Latin derivative Cetus. Cetus referred to colossal sea monsters, often depicted on mosaics and vases as dragon-like or serpentine creatures, sometimes horned. Cetus were often beasts to slay; heroes such as Perseus and Heracles slew Cetus to save fair maidens. Elsewhere, ancient perceptions of Cetus seemed more ambivalent: nereids, oft benevolent sea nymphs, are frequently depicted riding these large sea creatures. The Cetus is often not bad in itself, but instrumentalised as a form of divine punishment, sent by Poseidon to wreak havoc on those who defied the will of the gods.

Whales as monsters; whales as vengeful gods. It is this latter image which typifies the Hebrew story of Jonah and the Whale. When Jonah sails away from his divine duty, he is swallowed by a large fish, often understood as a whale. After three days inside the whale, Jonah repents and commits to obey God’s orders. The whale is not antithetical to God but part of God’s kingdom.

Fish or mammal. Saviour or devil? Watching the distant tails and dorsals fins of whales rising from the surf, it’s easy to see why people have misconstrued what whales are. Most of us never see them. Those of who do only catch glimpses. Coast dwellers are more likely to see a beached whale than a live one. From these fragments we make monsters or gods or embodiments of nature’s indifference from our own projections.

It should be stressed that classical chroniclers knew a fair bit about whale, even when the artists who portrayed them always missed the mark. Aristotle observed whales on the Aegean Sea, conversed with seafarers about cetacean behaviour and dissected whales. In his History of Animals, Aristotle notes that whales do not have gills, but blowholes which allow them to breathe, and they birth live young and nurse them like other mammals (Aristotle wasn’t immune from personal bias, however, in the same work articulating a cultural hierarchy of the animal kingdom, where humans stood at the upper rung, closely followed by cetaceans, which would endure through the Middle Ages and well into the age of ‘modernity’).

Classical knowledge of cetaceans endured in the Middle Ages, but was often overshadowed by less naturalistic, more ideological, symbolic interpretations of animals. Medieval bestiaries presented animals as symbols to teach Christian moral lessons. Nevertheless, these bestiaries help us glean what people thought about nature. What terrified people was the perception that whales weren’t mere “brutes” – they were cunning. A recurring image in medieval illuminated manuscripts shows a ship atop a large fish. As the 13th-century English Harley Bestiary tells it, the sailors had mistaken the sperm whale for an island – and mistakenly attempted to land there and light a fire. The fire pierced its thick blubber and the hungry whale dragged the ship down to its watery end in the deep sea. The bestiary warned that the whale is like the devil, who deceives man with temptation then drags them to hell.

An island is actually a ‘whale’, 13th century. British Library, Harley MS 4751, f. 69r. [bl.uk]

We see similar fears of the unknown in Medieval and Renaissance maps, where whales are frequently portrayed as monstrous composites, sometimes attacking ships. The whales in Olaus Magnus’s 1539 map, Carta Marina, don’t look much like real whales; they have two blow holes like baleen whales (including blue whales, humpbacks and minke whales). Oddly, however, they have teeth like toothed whales (including orcas, dolphins and sperm whales), and scales like a fish. Presumably the artists never got a good look at the real animals, they would have drawn from the conceptual idea of them, disseminated in bestiaries and in folklore.

A ‘balena’ whale is seen suckling its calf, but they are under threat from an orca.

Coastal communities abound with stories of sea monsters, many of which sound a lot like misidentified whales. The kraken sounds much like a humpback whale, known for ‘trap-feeding’, in this mid-13^th century Old Norse description of it from The King’s Mirror: ‘Meanwhile the monster keeps it mouth open, and inasmuch as its opening is about as wide as a sound or fjord, the fishes cannot help crowding in in great numbers.’ When humpback whales trap-feed, they stay still at the surface, mouth agape vertically, to encourage juvenile fish to find shelter there. In Norse folklore there’s also the Jörmungandr or Midgard serpent, a great monster of the world sea, coiled around the earth and eating its own tail; in bestiaries it is sometimes said that whales do the same thing.

By the 16th century, Renaissance artists were increasingly focussed on naturalistic accuracy over symbolic expression. Knowledge became more standardised, accelerated by the invention of the printing press which put millions of books into circulation. Even if a Renaissance artist didn’t see a stranding firsthand, there were more visual and written records to corroborate or copy when producing their own. And there were more opportunities to see a whale outside the ocean, as whaling took off on a large, commercial scale.

In a recent article for BBC Culture, I wrote about how Moby-Dick helped transform the image of the whale, offering a blueprint for how we might transfigure our relationships with other animals. In it, I detailed the harrowing true story on which it was based, of nautical survival and cannibalism at sea. Moby-Dick showed us that our human perception of whales as sea monsters, as Leviathan, are projections of our own disavowed fear of the unknown, and disavowed guilt about how we treat other animals.

In the last few decades, we’ve come to reappraise whales for their mystery, colossal mammals who breathe like we do but who have made the ocean their home again. We’ve been enchanted by their song and by their behaviour which invites us to project onto them more positive stories about what they are doing.

Scientists are quick to quell ideas about an ‘orca uprising’, but the truth is that we don’t really know why orcas are sinking boats in the Strait of Gibraltar. We do know that they are smart animals who remember traumas and pass down knowledge through generations; like Porphyrios and the real Moby-Dick, they have good reason to fear us.

If we learn to see past ourselves, at the animals ourselves, we’ll find very different creatures.

In The Book of Beasts, I interviewed Nan Hauser, a whale scientist saved by a whale, and relayed strange stories of Vietnamese fishermen rescued at sea by humpback whales, who worship the Whale God Cá Ông. It’s tempting to imagine these as fictions, as anthropomorphism, but research has identified altruism in humpback whales, who save other marine animals like seals and sunfish from sharks. What else are we missing through our irrational servitude to the dogma that nature is cruel or indifferent? A lot.

More from Cunning Folk and beyond

• London folk: Come hear me and Brigid Lowe talk beasts, folklore, magic, shapeshifting and demons at The Owl Bookshop on 15th September and/or Housmans on the 16th September.

• A wee reminder: the Journeys issue is now available for pre-order.

• London folk can also catch the strange works of Richard Dadd at the Royal Academy of Art until October 2026.

• For those coming to Edinburgh for the last week of festival season, read our guide to the folkier, witchier side of Fringe.

• From our archive: Read Cristina Ferrandez’s personal essay about the real witches of her native Spain.

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This newsletter, unless otherwise indicated, is written by me, Cunning Folk editor Elizabeth Sulis Kim.

In my mid-twenties, I spent two years immersed in secret societies, strange churches, cults and alternative spiritualities. It wasn’t a new thing – I’d spent my early years in a retreat centre but, I thought, grown out of it. Then, after years of attempting to fit into hypernormal society, and failing to be sated by the already-measured, I’d felt the itch to search again.

All of the spiritual groups were so different but also kind of the same. One thing that seemed common to most if not all of these worlds was their faith in antiquity. Their authenticity often hinged on claims that their founders took possession of a secret document that preserved teachings from ancient times, or else they’d inherited it.

Usually such lineage claims are disproven by historians, but there is still – for some reason – great appeal in this idea there is, at the centre of this new religion, some deep and ancient truth almost lost to the mists of time.

Why is it that we keep seeing books, zines, festivals and podcasts celebrating ‘the old ways’, the ancient, traditions? We know (most?) traditions were invented – so why does it matter how old they are?

I was of two minds concerning these ‘ancient wisdom’ narratives. They were enticing origin stories – how interesting, this sense we’d ‘lost’ something vital. But why were people conflating truth with antiquity?

Let me be emphatic: I’m not problematising ancestral knowledge, from which we’ve learnt much about the world through long-term observation and trial and error. I am talking about the narrative that Truth with a capital T is in the past.

There is arbitrariness to it. Modern pagan and occult narratives often look to the classical world as a reference point, borrowing its gods and goddesses who bore human forms, but only selectively look beyond the gods modelled on the human frame, or to prehistory.

For example, pagans might revel at megaliths, prehistoric burial sites, but seldom offer the same reverence to the living part of prehistory, the animals prehistoric people so keenly carved, etched and painted in ivory, ochre and clay.

If you believe authenticity is found in antiquity, why not revere wilder, less human gods? This was one of many threads that inspired my narrative non-fiction debut, The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom – which published last week.

I don’t believe we should be taking everything wholesale from the past, but surely our ancestors’ interest in the natural world might seed alternative futures to the one we are currently spinning in the Anthropocene – or the Eremocene (‘lonely time’) as coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson.

I too was being selective, I realised, but my interest in animal deities and spirits wasn’t about authentically resuscitating one moment in antiquity; rather, it was about embracing what felt true and good – what made me feel more interconnected – what gave the world more meaning.

I think what the past does offer is similar to what looking to other cultures gives us: alternative stories about who we are and how we might relate to each other, and to the cosmos.

More compelling to me than romanticising the old ways is the sense that there is eternal wisdom. While some spiritualities claim truth by virtue of ancient lineage, others speak of divine revelations, of a prophet transcribing the words of a spirit of deity, of a poet landing upon transcendent truths. These ideas exist across mystical traditions the world-over.

Romanian historian Mircea Eliade theorised that rituals and myths help people transcend profane time and connect with sacred time, which gives profane time meaning. WB Yeats saw the spiritus mundi – ‘world spirit’ – as the source of truth and poetry. Dreamtime and ‘Everywhen’ are loose translations of the Aboriginal concept of an eternal, ever-unfolding reality – where past, present and future exist at once. Such ideas don’t ignore the passing of time; communities instead draw identity and meaning from this other layer of reality, not susceptible to the same forces which bring material decay. There is the sense, in this thinking, that all our brief lives add up to something beyond our comprehension.

It is fascinating that we tell of history as a story of linear progress, born from the advent of swelling cities, writing and agriculture, but pay little heed to the ebb and flow of our connection to a less fixed notion of time, where truth is omnipresent if you learn to pay attention. Maybe what we are yearning for isn’t the old ways but a cultural memory of eternity and interconnection?

More from Cunning Folk and beyond

• The Journeys issue is now available for pre-order! Featuring Zakia Sewell, Muco (Book of Voices), Zohreen Murtaza, Tree Carr, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Rowe Irvin and many others, this issue is an invitation to transcend the notion of nation states and commune with spirits of place.

• In case you missed it, read our latest article, In Defence of Romanticism.

• The Edinburgh Fringe is here and we have our eyes on A Wolf Shall Devour the Sun at the Scottish Storytelling Centre from Dougie Mackay and Jemima Thewes, about the wolf’s shapeshifting role in folklore, told through music and shadow puppetry. What else should we see?

• More for Edinburgh folk: catch Rebecca Tamás at Argonaut Books on 29th August, part of the Book Fringe. It is free but ticketed. Rebecca will be talking about her latest book, The Book of Mysteries: Wild Time and the Ritual Year.

• Last week, it was wonderful to attend Pam Grossman’s Wheel of Fate talk on her book Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path of Creativity This was our first time meeting in real life after years of correspondence and generally a magical, inspiring evening, and a first event for this Edinburgh institution – we hope the first of many. This book is an engaging and vital companion to any artist, writer or creative person – everyone, then.

• More from across the pond: The Bookseller recently announced that Kristen J. Sollée is launching a new hybrid publishing house for horror and witchcraft, Feral Eye. We’re so excited for Nightcats and everything else in the works.

• The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom by Elizabeth Sulis Kim (me!), published on 6th August with Chatto & Windus and has been endorsed by the likes of Lally MacBeth, Ronald Hutton, Fiona Robertson, Henry Mance, Thomas Waters, Juhea Kim, Rowe Irvin, and Kristen J. Sollée, among others. Hear about the book and research on my book tour with dates in cities including London, Manchester, Oxford, and Durham.

Our Journeys issue cover is by art director Kaitlynn Copithorne. It draws on symbolism from the Six of Swords and the legendary Voyage of Saint Brendan, among other stories.

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Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne

It is oft repeated that Gustave Flaubert hated Romanticism because real life never measured up to it. That is, in essence, the through-line in his novel Madame Bovary. Emma Bovary’s provincial marriage to an ordinary man doesn’t live up to her romantic notions for life, which she learnt from novels.

The books she read promised exotic travel, adventure, and passionate, all-consuming love. But modernity has blighted these dreams. She finds herself in a modern cage. Everything is predictable and mundane, including her husband, Charles, ordinary and flawed.

Flaubert’s portrayal of the French countryside is bleak – it’s flat, predictable and marked by ennui. There are no commons to escape to – no wild places. It’s quite the anti-bucolic vision. Madame Bovary’s only salvation is to be found amidst purchasable distractions – “She wanted to die but she also wanted to live in Paris.” – and in great gestures and passionate love affairs which enable her to project onto nature whatever she is feeling.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, said Flaubert, but he might as well have said that she is every one of us, dissatisfied as we are with modernity. There is this sense, for most of us, of a bigger life happening somewhere beyond us, and we are unable to fully participate.

Flaubert is remembered as a fervent critic of Romanticism. The problem was that Flaubert remained a Romantic and was frequently, in spite of himself, moved. Madame Bovary can be read as self-satire.

Flaubert was not against Romanticism per se, but against a bourgeois conception of it, concerned with nostalgia for some imagined past, grand gestures and luxurious commodities. He satirises Emma’s attempt to escape the drudgery of provincial life by participating in the ready-made fantasy of the bourgeois elite instead of cultivating something deeper, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. If we hate Emma Bovary it’s because we, like Flaubert, see ourselves in her; her grievances are symptomatic of living within this broken system.

Now well into the so-called age of modernity, many of us have as a relationship with Romanticism as complicated as Flaubert’s.

On the one hand, I worry that some attempts to escape capitalism today are as individualistic as Emma Bovary’s. Many of us seek relief in the exotic and novel; we seem to only be able to enjoy nature as a marketable experience. We still buy into the elitist brand of Romanticism Flaubert railed against.

We see this individualistic Romanticism reproduced on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok where users are rewarded for leaning into romantic aesthetics – “romanticising my life”. The reality, meanwhile, is that they are unpaid content producers, filming reels instead of making the ordinary truly extraordinary. It is this type of Romanticism, where fulfilment can be acquired by those with the means, which still reigns supreme in our collective imagination; a sort of historic cosplaying concerned above all with self-image, like trad wives, and the elitist appropriation/fetishisation of working class folk culture.

On the other hand, Romanticism has become conflated in our minds with something defanged and cloyingly sweet – even manipulatively so; films or books that dilute real experience and promise us tears – fake, then.

Today books are praised for being “not romantic” and “unsentimental.” As we are realising in the age of AI, cultural institutions are rewarding writers for their lack of meaning, and for reflexively writing about all things visceral and disgusting (because presumably, this is the only safe, secular thing in our hyper-normal modern lives that makes us feel something, without really making us feel anything?).

Our simplistic aversion to Romanticism makes us stupid, because we are feeling creatures who pretend we are not, and this is so often used against us. We decry sentiment but cannot see how our own perception is filtered through feeling.

Werner Herzog has vocally rallied against the “Disneyfication” of wild nature. In his documentary Grizzly Man, he tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist and bear enthusiast who spent thirteen summers living among bears in Alaska with no guns, bear spray or any recommended precautions. On his thirteenth summer, he and his girlfriend got mauled to death by a bear.

At the end of the film, Herzog declares,

“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.”

In case it is not clear enough, elsewhere in the narrative, he articulates his ideology more clearly, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Are bears indifferent? To each other, probably not – though someone will dismiss every act of care as instinct. But how do they feel about other species? Very rarely bears attack humans, but we’re far, far more likely to be killed by another human than mauled by a bear – and we’re far more likely to kill a bear than to be killed by one. There are also numerous examples of bears forming relationships with humans, either because they were raised by them, through habitation or because they lived besides a human culture that fosters respectful co-existence.

Interspecies altruism is hard to empirically measure, because we are unable to ask other animals about their motivations, but there is research supporting altruism in humpback whales, who defend other marine animals, such as seals and sunfish, from orca attacks.

Current scientific consensus is that the human conscience evolved to enable us to survive together – and most of us acknowledge some feeling for other animals, even if we have cultural myths that help bypass these feelings. It would appear that the conscience exists in other animals too, including rats who in experiments refuse food if it means a fellow rat will come to harm. Am I projecting too? Perhaps, but also perhaps not.

To assume indifference is often part of the worldview of those who preach “I believe in science”, but it isn’t particularly scientific. As the late primatologist Frans de Waal put it, “The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.”

In an open letter, naturalist Charles Russell, known for his research among grizzly bears, praised Herzog as a “skilled filmmaker” but criticised his portrayal of Treadwell as “a nut case with a death-wish. His commentary expounds his own, very simple ideas about nature and how man doesn’t belong out there in wild nature with all these horrible animals.” Russell wished that Treadwell had followed bear safety advice, but worried that Herzog’s narrative would sway public opinion in favour of bear culls. “The fact that Timothy spent an incredible 35,000 hours, spanning 13 years, living with the bears in Katmai National Park, without any previous mishap, escapes people completely.”

A problem among Romanticism’s most vocal critics is they don’t engage with the roots of our aversion to the movement. They will, like Herzog, dismiss any attempts to project feelings onto nature because they have bought into the capitalist notion that to do so is foolish. Herzog doesn’t seem to understand that he too has absorbed an ideology, one based on violence, the one that powered the industrial revolution, that enables AI, the same sentiment which fuelled Ahab’s vengeance against the whale Moby-Dick, in Herman Melville’s magnum opus.

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” says Ahab. He hates the “inscrutable” thing which lies behind the whale. He too sees chaos and hostility. But that, like the instinctual, mechanical “indifference” Herzog sees in bears, is his own projection.

And what a bleak, unhelpful projection it is. The opposite of Romanticism can be just as damaging as unanchored Romanticism, offering us little more than a destructive, self-focused prism through which to view the world.

Those who conflate feeling with foolishness, who infantilise it, have fallen hard for the propaganda of the modern era, which ridiculed magic and sentiment. What’s more, feeling is often culturally gendered as feminine, and suspect towards it often veils misogyny and a capitalist mindset concerned with aesthetics and little else.

Feeling isn’t irrational though, nor something we should infantilise; it is essential, also as a form of rebellion against the institutions and corporations who tells us what to feel. One could say that all the things we love are born from feeling and while memories of the specifics fade, feeling is the one thing that will endure.

One of Herzog’s contemporary literary heroes, Cormac McCarthy, had a very different view of nature from Herzog’s. The post-apocalyptic world he presents in The Road is bleak and violent, but the man and his son are resisting its violence, mourning, like the Romantics before them, the “old” world:

“It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.”

Theirs is not thoughtless nostalgia but a yearning for a world which means something – and a commitment to carry its fire. At the end of this love letter to his son, the narrator enjoys a final soliloquy:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Of course, we readers know these things are still there (but for how long?). McCarthy reminds his son, and by turn us, that we can tread another path, approaching the unknown not with violence or indifference – both stemming from disavowed feeling; radically, he gives us permission to be moved by it.

The resolution of Madame Bovary is that we should put aside a bourgeois conception of a life well-lived, but we can still strive to make the world a better place. This thinking is the seed that sowed my narrative non-fiction, debut, The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom. Of all the stories we could have told about the world, why have we opted to tell the most boring and violent ones? Where everything is devoid of inherent meaning and real life must be purchased? Where nature is indifferent?

Tracing stories from around the world, from the past and present, I found alternatives to the ones in dominant cultures, where we’re more likely to run into simulacra than real animals. Stories that express a more real and meaningful otherworld which lies beneath the Baudrillardian veneer of modern life, a world where our lives and the lives of other animals have meaning, where we can foster different relationships with that “inscrutable” thing which lies behind the masks of other animals, a world which we can collectively invoke wherever we are.

The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom will be published by Chatto & Windus on 6th August, 2026.

Waterstones has selected this title for its summer promotion – pre-order between 21st-24th July to get 25% off retail price with the code SUMMER26.

This essay will appear later on the Cunning Folk website. As a subscriber to The Cunning you get early access.

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Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne

In 1957, Romanian historian Mircea Eliade published The Sacred and the Profane, airing his trademark theory that there is a sharp distinction between the two. Rituals and myths, Eliade claims, exist to help people transcend the profane reality and connect with the sacred. They only ‘acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.'

‘For archaic man,’ writes Eliade, ‘reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype." Though his language is sometimes dated, there is something to Eliade’s idea that humans need to forge opportunities to transcend the profane for it to have meaning.

The ‘modern’ world feels impoverished because we don’t acknowledge our stories, our rituals, but we still have them, even if we might have swapped out praying at an altar with attending our cathedrals of commerce, pursuing the glittering ‘transcendent’ penthouse paradise we see on television, over connection with the numinous. We still turn to stories to give our own lives meaning; the very best lift us from the humdrum to consider our life in cosmic terms, as some small part of an ever-unfolding story.

Rituals, of course, can also feel profane: a habitual morning coffee. A walk in the afternoon. Reading at night. But the very act of ritualising something profane offers a moderating effect. For those who ceremoniously consume substances such as tobacco or ayahuasca , these drugs are no longer coping mechanisms but ways towards community, greater self understanding, and respect towards nature. We can also cultivate reverence through our own daily rituals, whether that’s sitting down for tea and cake or to write a short story.

Ceremony matters because what we do here can’t only be about fleeting joy, chasing fame or material success. Through ritual, we are reminded of the greater picture, of the privilege of being able to enjoy the fruits of the earth, make things and quest towards meaning; in turn we are reminded of how our consumerism impacts others, and impassioned to reflect on how we might serve those beyond ourselves.

More intentional rituals help make living better for ourselves and for others. Here’s a little glimpse of our daily rituals:

Brigid Lowe

I go up the mount behind the flat every day, pick dinner and often something extra like elderflower or hawthorn or heather. The great thing about foraging is it ties you to the present moment. Hawthorn blossoms, wild cherries and elderflower pass so fast, all in one froth. You look at them and think, it will be still there tomorrow... and then you go the day after that and it’s gone. It’s a lesson in seizing the day. Britain has a special emotion dynamic because of its seasons, because as well as tying you to the moment they also tie you to all the other elderflower and hawthorn seasons there have ever been.

Michael Vince Kim

When I need to focus for a few hours, I prepare Yerba mate, a drink more popular than coffee in Argentina, where I grew up. It’s caffeinated but doesn’t make me jittery like coffee. It signals that now is time to focus, but back in Argentina I also drank it communally with friends.

Kristen J. Sollée

I do some form of bibliomancy every day. Sometimes it’s with a specific sacred text, but most often it’s just engaging with the different books and magazines that are always at arms reach to see what they have to tell me.

Liz Nelson

Every day I try to fill three pages of my journal, writing stream of consciousness. I set up space at my table, with the same journal, pen and sometimes a candle; it’s about creating time for an activity that’s part creative, part therapeutic, that’s just for me. With journalling I think about a quote from Flannery O’Connor: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Kaitlynn Copithorne

Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I take a coffee out to the garden and drink while watering the plants and throwing a ball for my dog. My morning routine has also become my dog’s morning routine and she will not let me skip it!

Elizabeth Sulis Kim

I also start my day with a coffee. Weekly freediving and daily transcendental meditation help me let go of stress I’m unconsciously holding, and connect with a layer of existence that feels impermanent. Freediving is about self-mastery, meditation is about surrendering control, so they are quite complementary and support my creative work.

Cristina Ferrandez

Every day, after lunch, my husband and I walk in the Surrey Hills, hoping to spot wild bunnies. We often see them hopping about the edge of a field, grazing on tall grass or chasing each other. It takes me out of the boring workday routine and reminds me what real life is all about.

More from Cunning Folk and beyond

• For anyone in the Midlands, a few of us will be at the Wyrd Folk Festival on 6th September. It’s taking place in a historic pub, The Fleece Inn on the edge of the Cotswolds. Join us for a day of storytelling, folk music and film.

• Between October 30th and November 2nd, head to Margate for The Samhain Society ‘to honour the ancestors, commune with spirits, and celebrate death as part of life.’ There will be bookish events in collaboration with The Margate Bookshop and you may see a few of us there too.

• Also in Margate: Between February – June 2027, catch the exhibition Natural Magic: Women, Art, Spirit Worlds at Turner Contemporary. Expect esoteric, Feminist works produced by luminaries such as Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Emily Kam Kngwarray and Anna Higgins. Say the curators, ‘Natural Magic will offer a timely reappraisal of art histories that have traditionally marginalised practices associated with intuition, mysticism and non-rational ways of knowing.’

• The sacred and profane worlds continue to overlap, as the Argentinian team worry about whether a key player has been cursed, and seek an antidote.

• From our archive: read Terri-Jane Dow’s essay about Sylvia Plath and the Occult.

Journeys issue – the reader stories spread

Have you been on a personal pilgrimage? We want to hear about the journeys you took for yourself. You may have followed a historic route, set out looking for Big Foot, traced the footsteps of a favourite writer, or sought out a spirit of place amplified through popular culture. Summarise in a sentence and send to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com

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–Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

It’s 10 pm here in Edinburgh and still light.

Yesterday we walked a stretch of the John Muir footpath that follows the Firth of Forth towards the sea. We were sheltered by the woodland running along the Dalmeny Estate, Scot’s pine and old oaks and a dense undergrowth of ferns and mossy logs. The tide was out and the estuary was part transformed into miles of beach, reflecting the blue sky. The sun remained high for our entire walk because we were almost at the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

Early this morning, thousands flocked to standing stones across the country to witness the sunrise. Most congregated at Avebury and Stonehenge in England. Word has it the situation at many of these prehistoric spots has become out of hand in recent years. You may have heard about traffic jams along the A303 and full car parks ad revellers being turned away.

The jury is out on what prehistoric standing stones were originally intended for. We imagine sites such as Stonehenge as places of ritual and intense life, but one convincing theory is that they were burial sites (and by extension, possibly places of ancestor veneration), aligned with the solar movements. This tallies with Mark Parker Pearson’s theory that places associated with life in Neolithic Britain were made with wood – timber houses, forests and sacred groves – and places associated with the dead were marked by stones. It also tracks with how we bury our dead today.

There may have been animated scenes at stone circles in prehistoric times – but it’s hard to determine, millennia later, whether there was feasting and dancing, or whether the ceremonies here were more solemn affairs.

Of course, if they were primarily associated with death and commemoration, that doesn’t mean that’s what they have to mean for us today. We are constantly reimagining and reinterpreting and telling new stories about what things mean to us. And thinking about the dead gives us an opportunity to think about being alive.

I am currently reading Fiona Robertson’s Stonelands: A Journey of Darkness and Light through Britain’s Ancient Places, a beautifully written memoir about confronting impermanence in the wake of personal grief. She sets out on pilgrimages to visit different standing stones, along the way connecting with folklore, including stories of witches turned into stone, and with other people for whom these are sacred places. Amid the stones, she does something akin to a spell or a prayer, willing that her terminally ill husband, Stephen, will survive. She recognises that the stones change too – everything does – but something also remains – at least we hope. And this desire to endure seems part of the human spirit.

In South Korea, where my husband Michael is from, people still visit burial sites like Gyeongju – once capital of the ancient Kingdom of Silla. These places look a lot like the grass-covered burial mounds found throughout Britain. Around two thousands years have elapsed since the death of these kings, ancestors of many Kim clans, and visits are neither celebratory nor commemorative. Rather, visiting is about intrigue, and connecting with the great story that lies beyond our own as individuals, in a country where people prioritise the pronoun ‘uri’ (우리) or ‘we’ over ‘I’, emphasising the collective self over the individual self.

Michael at Daereungwon Tomb Complex, Gyeongju, South Korea

Admittedly, I have always struggled to connect with the numinous at Stonehenge. Part of this was circumstantial. I saw it regularly from the passenger seat, as we drove along the A303, leaving behind the hills of the West Country for the flatter, more industrial south-east.

I have found more magic and meaning in the living woods near my childhood home – in the Undercliff, and a decade later, in the old-growth remnants of the Caledonian forest here in Scotland. I found an even greater sense of being alive in the biodiverse forests of Amazonia and the Great Bear Rainforest, where many spirits reside.

Nevertheless, I marvel at the complexity of these prehistoric people’s knowledge, and appreciate old stones as one component of a vast and awe-inspiring cultural heritage. Whether we’re spiritual or not, connecting with tangible relics from the past can be profoundly meaningful. The past is no longer some abstract idea, but right here, something we can reach out and touch.

I have felt a flicker of what draws people to Stonehenge at Callanish, on the island of Lewis, seeing the light touch the stones’ silhouettes at twilight, the mountainous peaks of Harris rising beyond. There is widespread folkloric belief in trolls, giants and other beings who morph into stone at sunrise, or at the end of their age. In the half light, that these stones aren’t really stones seems plausible.

I’m not sure, however, if it’s entirely about the stones themselves. There are many thin places – and the uncanny can be found even in our immediate surroundings. Pay attention to the tree stumps that, from the corner of the eye, look like strange creatures. The shadows that seem sentient. The sense that we are not alone in a forest.

When we imbue a place with meaning, with story, it becomes a part of our personal or collective lore.

I don’t know if it’s the landscape that gives the story, or we who story the landscape, or an interplay between the two, but wherever people gather and celebrate there is energy and magic. I have felt it on Glastonbury Tor, amid strangers plucking strings of a harp, and on less extraordinary days than solstice. I’ve also felt it at music festivals, on sacred mountains, and at less storied places with friends.

There is, of course, no right way to celebrate solstice. (There’s no obligation to even celebrate.)

My personal sense these days is that I’d rather dance in a forest than a graveyard. Perhaps that is because in the city where I live, Edinburgh, memento moris and cemeteries are everywhere. Or because once this land was more densely forested, and the advent of agriculture fundamentally transformed it and our customs, and I yearn for something older and imagined that cannot be put back. Or perhaps it can be put back, if we start caring about it again. What would our rituals and customs look like if we lived in the forest?

A tale for another time, but of the prehistoric spoils, the more beastly better captivate my attention.

*

This afternoon, I went to the launch of Jane Healey’s beautiful sounding Crescendo in the garden of Lighthouse Books, and though I haven’t read the book yet, it was glorious to sit in the midsummer sun among strangers, to watch the strange light filter down through the canopy onto a patch of daisies. Everything was so hyperreal it felt unreal.

On the way home, I saw an elderly man reading a newspaper on a bench, feeding the crows. ‘Happy midsummer,’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s solstice isn’t it?’ He looked at the bird who was perched beside him, who then took monkey nuts from his hand. The man told me he’s here whenever the weather is good, feeding the seagulls, the pigeons, the crows, whatever birds come to him.

Midsummer, like other equinoxes, remains an auspicious time for breaking down boundaries and finding connection, with other humans, and with other beings – fairies, spirits and animals – though once these boundaries were more porous – in other places they remain so. Night and day; reality and illusion; human and animal; everything, at this cusp moment, seems a little less exact.

Happy midsummer!

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More from Cunning Folk and beyond

• Read Sophia Adamowicz’ interview with Lucy Rose about the folklore that inspired her novel The Lamb.

• From the archives: Bw Bach tells us Why Magic Matters.

• Join Elizabeth Sulis Kim, Brigid Lowe and Kim Willis at Urmston Books in Manchester on 10th September to discuss ‘folklore and forgotten truths’ (but are they really forgotten?)

• On 31st October, Jennifer Lane and Elizabeth Sulis Kim will be speaking at Blackwell’s Oxford about wild intuition. Book your tickets now.

• Congratulations to Cunning Folk contributor Elizabeth Dearnley on the publication of her latest British Library Tales of the Weird anthology, Haunted Yorkshire: Ghostly Tales from God’s Own Country.

• Catch Sarah Perverley’s free webinar Mermaids in folklore, art and myth via Advaya.

The Cunning is free but you can support us by pledging (we are grateful to those who, uninvited, have already done so!), or by purchasing our latest issue via our online shop. The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom will be published by Chatto & Windus on August 6th. We’ll be announcing full book tour dates soon.

‘The Cunning Folk head office,’ I said, ‘is our flat.’

We get asked this a lot, and I am both appreciative and a little taken aback to hear people think we’re such a massive operation, when we’re just a family and some friends working out of our living room. Whenever a new issue arrives, we have to heave up boxes from a pallet delivered on the street. And then, for weeks, we have to live with them.

Hopefully this explains why we took an unplanned 2-year hiatus, between The Vampire Issue and The Sound & Vision Issue: in 2023, we welcomed to the world a daughter, and with no family support nearby, childcare, or real maternity pay, we were a little under pressure.

Oh, and I was writing some books.

I’m very pleased to finally be able to share news of the narrative non-fiction book that occupied most of my time, taking me on a journey across continents and through time:

The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom

Published by Chatto & Windus

A modern bestiary with an ancient heart: meet twelve emblematic animals and restore your relationship with the natural world.

The bear deities, Artio and Artaius, who’ll rise from sleep; the salmon of wisdom who gifts understanding of the universe’s past, present and future; the Lion Man carved 40,000 years ago. Join Elizabeth Sulis Kim as she travels across the globe and through time, from our deep past into the future, bringing together the animals which have captivated us for millennia.

Steeped in folklore, mythology, magic and religion, The Book of Beasts tells the story of our shapeshifting relationships with animals, from reverence to persecution, friendship to fear, awe to indifference. It asks us what we actually know about the creatures we share this world with – and offers us a different way of living together.

Excerpt from Introduction:

‘And, so, in writing this book, and the many years of thinking that preceded it, I have set out looking for something that felt largely missing, but that is not necessarily lost. I wanted to know why animals were the focus of prehistoric cave paintings, why they appeared so frequently in ancient material culture and myth, and why the adult stories and art in dominant western cultures have become so human-centric, our relationships with animals more dysfunctional and unsustainable. I wanted to know why animals are more present in the cosmologies and origin stories of other cultures, what their existence or absence has meant for people, the planet and the animals themselves. I wanted to know whether the dwindling presence of animals in our stories has reflected or enabled plummeting biodiversity and our intensified exploitation of animal kind. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the world we might inhabit if we could change our stories. I wanted to know whether, through a more intentional storytelling, we could become better environmental stewards.

If we listen closely, we might hear the murmurings of another story, one remembered in place names and art, or in brushing up against the ghosts, or inhabitants, of another shared world.’

Here’s what a few people are saying about The Book of Beasts:

‘Wild and strange, and full to the brim with tales from the deep past, offering a meaningful connection to our ancestors. […] An essential for any bestiary or folklore fan.’ -Lally MacBeth, author of The Lost Folk

‘This beautifully written book considers the relationship between humans and animals through the whole of time and across the planet ... a work of scholarship and passionate personal engagement ... [it is] ultimately an examination of the place of human in the world, past and present.’ -Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch

‘Immersive, enchanting, and exquisitely written, The Book of Beasts is a clarion call to rethink and rewild our relationship with animals. Prepare to be changed by this magical book.’ -Kristen J. Sollée, author of Cat Call: Reclaiming the Feral Feminine

‘Dazzling in range and tender in purpose, The Book of Beasts is an invitation to remember our kinship with the living world. Elizabeth Sulis Kim asks urgent questions with a scholar's rigour and a storyteller's heart. It is both confounding and humbling to consider how often humans forget that we belong to nature too.’ -Hollie Starling, editor of Bog People

‘Sprawling and immersive […] With great insight and compassion, Elizabeth Sulis Kim makes a case for storytelling as a potent ecological tool that might allow us to cultivate a more sustainable and holistic relationship with the natural world.’ -Rowe Irvin, author of Life Cycle of a Moth

‘The Book of Beasts is epic and wise, but also tender and sensitive. From prehistory to the present, through myth and magic to religion and literature, this captivating and highly-original book explores the immense importance of animals across diverse human cultures. With profound reflections about the power of beastly thinking, The Book of Beasts is essential reading for animal lovers everywhere.’ -Thomas Waters, author of Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times

‘This is a beautiful book, and an important one. Elizabeth Sulis Kim reawakens an older way of looking at animals, through stories of reverence and resonance that ask us to reconsider how we interact with the animal kingdom. From stepping among temple rats in Rajasthan to walking the Great Bear Rainforest and making eye contact with whales, the author travels a fascinating pathway across thousands of years of folklore that always has an eye on the world around us today.’ -Nicholas Jubber, author of The Fairy Tellers

‘Beautiful and provocative. Anyone who loved animal stories as a child will find this book enchanting. Elizabeth Sulis Kim shows how to think differently about the creatures with whom we share our planet.’ -Henry Mance, author of How to Love Animals in a Human Shaped World and Financial Times journalist

‘Written with clarity and quiet force, The Book of Beasts dissolves the boundary between human and animal without sentimentality or simplification. Elizabeth Sulis Kim invites us into a more attentive, more ethical way of seeing – one that could change how we inhabit the world.’ ‘Shakrukh Husain, author of A Restless Wind

‘Elizabeth Sulis Kim nudges us to re-enchant the world by recognizing the magic and mystery of wild creatures... I found this book to be highly captivating, deeply emotional and beautifully nuanced.’ -Chelsea Wolfe, musician

‘The Book of Beasts is a compassionate, clear-sighted and gorgeously written bestiary for the twenty-first century, challenging us to rewild our relationship with animals and the stories we tell about them. […] Reading this wise and magical manifesto has made me more alive to the possibilities of both epic and everyday beastly encounters, and I’ll be looking for white stags in every woodland I visit.’ -Elizabeth Dearnley, author of Fearsome Fairies: Haunting Tales of the Fae

A note on the cover: The illustration is by from Kaitlynn Copithorne, who has now worked with me for six years on Cunning Folk magazine, and I was so pleased to be able to work with her again for this book. (The cropped picture in this article preview is also by Kaitlynn and appeared first in Cunning Folk Magazine.)

During the research for this book, we finally met in person in Vancouver, and travelled together around Vancouver Island. We hiked in the temperate coastal rainforests, explored the inlets by boat, foraged for salmon berries, and encountered black bears, sea otters, sea lions, and bald eagles.

This was our office for a few days, in Ucluelet, Vancouver island. While here, a cunning crow took one of my blackberries, and left in its place an offering, a delicate piece of lichen. Strange things kept happening throughout the writing and research of this book, which reaffirmed its need.

‘The owls are not what they seem,’ says the giant in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks.

Nor are the other animals.

And so, I invite you to come with me, looking for another world that sometimes collides with this one.

The Carpathian Mountans / The Piatra Craiului National Park, Transylvania, România, 2022

Pre-ordering books is the best way to support authors. You can pre-order The Book of Beasts via bookshop.org or go direct to your local bookshop. You can also add The Book of Beasts to your TBR pile on Goodreads.

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New subscribers, welcome! Old subscribers, welcome back – you’ll notice things look a little different here. After six years on Mailchimp, as of June 2026, we’ve made the move to Substack, and our contacts list has migrated with us. It’s more user friendly, more aligned with what we do, and better for connecting with our community.

The Cunning is Cunning Folk Magazine’s newsletter’s new home. Since 2019, we’ve been publishing the most exciting writing pertaining to magic, mythology, folklore and the occult. We are fortunate to have such an engaged readership, who enable us to fund printing entirely through pre-orders.

We publish whenever we like, which at present is roughly once a year, but we have exciting plans to do more as a small press in the near future, and have other projects underway.

Over the years we’ve had the privilege of publishing a long list of brilliant writers, including Naomi Ishiguro, Zoe Gilbert, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Alohalani Brown, Diane Purkiss, Molly Aitken, Emma Glass, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, CAConrad, Ronald Hutton, Rebecca Tamás, Elizabeth Dearnley, Ella Duffy, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Rosa Boshier, Brodie Crellin, Juhea Kim and David Bramwell, and interviewing artists and writers such as Madeline Miller, AK Blakemore, Rachel Pollack, Alice Hoffman, Silvia Federici, Lankum, Pam Grossman, Sinéad Gleeson, Amy Hale and Chelsea Wolfe.

Cunning Folk is edited by Elizabeth Sulis Kim, with art direction from Kaitlynn Copithorne, and photo editing from Michael Vince Kim.

We’re proud to have had some small stake in supporting the early careers of writers such as Alice Slater, whose publication in Cunning Folk landed her interest from two big five agents and Jodie Matthews, who received mentoring with Molly Aitken via our free scheme – expect interviews with both in the near future!

Here’s what people are saying about Cunning Folk:

Evanna Lynch: ‘I am absolutely loving Cunning Folk, a magazine about magic, mythology, folklore and the occult curated by Elizabeth Kim. … it’s a brilliant resource.’

Jen Campbell: ‘a brilliant magazine’

Jill Dawson: ‘Clever and surprising and always worth a read … A superlative magazine.’

Kristen J. Sollée says, ‘Since its debut, Cunning Folk has fast bloomed into my fave new magazine’ ;

Ronald Hutton: ‘Cunning Folk remains one of the most sophisticated magazines on the occult- Pagan circuit […] It also constantly addresses important issues, not merely to Pagans and magicians but to humanity.’

Thomas Waters: ‘Absolutely beautiful […] I like to think it will be studied in years to come, as we study the esoteric periodicals and folklore journals of the last century.’

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The Cunning is the place for connecting with our community. We’ll be sharing interviews, news about our latest issues, events, forthcoming books, behind the scenes work, and rounding up opportunities, articles, publishing advice, and all things relevant to our readers. Subscribing is completely free.

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Our latest cover illustration is by Marina Ruiz. The Sound & Vision issue is an obvious homage to David Bowie, but also to Leonard Cohen, Hilma af Klint, David Lynch, Sylvia Plath and all the other artists (most good ones, to be fair) who turn to unconventional means to seek inspiration. It is all about the uncanny, mystical side of creation: within, find interviews with musicians and artists, occult-generated art, poetry, short fiction, and exercises to tease out that thing inside you. You’ll notice it’s a fair bit lighter than previous issues – we explain why in this article, ‘Should we still be using the word occult?’.

We are currently working on our Journeys issue, possibly our favourite edition yet, and will be posting more about what you can expect from it in the coming months.

We intend to carry on offering accessible content and have no immediate plans to hide our Substack behind a paywall.

The best way to support us is to pick up a copy of our latest issue, Sound & Vision, or an enamel lamen pin, via our online shop. You can also pick up a copy from your local indie – see our stockists here – or tell your favourites about us! We appreciate your support over the years, until next time.