She Who Runs With the Herd

Last tale of the Antlered Folk & story recording

While the days are slowly growing, leading the path towards the sun, we are still deep in winter.

The tops of the hills around Loch Lomond, and the summit of Ben Lomond are covered in snow. With clear skies and a midwinter sun, the temperature won’t rise above freezing.

The light is small and fragile and I’m feeling no need to go in search of it. I’m well suited to these short days, still unfurling slowly into the year.

I have one more tale of the antlered folks before I begin some tales of Brighid. I did promise more tales of the Cailleach, and we will have more of those before the Spring Equinox.

Radical Doll Making

Stories often solidify and become woven together when I create a doll. Doll making is an ancient practice and as a doll maker I picture myself as part of that long heritage, going back to the hands who carved some of the earliest dolls we have - such as the Woman of Willendorf.

I was already familiar with this figure - a woman whose kin wore reindeer antlers, performed rituals, shape-shifted and ran with the herd. I had met her, her kin and their great antlered deity in journeys through the worlds.

When you create a doll, you begin with an intention. It might not be fully thought through, or even take the form of words - for sometimes it can be a collage of images, of scents and things you might even think of as old memories.

As the form of the doll takes shape, building up layers of wool or perhaps starting with a wore armature - this is a digging down to the bones, hearing her stories of her people and the landscape. No matter how well you might know this figures story there’s always another layer added when you create, for dolls are born on the thresholds, one foot in this world and a foot in the otherworld.

She Who Runs With the Herd was born in a time of ice, a time when great herds of reindeer travelled out to this penninsula of Europe, across the vastness of Doggerland which now lies under the North Sea. Fishermen are known to bring up great tusks, or Irish Elk skulls with the catch.

As the female reindeer led the herd, the female matriarchs of the clan led their people. Sometimes they lost the herd, and these wise ones shape-shifted into reindeer to run and join the herd.

The female reindeer, like the male, grow antlers. She is the guide for the herd, following the ancestral paths over the land that her mother led the herd on and her mother before that – stretching back thousands of years.
There is an ancient connection between the woman who led her people and these female reindeer – one which has been honored and respected through ritual and ceremony.

Tending to the pathways is tending to the oldest magic and mystery there is in these lands, so run the pathways if you can, dance them wherever you are. Dance, rattle, and sing the pathways, do magic on the pathways, chant, and create rituals of gesture and ceremony.

Come join these shape-shifting women, tend the high shrines, etch your sacred maps into the bones, tune into the heartbeat of the drum, and become the dancer between worlds. Attune your antlers to the answers you seek and run...