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3 unusual facts about Order of Woodcraft Chivalry


Order of Woodcraft Chivalry

The first folkmoot ceremony of the Order was held on an estate at Sandy Balls on the northern edge of the New Forest, on Lammas 1921, with the sacred fire lit by four people dressed in colours of the elements of each quarter, bringing greetings from the elemental powers in succession from north round to west.

He saw women as incarnations of God, to be "worshipped in spirit and in truth"; he revered the Jack-in-the-Green, which he considered to be the English equivalent of Dionysus, and held that the "Trinity of Woodcraft" consisted of Pan, Artemis and Dionysus.

He started publishing an Order periodical called The Pinecone, which contained many provocative items, including a nude Dionysus on the cover of one issue, a photograph of a nude Byngham and his semi-nude girlfriend in Grecian dress, and a verse play by Victor Benjamin Neuburg, who also introduced Byngham to the ideas of the famous occultist Aleister Crowley.


Sandy Balls

Ernest Westlake, an anthropologist stimulated by the ideas and work of Ernest Thompson Seton bought the land as a site for his newly formed youth movement the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.


see also

Grith Fyrd

Its founders belonged to the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, a shadowy English group influenced by the thinking of Ernest Thompson Seton's Woodcraft Indians (later renamed the Woodcraft League of America), whose most lasting creation was the Woodcraft Folk.