The Source

Food is never just food. To mark Love British Food’s 25th anniversary, Love British Food and Future Countryside have commissioned a collection of essays exploring the role of food in Britain today. Bringing together diverse perspectives from across the food supply chain and beyond, the collection provides a snapshot of British food and society in 2026 – designed to inspire fresh thinking, worthwhile debate and positive action for the future. 

Spirit and the land

Connecting spirit and the land may seem an unusual topic in the context of farming but looked at in the broader context it’s the default position of practically everyone in the world except people in modern secular societies. 

I saw this in action myself. I lived in India for seven years, where I worked at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad. On our experimental farm, which had been taken over from the local villagers, the whole farm was full of small shrines where people could honour the gods and the goddesses. It was taken for granted that nature was sacred. Every village had its sacred trees, usually pipal and neem, and sacred animals, like the cows that wander all over the roads and no one bothers them. Even cobras and rats are sacred.

All around the world there has always been the sense of connection with living nature. In hunter-gatherer societies their relationship to the animals they hunt and the plants they gather is not simply economic. It’s to do with a living relationship. The people who are on the frontier between the human and the non-human world are shamans, or their local equivalent.

When agriculture first came to England about 5,000 years ago, it was associated with a celebration of the sacredness of the land and its relationship to the heavens. The great megalithic centres like Stonehenge were places where people went for festivals, usually at the solstices, to celebrate. They didn’t live there but congregated for the festivals. Modern solstice gatherings like the Glastonbury Festival can be seen as a kind of atavistic resonance with these ancient celebrations.

In the Middle Ages here in Europe, it was taken for granted that nature was alive. The philosophy taught in the universities was a kind of animistic Christianity. The official philosophy was that the earth, planets and stars were alive and that plants and animals were animated by souls. Plants had vegetative souls which give the form to their body; they shaped plants into their specific forms. Animals had vegetative souls that shaped the body, healed wounds and guided regeneration after damage. In addition, their behaviour was organized by animal souls, underlying their sensations, emotions, and instincts. Our word "animal" comes from the Latin word anima which means "soul". Humans had vegetative souls shaping the body like plants, animal souls like animals giving us our emotions and our animal nature and, in addition, the rational soul, which gave us the ability to speak, reason and be open consciously to God. The human mind was embedded within a larger psychic system which connected us to all nature, and to God, who sustained the heavens, the earth and all that exists.

The worldview of the Middle Ages was not a mere theory, but was sustained by rituals, seasonal festivals and included a sense of the protection of saints and angels. Each parish had its protector saint, angel or aspect of God, and still does. This represents a Christianisation of the older idea of a tutelary deity, or protector spirit, or genius loci as the Romans called the spirit of the place. And medieval England, like other parts of Europe was full of pilgrimage routes, where people were going to holy places all over the land.

All this was interrupted here in Britain by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Pilgrimage was suppressed, and the importance of saints and festivals greatly diminished. Then in the seventeenth century, the "mechanical philosophy" that underpinned the scientific revolution asserted that the whole world was made up of nothing but inanimate matter; animals, plants and human bodies were soulless machines. This revolutionary change created a spiritual void in which nature was merely material and mechanistic, lacking any spiritual dimension. Agriculture then became just a matter of the right chemicals in the soil, the right genetic make-up of crops, the right machinery, market forces, and so forth. 

However, the limitations of the materialist creed are increasingly obvious even within the sciences themselves. We are entering a post-materialist era.

One of our challenges is to rediscover and reconnect with the spiritual dimension of nature. The revival of pilgrimage is one aspect of this process. In particular, the British Pilgrimage Trust, founded ten years ago, has been reopening the ancient footpath pilgrimage routes. It’s a wonderful experience to walk through fields, woods and meadows to sacred places – deeply archetypal.

I think it is also important is to revive those festivals that connect the community to the land, which are part of every culture. In the agricultural festivals of our own tradition, one of the first of the year, in January, is Plough Sunday. In my own hometown, Newark-on-Trent, a plough is taken into the church by local farmers and blessed. Then there is Rogation Sunday in May. Rogation means "asking", and involves praying for the crops, animals and the land and for those who live and work there. Some parish churches still have processions around the boundaries of the parish "beating the bounds", or a local pilgrimage to holy places within the parish, including holy wells and springs. This year the British Pilgrimage Trust gave grants to forty parishes in England to encourage the revival of these local pilgrimages. Lots of people joined in. Then there are harvest festivals, which are still widely observed, giving thanks for the crops and the productivity of the land.

We are also seeing a revival of patronal festivals, which are the feast days of the patron saints; for example, St George's day is April 23, St John the Baptist's day June 24, St Mary Magdalene's July 22. In Italy and Spain these are big events with processions, feasting, fun and games. There are at least 80 new patronal festivals happening this year in various villages in Britain. So far, they have been a tremendous success, reconnecting local people with their holy place, and with the ancestors who buried around it in the churchyard, and with the spiritual protector of the land.   

A revival of our own native traditions is very important if we want to reconnect with the people who have lived on this land before us and been part of each local community over the centuries.

Spirituality is about connection with that which is greater than ourselves. And farming is clearly not just about humans, it is about the land, the soil, the plants and animals, the weather, the seasons, the whole earth, the sun, and indeed the ultimate source of everything.

*****

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 100 papers in scientific journals and nine books, including The Science Delusion and Science and Spiritual Practices. His website is www.sheldrake.org