Bone, Bell, and Bonfire: Richard Sermon's Research and the Reclamation Series
Working notes on four papers by Richard Sermon (Waterford bone flute, The Wicker Man and Beltane, Thomas Dowse the Virginia taborer, and the origins of wassail), with attention to method and to points of contact with Playing With Fire.
Why these four papers belong together
Richard Sermon works as an archaeologist by trade, and it shows. Across all four pieces the same discipline repeats itself: state what the physical or documentary evidence actually says, state separately what pattern or tradition has been layered on top of it, and keep the two visibly apart. He rarely tells the reader what to conclude. He tells the reader what survives, what the earliest attestation is, and where the gaps sit. That is, essentially, the Documented / Pattern / green-hat speculation discipline you have built into Playing With Fire, arrived at independently by an archaeologist working on entirely different material: Irish bone flutes, Scottish film folklore, a Virginia skirmish, and a Christmas-season drinking toast. It is a useful thing to be able to point to, because it shows the method is not an idiosyncrasy of your own project. It is what careful people do when they refuse to let a good story get ahead of what can be shown.
The Wicker Man, May Day, and the reinvention of Beltane
This is the piece with the most direct bearing on your work, because it is a case study in exactly the kind of invented-tradition unmasking that runs through your suppression-timeline and pattern-of-erasure appendices, except run in the opposite direction. Where your book recovers material that was genuinely suppressed, Sermon's essay dismantles a tradition that was genuinely invented and then mistaken for something ancient.
The argument in brief: the "Celtic Calendar," the eightfold wheel of solstices, equinoxes, and the four Old Irish festivals (Imbolc, Beltane, LĂşgnasad, Samain), which underwrites the plot of The Wicker Man (1973) and countless Neo-Pagan and modern festival reconstructions since, is a nineteenth-century academic construction rather than a surviving pan-Celtic system. Sermon lays out the case methodically. Sir James Frazer and other Celtic Revival scholars assembled the wheel by combining the four Old Irish seasonal festival names, attested in Goidelic sources such as the Ulster Cycle, with the solstices and equinoxes, which are never mentioned as festivals in the early Irish texts at all. The four festival names themselves survive only in the Goidelic branch of Celtic (Irish, Manx, Scots Gaelic) and are absent from the Brythonic branch (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), which by itself undercuts any claim that this was a shared pan-Celtic system rather than a specifically Irish and Scottish Highland one. And critically, English May Day customs, first documented in 1244 at Lincoln, England (Europe), are demonstrably a separate tradition from Irish and Scottish Bealtaine, which centered on bonfires and livestock purification rather than maypoles, May queens, and Morris dancing. The film's equation of the two, and the wider modern habit of equating them, is a retrofit.
What makes this useful for your own methodology rather than just interesting on its own: Sermon shows his work at every step in a way that models good tier-labeling. He does not say the Celtic Calendar is nonsense; he says it is a nineteenth-century construction built from real fragments, still deeply embedded in both popular and academic writing, and repeated "with no reference to original source material," which is a green-hat-speculation problem hiding inside what looks like Documented consensus. That is precisely the failure mode your evidence-tier convention exists to prevent, caught here from the outside by someone with no stake in the sacred-feminine material at all. It is a strong citation-worthy example if you ever want to illustrate, for a skeptical reader, that rigorous tier-separation is a real scholarly practice and not special pleading invented for your own thesis.
There is also a genuinely useful piece of raw material here for the Reclamation Series: the essay's account of Frazer's dying-and-reviving priest-king mytheme, the burning of the wicker man drawn from Julius Caesar and Strabo, and the film's own in-story lecture on spring fertility rites (drowned or burned virgins, human sacrifice standing in for the god renewed) sits close to solar-king and sacrificed-and-reborn material you have already traced elsewhere. Sermon's caution is worth importing wholesale: Caesar's account describes practices in Gaul specifically, may be Roman propaganda rather than reportage, and Strabo may simply be copying Caesar rather than offering independent confirmation. In other words, the wicker man burning has exactly one ancient source lineage, not two independent ones, and no archaeological corroboration has ever been found. That is a clean, quotable green-hat-speculation caution if the motif comes up in your own solar-symbolism material.
Wassail: the origins of a drinking toast
This piece is the closest thing here to a companion to your own etymology-trail appendices, and it is worth reading with that appendix open beside it. Sermon traces "wassail" (and its response, "drink-hail") through Old English wes hal and wesaþ hale, Old Norse ves heill and ver heill, and Old Saxon wis hel, all converging on a root meaning "be whole" or "be healthy." The popular assumption, and the Oxford English Dictionary's own historical position, was that the toast arrived in England with Danish and Norse settlers because of the diphthong in hail. Sermon complicates this cleanly: the earliest attested example of the full drinking-toast pairing (wes æil... drinc-hæil) is not Norse at all, but a monk's scribble, possibly by a monk named Orm, at the end of an eleventh-century manuscript from Bath Abbey, Bath, England (Europe), now held at Arras, France (Europe), predating every Old Norse literary attestation of the phrase by roughly two centuries. The Germanic root is genuinely shared across Old Saxon, Old English, and Old Norse; the diphthong in hail may still be a Danish-settlement legacy layered onto an Old English hal that already existed; but the toast itself, as a toast, cannot be shown to be exclusively of Norse origin, which was the received wisdom Sermon is correcting.
Two more observations from the piece are worth carrying into your own work directly:
Sermon notes that wassail as a toast is not found in Ireland, the Isle of Man, or Scotland (particularly Orkney and Shetland), the very regions with the heaviest Norse settlement, where you would most expect to find it if it were exclusively a Norse import. Absence-of-evidence-as-evidence is used carefully here, flagged as an inference rather than proof, which is again a useful model for tier-labeling absence claims in your own suppression-pattern work.
The two wassailing customs he distinguishes, house-to-house wassailing with a bowl at Christmastide and orchard wassailing of apple trees around Twelfth Night to ensure fruit, sit directly inside your Christmas research thread. The orchard wassail, with its cider-soaked toast placed in the tree and its Gloucestershire rhyme ("Blowe, blowe, bear well, spring well in April..."), is a fertility-rite pattern for the turn of the year that runs parallel to your existing solstice material, and the earliest documented instance (Fordwich, Kent, England, Europe, 1585) is later than you might expect, a good caution against assuming continuity with prehistoric practice without a documentary bridge.
The Waterford bone flute and the tabor pipe
This is the most technical of the four papers and the least directly about your existing threads, but it connects to your music-suppression timeline in a specific, useful way: it is a case study in how much of medieval European folk-musical culture survives only by archaeological accident. Sermon reidentifies a mid-twelfth-century swan-ulna flute excavated in Waterford, Ireland (Europe), and argues on acoustic grounds (a long sounding length, a high internal-diameter-to-length ratio, and only three tone holes grouped far from the mouthpiece, favoring harmonic overtones over fundamental tones) that it may represent an early, one-handed ancestor of the pipe-and-tabor tradition: a melody pipe played with one hand so the other hand is free for a drum, a combination that becomes common across medieval Europe by the thirteenth century and that survives today in instruments like the English three-hole pipe, the Catalan flabiol, and Basque and Pyrenean folk ensembles.
What is most useful for your purposes is how carefully Sermon holds the "proto-tabor-pipe" claim at green-hat-speculation level even while making it. He explicitly says the acoustic properties "may have been intentional or simply the chance result of the size and position of the tone holes," and quotes a fellow researcher, Helen Leaf, cautioning that no surface wear pattern confirming one-handed play has actually been observed on most specimens, even where Graeme Lawson has proposed thumb-wear evidence on a related Norwich, England (Europe), flute. This is a small, self-contained example of a researcher building a genuinely interesting pattern-tier argument (three-tone-hole bone flutes as ancestral to the wooden tabor pipe) while refusing to promote it past that tier for lack of confirming physical evidence, even though the pattern is elegant and even though it is his own idea.
Thomas Dowse, Virginia's first taborer
The shortest and starkest of the four. In July 1610, English colonists at Jamestown, Virginia (North America), under Sir Thomas Gates used a taborer, a musician playing pipe and drum, as bait: the music and dancing drew the Kecoughtan people out into the open so that Gates's men could attack and kill them. The same taborer, later named as Dowse or Dawse, was used again in a second, failed ambush against the Appomattock, this time barely escaping with his life. Captain John Smith later references the episode obliquely: "will any goe to catch a Hare with a Taber and a Pipe?"
There is no gentle way to fold this into a Reclamation Series essay, and it probably should not be folded in gently. It is documentary evidence (not pattern, not speculation; this is a first-person 1610 account, George Percy's A Trewe Relacyon, corroborated by Smith and Strachey) of a joyful English folk tradition, the same pipe-and-tabor pairing traced in the Waterford and wassail papers, being weaponized as an instrument of colonial deception and violence on North American soil. If your Doctrine of Discovery and colonization threads ever need a small, concrete, well-documented incident rather than a structural argument, this is one: not a metaphor for how colonization instrumentalized culture, but a literal, named case of it happening, with the taborer surviving to be named a beneficiary in Jamestown's own records shortly after.
Where this leaves the manuscript
None of these four papers require you to revise anything already written in Playing With Fire. What they offer is corroboration of method (the Wicker Man piece), fresh primary material for the etymology and Christmas threads (the wassail piece), a small, honestly-caveated data point for the music-suppression appendix (the bone flute piece), and one sharp, citable incident for the colonization thread (the Dowse piece). If it would help, I can draft a short appendix entry or footnote cluster for any of these threads, formatted to your existing conventions, the next time you are back in the manuscript.
Five Papers by Richard Sermon: What They Confirm, Complicate, and Add to Playing With Fire
All five uploaded papers share an author, Richard Sermon, an archaeologist based in England, United Kingdom, Europe, who has spent his career doing exactly the kind of work the Reclamation Series depends on: taking a claim that has hardened into received wisdom and going back to the primary sources to see whether it holds. That habit of mind, more than any single fact in these papers, is what makes them worth folding into your research. Below is a summary of each paper, followed by a section on where the findings intersect with the chains you have already built in the manuscript.
1. "From Easter to Ostara: The Reinvention of a Pagan Goddess?" (2008)
This is the paper with the most direct bearing on your work, since it sits right on top of the Aset to Isis to Ishtar to Astarte to Eostre to Easter chain.
Documented. The Northumbrian monk Bede, writing in AD 725, is the sole ancient source for a goddess named Eostre, after whom he says the Anglo-Saxon month Eosturmonath was named. Jacob Grimm, writing in Germany in 1835, reconstructed a continental cognate he called "Ostara" and proposed she was a dawn goddess, comparing her to the Greek Eos and Roman Aurora. Charlemagne's court, a generation or two after Bede, renamed the Frankish month of April "Ostarmanoth," a name nearly identical to Bede's Eosturmonath.
Documented, and directly relevant to your sound chain. Sermon lays out the Astarte evidence in some detail. A Roman-era altar at Corbridge in Northumberland, England, is dedicated to Astarte and is the only such dedication known from Britain. Sermon also cites the Pyrgi gold tablets from Italy, Europe, dating to around 500 BC, which give the Phoenician goddess Ashtaret and her Etruscan counterpart under the name "Astre," an intermediate form that sits phonetically between Astarte and Eostre. He states plainly that it is theoretically possible to project the name Astarte forward through an intermediate *Astare or *Astre into Old English orthography as Eastre or Eostre. This is an independent scholarly thread, developed without reference to your project, that supports the same sound-chain link you have already proposed. It belongs in your manuscript at the Pattern tier rather than Documented, because Sermon himself flags the weakness: more than four hundred years separate Bede's Eostre from the Corbridge altar, and a single inscription does not establish a major cult center of the kind the Astarte link would need to carry real weight. He is careful to say cognate names do not prove common origin, since two cults can develop independently and converge in sound by coincidence.
A genuine complication, not just a footnote. Sermon's own conclusion is that Grimm's goddess theory is very likely wrong, and that Ostern most probably entered German through a much less romantic route: Anglo-Saxon missionaries such as Boniface, working in Germany in the eighth century, simply carried the Old English word Eastron into German as they converted the continental Saxons, and it was written down as Ostarun. If Sermon is right, the German evidence you might otherwise cite as independent confirmation of a widespread Germanic dawn goddess is not independent at all. It may just be the English word, exported. This does not touch the Eostre/Astarte link itself, since Bede's testimony and the Corbridge altar stand on their own, but it does mean the German material should not be stacked on top of the English material as though it were a second, separate line of evidence. Worth naming explicitly in the manuscript at the point where the chain is laid out, both for intellectual honesty and because a sharp reader who knows this literature will raise exactly this objection.
A second comparative thread. Sermon also discusses the Matronae Austriahenae, a group of over 150 Roman-era altars found at Morken-Harff, Germany, Europe, dedicated to triple mother goddesses whose name shares the root "Austri," cognate with Eostre if the root is Germanic. Again he cautions that cognate names are not proof of shared origin. Useful as a second data point at the Pattern tier, not as confirmation.
Directly relevant to your "suppressed knowledge weaponized" material. Sermon documents that Grimm's Ostara was picked up in 1905 by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, an Austrian former monk who founded a magazine literally titled Ostara, mixing esoteric and racist Aryanist theory, reportedly read by a young Adolf Hitler. Sermon also describes the Osterräderlauf, a German Easter bonfire-wheel custom at Lügde, which the Nazi regime deliberately repaginized between 1933 and 1945, staging torch-lit swastikas on the hillside while some local residents raised a white cross in protest. This is exactly the kind of case study that belongs in a book about how sacred feminine and solar traditions get suppressed, distorted, and in this instance actively hijacked for a racist political project. It also offers a cautionary example for your own methodology: Grimm's Ostara is the textbook case of nineteenth-century romantic reconstruction outrunning the evidence, then being exploited by people with an agenda. It is worth being explicit in the manuscript that you are aware of this history and are not reproducing Grimm's leap.
2. "The Celtic Calendar and the Anglo-Saxon Year" (2002)
This paper argues that the so-called "Celtic Calendar," the eightfold Wheel of the Year with its four Gaelic fire festivals (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain) plus the solstices and equinoxes, is a modern scholastic construction assembled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chiefly by Sir James Frazer, and not attested as a pan-Celtic system in any ancient source.
Documented. The four Gaelic festival names appear only in the Goidelic branch of Celtic (Irish, Manx, Scots Gaelic), not in the Brythonic branch (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), so they were never demonstrably pan-Celtic even within the Celtic-speaking world. Old Irish texts never mention festivals on the solstices or equinoxes at all. Ronald Hutton's 1996 study The Stations of the Sun had already reached the same conclusion; Sermon's contribution is to show that Hutton did not go on to fully develop the Anglo-Saxon evidence, and to argue that Yule, Lent, Easter, Litha (Midsummer), Harvest, and Winter are all genuinely of Germanic origin, attested throughout the Germanic language family, including in places that were never Celtic-speaking at all.
Pattern. Sermon suggests, following Jacqueline Simpson, that the twentieth-century over-emphasis on a "glamorised, idealised Celtic tradition" over Germanic and Nordic material has a political explanation: after two world wars and the Nazi exploitation of Germanic myth, Germanic folklore came to feel tainted by association, so popular and academic attention swung toward Celtic material instead, whether or not the evidence supported it.
This is directly useful for the parts of your manuscript dealing with invented tradition versus documented survival. It gives you a clean, well-sourced case where a widely believed "ancient pagan calendar" turns out to be a modern assembly job, alongside a plausible account of why the invention happened and who kept it going. It also models good practice for you: Sermon does not claim the Celtic festivals are fake, only that the eightfold wheel that combines them with the solstices and equinoxes into one coherent pan-European system is a later construction layered on top of genuine but more limited attestations.
3. "A Reassessment of the Franks Casket Cryptic Inscription" (2002)
This paper works through competing interpretations of the runic inscription and carved scene on the right side of the Franks Casket, a whalebone box made in Mercia or Northumbria, England, in the seventh or eighth century AD. Wadstein, Napier, Elliott, Ball, and Page all read the scene as depicting the Norse hero Sigurd; Sermon proposes instead that it depicts the death and burial of Beowulf, which better accounts for the cup and the bird in the carving. The casket elsewhere depicts Romulus and Remus, the Christian Adoration of the Magi, the sack of Jerusalem by Titus, and the legend of Wayland the Smith, mixing biblical, classical, and Germanic material on a single object.
This paper is less directly load-bearing for your existing chains than the Easter paper, but it is a useful methodological companion piece and a striking image in its own right: a single Anglo-Saxon artifact casually juxtaposing Roman myth, Christian narrative, and Germanic legend as though they belonged to one continuous cultural world, which is close to the argument your book is making about the porousness of these traditions before later theological sorting drew hard lines between them. Worth a footnote or an image reference if you ever discuss Anglo-Saxon syncretism specifically; not essential to the core Eostre argument.
4. "Joan Sharp (1898-1968) and the Revival of the English Pipe and Tabor" (2021)
A biographical and material-culture study recovering the overlooked role of Joan Sharp, daughter of folklorist Cecil Sharp, in reviving the English pipe and tabor tradition and making the first recordings of it in 1930. Sermon also traces the physical provenance of specific instruments through photographs and museum accessions.
This paper's relevance to your project is more methodological than thematic. It is a clean example of a female contributor's foundational work being credited to the men around her (here, Kenworthy Schofield and Russell Wortley) until a researcher goes back through primary photographic and archival evidence to correct the record. That pattern, a woman's substantive contribution absorbed into the record of the men who came after her, is structurally similar to arguments you make elsewhere about erasure, and could serve as a modern, well-documented parallel case if you ever want one outside the ancient material. Not essential to the core manuscript otherwise.
5. "The Malham Pipe: A Reassessment of Its Context, Dating and Significance" (2018)
Sermon and Todd reassess a sheep-bone pipe found in 1950 in a Bronze Age barrow at Malham, England, originally dated to the Iron Age by the excavator Arthur Raistrick on the basis of associated iron knives. Reworking the knife typology, the settlement evidence, and comparative burial practice, including newer radiocarbon dates, the authors conclude the pipe is very likely post-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, not Iron Age, which changes its significance from "earliest known duct flute in Britain" to "first bone flute recorded from a post-Roman burial context."
Again, this is primarily a methodological parallel rather than thematic content: a confident dating from the 1950s, defended for decades essentially on authority, gets overturned by patiently re-examining the underlying typological and stratigraphic evidence rather than the original excavator's conclusions. It is a good model for the kind of evidence-tier discipline your own book asks of its readers, and a demonstration that even careful scholars can anchor a date that later turns out to rest on circular reasoning. Not something you need to cite in the text, but worth having in mind as an example of the discipline you are holding yourself to.
Where this leaves the manuscript
The one paper that actually touches your argument is the Easter/Ostara piece, and it cuts both ways. It hands you a second, independent scholarly voice tracing Astarte through an intermediate *Astre form into Eostre, which is worth adding to your Pattern-tier evidence for that link, properly cited to Sermon 2008. At the same time, it argues fairly persuasively against the wider Grimm-style claim of a pan-Germanic Ostara cult, which means the German evidence should not be presented as a second confirming data point alongside the English evidence; Sermon's own account has them collapsing into a single English-origin explanation. And it hands you real, well-documented material on how "Ostara" specifically, as distinct from Eostre, became a vehicle for early twentieth-century Aryanist and then Nazi propaganda, which is exactly the kind of case study your green-hat-speculation-versus-documented-fact framing exists to guard against repeating.
The Celtic Calendar paper is useful background for any discussion of invented tradition and does not touch the sound chain directly. The Franks Casket, Joan Sharp, and Malham Pipe papers are good-faith scholarship worth knowing about but sit outside the immediate argument of the book; they are strongest as methodological models of the reassessment work you are doing yourself, rather than as evidence to cite.