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I am obsessed with mythology.

When I was a child, we were taught Roman and Greek and Egyptian myths at school. My mother and grandmother, both big fans of mythology themselves, told me some of the racier stories that the teachers steered away from.

I didn’t really notice, back then, that we never learned myths from my native England. I think I simply assumed that myths belonged to far away lands, where more magical things happened.

Once I became an adult, though, I started to see these stories as outdated. Even offensive. Princesses waiting in towers to be rescued, young girls destroying themselves for the sake of a man… it all seemed rather misogynistic.

It wasn’t until I discovered the work of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, , Amy Jeffs and others that I came to understand how much of our ancestral folklore was stolen from us. I learned about the wise women that were the centre of our communities, the witches and priestesses that held the world in balance, and the crafty old women that worked on young men to assure their young brides would be spared domestic labour.

So many of the stories that we know today were rewritten by invading forces and Christian authorities, reshaped to embed a specific worldview.

That’s why we don’t know our British stories. We are, thankfully, becoming more and more conscious of how British colonisers destroyed and appropriated the histories and belief systems of other cultures, as their descendants rediscover and reclaim their stories. But the United Kingdom itself is still very much under the control of that British Empire mindset, and we have been slower to realise how much was taken from the natives of this land.

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