Sussex Coils & Loops: Following the Hidden

Paul Holman’s Sussex Coils & Loops, published by Scarlet Imprint, describes itself as “a work of parafolklore on the great serpents encountered in the land of south-east England.” The book follows a series of journeys and ritual actions across Sussex, moving through woodland, towns, pools and the coast in search of serpentine histories and presences.

The serpent here need not mean simply the snake as a physical creature. Across folklore and esoteric traditions it may appear as dragon, wyrm, guardian or a winding current associated with the land itself. Such telluric and serpentine currents belong to a much wider magical inheritance, although Andrew Chumbley offers one particularly resonant example: his draconian and ophidian imagery emerges through a form of practice in which magic is encountered and received as well as deliberately made. Ritual, image and artistic expression become ways of giving form to something discovered through participation rather than merely following an inherited set of instructions. Holman develops his own language and practices, but a related sense of the land as animate and capable of revealing its own patterns runs through the book.

Sussex is my home county and has always carried considerable personal and spiritual significance for me, so I approached the book with particular curiosity. Strangely, I did not always recognise my own Sussex within it. The writing can be deliberately elusive, following connections whose significance sometimes belongs more clearly to the author than to the reader, yet this became part of what I found most interesting because the Sussex encountered here is unmistakably Holman’s.

A personal folklore of place

There are several places I know well in Sussex with serpent associations of their own that do not appear in Sussex Coils & Loops. Rather than feeling like omissions, these came to reinforce something important about the nature of the book.

Holman is not attempting to provide a comprehensive map of a hidden Sussex. He draws upon historical fragments, folklore and cultural associations, bringing them into contact with places he visits and ritual actions of his own devising. The result is closer to a personal mythic geography than a guide to the county’s folklore.

The ritual dimension is important because these actions emerge from particular encounters with stories and locations rather than from an established ceremonial system. Their meaning cannot therefore be transferred intact to another person.

This is one of the aspects of the book that interests me most. A relationship with a particular locality develops through attention over time, and what becomes charged or significant for one person may remain almost invisible to somebody else.

Mythopoesis and the living land

Folklore can easily be approached as something inherited from the past, a body of stories to collect or preserve. Sussex Coils & Loops suggests something more cyclical, in which older material enters present experience and is encountered anew.

This comes close to what I understand by mythopoesis. Myth in this sense does not mean something merely invented or untrue, but something arising through lived experience and continually renewed through our encounters with the world. Stories shape how we perceive a locality, while new encounters may alter or extend those stories in return.

These questions have long been important within my own art. Why do certain hills or paths repeatedly call for our attention? Why does one environment remain vividly present in the imagination while another leaves comparatively little trace? What begins to emerge through repeated encounter?

My work has often developed from this kind of engagement and attention. A relational encounter with a place or landscape provides a starting point, while the finished image may carry an atmosphere or presence that emerged through the process of its making.

The Serpent Hill belongs particularly clearly to this territory. The serpent is present within the title and image, yet the work did not arise from an attempt to illustrate a particular piece of folklore or place. It belongs instead to a longer engagement with hills and mountains as forms that can gather imaginative and spiritual significance, and with the possibility that the serpent may be encountered as something more than a representational motif.

In this sense, Holman’s book feels less like a mythology of Sussex to be adopted than an invitation to notice how such a mythology might emerge through one’s own encounters with the land.

The Serpent Hill - Ink on paper, Andrew Phillips

Those who have gone before

Another aspect of Sussex Coils & Loops that I appreciated is the presence of people who inhabited these places before us. Some are known historically, while others survive only through fragments of record or their association with a particular site.

To encounter a locality in this way is also to become aware of traces of other lives. Who knew a place before us, returned to it repeatedly or found something there that mattered enough to remember? Which lives have become part of what it now carries?

There is something important in remembering those who might otherwise disappear. A place can begin to include human histories alongside animals, legendary beings and other forms of presence that continue to gather around it.

Perhaps this is what I take most from Holman’s strange and sometimes obscure(d) book. It did not offer me a Sussex that I simply recognised as my own, and that may be precisely its value. It returned me instead to the question of how our relationships with particular places are formed through attention, imagination and repeated encounter.

Where calls for your attention, and what has gathered there through the years?

Books can provide histories and possible routes into such questions, but eventually the relationship has to be discovered through encounter itself.