Channeling with the Iron Wand of the Völva

Working with the Ancestors at Revival Festival

Iron wand belonging to Andreas Kornevall, used in ceremony

It was incredible being at the Medicine Festival spin-out Revival yesterday at 27 Uxbridge Road. I wasn’t aware of Medicine Festival until I learned about it on the Colombian retreat, which piqued my curiosity. Going on to their website, I was drawn further by the beautiful graphic design, and landed on the Revival one-day event that took place yesterday, Saturday.

It was a two-hour journey to get there from Hove, carrying too many bags as usual—but I had my drum and an overnight rucksack! As I came out of the Elizabeth line into Southall, London, a woman said to me, "You look like you're going to Medicine Festival." I said yes, and we travelled there together. Caroline is a lovely homeopath, and we spent the day joining sessions and then waited an age for the bus back at the end of the day. I'm sure we will meet again. It's indicative of the great connections that you can make at events like this, where people are coming together with real intention—to honour the land, to remember our ancestors, to weave new ways of being in relationship with nature, and ultimately with ourselves and with community.

A Sacred Space in an Urban Setting

What attracted me to go was the incredible range of speakers at the event. From Angharad Wynne and Mac Macartney, who opened the fire ceremony at 11:00 a.m. That too was so beautiful. We sang, we invoked the spirits of the place, even though it was an industrial site—hosted at a spiritual community providing low-cost, affordable housing on the edge of the busy Uxbridge Road in London, surrounded by warehouses and industrial units. Inside it was tastefully decorated, with relaxing eating and chill-out areas and a café-bar selling nutritious foods, which was staffed by so many beautiful people who just radiated their light. Outside there were saunas and hot tubs, a tipi, more space to hang out in hammocks, and the fire pit.

Signs and Omens: The Bee, the Dove, and the Red Kite

As we gathered around the fire pit, the sun was really shining brightly. As the fire was starting, we sang to the flames, which is something often done in ceremony I've noticed. As Mac Macartney was leading this ceremony, I noticed a small bee hovering—just one bee, flying right in the centre, circling around us. Just one beautiful bee. Then a white dove flew down to watch us.

As the ceremony ended, we were really harmonising our voices, singing freely but together. And we called in—and this is what is magical for me—a red kite, that beautiful bird of prey that was once on the brink of extinction but with care and rewilding has flourished again in parts of the UK. In Wales, you see them, in Sussex, in the Hampshire Downs. You see them in Wiltshire. And I always see them when there is magic afoot—always! But not in the city so often, although the rubbish dumps of London were once their home, so this was a first, and everybody saw it. A gasp of wonderment and awe rose up from the crowd to greet the bird, as if to say, "OK, Great Spirit is here." A bird of prey, I see the red kite with its huge wingspan and forked tail as related to eagle—and eagle is Great Spirit—so it felt like a blessing upon us for the day.

Drumming, singing, Scottish Ancestry and Generational Trauma

I was delighted to attend a beautiful singing and drumming storytelling session with Dee, followed by some fantastic Scottish ancestral tales with Ryan McKenna. I've worked so much with my Scottish ancestors and lineage, through my grandfather Harry Mitchell. I've uncovered difficult and challenging storylines—the witch trials, colonialism, the slave trade, a grandmother and her daughters dying of yellow fever in Haiti in the late 1700s, Scottish sailors and sea captains being thrown into jail because of mistakes they'd made at sea.

I had an incredible road trip taking in the Battle of Culloden. We spoke about the Battle in the session and about the ley line of the Spine of Albion—the two dragon lines that start in the Isle of Wight and thread through the land all the way up to Scotland. There's a brilliant book, The Spine of Albion, and with my dowsing rods I've been to many of the points that have been discovered and mapped by the authors. Even if you don't believe in the power of ley lines or dowsing, just use it as a guidebook to go on a road trip, because it takes you to some amazing sacred sites across the UK following these dragon lines. Every time I've done work on those lines, something strange has happened—it is powerful energy.

Anyway, I was at the Battle of Culloden with the blood-red sun setting, and my ancestors had fought there. The air was so potent with their battle-death cries, you couldn't help but cry for the trauma and the blood that had flowed into that land when the Scottish clans were beaten back by the British troops. It was a massacre. It changed the history of Scotland because that then made way for the Highland Clearances. And of course, the Highland Clearances and the oppression of the Scottish warrior clans was then channelled into colonialism and empire-building. So many Scots went out to settle other people's lands around the world and worked as overlords overseas on plantations and were very heavily involved in the slave trade.

That's a heavy history, but to me it demonstrates that when you traumatise people, a traumatised people will so often go on to traumatise others. So that pattern of trauma gets passed down from generation to generation, both on a familial level and a wider societal level. By starting with ourselves, by doing your own inner healing work—then maybe doing ancestral healing work—you start to understand what these patterns are and how you can change. Because you can change. You can heal yourself and your family lines.

The Iron Wand and Rune Ceremony

I was grateful to be able to take part in a rune ceremony with my teacher and mentor, Andreas Kornevall. This was in the beautiful tipi, and for the first time I was very honoured to work with the iron wand. This is a replica of a wand or rod forged from iron that was found in the grave of a völva, the witch of the Northern traditions—and it's very powerful. Andreas said that it's been used in ceremony several times now with powerful magicians and energy workers, and as soon as I picked it up, I could feel this electric current running through it. It's very strong. I remember the first time holding it at Caer Corhain Centre, run by Lynn Gosney who taught me to make my horse-skin drum in 2018, and the rod was powerful then. It seems even more charged now.

As part of this workshop in the very crowded tipi, participants were invited to chant the runes—"Sol," meaning sun, and "Eihwaz," representing the world tree Yggdrasil. My role was simply to become the hollow bone, the empty vessel, to channel the energy that would be received by the iron, gathered and then transmuted and fed into the Wyrd—the universal cosmic energetic web. The intention was to call in reconciliation, positive energy, healing energy—healing for community, for the land, for family, for our ancestral lines. We’d already been calling in our healed and well ancestors, the ones whose names we knew to call out, who we love, who we cherish, who still walk with us during the ceremony.

During that chanting, I was holding the rod horizontally, and I could feel the charge building up. I could feel it in my body. Doing a lot of energetic work with Qigong, I'm attuned to how energy flows in my body. I felt very grounded, but I could feel the rod starting to heat up in my hands. I could feel the energy rising through my chakras and my body, and colours starting to come in my third eye, and then my crown chakra absolutely opened wide. I could feel this energy starting to surge up and out, like the London Shard. I’ve been staying opposite the Shard for a night after the ceremony and could see it at dawn this morning and last night. That’s what I felt like—this tall pyramid-like structure with the slit at the top.

I could feel the energy of the group and of the runes coming into the rod, and then the rod itself was wanting to move. So I found myself moving my arms in a circular motion, just rotating the wand. Andreas said, "You'll know when to release the energy," because you have to release it; otherwise, if you hang on to it, it'll be too much. When the energy got so powerful and the iron hot in my hands, I just then turned the rod vertically, pointing upwards to the sky, and I literally sent that energy with a huge loud cry up to the top of the tipi and out into the cosmic web.

Afterwards, speaking to some people in the group, they said to me, "Well, that was so powerful to witness that and to be part of it." “When you opened your eyes, they were so bright.” It took me a while to come down actually. I felt really energised and also quite high. But I knew that I had to close down energetically before I stepped out of the ceremonial space that had been woven.

Revival Festival

Grounding and Return to the City

So before I left at the end of the day, I did some work to close down my energetic centres, splashed water on my face, and just gently grounded—I had some cacao, which helped. I finished the day listening to a beautiful talk by Angharad Wynne followed by Mac Macartney.

Unfortunately, it took two hours just to get from there back to the Tower of London. I've just been staying right opposite the Tower, where all the beheadings took place, where Henry VIII cut off the head of Anne Boleyn. All that collective trauma again—these are the pulse points around the country where there’s been difficult history that we can start to heal and clear. You can see the work they’re doing to rewild the moat—it’s really beautiful.

Ancient History and Ancestral Connections

The Tower of London is interesting because it was William the Conqueror who built it into the old Roman walls. A new wave of conquerors replacing the old. We had the Romans come in, but they were invited by the Atrebates tribe of Sussex, who were allies and trading partners with the Roman Empire in Gaul. They were seeking help to fight off neighbouring Celtic tribes. So actually, the Atrebates were a welcoming party, and that’s how Rome succeeded—it worked with the allied peoples of the lands it entered. Of course, there was fierce resistance too.

After the Anglo-Saxons came William the Conqueror, in 1066—but that was more of an invasion. I’ve traced branches of my ancestry back to some of the nobles who came with him, and they lead me back to King Rollo. So it’s very long ago, long-long-ago history, but it still excites me.

Of course, all of us—if we go far back enough—will find nobility, lords, ladies, even royalty. We’ll find the whole spectrum of society, because society was much smaller then. There were fewer of us. And so, if you go digging, you will find the dark stories, but also rich and fascinating ones. We are made up of all these different threads.

Dawn Reflections and Looking Forward

So I shall leave it there. I just had the most beautiful dawn, waking up looking at the Shard with the full pink moon setting and the sun starting to light up the skyline. I went for the most beautiful walk, and only the street cleaners were up—and a few people sleeping on benches, who had obviously been out all night and couldn’t quite make it home.

Now I’m off, excited to be spending the night singing with nightingales with Sam Lee and a Spanish accordion player. This is the second year I’ve done this camp and it really is powerful.

I’d like to thank everybody for such a wonderful day yesterday, and my teachers, guides, animal spirits, and ancestors.

I really hope you have a wonderful Easter break next week. I’m going to be attending a family funeral up Newcastle way—an important occasion to honour my cousins as their souls pass on, to remember their lives, and to send them off along the way that we should always send people on the next stage of their soul journey. With love and remembrance.

Wishing you well and sending all my love as always,

Serena xxx