Year

Spike Bucklow is the author of numerous books on artists, and their materials and methods, including Children of Mercury: The Lives of the Painters (Reaktion, 2022). He was previously Professor of Material Culture at the University of Cambridge.

The Year is a contemplative almanac charting nature and culture through the zodiac, with a powerful message for our time of grave disjuncture between the two. - Ferdinand Saumarez Smith, author of Eleusis and EnlightenmentSpike Bucklow, an art historian, revisits the ancient idea of the zodiac through contemporary ecological science and thought . . . an attempt to reunite the poetic and the scientific in the shifting cycle of the months and seasons to create a cultural astronomy for the 21st century . . . full of interesting and provocative connections between ancient and modern, the human and the natural order, between ethereal ideas and experiential realities. - Mathew Lyons, The Broken CompassThe Year elegantly enacts the deep, encoded wisdom of traditional astrology as a key part of the indigenous Western worldview, a baby of truth repeatedly thrown out with the bathwater of “superstition”. In particular, this book shows the potential of that model to deepen our understanding of the most important single issue of our times, namely the ecology of the more-than-human natural world and our impacts upon it. And it does so by quietly correcting the prejudices that have come to dominate modern cultural life: the isolated individual over inter-connections, essences over relationships, becoming over Being, and humans over all other animals. These culminate in dangerous hubris which The Year both reveals and corrects. It is thus invaluable as both diagnosis and prescription. - Patrick Curry, author of Ecological EthicsThe Year provides a cultural-historical frame for readers to unpack the way Western and secular forms of time are indebted to, or expropriate concepts from, non-Western cultures. A wonderful book that invites you to read its words in ebbs and flows: a historical-cultural-aesthetic-poetic almanac to carry in your pocket, its sentences in your head. It is a joy to read as the year turns, but it also makes you think about the way global warming and anthropogenic climate change are altering our sense of the seasons, and our place within the world. - Julian Yates, H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture Studies, University of DelawareBlending ancient wisdom with modern science, this ‘lyrical, poetic’ chronicle of nature’s annual cycle aims to provide a positive perspective on ecological, global and personal change. - The Bookseller

• Prologue: Ecology and the ZodiacChapter One       March–April: Cardinal Fire, ‘Emergence’Chapter Two       April–May: Fixed Earth, ‘Flowering’Chapter Three    May–June: Mutable Air, ‘Mixing’First Interlude: Summer SolsticeChapter Four      June–July: Cardinal Water, ‘Nurturing’Chapter Five       July–August: Fixed Fire, ‘Ruling’Chapter Six         August–September: Mutable Earth, ‘Serving’Second Interlude: Autumn EquinoxChapter Seven   September–October: Cardinal Air, ‘Journey to the Other’Chapter Eight     October–November: Fixed Water, ‘Dwelling in Darkness’Chapter Nine      November–December: Mutable Fire, ‘Sharing Wealth’Third Interlude: Winter SolsticeChapter Ten        December–January: Cardinal Earth, ‘Return of the Light’Chapter Eleven   January–February: Fixed Air, ‘Information’Chapter Twelve   February–March: Mutable Water, ‘Ensoulment’Fourth Interlude: Spring EquinoxEpilogue: ‘Next Year’ GlossaryReferences Bibliography AcknowledgementsPhoto AcknowledgementsIndex