Glastonbury 2025: Fire circles, hippiedom, and an attempt to convert
Long hair, dirty feet, and flower power, the hippie subculture is among the world’s most enduring and diverse. It has been well over 50 years since the 1960s heyday of the hippies, but that hasn’t stopped legions of spaced-out spiritual followers from descending upon Glastonbury Festival year on year, although they’re often more Stevie Nicks than Abbie Hoffman these days.
At this year’s festival, I made a promise that I would try my best to immerse myself in this peace and love culture, rather than reverting to the Yorkshire sense of cynicism that has been instilled in me since birth.
After all, Glastonbury itself has an incredibly rich history of spiritualism, dating back centuries before Worthy Farm ever hosted any bands. Ancient druids, stone circles, and an unwavering worship of Mother Earth, the Somerset town is a natural haven for hippies. During the festival, these free-spirited folks tend to congregate around the Healing Fields, demonstrating their dedication to the Earth’s energy and offering various therapies and pseudo-ceremonies to the spangled punters at Earth’s greatest music festival.
Spiritualism is something that has always seemed pretty alien to me, in all of its forms. In the north of England, shirtless men with long hair offering free massages is something to be viewed with suspicion, rather than a celebration of togetherness and free spirit. Friends have spent hours trying to convince me of the healing power of crystals or the position of the moon having an effect on my mood, but I’ve never really bought it. ‘The only power that crystals hold is to magically generate a fiver for the lass selling them at this market, and I am in a bad mood because you won’t stop talking to me about the moon’, is what I would invariably think.
Nevertheless, the hippie subculture is undeniably interesting, particularly within the haven of Glastonbury. So, throwing myself as far out of my comfort zone as possible, I bundled away all my cynicism and headed for the opening of the Healing Fields on Wednesday afternoon. As I sat around an unlit fire, legions of hippies descended, bedecked in elaborate, flowing outfits, and singing The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’. No prizes for guessing what happened next.
Is Glastonbury a hippie paradise?
As the fire was lit, a woman in a headdress told us to cast whatever we wanted into the flames – grief, shame, anxiety – and leave the festival with a newfound sense of freedom and happiness. She also declared a message of togetherness and community as a form of resistance against the darkness of the world. I don’t know whether it was this message of resistance in a particularly dark period of history, the roaring flames of the fire, or the overwhelming atmosphere of the festival itself, but, to my own surprise, I found this speech quite inspiring.
Glastonbury Festival is, at its core, a gathering of like-minded individuals, and it has always fostered a sense of community and resistance – from its unwavering and vitally important support of the CND movement, to more recent partnerships with charities like Greenpeace and Wateraid. So, much to my own bemusement, this rousing speech by a presumed marketing exec at the fire circle did inspire some genuine emotion in this typically weary reporter. However, this feeling soon faded when the crowd at the fire were instructed to join in with a group sing-along, while marching to another area of the Healing Fields. This seemed like a step too far.
My only other experience of group singing in public consists of primary school assemblies and football chants, so holding hands with people in flower crowns and wailing about how we appreciate each other’s energy felt incredibly alien. There followed even more chanting and a meditative breathing exercise, which, to be honest, only inspired more anxiety in me. The instructor kept talking about the Earth’s energy and how we can hold it in our bodies, but my mind invariably wandered to how much my feet hurt, and how long it would be before I could sneak off to a food stall or the bar.
By the time this hippie procession had marched from the fire pit to the elements of earth, water, and the ether, I had firmly decided that the hippie culture was not for me. The hippie hardcore held hands and walked in circles, chanting rather dour tunes, while their leader spoke of how we can all achieve peace by connecting with each other and the Earth.
At a time when a genocide, war, and existential threats seem daily, the leader of the free world is sending missiles into Iran, and our own prime minister is bolstering our nuclear arms programme, I found this message to be ridiculously complacent – holding hands and chanting is no substitute for protest and direct action. In fact, it felt borderline entitled. Yet, it was hard to settle on cynicism for long. Mixed feelings pervaded even the most sceptical of onlookers gathered at this strange happening.
It was difficult not to, at least, appreciate the fact that this subculture is continuing to thrive in the modern world. The Healing Fields was full of smiling faces, and although my conversion to spiritualism hadn’t exactly gone to plan, I have to admit that I did leave the opening of the area feeling a little lighter than I had upon entry. Glastonbury is the hippie free-for-all that it is so often idolised as, and – even for a Statler and Waldorf-style cynic like me – it is difficult not to get swept up in its charm when you’re in amongst the ‘energy’ of it all.
