The Thetford Hare: An Introduction

The Thetford Hare is real and yet unreal all at the same time. It measures about 10 miles across its back from nose to tail and has its feet firmly planted at Thetford. It is a part of sacred landscape created by the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors whose thought forms intermingled with the devas and elementals of the rivers, stones and living geography. In Richard Dighton’s Geography Bewitched! England and Wales 1795 delightfully illustrates the concept:

image with many thanks to Saint at 'Dogfight at Bankstown'

and since then there have been many and various authors who have helped bring it to light. Please see the appendix for further details on the more general aspects.

Boudicca and Thetford

There are many layers of human interaction with our environment over time, each leaving its mark on the land and on our psyche. Boudicca is probably our best known Iceni and her lifetime pinpoints a particular slice in time when the Hare's majestical and powerful symbolism fully penetrated the imagination - secular and spiritual - of all those that beheld them.To the Iceni, the Hare was special, you didn’t eat them ever – it was taboo food. Aspects of the Hare's life; that it seemed as if it was living above and below ground, a visible affirmation that they were “messengers” across the boundary bewteen the living and dead, or the fact that it doesn't run in straight lines and in the way in which a hare tracked across the land,or manifested in its entrails confirmed its use in sacrifical divination.

In a life less predictable, with society being rocked to its roots by the invasion of soldiers whose religion had no place for a spiritual connection to the land, especially not a feminine goddess – their religious etiquette was rather one sided in the balance of the genders especially by the time of Mithras with no female aspects to the deity. Quite different to the Iceni goddess Eostre, a goddess associated with the moon, who took the shape of a Hare and those living then would see not to the Man in the Moon but the Hare in the Moon and if you look at the full moon today you also will clearly see the shape of a hare.

There was a sacred connection between the Hare and Boudicca herself. Andred (Roman name Andrastre) was the patron Goddess of the Iceni tribe. A warrior goddess whose symbol is the Hare. Many now think that “boudicca” is a religious title, a given name not her birth name, symbolising her dual position both as victorious tribal leader and as the manifestation of a Druidic or Celtic Goddess.

Celtic Goddesses and Gods were worshipped as a trinity, with three aspects of the feminine and it was to the Crone aspect that the propitiating sacrifice of a multitude of Hares was made in preparation for victory in what was to become the unholy slaughter of revenge on Colchester.

"It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters.." (Boudicca)

This event gathered hundreds of peoples from affiliated Celtic tribes in East Anglia to the Iceni's spiritual centre, and Boudicca’s home town, Thetford and it my suggestion that this concentrated and emotionally charged religious experience has truly left its mark – the Thetford Hare. The outline of the Hare's form is drawn to our attention by the position of ancient "monuments" such as burial mounds, and natural topographical features such as rivers.