page_title: Handfasting
section_title: Handfasting ribbon
hierarchical_section_title: Handfasting / Neopaganism / Handfasting ribbon
caption_attribution_description: English: Handfasting during a civil ceremony in Ukraine. The cloth is a ceremonial rushnyk decorated with traditional Ukrainian embroidery. Hand Fasting at a civil ceremony.
context_page_description: Handfasting is a traditional practice that, depending on the term's usage, may correspond to an unofficiated wedding, a betrothal, or a temporary wedding. The phrase refers to the making fast of a pledge by the shaking or joining of hands.
  The terminology and practice is especially associated with Germanic peoples, including the English and Norse, as well as the Gaelic Scots. As a form of betrothal or unofficiated wedding, it was common up through Tudor England; as a form of temporary marriage, it was practiced in 17th-century Scotland and has been revived in Neopaganism.
  Sometimes the term is also used synonymously with "wedding" or "marriage" among Neopagans to avoid perceived non-Pagan religious connotations associated with those terms. It is also used, apparently ahistorically, to refer to an alleged pre-Christian practice of symbolically fastening or wrapping the hands of a couple together during the wedding ceremony.
context_section_description: The term has entered the English-speaking mainstream, most likely from neopagan wedding ceremonies during the early 2000s, often erroneously being described as "pre-Christian" by wedding planners. Evidence that the term "handfasting" had been re-interpreted as describing this ceremony specifically is found in the later 2000s, e.g. 
  "handfasting—the blessed marriage rite in which the hands of you and your beloved are wrapped in ribbon as you 'tie the knot.'"
  By the 2010s, "handfasting ceremonies" were on offer by commercial wedding organizers and had mostly lost their neopagan association (apart from occasional claims that attributes the ceremony to the "ancient Celts").
  The term "handfasting ribbon" appears from about 2005.
caption: Civil wedding ceremony in Ukraine. The cloth is a ceremonial rushnyk decorated with traditional Ukrainian embroidery.
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