Thread Drift alert:

Which folk customs and lore within the UK, tie into formal organised religious dogma & observation? I imagine the syncretic integration of err peasant agricultural rites and formal religious ones as one example, would potentially be impossible to untease??

One of my favourite recently learned songs, is the Lyke Wake Dirge. What I love about this is the local Yorkshire imagery describing Christian horrors of the afterlife and dangers of damnation, in terms that the local folk would all readily recognise. The Whinny Moor that one comes too upon leaving the physical, is an afterlife land filled with spikey plants. If you've been good to the poor and clothed them, then those same 'hosen and shoon' will be waiting for you on arrival. Meaning you'll be protected on the walk to the Bridge of Dread. I love the vivid imagination of the people translating abstract Christian dogma into images and language that are very much immediate and their own.

I'm not a folklorist, so I don;t have a clue, but this kind of thing must occur simply all the time in folk custom? Err, or so I'd assume...