Hearth & Horn

one thing about being away from the desk for a while is it resets your habits and relationships to your habits and you see them afresh from the outside, & this prompted me to ask 'when I feel this little stab of distress that prompts me to check reddit, where is that distress coming from? What is distressing me?'

& I realised that for me at least, it's the context of being on a computer in and of itself which produces the stress, even if nothing especially bad is happening. So, yeah.

I hate that all these neat things like communicating with friends, reading blogs from people in countries I will never visit, pirating out-of-print books, accessing neat organisational tools and listening to Nigerian disco and taqwacore come with a side-order of 'being on the computer' :/

While planning my route home from a retreat this weekend, I noticed a route could be planned via Pinvin - setting of Penda's Fen, though not the shooting location (though that is very close by, maintaining that specific sense of place). I don't like driving, or coming home from a holiday, so all week this was my treat to look forward to.

About an hour before I arrived, I was suddenly and shockingly aware of the landscape - fields in the foreground, but with that line of purple in the distance. I hadn't realised the landscape in the film was distinctive - it just read to me as England; but I knew that it was a particular part and supposed to be read as such. I tried to concentrate on the road and not be overtaken into mythic time just yet, and then I got stuck in the Worcester traffic and fell slightly in love with an aging biker who was behind and ahead of my car.

Eventually I passed the sign for the village - abruptly - and looking for somewhere to park, followed Town Center signs to the church. The signs said no parking except for churchgoers but I judged it was quiet enough.

So firstly, I must announce my regret at not running the kind of cult which scams money out of people, because not one but several of the large houses around Pinvin church are for sale, and it struck me as quite the place we ought to be. Here is one of the houses. If I lived in a place like this, I would die of delight, you would never hear the end of it, I'd be striding affably about like Lord Summerisle and shaking hands.

Secondly: the position of St Nicholas church - the only one in the village - is extremely striking. It is on a foot-crossroad, and in the quarters around it are fields of wheat. I have never seen anything like it. It's not unusual for a church to be on a green, but within a wheatfield is extremely uncanny and dare I say, symbolic.

Pinvin is a road, more or less. Alongside the church, there are two schools (didn't go to see or photograph, for obvious reasons), and an inn. Walk too far in any direction and you fall off, back into fields. All the houses look expensive, and many of them are new-ish. In the 70s I imagine the village felt quite frighteningly exposed among the big empty fields and the face of the sky bearing down. It's present in the film, but I'm only now fully aware of it, that Pinvin is exactly like the little village of the Fencraft journey - a small town, with fields for wandering around it, but in the distance - mountains. These are the Malverns, which I drove over on my journey there. Not many trees, and none of them old-feeling - a handful on the green.

I pottered about the churchyard - fairly unremarkable. I am going to visit again to do a service, but the door was closed when I was there. I was taken by the site of the hungry earth within the sepulchre, and what seemed to be a stone circle of old grave-markers

Then it was time to visit the pub, which was just opening at 2pm. I spoke with the baffled innkeeper. There is nothing in Pinvin, and yet here is a newcomer - a weird looking man-woman who smelt of the undergrowth and for some reason, really wants to be here, not at the Anchor in the next village along, even though they will do a meal and tea and the Coach and Horses will not. I had talked to some people at the retreat about my planned trip to Pinvin, and discovered Penda's Fen is a seven-minute infodump at the very least, so I smiled and stayed discreet. The pub is modern, and after a while some regulars came in, all of them looking bemused at my presence. I asked if there was anything to see locally. They recommended the Abbey in Pershore - nearby large village. There clearly wasn't anything else here. It's a place for leaving.

Top Tip! If you do not keep the Landmother's days when they are due, she WILL flood out your campsite tho no rain was forecast.

On the aether at KP Radio once each week:

• PST - Sunday 10am
• GMT - Sunday 6pm

and afterwards, in perpetuity, on the website

This week: celebrate the summer’s end with a drop of acid communism: lysergic lullabies, lazy sundays, and long shadows from the sixties and seventies. Naptime. Things are because they are wonderful

Plus readings from Mark Fisher’s unfinished Acid Communism

The traditional four elements have never worked for me, so when I began the work of making my own system, it had to go. Instead, I started by looking at the landscape and trying to derive from that. It's quickly clear that fire is very different from the other three. When I go about, I see all around me - the sky and the land and the water - and their intertwining processes, of the water within the air and within the land, all these swirling grey-greens and grey-blues and grey-grey-greys that are Welsh weather.

But fire is the odd one out: one never comes across it by accident. The Earth is not made of fire. It does not naturally produce fire. Volcanos are not part of my landscape, and the deep-presence of lava isn't within the knowledge of the imagined ancient viewpoint from which I work. Fencraft sees the motion of light as its own system, as THE system of metaphor, that the sun is more alike to the coldness of the moon and stars than it is to human candles. And it considers 'warm things and cold things' - warm water, in the living rotting burning bog, and cold water in the depths of ocean; warm, terrifying exhilirating tempting winds of red stars in autumn, brisk and cobweb-brushing winds on the hillside, miserable wet winds crawling up and down the mountainside. But warmth is not elemental fire.

(Ray Meares - a bushcraft celebrity who can make fire by rubbing two sticks together - describes his own awe at once coming across a woody climber rubbing against a tree in the wind and seeing it smoulder; he wondered if the first makers of fire saw this, and it gave them the idea)

Instead, fire is self-evidently a human element. In cheap sci-fi, one might imagine human characters expressing that the making of fire is what sets humanity apart from the animals. A subcomponent of the world and our expression within it, similar to the harvest, the forging of metal, the making of maps and ships, a thing that is only present when we are. There is potential within the world to make a fire of what we find, but the same things can be carved into a staff, split into fibres for rope and garments, shaped into plastic, used to run a car, a latent potential within earlier things.

When I map ~elements~ in Landcraft, I go by their combinations - that is, the air and the water expressing itself as storm on the ocean or the wetness of the weather or the sculpting of great glacial valleys, or the sun and the land expressing itself as a summer afternoon, the dry wood of a home, tinder-dry underbush, the coming-to-fullness of fruiting, or the meetingpoint of earth-and-air as a farhorizon or the barren breeziness atop a hill. It is here they are most alive, illuminated by what they are not, and in the process of change by what is near them.

So fire appears. It is placed, more or less, between the earth and air - that is, between the raw materials of fuel, and the oxgen and the fastmoving friction that sparks. Fire cannot exist anywhere else: the wood is too wet, the sky is too sodden, nothing has grown to be cut back, the wind is not under your hand and rages as it will. Fire is the meeting point of earth and air, it turns the physical into the insubstantial.

Fire is-and-is-not the Solar. It appears in a similar place on the map, our little bit of sun, because humans like to be warm - but crucially, it is offset. Other occult traditions would group all firey things under one banner, but in Landcraft the Solar has a range of symbolic meanings, and only some of those are shared by fire. The Domain of Solar opposes the immense depression of elemental air-and-water, the thing that chases away the ice, the fear of midwinter, that burns off cloud and quiets storms. Fire could not oppose it. Fire could not exist in such a sphere.

There is an aspect of Fire under the Solar, to do with the hearth-fire and safety in the warm and cooking. There is another under the Domain of Solar-Lunar, with all our insubstantial, clever human things - alongside the forge, and things of metal and glass and invention, the bunsen burner, the bomb. You might say: the fire is necessary for the Solar to persist, that is, for us to have peace and plenty and security, we must have a fire. One precedes the other. One is the gift of the other.

I cannot make fire. Once or twice a week, I go to my bushcraft club. We clear brambles off paths and then retreat for an open barbecue. Firebuilding is competitive: a certain atavistic need to be the one who provides. I have a little portable kettle and always intend to practice ahead of time, but it's been cold; practicing at the meeting does no good, for I will have a queue of men who cannot make fire mansplaining to me, another man who cannot make fire, how it is done - and as often as not, I can see they are wrong but not my own way to doing it correctly.

Fires must be built, tended, planned far in advance. It is incredible to me that people's homes burn down by accident, as starting a fire when you want one is the most impossible task in the world. Fire begets fire: you need fire to make charcoal and charcloth and to dry wood, in order to start other fires in future. I feel the presence of the-first-firemaker; I remember too that there was once a first Tool, for all tools are made by tools that existed before them, the hammer in my hand descendent of another hammer, backwards and backwards and backwards as awesomely as my body descends from something ancient in the dark.

Fire is elusive. Not for nothing is it filed beside trickster spirits. Fire is ephemeral, coming out of the invisible. Does it rest in the wood or in the air before the light and heat can be sensed by us?

Fire is the precursor for humanity to do anything, more or less. I stop wondering how fire matches up with the 'healing' meanings under the Solar-Lunar - because a hot drink and a place by the fire is the first part of recovery. Everything on the map exists in three places, that is at the center then one position either side.

• Under the Solar, hot food and a place by the fire is community inclusion, the very rudiments of being alive, the safety of being seen as fully human by those you depend upon.
• Landwise & starwise, hot food and an open fire is pleasure and relaxation, the delight in food and the great outdoors, the magic of crackling twigs and storytelling and secret kisses.
• Airwise and moonwise, under the Solar-Lunar, we are related to active purpose, ambition and creation; we need the fire to get someone warmed up and with fluids inside them; the fire in the morning to draw us out of bed, the fire that restores. The Solar-Lunar is the hillside and the hiking, but one cannot get far without a warm drink and a campfire.

All of them, not-the-sun but yet grouped around it: the conditions for the one create the other. In Landcraft, every position on the map behaves a little differently - it's not four differenly coloured mana cards or lego blocks, as in the traditional occult - but each flowing from its own nature. There is no fire until we make it. It is like a pot, sword or quarterstaff that way.

I'm reading David Abrams Becoming Animal (whoa!), and it's basically about vernacular mindfulness - he's a nature writer and spiritual person, and large chunks of this nonfic book are him describing everyday occurrances as made newly-strange by an intensity of noticing and sensing. At times, the effect is almost psychedelic

So yes, it's very very good. It has a strand of dated fascination with indigenous wisdom, and here the book is at its weakest, but he has at least done the work of travelling and meeting with people from other cultures, albeit within an orientalising framework.

He talks intensely about bodyminds, about the modern western shift towards experiencing themselves as cerebral instead of embodied. I'm thinking about Abrams wrt daily practice, because all my life pagan traditions have modeled what daily work looks like: something akin to, you light a candle, you sit down, you think a bit - perhaps you meditate - perhaps you draw cards - perhaps you 'hear a voice' - but it is both still and internal.

Something I emphasise in my writings is daily work that is very active:

• Solar: making sacred the daily routines of life
• The rite of walking, of being in your body and doing something outside, maybe expressed as gardening or even sitting and watching the birds if you can't hike far
• the rite of reading, of interacting with a second mind (expressed as a book, film or album, but still, a secondary perspective)
• the rite of disconnecting - that is, a taboo which forces you away from sitting in silence
• The great dance of the Solar Stellar, of dreaming in the sun, being open to experience, and ritual movement and play
• for 'meditation' I would always advocate for either reading then thinking/writing about it, or yoga/tai-chi/even jogging, some kind of body movement

And so on

I always assumed it worked better for me from an ADHD perspective, but Abrams has opened me to considering that maybe it just works better period. Why did we ever assume that stillness, silence and being alone was the best route to interfacing with pagan spirits, who most pagan theologians will describe as embodied in the world and substantial?

Sit-still paganism comes from a couple of places. Crowley brought eastern mysticism into the occult new age - he was a big fan of yoga, for example, and writes about meditation. At least some yogic traditions do involve a lot of sitting and thinking. It's likely Crowley who is the progenitor of 'meditate every day as a key building block of paganism', I haven't found it in earlier Golden Dawn texts (tho they were, in their own way, orientalist).

Meanwhile, we are all still Christians at heart, and the sitting still and saying words and thinking is a feature of normative Christian prayer. I'm a big fan of marginal christianity, of seeing christianity as diverse and weird and changing through time and location, so see: there are gospel churches where Christianity is expressed as ecstatic song and dance, there are groups where people speak in tongues and faint with the spirit, there's medieval mummers plays where christianity is expressed as movement and performance, there is flagellation and fasting and body-techniques to experience the divine in odd monastic orders. But none of this is familiar to the average pagan, because none of us come from that kind of Christian upbringing. What we bring into paganism, then, is sitting quietly in a pew

One feature I try to bring to my pagan life is revealing a new theology. That is, if the precepts of Paganism are true (and they are), then how would that change how I behaved, thought and worshipped? I try and look especially for places where these beliefs are dissonant with my own instincts and preferences. Of course, they align fairly well, otherwise I would not have been drawn into the kind of religious life I keep - but it is always good to pause and ask this.

And so: is this typical vision of a daily Pagan practice of the mud and lonely waters? Or does logic lead us from understandings that the Otherworld is just over the next hillock and there is divinity in the privet bushes all along my garden, that we must also be intensely bodied and of-the-world as our daily work? Our gods are here, and so must we be.

Not unrelated, but I have put up a first page (of many) on my website describing a 'location' on Landcraft's map, that is, the alchemy of sun, moon and star imagined as places you can 'go' to be immersed in a certain way of being. The Sanctuary is expressive of a lot of unspoken magical norms; part of the goal of a map is to make explicit by naming and locating.

These norms include:

• You must be ritually pure - with water and energetically
• You must be 'safe' within a container
• You must be calm and in control
• You must carefully plan all you do
• You must consider the light, as in a candle or a clear, pure energy

This glassy occultism will, I think, be familiar to everyone who has read a beginner book. Fencraft locates this as the Sanctuary, a place in which this modality works and is best. It is in strong contrast with the logic of magic where you put forth the intensity of your emotion or become ritually possessed or lose yourself in dance, which also works, but ritual must be in harmony to push all the way through, and so it is somewhere different. The magician's task is to consider which model to use for a working (or how to combine them).

If one was to attend a Fencraft mystery school, in one's third year it would be a decision as to which of these locations to spend time in. In earlier years, one would travel through them all as a taster, but the third year would be a moment to pick one and get extremely good at it - not that you ever have to stay in one, of course, but it is good to get good at something.

I think I need to go through and capture all my bits on Pagan Infrastructure, and turn it into a longer essay, as it seems to occupy my thoughts so often, but another thing I was thinking was

to what extent are proper world religions actually funded by the devout?

vs

they are funded by geopolitical strategy & the inherited wealth of such.

like, one very liberating thing about being a wiccan is that you have no country, no politicians, no history, no schools, no wars, and so you're never in this difficult ambivalent relationship to your religious life where you love something that is so terrible. the worst you get is shitty interpersonal behaviour to other wiccans. neo-pagans can and do wield systemic power through their other privileges - but 'being a witch' just isn't one of them.

what it makes me think about is, so much of religious power and state power are intertwined, and so in Britain for example, stuff like people who funded cathedrals or religious schools etc were buying worldly power, as much as favour on the other side. Or, King Henry trashing the monasteries, kind of so he could get divorced, kind of to establish a new religion, but mostly because he wanted their money and he didn't like the Pope as a political rival in his country.

& those are the times and places whence come the wealth of religions, for example, the Church of England has a lot of wealth in land and investments that they've had for centuries, and it's run by the literal King who is chief commander of the army .

We don't want any of that, of course, and if we do we need a sharp slap. But yeah, I feel like perhaps this kind of analysis is missing from conversations about why we don't have infrastructure. It mistakes the infrastructure as something that is for religious work, whereas I think that's a byproduct. The infrastructure is a facade for underlying politics. So long as pagans have no worldly power, there is no reason for us to be funded

In the dark woods, surrounded by the tall trees, I saw them as I had - the ancestors on the hillside, except now they were all around me - and I thought first, pity that these trees are so young, not like the very ancient beings I am seeing within them; and my thought came back to me,

but the gods are young - we are not at the end of days, but in their earliest beginnings, and as our lives are short - they are young and laughing still, alive and stretching forth in strength like young trees

Following up on the theme of the last post, here is an (incomplete) list of Lost Gods of the British Isles