(no subject)

Technical magic question (probably best solved by experimentation)

What is the difference between banishing a bad thing and summoning a good thing?

For example, banishing poverty vs summoning prosperity; banishing misfortune vs attracting luck.

Some initial thoughts:

1. How concrete the concept you're working with is. Attracting a lover is more "concrete" than banishing...loneliness? Unattractiveness? It's not immediately clear what the opposite of "a new lover" is, what the negative state you're trying to end is.

2. Whether the issue is a presence or a lack. If you're doing ok, then summoning wealth makes more sense than banishing-lack-of-wealth. However, if the situation is an active/"live" one, then a banish might make more sense. For example, if you're actively in an unsafe situation then banishing the unsafeness is more salient than just summoning safety.

3. Good operations could include both. Clean a thing out then fill it with something new.

4. How simple they are to accomplish as spells. This is related to point 1 of how conceptually simple the spell is. I'm currently designing a spell which could be done at midday to amplify a Solar thing, or dark-and-dawn to banish and renew a Solar thing. From a practical standpoint, a midday rite is less burdensome than a darktime one.

(But waking up at night to do a spell will make it feel more special and perhaps represent a greater sacrifice, both of which may empower it more)

5. This type of questioning process is maybe integral to spell design, like, hammering down what forces exactly are you're trying to work with.

(no subject)

https://apath.org/ritual-creation-worksheet/

This is a lovely, lovely brain aid for designing ritual.

(no subject)

I'm very troubled by things I've read about British folklore.

I've just finished reading Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton - a history of modern pagan witchcraft. Hutton is a huge intellectual crush of mine: a real historian who investigates magic, druids and the occult. Reading his books have made me admire history as a discipline, and learn more about how historians are really like journalists in a way, looking the truth and considering all the angles. I always learn new things from his books and - even when they puncture much-loved Pagan fakelore, it doesn't shake my faith and im often appreciative to learn the origins of ideas I use every day. Something doesn't have to be real to be true.

So I recommend all Hutton's books, and if you're pagan, a Wiccan or witch, Triumph of the Moon is a must read.

In Fencraft, we don't seek a literal religious truth. Instead, we co-opt people writing or cresting works which seem go be responding to the land into a lineage of quasi-prophets hearing part truths about rhe Landweird. Tolkien, Gerald Gardener, Syd Barrett and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water stand side by side as whispered fragments of it. This is a convenient handwave which welcomes in a broad church of belief, permits pop cultural paganism, and encourages playfulness.

So normally, something like Triumph wouldn't bother me: I don't need Murray to be literally correct, bevause I can understand the cool bits of her books as the Land dreaming of itself, a partial truth, a possible mythos.

But Hutton writes about the extent to which Victorian folklorists were...awful. shamefully awful to the "simple" country folk who they collected folklore from. They had a theory that pagan beliefs and rituals survived in rural areas, hidden by folk traditions which they had forgotten the significance of (but which an outsider to the community who was a wealthy academic understood perfectly). They then went out to collect folklore, recording only what matched their hypothesis, and in some cases over-riding local folk about how their own local rituals ought to be performed. He gives many examples, and it feels ugly. It's the exact same racist attitude early explorers applied to "savage" tribes, applied to like, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire dales and the entirety of Scotland.

This hits me right in the feels. Fencraft is very, very inspired by folk horror: the archetypal genre of "the country folk know something you don't know about ancient rituals at the stones". And it eagerly draws in stuff like Robin Hood and the May Queen and the Green Man. In other words, this shitty Victorian hypothesis underpins how *i* feel about rural traditions in the country side. It's also *my* fantasy of the land. It's what I want to find there. When we talk about seeking the Landweird it is, in part, this "pagan survivals" which we seek to find.

In other words, I can't feel the proper abhorrence at these Victorian chaps without also feeling abhorrence towards something I cherish and find joy in. Awkward!

& it's not like, say, finding out that Gardener was an inveterate liar, because what he created still has meaning and reality for people. Or finding our the Green Man was invented in 1927, but knowing he still walks the land regardless of when he was named.

It's having someone identify and (rightly) challenge that the whole underlying framework of what you're doing is a problem. I'm not really sure what to do about it, but I do feel...I do feel alienated from what I've been doing and like I kinda don't want to continue with it in the current form. Not sure how to move forward at all.

Religion Handbooks

So the Fencraft book isn't finished and online as promised. I'm struggling to choose between a couple of potential formats:

1. Archival: a dry but complete collection of everything I've figured out and how it works.

2. Educational: a step by step guide so YOU too can make rhis your new faith

3. Proselytising: the mystic, the mythic, the images and poetry which make you want to join a religion and really understand in your soul what it is

These, it turns out, are three very different things!

Archival is by far the simplest - but it's being derailed by the fact the system isn't finished yet. It'll never be in a sufficiently fixed form (one thing I appreciated about Triumph of the Moon was tracing how figures like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley's belief systems changed over their life). But there is plenty of it that is useable now!

Teaching is a very, very different beast: particularly figuring out what order in which to present material so that it builds and makes sense, and neither overloading not boring the reader. I've started and abandoned so many versions of a teaching course it's not true. I find them helpful for me, because a voice telling you what to do step by step makes it easier for me to overcome my executive function issues. But it's also a fragmentary, messy way of archiving information. One thing ive tried is writing archive essays ("a list of planet correspondences") and then booking them up to a separate lesson ("chapter 6: working with planets"). This does work quite nicely, and makes it easy to update changing information, but I also get quickly overwhelmed by indexing it well.

One advantage of Teaching is im inspired to find out things like "what are our values?", interesting little challenges like that. One disadvantage is, again, how unfinished it is: I don't want to teach thst this colour is for thst spirit if I know it will change. And there are some huge gaps, like, "how do you cast a circle?" which I can't really share a thing without. If I don't know what the finished product is yet, then how can I write steps towards it?

Proselytising is more important than you might think, but it's also absurdly hard work. Without it, you get a Scott Cunningham book: clear and easy on the how, but no sense at all of the why. Fencraft is assembled from walks in nature and cultural detritus - colours, weather, landscapes, and archetypes are extremely important. And a lot of the time the best way to express a thing is to just show a picture and say "it's like this!". But this is overwhelmingly hard work. Finding images which truly represent all the states ssnd elements and gods is more time online than I desire. And assembling a liturgy is a work in progress: it's the work of a lifetime, my lifetime. I can't accelerate it.

I spend a lot of time on this stuff, and it never feels fulfilling. I think perhaps because it takes lime 3 hours for me ro write a post on recommended children's books, say, but there's no new information there for me - im just writing it nicely and formatting it and finding pictures. 3 hours I could have spent walking or seeking new texts. Proselytising feels like it takes away from my own practice and redirects my focus to things which are artificial, like pictures and tumblr, rather than interacting with the divine. And yet, this is rhe make-or-break thing which makes what im doing count. If I can't write about what I do in a way which makes others go "oh my! This! This is what I have been looking for!" then there's really no purpose sharing it at all.