(no subject)

When someone asks you out of the blue to teach at their online academy and you're like, SURE that's awesome, I support the concept of infrastructure and better clergy training, but also...do students pay? What does your shop fund? Do I have to agree with the tenets of your path (because I don't)? Does working with you prevent me releasing my teaching for free? How do you feel about me teaching under my own label of what I'm trying to grow? Here's what I know about - are any of these of interest? How long have you been running this? Who else is involved?

Then *crickets*

I'm happy to trade my labour for all sorts of things, including warm feelings and the knowledge that I'm growing community and building a sharing community, but "basic information" is as cheap as I'll go.

(no subject)

Between the news from America, news about Covid and news about the climate, I'm really struggling atm, and its bringing home to me yet another benefit of older, slower social media. It's so much easier to curate your experience here, or on traditional forums,or (admittedly) on Discord - which also has these qualities of, strong gates and intentional curation.

People talk about how "the internet IS real life nowadays", but that's not wholly true. The experience I have hanging out in a room with friends isn't stuttered with advertising and political posters. It's mostly just chilling and talking about daft nonsense (not that I've chilled in a room with an actual friend since, like...October...), and talking about favourite brands and concerning news isn't absent from the conversation, but the tone is very different. Like, the...an activist poster or an activist graphic, it's attention-grabbing, it's loud, it's angry/impassioned/hopeful, it's quite a Lot, it's advertising, you know? It's designed to yank you about.

And I don't want that, not all the time, in all my social spaces, and not unintentionally, peppered amongst my Delicate Photos Of Wildflowers And Bees blogs and my Horrible Things Happening To Scuba Divers blogs and all that, and most importantly, as omnipresent when I try to interact with my online friends.

I like dreamwidth so very much.

(no subject)

It's just kinda Difficult that, at times of great stress, our need to just curl up on the internet and refresh twitter looking at photos of wildflowers and cats escalates; and our willpower for doing anything else just goes; but when you try and do that, that very same "I'm going to curl up and hide" place is absolutely filled with the things you're trying to run away from.

(no subject)

"Nothing is 'apolitical’. No one deals with issues that are 'beyond human affairs’. Consider how appealing to transcendent powers, archetypes, or ‘nature’ propagates, legitimises & enforces power structures & political hegemony. Consider the possibilities of a Critical Magick."

See, I don't even necessarily agree with this - and yet...

...a fundamental part of what the spiritual is, is an attempt to go beyond the human. Whether that's seeking greater connection to the natural world, to your ancestors, or to a rarified divine outside the sphere of everyday affairs. Turning away from the world has always been a spiritual tool, in almost every culture - people seeking solitude with the divine, people choosing to live with different habits (often very challenging ones, like rules about sex, food or personal dress).

It almost seems like a cop out to say, as a person of faith or who does magic, "it doesn't matter what I do because it's all ultimately about humans anyway", a disavowal of what can be some of spirituality's greatest gifts.


(Imagine a six pointed star. On one point is the Stellar, and on the point opposing it is the Solar-Lunar (crap name, sorry), which is symbolised by light.

Now, the line between these two points can be turned both ways. In one direction, the most-mortal point of Solar-Lunar is uppermost, and it shows the dominion of human affairs - the worldview of this tweet, almost, where everything returns to human power structures and human affairs; and the flipside of that is, this point on the map asserts human ability to control and master the world and nature. It is the point associated with machinery, skill, and also revolution (because it is the Lunar impacting the Solar, it is a motion away from something stagnant - it is both dazzling and renewing fire, and the chaos of the riot). It is the post associated with a lot of World Religions, in which man is the image of the divine who loves us, and through Him we are masters of all we survey - we named the animals, our planet is circled by the sun and the stars, our ability to summon a brilliant and dazzling celestial light of enlightement, mastery and power, the glory of the divine as embodied in us, like an angel in golden armour bearing a silver sword, challenging the Holy Father in his walled and perfect city, demanding change.

Now reverse the line. The human is below your feet, and what's around you is immensity. What could be smaller or more meaningless than human structures, feelings or skill? The planet earth is a small island on dark seas of infinity, and we're not even at the center (the universe has no center - it is everywhere and nowhere). We are part of an ecosystem, and we did name the plants and fish, but they have their secret words for themselves which we cannot understand - and they have their own gods too, and myths in which the world is cetaceanocentric, felinocentric, mustelidocentric. We make ourselves small if we only look at other human faces and fill our lives with words and pictures made by one another. And out, beyond the natural world, the divine is something larger than us - in time, in space, in scope, in caverns measureless to man.

Landcraft is built on our ability to rotate that star like a kind of compass, pointing us to where we want to go. Both of these approaches can be useful, at times; and you can identify these trends in many existing spiritualities; but it's most powerful to hold both as possibilities)

(no subject)

What is folk horror? I'm not sure I know any more.

Folk horror is a genre which has been defined in the last 20 years or so, a label bringing together a number of films, and then books and other influences into a coherent trend. One of the early figures in this was Mark Gatiss, who kind of made the label happen. He identified the three key films as:

• The Witchfinder General (1968)
• Blood On Satan's Claw (1971)
• The Wicker Man (1973)

That's the startpoint, but is it really the core canon?

I say this because I kind of hate all of them. My hate ranges from a sense of "fondness, but ultimately, disinterest" in the Wicker Man, to a deep loathing for everything about Witchfinder General, bypassing my "high-intensity bipolar mixed feelings" for Satan's Claw along the way.

You can identify a lot of common characteristics in the genre - including rural locations, a degree of cheapness or schlock, witchcraft (or a belief in witchcraft), hysteria, and a certain unsettling quality that comes with the cheapness, the knowledge that this is exploitation cinema and might jump in unexpected (and unexpectedly nasty) directions.

But primarily, there are a lot of very impressive breasts, and that's what's left me feeling so disenchanted this evening. Friends, the attitude to women in these films is appalling, even by the standards of both horror and neo paganism, which is saying something. It bothers me that this is the "core canon", when a key characteristic they share is repellent gender politics.

I'm very influenced by Ingram's review of the Wicker Man which talks about it as a film about grooming (they're correct); Witchfinder General is as depressing and ugly as the historic witch trials era it is set in, but that still isn't something I want to watch. I loved Blood on Satan's Claw. It's *really* good - unsettling, atmospheric, fantastic music and imagery, with a persistent mood of violence against women that can't be ignored or stepped around or re-claimed or re-evaluated, no matter which way you look at it. My feelings about it are mixed because it is so good at what it does, a sort of hypnogogic pulp, both terse and lurid; but its politics are so truly horrible, in every way.

Adam Scovell's definition of folk horror is:

• Rural Location
• Isolated Groups
• Skewed Moral and Belief Systems
• Supernatural or Violent Happenings.

I think this is actually really good. When I attempted to define the genre earlier this evening - or at least, name what I liked about it, I chose:

• folklore
• the countryside
• the unexplained/unexplainable
• the village, or a notion of insiders/outsiders, us/them

Which maps onto Scovell's Folk Horror Chain quite closely.

What's missing from these three films is, paradoxically, what I love about the genre. Mystery, awe, and the visionary. An otherworldliness. The paganism, for want of a better world. Paganism not only as a flashpoint for a moral conflict, or as a way of depicting "skewed moral and belief systems" - but a sense of the sacred.

I find it in Robin of Sherwood, in Penda's Fen, in Excalibur, a sense of something greater and more ancient asleep in the land. That's part of the folk horror mood, isn't it? At the very least, it's part that people really like. And yet I go back to the core canon and see, at its birth, it's the human-level, interpersonal interactions of cults, amorality, hysteria and isolated vulnerability which are the motor which gets the genre running. I'm fascinated by this, and I'm wondering if the break is significant enough to define what I'm watching as *separate* to folk horror, a genre within a genre. After all, people often say that Penda's Fen isn't folk horror, and now I suppose I can see why: it's visionary English landscape cinema about national identity as understood through the fen. It's not schlock horror, there's no cults or murder, no hysterical mob behaviour - there are no tits of any size or shape and that, I'm now lead to understand, is more central to the genre than I thought.

Most of all, having marathoned Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General for the first time today, I just feel a bit...dirty and disheartened; brutalised is to strong a word, but I do feel depressed in a particularly hollowed out way. A big problem for me is, I like a lot of things you find in horror (strange survivals in the landscape...haunted houses...witch cults), but I don't especially like being distressed or scared. So it's a challenging path to walk, finding what is (I suppose) on the fringe between the fantasy and horror genres, things which evoke a sense of the unsettling and uncanny, but without being actively horrible, gory, or disturbing. I think this is one of those times, the recognition that folk horror is larger than films which merely set out to shock and scare, and that some of its most compelling work is on those fringes - where other emotions and states are explored. Joy, wonder, curiosity, awe. None of that in these films, I am sad to report.

And this was my "I'm having a horrible day so let's treat myself to some of my favourite genre" treat. Simply wretched.