Names for Weird Night

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

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Ancestor Trees

When I look out of my window, I see the ancestors in the hills. They walk in a solemn procession, up and up and up and never getting further away. I see them in the lines of trees along the edge between mountain and sky, like caped and veiled and hooded figures - familiar and always there, and yet also unapproachable. One day I will join them - but only then.

My sense of them as ancestors is rarely, exactly, connected to the human - they don't feel like family members, but embodiments of mighty age and deep time, the procession of the ages and the keepers of memory. The trees themselves are not old (no more than 50 years, I'm sure), but wherever I am in the valley I am under their eye, looking down, surrounded by shadow-shapes

For several years I've had a firming sense of what this night is for. Samhain is, generically, the day of dead souls, and many Pagans venerate and speak to lost spirits - but in the particular way of how I see and walk, I think this is more a time of dead gods - of the many lost and forgotten things which are the mightiest movers of my craft, a passageway through time to things long gone.

For the past month, I've been looking at a random Lost God each morning & have found it very pleasing, just an extra thing to make each day special and focused. I think I will continue this beyond October, as long into next year as seems appropriate. But what I need to do is go out into the dark of night and call them all, collectively in their aspect of the Lost.

This presents logistical issues, as it is October.

I never want to give myself excuses to buy new products, as that's so easy to do in a consumer society, but I'm very aware I'm pushing it for safety wrt my current gear. In particular, what I want to get is a military poncho (to stay dry), and some kind of stove and kettle (to make a hot water bottle with). But my bushcraft meetup is literally doing 'what stove to get' next week, so I don't want to incur the psychic debt of impulse buying just anything; but I'm also Very sure that my sleeping bag, tent and ground mat are not rated for winter. There's also other factors: I want to get a stove that's safe to use in the wild to avoid forest fires, but I really don't want to be tied to a dirty fuel to power it; and most of the suppliers for this kind of thing have Really sketchy connections to the army/police and I don't want to fund something ugly.

Part of the purpose of Walking is to give yourself a sense of how far you can walk and under what circumnstances, and to learn the sacred map of where you are - to re-enchant your landscape with repeated ritual, re-awakening the net work. So I have a handful of places in mind. I want to walk up to near the trees - but I think that's too dangerous. I've explored the mountains and while there are many places to camp safe from human beings, these are steep water-riven slopes covered in shallow-rooting pines that come down like nothing, and I've yet to find a spot that truly feels free of the risk of something falling. But I think out on y Bannau are many quiet-enough places, albeit quite exposed and not quite the right landscape (they are big, flat, wide, empty, over-grazed plains, and I feel like I need the horror of surrounding, windnoisy trees, as well as to be close to the very ancestor trees I have been watching). But they have the benefit that my husband can drive straight to them at 2am if I run out of patience.