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haptalaonAll through Christmas and the new year, I had a morning ritual - but it's fallen by the wayside. It stopped feeling appropriate. It's bothering me in the sense that, I finally had a routine practice! But also because I know the value of routine, and can't find something to fill the gap with.
I'm currently working on developing my own tradition - I don't know what value it has for others, but for me it's an excuse to spend a lot of time reflecting, walking, researching, and generally keeping the landweird at the forefront of my mind.
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At the core of my tradition is the Landweird - the sense of terror on entering a dark wood, the great unknowns at the heart of English pagan worship, the sense of slipping off the map found in rural horror, the sense of encountering something fathomless and terrifying as found in Lovecraft. The Landweird isn't a god per se - we don't generally use the word "god", we tend to use "Power" as part of an official policy of uncertainty and doubt. It is a force in the world, and getting closer to percieving it and understanding it and experiencing it is one of the key tasks in the tradition.
For this reason, a lot of the everyday spirits are tutelary spirits, and part of the path & daily work is just building relationships with "Lesser Powers". Again, we're officially uncertain about how it all fits together, but there's a sense of progression and of veils, and either all the Powers are aspects of the Landweird, or they're guarding it, or it's the source of their power. I don't think it especially matters, but what that means in practice is you start by essentially interning for the Fairy Queen's Court. And working up. Gods which are "godlike" are closer to the Landweird, and therefore harder to access and understand - your work with the Lesser Powers prepares you to encounter the Greater ones, although never the whole Landweird in one go, because yikes.
I think my development of Landcrafting has been pretty heavily influenced by my melancholia - I've always struggled with the concept of an All-Knowing Loving Father God. Hence the act of worship always feels very quickly like a calling out on deaf ears, not as in "because the gods aren't real", but as in "they're real but are generally indifferent, and that's good because when they take an interest things tend to get much, much worse". Like Lovecraft. Like Semele asking to see her husband, and being blasted into ash. Like most of the Old Testament. Gods know, there's precedent for being devoted to the divine but also frightened of it.
I had a long period of interest in Vodou because it finally had a cosmological structure which made intuitive sense: their God, Bondye, was unreachable and tended not to be accessible, for which reason their daily work is with the Lwa, a troupe of saints/ancestor spirits who are intermediaries, but tend to be capricious and have a funny sense of humour.
[And now I'm saying this in this context, perhaps there's something here about...people find and develop the religions which help them make sense of the world. I've got a personality disorder, the diagnosis you get after a lifetime of small repeated traumas; and vodou was developed by people who were enslaved, and survives to this day in a nation marked by serious povery. One of these things is not like the others, obvs. But characteristics like - how much faith you have in people, how much optimism about life, how great your sense that you are cared for and protected, and that everything is going to be OK. Is gonna shape your engagement with the divine. Perhaps you can only make sense of Church of England Sunday-going if you're already smug and comfortable in your daily life.]
You can see all that influence, I think, in the tradition I'm now working with: the greater the Power, the more explicitly alien it is, but there are spirits who are smaller and are better at interfacing with humans for whom that sense of cosmic awe/terror/abandonment is less true. It encompasses my beliefs about mighty gods and spirits, but still gives me something I can work with.
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What do you DO with tutelary spirits? Prayer isn't appropriate. But you want to be offering something back, and regularly making room in your life.
What I found was my morning rite stopped feeling appropriate. It felt far too "religious" for a being which I don't have a "worshipping" relationship with. I've yet to have something to replace it with. I'm thinking a tarot card draw might be the thing, as that at least is part of a two-sided conversation. The rite could be a tarot card and a cup of tea - a quick catch up. But then that doesn't meet *my* needs from spiritual time in quite the same way as a rite either. It's a work in progress.
I'm currently working on developing my own tradition - I don't know what value it has for others, but for me it's an excuse to spend a lot of time reflecting, walking, researching, and generally keeping the landweird at the forefront of my mind.
----------------
At the core of my tradition is the Landweird - the sense of terror on entering a dark wood, the great unknowns at the heart of English pagan worship, the sense of slipping off the map found in rural horror, the sense of encountering something fathomless and terrifying as found in Lovecraft. The Landweird isn't a god per se - we don't generally use the word "god", we tend to use "Power" as part of an official policy of uncertainty and doubt. It is a force in the world, and getting closer to percieving it and understanding it and experiencing it is one of the key tasks in the tradition.
For this reason, a lot of the everyday spirits are tutelary spirits, and part of the path & daily work is just building relationships with "Lesser Powers". Again, we're officially uncertain about how it all fits together, but there's a sense of progression and of veils, and either all the Powers are aspects of the Landweird, or they're guarding it, or it's the source of their power. I don't think it especially matters, but what that means in practice is you start by essentially interning for the Fairy Queen's Court. And working up. Gods which are "godlike" are closer to the Landweird, and therefore harder to access and understand - your work with the Lesser Powers prepares you to encounter the Greater ones, although never the whole Landweird in one go, because yikes.
I think my development of Landcrafting has been pretty heavily influenced by my melancholia - I've always struggled with the concept of an All-Knowing Loving Father God. Hence the act of worship always feels very quickly like a calling out on deaf ears, not as in "because the gods aren't real", but as in "they're real but are generally indifferent, and that's good because when they take an interest things tend to get much, much worse". Like Lovecraft. Like Semele asking to see her husband, and being blasted into ash. Like most of the Old Testament. Gods know, there's precedent for being devoted to the divine but also frightened of it.
I had a long period of interest in Vodou because it finally had a cosmological structure which made intuitive sense: their God, Bondye, was unreachable and tended not to be accessible, for which reason their daily work is with the Lwa, a troupe of saints/ancestor spirits who are intermediaries, but tend to be capricious and have a funny sense of humour.
[And now I'm saying this in this context, perhaps there's something here about...people find and develop the religions which help them make sense of the world. I've got a personality disorder, the diagnosis you get after a lifetime of small repeated traumas; and vodou was developed by people who were enslaved, and survives to this day in a nation marked by serious povery. One of these things is not like the others, obvs. But characteristics like - how much faith you have in people, how much optimism about life, how great your sense that you are cared for and protected, and that everything is going to be OK. Is gonna shape your engagement with the divine. Perhaps you can only make sense of Church of England Sunday-going if you're already smug and comfortable in your daily life.]
You can see all that influence, I think, in the tradition I'm now working with: the greater the Power, the more explicitly alien it is, but there are spirits who are smaller and are better at interfacing with humans for whom that sense of cosmic awe/terror/abandonment is less true. It encompasses my beliefs about mighty gods and spirits, but still gives me something I can work with.
---------------------
What do you DO with tutelary spirits? Prayer isn't appropriate. But you want to be offering something back, and regularly making room in your life.
What I found was my morning rite stopped feeling appropriate. It felt far too "religious" for a being which I don't have a "worshipping" relationship with. I've yet to have something to replace it with. I'm thinking a tarot card draw might be the thing, as that at least is part of a two-sided conversation. The rite could be a tarot card and a cup of tea - a quick catch up. But then that doesn't meet *my* needs from spiritual time in quite the same way as a rite either. It's a work in progress.
