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What is Landcraft?
I am ready to launch the first stage of the Landcraft correspondence system, which organises all things in terms of the Solar, the Lunar and the Stellar.
The purpose of the Landcraft correspondence system is to be an alternative to the four classical elements, the gender binary, and the Tree of Life, an underlying system of magic for people who do not wish to use the standard correspondence systems for various reasons; a system of correspondences which, additionally, feels earthy and pagan, organic and authentic to the land and the folklore beneath our feet. It is an open system: you may combine it with any other pagan tradition, not only Fencraft; as well as re-mixing and hacking it for your own purposes.
Now available:
These parts of the system have been fixed and certain for around two years now. The next step for Landcrafting is to release the fuller correspondence charts (colours and so forth), pin down how the dual-celestials work (concepts like the Solar-Lunar, the inbetween elements), and how they interact with physical elements (like Fire, Land, Water, and so forth). And then finally - the big bit that's still missing - how you actually *use* them in ritual and magic, which is still eluding me.
I've also written a first masterpost of Rural Psychogeography, works exploring the hidden mysteries of the land. I am now obsessed with Chanctonbury Rings.
Mood? A deep, relaxed, mellow breathing-out of satisfaction, completeness and success.
The purpose of the Landcraft correspondence system is to be an alternative to the four classical elements, the gender binary, and the Tree of Life, an underlying system of magic for people who do not wish to use the standard correspondence systems for various reasons; a system of correspondences which, additionally, feels earthy and pagan, organic and authentic to the land and the folklore beneath our feet. It is an open system: you may combine it with any other pagan tradition, not only Fencraft; as well as re-mixing and hacking it for your own purposes.
Now available:
- An overview chart of the correspondence system, summarising its binaries and contrasts
- The Wanderer's Map, the way that the three celestials* come together to make a map of our world, our cosmology, our folklore and the otherworlds
- A summary of what each of the three represents: the Solar, the Lunar, and the Stellar.
These parts of the system have been fixed and certain for around two years now. The next step for Landcrafting is to release the fuller correspondence charts (colours and so forth), pin down how the dual-celestials work (concepts like the Solar-Lunar, the inbetween elements), and how they interact with physical elements (like Fire, Land, Water, and so forth). And then finally - the big bit that's still missing - how you actually *use* them in ritual and magic, which is still eluding me.
I've also written a first masterpost of Rural Psychogeography, works exploring the hidden mysteries of the land. I am now obsessed with Chanctonbury Rings.
Mood? A deep, relaxed, mellow breathing-out of satisfaction, completeness and success.
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I love a lot of your ideas but I hesitate to read much further, since I don't want to "steal" them for my own practice, and as it is, it seems Landcraft is for English people, or at least people who are in England.
How do you feel about that? I don't mean to go "hey I practice Landcraft" and then do entirely my own thing, just to incorporate, very privately, ideas like correspondences and the separation of the three parts of the system.
(This is part of my continuing waffling on how to practice while living in urban Flanders and being of urban background myself, and in another country from my birth country, when the current trend in Paganism seems to focus on the authenticity of local tradition and local magic. I'm veering towards the idea that gods make homes in people just as they might make homes in places and you carry them with you, but I may be in the minority, and it's not like that makes the problem of appropriation go away. Impostor syndrome, why yes...)
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I am obviously not Hap, but I can empathize with a similar identity crises when it comes to pretty much all neo-pagan things. (I think a lot of people can.) I’m half Korean and half white American Euro-blend, and I’ve immigrated to the UK. So I guess I have that last bit of living in England now, but I have a mixture of other things going on, too. How do I resolve East and West? I always felt really out of sync with the heavily Celtic aspects of Wicca and mainstream paganism when I was in America.
That said, I think the 3 practices and concepts of local spirits and gods are elements of Fencraft/Landcraft which can be applied anywhere and so you could view yourself as using “elements of Landcraft,” in your personal practice, if not the English-centric tradition. In my identity crises mentioned above, I mostly just have nameless local and family spirits I work with. I move often, some travel with me, some stay behind.
(That said, I have no idea how Hap feels about that. I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone.)
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And thank you! I appreciate that. <3
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Tl;dr: Please use whatever parts of this you like, in whatever way you like.
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0. I am a huge fan of open culture, its a deep-held value for me. I love what comes out of experimentation, play, borrowing, recombining, and making things open and free as far as possible; my paganism has come out of freely available sources and giving myself permission to do this, and I want to encourage others to do the same.
1. Appropriation isn't relevant here; Fencraft is mostly me sat alone in my bedroom watching cheap 1970s television, it has none of the real weight associated with the appropriation of a living tradition
2. The concept that England has forgotten its gods comes out of a particular strand of longing in English pastoral writing, and the reality that we don't have a legendarium as rich even as that in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I think I wouldn't have developed this if I hadn't been in England.
But everywhere has a Landweird, both a hidden something in the landscape that the trees seem to whisper, and a lostness in history of culture that one may long to rediscover. All Landweirds are local, and I think you could find one anywhere. Despite how well attested their mythology is, Hellenic Fencraft would still make sense: it would be focusing on those elements of mystery and lostness and reverence for the sublime and the strange within that culture.
3. You could see Fencraft as a collection of priorities. Nothing in it is new, but it puts particular emphasis on, say, re-enchantment, the sublime in the landscape, the half-remembered-ness of divinities as part of their inherent characterstics rather than an inconvenience to work around.
You can apply that template anywhere
4. "Neo-Paganism" is an international culture, there's never really been an inconsistency for revering Brigit or Isis as an American. A big part of Fencraft is responding to trends in neoPaganism that weren't working for me. It intends to create solutions to problems like:
• Systems of gender-agnostic magic
• Ceremonial magic which does not appropriate from Jewish mysticism
• Spirit-work which does not appropriate from various traditions
• Engaging with pop culture but in a consistent way
• Responding to the landscape and folklore in a way that bridges reconstruction and pop-culture
• Being more than just “esoteric witchcraft”
• Being very disability friendly, with lots of practices which are low-spoon
• Being solitary-first, not feeling like you're constantly missing something by not having a coven
• Being somewhat like traditional witchcraft, but without all the secretive flim flam
• Wanting to create a roadmap for people who wanted to create their own religious tradition. A lot of Fencraft is just breaking down & making clear the processes of Doing A Spiritual, so people can apply them in new ways.
• Wanting a spiritual architecture which feels 100% pagan/fit-for-folklore (not re-skinned Christianity; no angels)
If you've had these problems, they'll be something in Fencraft responding to it, and I'm very supportive of people using the solutions if they also have been looking for them. Even if that's *just* pulling out the solution they need, and gnoring the best.
6. I'm writing this for myself, first and foremost, so it's focusing on British culture. Ultimately, I think I am open to reading more widely and bringing other influences in. But part of the concept of the Landweird is revealed by the Commonplace Book: a collaged collection of personal influences pointing towards something unexpressably divine. It's having had a sense of a pagan spirituality for a long time, and yet not finding a path or deity which really seems to match what I'm seeking.
So the process of creating a Commonplace Book and seeking the Landweird will always be a personal one; maybe a better term would be seeking *a* Landweird, or seeking a personal path to it, or seeking part of it. It's always going to be an ideosyncratic process. I mention cheap 1970s television so often, I think, to highlight that what you place in the Book will be personal, and maybe not shared by anyone else, so long as it's a way in for you.
7. If Fencraft was to spread as a “real” tradition, then it would be made up of individuals each developing their own mythology, united by certain principles and practices - but each person's pantheon would come to look very different. Each person's Reading List would be determined by where their curiosity led them (I don't really expect that anyone else get quite as into niche 70s television or hauntological music as I am, even though they are huge for what I do personally). And in terms of nationality, I imagine that there would be a sort of...consensus for each nation of what the important elements, Powers and texts of their collective Landweird was, but we're nowhere near identifying what that would be. I'd also say that one man's spiritual practices are not, on their own, a tradition - it takes multiple hands and eyes to really develop something that can last; it needs disagreement, experimentation, alternative approaches, to take on its own full life. At this stage, the Golden Dawn & its decendens have had around 100 years of development, and Wicca around half that: if they weren't ancient traditions at their inception, they certainly are now. If I have any hope that in the future, Fencraft will be mentioned in that kind of company, it needs to be more than my vision of the Landweird.
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I have a question about Landcraft. I love the work you're doing and I find it fascinating, but you also wrote earlier about--forgive me if I misremember or misinterpreted--how you'd like to both share it and encourage other people to make it their own AND keep it consistent with the way it is being created now.
It's a difficult one, isn't it? I go back and forth on it. My first draft was radically open. This is, I think, part of why I'm splitting up the religion Fencraft, the correspondence system Landcraft, and the pantheon British Traditional Animism: even though it's all, bits of what I'm doing as a unified whole, I want to encourage people to take out and use the bits they like in their own way. You might like the Fencraft way-of-doing-spirituality, but not have any interest in this pantheon; you might like the pantheon, but use it as part of Wicca; you might be doing a different tradition of religion or magic, but want to use the Landcraft system instead of the original system.
I think if I presented all of it, as a single unified thing, then that would be the overall “static thing I wish to keep consistent with how it is now”, the thing I want to teach in a way that becomes generational and grows through a clear lineage. But the individual elements of it, I want those to be “shared and people make it their own”; I think when the bits are split up, they are very stealable, and it doesn't feel like a dilution of something complete. Does that make any sense?
Ultimately, it is being shared to be stolen. I envisage development being like a tree with many branches, and one of those branches will be “mine” - or maybe you could call my work the trunk, and that trunk will continue to do its own thing - but that doesn't compete with or prevent the creation of or undermine/supersede the growth of powerful branches. Maybe, ultimately, what is done on a branch will prove far stronger & more resilient than what I'm doing; perhaps I'm *not* the trunk, but the root.
I suppose (not to get ahead of myself and be egotistical), but nowadays "Gardenerian Wicca" is a *substrand* of Wicca under a larger umbrella. It's not the best, most important, most legitimate. So, you can have your cake and eat it. No matter what happens next, I think there will always be a Hap-does-Fencraft strand that people can respond to, but like Gardenerian Wicca, I don't expect it to be the ultimate "survivor".
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I support any of these approaches. Stealing things and doing them your own way; saying you practice Landcraft, but doing something that ends up quite radically different from my startpoint; taking bits you like and using them privately; practicing Landcraft as I've laid it down, with very English reference points, despite living elsewhere; practicing Landcraft as I've laid it down, but exploring your own non-English reference points and filling it with something new. I share it, because I think some of it might be helpful for others; and I don't want to put bars or limits on what kinds of useful people might find, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of the bits of Fencraft lend themselves naturally to becoming radically different in the hands of each person using it.
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I think the bringing your gods with you is a really interesting model, and you're right - we are having a "moment" in paganism for focuing on the local.
Fencraft, I think, would tend to agree that gods have been *brought* here by the many migrations of people, but would ultimately prioritise a “gods of where you are” model. That's why anti-white-nationalism is so core to the tradition. Not just because racist fucks are drawn to folklore like buzzflies to a turd, but because anyone who is here can hear the voice of the Landweird (regardless of where “here” is). It's not really about bloodlines or ethnic “rights" to certain pantheons or practices, it's “are you here and participating? Then you're where you need to be”
I'd definitely say that the models worth rejecting outright are, any which restrict divinity along racial/ethnic/national lines *alone*. In part because that's a very racist horseshoe, which starts somewhere laudible but goes all the way around to something repellent.
I think the most important parts of appropriation discourse are, say...I'm really into African Diaspora Religions, and so they sometims get boiled down to “are you Black” or “are you Black & Cuban” etc. And I don't think that's what it's about. It's more like, are you willing to initiate with an actual house linked to the tradition, fly to Cuba three times a year, learn the tradition as it has been handed down, learn Haitian Kreyol so you can speak to people in your community; are you going to do this properly, or are you going to be a tourist - possibly erasing and undermining living traditions with your far more powerful platform for spreading shallow versions of the faith.
The city in an interesting one, I'm going to get some quotes for you about it. In terms of Landweird, I am very in love with London, my home, and that sense of layers built on layers upon layers is never more vivid and visceral than when within a city, where you can feel its age and development; I get a very strong something off those parts of London where a medieval pub has survived right next to a skyscraper, a sense of something breaking through that is dissonant and represents a potential break from the everyday towards mythic time. If I'm to be honest, I get it far more strongly in London than I do near standing stones and other more clearly “pagan” places. And every city has so much history within it, so much ancientness. In London, we have the temple to Mithras and Tamesis, Isis-of-the-Thames; and then in British mythology we have ancient King Lud of Ludd's gate and Bran's head under Temple Hill; and then we have the particularly London folklore, of the London stone and the Crossbones graveyards and all the weirdness of the City of London; and we've got the anglo saxon mooring posts rotting at low tide on the mudflats. And every city was once open ground.
So, to my perception, the ancient gods of the land are still present in the city, but they have been made strange by the process of what has happened to the land. Divinity is tidal, and tied to the land, and so the Powers I found in London always had to have this particular hysterical-yet-constrained quality, something tangled that was far more straightforward the further up the Thames you travelled. I'd also say that my personal practice has been unavoidably changed by coming to the mountains; I miss the princes of the city so much, but I for one cannot hear their voices here. But I keep it alive in my Reading, and I keep a Tube map in my box of sacred tools. Maps can often be used to find your way in places they were not originally intended for.
OK here's what I was reading this morning, it's Alan Moore in Hellebore zine edition 2:
“It strikes me that our urban settlements may be the only plaes where the Wild Gods walk, since only civilised populations nurture an abiding fear/fascination for the rural and primitive. The ancient primordial horror may be a construction onlyof the sophisticated but culturally rootless modern mind...I would suspect that since our earliest urban cultures, we've situated our terrors beyond the neatly-ruled boundaries of the artificial landscape that we have imposed; out in the remote fractal wilderness where who knows what goes on, and who knows what they do. The countryside, the natural world, is observably beyond human authority and the human concept of time, and as such, is the perfect recepticle for our most lurid imaginings.. We measure our progress as civilised creatures by how successfly we have disconnected from the dirt, violence and ecstasy of our arboreal origins, and thus our uneasiness tends to start where the good roads run out. It must be said that a subset of this dread of rural places is almost certainly a dread of rural people, perhaps shading into a fear of the poor and disadvantaged generally”
I though this was great, as well as a pretty good analysis of the Wanderer's Map model, where folklore and folk horror are constantly trying to navigate between the civilised and uncivilised worlds.
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thank you for your comment, and I wanted to take it seriously in my reply & give you a good answer. it's a huge wall of text, so don't feel you need to respond to any/all of it, or just pick up on bits that interest you.
And thank you too for taking an interest. It's hard to do something as narcissistic as Set Up Your Own Religion without feeling like a prat, and so any kind of feedback where someone says..."this started me thinking in new ways about my practice" is, I suppose like the feedback that any creator craves, it keeps you going. So thank you. I'm getting a wadge of work done, like, every two weeks when my own impostor syndrome wears off, but a lot of the time what's bringing me back to the task is being able to imagine that there's some kind of an audience.
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And a big part of what I'm putting together is focusing on that "nameless local and family", with a real focus on the divinity of the "nameless" part. Its less about where a spirit is or comes from, more about emboldening people to be OK with not-knowing and not having a clear named historic figure or pantheon, and that being a Real Thing, not just rootless eclecticism.
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It's this part of folklore that really gets me fired up, like that crossing-place between reconstruction and pop culture. You could call it...medieval pop culture, almost. You could relate it back to the actual worship to these Greek/Roman deities, OR you could use the Murray hypothesis and say, these were actual ancient deities of place which were called by these names by learned academics of the era, divinities that were closest to Hecate out of all the Greek pantheon but ultimately their own thing, their uniqueness lost in the passage of time; OR something entirely made up by paranoiac aldermen and lawmakers that was nevertheless believed to exist, and which still have a hold on the imagination today.
There's something, in the middle of all that not-knowingness, which I find extremely crunchy and compelling. Far more than anything that can be proved with actual history.
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I think even in British-based Fencraft one may find the little details of the practices differ based on location—even within London, the local spirits of the Docklands (where I live) are not the same as in Hampstead Heath. I imagine they are also different in Wicken Fen than they are in the Wye Valley or the Isle of Skye, etc.
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