The Three Paths

[haptalaon]

Big Fencraft website update today, trying to soothe my jangled nerves by a bit of work on something uncomplicatedly beneficial.

Among other things, the Solar/Lunar/Stellar map can be used to classify different forms of magical practice and pagan spirituality.

(and just between me and you, dear reader, this is where a lot of these correspondences originated from. Trying to split out different trends in
which I was observing, but didn't really see named. I think if you can't clearly define and name something, you're then disempowered from discussing it objectively and judging whether it's a good fit for you/yr goals)

None of these essays should be taken as dogmatic, but I hope that people reading them will know more clearly "that's what I want to do, and this is why"

• The Three Paths
  • Three Types of Power
  • Three Types of Relationships
  • Three Types of Daily Practice
  • Three Types of Magic

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I love these so much. And your breaking apart the practices and magic styles really helped put into words things that had always felt not quite right when I was trying to do magic “by the books” and related teachings by people who wrote those books.

Thank you for taking the time to develop and write these ideas. I always look forward to your new posts.

Based on what I know I’m definitely Solar, probably Solar-Stellar. (The Stellar bits are hard to explain, and maybe I have it wrong.)

[haptalaon]

No worries: so much of this started with me also having this frustration, and doing the breaking-down to just get straight in my head...where I wanted to be.

But also the desire to mix and match: I'm also a very Solar person, but I love that noodly Lunar ceremonial magic too. But most Lunar paths imply a whole worldview, and I can't get on board with that, so trying to develop my own language for...how to do both.

The difference between religion and magic is one of those Things that academics can talk yr ear off about, but I'm ok with it as a division, because most societies do clearly have a split between "supernatural acts done by the right people in the context of sanctioned spiritual practice", and "supernatural acts done by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, outside of sanctioned practice" - although in Fencraft, the latter we connect more to these reclaimed visions of Witchcraft and also to some ideas in Satanism, which I've always been a fan of, to make them not inherently wrong but just...done outside of a system. Roland Hutton has some good stuff about this, I think in his newest book about the witch, in which he also deconstructs what """""shamanism"""""" is.

The Stellar is, I think, by nature always going to be difficult to pin down...and I also expect that it has to be the most individual part of anyone's system. Because it's linked to the infinite point where one slips over the edge, places which fill one with awe/terror, experiences of lost control - but that has to be different for different people.


As a practice, it was initially a holding location for that concept of """shamanic""", so that included otherworlds and altered states; danger, be it physical (mushrooms, going on walkabout alone) or spiritual (the possibility of soul-loss); and practices which are extremely direct & unfiltered. I haven't been using the word "Lovecraftian" on my site as yet, due to concerns about Lovecraft himself (and also a growing sense that Lovecraft's cosmic horror is some of the least pagan, compared to other writers), but the Stellar certainly carries that overtone of the encounter with the Great Old Ones - who are sleeping - being too huge to comprehend, and dangerous.

I was reading a lot of traditional witchcraft blogs at the time, so looking at people who were covering their skin with actual psychoactive edge-of-death flying ointment and sitting in the forest while doing something with menstrual blood and talking a lot about bones and how witchcraft is dark and terrible. As a contrast to my baking and walking practice, but wanting a framework in which those magics were *not* in competition - I can't be doing with this sense that Stellar practices, by virtue of being dark and edgy, are better than daily simplicity. It's all roads to the divine, hence the importance of a map.

But there is a clear link down the Solar-Stellar path about the experiential; & in the sense of it being a map of ways for people to seek the Landweird (or seek some other divine concept which fills that spot for people), the idea that you could start a walk in a very Solar way but that a strangeness in the light, or your readiness, or the ways your mind and feet take you...can be the road to awe, to a Stellar understanding of the landscape.

You can encounter it in a Solar way, say by cultivating a routine of presence in this beautiful world; or you can encounter it in a Stellar way, say by going into the woods at midnight and eating a plant that might kill you; or you can do Solar practices in ways which eventually lead you to Stellar experiences, if that makes any sense at all.

But yeah, I'm in a very similar place to you with it being those three that are most of my focus.

[annofowlshire]

I have nothing insightful to say in response, but I wanted you to know that I read through this (a few times) and appreciate the breadth of your reply.

...I do recall having a conversation with another pagan recently in which she was being courted by new Capital Letter Big Gods, and was trying to figure out if she should answer the call and how that might affect her relationship with the other gods she works with and thinking “this is so very out of my depth... my ‘magical’ world is not that big or that powerful. And I think I prefer it that way.”

[haptalaon]

<3

Yeah, absolutely. I feel the same way about the concept of a patron deity, and being chosen by a god or spirit. It's very over-promoted in the circles I run in, and I want to counter-promote a model which works for me...which doesn't involve a fixed commitment, but is still rooted in a huge love and awe for the great *something* that is out there