haptalaon | A Fencraft Theory of Sacred Space (Reply)

Now I'm beginning to be happy with an underlying theology of magic that works for me (there are still some messy bits, like how exactly elements fit in, but that's the sort of thing I can develop through experimentation), I've been reflecting on standard ritual technique.

There's various outlines of how to do this, but they tend to include:

Center self (energetically)

Center self (emotionally) - focus awareness on the BodyMind

Demarcates the main zones of the chosen magical universe, with you at the center (i.e. the four quarters)

Align self with the infinite

Create sacred space/reveal sacred space

Clean unwanted stuff out of a space

Create a barrier in/out

Reinforce barrier with power

And the various techniques in my collection combine these stages in different orders or slightly different ways.

Now, me being me, I have a bit of a problem with each of these steps as commonly described in the literature; but I had a helpful chat on the Cauldron that sparked off some ideas for step 3: Create/reveal sacred space; clean unwanted stuff out of a space. Specifically, how to use the Fencraft lore as a visual startpoint for creating meaningful gestures and ritual actions which actually communicate what I want to do.

Right now, these are untested, and you're welcome to give them a go; they're designed to function in a way that feels coherent with the rest of the theology, which isn't so much cleansing a space or consecrating it to an outside force, but teasing out what's already there.

O'r Ddaear Hen

An old man is digging in his garden. His spade hits upon something solid. With his fingers he carefully brushes the mud away and lifts it. Then he takes a brush, and dips it in water, splashing and delicately brushing the dirt away, until it is revealed with full brilliance. It has been buried beneath his feet for longer than human minds can remember, but calling to him.

Possible gestures: dipping your hands into a container of earth, and letting it run between your fingers; drawing pentagrams, or similar, with an archeologist's trowel; actually burying a focus object and revealing it (surely this, like the revalation of wheat at Eleusis, is our mystery tradition); with a brush and water infused with certain herbs, asperging the viscinity, with the intention of cleaning something away that is obscuring the truth of a place, and the truth of the place is the Landweird - the long-forgotten, the buried, the calling.

See also: the Owl Service, A Warning to the Curious

Delia Derbyshire

You enter an ordinary room. You still your heart and sit quietly. You listen intently for the sounds around you, noting them with your mind until they turn into rhythms, musical rhythms. You start reaching out, always aware of the room, probing its stranger qualities; what if a chair was no longer a chair, but disconnected entirely from what it was and became strange.

You are feeling, with your mind, for a frequency. The clock ticks. The fridge hums. A certain frequency in the room. In the vision of your heart, you can see an old fashoned jukebox, faintly glowing. You reach towards it and start gently turning the dials. You are looking for a very special frequency - a ghost frequency - tuning the room to catch something that's hidden there, the weird behind the everyday. As you turn the knob from left, to right, always adjusting, you feel time move. And then you feel the room move somewhere entirely sideways, and it is alive, and you can see it, and it can see you. The Landweird is everywhere, just beneath the surface, and you have awoken it.

Possible gestures: drawing out a pentagram or other sign, as with the LBRP, but then reaching out and rotating them, as if you were turning a giant wheel; an actual radio tuned to white noise; a physical tablet on which one layer can be rotated within a magical wheel; sonic objects, apparently Derbyshire was extremely into the sounds of singing glasses. If a coven, everyone having strange-noise-makers to play with to collectively create a mood, over time; actual Derbyshire music, or other strange ambient or sounds, played from several stereos; focus object, clueing you in to where you wish to go.

See also: the Stone Tape, Blue Jam, The Ghost Room, The Caretaker

Note that this is, of course, a rather Stellar conception; one can find other frequencies of Landweird in a place - for example, imagine how you would tune to the Solar-Stellar psychedelic possibilities of a field of wild-flowers, i.e.

The Subtle Knife

Beneath this world there is another, and another, layered close atop each another like the rings of a tree.

Take the knife - for the knife is always your knife - which is white on one face and black on the other and, standing on the outside of the protected space you have made, cut a door, so that when you step into the circle - you step into another world. Æsahættr, you call to it; teleutaia makhaira , knife that has blooded me, knife is part of my own skin just as my hand is. Feel with your mind for a snag of something in the air and cut. It is not so very far away that we go - to the same place we are now, in fact, but a slightly different face of it - its hidden face. Step into the circle, into this same-but-different time, and close the door behind you - but do not forget it.

Possible gestures: I often think of the aletheiometer when thinking of the triangle, so why not combine this with the Derbyshire focus - perhaps with a physical clock? - something with hands you can turn.

See also: Escape into Night - drawing a door with crayon

Sapphire and Steel

Turn back time, Sapphire - the voice says - turn back time. You've been aware since you walked in of how much time there is here - how old everything is, and the clutter that it brings - the inner clutter, the other voices, every clock and bookcase trying to speak to you. You focus on your third eye, and generate a light which is bright blue, and when you open them your eyes are blue and still, and everything is running back, disappearing, figures coming and going, running back towards what's hidden here, until the dark spirit of the place is alive and hungry for you - a dark corridor, all around you - and only then, do you stop.

Possible gestures: Let's keep thinking about clocks, one set to run forwards, another set to run backwards, either side of you so the ticking is not quite aligned. We have 3 domains, subdivided into six, so should we not put a carriage clock at every point as some may place a candle, each clock differently set.

See also: Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Dark is Rising

Caduellin and the Sleepers

This place is wreathed with legends: that is why you have come. The circle is cast firm, and you can feel around you the ancient stone walls of the cave. Come, you say, striking the gong - awake now, you old wights, you should not be sleeping. Something stirs in the land, a great yawning of soil and storm, as you strike the gong again - something shakes and cracks, and up out of the earth in the quarter you have marked come the woken sleepers, and with them their world, to treat with you.

See also: The Magician's Nephew, Arthur legends, Penda's Fen, Tom Bombadil, Earthfasts, Call of Cthulhu

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The circle is already cast, protected with girlish trinkets - nosegays of carefully chosen flowers; old photographs; love letters; clocks. You sit, just outside it, and look at the door. The door is two large rocks, cut by no human hand, and darkness inside. You breathe. Focusing on the darkness, something seems to move in there. The darkness is stretching, becoming other, becoming a corridor - filling with stars, and then darkness like slippery black tar water - filling with motion, and silence, and great age. When its strangeness can no longer be bourne, you step inside. Here is a place that is not a place, a time that is not a time - you are a dream, within a dream. Proceed from this point in a spiral motion.

See also: Narnia, the visualisation of a wardrobe; Alice in Wonderland, a rabbit burrow; Little Red Riding Hood, the forest; Abbot St Thomas, the stain glass window which reveals a dark staircase spiralling down; the weird generally, an unexpected door that opens onto nothingness

O'r Ddaear Hen, Delia Derbyshire, and Sapphire all focus on waking up or revealing a place's tendency in a gentle (if sinister) way; Picnic and Subtle are far more active, creating a secondary space, which probably suggests a very different kind of magic.

The second thing is, I feel like elements of each of them can probably be combined, and that once I've experimented with them there will probably be a single process that comes out of it.

I think all of these imply a magical circle; after all, most of our lore is horror lore because encounters with the Landweird are horrifying. The purpose of a circle, then, is to protect other people. To prevent what you call or awaken getting out, especially important if you're waking the land up because that's the sort of thing that tends to leak. I'm going to look back through the lore, but the barbed wire fence of a military institution comes at once to mind (for example, Penda's Fen, Quatermass 77, Timeslip.) But I feel good about this, because again, something about standard circle procedures have never seemed quite right to me, but I feel confident of compiling something now I have a stronger sense of why-ness.

I do still have questions about the inside/outside of circles. Like. I have a mental image of the circle being safe, and things prowling around its edges, which feel consistent with the lore, but also a fundamentally different kind of magic. A solar, I suppose, rather than these rather more stellar operations which invite the seeker to get lost in it. But like, ultimately what a circle is is a barrier that demarkates two zones, there's no real reason to be dogmatic about what those zones are, so this feels fine to me.

A Fencraft Theory of Sacred Space