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"An Englishman’s home is his castle, but a castle is nothing without a moat. A little water defines the place, makes sense of it, adds a richness to everything all around. A pond is the centre of the stage: the garden’s focal point, drawing the eye, bringing in many other living things. More than that: it’s a statement of what a garden is for."

I miss being this middle class :(
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Heartwood by @phoebecoco

Incredible, unsettling little song by a hawthorn tree fearing the ax.
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Also, my neighbours have started parking their massive van between me and my view of three mountains, the light moving on the hillsides, the clouds coming together and dispersing and the birds wheeling, and I am ready to Go Out And Hurt Someone.

(My neighbours are currently expanding their patio so they've got a nicer sitting place with their view, so they can't park their van there any more. Can they park it in their alley? No. That's where their caravan is. Can they park it in front of their house on the side without a view? No. That's where they park their big moving van)

So instead, I'd like to share with you the soundtrack for Worzel Gummidge by the Unthanks.



Worzel Gummidge
is part of the Haunted Generation trend of extremely unsettling 1970s British television for children - and it often has a pastoral/folk horror edge. It's about a scarecrow that comes to life. In 2019 it was remade at Christmas, and it's...unexpectedly wonderful. Just wonderful.

It's reassuring and beautiful; it's for children, but has got the political edge that is always essential when talking about the Land - in this case, talking about the climate emergency, and casting actors of colour as the protagonists, affirming that the mythology of the land is that of any who care for it, not a rural pastoral fetish for bigots. It's quite creepy. You can tell, I think, from the way the show is constructed, and some of the cast, and the very fact you'd remember Worzel with any fondness - it's made by haunted generation people, by people who believe a bit of horror is healthy for children or at least, an important part of a childhood.

Steve Pemberton is former cast of League of Gentlemen, the show which in part spurred the folk horror revival; and Mackenzie Crook has since been interviewed by environmental charities about his passion for the natural world.

There's a sincerity to this - a deep sincerity. I watched a very good youtube video about how modern films are too quick to laugh at themselves - following the tradition of Joss Whedon and Tarantino, a post-modern self-referential wink at the audience that undermines their own weight and drama. The video compares Dr Strange unfavourably to the films of the 80s, which wore their heart unashamedly on their sleeve: Rocky is their example; my go-to is John Boorman's 1970s Excalibur. Excalibur does not have a sense of humour, but it is otherworldly and powerful for it: telling the story of Arthur, the once and future king, the boy who pulled the sword from the stone, who rode with the knights of the round table. No grit, no cleverness, no post-modernity - just pure myth and wonder.

Worzel Gummidge has dancing scarecrows at midnight doing magic in the corn. Flocks of crows clustering in the hedgerows. It has the Green Man, quite unexpected, but some of my favourite imagery of the man I've ever encountered - drawn straight into my personal mythology.

(Again, harking back to the 1970s tradition of Robin of Sherwood, where the pagan implications of the greenwood company protecting the folk from the nobility was backed by the literal appearance of Herne, the god of the green. Here, Gummidge goes all in with its pagan sensibilities, by depicting the Green Man of the ways as present and part of Worzel's otherworld)

Underpinning it all is this incredible folk soundtrack by the Unthanks (whose Magpie you should also listen to, and learn). It's very soothing, I find. Just as the show is soothing. I cannot recommend either the mini-series or the soundtrack strongly enough.
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 Say what you like about Scott Cunningham - he's a brilliant writer. He's accessible! My copy of Wicca for the Solitary Practicioners has survived several book culls because I never don't need a quick reference for, say, the 7 basic steps in ritual. Or, some quick sabbat correspondences. Or in this case, how to cast a circle.

It's clear, concise, well laid out, and I frequently don't have the spoons to access more complex information or remember where I might have written or stored it. 

Like, I have other books which talk about circles. From various trads - ive a handful of ceremonial works, some 60s original coven books, some modern ones, some dorky stuff like a book on animal spirits or druid Wicca. They've all got a basic sacred space chapter. 

But Cunningham is my go to.

And that's the essence of what a textbook should be. Not just simple, but simply laid out. 

I think the biggest problem with WftSP is a lack of signposting. It really needs a chapter directing you to 201 level material, and supplementary stuff to pad out his work. For example, there's non real discussion of what you do when a circle is up; and none of the poetry and strangeness which existed as long as Wicca has been performed. Cunnigham's goddess is bland, safe, fully mapped, vapid. I don't necessarily think his craft was like that, only that his accessible textbook style lends itself very badly to poetry.

So you'd definitely want to give a new starter Cunnigham, alongside maybe a book by Valiente -which is more vivid about what the craft looks like in practice, and how complex and vital it was even at its genesis (I feel like Cunnigham is in part responsible for the idea thst Wicca is bland. You think Gardener didon't know how to curse?!). And then thirdly, you'd want to give them something like a book of fairy stories, or the Hobbit, or Paradise Lost - something beautiful, something with poetry and depth, something that feels rather like what magic can be. 

I feel like far from empowering my craft as a new starter, Cunningham held me back. I use him a lot more now I've got the "why" of the faith fully in place, and consult him for the "how"

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The Witch (2015)
"What went we out into this wilderness to find?"

Read Review )
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Here's a starter collection of Folk Horror resources. I hope to keep reading and reviewing them as a form of devotional work, and using this list as a guide to where to go next.

Paganism suffers from a lack of art. That is, Christianity has had the very best and most beautiful and well funded art for hundreds of years, and deliberately-made-Pagan art can rarely complete. They have Michaelangelo! I feel positive about actively rummaging through the rest of the culture for art made by non-Pagans to fill the gaps of hymns and poetry and art.


Books-With-Associated-Blog

Films

Brilliant starter list at:
Extra resourcesBlogs
RadioArticles
Books and music - TBA

Essentially, the best folk horror music doesn't know it's folk horror music. Right? You can't accidentally disturb the ancient Pagan echoes of the land on purpose. There are bands which use clips from Blood On Satan's Claw and cherrypick the creepiest folksongs and market themselves in this zone, but they fall short of what I want from them. For example, I think Let England Shake by PJ Harvey is extremely landweirdy, in a way that anything The Hare and the Moon do is not, no matter how many times I listen with optimism.
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Lack-of-internet-access has become increasingly central to my understanding of the Landweird - which for those just joining us, is the central concept in the tradition I'm developing.

The Landweird is not-knowing-ness. It was originally connected to the idea that England had forgotten its gods, and that the very act of forgetting left an uncertainty, a liminal space, an almost Lovecraftian sense of things which were out there, nameless in the fields and the furrows and the fens.

Soon, Fencraft developed a strong link with folk horror. Folk horror often depicts a rational hero travelling from an urban environment, to a rural and isolated one which is wreathed in the Landweird. Certainty and rationality is left behind, and the hero acknowledges the awesome power and horror, ancient and limitless. The best source for learning about folk horror is the blog & book We Can't Go Back, which writes personal reflective essays on the canon which capture some of the creepy mood.

From there, it passed on to The Haunted Generation. This lovely term refers to a British tradition of 70s children's weird media, originated by Bob Fischer in a Fortean Times article. If you can find it, this article is essential reading -  or check out Scarred For Life, a book all about this teatime nightmare-fodder television. Core folk horror was also 70s, and a lot of the eerieness of the Haunted Generation media came from its odd use of English pastoral - We Can't Go Back has a special section for children's folk horror, including Bagpuss of all things. Crucial to this is the phenomenon of lost TV - early broadcasters reused, burnt, or lost many of their programs, not imagining video and DVD or the ability for consumers to re-view a thing, and it is associated with Britishness again as the BBC notably lost much of the early Doctor Who. This occasionally happens of film - The Wicker Man was buried under the M25 and rediscovered by a miracle. We almost lost it. Would folk horror exist and be recognised without The Wicker Man?

But for me, this pulls in a lot of other media that isn't folk horror, but fantasy which sits in an uncomfortable "aimed at children but really very scary" place - Legend (1985), The Neverending Story (1984), Dark Crystal (1982), literally every adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Or things which I am uncertain who they were aimed at, like Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Company of Wolves (1984).

(And note that while I do pull god-concepts and words and imagery from all these sources, they are primarily part of the tradition to explain  what the Landweird is and feels like.)

Although I'm content and keen to share, a personal tradition will always be driven by what one personally finds awe of the divine in, what one wishes to revere and make sacred. The final veer is into hauntology, the interest in nostalgia as a kind of unsettling, half-remembered presence in the cultural detritus. Paganism can often be quite LARPy, a make-believe version of an imagined past; for me, this extends to media from the 70s and 80s. The Landweird isn't merely old, but forgotten. Vapourwave is the hauntological sense of the 90s. The Caretaker the hauntological experience of dementia and the haunted 30s ballroom. They too form part of the corpus - because I love them, because they speak to me, because the Landweird is England's strange dreaming, and we will never fully remember.

Anyway - to get back to the internet. The internet never forgets. The internet makes everything accessible. The Haunted Generation were haunted because they did not have home videos or cheap photography - their childhood is wholly memory, and memory fails and gets mixed up with dreams.You could forget its name and be unable to find it. You could remember something terrifying, and now you rewatch it on youtube, learn you'd remembered it all wrong. It was the last era where you could miss a show, and know you would never see it again. My dad missed a William Hartnell episode of Doctor Who which was later burnt; he cannot go back. He saw others, and his memory is all that exists of them, his memory and the memory of every child who saw them - a strange gestalt, the memories of the land. Things existing in memory, things being lost.

The early internet was Landweirdy, because you could look - I remember using it to try and track down a Celine Dion video which had marked me, the magic of finding a sparse website devoted to Look and Read, my own scarred-for-life experience, with a couple of RealPlayer clips that took an hour to download. Now you can find it all on Youtube. Tomb of the Cybermen was landweirdy when it was lost, but not when it was found. My grandparent's wedding photo is landweirdy. My 30GB memory-card is not.

Our god of the gaps needs the gaps to exist in.
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Here's a brilliant article about Thai religion/mythology and cave spirits from the Atlantic:

Thailand's Caves are Dangerously Alluring

We've been very anxiously watching the rescue of the football team - we're spending a lot of time in the hotel bar, which has a news channel unfortunately, and I am *terrified* of drowning so I have some Very Strong Feelings About Diving In Caves.

Not wishing to insert my spiritual feelings where they're inappropriate, and yet the year's been so bad and my month's been so bad and sump diving so dangerous, it's hard to see the rescue as anything other than miraculous. (How do we square terms like "miracle" and ideas like "prayer" with also giving the credit and praise to the human skills & professionalism which made the rescue work? Can you even use a word like "miracle" without inherently implying the work of a higher power, and devaluing what the aid team did...?)

Full article cross-posted for posterity under the cut )
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I'm sketching out a new tradition, and creating a quasi "holy book" for it made up of books, films, music and so on, things which capture the mood and essence. So I'm watching/reading some potential additions, and up now is the 1969 adaptation of The Owl Service

It seems like a likely prospect: rural horror based on a children's book from the early 70s combines several factors which come up again and again on the list. Plus, Owl Service was complained about by parents on the basis it was too frightening for children.

And errrr holy smokes, the mood of the piece is midway between "porn" and "video nasty" - just like what I imagine the Exorcist or Last House on the Left to feel like.


Read more... )
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When I studied film, the best course I ever attended was on American outsider art cinema. Not films with stories you might see in the cinema: weird art-installations made by people who owned a camera, like Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Sadie Benning. I saw all sorts that term - like a birth in close up, porn, and autopsies (I think the lecturers were just trying to encourage us to do the reading ahead of the class...)

A priestess of Isis raises her hands in a desert landscape

Kenneth Anger worked in the 60s, and more-or-less invented the modern music video. He combined homoerotic imagery with bubbly pop and automobile fetishism, as well as occasional first-year-art-student stuff like "what if Jesus was actually a biker and also a Nazi". When film academics/critics write about Kenneth Anger, they describe him as "using occult imagery" - which is maddening, because Kenneth Anger was *literally a magician*, and Lucifer Rising is devotional cinema: a ritual, disguised as film.

A young woman weeps into a handkerchief

Some things cannot be explained: they must be felt. That's true of most magic, isn't it? What do I like about Lucifer Rising? I feel like the act of watching it is, in some way, an act of magic. I make time for it several times a year - often at times which feel solar. When the eclipse happened, I listened to Lucifer Rising. I've used its imagery for meditations and artworks, and used it as a sermon of-sorts to reflect on in ritual.

Anger's imagery is bold and strange. It lodges in your memory: rich colours, striking symbols. Like magic, it communicates straight with the subconscious - there's a plot there of sorts, to me a very moving one, but the most important thing is the experience of watching, how those colours and sounds affect you. The music is especially haunting and strange, a key part of the film's mood (Ensure you watch it with the original soundtrack, by Beausoleil - as there are several versions of the film online with new music. A cool creative act to be sure, but the original music is so much a part of it. I almost dropped £80 on a vinyl copy last month. The fact I even considered that might be sensible is a testiment to this film's eerie soundscape)

This film single-handedly got me into Thelema and ceremonial traditions, which I had previously regarded as rather silly. Still do. But by god, it works - you know? It works.


A man rises from a bed in a red room - he is wearing a strange robe of triangles, and the symbol of Thelema is on his bed.

In Short...

Haunting occult imagery and incredible soundtrack combine in an intense cinematic ritual

You can watch Lucifer Rising on youtube: here (30 mins)

To own:
All Anger's films are collected on a DVD called the Magic Lantern Cycle. This can be fairly challenging to track down cheaply, although if you support Amazon, they currently have a couple for a very reasonable $16.

Viewing notes:
If you've never tried art cinema before, switch off the lights and put the screen on full - and just watch. If you like, put yourself into a meditative and responsive state.

CN: Lucifer Rising contains occasional non-sexual nudity, some blood, and a fair amount of imagery your easily-frightened conservative neighbour would describe as satanic/demonic.



Cautionary note: When I typed that Lucifer Rising is a ritual, and watching it a magical act - I meant it metaphorically. But now I've said it, I think this is very likely to be correct. I think the intent of the film is almost certainly as an enchanted artifact, which is cast as it is unspooled. Magical audiences, concerned about participating in rituals blindly, may wish to take shielding steps or similar, or avoid the work.

That makes it sound more serious than it actually is - my top recommendation is to light candles, cast a circle and immerse yourself in it. I don't think you can appreciate any work of art if you are actively trying to shield yourself from it. And I think that would be a tragic way to approach something which - as I've said - is one of the most beautiful and moving things I've ever seen.

But consent is a thing and all, so if you're not sure, here's a spoilery precis of the film's content, so you can judge how you feel about possibly "participating" in it. I'd urge you very strongly not to read it.

Lucifer Rising spoilers )
 
A red solar disk passes an Egyptian statue

Further Viewing:


Kenneth Anger's films are all on youtube - ensure you choose ones with the original soundtrack. His most famous is Scorpio Rising (CN: Nazi imagery), and it's funny because the homoerotic shots of bikers feature real bikers who didn't realise Anger's queer intent in shooting them.

I like Kustom Kar Kommandos, which pulls a similar trick with boys who love to polish their cars. Fireworks is also a fave, about homoerotic fantasies. His other occult film, Invocation of my Demon Brother, can be seen here (11 mins). People also describe Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as an occult work - I'm looking forward to revisiting it in this light.

Newly interested in art cinema? The most iconic ones to start with are:
  • Meshes of the Afternoon - Maya Deren
  • Un Chien Andalou - Luis Buinel (CN: some surprise intense violence & rotting animals)
  • Window Water Baby Moving - Stan Brakhage (CN: childbirth)
These can all be found on youtube. Meshes of the Afternoon is a total must-see if you haven't experienced it before.

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Haptalaon

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