Hearth & Horn

I'm very troubled by things I've read about British folklore.

I've just finished reading Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton - a history of modern pagan witchcraft. Hutton is a huge intellectual crush of mine: a real historian who investigates magic, druids and the occult. Reading his books have made me admire history as a discipline, and learn more about how historians are really like journalists in a way, looking the truth and considering all the angles. I always learn new things from his books and - even when they puncture much-loved Pagan fakelore, it doesn't shake my faith and im often appreciative to learn the origins of ideas I use every day. Something doesn't have to be real to be true.

So I recommend all Hutton's books, and if you're pagan, a Wiccan or witch, Triumph of the Moon is a must read.

In Fencraft, we don't seek a literal religious truth. Instead, we co-opt people writing or cresting works which seem go be responding to the land into a lineage of quasi-prophets hearing part truths about rhe Landweird. Tolkien, Gerald Gardener, Syd Barrett and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water stand side by side as whispered fragments of it. This is a convenient handwave which welcomes in a broad church of belief, permits pop cultural paganism, and encourages playfulness.

So normally, something like Triumph wouldn't bother me: I don't need Murray to be literally correct, bevause I can understand the cool bits of her books as the Land dreaming of itself, a partial truth, a possible mythos.

But Hutton writes about the extent to which Victorian folklorists were...awful. shamefully awful to the "simple" country folk who they collected folklore from. They had a theory that pagan beliefs and rituals survived in rural areas, hidden by folk traditions which they had forgotten the significance of (but which an outsider to the community who was a wealthy academic understood perfectly). They then went out to collect folklore, recording only what matched their hypothesis, and in some cases over-riding local folk about how their own local rituals ought to be performed. He gives many examples, and it feels ugly. It's the exact same racist attitude early explorers applied to "savage" tribes, applied to like, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire dales and the entirety of Scotland.

This hits me right in the feels. Fencraft is very, very inspired by folk horror: the archetypal genre of "the country folk know something you don't know about ancient rituals at the stones". And it eagerly draws in stuff like Robin Hood and the May Queen and the Green Man. In other words, this shitty Victorian hypothesis underpins how *i* feel about rural traditions in the country side. It's also *my* fantasy of the land. It's what I want to find there. When we talk about seeking the Landweird it is, in part, this "pagan survivals" which we seek to find.

In other words, I can't feel the proper abhorrence at these Victorian chaps without also feeling abhorrence towards something I cherish and find joy in. Awkward!

& it's not like, say, finding out that Gardener was an inveterate liar, because what he created still has meaning and reality for people. Or finding our the Green Man was invented in 1927, but knowing he still walks the land regardless of when he was named.

It's having someone identify and (rightly) challenge that the whole underlying framework of what you're doing is a problem. I'm not really sure what to do about it, but I do feel...I do feel alienated from what I've been doing and like I kinda don't want to continue with it in the current form. Not sure how to move forward at all.

This series is about the three regular practices of Fencraft; but it's also about tradition-building.

I think Cassini is right to spot that there's very little content showing you how to find or hack your own religious tradition. This is a shame - because nothing is quite as intense or otherworldly than encountering the sublime, or discovering the divine for yourself, or expressing it through imagery which sets your mind on fire. The Three Practices are the three basic techniques I used, which lead me to developing my own religious system; so that's why I've named them the official three practices within the tradition, the roads to follow to get to the same kind of place. But I feel confident that anyone following them for a period of time will benefit: they deconstruct and explain some of the practices which are often assumed within Pagan/Occult stuff.

At their core, the Three Practices are a way to make space in your life in which you can encounter the Landweird. For non-Fencrafters - they're quite simply a way to make space. It's the long road, filling your mind with ideas and images, your life with experiences, and just giving it time to percolate.

(There's also the secular Practices: they are a reminder to spend more time doing what you love. Your humble author is profoundly depressed; and so, these daily practices are built around the things that keep me healthy, happy and well. There's an important lesson here for system-builders: your religion should call you to do more of the things which nourish you. If you love blues rock, then put it in your rituals. If you make clothes, then design robes and masks for it. And so forth. Make sacred.)

Finally: There's nothing new here. There are an awful lot of "Seeker First Steps" techniques and pathways; and this one is mine. These are the three I think are most important. They are achievable and accessible - nothing is worse than "two months of waking at dawn, three meditations a day, and cold showers" as an initial step no one will ever actually pass. And I encourage you to adopt and deconstruct them - you could use them within whatever tradition you're currently following, or to consider Fencraft, or as first steps towards developing your own thing.

What is It?
Geography is the study of the land, psychology the study of the mind. Psychogeography explores our experience of the land: what we can see, wreathed about with its history, its politics, the experiences it brings to mind. Our life is a unique map across the territory - when one passes down a street and remembers being kissed there, this is a psychogeography.

Psychogeography is often political: it is impossible to exist in a space without people policing how you are supposed to behave there, who owned it, who has been displaced from it, what laws enclose it, and so forth. Although it draws from history, it is rarely a nostalgic genre: the social changes impacting the land right now, the way spaces are contested, are essential to it. For example, the Situationists who originated the term saw it as a way of resisting capitalism: idling around the city without aim was a challenge to the demand to be productive; modern writers often discuss colonialism or gentrification.

• The Conversation: Psychogeography: A Way to Delve into the Soul of the City
• Wikipedia: The Flaneur
• Wikipedia: Psychogeography
• Wikipedia: Derive
• The Double Negative: An Introduction to Psychogeography
• Tate: Psychogeography
• Mapping Weird Stuff: Psychogeography
• Aeon: Psychogeography: where Writers Should Now Fear To Tread <- I find this one's ambivalence very relatable

Why is it important to Fencraft?

Inexplicably, I did not rediscover the term psychogeography until like...three years into my practice. This is bizzare, because no other genre better evokes the Landweird. Everything that has happened has somehow imprinted upon a place: not literally, as in a Roman wall, but emotionally or psychologically. We can traverse the landscape in a way unbound by maps - for example, visiting all the London graveyards, or travelling on the first and final Tube of the day. Place as memory, place as emotional state.

Psychogeography informs our Walking practice: the call to ramble without aim. It describes spaces as palimpsests, layers laid over one another, echoing through time and indelibly marked upon the land and upon the people who live there. It depicts the land as an intensity of meaning, dense prose and memory as if the whole city was vibrating under the weight of it.

For Pagans generally, the politics of psychogeography give us ideas for activism around the environment, resisting gentrification, capitalism, and so forth.

What should I Read?

Psychogeography is a pretentious-ass genre. Nothing that's important about the land can be spoken, only felt. I have taken very strongly against Iain Sinclair, the iconic psychogeographical writer of London: I do not recognise the city he walks in, and am put off by the density of his prose. It can also become too self-aware - a book in which one reflects simultaneously on Thatcher, the Corn Laws, and the revelations of John Crow sparked by seeing a traffic light, like edgy travel writing. There are popular themes they all return to - like Hawksmoor churches, or the lost rivers - which seem to me to block off authentic responses to the environment. Instead, we're performing other people's routes and ways of seeing.

Seek works evoking parts of the past which hold interest for you, and landscapes near where you are. More important is to be inspired by the concept of the derive, of the idea of travelling through spaces in unusual ways or ways they were not designed to be explored.

• As a practice: Getting Started with Psychogeography
• More ideas: Mookychic
• There's an app for this: Derive
• Book Blog: The Psychogeographic Review
• Films: Where to begin with British psychogeographic film

Any specific recommendations?

This section is a WIP list of things in this genre I have enjoyed - it will be updated as and when I find things worth sharing.

• Diamond Geezer - My favourite London writer; and a genius for finding challenges to get him to new parts of the city
• Let England Shake - PJ Harvey
• Arcadia (2018)