Hearth & Horn

The traditional four elements have never worked for me, so when I began the work of making my own system, it had to go. Instead, I started by looking at the landscape and trying to derive from that. It's quickly clear that fire is very different from the other three. When I go about, I see all around me - the sky and the land and the water - and their intertwining processes, of the water within the air and within the land, all these swirling grey-greens and grey-blues and grey-grey-greys that are Welsh weather.

But fire is the odd one out: one never comes across it by accident. The Earth is not made of fire. It does not naturally produce fire. Volcanos are not part of my landscape, and the deep-presence of lava isn't within the knowledge of the imagined ancient viewpoint from which I work. Fencraft sees the motion of light as its own system, as THE system of metaphor, that the sun is more alike to the coldness of the moon and stars than it is to human candles. And it considers 'warm things and cold things' - warm water, in the living rotting burning bog, and cold water in the depths of ocean; warm, terrifying exhilirating tempting winds of red stars in autumn, brisk and cobweb-brushing winds on the hillside, miserable wet winds crawling up and down the mountainside. But warmth is not elemental fire.

(Ray Meares - a bushcraft celebrity who can make fire by rubbing two sticks together - describes his own awe at once coming across a woody climber rubbing against a tree in the wind and seeing it smoulder; he wondered if the first makers of fire saw this, and it gave them the idea)

Instead, fire is self-evidently a human element. In cheap sci-fi, one might imagine human characters expressing that the making of fire is what sets humanity apart from the animals. A subcomponent of the world and our expression within it, similar to the harvest, the forging of metal, the making of maps and ships, a thing that is only present when we are. There is potential within the world to make a fire of what we find, but the same things can be carved into a staff, split into fibres for rope and garments, shaped into plastic, used to run a car, a latent potential within earlier things.

When I map ~elements~ in Landcraft, I go by their combinations - that is, the air and the water expressing itself as storm on the ocean or the wetness of the weather or the sculpting of great glacial valleys, or the sun and the land expressing itself as a summer afternoon, the dry wood of a home, tinder-dry underbush, the coming-to-fullness of fruiting, or the meetingpoint of earth-and-air as a farhorizon or the barren breeziness atop a hill. It is here they are most alive, illuminated by what they are not, and in the process of change by what is near them.

So fire appears. It is placed, more or less, between the earth and air - that is, between the raw materials of fuel, and the oxgen and the fastmoving friction that sparks. Fire cannot exist anywhere else: the wood is too wet, the sky is too sodden, nothing has grown to be cut back, the wind is not under your hand and rages as it will. Fire is the meeting point of earth and air, it turns the physical into the insubstantial.

Fire is-and-is-not the Solar. It appears in a similar place on the map, our little bit of sun, because humans like to be warm - but crucially, it is offset. Other occult traditions would group all firey things under one banner, but in Landcraft the Solar has a range of symbolic meanings, and only some of those are shared by fire. The Domain of Solar opposes the immense depression of elemental air-and-water, the thing that chases away the ice, the fear of midwinter, that burns off cloud and quiets storms. Fire could not oppose it. Fire could not exist in such a sphere.

There is an aspect of Fire under the Solar, to do with the hearth-fire and safety in the warm and cooking. There is another under the Domain of Solar-Lunar, with all our insubstantial, clever human things - alongside the forge, and things of metal and glass and invention, the bunsen burner, the bomb. You might say: the fire is necessary for the Solar to persist, that is, for us to have peace and plenty and security, we must have a fire. One precedes the other. One is the gift of the other.

I cannot make fire. Once or twice a week, I go to my bushcraft club. We clear brambles off paths and then retreat for an open barbecue. Firebuilding is competitive: a certain atavistic need to be the one who provides. I have a little portable kettle and always intend to practice ahead of time, but it's been cold; practicing at the meeting does no good, for I will have a queue of men who cannot make fire mansplaining to me, another man who cannot make fire, how it is done - and as often as not, I can see they are wrong but not my own way to doing it correctly.

Fires must be built, tended, planned far in advance. It is incredible to me that people's homes burn down by accident, as starting a fire when you want one is the most impossible task in the world. Fire begets fire: you need fire to make charcoal and charcloth and to dry wood, in order to start other fires in future. I feel the presence of the-first-firemaker; I remember too that there was once a first Tool, for all tools are made by tools that existed before them, the hammer in my hand descendent of another hammer, backwards and backwards and backwards as awesomely as my body descends from something ancient in the dark.

Fire is elusive. Not for nothing is it filed beside trickster spirits. Fire is ephemeral, coming out of the invisible. Does it rest in the wood or in the air before the light and heat can be sensed by us?

Fire is the precursor for humanity to do anything, more or less. I stop wondering how fire matches up with the 'healing' meanings under the Solar-Lunar - because a hot drink and a place by the fire is the first part of recovery. Everything on the map exists in three places, that is at the center then one position either side.

• Under the Solar, hot food and a place by the fire is community inclusion, the very rudiments of being alive, the safety of being seen as fully human by those you depend upon.
• Landwise & starwise, hot food and an open fire is pleasure and relaxation, the delight in food and the great outdoors, the magic of crackling twigs and storytelling and secret kisses.
• Airwise and moonwise, under the Solar-Lunar, we are related to active purpose, ambition and creation; we need the fire to get someone warmed up and with fluids inside them; the fire in the morning to draw us out of bed, the fire that restores. The Solar-Lunar is the hillside and the hiking, but one cannot get far without a warm drink and a campfire.

All of them, not-the-sun but yet grouped around it: the conditions for the one create the other. In Landcraft, every position on the map behaves a little differently - it's not four differenly coloured mana cards or lego blocks, as in the traditional occult - but each flowing from its own nature. There is no fire until we make it. It is like a pot, sword or quarterstaff that way.

I was lucky enough to come across a book of Celtic knot designs for tracing in my Community Shop.

My original Landcraft maps weren't actually based on the Tree of Life, but they were certainly kabbalaesque - probably, the reference point was as much the London Underground map, or any abstract system of places and ways to join them

(I am now wondering, given that the Tube map is one of those iconic moments of graphic design...it IS an awful lot like the Occultist Tree of Life...and given that English history is mostly the history of the same eight families who went to the same schools and aristocratic clubs...it's not inconceivable that Harry Beck in 1931 was familiar with the Golden Dawn or w/e. Surely, also, it's already been done by like Alan Moore or a Constantine issue, to do Tree-of-Life-as-London-Underground/or-vice-versa as a serious magical thesis. I miss home.)

My original notes are crammed with this kind of diagram because I just needed to slam down ideas quickly on the page. But I've been drawing out celtic knotwork and painting them with more-or-less the colour patterns of Landcraft, and as energetic flow diagrams, they work far better. Because the key characteristic of the map is not their stasis but their blending.

Whenever an energy becomes stagnant in Landcraft, it's typically a precursor to the bad - or, it is an intensifying of that energy but in a way that is unbalanced. I do conceive of these as spheres because when you are in a sphere you are not conscious of what is outside of it.

The Solar sphere is an isolated village that doesn't like outsiders and where no one has ever left - parochial, cosy, claustrophobic, tending to mean and authoritarian and set-in-their-ways, preternaturally unchanging. It is always a long warm, dark afternoon there; or it is a city made of sandstone and wheels, all golden metals and black shadows and mortal bureaucracy, the kinds of place where cruelties are dashed off with a pen, the inner-workings of policing or monarchy, humanity's self-made inscapeable traps - like living inside a clock.

The Lunar sphere is an isolated institution of respite and study and its flaw is forgetting there was ever an outside. When we are on the sky-path, this might be seekers of purity as in a spa or an abbey, or seekers of knowledge as in a university or library, and people there are strange because they are trying to be unnatural - to in some way, transcend the human (or, never were). When we are on the wood-path, the image is more fairylike and so we might encounter a hall under a barrow devoted wholly to idleness and pleasure. In any case, the striking characteristic of this place for mortal visitors is the willingness to cut parts of oneself away - that is, forgetting your human family after drinking fairy wine and caring no more for sorrow, or seemingly existing on nothing but water and light and higher vibrations, looking only at books but never at the world; or striving to overcome sin, that is, the human tendency to be human. So this position too is unbalanced.

The Stellar sphere is unspeakable.

When we look at the lore, our heroes are in motion: "there, and back again". So these spheres are good places to visit but not to stay. Indeed, these kinds of places appear as sinister because they divert us from the path - see Percival being tempted at Morgana's castle in Excalibur, Frodo's desire to stay in the Shire or at Rivendell in Fellowship of the Ring, or even the necessariness of the Narnia children's rediscovering the way home and continuing to adventure instead of remaining static as kings and queens. Odysseus on Calypso's island. And when we think about magic, which is to say - change - it should be clear that power will always be between the points, where change is happening, and the work of magic to balance and wield them and walk along the ways.

I have longed for a static diagram for as long as I've been doing this, which must be at least six years now; but one cannot rush the work of creating a comprehensive map of the hidden powers underlying all creation ;) and in any case, the Landweird is in its seeking not its finding. I am enjoying the process, of drawing it with little variations, and finding new things each time

Worries about banishing rites are so dorky and I can feel myself stuck in the same place I've been for about a decade, regardless of how many new frameworks I encounter to explain it - like, what if it was tuning a space? What if it was banishing internally? And regardless of my own limitations as a mage, like - it's maybe arrogant to worry about me doing wholesale destruction to the local energetic ecosystem right out of the gate.