Hearth & Horn

wrt the weather right now, I keep toying with a system - I have no idea where it fits in with anything or how it should be used - of a white wind, a red wind and a blue wind.

The white wind is when things become clearer, a blowing-away-the-cobwebs of a walk ( ☉☽︎ and/or  ☽︎). It brings clarity, freshness, a spring-clean-for-the-soul, a blank sheet of paper, a bath in the air; it may be bracing, but always helps you see your way more clearly by cutting back what is clutter.

The blue wind brings despair, brings weight of water. ( ☽︎🞱) - like a fog sitting on your soul, like being doused in misery, like the air you breathe is wet and the earth beneath you is sodden and your skin is soaked with sorrow, and the clouds blot out the sun and the darkness is unending. Helps if you're British, to know the blue wind I think; a properly Welsh wetness.

But the red wind wakes you up inside with laughter ( ☉🞱) and its this red wind I've been feeling for a few days now, reminding me what autumn is. Red winds sweep you up with them. Red winds are generally dry (but not always), and they can be felt more inside than out - a great hurrying and harrying to getup and go dancing; a playful wind which destroys things in its joy and never notices, a hysterical wind which says now, now, now; the sort of wind that gets you into trouble. Where I come from, when the wind ruffles the cornfield, the rhyme goes:

Herodias's
daughter
is shaking out
her skirts

as if somebody was dancing and swirling there and making the land dance with her, overpowering the senses until you go and dance alongside - no matter where it leads.

I have missed red winds. Red winds can be accompanied by red stars. I felt the red wind once at night as slender clouds streaked across a strangely hot darkness; it felt a little like getting swept up into the final track of Seance at Hobs Lane, an insistent pulsating of everything - not like a wind at all, and sometimes the red wind is sudden stillness but a thrumming inside. I have missed red winds

I have no idea how such a system would be "put-to-use" in a magical context, but that says more about me than it; I like to exist alongside the spirits more than I've ever felt drawn to "do" anything with them

I am ready to launch the first stage of the Landcraft correspondence system, which organises all things in terms of the Solar, the Lunar and the Stellar.

The purpose of the Landcraft correspondence system is to be an alternative to the four classical elements, the gender binary, and the Tree of Life, an underlying system of magic for people who do not wish to use the standard correspondence systems for various reasons;  a system of correspondences which, additionally, feels earthy and pagan, organic and authentic to the land and the folklore beneath our feet. It is an open system: you may combine it with any other pagan tradition, not only Fencraft; as well as re-mixing and hacking it for your own purposes.

Now available:

• An overview chart of the correspondence system, summarising its binaries and contrasts
• The Wanderer's Map, the way that the three celestials* come together to make a map of our world, our cosmology, our folklore and the otherworlds
• A summary of what each of the three represents: the Solar, the Lunar, and the Stellar.

I hate the term "celestial", hate it hate it hate it, and very much welcome other suggestions.

These parts of the system have been fixed and certain for around two years now. The next step for Landcrafting is to release the fuller correspondence charts (colours and so forth), pin down how the dual-celestials work (concepts like the Solar-Lunar, the inbetween elements), and how they interact with physical elements (like Fire, Land, Water, and so forth). And then finally - the big bit that's still missing - how you actually *use* them in ritual and magic, which is still eluding me.

I've also written a first masterpost of Rural Psychogeography, works exploring the hidden mysteries of the land. I am now obsessed with Chanctonbury Rings.

Mood? A deep, relaxed, mellow breathing-out of satisfaction, completeness and success.

Part of the problem with trying to develop a "Golden Dawn but for Pagans" is that they are...conceptually incompatible.

Things like: I like the Tree of Life. I like the idea that all things can be mapped onto a clear diagram, a representation of the physical and energetic world there on paper which can be traversed from points to highways. And that as an initiate, I can travel step by step up the tree, learning and empowering myself once concept at a time.

There have been earlier attempts to put Paganism onto the Tree of Life; I recently read a very good one from Ross Nichols of OBOD which sort of redesigned it. And yet, almost by definition...the energies of the land and the Landweird and the ancestors and the spirits in the earth and storm are not capable of being mapped. That's why we love them.

And while my Solar/Lunar/Stellar distinction is working for me, it keeps resisting all attempts to turn it into a Tree of initiatory stages.

Similarly, Ceremonial stuff is underpinned by a certainty - the pure white light - which you reach up to. This is vaguely but persistently identified with the Abrahamic God, and again, seems very difficult to replace with anything else. Who else but He represents goodness, purity, strength, holiness, otherworldliness, and has given His followers a promise? Who is both in some ways a person but in others an energy field? No Pagan concept can be slotted into that conceptual space. We do have thigns that cleanse, or that are good, or that are interested in our welfare. We don't, however, have that white light of godhead.

You can try and put, like, Odin up there - because he's the top - or Spirit, or all sorts of Pagan concepts. It will have an effect, but it won't have *the* effect. Because again, an important part of the Pagan is a lack of certainty.

A lack of certainty manifests in different paths in different ways. It could be Powers who are characteruistically fickle, unreliable or capricious. It could be the force of Fate or Wyrd, disrupting man's affairs. It could be the sense in any religion that sometimes magic and prayer does not work, because it is subject to a higher will or doom. Many of our traditions are hazy about the afterlife, and what you need to do to get there; or have a relavitist approach to morality, so there is no energy which represents both the Lord and all that is good. We are of the land; and the land is unpredictable, made of tides. It rises and falls. It is not eternal.

I think the idea of making "ceremonial paganism" is like trying to serve stake with a chainsaw, or knit with spaghetti - two things which fundamentally can't come together without ruining the essential qualities of each. You can knit with spaghetti, of course - but it'll make for a bad jumper and a bad meal, and you'd best just do one or the other.

At the same time, the challenge is still quite satisfying for me. Because only in attempting to do so I come to understandings like this.

One good thing about a period of time away from the web, is it does force you to develop ideas more slowly: they can't be immediately shared, and this allows them to mature and be tested.

I think I am close now to having a workable trad outline. The goal is a universal generic framework for tradcraft - which includes a bit of nature work, a bit of techy ceremonial stuff, a bit of liminal stuff, and a lot of pop culture.

The frameworks that exist have a couple of problems:

1. They're heavily Judeo-Christian in origin, and don't feel "Pagan"

2. They're very specific at doing a single thing: Gardinarian Wicca, or Celtic Reconstructionism.

3. They're secret. People hint, but there's nothing one can use out of the box.

So I'm hoping to share what I've been working on as a bridging system:

1. It has a theoretical/technical background, replacing the Kaballah, the 4 Elements, and other ceremonial ideas which persist into Paganism. One can still do noodly ceremonial magic, but it isn't underpinned by alien ideas.

2. It's not specific, and umbrellas a lot of other traditions. One can do Wiccan gods or ancient pantheons or pop culture under our brolly, without having to do Wicca, reconstructionist polytheism, or eclectic magic. If you're too eclectic to fit an existing group, but still want the lore, history and detail of a real tradition, this is for you.

3. It's not secret, but it is a Mystery tradition. Available notes will walk a line between sharing the basics, but leaving room for individuals to fill in the gaps and do the experiential stuff of which Mystery is made.

4. It comes with an optional deity set one can use out of the box, but a lot of room to fine-tune and develop over time, or slot in your own names.

5. It's explicitly gender-blind - one can use or ignore gender as preferred - and anti-authority - I encourage people to develop their own blends and flavours. I will, of course, continue to develop it; but you can return to the trunk or define your own branch at will.

6. Fairies, witches, land spirits, old gods, things which were possibly once gods, trees, seas, storms, dead things in barrows, Tolkien, Syd Barrett, Boudicca, Jim Henson and Little Red Riding Hood. Is the kind of thing we do, and the kind of experience the system is designed to facilitate. However, it's very flexible.

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I'm currently sorting the core, open content from the idiosyncratic/personal/secret stuff. I'm also wrestling with the urge not to put it online, but to send it to the interested by post.

Is this weird, perverse, deliberately difficult and obstructive; grasping at a thing which could be made truly open online; and a failure against which the system will be no good to anyone, remaining too small and private to gain traction, and inaccessible to those who don't wish to share their address? I don't know. But I *really* like the idea of sending written correspondence to people, and them receiving something strange in the mail; and especially considering the importance of not-being-online to the Landweird. I really like the idea of writing up note sets one at a time, to be mailed out to interested parties; and rumours of a hidden tradition circulating, unseen but perceived. I like the idea of conversations happening that I am less aware of, instead of it all going through my blog and maintaining a strong level of authorial control. Letters are copied and copied and copied into personal grimoires, and quickly assume a strong local flavour.

The Gerald Gardener factor: far more fun to feel like you've joined an ancient, secret coven, than to read all available documentation for a tradition in a day then say - is that all there is? I think this is where Scott Cunningham went wrong as a writer, and where I went wrong with Wicca generally. I encountered it as a complete, rather boring, middle-of-the-road description, rather than a living tradition. No doubt, actual Wiccans do the fun stuff too - but you wouldn't know it to read Cunningham. So there's a chance that, Mysteries-by-mail prevent a putative tradition from being over & old hat before it's had the chance to draw breath.

I don't know.