![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
something vague in my head about there being four children
( Read more... )
Website update
26 January 2021 21:07Big website update this week, with two Powers now uploaded.
I am extremely bored about writing about bits of religion I've already done, rather than exploring new areas.
A bit of background
Landcraft is a new magical system, designed to channel the sorts of images and tensions which appear in folklore, fantasy and fairy stories. There are six energy trends on the Travellers map, and you can understand pre-existing divinities through the Map by spotting different "aspects" of them in different "places" on the map.
The British Traditional Animism pantheon is personifications of those energy trends, revealing their element, values, stories, magics and powers through a pattern of somewhat-popcultural iconography that has repeatedly appeared in our lore.
One can make of this whatever one likes; treating them as Actual Gods, or personified images, or as clues for gods from your own pantheons to revere in their place while Landcrafting.
In any case, these things took hours, so I commend them to you for whatever value you might find in them or use you might make of them
The Changeling (tag)
The Landmother (tag)
I am extremely bored about writing about bits of religion I've already done, rather than exploring new areas.
A bit of background
Landcraft is a new magical system, designed to channel the sorts of images and tensions which appear in folklore, fantasy and fairy stories. There are six energy trends on the Travellers map, and you can understand pre-existing divinities through the Map by spotting different "aspects" of them in different "places" on the map.
The British Traditional Animism pantheon is personifications of those energy trends, revealing their element, values, stories, magics and powers through a pattern of somewhat-popcultural iconography that has repeatedly appeared in our lore.
One can make of this whatever one likes; treating them as Actual Gods, or personified images, or as clues for gods from your own pantheons to revere in their place while Landcrafting.
In any case, these things took hours, so I commend them to you for whatever value you might find in them or use you might make of them
The Changeling (tag)
- Introduction to the Changeling
- The Changeling Reading List
- Changeling Correspondences
- The Changeling Cycle
- Changeling Commonplace Book
The Landmother (tag)
- Introduction to the Landmother
- The Landmother Rules Over...
- Landmother Correspondences
- The Landmother Cycle
(no subject)
24 June 2020 11:41This is something I started writing on last week for the last run of how-to-build-a-path, but I've been meditating on it since and...I think there is something very important about not letting the gods "fix" for you, like, not letting them reduce to a severe-looking woman in a robe with an owl and a helmet, but keeping them in "motion" somehow in your mind. Not letting them become a correspondence list, or a fixed set of jobs, but keeping your visual imagination and emotions engaged. Fencraft focuses a lot on mystery/unknown, I think because that's exactly what the Easy Wicca For Everyone books of my childhood lacked: a lot of recipes, but without the luxury of taste and smell. & so it's trying to keep approaching the Powers & the divine in a way which continually re-centers their God-Ness, their Magical-Ness, their Awe-Someness, that childlike sense of wonder, or a mortal sense of terror, or *something* which makes the experience bigger than just talking to an imaginary friend who looks and feels very much like me. So cultivating a sort of slipperiness, a mutability, and any time I feel the imagery I'm using feel too rigid and like it can be catalogued (a difficulty at a time when I am actively cataloguing gods), finding a way to let it move again. I think that's part of the value of the Commonplace Book: when you're compiling *other people's* words, it's a way to get you out of your own head when thinking about something divine. You're revering the same presence and experiences, but someone else's words can help you rediscover Them from a different angle.
The horror, the horror
9 April 2018 09:27I'm working on a series of profiles for popcultural figures I work with. I think the genesis for this is -
I'm writing a book about How To Pagan. I don't know if it has any value to others, but I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoy using it to remind me of important precepts or ideas. In the summoning chapter, writing about safe summoning - it occured to me that truly horrifying beings do not exist in real world mythologies.
Me and my growlfriend made a list of things you really did not want in your living room - and the list was Slenderman, Cthulhu & the Lovecraft mythos, the Daedra from the Elder Scrolls games, the Harbingers from the Atmosfear series, the Nothing from The Neverending Story etc etc etc.
Real world mythologies have evil powers, but they tend to be contained. The Norse mythos has Loki (who is chained to a rock) and the Fenris wolf (who will be killed by Víðarr). The Egyptians have Set (defeated by Horus), and Apophis (defeated each night by Ra). Christianity has the devil, but his minons can be banished through the power of Jesus, and ultimately his armies are defeated by St Michael in the the last days.
And so on: there's something about human nature here, needing representations of horror but also needing them to be containable. We invent werewolves, then we invent silver bullet legends. We invent vampires, and then we invent all manner of kryptonites to destroy them, even silly things like they have to untie knots and count poppy seeds. Anything humanity has ever literally believed to be real - we've also believed in a way to stop them.
(There's an incredible article in an old Fortean Times called "Killing Slenderman". The author has studied Slenderman in detail, as a potential internet tulpa/spirit brought into reality by our collective belief, and so this article is about people who have tried to write weaknesses into the Slenderman mythos, as a deliberate act of self defence. In other words - at the moment people started believing Slenderman could be real, they started looking very seriously for ways of containing him. Albeit in a very meta way, as all Slendy related things are).
I think this is the appeal of the pop-cultural powers I'm drawn to. They provide a thing I can't find in non-imagined pantheons: a sense of horror, of cosmic horror, of total insignificance. That's a sensation I want to work with and understand, and it's core to my understanding of the Landweird. I think it's a trauma thing, as a sense of constant and unending hollow terror is a pretty average day for me; how else could I percieve the divine except with awe and terror? Powers who embody the ugly extremes of human experience - not beatific love but obsession, not a personified forest but primal horror - the extremes where I live.
And then generally, a relationship pattern of loving things that might harm me, or that do harm me, and that have a lot of power over me - again, my mortal patterns of being drawn to people who are bad for me, inevitably repeats itself in a draw to gods who are bad for me. But maybe it's a fuller way to indulge the abus-ee's ultimate fantasy of finding abusers who can love them, you know? The old "he's good on the inside and only I can change him", and with a pop-cultural deity you almost certainly can have that experience, you can dance near to the flame and fall over the edge - but then be caught.
I'm writing a book about How To Pagan. I don't know if it has any value to others, but I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoy using it to remind me of important precepts or ideas. In the summoning chapter, writing about safe summoning - it occured to me that truly horrifying beings do not exist in real world mythologies.
Me and my growlfriend made a list of things you really did not want in your living room - and the list was Slenderman, Cthulhu & the Lovecraft mythos, the Daedra from the Elder Scrolls games, the Harbingers from the Atmosfear series, the Nothing from The Neverending Story etc etc etc.
Real world mythologies have evil powers, but they tend to be contained. The Norse mythos has Loki (who is chained to a rock) and the Fenris wolf (who will be killed by Víðarr). The Egyptians have Set (defeated by Horus), and Apophis (defeated each night by Ra). Christianity has the devil, but his minons can be banished through the power of Jesus, and ultimately his armies are defeated by St Michael in the the last days.
And so on: there's something about human nature here, needing representations of horror but also needing them to be containable. We invent werewolves, then we invent silver bullet legends. We invent vampires, and then we invent all manner of kryptonites to destroy them, even silly things like they have to untie knots and count poppy seeds. Anything humanity has ever literally believed to be real - we've also believed in a way to stop them.
(There's an incredible article in an old Fortean Times called "Killing Slenderman". The author has studied Slenderman in detail, as a potential internet tulpa/spirit brought into reality by our collective belief, and so this article is about people who have tried to write weaknesses into the Slenderman mythos, as a deliberate act of self defence. In other words - at the moment people started believing Slenderman could be real, they started looking very seriously for ways of containing him. Albeit in a very meta way, as all Slendy related things are).
I think this is the appeal of the pop-cultural powers I'm drawn to. They provide a thing I can't find in non-imagined pantheons: a sense of horror, of cosmic horror, of total insignificance. That's a sensation I want to work with and understand, and it's core to my understanding of the Landweird. I think it's a trauma thing, as a sense of constant and unending hollow terror is a pretty average day for me; how else could I percieve the divine except with awe and terror? Powers who embody the ugly extremes of human experience - not beatific love but obsession, not a personified forest but primal horror - the extremes where I live.
And then generally, a relationship pattern of loving things that might harm me, or that do harm me, and that have a lot of power over me - again, my mortal patterns of being drawn to people who are bad for me, inevitably repeats itself in a draw to gods who are bad for me. But maybe it's a fuller way to indulge the abus-ee's ultimate fantasy of finding abusers who can love them, you know? The old "he's good on the inside and only I can change him", and with a pop-cultural deity you almost certainly can have that experience, you can dance near to the flame and fall over the edge - but then be caught.
