Hearth & Horn

Some threads on meditation and ritual cleanliness before I forget:

Phil Hine - meditation / Phil Hine - cleanliness (extremely appreciated!) / Selkigirl - meditation / and also, a reminder to me to track down Véronique Altglas’ /From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage' (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Angela Carter's Lovecraft and Landscape

I've been very offline in another period of 'more thinking than speaking', and one thing I've got done is the first iteration of the Commonplace Book

The Commonplace Book is a Fen-specific practice - it refers to a book where you compile knowledge from other sources:

Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler's responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes. Entries are most often organized under subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective

and, in truth, this has been a feature of Book-of-Shadows and Grimoires and the like, implicitly, for a long time. I make it a very explicit part of what I do, and keep my Commonplace separate from other magical notebooks. The Landweird is, among other things, imagined as a kind of palimpsest memory hidden in old lore, as in the memory of the sleepers under the hill, as in the clutter of a junkshop, as in a lost manuscript reused for new words, untranslateable runes or words never written. And so, far more than in other Paganisms - where making notes from other sources is useful - in Fencraft, the Commonplace Book takes on a kind of sacred status in its own right. It is a kind of living Landweird, and its made from your seeking.

And on a practical level, it solves some problems. The first is the struggle of being your own priest and Entire Religious Structure; the second, the (comparative!) lack of Pagan art and writing; and the third, disability. Compiling or reading the Commonplace Book is a low-energy ritual routine, for days when sitting by the window and reading the same paragraph over and over is your limit; I pilfer through mine for ritual in a conscious way (say, a prayer or a summoning chant), but I spend enough time with mine that its words will reoccur unbidden when I am walking or in need of guidance.

It's a DIY Bible, but that is no bad thing: I accept the criticism of a local witch that far too many pagans do worship instead of magic nowadays, and yet copying Christianity has been a feature of my magical life for many years because I am tired. To clear my room for ritual and make time is the work of a week or two, and that's before I contemplate the effort of a bath. I like to sit with a book and call it practice - and for it not to be an afterthought, but to be deeply understood, and for it not to be a lesser shadow but the whole thing. It's bardic - i have living words inside me. It's Landweird, held between my hands. And there's a magic to compiling: these are ordinary pop songs and books you can find in any second hand store, they are only made-holy because they have been brought into combination with one another - the act of ritual which is a bringing together, a sacred union, an act of revealing. I have often tinkered with a circle-opening Fenrite which uses the metaphor of an archeologist's brush and water, gently washing away the dirt. A re-recogntion, or a pulling out of latent threads - eerie and unintended, but there in new nets.

The search for the Landweird is different for everybody, and so, everybody's Commonplace Book will wind up different. Although I consider these things sacred secrets, I have a personal committment to doing everything in public as much as possible, in tribute to the elders I learned my art from (i.e. people with geocities sites in the 1990s before the word 'blog' was spaketh). I don't feel these things are more sacred for being hidden - in this case, their magic is in the act of rediscovery.

For some maddening reason, the homepage won't update my link to the new section. But you, dear reader, can have a peep. My CSS has improved and so, it should be mobile-friendly, though I've yet to test it to make sure. I may be an indifferent sorcerer, but by the time this is done my coding will be without parallel. I am, as ever, exhausted by the effort of undone work. But this, at least, is complete for the year.

I've also started a new blog - the Astercote Herald.

basically, because I've been reflecting on the immense quantity of primary/secondary reading I've been doing for pagan stuff, and thinking that possibly it's wrong for a pagan audience, or at least, what a pagan audience wants is more of the directly useful stuff (we're a practical bunch) and less philosophical/theology/cultural deep dives. idk. So I'm now thinking, maybe film people or hauntology people or even looking back at getting into academia myself, is the way forward with it.

& when I do that, I don't know if I want my pagan identity attached to it. Anyway, idk yet, but there's a link to the blog if you always looked forward to my nice popculture reviews - it'll continue to inform my pagan writing, but there will be links out, but none in, if that makes sense.

• More than 49,000 paths lost from maps in England and Wales

• Who own's England's woods?

• Discovery of anglo-saxon warlord overlooking the Thames

• Secret Britain