Thought for the Day
10 March 2023 11:35I 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