Hearth & Horn

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

How - if the Commonplace book serves as a sacred site, then a bookcase (or library) must be also. I have a little Fenbookcase right next to my bed - it is small, and has mostly books with some DVDs and CDs, and not all my witchcraft works either but a curated set. So there are a couple on mountain-climbing, an anthology of British saint stories, old English riddles, a re-released 70s library album of music and spooky poetry about the seasons, and so forth. It hadn't occurred to me that, in some sense, this WAS my altar.

I have an altar in the corner of my room and it is infinitely a clutter pile - at present it hosts jewellery, medicine, old phones, a doll I'm waiting for inspiration to DIY, candles I daren't light because when they burn down I can't replace them, notebooks, and a camera for snapping the mountains and sky whenever the colour is just right. I dream of getting it tidy; it will never happen.

How much better to think of the bookcase already made and filled with things as altar. What is an altar? A place where god dwells. In some paganisms, it's a kind of work table where you put down objects you're using during a process; or a focal point, a kind of decorative feature to reflect on on; or a place to murder goats. It seems right for me that the bookcase itself is the place of power, the dwelling-place of secrets.

On my walk, i was reminded of a book. it discussed the 'invention' of landscape. Rather like the invention of the clock preceding the invention of time, so the invention of Landscape Painting as a genre preceded our cultural concept of A Landscape

I get the persistent feedback in what I do that Disconnection is the one that make people sideye-to-refusal - which is fine, in the sense that I'm just sharing what works for me, and it is for you to try them and reject them if they're not viable; but less fine in the sense of, I think a lot of people reject it out of hand (which is also fine!) before considering what its purpose is.

My husband once went to a Christening and came back, joking 'who is this god that claims dominion over all things and yet prefers to be worshipped indoors?'. I think about that a lot. We are in nature based religions, but often aren't sure what to 'do' with nature - we've been primed by Landscape Painting to think of Landscapes as things you either look at or describe, hence the standard Pagan rite which is going to a forest and having someone say 'i call the spirit of the east wind, i am struggling to off-the-cuff this even though i thought it would convey authenticity, the east wind of Air that is the spirit of New Life and Knowledge, uhh'. And this process is only getting worse with television, photography, the internet, and the retreat of nature away from modern lives so that it's a thing we have to Go To See, rather than dwell within.

How could we retrain ourselves to experience the land differently? I am reminded of many moments in my Reading in which people go inside a picture or inside the television (Sapphire and Steel: Assignment 2; Escape into Night; Look and Read: Through the Dragon's Eye; many examples in toddler television, and others I've forgotten.) it's a creepy trope. That could be our metaphor for re-experiencing the land - knowing we look at it as if it were flat, a 'view', a picture postcard of beauty - but then having the magic to step inside

Some of the lessons of Disconnection, then, are about relating to the place we are differently. I use so much wood nowadays - I've built towel-rails and a window-box to dry clothes and some little fairy-scale furniture just from twigs and sticks in the garden - to help with the survival challenge of a winter without heating. I experience differently. The weather is not a thing I look at, they are things I am inside, because drying clothes and planning safe dog walks and pre-planning to prevent clothes getting wet takes up so much of my time. Similarly, because I'm reducing my consumption of Bought Objects so much and trying to DIY more from the things naturally around me, I am very awake and inside the landscape on my walks - I'm cultivating a new way of looking, with one eye out for the correctly shaped branch to complete tasks.

I don't think these are the only ways to go inside landscape paintings. I'm reminded of Rewild Yourself, which I hated and slammed because it was so non-tactile. I think there are plenty of non-survivalist ways to do this: building a temporary shelter in the woods from branches, say, or finding somewhere safe to wild swim, or learning to build a fire, are playful leisure activities which nevertheless force you to engage with the Thingness of nature, rather than its Lookingatness. Even gardening - or the wild gardening I do, i spend much of my year taking on invasive species - is an interactivity.

One has to be a little careful not to bring the logic of capitalism into the wild - looking at it only as things which are Useful, or bringing destruction into these places by disturbing them or taking too much. But all the pagan aesthetics we crave surround people who had to know their land intimately: shepherds, hunters, farmers, vikings in sailing ships - and somewhat like how, in postmodernism, we learn that our way of conceptualising gender - say - is culturally specific and we can learn to see it differently, so i think experimentation with different ways of looking at landscape is essential.

What ought one do, then, to resist experiencing the outdoors as 'a pretty landscape painting'?