Disconnection and the Star

Why is Disconnection a Stellar practice? Because it was the only one left after easily assigning Walking to the Sun and Reading to the Moon.

In conditions of digital recall, loss itself is lost

Mark Fisher
  1. The Star is most associated with the Landweird, + thus with memory – in particular, imperfect memory. The web makes it hard to misremember anything. That distorted state, like a childhood without photographs, is a key part of our mood. We have a strong aesthetic link to the 70s Haunted Generation because they were the last who could miss a program on telly and literally never see it again. There were few photos, and no home video. Life blurred. Memory is fallible. The internet’s astonishing archive has killed, unnoticed, a whole sensory experience. But that experience is a key part of what we reverence. When we look at our fragmentary lore, we see and honour its contradictions and strangeness.

  1. The Star is awe and terror, intense emotional states and physical exertion. The internet is powerfully disassociative and sedentry. Stellar work calls us to find the rabbit hole, then fall.

  2. The Star is the wild. We have forgotten our terror of it. Authentic Stellar practices usually carry some risk of death: reject maps, reject GPS, reject Goretex, go out into the woods and go mad there, and then get eaten by bears. The Star is nature as no friend to man; Disconnected practices viscerally remind us of our powerlessness.

  3. Disconnection profoundly changes the way we map & experience the world. Distances change. So does time. The Star governs peculiar emotional & sensory states, so whenever we choose to act in ways which impact our psyche for strangeness, it is of the star. I strongly recommend a month of no artificial lights in the house (even at night), because it’s so powerfully disorienting.

  1. Given that it is infinite, dissociative, a kind of unmapped and unmappable place, an unsorted repository of memory and sensation, a dream of man that somehow got out of hand and now cannot be stopped or controlled – it is likely that the internet is Stellar.

The Unearthly Powers: The Star

The presence of Stellan energy, and thus a Stellan path, is newest to my understanding – and far less clear. And yet, that’s Star in a nutshell: Unclear. Vague. Contradictory. Uncertain and unsettling.

It is associated with the Landweird. For “Stellar energy” does not have anything to do with stars – but the spaces between them. And if the Landweird is the “God of the Gaps”, then Stellar practice is launching yourself headfirst into that abyss and getting lost in what you find there. You’ll be working with the Greater Powers in their most wordless and inhuman form; its sacred texts include the Owl Service, Arthur Machen, Merlin Wylt. Tales of going underground and off the edge and beyond the places man was supposed to know. Not just through the looking glass, but what Alice found there. The Stellar path is sanity check magic.

Stellan energy stands outside of time; it’s most often associated with nighttimes and new moons, but only because those times make you vulnerable. You enter the Stellar current by immersion and self-loss: rage, terror, obsession, adoration, or by ecstatic practices like fasting, drumming, substance use, singing, jogging, or by land-based practices, like sitting in a dinghy and casting yourself adrift on the open sea. The Star is associated with the unknown: the sea, the barrows, caves under the earth, the heart of the forest, the immensity of space. The Star is the sublime, the ecstasy of the land; it is awe, and it is terror. The Land remembers when all this was wilderness, and at certain times, it begins to break back through. Distortions of memory and disruptions of time.

The Star Path can also be Moonish: sigils, almanacs, crystals and complex ritual forms are welcome here, so long as your working is – on some level – a terrible idea. You’re summoning something far before human ability or understanding. You’re blind with rage, or consumed with lust. You want knowledge – at any cost. Moon magic emphasises cleverness, mastery and control. Mad scientists, evil wizards, scorned witches: all are tapping into Stellar energy, of power used blindly and too far. The Star brings us war, environmental devastation, and radiation: chaos, blight, the world un-done. And the star can be Sunlit – the psychedelia of long, dreamlike English summers in long grass; the strangeness of smoke rings; the temptation of fairy rings; the pleasures of your skin.

Beyond this, the Star is many things beyond our understanding and control: fate, perhaps, and dreams. The Star is beehives as alien minds, unknowable and bizzare, the natural world as profoundly indifferent to man – neither anthropomorphic, nor anthropocentric. When we encounter the divine in the landscape, it is not always the pleasant goddess of the grain – but gods, like landscapes, immense in age and strangeness, uninterested in man – or unaware. Which of us can look upon space without experiencing profound existential terror – and awe of the sublime?

It is here, you note, that Fencraft is short on moral guidance: we know the Powers exist, but many pay no mind what you do with them. Mortal men have always been afraid of the Star; but we are witches. The Star is things unknown – awe and terror, wonder, immensity. Things man has labelled evil or malign are, in truth, those things that man does not understand. The Star governs the emotions, memories, dreams and hopes, and the hidden movers that rule over man. The wicked witch of the wood was not always so weird and warped, and perhaps to listen to her you may agree her rage is just, or at least, can be understood.

Of course, sometimes things of the Star are genuinely “evil”, and ought not to be tampered with. But who am I to tell you which is wise or foolish? This Path reveres those who free-diving or mountain-climb to levels humans cannot easily survive; the pioneering aviators who vanished into the sea, the early astronauts who burned in the sky. You risk everything, to gain a glimpse of that wordless immensity. You don’t have to have a fear of the sea to follow Fencraft – but it helps. Less than 10% of the ocean has been explored. We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the sea. It is dark down there, and heavy, and meter by meter the human body just breaks down. But I’m told that very close to that point, there’s bliss. We are in awe of the Star, and we fear it.

Stellar practices are best used as part of a path, rather than a path in its own right. It follows the traditions of mysticism or “shamanism” – but few of us have the support structures which allow us to go mad in a cave full-time and still get fed. It emphasises two aspects of Fencraft to the full: immersion and experience, and recognising the Powers as essentially inhuman, alien, beyond our understanding. Stellan work is generally unstructured; you have to feel it, and go beyond.

Thy sea, O God, so great,
My boat so small.
It cannot be that any happy fate
Will me befall
Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me
Through the consuming vastness of the sea.

Why We Disconnect

In the next section, I will summarise the key themes so far.