Another bitter winter comes to an end, but with the new year is new hope, for the wheel of history cannot forever be held back: our day will come.
Our sounds go out from under the hedge and up the hill, with transmitters concealed the old town clock, in the belly of rusting barges, sent out on pigeons, and walked on-foot out of town to the great old stones - wherever they can be hidden and heard. We speak with the voices of the silenced, the forgotten people, the real Astercote of scythe and hammer and laundry-basket.
In solidarity from all of us in the Radio Free Astercote decentralised network
There is a solidarity rally on the common on January 19th called by the Astercote Liberation Front after local man Jimmy Swales was charged with alleged ownership of radio broadcast equipment. We call for a new sonic collectivism, an end to the enclosure of the airways, and autonomous proletarian vibrations.
Free Jimmy NOW!
Listen in
We have been forced to change our regular frequency - tune in to our numbers station after 7pm this week, and then decode with the key marked in graffiti in the usual spots.
Radio Free Astercote is a community radio station by the people, for the people.
On the Mix
1. The Great Frost
Virginia Woolf
2. Oh to Be a King
Faustus
3. The Chemical Worker's Song
The Great Big Sea
4. Blow Your Trumpet Gabriel
Steeleye Span
5. Jesus Was a Carpenter
Johnstons
6. 1917 Revolution
Beau
7. All Through the Night
Peregrine
8. Old Molly Metcalfe
Jake Thackray
9. Please to See the King
Burd Ellen
10. Sheep
Strawbs
11. Working Class Hero
Marianne Faithful
12. The Knife
Genesis
January 2024
Week 52
Program Notes
this place is nowhere and it is forever
The snow has turned into deep, dark sludge-ice on the pavement outside Astercote Broadcasting House, and with it comes a moody guest mix of dark ambient, industrial, and post-punk from K-Punk, exploring the themes and ideas of Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life.
Taking as its startpoint the provocation that time has stopped - that culture looks only backwards and can only reproduce old forms, no longer creating a sense of future-shock; and that, likewise, we can no longer imagine modes of life outside of capitalism - Fisher reads texts, television and sound through the lens of hauntology, and asks what hidden longings are resurfacing within the crackle.
“You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.”
― Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
Schedule
Broadcast Hours
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
December 2024
Week 52
Program Notes
The Magician
Time to transcend the petty bonds of mortal flesh with a selection of music programming exploring the figure of the wizard.
Aleister Crowley, Bobby Beausoleil and Selki Girl share Thelemic ritual broad-castings in the form of sonic vibrations. Long-lost memory resurfaces from the forgotten tape-loops of Black Devil Disco Club, and from Mount Vernon Arts Lab's imagined television program Seance at Hobs Lane. The Scarlet Ceremony features dialogue from the Blood on Satan's Claw. Plus classic wizard rock from Black Sabbath and Hawkwind.
This music program was originally broadcast alongside a lecture on the use and value of ceremonial magic, put together by Mr Halbrook of the Astercote Antiquarian Society in 2023
Schedule
Broadcast Hours
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. The Pentagram
Aleister Crowley
2. The Sorceror's Apprentice
Paul Dukas
3. When The Wizard Blew His Horn
Hawkwind
4. Lucifer Rising
Bobby Beausoleil
5. The Wizard
Black Sabbath
6. The Scarlet Ceremony
Belbury Poly
7. Babalon (Every Drop)
Selki Girl
8. The Vauxhall Labyrinth
Mount Vernon Arts Lab
9. 'H' Friend
Black Devil Disco Club
10. She's Lost Control
Joy Division
11. Mercury
Bloc Party
12. Conjuring
Joy Shannon and the Beauty Marks
13. The Hermit
Steve Hackett
14. Substitutiary Locomotion
The Shermans
December 2024
Week 51
Program Notes
The Exorcism
A ghost story for Christmas.
Written by Don Taylor, this stage play was originally broadcast in 1972 as part of the anthology series Dead of Night. This strikingly horrible piece is among the few episodes remaining in the archive, and one of the forgotten treasures of the era.
Re-produced here as a radio play, it is a distinctive response to folk horror themes.
The Poacher was originally concieved and produced for television by:
Narrator
Douglas Leech
Music
Anton Mullan
Sound
Tony Yeadon
Editor
Justin Smith
Produced & Directed
John King
Originally aired on Mon, Feb 1, 1982
Produced by BBC South West
December 2024
Week 49
Program Notes
Wintertide II
In our second of a series of special programs for the Wintertide, a second collection of Pagan folk, medieval Christianity, old women's memories and children's dreams.
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn,
And keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing, poor thing!
Schedule
Broadcast Hours
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. For C.S.
Plinth
2. Lament of the Rohirrim
Tolkien Ensemble
3. The Angel Gabriel
Maddy Pryor
4. The Song of Durin
Clamavi de Profundis
5. Blackthorn
Solstice
6. The Queen of the Night
Michael Raven & Joan Mills
7. Adam Lay Ibounden
Medieval Baebes
8. Narnia
Steve Hackett
9. Mary Had a Baby
Mary Hopkins
10. Gaudete
Steeleye Span
11. Song in the Woods
Tolkien Ensemble
12. Sol Invictus
Thea Gilmore
13. Anniversary Waltz
Plinth
December 2024
Week 48
Program Notes
Wintertide I
Radio Astercote leads a walk through the woods, bringing together Pagan folk, medieval Christianity, children's stories, winter winds and wonder.
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. Warning of Winter
Christopher Lee
2. Cutty Wren
Steeleye Span
3. Slow Air
Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus
4. Carol of the Bells
John Williams
5. I Believe in Father Christmas
Greg Lake
6. Which Way the Wind Blows
Anthony Phillips
7. from the Snowman
Raymond Briggs
8. Sam's Song in the Orc Tower
Tolkien Ensemble
9. When Spring Comes In
Spriguns
10. Theme from The Box of Delights
Victor Hely-Hutchinson
11. Walking in the Air
Howard Blake & Peter Auty
12. The Winter Queen
Gwydion Pendderwen
13. Ring Out Solstice Bells
Jethro Tull
14. In Dulci Jubilo
Mike Oldfield
15. Here We Go a Wassailing
the Watersons
November 2024
Week 47
Program Notes
Autumntide
Autumn is really here now - wind against the shutters on the sea-shore, cats growing in their winter fur, the quiet rattle of dry grasses in the cold sun, the golden shadows of the October woodland and the brilliance of November stars. Later than intended (time moves differently here).
With particular thanks to the Haunted Generation Podcast for introducing the studio team to Autumn's Really Here and Spin Spider Spin, around which the bracken-brown sepia-cosy sound of this broadcast was built. Last Cloud Home and Edge of the Sea were sourced from English Weather, a compilation by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)
the Wurzels
2. Procession
Paul Giovanni
3. Lyke Wake Dirge
The Young Tradition
4. Idumæa
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
5. Lament of the Rohirrim
The Tolkien Ensemble
6. The Scarecrow
Lal & Mike Waterson
7. January Man
Paul & Glen
8. The Scarecrow Knows
The Unthanks
9. Twa Corbies
Steeleye Span
10. Idumæa
Baby Dee
11. Svitjod
Forndom
12. Lament for Theoden
The Tolkien Ensemble
13. Autumn
Sowulo
August 2024
Week 33
Program Notes
The Afterlife
Inventions for Radio were a series of four radio broadcasts that first aired on BBC's Third Programme in 1964 and 1965.
BBC policy at the time was to credit all sound work to the Radiophonic Workshop as a whole, and not Derbyshire as an individual; her status as an electronic music auteur would not be fully celebrated until her career had ended.
The Afterlife was originally concieved and produced for radio by:
Interviews
Barry Bermange
Sound
Delia Derbyshire
Producer
David Thompson
Spoken-word participants were recruited through the Hornsea Old People's Welfare Council.
Originally aired on 1 April 1965 for the BBC Third Programme
August 2024
Week 32
Program Notes
The Poacher
In 1981, the BBC put out an unusual call to the general public - requesting viewers write in with their true tall tales of the uncanny. The result was West Country Tales
The Poacher is one of the most remarkable pieces of weird television during the period - and the most forgotten. The television series is currently unavailable to purchase.
The Poacher was originally concieved and produced for television by:
Narrator
Douglas Leech
Music
Anton Mullan
Sound
Tony Yeadon
Editor
Justin Smith
Produced & Directed
John King
Originally aired on Mon, Feb 1, 1982
Produced by BBC South West
July 2024
from John Miller's Alice in Wonderland
Week 31
Program Notes
Celebrate the summer’s end with a drop of acid communism: lysergic lullabies, lazy sundays, and long shadows from the sixties and seventies. Naptime. Things are because they are wonderful
Plus readings from Mark Fisher’s unfinished Acid Communism
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether at KP Radio once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
Contemplation
Today's selection is drawn from Acid Communism by Mark Fisher, which can be checked out from the Oak & Ashwick Library (9am - 3pm; closed Wednesdays and Monday morning)
This text is taken from K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, and can be explored further in Post-Capitalist Desire: The Final Lectures edited by Matt Colquhoun.
Music Hour
Bob Stanley Presents 76 in the Shade
Top of the album charts this week: acompilation of subtly psychedelic pop released in the hottest summer in memory. The unexpected selections shimmer in a new context, where Stanley teases out their shimmering, hallucinogenic mood.
Music selections by Bob Stanley.
Released on Ace Records
On the Mix
1. I'm Only Sleeping
the Beatles
2. Bonny River
Sunforest
3. Sunny Afternoon
The Kinks
4. Lazy Day
The Moody Blues
5. Yellow Eyes
Jade Warrior
6. I Talk To The Wind
King Crimson
7. Are You Sitting Comfortably
The Moody Blues
8. Foothills
Keith Christmas
9. Woodstock
Matthews' Southern Comfort
10. Magician in the Mountain
Sunforest
11. Place in the Country
Mike Hurst
12. Psychedelic Shack
The Temptations
13. Tomorrow Never Knows
The Beatles
Open Transcript
Take one step outside of the village, to the edgelands of field and the forest's rim. You slip off early from work into the heat of the day - walking along the hedgerows, listening to the crows and poking about the carvings in sleepy old pubs. As you doze the afternoon away under the dapple of a tree, dreaming of what is beyond the woodland's edge, what has been imagined cannot be undesired.
In the symbol-system of Fencraft, the Solar is the passive everyday, and the Stellar is the intrusion of the outer-strange. This of their meeting points is a dappling shadow on the patchwork of grasses, the shades and colours made by drifting clouds on the mountainside - to take one step out of the clockcogs of life through daydreaming and refusal. It is here we sense the whispers of the woodland and of a world beyond.
Today's reading is the introduction to Acid Communism by Mark Fisher. Following the death of its author, the full text can now only be read at the Oak Ashwick Library, and that key is granted but rarely. But its provocation remains and, perhaps like the Landweird itself, its unrecorded secrets are living still, as sonic mysteries that cannot be taught, only felt.
The following is an abridgement for radio. Are you sitting comfortably? And if you are unable to sit comfortably, have you ever asked yourself - why?
July 2024
Week 30
Program Notes
A special program from the First Church of the Fen for the final full moon of the summer. Join in the devil's jig tonight with a mix of folk-hop, psych rock, prog rock and dance.
Wind in the Willows (1983) is a stop-motion film by Cosgrove Hall, adapted from the novel by Kenneth Grahame, and directed by Mark Hall - starring Richard Pearson as Mole and Ian Carmichael as Ratty.
Penda's Fen (1974) was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks.
The sample used by Boards of Canada is taken from an interview for the Mysteries, Magic & Miracles TV series, spoken by Amo Bishop Roden - who took up living in a ditch near the ruins of Waco, after the authorities who had been keeping her away finally abandoned it to be reclaimed by the land and time.
Schedule
Broadcast Hours
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. 'Ouses 'Ouses 'Ouses
The Imagined Village
2. Wind in the Willows Theme
Keith Hopwood & Malcolm Rowe
3. I Know What I Like
Genesis
4. Making Plans for Nigel
XTC
5. Glory
Nyx & Gazelle Twin
6. In A Beautiful Place Out in the Country
Boards of Canada
7. Time
Pink Floyd
8. Penda's Fen
Spencer Banks, David Rudkin, and Elgar
9. Heavyweight Champion of the World
Reverend and the Makers
10. Wind in the Willows
Richard Pearson and Ian Carmichael
11. Helplessness Blues
Fleet Foxes
A. Logo
The Advisory Circle
B. Oakston Associated (Logotone)
The Focus Group
C. We Have Been Here Before
The Caretaker
D. Civil Defence Is Common Sense
The Advisory Circle
July 2024
Week 28
Program Notes
Summer is here, and with it a Music Hour filled with pastoral whimsy, hammond organ, and hooting noises. With a special message from the acting vicar of St Aelfsige's about the life of our parish patron saint.
The story of St Aelfsige was adapted from Winters in this World: a Journey Through the Anglo Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker.
Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd features the nightingale.
Schedule
Broadcast Hours
Radio Astercote ripples outward through the digital aether once each week:
PST - Sunday 10am
GMT - Sunday 6pm
On the Mix
1. Main Theme
Picnic at Hanging Rock
2. Julia Dream
Pink Floyd
3. Kim
Steve Hackett
4. Adlestrop
Gilroy Mere
5. Summer Round
Belbury Poly
6. from Alice in Wonderland
Ravi Shankar
7. Under the Oaks
B'ee
8. The Little Hill
Beguildy
9. Rainbow River
Vashti Bunyan
10. Cirrus Minor
Pink Floyd
11. When the Fields were on Fire
Virginia Astley
12. Miss My Love Today
Gilbert O'Sullivan
13. Entangled
Genesis
14. We Have Always Been Here
The Caretaker
Open Transcript
A Word from the Vicar
This month, we recall the life of our beloved patron - St Aelfsige - in the story told of the false St Wulfstan, Bishop of the Other Church, as recorded by William of Malmesbury.
On one occasion, Wulfstan was invited to Longney, a village on the River Severn, to dedicate a church. When he arrived, he was annoyed to find the church was overshadowed by a large nut-tree, ‘which provided shade with its spreading leaves, but whose luxuriant branches denied light to the church’. The bishop summoned his host, a man named Ælfsige, and ordered that the tree should be cut down. But St Ælfsige refused, because ‘he had a habit of spending his leisure time under the tree, especially on a summer’s day, playing at dice or feasting, or amusing himself in some other way.’ He was so fond of the tree that he felt he would rather leave the church undedicated than have it felled. Wulfstan, angered by his obstinacy, laid a curse on the tree, and it shrivelled up so badly that it had to be cut down after all.
That night, the false St Wulfstan lay down to rest, and in his dreaming wandered out of the village upon strange hillsides.
The midday sun was hot, no longer friend to man and the face of his dear Lord; it seemed somehow pulled inside out, so all the sky was fire save for the orb, of sucking dark. He lifted up his eyes to the eternal heavens and saw true beyond many lifetimes of man into the deaths of stars.
He sought for some place to rest - but it was barren; he saw everywhere the long shadows of trees cast by the sun, and following them found only their stumps. As he turned in sleep, he heard the fingers of the ash tree battering against his window, and he looked all around for it in dreaming and saw nothing, and yet ever-insistent the sound of trees.
He called upon the Elder, that has fire within its naming; he called upon the ash, whose wood is best to burn; he called upon the apple and the cherry and their sweet smelling embers; and they rustled in reply, 'Wulfstan of the false god, no place shall ye find rest' - and he followed after their voices and saw none of them.
He looked about for water; there was too much and there was none. The Severn burst its banks with no roots to hold its crumbling, and waters lapped about the walls of Longney church; waters found no thirsty drinkers in the soil to subdue them, and splashed against the pews and soaked the tapestries into strange rots; and yet nowhere did the waters stay for him to drink from them, they shimmered laughing away into the unforgiving heat.
He called upon the false god, and the land shuddered in reply: 'Wolf stone, why have you forgotten me?' and Wulfstan denied that he was of the wolf or stone, denied that he was of the woodland; said of all he saw, he was the master, he that was made in the shape of God and spoke for him.
and in the morning he was found, dry as an old book, as if dead a hundred years; and as I have heard it, he is dead still.
but at the nut tree's base, there was a green ring of sapling shoots.
July 2023
Terence Spencer—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Ceremony
Thought for the Day
Fencraft incorporates a system of ceremonial magic, based in the landscape and folklore.
But what is ceremonial magic: how does it work, and why is it worth reinventing from its uncomfortable roots?
Experiments with Moog based melodies, sequenced with chimes and strings, over gentle changes in tempo and structure, creating inter-changing passages of music that ebb and flow over 77 mesmerizing minutes.
All profits for the album go to Médecins Sans Frontières
Music by The Hardy Tree.
Released on Clay Pipe Music
You are listening to Radio Free Astercote. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.
Fencraft is a tradition combining little bits of animism, traditional witchcraft, popculture paganism and ceremonial magic. Fencraft incorporates a newly devised ceremonial magic system rooted in British folklore and the landscape. Today we are going to be talking about ceremonial magic. In particular: why is ceremonial magic worth saving?
The argument for getting rid of it: there are many other forms of magic which work well, and chaos magic in particular - growing out of ceremonial - demonstrated you could do it with any old system, making system-centric magic redundant for results. If so much of the history of ceremonial magic has been intertwined with appropriation and unsavory characters, why save it?
Ceremonial magic works through an intensity of focused pedantry. It has a specific manner of operation. Where a ritual of dance, drums and enethogens raises energy through a particular technique, experience and set of beliefs; or a simple, furious folk spell does likewise - so does this. It's agreeing to a set of rules for how magic functions (if only in that context) and following them to get results.
People often mistake the key rule of ceremonial magic to be accuracy - including some ceremonial magicians. It's the prog rock of the craft, seemingly technical and over-clever for its own sake. In reality, perhaps it's just slower - more like disco or blues or even ambient, defined by a certain looping pattern which pulls you deeper in over time. It is deep meditation. My correspondences are not a telephone directory or filing cabinet - or, as in low magic, a temporary, strategic choice for a particular end - but a veil. It's a deliberate set of triggers that, once built, can knock you into trance angain and again and at a moment sparked by any part of the web that's nudged to set the whole thing thrumming. Because Landcraft is intertwined with the landscape, for me this tends to start whenever I look at the weather. I slip into deeptime and I'm ready. When combined with a practice of Reading, words come unbidden to my lips. For sure, some people make it work by closing their eyes before ritual and breathing and thinking abut a tree, but for me such practices were touch and go. Five minutes is short to let go of mortal flesh. But now I know the shape of magical net work underpinning all things, that state is always close to the surface. I can overload each part of my self with connections and sensations, unconsciously because they are always alive to them.
(It is possible that the fractured focus of ADHD makes ceremonial magic particularly appealing to me. It will always give you something to do with your hands, eyes, nose, ears, inner eye, breath, energetic body, and often feet and speech as well. One cannot wander from the path. One has too much going on to concentrate on.)
Being told what to do is underrated. One of the great strengths of our spiritual tradition is our (relative) freedom from dogma and from central control. Often coming from cultural backgrounds of religious intolerance there is a unique liberationary quality to our community's mantra of "Do whatever thou wilt, it'll probably work".
It's also exhausting. I wrote about this extensively in early Fen days. The further you wander from the track - the more you make use of this blessing to carve your own spiritual way - the more you are called upon to be your own priest and pope and Johannes Gutenberg and Michaelangelo and Handel, around taking the kids to school and then making coffees for eight hours. What a contrast to the pleasures of the Church of England, where I can just rock up on a Sunday and sit quietly in a pew. Pagans are notorious for getting stuck at the armchair stage, because the work of building your own church is exhausting.
Ceremonial magic is the ultimate in it's all been done for you; magic for lovers of 3rd edition D&D who get fired up by a hefty rulebook filled with tables, and the delicious crunch of using a fixed system in creative ways. The Chic & Tabitha Cicero brick on the Golden Dawn is a favourite book of mine for its reassuring presence: do this, go there, free up the power of your mind and energy for magic, not decisionmaking. If we've agreed that most magical modalities are capable of results, then the genius of ceremonial magic is putting all of what you are into the ritual. Paradoxically, perhaps, perhaps it cares about the colours of robes far less than other traditions. You're freed from the burden of time and work that is deciding what to wear, but still gifted the magically-effective faith that your robe choice has Significance. I'm told President Obama had many copies of the same good suit made, so he was freed from that daily decision and had that effort in reserve for difficult parts of his job. As an ADHD life hack, there's something to it - setting patterns and routines to avoid getting "stuck" and consumed at points of decision.
What value is the freedom of eclectic spirituality if, in practice, you never get to workings or magic or prayer? Freedom gives us the little devil of needing to get it "just so". In ceremonial magic, that "just so" is always already done for you - so it gets you past that hurdle faster.
This is not the same, however, as submitting to doctrine or letting go of creativity. The analogy is playing a game with a fixed set of rules. The pre-agreement of players is that the rules are fair and we will use them. The pleasure and power comes from discovering how you can combine those fixed parts in ways the creators never intended. The model is probably Magic: the Gathering, a baking recipe; or, indeed, a music genre - where certain features must be present and the challenge is to combine them in new ways. As director Francis Ford Coppola said admiringly of Cuban cinema in the 1960s: "I wish we had the advantage of their disadvantages"
Privation forces creativity, the way that Oscar Petersen and Dr John can improvise piano over the same 100-year-old relentless beat but make something entirely their own. Freed from the need to invent everything from scratch, they start from a formula that works - and then they play with it.
Slow magic is most apt to a certain purpose. Aesthetically, ceremonial magic is easily mistaken for something brassy and dusty; the term "Western Esoteric Tradition" even more so, wandering in the bastard mind palace of ancient Rome and a Catholic Cathedral. But it's just a way of doing and seeing. You do not need to learn Hebrew. You do have to learn something, and treat that learning as both secret and significant.
My work is concerned with memory and slow-time. Trying to enter into the pattern of a mountain or a slumbering god. Every part of the magic is the magic, and the key impact of ceremonial pedantry is to slow things right down. Yes, you probably can do that spell with a wand made out of a pencil. Perhaps, if your other modality is strong enough, the spell will also be as effective. But you'll get a very different outcome if you treat the wandmaking as its own ritual step, choosing the wood or applying a design, and then blessing and empowering it. It stretches the spell out, making it more all-encompassing. Ceremonial magic applies this method to everything: it's obsessive magic.
It brings an intensity of noticing. I cannot snap to that intensity or fullness in five minutes before ritual kickoff - I build it over time. It fills you with a hunger and readiness. When I go to rituals, it used to feel like a thin reedy little thing, and now it takes moments to enter the infinite. I'm no longer relying on the facilitator to create an experience for me; I'm bringing my own.
All good magic works on the inner levels, but only ceremonial puts the emphasis on building that architecture, on participating in what is built - on being the librarian and being able to lay your hand on a thing within moments in a vast storehouse. If we imagine the Landweird as rummaging in a junkshop, ceremonial technique is to set-aside and archive those parts that we have found. Its interchangeability gives me a route to tapping into that network in any context, in any ritual.
Before I went off on that tangent, we were talking about: an intensity of noticing, the way that ceremonial magic makes you a kind of librarian, where you have the ability to lay your hand on the resource you need at a moment's notice.
This too is a key to the power of Disconnection: to be intentiona about what you are taking in. Slow magic means considering the ritual nature of your actions far beyond the moments spent in circle. An afternoon spent on Twitter has after-ripples for, say, a week; that same afternoon spent in silence in a wood, equally, ripples out from time into deep time. This is not a moral judgement or Luddism or traditionalism for its own sake, but about recognising the impact of patterns. If next Saturday, I needed to perform magic on the fly, which influence do I want to be carrying within me? I cannot just put aside the ruminating prompted by a chunk of nasty discourse, any more than breathing and imagining I am a tree puts me in immediate touch with an actual tree. I must tend my garden. I am the living mass of my experiences - I am Landweird, in a sense, a storehouse of jumbled memory; it is wise to be intentional about what comes in.
Slow magic gets us closest to vibing with a mountainside because the state of nature is to be without novelty. The repeating patterns of ceremonial magic are perfect for it. A mountain says and is and does nothing but mountain on an unimaginable scale. The ceremonial way of every part of your ritual expressing the same thing, repeated and repeated, or broken down into small facets over time, is a good match for it.
Perhaps all ceremonial magic is, is right for a certain type of person. In teaching, we try to consider people's various learning styles - sensory, verbal, practical - to create classes engaging for all students. It is only natural that a human community of magicians would need different modalities to interface with their own and higher powers. I had no interest in the cosmology or aesthetic of ceremonial magic because, as written, it did not match my Pagan faith. But I've been called back and called back to it because it is uniquely powerful. Ceremonial magic is not the specific Golden Dawn temple layout, Liber 777 or a correctly executed Greater Hexagram - it is a magical method, within which temple diagrams, correspondence tables and magical 'katas' are fundamental components. This method taps us into certain strengths and weaknesses not found in other ways; and, for some people, this IS their method - the one which works. The details of the old way may not be worth preserving - but the underlying method, the reasons it works and what we can do with it, cannot be left behind.
It's on us to create the next era in the tradition.
This week, i'd like to talk about a work of real magic. Kenneth Anger is an underground filmmaker. He was credited with the invention of the music video, putting together short films juxtaposing images with pop soundtracks. In his most famous, Scorpio Rising, 60s sweetheart pop accompanies shots of real bikers lovingly oiling their jackets and waxing the pipes of their bikes; and standing astride traffic cones. In his loater career, Anger began to film as magical art. A follower of Thelema, the films WERE the rites.
I love them because to experience them is to be welcomed inside. I believe in film as amagical tool, loosing the conscious mind to wander as well as the physicality of trapping light and sound. These films are rituals the viewer is invited into.
Lucifer Rising changed my life. I explored ceremonial magic for the first time. What I found and find so moving about it is the sense of people coming together. I feel part of something. Each figure acknowledged the great approach. Music, image, colour. As I have learned more about Thelema, I have not understood the film any better because it is to experience. I listen to it once a year, around Midsummer.
There's not much to say about it.
For music, I have choen Sketches in D Minor by the Hardy Tree. Clay Pipe Music is one of several labels that has sprung up to cater to a growing fad for the types of thing I like, and it's worth considering if it would be doing half so well if the album covers weren't so attractive. They evoke twee English railway posters. We can debate ow important album art is to the overall unit of a piece of music, but suffice to say Clay Pipe sells a mood, and in group membershp, as much as it sells music. The music is very variable.
Sketches in D Minor puts one in mind of Mike Oldfield. Its two tracks - Side 1 and Side 2 - are instrumental pieces, starting with an insistent theme then building and building on it. I love this kind of thing; my husband hates it. The two kinds of neurodivergent! I love to be lulled into its undertow, its looping patterns soothing the antsy parts of my brain so I can go about my day in onenness; he loses touch with his self and his skin, and he does not like it. Sketches is insistent and uncertain, music of the periphery. It's not relaxing - Mozart of the dial tone - and yet something in me becomes silent and smooth. It's deceptively wonderful, a little ghostly - it has none of the presence and personality of Mike Oldfield, but is more melodic than 'real' ambient, and happier too
I've chosen it as how the ceremonial method feels - little fragments, looped over and over, all part of the same great work, wandering here and there and seemingly directionless - but never straying.
You have been listening to Radio Astercote. Come and say hello at fencraft.leprd.space, where you can also find the transcript and mix tape for this week's episode. Good night.
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