The Stellar

The Stellar is, perhaps, the most important of the three Domains – or at least, the one which is most central and notable to Fencraft as a tradition.

We acknowledge the energy evoked by the depths of seas, the infinity of space, the memory of the land, and strangeness at the gateway.

Keynotes

The Stellar is closely interrelated with the Landweird, so it is here we shall start. A key influence is folk horror, stories about a sense of something ancient coming up out of the land. The landscape shimmering, or holding a coiled horror; rural communities who still follow the old ways, and where the rational understanding of men from the city are broken; memories encoded into old paintings, ancient stones, church carvings; ambient land dread.

These are stories about the Landweird: for we have encountered such shimmering and strangeness in the wild places, and we hold these stories to be true ones. Or at least, an artist’s truth – fictions which reveal something deep and essential.

What we see and what we seem is but a dream within a dream.

We hold the land to be a kind of stone tape – like a fallible memory, a palimpsest book, or a jumbled subconscious. The Stellar gains the correspondences over memory, the unconscious, and time. We are particularly drawn to representations where memory is fallible, blurred, or lost, and time skips or judders, because that best mirrors our experience of the Landweird. Experiences like trauma and coma, dementia and amnesia are all underneath the Star.

Through memory, we also gain the correspondence what the dead know. The dead can be governed by Sun, Moon or Star, depending on their aspect; here, we imagine the memories, ideas, and experiences of the dead as all jumbled together and encoded onto the land, on physical artifacts, and in the aether for us to seek. As if sometimes our ideas are not our own, and mute stoneworks or old photographs can speak to us with long-dead voices.

As with death, so also life – we see both death and childbirth as experiences which take us into and out of a Stellar place. Proximity to death and near-death experiences are also altered states.

Related to this, the Stellar governs fractured mental states, dreaming, abstract thought, creativity, divination, and other such profound dips out of the everyday and into the infinite. Modernism, surrealism, and other such instances of “future shock” – where a technology or artform is not just new, but profoundly disrupts what went before – are Stellar, because it is as if the artist entered that Stellar jumble and accidentally brought something back from Outside. These are all kinds of altered states and self loss – to which we can add the use of drugs, of trance techniques such as fasting and bloodletting, and to experiences such as dance, jogging, and sex.

The Stellar also governs the emotions and particularly extreme emotions. You can see the interrelation here – the idea that love is a kind of madness, for example; one which inspires fantasy and delusions; one that powers acts of artistic creation; one that changes our physiology as we experience it. Emotions are also a key aspect of memory, and like it they are fluid, mysterious, and somewhat challenging to control or fully recognise.

The key Stellar emotions are awe and terror. The term encompasses a lot of what is meant by the Sublime – an out-of-body rapture at landscapes which take on an overpoweringly otherworldly quality. The Sublime is not happiness or beauty, however: sublime things usually induce a sense of terror too. We are careful not to allow the Stellar to be defined as “evil”; all the same, a lot of Stellar media and fiction is in the horror genre, and evoke an ambient sense of terror or discomfort. And yet, the Stellar is usually profoundly alluring and tempting: the urge to jump. It’s not simply offputting: it fascinates. It calls to us.

A useful adjective here is “Lovecraftian” – not slasher films or monster movies, but fiction with a profound sense of the uncanny, the Outside, and the weird. One can be frightened of a vampire, but that is not Stellar: un-named entities, experiences which defy the verbal and shatter the mind, presences which seem to have intelligence. Lovecraft’s literary philosophy was known as Cosmicism or Cosmic Terror – the idea that man is not the center of the universe, or even noticed by it, but that we are insignificant things in a hostile universe beyond our comprehension.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown….Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse…

the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. H.P. Lovecraft

This leads us to another core Stellar concept: that of The Wild. We understand the wild and the wilderness as cosmic things: places which are no friend to man, phenomena that do not even consider us. The Stellar can also be almost shockingly contemporary: after all, it knows no time, so we should not find the juxtaposition of lost Pagan rites and futuristic technologies surprising. We can remember things that have yet to happen, just as we forget the things that already have.

One example of this juxtaposition is relating the experience of animals to a kind of alien species – not anthropomorphic, but outside our understanding. The Wild also interrelates with the emotional correspondences as the beast in man – hysterical states, ecstasy, trance and stepping outside of your skin.

We also note man’s capacity for horror as related to all these ideas – war, genocide, ecocide, pandemics, climate breakdown, abused technologies, natural disasters, and so forth. These experiences reflect the beast in man, and show us at our most savage and instinctual. At the same time, these experiences profoundly remind us of individual insignificance and powerlessness; and they often seem to take on their own inhuman intelligence and momentum. Wars are more easily started than stopped.

A key image for this is, of course, the bomb. The bomb returns again and again as central to the Stellar. The weirdness of radiation sickness – it is invisible, but deadly; the life-in-overload of cancers; the fact that television white noise is a kind of radiation; and its ultimate embodiment of man’s technology gone awry, his capacity for annihilating himself and others. The interrelation of the very ancient and very modern – the story of an Aboriginal group with a generational belief in a cursed valley, which was later turned into a uranium mine. Additionally, a lot of the folk horror and genre fiction which inform my understanding of the Landweird, were written in the shadow of the bomb: unsettling military installations near rural villages, factories tampering with forces beyond their ken, Porton Down, radiation sickness from a Salisbury park bench, and the terrifying tap-tap-tap of a gieger counter; all are repeated themes.

The Stellar is pure abstraction. And it is the bringing together of unconnected things. I often get a very Stellar vibe off very old and very modern buildings stood next to one another. The Stellar is being in this idea-space, where concepts break down, and everything is wordless, and strange connections can be made; there is no time here, or direction.

A keynote Stellar correspondence is analogue recording media, which is interrelated of course with human memory, and also with the secrets and voices of the dead, and with transcending time. Again, we are particularly drawn to media which is fallible, fragmented, or unsettling: the last photograph of someone who went missing and was never found; museum objects that witnessed horror; Numbers Stations; missing films and television (until they are found). We especially appreciate hauntology – artwork which makes the strangeness of a media’s flaws its defining characteristic. The Caretaker on vinyl; Blue Jam on radio; found footage horror; Sapphire and Steel on photographs and household clutter. Vapourwave and glitch art – though contemporary – are part of this trend. Static, crackle, white-noise, glitch and record-skips are all Stellar phenomena: they make us aware of the act of remembering, and that it is flawed.

The final, essential Stellar correspondence is Space and its echo the Sea. More abstractly, things which are unknown, unknowable; unmapped, unmappable. These are some of the most wild and unfeeling environments man can travel to – places we cannot naturally survive, and which end the unwary without purpose or desire. They are also disorienting – they provoke both awe and terror to a profound extent, but they distort the memory as we cannot easily find our way by markers or signs, and our senses because we cannot fully touch, hear or see as we are used to. They require advanced technology to try – but this same technology leads to overconfidence and danger, or to destroying the very things we sought to reach. In our lore, we often see the well, the cauldron, or the sea of the unconscious as storehouses for knowledge and hidden wisdom; or as the place the dead go or must travel; and the experience of extreme emotions is much like being pulled under by a current or drawn by a more powerful gravitational force.

Additionally, I’m terrified of the sea. I’m increasingly convinced that you cannot excel at Landcraft unless you are too. Go find a video of a scuba diver in trouble or a boat sinking or dark shapes looming out of the fathomless black, and come back to me.

The sun pulled inside out: the eclipse is a frequently used Stellar image

Things of immense size, too – for example, the universe, the Alps, the Atlantic, things which are extremely old, and the profound human terror these things evoke. It occurs to me I may have agorophobia. Thinking about the earth rotating around the sun gives me the shakes. The size of blue whales. Have you seen the Alps, though? I had nightmares about them for months.

Not only outer space, but inner worlds too – astral travel, trying the realm of the dead, passing through the veil – are all forms of Stellar journey. They often require extreme emotion or altered states to attempt, and take us to an unformed space like unto the memory or subconscious. And they require both great daring and great prudence to survive, for the way is perilous.

Summary

Self loss

Dance, drugs, sex, ecstasy, hysteria, fasting, purging, extreme meditation, trance states, dreaming, near-death experiences, going mad, being asleep

Emotions

Especially intense and overpowering ones – lust, rage, confusion, intuition, hate. Key Stellar states – awe, terror, rapture, sublime.

Memory and Time

Dementia, coma, amnesia; remembering, forgetting; fallible memories; time skipping, looping, running backwards, or divergent times existing simultaneously, divination and prophecy, speaking to the dead. Note that “fate” implies one is important and there is a plan, and so it is a meeting of Solar and Stellar – pure Stellar is far more discomforting.

Strange mental states

Creativity, madness, abstraction, leaps of genius, intuitive jumps, surrealism, dreaming, dissociation, trauma, hysteria, awe

Otherworlds

Through the veil, across the hedge; travelling in time; getting lost, fogs, the unmappable; the land of the dead, the Feywilds, or any other planes one has discovered; dream-quests and visions; learning to live at the pace of the beasts or the trees, or otherwise leaving human society.

The Wild

The sea – especially out of sight of shore or in the depths; space; mountains, deep jungle, forest, caves. Anywhere one could still literally die. Extreme weather. The dominance of other things over man.

Directions

The underlying map of Landcraft is a Solar and a Stellar pole, with Lunar journeys inbetween. Therefore, the Stellar is also an opposite to the Solar - a profound opposite, not the disagreement of small differences but on a cosmic scope. The Stellar is the horrors which make monarchy seem like a good idea; the Stellar is as far away from home as you can go; the Stellar is the untamed and untamable - deep weird, deep time, and the infinite. Where the Lunar is nearstrange, the Stellar is farstrange: a profound difference in our the terror of fieldfairies against our terror of the cosmic.

Solar and Lunar relate to the world and perceptions of men. Stellar is their inverse and extreme. For inverse, we see the rational world give way to the hysterical and intuitive, the known and comfortable world give way to the infinite and unreliable one. For extreme, we see man’s capacity for horror – under the Sun, for war, domination, and devastation of the land; under the Moon, for strange science, occult depravity, and wanderers going too far.

They are also known things, compared to which the Stellar is the unknown. In the world, this is characterised by the sea and space; in the body, by emotions, dreams, memories, and madness. We use the term “unseen or hidden movers”.

Its opposite is the Solar-Lunar current. Combined, this current speaks of man’s control over himself and the world, the strength and dominance of man’s establishments and ideas, and knows only the court games and village politics of who ought to rule, and what values we ought to hold. Too much of this is too much of the mundane and the worldly. In contrast, the Stellar is the infinity of space, of time, of visions and imagination, of the wilderness, of that which we do not know, of that which we cannot control or begin to understand.