Alchemy
I
In the beginning, was the Stellar.
This could be conceptualised as darkness...or as chaos...or as void...as deep-primal existances, not quite yet gods...or as the existential terror of reading Physicists consider a time before time or space compressed to a single speck.
This was followed by the Lunar - processes, energy, of formation and destruction and change.
And resulted in the Solar - the physical world of the everyday, with life and death and time.
These domains are movers, influences, but have no physical form or embodiment in the way a human can understand it.
II
When the creation of matter begins:
Solar resolves into LAND - it is fixed, mutable, physical
Lunar resolves into SKY - it is mobile, capricious, insubstantial
Stellar resolves into SEA - it is mysterious, infinite, beyond man's control
These elements exist before the creation of light. Therefore, they do not have:
- heat, life, motion, brightness, and time
These elements are wholly contained within themselves. It's easy to conceptualise a realm where there is unchanging sky, and nothing but sky. It's rather harder to conceptualise pure, unmixed land as a kind of 'substance'. It helps to consider sensory experiences over visualised landscapes - unmixed land isn't exactly rock, or plantlife, but the potential underpinning all such things. How would you experience Land if it was sightless and containing no distinct objects or creatures?
III
Between these three points are three paths. The paths are where elements meet and blend, and all of them therefore express CHANGE. Whereas a point is stagnant and complete within itself, their influence seeps out to mix in confrontations which are naturally active, uncertain, and filled with possibility
IV
Between LAND and SKY is the horizon. It is UNMIXED - a sharp division
Between SKY and SEA is the weather. It is UNITY - the sky is in the sea and the sea is in the sky, all the same, all one.
Between SEA and SKY is verdance. It is INTERMIXED - water within leaves and trees, leaves and trees rotting within water, two different things interacting.
V
Between Land and Sky is the Horizon.
This is often imagined as scaling a green hill or small mountain, until your sense of skyness is equal to your sense of landness; large open prairies, or even a boat on the sea, might create the same sensation; as well as contemplation of great distances. Coast is seen as a synonym for horizon in coastal traditions. That same brink-of-eternity feeling, same choice between returning home to the cosy little village, or stepping into a boat and exploring the shallows (with the deep ocean visible and waiting).
This position has a tendency towards coldness, and an affinity with birds, who are creatures of both land and sky with a tendency to wander, as well as considering the impact of wind on things of earth - the rippling of long grasses, or the reflection of the sky in shallow pools in the landscape.
Horizon expresses possibility to leave the everyday - be that leaving home to go on an adventure, leaving mortal realms for the realms of the unseen, living among ordinary people but also having encounters with the divine, retreating from the world to think and then coming back to challenge it, and so forth. It expresses a mix of doubt and resolve, of contemplation and questioning - but usually still, in some way, linked to the everyday; it is restless, and yet-to-be-focused, a ramblers energy.
This path is one of two relating to Skyness and changes in the state of the Sky, beginning by contemplation of the point at which the sky touches the land.
VI
Between Sky and Sea is the Weather
Sometimes also simplified to 'the sky', as the overlap between the abstraction of sky and the behaviour of clouds and winds is so interlinked. As Landcraft is in origin a British tradition, "weather" inevitably means "bad weather". If you've contemplated the sea and the sky as separate spheres, you almost certainly encountered sensations of coldness, drabness, and on this path they are combined and amplified. There's a very real sense in which the weather is the sea in the sky, and the sea-storm the sky in the ocean. Consider especially cycles of rain and cloud, and their interaction with river-valleys they carve from stone.
It's usually envisaged as the sky over the sea, or a storm over a mountain; because of its greater proximity to the Stellar, it can also be the wonderterror of a night sky filled with stars, often over ice-waste or winter landscape. It tends towards coldness.
It refers to things of fate; things profoundly outside man's control and comprehension, in both the natural world and preternatural domains; experiences of endurance and doom; petitioning the divine for supplication and mercy that may well not be granted.
This path is the second relating to Skyness and changes in the state of the Sky, moving our contemplation further into high cloud and deep space, as well as emphasising the power of sky and sea to act upon the world, which is greater than our own.
VII
Between Land and Sea is the influence of ground-water on the things of earth.
Primarily, plantlife (the water contained within green things), and particular landscapes: bogs, meres, fens, and the marshy mossy clumps surrounding little woodland streams. There is no sky here, which should be easier to envisage: being in this soil or bog, being surrounded by verdance, being within the leaves and aware of nothing but leaves. It is dark and wet, but somehow vibrant and thrumming. And at this stage, it tends not to imply fruit or flowers - we have not yet the passage of time that would create them.
It refers to abundance, life in all its earthliness, the interconnected diversity of an ecosystem, the possibilities of creation and transformation, both the buried seeds growing and the rotting down of dead things, the fen and the bog as magical crucibles, and the airless soil as a preserving place - from bog bodies to secrets.
This position still tends towards coldness - like lush grass against your face - but within the bog there is the potential for heat, the simmering of life within the soil and marsh-fires.
This path is longer than the other two, and relates to Landness and changes of state in the Land. At the top, it acknowledge's man's influnce on and interrelationship with the landscape (both beneficial and baneful); towards the end, once more, the power of the landscape to change and master us.
VIII
And then there was Light.
I've done some creative writing inventing creation myths - and creation is the key word there, something I've come up with for the idleness of play; the order of creation seems right, but the details of it are fluffy.
Light comes from the position later referred to as Light from the sun itself (and also from the moon, its reflection, and stars, strangedistant suns). Light comes from the position where Land and Sea meet in the heat generated within the peat-bogs, the marsh-gasses that catch fire as will-o-the-wisps and form oil and coal, and the underland places that the sun goes in winter. Light is kindled within the woods of landness, and through the human ingenuity (or superhuman grace) of Lunarness, and in the hearthfire.
The only place on the map where light is not created is the Lunar-Stellar/Wetness/Sea-and-Sky path. Here, light must be brought and protected to ward off a world hostile to it. Its natural light is the coldness of the moon and stars upon a snowy hill at night, and the ultraviolet emanations of creatures in the ocean's depths; but these are not reassuring.
The coming of light is accompanied by the coming of those things that were initially absent:
- heat, life, motion, brightness, and time.
It is accompanied by (but distinct from) elemental fire
IX
Light is of central importance to Landcraft - our three key domains are named after the behaviour of light. There is:
SOLAR - the light and warmth of our nearest star; analogised to the life and systems of humans and their society
LUNAR - its strange reflection, both the mirrored light of the moon and the same-yet-unsame of the stars; analogised to outsiderliness, the near-human, the rebellious or shadow-side, the alternative
STELLAR - the inversion of light, the dark spaces between the stars, our sun's destiny as a black hole, and the terror of the nuclear reactor in the sky; analogised to the wild, the cthonic, the mystery, the awe and the unknowable
X
Between these points, there are paths:
Solar-Lunar Brilliance or Light - the warmth of solar and the pale brightness of lunar all at once in a dazzle of gold-and-silver light, like looking direct at the sun
Here we file the Sun and the Moon itself and spirits relating to them; it is a mix of warmth and brightness that can be at some times firey, at other times cold (but never distressingly so)
Lunar-Stellar Desaturation - the draining away of colour, the greying of the landscape or spirit
This position is always cold, from cold-and-dry like fresh snow to cold-and-wet like a torrent
Solar-Stellar Dapple - the interplay of light and shadow
This position is warm like the sun, or shaded like the absence of sun (which, for technical reasons, is distinct from the whitecold of lunar)
XI
There's interactions between the two triangles.
Horizon and Brilliance - both pertain to people still concerned with the world of humans. Horizon is a restlessness of possibility and doubt - Light is its resolution into a certainty, and an action. Horizon is stepping outside, Light is defining yourself by it. Horizon is wandering without end, and Light is the touch of brilliance that might be discovery, the divine, freedom and clarity - the direction.
As a landscape, this can be expressed by mounting the hillside, cliffpath or open plain in order to encounter a sunrise or sunset, to contemplate the stars or moon, and so forth.
Verdance and Dapple-Time - the colours of dapple are best understood as light and shadow falling through trees in the wood, but they are also the interplay of light and dark across the day or year - the physicality of time. The landscape is profoundly altered by it, changing in turn - brought alive by the coming of sunlight and night-time and rains and warm mornings - and the landscape is also dappled, patches of colour, patches of different biome, its life in the shifting. From the raw materials of the green, to ecosystems set-in-motion by solar circling.
As a landscape, this is therefore expressed as a forest with signs of its changing, including now fruits and flowers and brittle dry wood
Weather and Desaturation - it is clear to see why thoughts of the weather and the slow-coming of grey are intertwined - brooding shades of monochrome sitting atop the land, in fogs and clouds and the promise of a storm. Desaturation suggests processes - tides that come in and out by slow gradation, skyscapes that darken and then brighten, all within a restricted palette of possibility - the slow coming of death without the hope of resurrection. There is, too, a sense of the slow-fading and inorexible - the sapping away of hope, of life, of body-warmth and opportunity, as well as the downward-slide temptation of the eerie, the lobsterpotness of the Stellar more easily approached than escaped
Where the meeting of Sea and Sky is intuitively represented as a sky above an open ocean, the spirit of desaturation suggests to me images of implacable snowy mountains and the ice of the Arctic and Antarctic. The meeting of Lunar and Stellar energy here tells the story of an individualist human daring the impossible, of which mountaineers and arctic explorers are a good image.
XII
After the creation of light, we can now re-explore the landscapes already contemplated but with the addition of:
- heat, life, motion, brightness, and time.
Human cultures as they rise and fall: children and the ancestors, ancient villages and imagined futures
The LAND as it rotates through the year
The WEATHER as it gains motion, clouds which gather and disperse, the interaction of heat and light on these processes (for example, trees respiring in the morning which create clouds; the way that colder nights are also clearer; thermal currents used by birds and clouds; the weather cycles of the year)
The HORIZON tends to be barren and consequently little influenced by light. Nevertheless, it can be as a vantage point for watching clouds come and go with their patterns of light and shade, experiencing the shifting patterns of the sky, experiencing sunsets and sunrises
And there's definitely a distinction between the (no-light) horizon, which is cold and impassive and gives you no reply, and the nudging and ideas of a (lit) horizon that is inviting and invigorating
XIII
What Landcraft expresses most of all is motion: it is not separate building blocks but living systems, and wherever you are is being pulled to somewhere else
...the rivers flow down, across the land, blackening the soil, lushening and bringing life to the plants which grow tall - and mature into the harvest and the autumn fruits, and dry out, into wood for homes and fire for the hearth, that fire that burns up into the air, that fire which rises daily with the dawn, up into the insubstantial, the celestial, the light of sun, moon and stars, that mix with the heat that moves the winds and burns up and shifts the clouds and warms the moisture from the waters bringing rain, bringing storms, bringing water back to the ground; and the rivers flow down...
XIV
There are also three winds, one for each changepath, whose meanings will not now come as much surprise to you. These winds, perhaps, represent our ability to enter into experiences, for them to blow through us.
The White wind is associated with the Solar-Lunar, and it's breezy and brisk, clarifying, blowing away the cobwebs, bringing austere resolution, wakening you up and restlessness to be out-of-doors, a rather salty wind - one that makes you crave lunch after the satsfying exertion of a morning jog
The Blue wind is associated with the Lunar-Stellar, and its bloody miserable. It's when the motion of the air itself feels wet against your soul, and all is sodden, as if the world is sobbing and you with it.
The Red wind is associated with the Solar-Stellar, and in a sense it is no wind at all: it's warm, it can have motion but no sound, or it can have no motion either and be a sudden alert stillness, and the pulsating and panic is felt only within, stirring you to dance, to wildness, as forceful of a wind but of the spirit - it is electrifying, rash, irresistible.
List of Contemplations
Meditate through each of these contemplations in turn. Seek out the sight of them in your Walking.
- The creation of all (Stellar ▻ Lunar ▻ Solar)
- Solar resolves into LAND
- Lunar resolves into SKY
- Stellar resolves into SEA
- What it is to sense each of these things without heat, life, motion, brightness, and time
- Between LAND and SKY is the horizon.
- Between SKY and SEA is the weather.
- Between SEA and SKY is verdance.
- Characteristics of the Solar (and the daylight)
- Characteristics of the Lunar (and moon and starlight)
- Characteristics of the Stellar (and darkness)
- Light: land-sea, as in peat, coal, oil, underland mystery
- Light: human brilliance, our fire and industry
- Light: the grace of otherwordly light descending
- Light: where there is no light, as in underwater
- Forest-time and the Dapple
- The Land's year and the Dapple
- Desaturation and the Sky-Sea
- Desaturation and the Ocean
- Desaturation and the Cold
- Brilliance and the Celestial
- Brilliance and the Horizon
- LAND with heat, life, motion, brightness, and time
- &c. for HORIZON and for SKY
- &c. for WEATHER and for SEA
- The White wind
- The Red wind
- The Blue wind