The Wanderer's Map

Correspondence systems are ways of organising the universe. I’ve heard the spheres of the Tree of Life described as a “conceptual filing cabinet”, a kind of map to the otherworlds – so you always know where you are, and how to get where you’re going. A map needs to highlight points of interest, so our map is of key concepts found within our lore. When reading fantasy, fairy tales and folk horror, you should be able to identify the characters, phases and symbols in terms of the Landcraft system. I have used other correspondence systems in the past, and always felt I was using the “wrong map” for the territory I travelled.

There and Back Again

The first way we understand the Solar, the Lunar and the Stellar in relationship to one another is:

• a spectrum travelling from Solar through the Lunar to Stellar
• as a golden Solar bullseye surrounded by a white Lunar ring, and outside it an infinite Stellar darkness

What does this symbolise?

The Solar

The Solar is the little village. It is where the hero always begins. It is, most archetypally, the Shire – permanent, changeless and lovely. It is the hall of Hereot, safe and guarded from the creatures that are outside. It is the Village of the Village, surrounded by a ring of threatening trees. It is the safe place Red Riding Hood begins before she walks to grandma’s house. It is Camelot, the perfect kingdom of men. It is home. It is the everyday life of mortal men, commonplace but not unmagical in its own way. There is always a Village.

The Lunar

Our lore almost always includes the image of the Village in some way or another, and a Village is defined by who is outside the walls; and a story is created by those who dare to wander outside them. Lunar is the threshold and those who pass through it. It is the gate, the in-between places, the act of daring to choose.

The Lunar maps the ambivalence of fairy-lore, where the Good Folk are always outside the walls – targeting those in isolated houses, walking alone on the road, or visiting forbidden mounds. The Lunar is the road to grandma’s house, the rabbit hole. The Lunar is the threat (and hope) of rebellion; the wickedness (and empowerment) of the witch in the woods. The Lunar is the Outsider without which the Village cannot define itself. In the Wicker Man, the residents of Summerisle are the Lunar to the Solar Christian, police-officer from the mainland; but that same isolated outsider is the Lunar to Summerisle’s community, to its village and its power. The Lunar is saying “no” – it is Robin Hood taking to the forest and fighting back, and it is the hippy dropping out and refusing to participate in any way. Sometimes it is Bilbo, leaving to travel back again, and sometimes it is Frodo who is forever changed; sometimes it is the witch they burn, and other times the disobedient woman who gets away and grows into her own power.

The correspondences of Lunar are the things which tempt one out of the village: Curiosity. Truth. Disobedience. We often see this function in the imagery of water, a Lunar element: the prophetic waters of Galadriel’s mirror, granting us access to the mysteries; the way over the waters to death in Excalibur and Robin of Sherwood and on the Styx and to Valinor; the way by river to the otherworlds as in Merlin (1998) – where Mab’s underground castle is reached by river, the way by sea to Summerisle from the mainland, and again in Robin of Sherwood, where Herne’s sanctum is in a cave across a waterway which, it seems, cannot be easily found in the forest by those who are not called to it. These waters are in two worlds at once, a kind of unmappable bridge. Something must be crossed. Something must be dared.

The Stellar

The final phase is the Stellar, the great Outside. When the inhabitants talk about the outsiders, they may mean people who dress strangely and speak wrongly and are different to them, the little differences of man. But there is also the Outside as the eerie, the uncanny, the untamed and the wild. For the Village was not built to ostracise those who are strange, but to defend man against the infinite. As landscapes, this is the mountains, the depths of sea and space, as opposed to the cosy pastoralism of the Solar. As gods, these are the cthonic and the strange ones, Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, the howling and the hunger. As spirits, this is not the otherworldly elves or even the capricious fairies but something that cannot be comprehended arising from the wildwood and the whole world shifts as it breathes. It is ancient, it is other, it is infinite. It is unwise to leave the Village and stray into the forest, but the Stellar phase represents those who are lost without returning, or who travel as far as they can go: this is frequently depicted as becoming one with the infinite, being devoured, going mad, or some mystery not fully explained.

When we say the Stellar is awe and terror, we are imagining this image of the golden village surrounded by darkness: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

We admit both perspectives: on the one hand, the human world is small and limited and we must open ourselves back up to the wild and uncanny which is all around us and more awesome than anything mere mortals can comprehend. On the other, we are in sincere terror of uncivilisation and revere its power and are greatful for the local corner-shop which is always filled with food. It’s important to note here that the three Celestials behave in different ways energetically – and that the Stellar is attractive, absorbent, a downward and rather slippery slope; it calls to you, and is easier to get lost within than it is to find ones way back.

The Lunar is the path between these two extremes. We conceptualise the Lunar in several different ways, because there are different ways the call can come, and because its nature is motion and change. It is the most contradictory and “cluttered” of the Celestials, because there are so many paths out of the village.

This is the Wanderer’s Map, the first symbol of how we understand the Celestials in a cosmological sense.

The Alchemy of the Moon

The spectrum of Solar -> Lunar -> Stellar underpins a lot of our correspondences. Here are a selection, but you will discover more yourself. We can overlay this sense of outwardness onto whatever it is we are doing. In Fencraft, this is the underlying map of all that we see and do.

Here is the forest; it is Solar, dappled sunlight on the green between the oaks, playing with the children of the forest in glades open to the sky; and it is Lunar, for as you go further in, it is the tangled undergrowth of the wildwood, where strange roots grow from the leafmould and owls hoot in the twilight, and the folk of the fae dance there and will speak to you – for a price; and it is Stellar, for go too deep and you will find the dark heart of all forests, the hunger and the howling.

And in the sea, the Solar is the sunlight upon the waves as brave men in golden helmets toss on the waters under a bright blue sky, voyaging; and the Lunar is the strangeness just under the water, a world of mermen and naiads and colourful fish, of the things within the sea calling you to dive in; and the Stellar is the ocean’s immense weight, its darkness, its unmapped depths, the strange and nameless things that might live there, and the way that sunken ships keep calling out to divers to become lost there and join the drowned and the dead.

And in the sky, we look upwards to the dome around us, the Solar of a bright blue sky and a fine day; and above it to the Lunar, where the clouds are and the birds are, wheeling to their own mystery; and up, up, up into the dark and further than the dark, to the contemplation of planet Earth, a tiny speck on the shores of the infinite, how wonderous, how terrible.

When we contemplate the natural world, we experience (and cultivate) this slippage.

And when we look to the divine, we see it also. We see first the Solar, the named gods: the fixed and reliable faces of the infinite who we call by their titles and their attributes – Minerva of Sulis, Gwyn son of Nudd, Arthur king of the Britons – and whom we trust, who have ever been a friend to man, who have appeared to us with fair-seeming faces in forms which do not harm us; and we see too our ancestors and our Mighty Dead who, perhaps in time, have become the gods; we see things that look like men, who speak to us with our own voices.

And behind it, we see the Lunar, the uncertain and untrustworthy spirits we share the world with – who were, perhaps, once gods, but their names have been forgotten; or who are, perhaps, gods still, but forced into the forests by the village who name them: demon, devil, fairy, witch. For gods can be outcast just as can man. Under the moon, we see the making of pacts and truces, of alliances and promises, of respect without worship, for the things that are around us in the mounds and the undergrowth, the forgotten people. Gwyn son of Nudd, the mighty god is transformed into the fairy Gwyn, lord of the hunt and prince of mounds. Fair-seeming at times, they can change when they will it to many forms; a friend to some when it suits them, but there is always a price.

And when all masks and veils are revealed, we see – if we can dare to look upon it – the Stellar that is behind all things. It is Semele, asking to see her lover Zeus in his true magesty, only to be burnt and blinded, just as Morgana is burnt by looking into the unshielded eyes of the dragon. It is angels depicted not as youths in robes, but as eyes and wheels and wings of light; no longer a goddess of love or a fairy queen, it is pure lust or adoration experienced withot filter. Unnamed and unremembered, it is an experience, an atmosphere, a miasma, a sense of something in the land. It is the reason we mistrust those who leave the village and spend too long in the forest. It is the reason why we first created gods, fair-seeming filters through which we could dare to approach the infinite.

We see this map in the act of creation. This time, we are travelling from the divine darkness and great unknown to the known and the physical beneath our feet. In the beginning, there was mystery. Sometimes we see it as darkness, or as nothingness, or as immensity; and in our myths we conceptualise it as the love of night sky for the sea, who were first, black and beautiful, reflecting one another. Or perhaps the spark of fire within the fen, as the water and earth poured in and brooded within the dark, rotting into renewal and life. But truest of all to Fencraft, it is mystery: the uncertainty of physicists to truly explain what was there and the sacredness of our not-knowing, of our capacity to wonder and imagine it. This reverence of the act of not-knowing appears throughout Fencraft, most clearly in our reverence of the Landweird, of the lost gods as lost gods rather than as something fixable which we can solve.

From that immense possibility, everything travels inwards and shrinks towards the core of what is known, which is the Solar: the everyday, the seen, the physical, the worldly, the fixed.

On the Shore of the Cosmic Ocean

In short: when the Celestials are put in a straight line, the order is Solar -> Lunar -> Stellar – or vice versa. I have never encountered an exception to this and currently believe there are none. This order, of two polar extremes and the journeys between them, is part of the underlying wordlview of what they are.

My husband has challenged this model a couple of times – specifically, the idea of a Solar startpoint or Solar vantagepoint. My husband is a Heathen, but also my sounding-board as I’ve been working these things out. So, I want to make some pre-emptive defenses based on his take.

Firstly, this model allows you to take any perspective point or start from any location. For example, whether the Village is a safe home or a cloying trap. Whether leaving the Village is adventure or danger. Over time, you may discover that your regular startpoint/perspective is not in the Village, but somewhere else looking back at it. But your craft will almost certainly continue to have the concept of the Village within it.

The second thing is, the map is not a moral imperative or even an accurate map of the real universe. It is a map of our lore. The Village, and what it represents, is core to the worldview of the lore. Therefore, our map must include it as a location point so we can relate to it. When you look at, say, the Tree of Life – it isn’t a set of circles and lines, it’s deeply embedded in Jewish mysticism as a map of how the cosmos was created, as emanations from God filtering down and down and down to the physical world we are in. We don’t use the Tree of Life (although a lot of ceremonial tradition western tradition does) because it is not a map of the territory we are travelling. When you study Landcraft, you will find ways to the sorts of moods, folklore, experiences and divinity that we cultivate and revere.

I leave you with Carl Sagan (who is a ☉☽︎ figure, called out of the Village towards the infinite by scientific curiosity), with the monumental opening to his series Cosmos.

(I first encountered this as a teen, as part of a mashup album by RIAA on a track called The Wonder is All Around Us, which contiunes to be one of my very favourite songs)

The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.
There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice a faint sensation, as if a distant
memory of falling from a great height.
We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.
The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.
Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth.


For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves.
This is a time of great danger.
But our species is young and curious and brave.
It shows much promise.
In the last few millennia, we’ve made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it.
I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.


We’re about to begin a journey through the cosmos.
We’ll encounter galaxies and suns and planets life and consciousness coming into being, evolving and perishing.
Worlds of ice and stars of diamond.
Atoms as massive as suns and universes smaller than atoms.
But it’s also a story of our own planet and the plants and animals that share it with us.
And it’s a story about us: How we achieved our present understanding of the cosmos how the cosmos has shaped our evolution and our culture and what our fate may be.
We wish to pursue the truth, no matter where it leads.
But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.
We will not be afraid to speculate.
But we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.
The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths of exquisite interrelationships of the awesome machinery of nature.


The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.
On this shore, we have learned most of what we know.
Recently, we’ve waded a little way out maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from.
We long to return.
And we can.
Because the cosmos is also within us.
We’re made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
The journey for each of us begins here.
We’re going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies it can take us anywhere in space and time.
Perfect as a snowflake organic as a dandelion seed it will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts.
Come with me.