Deep Time

Fencraft explores the eerie of unrecorded history. Pagans tend to be history enthusiasts, but we put particular emphasis on thinking about history, memory and time, and the sacred strangenesses they create - distortions and revisions, palimpsest places, half-forgotten gods, and what it is to reawaken them.

To discover

• How was the primary shape of this landscape formed? For example, what processes shaped its hills and mountains, its river or its coastline.
• What processes do you anticipate shaping this place in future? Notice how they are inevitable and latent already in the shape of things, tho it may be many centuries until it comes to pass.
• Was this place ever wholly underwater?
• What are the primary trees in your area - and how long do they tend to live? Look about as you walk for the longest-lived tree nearby.
• How long has the place you live been inhabited?
• Which in your town is the oldest road?
• Who is the oldest burial in the cemetary?
• Where does the name of this place come from? Has it ever had other names?
• What is the greatest change humans have made to the environment around you?
• What are the oldest buildings in the area?
• Who lived in your house before you?
• Spend any opportunities you can listening to older people talk about the past, and especially the past of place
• Spend time rummaging in junk shops, old bookshops, and museums.

Contemplations

• As you walk down paths, consider how many people have walked down it before.
• Collect photos and paintings of this place as it was - the older the better. See them overlayed onto the places as you walk about.
• When you know some of the processes which formed your landscape, find a place to sit & see it happen - overlay the two images until whenever you see that place, you see its past and future too.
• Learn how to estimate the age of a tree for trees in your area. Now as you walk past them, put a human year on the year that tree was planted, and the year when it was a young sapling.
• To make a tool, you must have a tool - which means all tools are in a family tree, going back to the Maker of the First Tool deep in unrecorded time. Meditate on this.
• Badgers go by fixed ways - to the extent that, if you put a fence across it, they will batter it down, for it was their way first. Who was the Waymaker of the first badger paths?
• When you go for a walk, consider that you are following your own ghost in the walks you have made before. Learn to see it.
• Sit and breathe. As you breathe out, see the place a little further back in time; and as you breathe in, return to the present moment. Gradually slow your breathing each loop, until you feel fully more somewhere else than here. Attempt this in buildings, ancient structures, and natural places.
• Hold an object and unmake it in your mind. Fold back through every hand that touched it, the processes of its making, back to the stillness of raw material, and back further to how that once was made. Then snap back to now.
• Consider your own body. Sometimes, we may look a little like a relative we know, but within us are old faces and shapes from further back than we can photograph.
• There are archeological sites sleeping undiscovered in this moment: perhaps bodies beneath the mound, or an old village. Meditate on this image.
• Instead of looking bacwards at time, look forwards, as if you have been floating on the surface of the sea until now - pass downwards and watch the water growing larger and larger above you, for you are in the middle of time, perhaps even at its beginning, and one day you shall be Landweird. Consider instead of the great age of things, how young are the mountains and the stones and the gods.

Tools for magic

Clocks, old photographs, old maps, dictionaries of etymology, Tourist Information booklets, local history societies, 2nd or 6th hand things

Spellcrafts

• Invite a haunting to your house. Collect second-hand things and speak to old photographs to increase the likelihood that the uncanny will break through there.
• Practice entering into ghost-time.
• Experiment with encountering time as substances, objects, or things you can interface with: particularly a kind of thickness or location, but possibly as doors and paths, or contained within a thing. If you have an affinity for experiencing energy, can you work with time in this way?

Reading List

Non-fiction

• British Woodland: Discover the Secret World of Our Trees - Ray Mears
• After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC - Steve Mithen

Fiction

• Lavondyss - Robert Holdstock