Landweird FAQ
Here’s a handful of overspill questions from the previous post introducing the Landweird.
Is Fencraft monotheist or polytheist?
It’s a very interesting question! But probably polytheist.
The Landcraft in Fencraft is ever-present in our thoughts, and in the background to to our understanding and cosmology. We may honour and recognise it, or call upon it for guidance to know it more fully, as part of a ritual routine – but we would never exactly expect a “reply”. It is everything to us, but we would not necessarily say that we loved or feared it, more that it has existence and is mighty and is thus worthy of honour. Like Mallory on climbing mountains, when asked why we worship the Landweird before all others, we reply “because it is there”.
I think the nearest example I know of would be the role of Illuvitar in Middle Earth, or Bondye in Vodou – both of which are monotheistic religions which do not look monotheistic to a casual observer:
“ Like many other monotheistic deities, Bondye is a remote being. He is too far beyond human understanding for direct interaction. Instead, Bondye manifests his will through the lwa. These spirits manifest as forces that impact the lives of humanity on a daily basis. Vodou ceremonies, therefore, focus upon the lwa rather than on Bondye…Vodou is most known for its lwa. These are the spirits with which Vodouisants regularly interact. Outsiders sometimes mistakenly label the lwa as gods, but this is incorrect. They are spirits who in many ways act as intermediaries between the physical world and Bondye, the single god of Vodou. ”
Source: https://www.learnreligions.com/bondye-the-good-god-of-vodou-95932
Like Vodou, the Landweird is an overarching entity beyond human understanding, and with which we cannot directly interact – instead, most daily work is done with a large pantheons of other, personified spirits. This is also not unlike Medieval Christianity, where saints do the day-to-day work of direct contact for followers. An outsider looking at your practice, ritual cycle or altar space may not immediately recognise the importance of the Landweird.
Howevegr, there are significant differences too: the Landweird is not a creator, nor a “great god”, and indeed we usually avoid referring to it as a “god” to avoid the baggage that comes with that term. My (limited) understanding of Bondye is that understanding him as similar to the Christian God is not far off the mark; whereas this understanding would be extremely misleading for the Landweird. It has no clear gender, and we never perceive it as having either voice or form – it takes no actions beyond being a presence we cannot wholly understand. Nor does it perform any of the functions we might expect of a god, such as passing judgement, rewarding good behaviour, protecting worshippers, answering prayers, ruling the world, ordering nature, or policing morality. It is greater than gods and more strange, we are not even sure whether it has consciousness and will to express itself – or, like a cloud, is simply there.
Additionally, we would never suggest that the “other” gods were our intermediaries to access the Landweird – if anything, it’s the other way around. This is discussed more below, but we would more usually understand it that the Landweird is some strange intermediary through which we access the forgotten gods, which are “somewhere else”; or the rememberer through which we can know once more what has been “forgotten”; or the dreamer through which we can reawaken the old, lost spirits which only exist now as dreams. At the same time, however, some of our spirits associated with Lore or who are Keepers, we may work with them especially because they have insight into the Landweird, and may help us understand or approach it more safely as a kind of “intermediary”
Each Fencrafter will recognise a “Personal Court” – that is, of all the possible Powers that could exist, these are Powers the individual has either met, thinks it looks cool, or intuitively knows to be real. Everyone’s Personal Court will be slightly different. We enthusiastically encourage people to make-up-their-own-gods. If you like the Elder tree down the road, do a meditation, and perhaps a name and a face will emerge from the Landweird. Discovering a lost Power, such as the guardian of this elder tree, is fantastic – they typically have less demands on their time than named Powers, are often greatful or curious about you, and in an important sense, finding them is part of the “duty” of a Fencrafter, we who revere the great forgotten mysteries of the land. If you get a gut sense or a mental image, go with it, and encourage those faculties to grow.
So – back to the first question – monotheist or polytheist? Our daily practice looks more like polytheism, a myriad of Powers. But the Landweird is always central in our thought, understood as uniquely overwhelming, and set apart from the others in its characteristics and function. Perhaps because (as in monotheism) it is much more important; yet perhaps it is not actually a god at all, but the biproduct of some kind of process, and thus describing it as any kind of god would be misleading.
Are All Gods One God In Fencraft?
Unsure – probably not, generally no, but potentially.
I tend to take a hard polytheist approach to Powers in Fencraft – approaching them as literal reality, and as individuals.
(Soft polytheists are welcome, but my experience as a pagan over the last 15 years is that telling yourself that gods are merely archetypes of the human imagination is a real “barrier” to gnosis and immanent experiences – especially in Fencraft where the human vs nonhuman distinction is so important it’s mapped in Landcraft as a primary correspondence. Soft polytheism recaptures everything to some form of human thought or expression. In other words, it’s an extremely Solar-Lunar perspective)
Fencraft practice usually assume all gods are individuals, separate from one another; but are open to them both coalescing into all-gods, and fragmenting into aspects. Our Powers are fluid and shimmery. Just as the books about them have come down to us, uncertain and changeable, so we cannot hope to reconstruct a neat pantheon out of them. We work primarily with aspects – the smallest, most-narrowest possible vision of the Power – because we can get some kind of clear fix on them. Part of the “seeking the Landweird” is a recognition that, over time, our gods will tend to merge with one another – or the reverse, that they will split down revealing many gods, in an organic and never-ending process. We are undertaking actions which lead us to deeper, unwritten understanding of the divine.
Fencraft embraces not-knowing. We will never know the true nature of the Landweird. We will never know for sure the lost names of the Old Gods of England. We will never rediscover the lost Mysteries of our ancestors, or have a clear and fixed Pantheon. Fencraft is enthusiastic about the way the terms god, fairy, demon, dead and fictional character are used interchangeably in the lore. We are open to discovering a fey creature is, for example, a lost river god. We approach mythic figures as individuals (Herne and Robin are two different spirits) but we are open to discovering they are the same spirit over time, or perhaps two more-approachable “aspects” of the same Power. We typically do not ask tough questions about how Robin Hood AND Herne AND Robin Goodfellow can all be Lord of the Greenwood simultaneously. Instead, we note that when spirits occupy a similar place on the Map, they are more likely to have blurred in history, and this may-or-may-not indicate a single underlying spirit, or a genuine case of mixing up two separate things. Sometimes, Powers seem to be aware of each other – and others do not, as if each occupies a slightly different vibration of reality.
We would never say that Sulis Minerva was an “aspect” of the Landweird or an expression of it, the way that we would say that Sulis and Minerva were closely interrelated Powers or aspects of one another. Nor would the Landweird be an appropriate stand in for the Wiccan God or Goddess, of which all divinities are a part.
However, there are certain mythic understandings of the Landweird and the nature of the Gods which would propose that they are all parts of the Landweird’s dreaming, or its (fallible) memory – the Landweird is not the gods, but it is the rememberer, and through it we can speak to their their shadows. Many pagan sources propose a myth in which the gods are “gone” or “asleep” or “dead” or “somewhere else”, to explain their comparative absence from the world. We can’t immediately access the spirits of the Avebury circle as our forebears once did – what’s left in its place, is Landweird, its mystery and our not-knowing.
We believe that these secrets are now part of the Landweird, and with them their gods, who have perhaps become part of the dreaming of the Land – so one could, perhaps, see them as all aspects of the Landweird, or all projections of its memories. Additionally, Stellar beings often have a gestalt/hivelike quality – like understanding a forest ecosystem as one, living, writhing entity, made up of myriad smaller intelligences. The Landweird is not all gods, but all gods may be understood as contained within it – as a moth is contained within the forest or a single man contained within the ancestors. One evocative way to understand this vision of the Landweird is “Ancestor worship, but for the gods”, a lineage of unknown faces spilling backwards in our blood, the long dead surviving as long as we survive to sing of them.
What does it want?
It’s just there.
The Landweird in brought on by unexplained beginnings, phenomena that are impossible to stop because we do not fully comprehend their nature. Consider when (in The Weird and the Eerie) Mark Fisher suggests that the Shining is, in fact, not a ghost story – we merely interpret the Happening at the Overlook hotel as a haunting because it is a horror film, but we have equal in-world evidence that it could be some form of alien presence. Part of the film’s eeriness is the unanswered questions: is it one entity, or several? Does it have agency or intelligence? Can it be understood in human-like ways? Is it knowingly malevolent, or unaware of human presence? When the ghost-bartender makes reference to the “real Management of the hotel”, to what or whom is he referring? Fisher compares it to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which similarly has an influence on humans without ever being certain if that influence is conscious and willed – and if so, what its intentions might be.
No monster that can be easily fought, is Landweird; this it what sets Landweirdy media apart from other parts of the horror genre, in which something is attacking or menacing and can be overcome. Its why, in the Shining, no one even momentarily suggests an exorcism or other act of operative magic to get rid of the Happening, nor do they use the word “ghost” or talk about their experiences in ways which might easily recapture an eerie occurrence into something that can be understood and solved. It’s just being experienced. You do not need to watch the Shining to understand the Landweird which, aside from my & Mark Fisher’s shared fandom, is not itself especially Landweirdy; but his understanding of the Overlook is nevertheless central to my understanding of the Landweird as haunting.
We wouldn’t usually pray to the Landweird; it’s definitely not a god in that sense, nor is it anthropomorphised, scrutible, understandable by man. We do not generally believe the Landweird has an intelligence – at least, not that we can understand it – and don’t peer too closely; we’re open to the possibility that the Landweird might be recordings senselessly repeating themselves, or in some way mad, distressed, trapped, sharing its memories to no purpose; or alien, and at so cosmic a scale of remove that humans are quite unable to grasp its purpose.
This is why we define our practices as Seekers of the Landweird as one of experiencing it, through time spent Walking or Reading; or attempts to more fully understand it. We view the “wordlessness of the Landweird” as an expression of its alien nature; it is producing experiences, and therefore, that may be its method of “communication” with us – though what it is saying is the task of our mystics and seekers to comprehend over time.
Is the Landweird OK?
An unanswerable question, but I certainly have a sense that it is the result of a traumatised process. After all, quite literally, the loss of our gods and ancient traditions were written in blood, one conquest after another, writing over what was there before.
If we understand the Landweird as some kind of haunting, then we might look to how spiritworkers will encounter ghosts who are too confused or incoherent with rage to understand what and where they are, and their task is to mediate with it and help it pass over, released from the panic of sudden death. If we understand it as ancestor-work, but for the Lost Gods, then here too we see difficult magic, of healing, remembering and restoring. Or if we understand the Landweird as something that has been bound, trapped, hidden, chained, or buried, then our instinct is to release it, or if we cannot, to soothe and calm it. If there are Sleepers, they must be guarded so that their dreams are gentle and clear, and do not become incoherent and muddled. If there is a Keeper, then we return once again at an urge to protect something – or to protect others from it.
Similarly, I reflect on the anger of dementia patients, who know they are forgetting what they ought to remember – or the anger of trauma survivors, unable to escape a shard of their past – the great grief that history is made up of – and the mourning that accompanies any kind of a loss – and I imagine that a Mighty Power related to these processes would express far more “difficult” emotions than ones which are benevolent or comforting.
When I do Landcraft, am I drawing power from the Landweird?
I don’t think so. I think power, in the abstract sense, is a different part of the system, perhaps related to the act of creation. After all, “Landweirdy” characteristics are on the Map as the Stellar point – you never get Solar Landweird, at any time, so I don’t see how Landweird could ever produce Solar energy. Similarly, we think that the Landweird probably played no part in creation, and thus how could it be a source of “creative energy” now? Nor do I think that attempting to “harness it” or “use it” is wise, given that it may well be sentient.
Like elsewhere in Fencraft, we typically “leave the Landweird alone” – we do not trouble it with prayers, summon it, or attempt to influence or control it. So more broadly, you should avoid doing Landcraft that interacts with the Landweird.