The Changeling

Values and practices

• Pleasure: dance, food, joy, sex, nature, sensation, beauty
• Fullheartedness, intense emotions
• Self-transformation
• Taking your own power; saying no; creating freedom
• Using intense, ecstatic methods – such as dance or intoxicants – to seek wisdom
• Say no to everybody but yourself; deny yourself nothing
• Rediscovering your inner child – reading fairy stories, for example
• Contribute to activism around sex and relationships – for example, domestic violence, consent, sex education, contraception, and so forth
• calling on the Changeling as a guardian or guide to open the way to otherworlds, to fairyland, to her particular magics, to the wildwood, and so forth
• using the Changeling’s story as an inspiration and model for your own life, especially as a pathway to encounters with the Landweird

Children

• curiosity and playfulnesss
• wilfulness
• rediscovering imagination and play
• refusing responsibility

Sleeping

• dreaming
• visions and fantasies
• reading fantastical stories that give you Ideas
• daydreaming
• visiting the otherworlds (nderground, asleep, through glass, off the path)
• hibernating in order to grow
• Getting “lost with the fairies”

Sex

• The sacred sexuality of the flower that becomes the fruit
• Forbidden love – especially of a sexual character
• Or alternatively, refusing sex or romance
• victim/victor; hunter/hunted; seducer/seduced
• Courtly love/sexual love
• Protector/avenger of those who have been hurt in love
• An especial guardian and protector for young people beginning to express their desires/setting their boundaries
• The sensual world - art or music, for example

Self-loss

• Creating trance experiences
• Ecstatic dance and music
• Intoxicants
• Becoming overwhelmed by the might of nature and magic
• Journeys to the otherworlds
• Becoming part of the swirl of nature’s abundance
• Self-loss to encounter great secrets and power

Experience

• Innocence/experience
• Survival, catharsis, growing in strength
• Death, rebirth, self-healing
• Transformation from one thing into another
• Radical life change
• Growing in power/claiming power
• Breaking out of duty/social limitations, and claiming freedom
• Autonomy, independence
• Knowing what you want and how to get it
• the choice

Pleasure

• “Time to be greatful for every limb”
• Joy, delight, wonder,
• Marvels and luxuries
• Self-indulgence
• Abundance
• Art and true beauty

Stories

• Fairies
• Werewolves
• Things in the forest
• Things that devour other things

Magic

• Particularly that related to the fae folk, such as calling them or glamours
• Use of trance and altered states – especially dance and transformation into animals
• The use of emotion as a conduit for will in magic

Image

The Changeling should always have something of the pre-raphaelite about her – flyaway hair, as opposed to straight; an abundance of fabric; huge medallion-like flowers and twisted briars; and a smile and a foot both ready for dancing. In our period, women’s hair was generally pinned back and covered. Erte’s is not, or it is rarely shown this way – or it is put up only to be released.

Everything about her is dreamlike. Never settle with depicting or imagining Erte. Do not depict her in anything less than a seven-year old girl’s dream princess dress, regardless of her aspect. For music, it must soar unashamedly with passion or make you want to dance. Fill the background with the most luxurious shapes and the most vivid colours. Dancing in the woodland in the springtime, or dancing surrounded by the red storm in the autumn, are iconic images; as is her sat with arms filled with poppies, mead, and fruits of autumn.

She is generally depicted as a young woman. Despite her association with childhood, I rarely see her as such – her story is one of returning to childlike wonder, more than being a literal child, and her moments of power and mythic interest all happen when she is far older. I suppose for me, the implicit sexuality of her power means depicting her as a child feels unavoidably wrong. My writing imagines adults, rather than children, as its readers - her focus is 'encountering your inner child' within the midst of adult experiences (parenthood is addressed in other parts of the Map)

Erte-of-Mabon is often depicted as more plump than her springtime counterpart, communicating a comfort and luxuriance in her own body.

The waifish woodland girl is an overwhelmingly white cultural meme, related to ideas of whiteness representing purity; I would urge you, when depicting and envisaging her, to push back on this meme (especially since Erte is the spirit of unashamedly-being-yourself; we can hardly celebrate that story and then go on to envisage her in an extremely restrictive and monocultural way). I’m hoping to produce some alternative images in future; and would welcome anyone who wants to submit some in the mean time.

Colours

• Beltane – white, green, pale yellow, spots of red
• Mabon – deep red, brown, black, spots of white, or a dark silver

White or silver can appear to show her relationship to the Lunar independence, but she is generally “dry” not “wet” or “cold”, and related to land not sky or water. The greens and browns show her relationship to the Solar and to things of land and earth. To denote the Solar-Lunar, her images often use the interplay of light and dark, like when sun comes through the leaves. The dark underpainting – the vivid contrast with black – shows her attraction to the dark

Places

Erte is a spirit of the woodland and the forests of the otherworlds. Her characteristic times are dawn and dusk, and any time the sense of magic in the land is bewitching and calls to you.

Her duality here is a perfectly kept walled garden (and its courtly love sexual symbolism, as a controlled, confining place), vs the untamed wildwood. Another duality we see is overground/underground (with underground including tangling roots, burrows, things that are buried, things that are beneath the surface, and the transformative way that fallen leaves turn to soil and to new spring growth)

She is associated with the “red wind”, which is hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it, but it is different from the clarifying white wind and the sodden blue wind, and feels somewhat like if you were to become a dance of autumn leaves.

Trees and Plants

• the Changeling is associated with elemental forest, so overwhelmingly the landscape of British woodland and the forest which is a part of all forests is hers
• apple, cherry, rowan, hawthorn (red berries, white flowers – the innocence/experience duality, and the sacred mystery of the flowers and the fruit)
• roses (anything big and lush that would look good on a pre-Raphaelite wallpaper)
• poppies (bring sleep), mushrooms (bring visions)
• possibly the yew (red berries and poison)
• briars, brambles, anything with thorns
• abundance – a riot of flowers and leaves and animals
• undergrowth, fallen leaves, mushrooms; swampy mosses, rotting trunks (these presumably speak to her role as transformation, as the life cycle of plants)

Animal

There is at least some evidence that the Fairy Prince in our pantheon is more concerned with the lives of animals in the forest. Nevertheless, the Changeling has some characteristic animals that might be considered to be hers. These include:

• Moths, insects, butterflies, cobweb, creepies, caterpillers
• The wolf (from Red Riding Hood lore)
• The white rabbit, the luxurious cat (from Alice in Wonderland lore; the latter usually self-satisfied)
• The ermine (goes underground, changing from winter white to summer brown; associated with lumpenprole sculduggery)
• The doe (“the hunted” symbolism)
• Little birds and forest friends (from classic Disney imagery, as her surrounded as mistress of the animals)

Food

• Erte is the berries, as the Hunter is the meat, in pre-agricultural feasts.
• Forest feast: nuts, honey, and other such fairy foods (honey is associated with her bees and his bear)
• berries, berry jams, especially black and red.
• And beyond that time, she is the fruiting in the autumn, one of the three autumn feasts. Fruits include: apple, pomegranite, cherry
• Mushrooms, things growing on other things
• Fairytale food: treacle, gingebread, rich fruit-cakes
• Treats: dessert, dark chocolate, truffles, anything rich and luxurious
• Intoxicants: ertaic practice welcomes the use of enethogens. For alcohols, mead (from honey) or port, or other heavily fruity alcohols, is recommended; anything related to mushrooms or poppies.

Other Symbols

• Footprints, slippers, cloaks, going barefoot, crowns and ballgowns
• spirals and circles – dancing, spinning wheels, labyrinths, cloaks, swirling skirts, the motion of clocks, fairy rings
• Chess sets, chequers, cards
• white queen/red queen
• strange mirrors
• Things feasting on one another

Attribution

Landish (Solar-to-Stellar path) and Lunar.

If you envisage the map as two paths from Solar to Stellar, you will find that the Solar-Stellar and the Lunar are in some way equivalent.

She is the ruler/symbol/embodiment of the Solar-Stellar; but simultaneously is a Lunar spirit – especially in terms of values and drive, like independence and freedom, rather than elements or symbols, and the way she represents a feared-outside that contrasts the Solar.

Names

She who Dances, the Lost one, Breaker of Bonds; unlike the other spirits, there’s a definite sense of a personal name trying to come through for me, and my notes contain reference to Erte, Erthe, Erda. I don’t know where this is going, so I leave it with you.