Forest Fellows

The wildwood of folklore is European fantasy's most fundamental imagnary - so well known that there's little to say about it, for you have always already from story feared and longed for it. Where I grew up, we did not have woods - a flat, harsh island like a washed-out watercolor, perfect for growing very little except the terror of the sea - with the occasional pine copse you could see all the way through. It was only on visiting my grandparents I encountered the same forests I saw in film - and they lived where in England Robin Hood once lived. I belonged to it.

Fencraft acknowledges that our spirits are overlapping and fragmentary; it's a system designed to do this best. Where two entities are on the same position on the map, they are likely to have become blurred in the record and the culture. This does not mean they are the same spirit - nor are they necessarily different. When we begin our journey we are open to both possibilities. It is only through seeing and direct gnosis we will arrive at a truth.

The forest is associated with the ☉✺, and thus has several aspects spanning the whole path ☉☽✺. There are also spirits which are forest-aligned, but whose core is elsewhere on the map (most notably, Robin Hood as Defender of the Downtrodden, who is a Lightbringer who just so happens to be in the woods). But where there is overlapping, there's no need to fret about clear taxonomy. Is it ☉☽ of ☉✺ or ☉✺ of ☉☽ or ☉☽🜃 or - use whatever seems right in the moment. It's simply a language for articulating these shades of meaning, to point you in a direction you need to go. The system is for describing that which blurs. Use whatever combination of layers, or whatever simplicity, communicates what you intend to say, or how you perceive it. You can, if you like, think of these as less people than phases a given ☉✺ Forest Fellow might be encountered under. But you might also discover them as totally distinct beings.

Guardian of the Green

A figure embodying an area of the land, guarding and protecting it - a nature spirit, first before all - sometimes encountered as the Green, or as highly local spirits who have adopted their patch or are bound to a task. You can read the essays on the Guardian and look at images.

See: Tom Bombadil, the Green Man, Cerunnos (lord of the animals), Ents, Sylvanus

• Total immersion, embodying nature
• Being part of an ecosystem (☉ being part of a system, but it is ✺ beyond the human everyday and control)
• Governing the right action ☉ of things wild ✺
• Interfacing between things mortal ☉ and things wild ✺ - typically from the wild's perspective
• Embodying an alternate value system that is suggested by the experience of being in the woods
• A nature defender - terrifying ✺ to threats, placid ☉ or ✺ indifferent to those who leave it alone
• The interlocking system ☉ of wild or uneartly things ✺
• Twee and simple celebration ☉ of nature ✺ - see also Queeen of the May, Jack of the Green style roles (or is that like the Corn King, more of a mortal festival about mortal concerns?)

The Wild Hunt

Variously led in different cultures and over time - as the Good Neighbours, the dead, demons, to us all ☽ spirits that are both person-like yet outside, and of immediate concern as near-nightmares to the village.

See: traditional hunt leaders include Odin, Gwyn. Consider Dionysus, maenids and somafera. Interlinked with ☽✺🜁 the Night Flight, and potentially interlinked.

• The ☽✺ sensation of getting lost, becoming utterly out of your depth, but embodied as forest things
• The hunger and the howling - as either victim or part of the pursuit
• Mortal nightmares ☽✺
• The slippery sensation of falling towards the abyss, which in this case is the profound ☽✺self-loss of being ☉ swallowed by a collective - the hunt
• Related to the next point, becoming food and no longer being fully human because of it

Werefungi

I use this term in my notes as a blurring between the two central images here: transformation into animals and becoming part of the strange networks of sentience of plants.

See: Pan, werebeast legend, lost-with-the-fairies lore. Cerunnos as sacred stag may fall here.

• The profound self-loss of ☉ becoming one with ✺ something wild. As in the Wild Hunt, one is utterly ☉✺ transformed by the encounter with nature.
  • This could mean becoming a weird old man of the woods - Merlin Wyllt, St Guthlac
  • lost with the fairies never to return in a terrifying dance
  • or physically transformed into a beast (or becoming more beast than man)
  • or being devoured (as route to transcendence)

As on the other path, starting from ☽ through ☽✺, one has made a break with mortal things, and is now facing the infinite, drawn by the irresistible cosmic tug of the star, something more easily started than stopped.

the Horned One in the Wood

A sort of forest devil/trickster fairy archetype, often the image of the folk devil as teacher in the woodland, or a gentleman in green velvet. In Wicca, he is the blended memory of the Christian devil presiding over cults in the wood with the ancient hunter god. A definite sense of being spindly. Qualities of the fairy ☽ and witch cult ☽ expressed under 🜃, but more as a person who just happens to dwell in the woods than - say - a Guardian of the Green, who is a nature spirit before all other things. Silvery and dark - rarely sungolden.

A good example for this archetype is Scarf Michael The Outcasts (1982), in which he is part homeless wanderer, part folk-story.

The Fairy King

In Fencraft, 'fairies' are an umbrella term for non-human people who live alongside us, and this is also an essentially ☽ level of being (neither ☉ mortal nor ✺ outer entity). As a solid sphere, (static, cut-off from other energies entirely, not a path), the ☽ part of the path can be the entry to the fairy kingdom, cut off from time and ageless.

The actual manifestation of 'a fairy' is impossibly broad. The ☉✺ path can be a running-away-with-the-fairies narrative, and so this is where they dwell, in forms somewhat safe to approach and treat with. Often but not always 🜃 related, as faeries may-or-may-not be elemental depending on who you meet. Sometimes, they just happen to be encounteres within the forest; and as they are a little set apart from time & the world, this is not even necessarily like meeting a deer or a spider in the woods that is within the ecosystem there.

Like the Horned One, I see silvery and dark but rarely golden, but there is a golden face, as in the elves that children meet at the forest's edge.

The Changeling

A figure embodying the path as a whole - dreaming, escape, fae folk, forests, transformation and devouring. See her pages.

Her story takes her through ☉☽ daydreaming as resistance, through to her apotheosis as ☽ fairy queen, and sometimes beyond, into becoming a ☽✺ wild thing. It is she who knows the secrets of the ☽✺ underground and its returning.

Her images are quite distinct from other forest fellows: undergrowth, insects, berries, flowers, rust red and browns. To me, this signals her separate role as archetype of the path, and perhaps a different history (both cultural and divine). She is in the forest, but not of it - she embodies ☉✺ energies, not 🜃 ones. It also creates a clearer division between when you are encountering a ☉✺ energy, vs encoutnering Her as an experience or person.

The Hunter

In many ways, just the Changeling with differently gendered vibes. A ☉ mortal who communes with the ✺ wild.

• Sometimes, like a ☉ King, making truces with the wild to allow man and nature to live in harmony.
• Sometimes, a ☉ Guardian ancestor who teaches what he knows of his craft
• Sometimes, more of a ☉☽ go-between, suspicious because who knows where his allegiance lies
• Sometimes, as in a ☉☽ priest or wandering wizard, some mortal whose skill in the wild and relationships there is essential to the community's survival
• Sometimes, a ☉☽✺ Changeling, who is tempted and falls, or flees and never turns back, more of the woods than the world.
• Sometimes a ☽✺ becoming one with the hunt or becoming its prey or disappearing utterly into the world of beasts.
• And at his depths, the ✺ - the first and ancient great hunter, deeper back before time, walking beneath the mistress of the midnight stars, oldest and wordless of mighty spirits.
• At times, I see a ☽✺ bog body god, a swamp thing, and he is perhaps a hunter transformed that which was once a man and now is marsh gas. A weird forest dude.
• Sometimes I see a ☉ mortal hunter in relationship to a ☽ fairy prince, who is his tutor or companion
• Sometimes I see the mortal hunter as the Changeling's unwanted prince, and th young hunter as her tempter - or her consort - a relationship which to me seems always to be rocky, as if neither can tolerate a rival.

He tends to seem autumnal and wintery to me; tends not to be floral, poisonous, nor plantlike.

I see all of these in what is said when pagans haphazardly reach towards a Hunter spirit, that ever-appealing embodiment of knowing the woods and being known in turn. When we seek for the Hunter, what is it we are reaching for?

The Thing in the Woods

For years, my notes concerned 9x9 grids of increasing complexity and strangeness, trying to hammer down what I was channelling into form. The furthestmost corner of the grid (✺x✺) was always 'The Thing in the Woods and the Thing in the Water' - the dark heart of all forests. Don't get lost.