the Landweird

Our most important Power is the Landweird – a faceless, unknowable, omnipresent, unsettling gut-feeling about the British landscape and its mythology. It is is our uncanny sense that there is something older, more ancient, impossibly powerful, impossibly strange, hidden in the landscape, and half-remembered in stories and songs. Percieving parts of it more fully is the key task of Fencraft. When you get a sense that there is Something in the forest, or that a nursery rhyme hides ancient lore you have – briefly – glimpsed the Landweird.

We live among objects of mystery and fractured folklore. There is no totality of archaeological explanation, no decoding of legend to explain every barrow and stone. - Dr. Michael Benn, 1976, Hookland

More atmosphere or mood than anything else, the Landweird encompasses the following ideas:

Yet, the Landweird is no mere metaphor – we understand these experiences as encounters with a mighty Power, and seeking them is the primary call of our Tradition. We live so as to increase the number of transcendent moments of awe and the otherworldly we find – for the sake of having experienced them, rather than as a stepping stone towards other goals.

A secondary meaning of “seeking the Landweird” is rediscovering, and re-revering, the lost gods, spirits of the quiet places, the forgotten ones. In England specifically – but really, across Britain – we have lost touch with our pagan ancestors, who wrote nothing down, and their words are hidden to us – and with it, their gods, as much as we have tried to reconstruct them.

And a third meaning would be, wrestling with our uncertainty about what the Landweird is. Possible ideas range from the benign – a mystery which we can approach more nearly by devotion and prayer, the Old Ways which slumber until we can rediscover them, perhaps some conscious choice by a Merlin or a Penda to guard the Sleepers until they reawaken to a new and more brilliant Pagan dawn; to cosmic horror – an alien presence indifferent to man, and potentially dangerous in its vast unawareness of individual human existances, or a Power so mighty it fits none of our criteria for a loving god, and is not safely at some distant, celestial remove but immanent in the land around us. Our uncertainty about the Landweird is a key part of Fencraft as mystery tradition, which sees the unknown and unknowable lostness of gods as our most sacred mysteries.

It was evening before I climbed the bank. The sun had very nearly slipped out of the sky by this time, and I could get a good view. You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw – low coloured hills. But to me the were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled and I felt that those hills had called with inclaculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep, perhaps forever. They commune with humanity in dreams. Happy the man, happy the woman, who awakens the hills of Wessex. For though they sleep, they will never die - The Machine Stops – E.M. Forster

Experiencing the Landweird

Many of our texts wrestle with the lostness of the gods. From Excalibur‘s suggestion that Merlin has become part of the world of dreams; to Robin of Sherwood‘s depictions of visiting Herne within a cave or across the water, but always with the sense that they may not be physically there, but in a vision or entering into some shifted perception whereby Robin can be both present and alert in Sherwood and speaking in the the cave all at once.

The Owl Service and Sapphire and Steel present a world in which the past, the future, and mythic time have perpetual presence in the Land, all jumbled up at once, as if anyone can suddenly pass into a dreaming not of their own making. It may be a sudden incursion into the now, as in Penda’s Fen, or a cascade of jumbled parallels, as in Red Shift. Fairy stories, including those of Arthur, Tolkien’s Smith of Wooton Major, and Children of the Stones show the otherworlds as part of our own – and anyone can stumble into them unaware, but nobody can find them unless they wish to be found; and they are more easily entered into than escaped from.

The Landweird is often suggested by the presence of something buried, but imperceptibly influencing the land around it – as in the mysterious burial in Quatermass and the Pit, the sleeping warriors of the Weirdstone of Brisengamen; just as the Sutton Hoo ship burial was present, but hidden under the earth, at the same time M.R. James was writing his ghost stories about mysterious Anglo Saxon artifacts on the Felixstowe coast. Or the absence of something buried in the earth, as in the missing girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock, or the sudden evening strangeness that Arthur Machen felt at Caermaen, and that he tried to capture in The Great God Pan.

These could all be understood as an expression of Landweird. These depictions are often found in horror fiction, but although horror is an emotion often brought on by Landweird, it is also a limiting way of thinking about It: it is rarely if ever evil or malevolent, although it is often (without intent) harmful and frightening for a human to encounter. It is eerie, rather than horrifying or violent; and as Fisher points out, the eerie is not only a creation of film and fiction, but often encountered “in the raw” – when contemplating what we do not know about Stonehenge or Easter Island, or filling in the gaps of the story of the Marie Celeste.

Ian Miller

There are three ways you can think about the Landweird

The first is as some kind of god – albeit of a very Stellar kind, larger than we can concieve of or understand. Fencraft is, after all, a religion, and the Landweird is the most important Power within it – the one that sets us apart from others, the one you would expect to find acknowledged in everybody’s Personal Court. However – we must be very careful to not bring our “baggage” about gods to conversations about the Landweird, as discussed below – it is more of an animist presence, than an anthropomorphic thing with a face.

The second is simply as a mythic framework. Eclectic paganism is valid – but to me, always a little unappealing. The Landweird serves as a unifying concept for the grab-bag of gods, faries and landspirits many modern pagans count in their Court. As well as a mythologisation of the cultural processes of forgetting that have produced our surviving, fragmentary records – and a celebration of it, a way to honour and recognise it instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, or getting trapped into research which will never answer your questions.

Because our gods are fragmentary, we often cannot recognise them straight away. Our first instinct of a place or a piece of poetry is “…there’s Landweird here”. And through contemplation, ritual and time, we might come to understand the specific nature of a power – is it a fairy lady in a pool, is it the site of an old battle, is it an enchanted stone, is it the sleeping place for a dragon? But we can’t always get a fix on that straight away; which allows for a full and fulfilling pagan practice before you quite know your gods or how to interpret otherworld experiences and psychic impulses. But in an important sense, that experience of wondering is crucial to Fencraft, perhaps a unique part of our experience compared to other trads. We don’t know what’s out there, we don’t know the nature of the Landweird, we have forgotten our gods – and are seeking to rediscover them – but we are empowered by that seeking, not the destination, just as our Powers are at their most vital when fluid and shifting.

This is also the Landweird of the Reading List, the suggestion that many hands of artists in our land have been imperceptibly influenced by the unrecorded ones to make impressions of it, and our meta-explanation of why Pop Cultural sources are fully accepted within Fencraft, not as postmodern magical experimentation, but as genine routes to a divine we view as fully real.

The third is as an entity or process. I’m influenced by stories in which the Old Gods went to sleep – but can be awoken; or perhaps were defeated and in hiding, but will return. And if they are asleep, there must be both a dreamer and a dream: perhaps we are not experiencing the true Powers of the land, but their dreaming spirits which still linger here; perhaps the Powers truly are, in some sense, dead – but they survive in the dream, and that is why they are so strange to us, and must be reached by indirect ways. Perhaps it is the land itself, and its half-remembered memories.

The Landweird is the residue of that process, or a side-product that continues to be generated by it, which may have developed a kind of (hard-to-comprehend) consciousness. Possible concepts include: the land dreaming of itself; a landwight the size of Britain; the ghost of a dead god, tasked to remember and one day reawaken and bring back the Old Ones; the massed, faceless psychic energy of gods who are sleeping under the sea, powerful enough for sensitives to pick up on; a process whereby gods that are forgotten become gradually less personified, less individuated, the way an old carving is worn down by the rain, and the rememnants cluster themselves into formless gestalt creatures, and over time so many have come together that a Landweird has been formed, so ghost-wreathed is our landscape. It is the process of forgetting and misshapen remembering. All of these ideas propose the Landweird as a Presence, mightier and more important than any single god or Power we may serve, but not really fitting any of the criteria for god or Power either. We use terms like entity, presence, experience, mood or atmosphere, to discourage people from imagining the Landweird is ever something that may take the shape of a man.

Even though the Landweird is associated with deep ancientness, we have never seen it proposed that it might be itself the oldest, greatest or creator god. It seems ancient because it has contained within it ancient things; but it is itself comparatively new, and most importantly – growing, for the time of our forgetting will never be done.

The fourth is as a focusing of the tradition on some key concepts. When we know that Jesus is a forgiving god, we can assume that forgiveness itself is core to Christianity as a discipline. When we read myths in which Odin or Zeus disguise themselves as travellers seeking shelter, we can assume that hospitality to guests and stranger is a key cultural value.

Following these examples, our most important focus would be that the confusion and holes are not a barrier to reconstruction, but as sacred mystery – with both not-knowing and mystery-seeking are integral to the tradition. Another is to highlight our tendency to see Powers as subject to fluidity and distortion, in the process of forgetting and change – this concept appears in other faiths, such as the Mother/Maiden/Crone, but in Fencraft virtually all spirits have an unfixable nature. It reveals an interest in forgottenness generally, from palimpsest books to glitch culture; for me, Landweird tends to cluster very heavily where there are old things, as in cluttered junk shops and quiet old libraries. The same is true with media which is eerie, ghostlike, concerning memory, or featuring distortions in time.

The title The Lost Day carries the suggestion of an episode of amnesia. Fugues, losses of memory, are fundamentally eerie; but with the eerieness of amnesia, the unknown thing from the outside is you. What happened? What happened on some lost day in the late 70s? On the Suffolk coast, there’s a persistent feeling that the land is all out at sea. There is a feeling of a hot summer day where something becomes perceptible behind the surface of the land, behind the surface of the day. The land becomes hollow, it becomes hypersubstantial, it becomes an eerie emptiness consisting of awareness, feeling, intent. The sea is not around the land; it is the land, and it is the sky, a sky now swept with truly unfamiliar winds. They will live this, but they will not remember, for only their dreams will remember. There is a white void of air beneath their feet. This white void is the planet. It is beneath the figure on the hill, and all around them. They are a dream within a dream; the planet is a dream within a dream; the planet is teeming with inorganic sentience, as is the cosmos; potential allies, parasitic entities, explorers of the unknown, shadows, demons. The figure on the hill – a man, a woman – they see this, grasp it all, but it is too intense to be remembered, too perturbing for any normal level of energy. and then it is gone, the fugue memories keep coming through for a while, like aftershocks, ruptural incursions which do not rupture nearly enough - On Vanishing Land

Appearance

We don’t tend to visualise the Landweird, as doing so psychologically limits us to preconcieved notions of what is really more of an experience; however, images which occur readily to me include thick, dense fog; white noise; the colors grey-and-black, and speckled; and a general sense of nebulosity but with warmth – it’s diffuse, not cold or sharp. Sometimes I see it as a landwight, large as the isle of Britain; or I see a sleeper on a hillside, dreams billowing out of them as myriad creatures both fair and unearthly. Forgetting, remembering, recording, and dreaming are all correspondences of the Landweird which might produce a visual impression.

Mark Fisher writes that a key element in hauntology is “crackle”, because that’s what draws attention to the imperfection of a medium and its forgetting – the choice to create art that is haunted by shades of past and potential selves. With this in mind, it is also likely that “crackle” is part of the Landweird’s appearance: something that produces awareness of imperfection, lostness, or the passage of time. For example, an ancient inscription we can read accretes less Landweird than a half-broken, indistinct, or indecipherable one.

Element

Because it is Stellar, we understand it as having certain characteristics – but we could phrase this the other way around. As we are the Seekers of the Landweird, it is natural for a third part of our correspondence system to have the characteristics of our mightiest spirit.

These include: unknowable, part of deep time or the untamed wild, un-anthropomorphic – communicating in unhumanlike ways, and existing as an alien experience which we cannot fully comprehend – impossibly huge, and impossibly old – related to memory and forgetting and recording media

The Landweird has no other (physical) element. However, if you are using a non-Landcraft correspondence system, you would probably place it at Spirit or Aether – but know that it brings a very distinctive set of changes to that position, and fundamentally changes the balance of your craft. Additionally, it seems to be associated with things that have some weight – the deep earth and the dark sea – as opposed to the middle places of the sky; or the abstraction of weight, like the way the sea has intense pressure or a substance with high atomic weight.

When I walk the lanes ways of England the ghost soil coats my boots and sings stories of the secret land to me. For no field in England is truly fallow. Strange blooms of stories grow in the ghost soil whether the land is tended or not. Those that walk the ancient lanes of England walk with folklore to be harvested from hedge and to be collected along with the mud and dust underfoot. All our old paths are shortcuts to story. The land is long memory. Soil home to ghosts. Fields remember the dead buried in them long after no-one living knows their names or that they were even once living. The land is the final remembrancer. Every clump of trees huddling together for protection, every diminished wood, casts a ghost shadow of when they were forest. If I have learnt anything from folklore it is that the old gods are not dead, not lost, but merely sleeping on the borders between those deep seasons of time that turn in cycles slower than the year. They wait to wake and walk beside us again. I am of the green church. I am of the church of awe. I have no business with any faith nor priest peddling a fear of the divine. I enjoy delicious moments of landscape terror. A sense of what is buried below, the scream of the horizon. Between unearthing and open sky, my soul is overwhelmed. This a is a good thing. - C.L. Nolan, Hookland
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