The Landmother Correspondences

A collection of moods, thoughts, images and aspects for the Landmother.

Key Themes

The Sky and The Weather
Doom
Endurance
Union of opposites

About Her

Nature

Triad. the Landmother appears fully as a goddess, a fairy, and an entity, with none of those parts being fragmentary, speculative or sentimental.

Appearance

She is usually depicted as a woman of middle age, with black hair and pale skin and a rather severe look – garbed in deep grey-blues, of a somewhat Roman appearance. She is always drawn so to as stand out among the others in the image, for she is a Goddess trapped in mortal form or a fairy bride, and thus some kind of “foreigner”. She is associated with robes, veils, cloaks, hoods, and other great expanses of fabric, suggesting I suppose the expanses of skies and inland streams. My notes read “somewhere between Mother Mary and Ringwraith”. which would not be a misleading mental image for you to come to terms with Her. She does not have warmth – it is a cold white, a drab blue, a heavy grey.

Depicting her in bright blue or with a golden halo or golden sheaf is the usual way to denote her most Solar and benevolent form, such as appears during the summertime, when she is consort to the King. Her mystery, which is Solar-vs-LunarStellar, often contrasts the vividness of golden corn with a heavy grey sky, and depicts her with a hand-scythe of golden metal and black-metal handle.

She is more his consort than his queen, and they are rarely worshipped as a divine pair – for that may diminish Her – and there’s a liturgical uncertainty about their relationship status, as either grand romance, kidnapping, or a political alliance. She certainly never bears a child. She is a mother of civilisation, whose mercy allows humanity to flourish – but somewhat short of an ancestor. The term Landmother also, we use in hope that she will be maternal, that we might bind her to maternal qualities, rather than a description.

Terms like cold, severe, a penetrating glance, graven, serious or still are appropriate for her mien. It is possible that we have these associations because they are a depiction of the benevolent goddess-Landmother, who has the changeable wildness of the weather firmly bound underneath her control or the control of those who trapped her – a Landmother-Of-The-Closet – and that images of her laughter and her rage and unbound hair are suited to her Lunar and Stellar forms.

Reverence

Practices
The most important thing you can do is sit in contemplation of “bad” weather. Breathing the fog in and out, or watching cloud-patterns, or thinking your way into a heaviness of sky and wetness of the land. Before anything else, She is a weather goddess.

Colours
As she is Lunar-Stellar, her dominant colours are that of the storm – drab blues and purple, grey, white, black. At other times, dark grey and bright gold; or dark grey and deep blue-blacks. Think desaturated.

Foods
The Landmother is Lunar-Stellar, but the foods associated with her are decidedly not. She enables the wheat to grow, so we celebrate her with beer and bread; as well as all the things of grown agriculture, such as potatos and carrots, and cows and meat.

Places
A great sense of open-ness. Anywhere you can really feel the sky around you. Flat plains, a boat on the sea, or the top of the highest hill.

The Lunar is the coldness of water, and we generally choose inland water over seawater for her, but a lake or stream over a spring. Whereas the Stellar is the sheer unpleasantness of the water, so anyplace the weather is miserable and you can feel the water numbing your cheeks will serve. She is generally not indoors (again, this is a Sun King contrast, where he is the warm inside and She is everything else). When you walk in the fogs you feel the sky is the sea and the sea is the sky and inside of the clouds, the little streams are all around you - silent as if you had sunk deep beneath the waters.

The are particular landscapes associated with her. When the sky is huge and neutral, and reflected in inland water with green land all around, it relates to the balance between the Sun King and the Landmother. When the sky is grey and vivid, and the land is gold (as with a wheat field), it refers to the Solar-LunarStellar line, and to the Necessity of the Harvest.

Times of day
As both a Lunar and Stellar being, She is not bound to time: and you must look instead to the weather forecast. I have an untested idea that instead of the cycles of the day or year, the rain cycle might be a way to approach her mythically. When contrasted to the Sun King, you can use the night time.

Times of Year
This will be explored in the next essay.

Music
None, as of yet, but my first place to look would be the songs which are filled with a winter coldness. Perhaps you have your own playlist of this kind, where you can feel the thickness of fogs in your bones – calm, but brooding also.

There is nothing particularly lyrically or rhythmically Her about the songs I have right now, there’s just something in them that feels a little like November. Remember that the song-recommendations I make – especially the modern ones – are determined mostly by the music I like, and it is your own task to develop a playlist from your own tastes.

Other Spirits

Frankly, this has been very difficult to settle on – far more difficult than I expected. I sort of assumed that a mortal marrying some kind of otherspirit to legitimise his rule was a standard mythic narrative. It is not. I always welcome new additions to this list; those on it are merely partial. Possible stories to look at include:

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