The Fencraft Picturebook

These albums are made for the use of followers of the Fen, and the curious - which, by my guess, is no more than 15 people - to illustrate certain trends or imagery. I envisage it as a semi-private space: not a pinterest, twitter or tumblr, not a facebook feed, the sort of place one only finds if one has the link, and has read through several paragraphs of my ~profound mystical insights~ first.

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Some Questions Answered

A pre-emptive FAQ

On Copyright

Where I know the name of the artist, it is the name of the picture. I manually save this information at the time I save the image. Older pictures in my collection might not have this information, or it might not have been present at the time I found it.

Filling in those blanks is an ongoing project, as is adding in links and image descriptions. I always add image descriptions when pictures are used as part of an article text. All images are here without permission.

If I've incorporated your art and you would like me to take it down, I can be contacted on Discord (Unmutual#0576) or by email (seekthelandweird@gmail.com). I'll take it down asap, and move it to a different part of my home computer folder system as a reminder not to use it in future.

If you'd like to contact me more generally, know that I'm OK with the decisions I've made, and won't be changing them.

I am opposed to Pinterest because of the way it steals and decontextualises images in a way that an artist can never undo (and its uncivil dominance of image search engines). I'm opposed to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr because of their restrictive content policies and - more importantly - poor exportability/not having control over my collection; my account or individual images could vanish like snap.

My judgement is that my site is small and in an out-of-the-way corner, not clout-chasing or in competition with actual artists' social media presence. It supports the goal of online artists to exhibit in galleries online, and provides information for viewers to follow up if they wish. My online collection also serves as an emergency archive for me, against hardware loss. I'm building for the long term - that is, I would rather have reblogged this all to a tumblr tag, but my worst case scenario is putting in that work only for the site to evaporate.

I am in favour of collage, in order to display a range of images showing mythic tropes appearing in different guises. One part of the Reading List as a practice is to create a sense of wider culture. Major faiths have centuries of imagery to bolster what they do; for Pagans, our resources are far more slight. Compiling collections such as these are intended to evoke a sense of something bigger and beyond, not just a Landweird but a culture and community - as well as reducing the effort required to do religion (it's quick and easy to run one of these galleries as a screensaver, for example). What can I put together from things I can find isn't just an excuse - it's deeply rooted in the design of what I'm doing and why. I am not alone in my room: I am part of something larger. It's an envy of the Sistine Chapel, Handel's Messiah, Nativity plays and screen rood carvings - a desire to be surrounded and immersed.

My website is a little world; it is online so you might explore it. It is friends-only, but many friends I have yet to meet, and can encounter only here.

What's your stance on diversity in spiritual art?

We understand the powers as existing in a Solar, Lunar and Stellar form. In the Solar they are encountered as some kind of human-like-person-god, like a picture of God as an old fellow with a beard, a Greek statue, or a Norse myth in which Odin gets into girlfriend trouble. They are encountered as proximate-to-the-human - for example, as an ancestor, who keeps a special eye on their decendents, or a Guardian of a human activity (motherhood, hunting, age, transition) who is a sort of ancestor-not-by-blood; or as a spirit who has experienced something alongside their human followers or has the form of a human-scale thing (Jesus, the Buddha, Mademoiselle Charlotte and Dinclinsin)

However, this is a kind of mask. Most Powers also have a Stellar form in which they are some kind of entity profoundly beyond our comprehension. At this level, 'is this person gay' is a bad question - cosmic void presences do not have a sexuality. Identities are social power relations: Stellar powers are neither meaningfully Black nor white, because those terms refer not to 'skin tone' but a shared human history, culture, power dynamic, community, ways of thinking and being which are human-created and human-determined.

Where possible, I've tried to find non-white, non-het, non-cis or gender-swapped variants of archetypes; but for cultural reasons, this tends to be tricky. I am always keen to find more of these, and am making them as and when I can.

Some reasons for this include:

1

While the gods and spirits are very real, the archetypal ways we depict and encounter them tend to say more about the limits of our imagination than anything about them. As citizens of the world, we should take every opportunity to challenge these archetypes.

I've taken some very conscious choices in my work around gender (the Sun King as the fertile earth, Diana as the master magician) to try and re-imagine Pagan myths away from its gendered problems in the past, and I have found this satisfying and effective.

2

Fencraft is a modern religion, for modern people; consequently, when we anthropomorphise the great powers of the land, we anthropomorphise them as "like us" - like all of us.

3

Northern Europe of the past was more diverse than we give it credit for, and it is important to resist the imposition of ahistorical narratives of our heritage as a monolithic white culture that is inevitably patriarchal and callous.

Whiteness is socially constructed by racists as an unbroken lineage from the present to the past. This is false. whiteness is a contemporary phenomenon. I am a white Englishman - but I have no idea if that makes me an ethnic Roman, Viking, Saxon, Jute, Norman, Celt or anything else, and I'm not in meaningful cultural continuity with any of those people either. I was born in the 80s. Nontheless, contemporary white nationalism encourages a make-believe lineage-of-whiteness which creates an imaginary community around an imaginary unbroken blood heritage in which we harken back to an mish-mash of ancient days which is imagined as mono-ethnic.

We should always look to resist this. Politically, we should give no strength to that belief system. And historically, we should seek to be accurate!

4

We're a religion first and foremost, and I belive strongly that our ability to be playful with sacred imagery helps keep it vital and alive.

Gods die when you fix them. 'Mercury was the god of trade' traps a living thing in a dead skin. gods have motion, life, they change and breathe, they flow and morph. So we should always aim to keep the Powers 'in motion' in our minds. When they feel known and knowable, we must look again and find new mystery.

Variant imagery is an opportunity to engage your sacred imagination: does imagining the Changeling as a young boy, or a person in a wheelchair, crack open to the light new and deeper understandings of the spirit's essence? Does the image of a Sun Queen or a male Winter Witch, or a Lightbringer who is Black and heavyset undo your expectations, or bring in new cultural understandings and possibilities?

The political call to do this is clear - 'don't imagine the personification of innocence as a dainty white woman'. To keep out of cliche is to open us to new ways of seeing.

5

I've spoken with friends in the past, about "colourblind casting" in films; and their frustraition with productions that are superficially 'diverse', without committing to narrative adaptations to flesh out the story (i.e. if David Copperfield was a man of colour, well, let's tell that story properly).

The Fen Picturebook does this: it chucks in variant imagery without thinking in any great detail what it would mean.

My reason for this is that these are not images of actual people, people in history or characters from a story. Actual people can have actual identities because they exist within a society and context. But these are symbolic figures - they depict myths, and anthropomorphise energies and relationships. They do NOT exist within a society and context.

But we - as viewers, creators, artists and magicians - still do; we as viewers bring our cultural expectations into play when imagining, creating or encountering spirit imagery, even for entities which are quite beyond the human. It's simply not possible for us to embody a spirit as a kind of person, without then bringing society with us. My intention may be to represent entities that are essentially identity-neutral - but there is no way for me to do that, no representation including the human form which is neutral.

It's tricky, and I can't say what I'm doing now is the best option, only that it is at present the best option I know. Probably, there is no best option - but I hope you will vibe with the reasons I have for making the choices I have. I am excited for a future in which more participants on the path bring their own interpretations to the myths, and flesh it out in ways I cannot.

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