Questions Nobody Is Asking
Is this real? Is this fakelore?
Its complicated.
Fen is fake ways to true things. You cannot use a reconstructionist approach to British mysteries: there is nothing to reconstruct. I grew up in a pagan atmosphere keen to trash Wicca at every turn for 'inaccuracies' - but this great absence is why it is the way it is: the use of archetypes and cycles, looking to other cultures, the theory of pagan survivals in folklore, and vibes, to reproduce a sense of something that ought to be there. Much of my journey over the past decade has been re-figuring-out these things that Gardener probably had figured.
These pages are a record of 'how do I find and communicate with what's here' - problem solving for this specific issue. It's looking for Maid Marian, the Lady in the Lake, the Green Man, the Fairy Queen, these peripherystrange figures which haunt our landscape.
The Landmother is an archetype of my own making. But she encompasses things which have both historic - and spiritual - reality: the sovreignty goddess; the Caillach; the mighty spirit associated with rivers and waterways; the animist spirit of the British weather. It's a placeholder for getting through to those things. No reconstructable path exists - which means you will be using some modern framework. And it might as well be your own, because no other framework is designed to work towards this purpose.
You might say, Fen is both uncommonly keen to make things up, but also uncommonly forthright about the difficulties of reconstruction: core to the mythology is that the gods are lost, fragmentary, half-forgotten, and that this is now a characteristic of their mystery, that there is no stripping back to an imagined before, and the not-knowing of what once was is but a little taste of the vast not-knowing of beings immeasurably stranger and more awesome than ourselves. Time in the woods and fairytales is what we have for reaching out.
To clear up a potential point of confusion: we are followers of the Old Ways, as understood in authors such as Margaret Murray. It does not matter a fig that her scholarship has been superseded, as this is not history-based craft or reconstructionism: this is pop culture paganism, and these are part of the mythic pop culture of the land. Her Old Ways may be no older than the 1900s - but why should that matter?; ours were made up in the 2010s.
In general, I'm not interested in seeing historicity, accuracy or oldness as markers of 'more serious'. We are all modern people doing modern religions, we all use creativity, intuition and a bit of bricolage. Fen is for discovering by doing: for entering into a state of play where the strange can come through. The gods are the only initiator, the only validator.
This approach has brought me far closer to the infinite and strange than when my craft was research-bound and afraid of making a factual error.
As a general rule: know that this is an outsider artwork & internet cult, not a history lesson. Its information is accurate insofar as it is accurate about what we believe and do. To know more about culture or history, consult an authority who does not hear whispers of the divine dark in the form of Bagpuss
Is Fencraft messianic?
For a while I experimented with a belief that, if the Landweird is sleeping, we long for the day it will wake up; but this never felt quite right. Our magic is rooted in the ongoing mess of history. I think it just goes on and gets stranger; there is no beyond or after.
(This idea is however present in a lot of our lore! But I think the idea is a Solar/Solar-Lunar Light concept rather than something expressive of Fencraft as a whole. Solar cycles fear the dark and trust in renewal. Hence you get King Arthur, Aragorn, Penda's Fen, Jerusalem and so forth evoking this hope and longing for human life perfected. But other positions on the map are quite outside of time and human survival, and so of the messianic dawn they say nothing and laugh)
What is Fencraft's view on the modern world?
Neutral. The modern is and will continue to be; it's not necessary or useful to take a perspective on it.
Fencraft seeks to replace older magical systems which appropriate Jewish mysticism as a symbol system, in solidarity with Jewish people who have named the dangers of this practice. Fencraft's symbols are therefore drawn from a (more) neutral well of culture: the landscape around my house, weird fiction, rural history, cheap children's television, prog-folk music - things which may well have their own politics, but don't meaningfully belong to anyone. Fencraft uses this particular aesthetic as a magical tool - entering into an imagined time and space. Like all temples, that time and space is set apart from the world. It is a fantastical space because what we do there is made from fantasy.
And yet it is not wholly imaginary. Astercote exists in the modern world: I live there. I live in a little village with one pub, one post office, and four churches, and all around it forest and wild hillsides.
There's no reason you can't use this symbol-system any sort of place - in other countries or cities. I am myself a city boy at heart. Perhaps, in part, this is why I've lost myself in folk horror over the past five years: my own view on the Village is ambivalent, and as unhappy as it is at rest. In Fencraft, the Solar village is as much home as somewhere you are leaving. I find cities strongly Lunar as a primary experience - but this is no bad thing - and then underneath that ruling domain, all the other themes on the Landcraft map. Disco balls in particular are excellent channellers for a certain kind of Lunar.
In Fencraft, 'pastness' has a magical force and energy which we can tap, and which opens the door to the Landweird. That's not the same thing as the old days being better, nor even the same thing as an interest in history or a desire for historicity. Places and things with a pastness give off emanations, similar to the way a radioactive stone interfaces with a geiger counter and with human skin - an unseen influencer - and those emanations don't always feel distinct from each other. As often as not, it's just presence - presence we can then use to many ends, as electricity might power either a wall clock or a table-lamp. In many ways, the more
Objects and places that are brand new tend to have accreted less of this strangeness; and yet nothing is ever brand new - as much as shops give the illusion that products have manifested out of nowhere. I reject the mid-90s Pagan assertion that all your tools should be freshly bought so they are
There is an important sub-strand in Fencraft about wildness. Wildness is also not the opposite or in tension with the modern - although if you live in many places, it may take additional effort to find it. In general, I advise pagans who want a nature-oriented practice not to live in nature-depleted places. Yes, an urban paganism is possible (and pleasurable), but it can't effectively be about the Green. You can do well there - even, better - at working with Solar concepts of the polis, Lunar of the artificial, of light, of energy in the abstract, of speed and color, and Stellar of the landweird, the cacophonous Landweird where people and stone are all-on-top-of-one-another and that on top of the ancient marsh. But nature-depletion is also not modern.
Remember too that Fencraft is not reconstructionst: it is pop culture paganism. The way we do things does not rely on supposed wisdom of the ancients, but living craft - as apt to emerge from music of the 1970s or now, in childrens books, in handmade second-hand lace, as in a bowl drawn from a bog and fragments of parchment. The gods are alive: and they are young.
What I'm trying to get at is that the Modern in and of itself is not a concern: anything you might want to critique (or praise!) about The Modern World has also manifestations in the past and future, because you will find its causes there also. If something needs to be critiqued, then we can do so without reference to an imagined framework which puts the blame on Time: the modern world's exploitation of animals is vile, for example, and yet to look at history you discover it was ever thus and worse.
I reject the idea that historic and pastoral fantasies of these kinds are inherently fascist, because there is also manifestation of fascism which is hyper-modern, mechanical and futuristic. Aesthetics are masks, and can be put to many ends. I advocate time away from the web not because it is new, but because it is noisy. I advocate walking more than you drive to bring yourself into encounters with the nature, history, and community of the place you live. I envisage human society as an isolated rural village because it is where I wake up each day, with mixed feelings. The 90s pagan books will all tell you to take the phone off the hook before ritual; but go back three centures, and spiritual people advocate living in secluded locations or alone. These are not really attacks on the modern world or modern living, but advice on nurturing certain kinds of experience in a spiritual context as spiritual tools - to develop a becoming weirdness which puts you closer to the strange than to humankind. This is not the only possible goal of a Pagan life, but one that has been under-explored, so Fencraft puts more emphasis there on the assumption you will have plenty access to other writers describing a modestly Solar pagan life integrated with your day-to-day or how to cast spells.
And so, the religion has nothing to say about modernity, beyond: seek where you are in time for the Landweird, and you will find it.
Does Fencraft have a political orientation?
I have a political orientation, and as long as I am writing about it, what I encounter on the cosmic levels will be understood through my own experiences and understandings of the world. I am left of left, and I require any participants or groups within the faith to be left-of-center.
If it is said to have a meaning as a whole, it is that the world is impossibly massive, strange and wonderful.
I generally endorse the idea that religion leads us to transcend the everyday - but knowing that the human everyday is temporary and fragile should move us the direction of justice. Personally, I am not a fan of liberation theology - thinkers, activists, workers and the oppressed are the right people to speak on and build movements, not priests. Religion is best at being religion; that is all. When religion takes political perspectives, it tends towards violence; I prefer it to stay in its lane, and speak only to the infinite.
Fencraft is land-history-and-culture oriented, but not nationalist - because the concept of a nation, a state, an ethnic monoculture are contemporary human models, not objective cosmic realities. The sea cares not.
Does Fencraft have values or rules?
Not exactly. Fencraft is a map which leads you towards encounters, and in those encounters you may receive values and rules. In the way of chaos magic, adopting different patterns and beliefs lets you travel across the map. At these various stopping places, your work will look wholly distinct from that of others, as each point has its own perspective on what is true.
These three qualities will lead you best: love for the natural world, an interest in history and time, and fear of the sea.
Is Fencraft pro-monarchy?
Absolutely not.
Fencraft answers the question: if we were to rebuild paganism from scratch, instead of leaning on appropriated symbol systems such as the Tree of Life, what would we draw our metaphor and meaning from? I found this in our own myths and lore and stories of all ages of the land and the strange.
These stories contain the King as a key symbol, and so the system does also. In Fencraft, the King can represent you - a person with agency within a situation who must maintain their relationships, work, community and home. It can represent the State or the community as a social force impacting you (for good or ill). It can be a point of contrasting human order and control to the wild, the chaotic and the strange. It can be a passive symbol for the Solar wheel of tradition and repetition, year-on-year, and what is sacrificed when one embodies a role. And it can be a core figure within a pantheon or retinue.
Why Fencraft ?
Naming things is a terrible act of finality, but at some point you do just need to pick a name and hope you don't start hating it too much.
I knew I was a Pagan since I was nine, but by this point I also knew that Paganism-as-was was doing nothing for me, just an endless round of reading beginner books and not finding what I sought. I had begun toying with the idea of starting again from a blank page, and building my own thing.
I was put on to my present track by a Fortean Times article by Bob Fisher pulling out the latent spookiness of marginal British media of the 1970s. Something about that idea struck me as essential: that the eeriness was here and all around me, but it was something trapped and unrecorded and had to be re-awoken, like re-tuning the frequency of an old radio.
I began looking at the music and other references in his essay. Watching Penda's Fen was the moment that a lot of spiritual elements clicked into place for me. It's a 1970s British teleplay, about a very serious teenage boy having a spiritual/sexuality crisis.
At the time I was trying to synthesise what I saw as Sun-focused and Moon-focused paganisms together. The play helped me solidify the distinction between Solar and Lunar - between the Establishment of the village, and those who choose to live outside or challenge the village, and their mixing point as a rebel figure. And it made me realise that a third element was necessary, a Stellar, a Strange, the black dark mystery of the bog from which all weirdnesses emanate.
And the play was a ticket to finding a lot of similar works in a rural folk weird (not quite folk horror) tradition: music, books, television, if someone is talking about Penda then it probably means they're on my wavelength and might have new media ideas for Reading, which might in turn produce spiritual insights.
A fen is a kind of bog or mire, a peaty wetland - and in Penda's Fen it is the place where, it is rumoured, the last pagan king of Britain died in battle and was buried. The fen also appears in Beowulf, as the place that Grendel comes from. In both cases, it's a strange meetingplace of water and land - a transformative place, where old trees become peat - the sort of place bog bodies are preserved beneath the soil - and above all the idea that Penda might not fully be dead, but part of a sleeping-land that is ready to awaken. Hence in Landcraft, the meetingpoint of dark land and dark water within the bog is seen as most powerfully Stellar (but you can also encounter this idea in 'brighter' forms throughout British folklore - the liminality of lake-sides and springs, the cthonic tug of the seashore)
(I should add that David Rudkin, who wrote the play, saw it as political metaphor and would be horrified that someone was using it for actual woo woo; please don't tell him. But I think this perspective is a little extra. Its an intensely spiritual play, or at least, a play that is deeply invested in and interested in the spiritual. I don't think seeing magical creatures and experiences in stories as true magic cheapens it; I think it points to moments when the skull is flooded with sudden light and the heart with sudden darkness, a keyhole to everything from which we come back changed. Call it what you will.)
The play is also important as a touchpoint for Paganism IMO because even though it's all about Englishness, it's also about deconstructing some of these nationalist/establishment myths, which I think is completely essential. When we look beneath the surface into the mire, the histories we find are unclean and chaotic - nothing there preserved speaks to a monolithic white English continuitity, or demands it of our future.
But ultimately, it's never been a choice of name I've loved, but it's what I'm using because sometimes things just need naming.
PS - if you're non-UK, you can find Penda's Fen on youtube; although, it's worth getting on DVD if you're a fan of talky plays.
Famously, this youtube version is uploaded from a single well-loved VHS copy recorded in the early 90s, and it shatters at the climax as if the video itself cannot contain the ruptural incursions of the weird on screen. That itself is Landweird: a play that was screened once in 1974, once in 1992(?), and then finally released on DVD in 2016 - existing only in memory, and rather strange memory, for the rest of that time. I actually make a copy of the youtube version despite also owning the DVD, because the DVD booklet discusses the youtube version as part of the program's mythos.
The fragility of the way the BBC lost or destroyed so many of its programs of the era make it a small miracle that Penda's Fen survived, and then evidence of its existence being centered on a single VHS recording, that produced a single youtube video - it's the process of history and memory encoded into objects, and no less fascinating to me than - say - the Sutton Hoo helmet, or a cloak-pin in a pool. That process is of spiritual interest to Fencraft.
David Rudkin's first teleplay - the Stone Dance - I think is missing, the first program on British television to address homosexuality, and something to do with a stone circle. Needless to say, if I could but dip into the Landweird and pull something out of it whole, the Stone Dance is first on my list.
All our ways are made of longings.
How does Fencraft feel about churches?
We know the sun, moon and star, and the Landweird, as the true pattern of all things in the world, the real power in the land. Why should strange gods be of danger to us? He has His place; like the others, He is sleeping. When we listen to his myths, we hear the things of the deep hidden within them, as we might hear them at the field's edge or in an uncovered object. We seek the Landweird, the places where it dwells - and in the little villages and greatest of cities, there is rarely a place older and more filled with memory than the church - all the moreso as paritioners ebb away, and they become once more strange monuments to time. No god can be a rival to us, and no power intimidate, for we are followers of the old ways - deeper still into the unremembered. Those that followed after are but visitors awhile.
Every name spoken here in reverence is part of the land's long story, but lesser within a greater whole: contained within its strange forgetting. All that can be memory or tale is trapped within. If any god likes not this law, let Him come: the Landweird devours.