The Bog

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This Land Remembers

In Fencraft, where land and waters meet is not the coast. Wetlands are the true places that are both land and water at the same time, and it is here our deepest secrets dwell.

(The coastline in-and-of-itself and the beach would be considered a kind of Hillside, a place of brinks and departings, a horizon - an invitation towards wandering, with its flatness and seeming featurelessness and harsh strange barren life)

The bog may indeed be nearby the sea, where saxon ship's masts and mooring posts rest within the rising and falling muds, or along the river of lost coins and broken bottles. Or it can be a swamp amidst the forest where old trees sink into rot. Fens are alkaline, bogs acidic. Swamps have trees and shrubs, marshes reeds. Some are peatlands, strange processes of change in the dark. The mere from which monsters come.

In all these places, is a dark downtugging - a place of hiding, transforming, remembering. The most sacred of things in Fencraft is strange memory - our Landweird, and this is where it dwells, within the landscape that holds on to things. I meet it as a bog body speaking, old man of the mosses in the swamp, words I cannot comprehend, the gargling of black pools and cracking of ancient trunks and languages unrecorded.

Fencraft calls us to seek and contemplate the Lost Gods, and often imagines them as a retinue - as a great dark mass, emanating the stellar energy of that-which-is-forgotten and that-which-has-existed-in-time. The bog is a place considered to particularly hold this sensation. We meditate on the strangeness of Deep Time - the unimaginable 30,000 years of human history and all that occurred even further back, all of it unremembered, unrecoverable, that great haunting - and our own place within it, for time goes forwards as well as back.

What the bog represents gives Fencraft its name. If Wicca is the Craft of the Wise, ours is the Craft of the strange wet darkness, and what we find within.

Alchemy

When we talk about the Bog as a location on our journey, we are really imagining being within the bog - a place without a sky. Alchemically, wetlands are places that blot out both air and fire - but it can birth them, as marsh gasses and coals.

It is dark, Star-cold (that is, unlike the warmth of the Sun, but sometimes holding an uncanny heat - not chilly in the way of Lunar-cold), heavy, sucking, and has that 'dampening', numbing, absorbent Stellar quality - for such things tend not to be noisy, in my experience, they are immense and wide as if anything spoken is on a cosmic scale, not a conversational one.

The colours of the Stellar are black but also an oily rainbow, and that oily rainbow colour is seen here as bog iron and ancient plant materials as oil. I've always felt that iron was a Stellar metal, but couldn't parse how with iron as a thing that repels fairy beings. But fairy beings are Lunar. And the Stellar has always been absorbent. The Stellar has this...inert pulsating...quality I find very hard to describe, but there's something about the heavy dullness of iron contrasted with the terror of imagining life within a heavy dull thing, like the black under a mirror or within a haemetite.

Qualities

Domains

Stellar

Elementally

Mixing of Land and Water

Landscape

Black soil within wetland, clumps of wet mosses, moreso beneath a covering of trees than under an open sky. Sense of land and water equal.

Mood

Patient, waiting, alert to great strangeness, voiceless,

Colours

Intense greens with an undertone of warm black or purplebrown oily black.

Weather

TBC, as Sky and Light isn't present.

Tides and Times

TBC, but I would say predominantly outside of time, or on scales of time unmeasurable with the usual calendars.

Seeking the Landweird

The wanderer has come to the place where it dwells. The unwary and the brave wade now within it, to be transformed beyond returning.

Reading List

None of these reference points are exactly similar to the mood evoked here, but notable wetlands feature in