The City

☉ᚠ☉

Pure Solar, an environment of yellow stone, glass, golden metal, often envisaged as feeling a little like a labyrinth. The sense you might be inside a dome, or living in a city or a court which feels like the entire world (containing everyone and everything that actually matters). The state of having absolutely no sense beyond the everyday. and accepting human society as-it-is as both natural and perfect. Incurious, hierarchical, often authoritarian.

Its religious-magical form is State Religion, typically imagined in some of its most claustrophobic and patriarchal forms - for example, a Roman triumph parade, the crowning of the Queen at Westminster Abbey, as well as the most fernickity ceremonial magics which deal with constructs and universal energy forms if only you follow the right recipe.

As this site is a single Domain, and not of a Path, it is too much of its own nature, intensely stagnant and resistant to change, and utterly blind to things outside its own sphere. In this case, it represents the mortal world unseeing of any Outside - to be trapped within the everyday. In Fencraft, this Outside includes the divine, magic, the natural world, the uncanny and the wondrous. This is truly to be touched by nothing at all. It is not the rational, for rationality is not the opposite of delight. It is to be utterly grubbed down in everyday self-importance and incuriosity. It is boredom and exhaustion. Fencraft has no sense of sin, but if it did this would be its closest model: a person who hears nothing and does not wish to listen. It is to own everything, and discover no pleasure in it, an insatiable hollowness. It is something that can be done to you by the world, and must be resisted.

The City tends towards the human everyday, and it is bad in contrast to the Village which tends towards the human everyday, and it is good - because the Village is open to other influences. Those influences include the natural world, the tug of the hillside and the woodland's edge, wonder at storytelling, walks and rambles, the presence of gods and fairy-folk, participation in a community and connection with other human beings.

The distinction might be the difference between the (Village) Smith-Waite 10 of Pentacles - a city, with people and a grandfather, conversations and dogs - and the 10 of Cups - the joy of harmony within a family; and the (City) Harris-Crowley 10 of Discs - a dark room filled with gold coins, and no life, or the Smith_Waite 9 of Cups - a smug man surrounded by chalices from which he never drinks.

I feel like I am thin...stretched like butter over too much bread...I can't recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass
- Lord of the Rings

The Seeker's Journey

As a state for the Seeker, the City is one who is incapable of dreaming. It is far more intense than the Malkuth in Tree of Life magic, if you are familiar with that system - it is not just the mundane or the everyday, or a period of time when you get to know everyday magics and the elements of Earth. For this reason, it is positioned behind the startpoint on the Map, probably because anyone interested enough to look into Paganism is already on their journey; but it nevertheless exists. We recommend you never go here.

Nontheless, life can always pull you back into this, so it is one to be constantly wary of. The three practices of Walking, Reading and Disconnection are there to ward off and free you from this state, even if that is all you have energy to do.

Alchemy

The City is a state in which you can only see ᚠ illuminated by Solar, that is, manmade things through a mortal point of view.

On thing to consider is what is absent here. There is only stone. The stone is not enlivened by the Stellar, it contains no weird, it emanates nothing. It is inert - it is not dead for it was never alive. It does not have the motion of the wind, the lushness of greenery, the heat of fire or refreshment of water. There is no air: this is no place you can breathe. And it is only under the sun: it has no time. It has no resting and awakening, no fallowtide and flourishing, no gradations of colour or reflective shade. It is fully revealed by the light of the Sun, and under such a light, all things are obvious and uncharming. Objects exist: they had no manufacture, and will have no end - there is no connection to their maker or materials. There are no weathers, no rising and falling of storms or clouds which drift over the hills.

Immortality is associated with the ☽, but in the City the sun has stopped - it does not provide the relief of motion which would bring the renewal of ☉☽ or the daydreaming and wandering of ☉✺ - it is the horror of something that needs to die but cannot.

The symbols of the city elsewhere are brought to life: the clock and the stone are also stores and gates of the Stellar. This is part of their particular horror in the city, like seeing a taxidermy animal. The thrumming of the weird does not dwell in the clocks and stoneworks here - a place without a history, without dark corners, without the forwards and backwards motion of time. Reawakening the strange in the stone is among our primary tasks, wherever we dwell - seeing through an inert object until it remembers what it is.

Aspects

Under the Sun

The city as a nightmare of sociality - for example bureaucratic, over-policed, everyone too-intensely-bound to its circles and trapped within them. It is gold, like money, or the interlocking cogs of a merciless clock. I think about Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and other depictions of Confucian courts in Chinese historic/historic fantasy movies extremely evocative of this mood.

The City can be associated with the Divine In Man, specifically in its exploitative sense - where the Emperor is aligned with the God, or where religion is put to use as a tool of social control. The ☉ is finding the sacred in the human everyday, but this position on the Map speaks of that which is not worthy of worship or reverence, things set up as wisdom and for worship with no true magic in them.

Under the Moon

The city as a nightmare of isolation - a familiar cultural image from, say, film noir, or whenever your grandmother asks if you're doing OK in that London. Visions of haunted streets, broken families, men consumed by work. One nice example might be Smallcreep's Day, which I know best from the (not very good) Mike Rutherford album.

The central character Pinquean Smallcreep works in the slotting article of a vast and labyrinthine factory and has done so for years. He becomes curious about the purpose of the pulley that he puts the slots in and one day, having become obsessed by an idea, leaves his machine and goes exploring through the strange world of his factory.

Under the Star

It is possible there is no such thing. I associate other positions on the map with 'humanity being horrifying'. The key note of the double-Solar City is there is no outside, no conception that there could ever be an outside.

One possibility is the city of the ancestors. City shares some alchemical links with Ancestors, and so the Stellar may be what it is to be ruled over by dead men: not in the sense of the gothic, but to be bound by senseless tradition, cruel law, and the enduring unendurable decisions of the distant past.

Colours

A brash brassy gold, ordinary black, ordinary white, and sandstone.

Real Cities?

I'm actually very deeply a city person, so no insult to the concept of cities or living within one should be implied. It's about finding a landscape image which matches the alchemical associations here on the Map: a lot of stone, extremely human, and extremely not of strange and growing things - and one that communicates this within the lore. It is a state of mind, and can be experienced anywhere one is hemmed in, overburdened by the day, both crowded in society and utterly alone.

If you are a dweller in cities, the place you live is not The City of alchemy except on those horrible Thursday mornings. You can find many of the places on the Map within the built strangeness of where you live - holy wells where water comes above ground, snatches of bramble, and secrets in the stone. I wrote more about urban Landweird here.

And if you are still not sure, take a look at the images to get a sense of the mood, and how it differs from where you dwell.

Similarly, the City should not be confused with modern lifestyles, because the past had cruel drudgery aplenty. Its lesson is that the infinite is hard to find when overburdened by everyday things, and if anything this was truer in the past amidst the horror of laundry.

Reading List

• Look at images
• Momo - Michael Ende
• 24/7: Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep - Johnathan Crary
• Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis - the city of Charn
• the story of King Midas

Plus many, many good films about existing within a trap, including Brazil, Curse of the Golden Flower and more.