When we talk about the Solar in a general kind of way, we're normally envisaging a little village surrounded by fields and under the lawful authority of a local aristocrat, and him under the king: a whole landscape of the English imagination of what 'home' and 'country' looks like.
But when we start doing ceremonial magic with the Map as a whole, these elements begin separating out.
Widdershins of the Solar is the Fields - that which surrounds the Village. Elementally, it is predominantly Solar but with a little touch of the Lunar and Stellar; it is Verdance and Landish, but of the most domesticated kind; and it is related to late Summer and long sunny afternoons.
Fields arises when you need a contrast point with the Village that is still on a human scale. In many situations, it is just Village vs Infinite or Village vs Wildwood, but Fields vs Village is when you need to get granular with Solar symbolism. We can think of Fields as a subtype of Solar. Sometimes, we need to draw a contrast between two Solar themes, or to assert very clearly what kind of Solar we are in. For this, we use Fields.
The Fields continue the themes of the Village, but introduce a note of anarchy and the untamed. Here are human communities ouside the Village walls, and outside the direct control of the King. They are impacted by his rule (say, if he begins a war or imposes a tax) but not compelled by it. The Fields represent everyday human community transformed by little dissonances - such as remembering the Old Religion, developing egalitarian social structures, refusing cultural norms. This can be the stuff of Leftist fantasy - or it can be its own way, horrifying. The Fields are the archetypal folk horror setting. Or we can use it in reverse: we can evoke Fields to draw out the dogmatic, order-bound, dry, authoritarian meanings of the Solar core.
Alternative Social Structure
Fields is a farming community - growing crops or shepherding animals. As a Solar place, that sense of community is key - the little relationships, both firm and claustrophobic, on which small communes survive. However, the Fields are further away from centralised control.
Pure Solar refers to establishment power: the King and his subordinates, the law, the church. Like a frontier town in a western, an isolated cult compound town, an alternative commune nestled in a deep wood - the hand of the state cannot quite reach and command here, and things are free to become a little anarchic. Anarchism is a political philosophy that argues for people's ability to self-govern, instead of the need for police, aristocrats or for nation-states. Fields becomes another reflection on the shape of human communities: places where this is being put into practice.
The king's peace is welcome, but actual kings are unwanted and unecessary: the freedom of Fields is temporary, because the outside can always come in. A common theme in Greek and Roman pastoral writing is the horror of being pressganged and sent to war (or, see the destruction of World War 1 on rural communities; my home lost its ancient language due to World War 2). This is the tension of Fields. Like the Horizon, it is the first step-out-of-the-village - close enough to still interrelate, to be defined in opposition.
Pastoralism lurks between here and the Village. The Village itself is the green and pleasant land of, say, The Wind in the Willows - all picnics and talking moles and messing about in boats and hurrah for a cosy feudal social order. The Fields are pastoralism as subversion, say, Winstanley - the same longings for hearth and home, but knowing that a true utopia would be free of kings and border walls. I often think of Wickham from Robin of Sherwood, the little hamlet more loyal to the Merry Men and the worship of the Greenwood than to the King and centralised control.
But the society of Fields is not necessarily utopian: it can also be bad, but in ways which are distinct from ordered, establishment Solar normalcy. An isolated cult compound - of any religious flavour, conservative or hippy - is dangerous Fields. Ultimately, Fields is still a Solar position; it has Solar flaws - traditionalism, village gossip, morals and social norms, and the horror of what humans do in groups. Adam Scovell's definition of folk horror requires 'isolation' and a 'skewed belief system'. The new ways of being in the Fields may be unorthodox - or they may be fundamentally wrong; and at that point, the everyday Solar Village can stand as the contrast for 'normal and good'.
Alternative Religions
At the core of the Solar is religiosity - right action, right behaviour. This theme continues in the Fields, as agricultural survival is rooted in patterns of time. However, core Solar powers - gods and ancestors - tend to emphasise the rightness of human dominance, on the model of Woden being the ancestor of Old English warlords and Jupiter being the echo of the Emperor who is the echo of the Father in the home.
Fields rejects this model of authority; but are ruled, all the same, by the natural world. The spirits here may be Solar: godlike - fixed, consistent - beneficial to man - anthropomorphic or with an abstract face which is not-too-Stellar. It is traditional rituals for spirits of the corn and woodlands, done in the community, and alone on the woodlands fringe.
The Fields are in closer proximity to the land and the wildwood than the Village. Religion and magic is natural, but beginning to get a little weird: some notes of traditional witchcraft, with the witchiness stripped out. These people know what fairies are, and do what they need to to be left alone by them; there's dancing around the May Pole and Green Man carvings in the church pews, but witches are a source of terror. Still - they do know where the witches live, just in case.
Here, religion can become more small-scale or personal - not a reflection of the State as a whole, a distant thing handed down to you by a priesthood not of your class, a tool of social control. And yet these dynamics can still emerge within the insularity of the Field community, disconnected from the systems of the wider Land.
Alternative Ways of Being
Another time I sense Fields is when a protagonist still bound to the village is going on too many walks, strolling far from home among the hedgerows, idling at their work, and in their little, local wanderlust marking themselves as one apart.
This phase for the Seeker represents going for rambles her neighbours think are strange. Examples include Bilbo Baggins going for uncommonly long walks around the Shire at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, the deceased antiquarian going about the neighbourhood researching in A View from a Hill, children on their summer holidays left to make their own fun in the countryside (The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, The Famous Five, Worzel Gummidge et al). That is, a little 'loosening up' of the everyday (be it routine or custom) without being too far from home, and finding a touch of the Stellar weird close to where you already are. In this, it is very close to our custom of Walking.
Or it can represent 'dropping out' - refusing work and custom. Contrast with the Hillside: the Lightbringer's energy touching the cusp of the hill forms the sort of activist who is ready to stride home and cause trouble. The Fields whisper the passive resistance of, say, getting stoned and living in a van with your dog and your guitar. The Hillside responds to the problems of the Solar by going it alone, or coming back to win; the Fields, still within the Solar of the group, by building an alternative community. The Hillside prompts us towards something quite definite - like the sharpness of a floating hawk - and The Fields, to something undefined - like vanishing into the heat of the long grass and losing track of the time. Your neighbours will tut tut at you for it is in such idleness, the devil comes, and strange fellows of the forest call to you of strange luxuries beyond the wall.
In this, Fields can amplify the 'peace and prosperity' meanings of the Solar, and contrast the 'rewards of hard work and doing your duty'.
Those who Walk Between
The Landishpath describes interrelations between humans and nature.
In all places on the path outside of the immediate Solar - where man dominates - the relation is in some way balanced. In the Fields, man lives within nature - fields among scattered forests, hedgerow creatures darting among the wheat. The truce holds true: the right actions of ritual, and the right husbandry and traditions of technique make room for man and nature both. Further down the path, the balance shifts towards nature - when it is we who must shelter at the margins and dart carefully among greater things.
In the Fields you meet the Guardians of those who walk between: predominantly, Farmer and Hunter. Both must balance their need with that of the land, both must learn it with care - walking as outsider-and-threat, as ally-and-defender, as collaborator with things that live and grow.
The Farmer is at home in the Fields - but the Hunter is a more sinister figure. Alongside him is the Village Witch. Both are valued - and a little feared - for their ability to walk deeper into the wildwood, and yet return - and return with needed things.
The story of the Changeling, of the Hunter-Witch, will be that of the Landishpath - those who allow themselves to be transformed by the weird and wild, and are devoured by it, never to return.
Charles Tuncliffe
Look Around You
Domains
Between Solar and Lunar
Elementally
Meeting of Sunwarmth and Land. More land than fire.
Landscape
An isolated, but warm and placid village or homestead, surrounded by fields and hedgerows and little trackways. Cosy, yet tangled at the edges.
Nature
Undomesticated creatures found around the farmyard: hares, field-crows, field mice, farm cats, barn-owls, moles and hedgehogs. Weeds and wildflowers. Sleepy grasses.
A long sunny summer afternoons, turning towards long-shadowed evening; mid-day haze; dappled sunlight through the trees and sparkling off the streams. Always, the weather is dry - but without drought.
Times and Tides
Late summer and harvest-tide, when all is dry and the work is done; late afternoon, especially when associated with the time you get out of work or school
Aspects
Solar: The Fields are very similar to the Village, with an amplification of festival-feeling and pleasure - as opposed to orderliness, duty and work. The Shire.
Solar-Lunar: The Fields represent social rebellion, a way of living which resists the king and the establishment or an alternative social structure. St George's Hill.
Lunar: The Fields represents alternative religion, particularly of a folk or fairy nature, or the Old Ways. Summerisle.
Solar-Stellar: The Fields represent being closer to nature, being among seasonal cycles, more in-the-body and imagination than looking at the human world.
Stellar: Fields cannot be Stellar - they are too proximate to the mortal
which is more Light, more Skyish, barren not green, cold not warm, more purposeful and independent, more interested in change, more solitary, more angry, sad or confused - less luxurious
Sunwise - contrast with the Village
which is more domesticated, more traditional, more conservative, more State, more stone, more orthodox, less organic
Starwise - with the Woodland's Edge
which is more wild, more feral, more otherworldly and supernatural, more dangerous, further beyond human control
Seeking the Landweird
Ill-suited to work and the world of the everyday, the Seeker sneaks forbidden time and wanders further and further away - walking the hedgerow ways for no purpose but pleasure, asking questions about the carvings in the old church, and neglecting their duties to sleep under the old thorn. They become the Changeling - the mortal unworldly. Here, they may encounter strange figures from outside - the Good Neighbours at the woodland's edge, or the Man in Black at the crossroads, and learn much from them; go forth into the forest; make a new life beyond the Village, filled with friendship, daydreaming and slow-time; or give up the quest, and go home.
Reading List
Folk horror
The Wicker Man - Summerisle
Robin of Sherwood - Wickham
Winstanley - St George's Hill
Worzel Gummidge (modern)
'In the Golden Afternoon' sequence - Alice in Wonderland (Disney)
Picnic at Hanging Rock - I prefer the Weir film, in the director's cut
Favourite Albums
These albums have an especially hazy, afternoonish rural bliss to them:
Worzel Gummidge by the Unthanks
Adlestrop by Gilroy Mere
From Gardens Where we Feel Secure - Virginia Astley
Chill Out - KLF
The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld - The Orb
