Robin Artisson - An Carow Gwyn - Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

Introduction: Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, I was in a very bad place. The hundreds of pages I'd need to describe the situation to you have already been used up in this book, so you'll just have to take my word for it. My troubles, they were many and they were fierce. I could have handled just one or two of them, but when too many problems pile up, anyone will crumble. Twelve mangy dogs, they say, can kill a lion. I was feeling pretty lost and hopeless, and worst of all, my extraordinary attempts to solve any of these problems were failing.

The extraordinary solutions I was attempting were born from my personal practice of sorcery- the ancient art of building relationships and making pacts with spirits, to have them render their special kinds of aid to you, when you might need it. There are other practices involved with sorcery, but even those strange tactics- which had in the past brought so much to me- were showing limited ability to help change my situation. It was very disillusioning, very grim.

I'm glad this all happened to me when it did. At this point in my life, I was experienced enough to know what to do in a situation like this. I'm not the only person who's ever been in a spot like the one I'm describing here; chances are, anyone reading this is familiar with the feeling. What I understood now (and which I might not have understood two decades ago) was that sometimes, situations become locked up. Powers, conditions, forces- they have a way of falling into patterns, and repeating themselves. The whole system of a person's circumstances becomes a self-feeding, self-fulfilling prophecy of repeating outcomes. What a person in a situation like this needs is something from the outside to break the system up.

For all my skills or insights, nothing could spare me from one of life's most important lessons: healers cannot heal themselves. When you're down, when you're stuck, when you're sick- you're disempowered. You need someone from outside of your system of stuckness, to come in and do for you what you cannot do from inside your trap. You need a new pair of eyes to gaze upon things, to see what you cannot. Our world doesn't allow for isolation. Everything connects, and something outside of your everyday life is eventually going to be needed by you. However clever you are, someone else's cleverness is going to be required for you to move forward one day. This is a natural law, ancient and inexhaustible.

I did what any person would have done in my place: I consulted the strongest oracle I had access to. I asked it, just to be sure that I was right: do I need someone else to come in here and help me? Yes, it said. Was it someone I knew? A close sorcerous ally? No, it said. I should have guessed that before I asked; my closest sorcerous allies were also tied into the system I was part of. I needed someone from beyond even that rank of my relationships- someone that lived a great distance from my life and the people familiar to me.

The oracle told me that someone I knew had knowledge of the person I needed to find. It told me that the person I sought was also sorcerously active, or an outsider soul that had special connections to the Unseen world. This person, if found, would impart to me what I needed to break out of the trap I was in. And so I was off on a quest, but a difficult and uncomfortable one. I racked my brain trying to come up with a list of people I knew who could have knowledge of such a person. The list was shorter than I imagined it would be. My closest allies were mostly introverts like myself; they didn't have tons of friends.

I was forced to approach the oracle again, and this time it told me another thing I should have guessed- my closest allies were not the place to look; I needed to turn my gaze further afield. So I began making a new list of people I had met in the last few years, mostly online, who had captured my interest or respect. I ended up having to make lists of their names in (very) small lots, and using divinatory methods to eliminate certain lots, leaving behind a smaller and smaller selection of people to inquire with. I talked to people whose names survived the divinatory culling, and asked them to tell me about people they knew, whom they considered to be very deep, powerful, or connected. I took more names.

It took weeks, but I finally had a small pool of candidates. I was able to ask the oracle directly if it was this person, or that, I should be contacting. And finally, I was given a "yes" to a name. I had my man- and it was a man- a poet, in fact. I had been shown some of his poetry by the person who told me about him. It was immediately obvious to me that beings from the Otherness were pounding upon this man's throat and chest; his words were soulful and mysterious. These words had the simple beauty of the Earth, and the Fayerie twang of the Unseen world about them. Poetry and the arts of sorcery come from the same ancient family tree, and he was certainly sitting in the shade of that tree.

I had a big "yes" from the oracle that this was the man I needed to talk to. But then I was faced with a new dilemma: how in the world do you write a letter to a total stranger, and drop this on him? What was I supposed to say? "Hi, you don't know me at all, but an oracle told me to find you because I have all these problems, and it thinks that you can mysteriously do something just by talking to me to change them?" I dreaded having to contact him.

To make matters worse, contacting him was hard. Quite in keeping with the character of the rogue mystic-poet, he dropped offline pretty regularly, and stayed offline for long periods of time. I had the last known email address for him, so I composed a letter- one of the hardest and most awkward letters I've ever written. Even if he got the letter, I feared, he'd have a very large chance of thinking me just some mentally ill person online, a stranger with way too much honesty telling him sad stories about hardships, and asking for his help. I didnt know if he'd even write back. But why would the oracle say he was the one, if he would just ignore me? Perhaps just writing this letter (I reasoned) would be enough to break me out of the curse. Maybe the oracle never intended for me to actually contact this guy- just facing all these difficulties might have been enough. That was my despair reasoning for me.

In my letter, I told the poet- whose name is Eric Chisler- that this wasn't a scam, that I wasn't asking for his money, nor did I mean to make him think that the solution to all of my problems was somehow on his shoulders. I told him what I knew was true: if he would read my letter, and then write back to me and say whatever things first came to his mind-