Nigel Pennick - Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy

MAGIC
IN THE
LANDSCAPE

More often than not, modern humans have stumbled obliviously and deleteriously across the landscape they inhabit. Accordingly, their perception of reality has become ever more shallow, superficial, and desacralizedor, worst of all, may now be abandoned entirely in favor of virtual simulacra. Swimming against this tide for over half a century, Nigel Pennick is a tireless explorer and surveyor of the ensouled and eldritch world that still persists around us, despite our blind and clumsy attempts to constantly develop and smother it for short-term gains. At its root, Magic in the Landscape is a treatise about the authenticity that results from meaningful human interaction with the earth and its myriad energies. In this modest spiritual gazetteer, Pennick reveals some of the countless crossroads where local traditions and topography intersect, always with the aim of shedding light upon the deeper soulscape that these practices reflect.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN, PH.D.,COEDITOR OF TYR: MYTHCULTURETRADITION

In this book, Nigel expertly weaves together a narrative exploring the power of place and humankinds changing relationship with it. It is a thought-provoking and well-written exploration of the physical and spiritual aspects of the landscape, revealing the world about us to be more than an impersonal backdrop against which we live out our lives. Within these pages, Nigel reminds us of the importance of how we choose to orient ourselves within this ensouled world and of the necessity for discernment in any mundane and magical interactions we might make with the land beneath our heels.

MARTIN DUFFY, AUTHOR OF THESPIRIT OF THE DOWNS: WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC IN SUSSEX

In this book, Pennick does what he does so wellwears his deep learning lightly and makes more profound and highly readable connections between magic and the visible world than you could shake a geomantic staff at. He reminds us of the necessity of sacred space and the disenchantment of the world, demolishing the prettification of rural Britain and our loss of magical tradition. He also shows that what we now call feng shui existed in Britain long before it got fashionable and that just a few centuries ago major buildings were founded at times and places indicated by astrology. Should we need such a reminder, a postscript on magic makes it clear that Pennick is not some tenured academic toeing the scientism party line but a practicing magician who is writing from real personal experience.

DAVID LEE, AUTHOR OFLIFE FORCE: SENSED ENERGY IN BREATHWORK, PSYCHEDELIA AND CHAOS MAGIC

INTRODUCTION

A VANISHING WORLD IN NEED OF RESCUE

Many writings about historical subjects attempt to reconstruct the past by creating a depiction of an ideal time when the writer perceives that the system under study was perfect or intact. All history is a kind of editing; we are presented with records, stories, and opinions from the past from which we must try to construct some coherent narrative. The nature of events and how they are remembered, recorded, and transmitted is an uncertain territory. Time is a continuum, and we are present in it at a certain place. There is no generic moment: every incident that occurred was a real one, and every action happened at a particular time at a particular place. What has come before is only present as physical fragments, written and recorded documentation, legendary readings of events, stories handed down, and attempted reconstructions that seek to create an ambience of a historical period. Museums, reconstructions, and reenactments exist in the present: they are inevitably selective and creative works of the present that seek to present us with the illusion of being in the pastwhich we are not. Their many failings and falsifications are apparent wherever they take place.

The academic discipline of folklore and studies into earth mysteries, paganism, witchcraft, and magic are equally subject to this selection. Recorded evidence of much of the subject matter is extremely fragmentary and subject to widely varying interpretations. These interpretations frequently present themselves as composing a self-contained system that ignores variations of individuals and of time. A simplified, homogenized, and idealized principle is presented as if it were the complex and irreducible reality. An indeterminate and imaginary periodthe pastis often presented as a mythologized existence comparable to the dreamtime of the native Australian mythos. This is not a historical time and date like that of a recorded event, such as, for example, the laying of the foundation stone of Sir Christopher Wrens Saint Pauls Cathedral in London at 6:30 a.m. local apparent time, June 26 (Old Style), 1675, but rather is an idealized otherworldly time that remains forever in the eternal present in peoples culture.

Fig. I.1. Spiral stone, Newgrange, Ireland

Religions based on supposed actual events treat them in this idealized way. In Christian iconography Jesus is always on the cross, and the actual and precise location, time, date, and duration of the crucifixion is unknown and has no importance to the mythos. But if it occurred, it was on a particular date, at a particular time, with a particular duration, after which the event was over. This event has been transferred into an eternal imaginary time. Those who take visitors around historic sites often say something like, They would have sat here, a false way of viewing the past. There is no would have: either someone did something at a specific time or they did not. Would have is the language of imaginary time, the fabrication of a story that masquerades as past reality.

Every person lumped under the various categories was, like you and me, an individual who lived for a particular time after his or her birth, which took place at a particular moment, as did his or her death. They were individuals born into particular families at particular places. They were taught by other individuals, each with their own histories and their own life stories. Most of these people are unknown; their life stories are lost, and we are lucky to have a few names and the occasional anecdote of one of their actions. Although writers, statisticians, and politicians talk as if there are real entities like the British people, witches, ploughmen, drivers, criminals, police officers, foreigners, or magicians, in actuality these categories tell us nothing about the character and lives of the individuals so categorized. Equally, the modes of study and their development and changes have their own history. Opinions commonly held as true in 1862 may have been discredited by 1912, revised in 1962, and overthrown by 2012, and they may be reinstated by 2062. During the periods when they held sway, these opinions were the norm, the orthodoxy, and one risked criticism or the loss of ones credibility or even ones career or life to claim another opinion. In folklore and wider historical reconstruction attempts, their history as subjects embeds within them the processes of their development. Many of the early investigators were driven by a wish to find customs and traditions that were unique to particular placesor at least what they then perceived to be uniqueand that they saw as in danger of being lost. When an art has seemed threatened, then collecting has intensified so that people can record what was viewed as a vanishing world in need of rescue.