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Herein pictured are Spirit Fetishes of central significance within the tradition of the Wending Way. They are the Oath Fetish of the Cavern Mother and the Oath Fetish of the Ardent Father—syzygial divinities who make up two thirds of the perichoretic trinity worshipped as prime initiators in the current of my cultus.

Hasgstone for boundary. Key for passage. Iron for jurisdiction..

This piece was constructed using a large iron Key, two hagstones from local waterways, and one hagstone from the Baltic shores, all strung together with chain & rings of steel. It has been ritually consecrated as a ward, for placement above or near the prime doorway of a domicile. It is intended to reinforce the sovereignty of the home and to stand watch at the crossing point.

This ward is one of a kind and available for sale to whomever should reach out first.

This is an unusual and fascinating pendant I came across a while back. It contains a small piece of handmade bobbin lace, which is housed within the body of an old silver-plated pocket watch, beneath a plastic dome. It was created sometime in the mid-20th century and comes from Nottinghamshire, England. While it would make a lovely statement pendant or collectible curio, I can't help but think of what a unique Spirit House it could make; and so I share it here and gope that it finds a home in proper hands.

This is one of the most meaningful talismans I've ever created. It is a Linked Fetish to the Altar I keep in honor of my Magistellus—my soul bound Spirit Mate. He has been with me from my earliest days, though he chose to walk beside me cloaked in flesh for 13 years. He is dearest amongst my Spirit Kith, and I trust him with my very life.

On the Advantages and Liabilities of Magical Thinking in Magical Practice

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” – Joseph Campbell

There are certain temperaments that tend, more often than not, toward magical practice. They notice correspondences quickly. They feel atmosphere change when entering a room. They wake from dreams with entire landscapes intact and coherent. They detect rhythm in coincidence. They are rarely content with the flat explanation when a layered one is available. While these traits can deeply enrich one’s experience of the world, the same temperaments are also particularly vulnerable to misreading the world.

Heightened pattern recognition is not inherently mystical. It is simply the mind’s capacity to detect relationship. A practitioner who sees three crows in succession and pauses is not irrational; they are attentive. The question is whether that attentiveness is disciplined. Pattern recognition becomes magical thinking when it is unexamined. The mind that can weave meaning across distance can also weave illusion across absence. A string of unrelated events may be gathered into a narrative because the mind finds comfort in coherence. A dream may be treated as directive rather than digestion. A symbol may be taken as summons when it is merely familiarity. This is not a moral failing. It is an occupational hazard.

Strong imagination operates similarly. It is the faculty by which unseen forms become perceptible. Without imagination, spirits would rarely ever be encountered with any degree of intensity or clarity, because encounter requires a receptive medium. The imagination is that medium. Yet the imagination is also generative. It produces images without external stimulus. It elaborates. It embellishes. It intensifies. If a practitioner does not learn the temperament of their own imagination—how it behaves when bored, how it behaves when lonely, how it behaves when frightened—they risk mistaking its productions for visitation.

In my experience, what separates a gifted practitioner from a deluded one is not the presence or absence of imagination, but the presence of restraint. There is a tendency in modern discourse to equate skepticism with disenchantment and credulity with openness. But many traditions—especially ones that involve direct magical/spiritual investigation and mitigation—rarely operated this way. Many folk practitioners were and are profoundly pragmatic in their own right. A thing might be a spirit. It might also be damp air in the wall. One does not need to decide immediately. The disciplined practitioner permits ambiguity to remain. Magical thinking in its immature form insists upon meaning. In its matured form, it tolerates mystery without filling it. This distinction is subtle but decisive.

Consider coincidence. A practitioner with heightened pattern recognition may experience a series of related symbols in close succession. They might see a particular animal repeatedly, hear its name spoken unexpectedly, and dream of it that night. One response is to declare oneself chosen. Another is to note the pattern and wait. Patterns that persist without prompting tend to clarify themselves. Patterns that require constant reinforcement from the practitioner tend to dissolve when not fed. The imagination can amplify either pathway.

There are individuals whose minds are naturally porous. They perceive emotional undercurrents. They sense when something is about to occur. They anticipate shifts. This porosity can feel like psychic ability, and in some cases it may be precisely that. It can also be anxious vigilance, however. An anxious mind also scans for patterns, as a way to make sense of our circumstances and offer protective action. It also predicts outcomes. It also feels charged by small deviations in environment. And without careful self-study, the two can become indistinguishable.

To practice magic responsibly is to cultivate self-knowledge alongside perception. One must learn the texture of one’s own thoughts. Which ideas arrive quietly and remain steady? Which arrive in a rush and demand immediate action? Which are accompanied by fear? Which by stillness?

In my observation, genuine encounter tends toward steadiness. It does not need to shout. It does not flatter. It does not insist upon immediate identity change. The imagination, by contrast, often seeks drama. This is not to disparage drama. Many initiatory experiences are intense, and some encounters are world-shaking. But intensity in and of itself is not evidence.

There are practitioners who possess extraordinary imaginative capacity. They can construct elaborate inner landscapes and inhabit them fully. This can be a profound asset. Ritual often requires visualization. Relationship with non-ordinary beings often begins in imaginal space. However, the imaginal is not synonymous with the external or the true. A useful discipline is to differentiate between what one generates and what resists generation. If you attempt to alter an inner image and it alters easily, you are likely within your own construction. If it resists modification, behaves unpredictably, or introduces information you would not have chosen, the experience warrants further observation. Even then, caution remains appropriate.

Magical “giftedness,” if such a term is to be used at all, often consists in sensitivity. Sensitivity to pattern. Sensitivity to mood. Sensitivity to subtle change. These are not inherently supernatural traits. They are neurological and psychological tendencies that, when refined, allow one to perceive what others overlook. Yet, as William James observed, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

But they can also render one susceptible to overwhelm. A mind that detects pattern everywhere may struggle to dismiss irrelevant stimuli. A mind that imagines vividly may struggle to rest. A mind that senses atmosphere may struggle to differentiate between personal emotion and environmental influence.

Thus the same traits that allow one to see hidden facets of reality can distort reality. The difference lies not in suppressing these faculties but in training them. In this context, training includes:

— Deliberate grounding in ordinary cause and effect.

— Verification when possible.

— Patience before conclusion.

— Acceptance of uncertainty.

It also includes humility. There is a particular danger in magical communities of rewarding dramatic narrative. The practitioner who reports grand visions and complex spirit courts is often given more attention than the practitioner who reports subtle shifts and quiet guidance. This can unconsciously encourage elaboration. The gifted practitioner often learns to be content with the modest. It is often the modest perception that proves most reliable.

Magical thinking, in its healthiest form, is not belief in fantasy, but recognition that the world may contain more than is immediately visible. Heightened pattern recognition, in its healthiest form, is not paranoia, but attentiveness to interrelation. Strong imagination, in its healthiest form, is not escapism, but an instrument for encounter. Each becomes curse when untethered. If a practitioner refuses all skepticism, they risk constructing an elaborate architecture of falsehood around themselves. If they refuse all imagination, they risk sealing themselves off from subtle perception entirely.

The work, then, is balance. One must allow the mind to wander without allowing it to rule. One must attend to pattern without worshiping it. One must imagine without conflating imagination with fact.

The land remains the land whether or not one is perceiving spirits. Wood remains wood whether or not it is being carved into a charm. Bills must be paid. Food must be cooked. Bodies must be cared for. If one’s magical thinking begins to erode these foundations, it is not a gift in that moment. Yet if one’s heightened perception allows them to notice when a place is disturbed, when an offering is ill-suited, when a relationship is unbalanced, then it is indeed a gift.

The very same faculty can mislead or reveal. It depends upon whether it is examined. In this way, magical temperament resembles fire. In the hearth, it warms and cooks. Uncontained, it consumes the house. The practitioner’s task is not to extinguish the fire of imagination or the spark of pattern recognition, but to learn the architecture within which they can safely burn.

Only then do these traits cease to be a liability and become what they were always capable of being: instruments of a wisdom and discernment.

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Based on my upringing and personal understanding, repetition in these contexts is rarely for emphasis alone. It is a way of establishing position.

Many folk actions are not performed in an empty world but in one presumed to have depth—surface, verge, and beyond. A single act occurs only in the immediate place. A second confirms it. The third carries it across.

You can see this in formulaic speech. The first utterance addresses what is plainly present, the second reaches what is nearby but unseen, and the third fixes the matter so that it cannot easily be mistaken as accidental. After three, the action is no longer occurring; it has occurred.

This is also why the third is often the binding one. Promises sworn thrice, names called thrice, and knocks given thrice move from attempt to declaration. The number is less mystical than procedural: it converts a moment into a state.

This is a unique bobble that bears a deceptively strong capacity as a Spirit House.

A very old iron skeleton key was found at a Crossroads. It was then lustrated within a living spring for 3 days and nights before being set with a small, spinning bead of Rutilated Golden Quartz and then suffumigated with a smoke of crushed Juniper Berries, Crossroads-harvested Wood Sorrel, and Meteoric Iron Filings in a ritual of spiritual enlivening.

The resultant talismanic object has been ceremonially primed as a powerfully receptive Spirit House for a famulus or servitor.

If interested in acquiring this unique ritual implement, feel free to reach out here. ricing is flexible.

I don’t hold to the idea that the Fair Folk are simply deified human ancestors, nor that they are wholly unrelated to humanity.

Anglo-Celtic folklore repeatedly places the Fae in an intermediate condition—not gods, not ghosts, but a people who overlap the human dead in certain states. Across Anglo-Celtic cultures, you see three consistent threads:

1) The mound is both a fairy dwelling and a grave.

Barrows, cairns, and tumuli are simultaneously síde (fairy hills) and burial places. The dead are placed into the earth, yet afterward lights move there, music is heard, and riders emerge in procession. The living do not say “a ghost came out of the grave”—they say the hill opened.

This implies not haunting but continuation. The person buried does not linger as a shade—they enter a community.

2) The "Faerie Host" often behaves like the dead in the context of mythic pattern.

Night rides, the Wild Hunt, the Sluagh, and the procession of the Good People resemble funerary retinues for a reason. They travel in companies, keep ranks, carry torches, and move along old roads and boundaries—exactly the paths of funeral passage. Encounters are often said to leave witnesses weak, drained, or “taken,” which even mirrors the old belief that the dead draw vitality from the living. Likewise, in several traditions, the newly dead may be seen riding among the Fae within a year of burial.

This similarity to human funerary practices may very well stem from human attempts to understand, mimic, and appease the otherworld, but they may also represent a vestigial continuance of human practices within ranks of fae spirits that once were, but are no longer, human.

3) “Elf” historically overlaps with “the powerful dead.”

In early English usage ælf was not a tiny glittering being, but an unseen causing spirit—responsible for illness, trance, inspiration, and beauty beyond human measure. In Norse belief, burial mounds of notable men became sites of cult, and the dead within were called elves (álfar). Offerings were given to them seasonally as one would to land spirits.

So rather than “humans become gods,” the pattern might be said to look more like this: While the ordinary dead rejoin with divinity, the restless dead become ghosts/wraiths, the settled dead become ancestral spirits, and the potent/integrated dead become elves.

In other words, some fair folk were once human, but not recently human—they have crossed a threshold of belonging to the Otherworld’s society. They are no longer tethered to their humanity, yet not primordial spirits either. They are the assimilated dead. This also explains why folklore insists both that fairies predate mankind and that humans can join them. The host is older than any one people, but continually receives members.

So I would say, the Fair Folk are not merely the deceased—but the dead are one of the ways the Fair Folk are populated. Certain humans, especially those buried in old ways, remembered ongoingly, or who were powerful in life, may enter that company. Beyond the sheer liminality of the sites, Faerie mounds being tied to burial sites is not coincidence; it is mechanism.

The preliminary segment of my signature Cord Cutting ritual, as performed for a recent client.

In this spell everything burns except the cord, which, by that point, has become a potent physical simulacrum of the energetic teather linking the parties involved. I then perform knot magic using the endowed cord in order to crystallize the excisive intentions of my work, before severing it with a sained blade and burning the remnant halves within the hearth.

What Grindr and the Otherworld have in common:

A strange and mysterious place that has the potential to offer delights and terrors.

A certain degree of knowledge is required to traverse safely.

If you look at an entity, it can tell you're looking and is more likely to look at you in return.

Certain symbols and pass phrases are used to find the proper kind of entity you're looking for.

True names have power and are guarded by most.

People have lost themselves in their obsessive pursuits and gone mad.