#ttmt

Chapter 7 – Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1

Hello dears! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? The only defense I can offer is that I am sick and fucking tired of this book and Nigel Pearson and his bullshit. I’m tired of it, but I’ve got some free time and I want to see this nonsense through to the bitter end. So let’s get started.

Pearson now turns his attention to the Goddess.  He opens this section with a five-stanza poem/hymn/devotional piece which I wouldn’t consider out of place in any of my rituals. After this he once again has to stop and tear other people down:

“The Goddess, as perceived in Traditional Witchcraft, is not the “Triple Moon Goddess” of Robert Graves’ “White Goddess”, so beloved of modern pagans and Wiccans. Neither is she solely the fertile Earth Mother of so-called “Neolithic” belief.”

Venus figurine found at Çatalhöyük in 2016

I am sure you will be absolutely shocked to see that in the next few pages Pearson describes a divinity who is curiously similar to the capricious and cruel deity Graves depicts in The White Goddess. He sort of flip-flops around a bit, and uses phrases that readers in classical mythology will recognize – there are snippets of the Cyme Aretology of Isis, the statue of Isis at Sais, the Fates, and others. He also says:

“No one depiction of the Goddess can fully express Her powers and nature but Her essence exists in all the goddesses invented by Man – for all have been.”

This sort of flies in the face of his earlier complains that only idiots believe ‘All gods are one god’, but consistency has evidently never been one of Pearson’s virtues. He also states “it is from her that we all issue and to Her that we shall all return at the end of times” which sounds perilously close to that line from the Charge of the Goddess: “From me all things proceed and unto me they must return.” Funny how that keeps happening! He complains again that “She bears little resemblance to the bright, loving, and caring Goddess of modern pagan practice.” Sorry folks! Your Goddess just isn’t edgy enough!

CRAWLING IN MY SKINNNNNN

Pearson states that there are two titles for the Witch Goddess, the Great Queen and the Black Goddess. Let’s take a look and see what he says:

The Great Queen

This is a deity of “Life, love, sexuality, death and the Land”. I’m not really sure how this is different from how many modern pagans view the Goddess, but OK, sure, whatever. She is concerned with things that pertain to being alive. Pearson’s descriptions here really remind me of The White Goddess, in that Gravesian “The goddess fucks you and then destroys you” way, up to and including a comparison to the sow who eats her own farrow. ”To feed and nurture her cub, the vixen must kill the fluffy bunny and present it with blood-stained muzzle.” The fluffy bunny. I’ve been saying this for years, but it bears repeating – a lot of traddies really, really remind me of the kind of person who spent a lot of time yelling that fluff-bunnies would be the death of Wicca back in the early aughts.

He also identifies the Great Queen with the Land in the same way a lot of books associate a queen with the land, you know, like you read in books on Celtic mythology, but also identifies her with the inexorable forces of nature.

Next Pearson presents an exercise to form a relationship with this aspect of divinity, which he calls ‘Addressing the Dame.’ The title of this makes me want to scream for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has been reading my Tumblr. It entails making a sort of image or representation out of found natural materials in which the spirit of the Great Queen may dwell to which one may make prayers or petitions (but remember, as he mentioned earlier, witches do not worship deities). Once the framework of the representation is done you make regular trips to gather more materials to add to it, veiling it with a black cloth between trips. After a year and a day the work is completed and you will have a finished link to the Great Queen in all her faces and aspects, as it were, collected over an entire cycle of the seasons. He stresses that this should not be undertaken lightly (which is correct) but I feel like there should be some instruction on what to do if the image needs to be taken apart or destroyed for some reason.  It’s not a terrible idea, but he also doesn’t give many suggestions for what to do with this (should it be veiled at all times, for example?) but I feel like it would be an interesting exercise were it fleshed out a bit.

The Black Goddess

This aspect of the Goddess functions more as what I would say is more like modern pagan views of the Crone, the mysteries of the night, the Underworld, the spaces between the stars (mostly void, partly stars) and behind the Moon. He provides a description of a spiritual experience he had during the contemplation of the Black Goddess.

Pearson also states that the Black Goddess is the one who creates “the next shapes of force to be unleased on the world.” She is also a deity who makes magic work, if I am reading this correctly – “It is to this aspect of the Goddess that we appeal for any of the grand magics, the great life-shaping and life-changing works that we would attempt. These are not to be approached without great consideration and meditation beforehand but, when we are certain that it is the right thing to do – and Traditional Crafters do meddle and change things – then it is to the great Black Goddess that we apply for the permission and power to carry out the work.”

I’m not like other girls. I meddle and change things.

We are also presented with an exercise meant to form a connection with the Black Goddess and also find out where your life is going. This involves constructing a threefold Circle of salt, ashes, and a mixture of water, wine, vinegar, and salt, addressing four aspects of the Black Goddess at the four quarters, consecrating water, and then scrying into it. It’s not a bad working!

Next up is a section titled Approaching the Power. This is a place where Pearson contradicts himself quite a bit, saying that some witches actually do believe that the God and Goddess come from one ultimate Power, which he suggests could be a Goddess who birthed the one he calls the Goddess, a sort of primeval creatrix like Chaos. Alternately, some may view this ultimate Power as the witches’ Devil, a being of rebellion and cunning and disorderliness. And yet some may view this Power as a union of the God and Goddess, which he describes in fairly conventional heterosexist terms. Nevermind that earlier Pearson shit all over Dion Fortune’s ‘all gods are one god’ maxim. Like I said, consistency is not his forte.

He also seems to believe that Traditional Witches existed historically: “Certainly they gathered together upon occasions when fellows were known in the vicinity and certainly they swapped lore and instructed each other in their individual ways of knowledge.”

He points out that dedication and initiation are separate things (correct) and provides a ritual for self-dedication. This is not a process I can disagree with! Initiation, as he states, is something bestowed upon you by another, be it a group of people you are joining or a spiritual experience. His self-dedication ritual contains elements that will be very familiar to anyone who has read anything on the subject – blessing with the four Elements, quarter calls, making a declaration of dedication. His ritual has some actions and language clearly borrowed from trial records from the European witch hysteria.

The closing of the ritual is conventional, and at this point he ends the book – no further information, no afterword or conclusion. Our long national nightmare is over.

Conclusion

It’s over! It’s finished! I finally got around to completing my chapter-by-chapter teardown on this shitty, shitty book. I don’t like his writing style. I don’t like his bad editing. I don’t like Pearson’s bad habit of making portentous, ominous statements with no follow-up, explanation, or further detail. I don’t like his shameless pillaging from other writers, the complete and total lack of footnotes and sources, or his constant whining about how awful those Wiccans are while lifting ideas, ritual practices, and theology from the religion wholesale. I’ve said it before and it bears repeating – there is nothing in this book that would be out of place in a conventional book on Wicca, nothing.

I’m still angry that some old fart Gardnerian Third Degree who had been initiated by Buckland who I met in the old Witches’ Chat Network chatroom spent so much time verbally fellating this book, to the extent that I actually found a copy of it, because this book sucks. It is tepid, bland, very pedestrian writing, and while it has some actual rituals and workings in it, the way that they’re presented and the pointless ramblings and incessant whining about other pagans that fills the pages between those rituals and workings made this an unpleasant read. Should you purchase this book? No. Should you illegally download this book mysteriously find a .pdf of it on your computer somehow? Also no. There are infinitely better books out there that won’t be as much of a waste of your time.

Chapter 7 – Approaching the Powers – Part 2

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I’m sorry for the gap, I’m just kind of getting fed up with Pearson. I must be strong and persist. This is just a brutal chapter to slog through, OK?

Earlier Pearson talked about the King of the Wildwood. He gives what I’d describe as a meditative exercise (“Walking the Way”) to encounter him. He states it’s a development of his witch-tracking or SpiritWorking (there it is again! Making it sound like a product!) which he suggests one should do in the region beforehand, to be familiar with the area and so the area will be familiar with you, which is fair. Going into the woods and doing a kind of hyper-aware walking meditation, being aware of your surroundings, what you see and hear, while stilling internal dialogue until you arrive at a place that feels right, treading the mill (why not just say circle dance, Nigel?) until your inner vision become overwhelming, and then allowing contact from the Lord of the Wildwood to take place. He says if nothing seems to happen there will probably be some subtle inner change. Ground and centre afterwards, go home, and take notes.

He whines a bit that people reading the first edition of the book responded poorly to this exercise and then provides a dream he had after the first time he did it and had what I’ll accept as some kind of divine encounter:

“At that point, the dream image changed and I found myself lying on my back in some straw in and old, wood-timbered barn. I seemed to be a bit dazed and took a moment to get my bearings but almost immediately I became aware of the Being in front of me. Many, many times my size, this Being was looming over me and, I thought, about to lunge forward. It was in the shape of a huge naked man, with a hairy skin, wild shaggy hair and beard and antlers sprouting from his head. He had an enormous erection and was coming towards me with an absolutely wild and manic gleam in his slanted eyes. At this point I woke up, sweating profusely and thoroughly disturbed. It took me a great while to get back to sleep that night, I assure you.”

The Lord of the Mound

And now for something completely different. Next up comes the Lord of the Mound, who’s more of a death and underworld sort of divinity, associated with the grave and barrow, that which has gone before. However, Pearson also assigns him a shamanic aspect who provides divination and magical knowledge. He is also associated with rebirth. He may be encountered through an exercise called ‘Entering the Maze’, which involves doing it in actuality or symbolically. In actuality one draws a labyrinth on the ground, whereas symbolically would require the use of a labyrinth marked on a rock, which he calls a Troystone. Again, Trad Crafters – the labyrinth was in Knossos on Crete, not in Troy, get your shit right (Where does this term even come from? I have been unable to find any source for it at all).

Tread the Mill widdershins and either walk the labyrinth to the centre or run your finger along the line on the board, and do a meditation involving entry into a barrow / faery mound / hollow hill, communicate with whoever you find, then come back, going back through the labyrinth, closing the Circle dismissing the Compass, and going home.

Finally we have the Master of Light. This is a solar aspect that enlivens, illuminates, and gives life. “He is the source of all the sun gods in human history – their waxings, wanings, risings and settings – and encompasses and subsumes them all”... But of course it’s only Those Fucking Wiccans who claim that “All gods are one god”, right? Nevermind that Pearson disparages that statement earlier on in this same godsbedamned chapter. He then goes on to state that the Sun King is not the Oak or Holly King, but that they are quite different.

The Master of Light is a Promethean figure as well, who grants the light of knowledge, which is also the Element of Fire, which he then hilariously identifies with Ley lines and Kundalini and the Mark of Cain which he also associates with the Watchers from the Book of Enoch – because True Witches (tm) are descendants of the Watchers. This statement was embarrassing when Paul Huson wrote it in Mastering Witchcraft in 1970, it was embarrassing when Silver RavenWolf stated that witches are angelic agents in Teen Witch in 1998, and it’s embarrassing today.

As an extension of this he brings in a connection with blacksmithing, Cain (gotta get that Cochrane reference in there, right?), the Horseman’s Word, the Toadmen, and Morris dancing:

“The fact that the dancers blacked-up their faces may not have all been due to the desire for anonymity, but also to show their true allegiance to their real Master.”

Or it could be the idea that Morris dancing could theoretically be derived from Moorish dancing (which implies blackface), or from the fact that several Morris and Morris-adjacent folk dance traditions come from coal-mining areas, but again, we can’t expect decent scholarship or, indeed, references and citations from a book written in 2007 and updated in 2017.

But I digress. So the Master of Light also grants spiritual illumination. Pearson says that he’s physically incarnated many times and makes the sort of implications one would expect from such a statement.

He may be encountered through a ritual (and Pearson actually does give a full ritual here, not a bare-bones meditative exercise, which is a fairly well-written ritual, at that) full of blacksmith imagery – going from a place of darkness, through the forge and approaching a rise with a cave, entering that cave, communing with the Master and then returning with illumination. It’s really not that bad! I am a skilled and rather mean evaluator of ritual – in the Odyssean Tradition we are taught to deconstruct and creatively criticize our rituals so we can improve and help others improve – and I really don’t mind this one, although the incense recipe given seems to be suspiciously close to Paul Huson’s Cernunnos incense recipe.

Chapter Seven - Approaching the Powers

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

We begin to draw to a close. Pearson finishes up Treading The Mill with ‘Approaching the Powers’, which deals with deities. I’ve kind of harped on this point quite a bit, I know, but Pearson has been adamant throughout that gods are not worshipped in his version of traditional witchcraft – worked with, worked for, offerings made to, but somehow not worshipped. I confess that I, as a highly religious Wiccan who has had profound and moving experiences with several gods and goddesses, and as one who leads public rituals to facilitate people’s worship of the Gods, find this absolutely weird and baffling. Pearson’s approach to all of this work so far has basically been, word for word, a highly Wicca-flavoured modern pagan witchcraft, and what follows here in this chapter meshes perfectly well with Wiccan belief and theology according to my understanding as a BTW initiate. He’s been insistent throughout that his book has nothing to do with Wicca, but this chapter proves that that statement is a bold-faced lie, as I can see no daylight between what he describes here in terms of deities and how Wicca views them.

I can only assume that Pearson has the most hilariously incorrect, prejudiced, and out-of-date ideas about what Wicca involves, because his opening to this chapter is:

“Traditional witchcraft is not a nature-based fertility religion; that is modern, pagan Wicca and a different thing entirely. Traditional witchcraft, whilst it contains many different facets in its various manifestations and has its roots in the pagan religions of antiquity, is essentially the approach to and apprehension of – even the union with – the divine Powers of the universe, imaged as gods. This is achieved by the practice and comprehension of the Mysteries, as understood by our ancestors as being the mysteries that surround life and death and all in between.”

Like...my dude, that statement would be right at home in a book about Wicca, no questions asked. I don’t know where he got the idea that what he was doing was somehow Very Different, but it isn’t, Nigel, it isn’t. About all I can think of to explain this si that he read a book written by Silver RavenWolf in.....frig, 1994 or something, and decided that was the be-all end-all of it. He exhibits a level of misinformation that I think he could probably read Cunningham’s Solitary Guide and find it informative and eye-opening. That’s how mininformed I feel he is. It’s like he got his entire idea of what my religion (that he spends lots of time shitting on) involves from some bad Tumblr posts.

He states that one makes contact with these deities by putting yourself ‘in their way’, as it were, through trance and other exercises. He says that they are often conceived of as the gods of the UK and Europe in antiquity, not as emanations or aspects of some supreme being (no issues with that statement! Pagan witches are not monotheists!) but then says that they’re never given individual names but rather titles, and that when they do take personal form it’s usually not the gods generally worshipped in antiquity.....so which one is it?

“Where these deities take on a personal form, they are not usually the gods that were worshipped by the general pagan populations of the past, but the lesser known and acknowledged gods, those of the Underworld and the Outer realms”

You worship Diana? That’s cool, I guess. I worship the Blessed Bloodmother of my Especial Breed. You probably haven’t heard of her.

There’s some talk about working with specific deities with whom one has a special relationship – chosen by the deity, or by their own choice (although I feel that it’s the deity’s choice here), or through membership in a group or tradition that specifically works with that deity. Almost every initiate or long-term practitioner I know has some kind of special relationship with one or more deities, and I can’t take any great issue with what Pearson says here. He notes that it might be lifelong or for a set time, but also says that it’s a private and hidden thing which is not how I’ve seen it in the groups I’ve been with. Anyone who’s met me or read this blog will know that I’m particularly devoted to Isis, and it’s not something I would ever dream of hiding. Obviously other traditions or groups may have different rules!

He takes a snipe at Dion Fortune’s statement “All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator” from The Sea Priestess, again evidently believing that this is a common precept in other varieties of modern pagan witchcraft. I can’t for the life of me remember who it was that brought that phrase into a Wiccan setting, although my money is on the Farrars for reasons I’ll be going into in a bit.

Seeing as I’ve probably spent more time talking about the first two and a half pages of this chapter than there are actual words on those pages, let’s move on from contradictory theology. The next portion of this chapter is devoted to both the god and the goddess of the witches, which Pearson describes as archetypes of the Powers. He starts out with the God.

Remember how earlier I complained that there wasn’t much here that was actually distinct from Wiccan theology? Well strap in, because this is going to be a hell of a ride into a perfect storm of me bitching about Pearson.

“Historically, the Traditional Craft has been mainly God-orientated and has had the Horned God at the forefront of the majority of its workings, as opposed to the particularly Goddess and matriarchal path of most modern, pagan working”. So help me God, Pearson, if you go off into that shitty “modern trad craft is the same thing as the historical witches’ Sabbath of the European witch hysteria and all proper trad crafters worship the Devil” nonsense THERE WILL BE WORDS. I’m going to point out that many of the more prolific and popular writers on trad craft or cited by them are very often men, and I’m not sure why this is. Nigels Pearson, Pennick, and Jackson, Michael Howard, Robert Cochrane, Evan John-Jones, Paul Huson (a stretch, he was practicing Wicca when he wrote Mastering Witchcraft and presumably still is?), Daniel Schulke and Andrew Chumbley if we’re counting Cvltvs Sabbati, Peter Grey, the loathsome and detestable Robin Artisson, it’s sort of a long list, and that’s just off the top of my head. I’ve just looked through his suggested reading list (because there’s no bibliography and no sources, which is, again, unacceptable in a book published in 2017) and I’d say it’s ¾ men. But I digress.

There’s a bit about balance between god and goddess energies (for want of a better term) which I am trying desperately to view charitably but can’t. Pearson believes that the goal of perfect balance in all things and particularly the God-Goddess equilibrium is unrealistic, that this should properly be a sliding scale of movement, both being in the ascendant at different times. In my own life when I see people engage in such talk and language it’s usually to whine about how Those Uppity Women shouldn’t have women-only rituals, or how rituals should be run by a priestess and a priest, how the blessing of the wine is a metaphor for heterosexual intercourse and that’s Just the Way It Is, essentially covertly complaining that things aren’t as heteronormative as they think they should be / used to be. It may be that this isn’t Pearson’s point here (I am also aware Pearson is gay-married, although I have known my share of misogynistic gay men in my time), but I’ve seen this language used to that end before and it makes me deeply suspicious.

So we’ve got a discussion of three aspects of the God here, being the King of the Wildwood, the Lord of the Mound, and the Master of Light, with a description of each with an associated ritual working to gain communication and familiarization.

The King of the Wildwood, according to Pearson, is the one most immediately familiar to people, being a Horned God, although one he feels is somehow different from that of the Wiccans who he feels is a “gentle, loving father-figure...the comforting protector of his wild family...the mild defender of the rights of ‘New Man’”. I know I say this a lot, like, a lot, but Pearson is showing off his ignorance, his superficial understanding, again. Those sad, pathetic Wiccans with their sad, pathetic Horned God! Real witches worship a God “seen as the render, the destroyer, the ripper and raper. He may send mortal terror into those that come in his way and can bestow madness and chaos upon those that are not careful in their dealings with him...he embodies the pure, unrefined driving force of the masculine side of Nature, which is truly ‘red in tooth and claw’ and elicits a comparative response in us when we encounter Him.”

You guys....I think that Pearson thinks the God of the Wiccans is some kind of soyboy cuck.

Somehow he got the idea that the Wiccan conception of the Horned God is some kind of love-and-light deity and nothing more, I think. Again, not the case, but, well, I’ve been over that before.

He complains that people are too soft and complacent in their daily lives, that life should be raw and painful sometimes, in the way that certain modern witchcraft writers try so hard to say that witchcraft is actually about terror and loneliness and hate, but that the King of the Wildwood gets you past that? It’s a little weird. Pearson also, again, wildly misunderstands Wiccan theology, and assumes that in its entirety it subscribes to the Oak King / Holly King myth-cycle.

Alright, so I mentioned the Farrars earlier. Let’s get back to them for a minute, alright? Some or most of you (I’m hoping for most) will be aware of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a monumental work (twelve volumes in the unabridged edition) on magic, religion, and anthropology from which we get the idea or archetype of the sacred and sacrificial king who represents a dying and revived god. Particular chapters of this work influenced Robert Graves who wrote a particularly weird, disjointed and incomprehensible book on the subject of poetic myth called The White Goddess, from which we get the concept of a Maiden-Mother-Crone triple Goddess (also the ‘Celtic tree calendar’ nonsense!). Themes and ideas from these two books eventually got bolted on to Wicca when the Farrars wrote Eight Sabbats for Witches which most of us are familiar with from reading A Witches’ Bible. The Farrars were trying to flesh out and rationalize the fairly rudimentary Sabbat rituals written by Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, and did their best with the information available at the time, a lot of which happened to be heavily Frazerian (their anthropology and folklore for each Sabbat is hysterically out of date and bad by today’s standards but at the time it was considered impressive. This is an example of how books can age badly). From these sources they cobbled together the idea of the Oak King / Holly King ritual cycle, in which one reigns for part of the part of the year, is killed by the other at the solstice, and is then reborn to rule again. This myth-cycle gained popularity through A Witches’ Bible and it is from there that it because a core idea in some Wiccan groups and traditions. I could probably go into more detail about this but it’s not really relevant to what we’re discussing here. Suffice it to say that Pearson also takes issue with this idea, assumes that it’s universal amongst the Wiccans, and tries to fix it to make more sense in a seasonal setting.

He does mention something I almost never see referenced, which is that the ‘inner tides’ (for want of a better term) change on the solstices and equinoxes. The only other author I have seen mention this is Dion Fortune, who discusses the ebb and flow of Elemental energies through one season into another in Moon Magic. In this particular context he refers to the King of the Wildwood having different attributes depending on the time of year, for Summer and Winter, in Summer being expansive and procreative and in Winter being funereal and terrifying. Again, I don’t see how this is very different from Wiccan theology on this point. To be blunt: yes, the Horned God fucks. Curiously, something Pearson says something here that I’m fairly certain I’ve read elsewhere:

“His presence cannot be endured for long but his passing leaves an ache and sorrow as of great loss and bereavement and a feeling of enervation or depletion”

This is almost exactly what happens when Rat and Mole encounter Pan in Graham’s The Wind in the Willows:

“As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen, and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before...but Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.”

This is very much what happens should one be fortunate enough to have an encounter with the divine, and is why one should always take care to write down what happened or what the deity said to you, because you will forget.

Chapter Six: SpiritWorking - Part One

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

First off, many apologies for the months-long intermission, but my computer kind of died and I haven’t found a replacement until now.

I’m sure I’ve complained about this before, but Pearson smooshes ‘spirit working’ into one word and capitalizes both parts into ‘SpiritWorking’, which makes it look like some kind of product. Silver Ravenwolf did this in her ‘Teen Witch’, turning ‘witchcraft’ into ‘WitchCraft’ and god damn did it bother me, and it bugs the shit out of me when Pearson does it too. It’s possible this is an effect of the poor editing, but even so, it’s just kind of....annoying.

He opens with a sort of textbook definition of animism and points out that it’s important for you to know yourself before doing spirit work. He also emphasizes that we shouldn’t expect spirits to act the way we want them to, that entities may come from somewhere else with different laws, customs and so forth, so we shouldn’t expect them to follow our laws or customs. The analogy here si that a visitor from another country might have different customs or beliefs, and what is a spirit but a visitor to our world / plane of existence? I feel that this is perfectly reasonable and good advice.

He also provides what I’ll call, for want of a better term, a spirit catalogue of sorts which he’s careful to point out will be a little fuzzy around the edges as many beings won’t really fit into just one definition. A lot of this is also, I feel, Pearson’s own UPG and that is perfectly fine as he doesn’t say that what he’s describing here is a universal rule. I myself am not really a nature spirit kind of guy, I do stuff with planetary spirits and Elemental spirits and it’s rather interesting to see something more focused on nature spirits.

In the opening to that section, ‘Spirits of the Natural World’, he claims that the world-division of land, sea, and sky was universal in north and western Europe, which I’m familiar with in a Celtic context but a broader European one. Admittedly, the four classical Elements originated in ancient Greece and wasn’t pan-European in antiquity either. Pearson states:

“This system uses Land, Sea and Sky as its divisions and can be seen in the oath purportedly used by some of the European Iron-Age peoples and tribes, namely; “I will keep faith until the Sky falls upon me and crushes me, until the Land opens up and swallows me, until the Seas arise and overwhelm me.”  “

Which tribes and people would this be, Nigel? I did some research and the only place I can find this phrase cropping up is bad fantasy novels. This is one of those places where citations and footnotes would be helpful, but as I’ve said before, we just don’t get those in this book. Statements are made and nothing is given to back them up, and it’s grating.

So. First we get land spirits. Pearson says that land spirits are variously and regionally known as dobbies, boggarts, spriggans, knockers, gnomes, dwarves, wights, pucks, etc., etc., and uses the term ‘wight’ as a catch-all (I myself have never seen someone use the term ‘land wight’ outside of a Norse paganism setting). Now, most of these are what I would consider to be trickster spirits, not necessarily land spirits, and the gnome in particular is first attested to by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century and only as an Earth elemental. It’s specious at best to go ahead and make this kind of statement, especially when the historical use of these terms is wildly different from what Pearson is trying to use them for in this context, which is of indwelling nature spirits of trees, rocks, hills and such. He’s just laying a very thin veneer of fairy lore over animism and is suggesting that this is an ancient philosophy, with nothing to back his statements up. Trad Craft Syndrome strikes again!

Wight-tracking is next. This is a process meant to find, contact, and become familiar with local wights or land spirits. Go out into the woods, meadow, mountainside or what have you, and find the nature spirits.....because of course no such things can be found in the city? Again I see this romanticization of nature and denigration of urbanization which I find to be utterly ridiculous. You can’t open the chapter talking about how in Ye Olde Tymes people believed that all places and things had an indwelling spirit and then go on to imply that spirits live only in the pristine wilderness. There’s no consistency here, you can’t have it both ways! If a rock on the side of the cliff has a spirit then so does the apple tree in my back yard. I will freely accept that they’re not the same kind of spirit, but if you’re subscribing to animism then it has to be everywhere and not just your imaginary untouched primeval woodland (in England, nonetheless! England, the intensely cultured island!).

Rant aside, this talks about how to sort of track down a spirit in its natural habitat using both regular and non-regular senses, putting yourself into a light trace state and being receptive to the presence of beings around you. Upon finding that spirits may be present, you sort of....allow communication to happen. Pearson is really vague here, but it is my experience that this sort of thing is hard to describe both in terms of process and of the particulars of communication. It’s the sort of thing you let happen in its own terms.

Sea spirits are next. Most of what he talks about here are literally sea spirits instead of water spirits, and he writes that they’re friggin’ powerful – think of the sheer weight, momentum, and power of ocean waves, for example, and have a connection to the Moon. He suggests that they’re easier to connect with as Water rules emotion and humans are emotional creatures, and that inland fresh-water spirits are very similar to oceanic ones but on a smaller scale. Freshwater spirits, according to Pearson, are known as ‘Meremayds’ (by who?) although my own inquiry has turned up nothing to support this aside from it being an obviously oldey-tymey spelling. The method of contact for these watery spirits involves meditating on a body of water at moonrise and watching the reflection of the moon on the surface of the water. This could be varied by season and moon phase.

Sky spirits – contrary to what one might expect these seem to be more starry or etherial in nature, not Airy. Pearson identifies them with the Wild Hunt, as go-betweens travelling from the world of the Gods (who, again, he says trad crafters don’t worship) to the world of men. Contact with them is made by meditating on the stars and winds. Evidently they can take one on a journey, although “many do not return, or return in a different form”. So many sinister suggestions, Nigel. So, so many sinister suggestions with no follow-up that you just.....leave there, on the floor.

Next up is house spirits. Pearson tells us about what household spirits are – according to him, a land spirit that’s moved indoors, the spirits of those who’ve lived in that house, the family spirits, or something else. He gives the sort of usual folkloric instructions for working with one, and also gives a process why which one can begin honouring it if you’re not doing so already which involves setting up a found stone as a sort of anchorpoint for the spirit.

There’s a ritual to enchant a witch-ball to protect the house, as well as a sort of three-dimensional god’s eye sort of thing which is meant to be a kind of spirit trap.

Finally (for today’s update, at least), there’s a discussion of the uses of a familiar. Pearson diverges from many witchcraft authors here and actually suggests using a real animal for a familiar. This process involves bonding with the animal and then sending it out to do its work, usually just to watch, through a process that would be instantly familiar to fans of Terry Pratchett, because it is literally Borrowing, like Granny Weatherwax does. One rides along with the animal, seeing what it sees.

He also talks about creating a thought-form / servitor, and finally the fetch / spiritual double / shadow of which one reads so much online these days.

Chapter Six: SpiritWorking, part two

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

We left off last week with the Fetch and start up this week with the Ancestors and Mighty Dead. Pearson points out that witchcraft has often had a lot to do with necromancy in the popular imagination, which I can’t disagree with, what with the Witch of Endor raising the shade of Samuel, the visual imagery of the Witches’ Sabbath having a lot to do with corpses, you know, that sort of thing. He claims that trad witches have always maintained a connection with their ancestors (since what, the 1960s?) and that spirits don’t move on to some afterlife but instead sort of merge with the landscape and spirit of the land, there to possibly function in the same way as the previously-mentioned nature spirits.

Pearson claims that “so-called burial mounds” in the UK and elsewhere were actually places where the living could come and meet with the dead. I’m a little confused here, because if it’s a mound in which someone is interred then it is, by definition, a burial mound, and I’m not sure how a burial mound qualifies as a meeting-place for the dead as opposed to any other kind of burial site. Don’t people go to graves to visit their loved ones? How is visiting Grandma’s grave and leaving flowers at her headstone any different? He also talks about reincarnation, and makes a weird statement with no citations or references to people willingly being sacrificed so as to join with the land and spirits:

“In certain very specific instances, people chose, or were chosen, to give up this physical life – to deliberately die – to merge with the Land at a specific place or site, to act as intermediaries between this world and the Otherworld, for the tribe or people in that area and to act as guardians, mediating the energies of the two worlds, usually for a fixed period of time. However, once merged with the Land or a specific site, our sense of time has no meaning to them and many are still active, if you know how to approach them. Such individuals are sometimes known as Burial Chiefs or Burial Kings, who may be interacted with at their specific burial mounds or “tombs”. This is a difficult and potentially dangerous operation, so I will not go into it here, but will discuss other possibilities for contacting the ancestors later.”

Wow! There’s a lot to unpack here! As we should expect at this point, there’s nothing cited or referenced here to back these claims up. Which people did this? What area did this take place in, at what time, and by what tribes? How did the victim become a guardian? Who calls them Burial Chiefs or Kings? If the process is so dangerous why do you even mention it? As I’ve said before, this is something Pearson does an awful lot, making ominous pronouncement about a ritual practice and then saying they’re too dangerous to discuss. It’s weird and kind of annoying. If he’s trying to impress me it’s not working.

He gives a description of ‘Master Men and Women’ or ‘The Hidden Company’ which seem to be what other modern witchcraft traditions would refer to as the Mighty Dead – witches who have gone before, who were knowledgeable and skilled and ‘stick around’, as it were, to help out if need be. He’s less fanciful here, and brings up the fact that while there may be tradition-specific Mighty Dead, there are also more, uh, ‘general’ Mighty Dead of witchcraft as a whole, regardless of traditional inclinations. I will admit, I’m curious about how this would work for people trained in multiple traditions. Would be late High Priestess of the Wiccan temple I go to be considered one of our Mighty Dead, or would she be more of an Alexandrian one? Clearly the only way to find out is necromancy.

Speaking of – Pearson reminds us that you shouldn’t do that kind of thing frivolously, that ancestors don’t necessarily have to be blood relations, that they needn’t have been witches, and that if you had gardening questions it would be pointless to call on Uncle Fred, who was a witch and a plumber, instead of an aunt who was an excellent gardener but also a devout Baptist. Pearson is of the opinion that death probably changes one’s perspective on a lot of things, so it’s entirely possible that one could call on one’s atheist uncle in the context of a pagan witchcraft ritual and get an answer. One piece of advice that someone gave me when I was new to the Craft is unfortunately absent, which is: just because they’re dead doesn’t mean that they’re smart. Sometimes that’s why they’re dead and not alive! Further to this, I’ll point out that if you’re going to pick up spiritwork, you should probably make sure that the entity you’re talking to is who you think you’re talking to. Gods know if I ever die and have to hang around on this mortal plane I’d probably fuck with some kids playing with a Ouija board. Who wouldn’t?

There’s a little guided meditation in which one visits a burial mound, encounters the Lord of the Dead, and finally descends to the Underworld / burial-chamber to talk with an ancestor. This is followed with a ritual to contact the Mighty Dead, which looks like a pretty good way to do so – one sets up the ritual site with a pit dug in the west, enters a trance state, makes an offering to the Mighty Dead which is placed into the pit, and then enters into communication. The mechanics of this make sense to me, especially with the digging a hole and depositing the offerings. It’s very chthonic, it reads well.

The last part of this chapter is titled “The Elvenkind or Faerie Folk”. This......this gives me issues. I am really not a person who has comfort with faerie anything, it’s just not something I have any interest or trust in. Now, I know that people often like to draw a connection between witchcraft and the Folk, there’s a tradition of this going back to Margaret Murray (obviously don’t take anything Murray thought when it came to folklore seriously) at the very least, and these days talking about Isobel Gowdie is all the rage. It’s just something that I really advise against. Anyone who’s read Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies will understand why, as it is by far the best literary depiction of the Fae.

Pearson gives a few theories as to what faeries are, has more questionable entymology, talks about where they might have come from, and over-analyzes what is very clearly a reference to Leland’s Aradia. He talks about a time at which he believes he may have been faerie-led astray, suggests that the God and Goddess of the witches are faerie royalty, and closes the chapter with a ritual to contact the faeries. I’m going to describe this as ill-advised (not as bad as his meditation where one goes into a faerie mound!) and will openly state that I am very biased here and that other opinions may vary.

This chapter was a little conflicting. Some of the advice is good. Some of it is, well, it’s not. What I mostly found troubling was the portentous statements, the weird off-target analysis, but most of all the making claims with nothing to back them up. I was talking to a friend about this, and how it really bothers me – he pointed out that he’d had similar issues when reading Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft. The issue here is that Mastering Witchcraft was written in 1970, before really good scholarship took hold among pagan witches, but Treading The Mill was first written in 2007 and this updated version came out in 2017. That standard of scholarship may have been acceptable in 1970, but that was fifty goddamned years ago, and things have changed. Pearson, sadly, doesn’t seem to have got that memo.

Treading The Mill Tuesdays

Chapter Five: Entering the Twilyte, Part 2

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

Having gone over various methods of relaxing and focusing, Pearson turns now to how to raise energy. He identifies magical energy with a sort of divine fire, not an elemental one but more of a sort of spark of life sort of thing. He says this is perceived as heat, similar to the warm feeling of an overly warm or spicy meal (you know that sort of overheated feeling? I think that's what he means, a feeling of excess internal heat), or as a feeling akin to sexual arousal. He notes that this is similar to but not the same as the idea of Kundalini, which I can't comment on as I have no interest in yoga or Eastern mysticism. He touches very briefly on something similar to chakras but again stresses that they are not the same.

We get a brief talk on the nature of power, power-to versus power-over (do we all remember our Starhawk?) and refreshingly says that it really doesn't matter if you call what you're doing energy-raising, accumulating power, or whatever, the terminology is irrelevant as the actions and end goal are the same. I felt this was perfectly sensible - we often get bogged down in pointless distinctions that are ultimately meaningless.

What follows is a series of exercises designed to promote this accumulation of power. We start with what I'd describe as a meditation on Fire. Using a candle flame as a basis for meditation and visualization, one inhales the candle’s light and circulates it around one's body. The ultimate goal of this is to be able to raise your own energy at will so as to direct it through breathing and visualization. He talks about the sort of energy game one sees elsewhere with the brisk running your hands together and keeping it up until they become hot, then pushing this energy through a wand, staff, or other implement to your desired goal.

Next is treading the mill! This is a sort of circumambulation of one's circle / compass / bloodacre (SO METAL!) while fixing one's gaze at a central point such as an altar, candle, stang etc. We can look at this as being a kind of one-person circle dance, although the intent according to Pearson is more of an induction of trance rather than a raising of power. I'm pleased to note that Pearson suggests reasons for why you might wish to do this counter-clockwise instead of clockwise - we as witches are often unnecessarily leery of widdershins motions and I really can't see why, there are perfectly cromulent reasons to do so, just as Pearson says. Wisely, he notes that if you're still consciously in control of what's happening then you're not doing it yet. Done properly, he says, this will facilitate communication with spirits of various sorts and they may make their presence known through various methods. He is also sensibly non-committal about how long this will take, how strongly the effects will be felt, and that it's an open-ended process with varying degrees of intensity. A lot of the time writers on this kind of subject will set expectations that I consider unrealistic. Pearson does not fall into this trap.

We go next to trance working. He stresses here again that these techniques need not be universal and are offered only as a starting-point. First up is gazing or fascination, which is a sort of low-key scrying / trance, letting your attention get lost in a stream or clouds or tree branches and drifting into that trace state. What he describes here is very similar to a kind of scrying I'm familiar with and it's neat to see other methods of doing so. He also suggests swaying in place or swinging on a swing (delightful! I imagine a rocking chair would also work?).

“....you also feel your inner force rising or getting warmer and also that you may feel an internal vibration or 'buzzing’ occuring” This passage interests me because it is exactly what I feel when doing the Circle consecration written by Doreen Valiente. I use St Doreen's consecration and my hands shake so much afterward that I don't trust myself to pick things up!

Drawing the Line: a sort of movement meditation using a labyrinth-engraved board he calls a Troy Stone. Pearson says this name is used because there's a labyrinth on it, I point out that the labyrinth in Greek myth was in Knossos on Crete and not in Troy. We also read about a version of the witch's ladder and scrying into a mirror.

Pearson then turns to transvection or soul flight. My opinion on this subject has long been that it is an appropriation of ideas about witches during the European witch hysteria given a veneer of legitimacy through an association with European shamanism. Pearson and other writers feel differently. He gives a method of accomplishing this involving a sort of mill-treading with one's broom or stang accompanied by a chant drawn from one allegedly used by witches during the Hysteria and leaping over a fire. There's also a discussion of night-journeying which is a sort of trance/dreamwork kind of thing. This part of the book actually deeply bothers me, as it gives a guided meditation starting-point that, well, starts you off with a bell-decked horse that takes you to a hill with apple trees that have silver bells on them, which has a door leading to a place full of laughter and music…...like….you all know where this goes, right? You all know just why it's proooooooobably not the best idea to just do a sort of open-ended trance / astral / dream journey to a fairy mound and then go inside, right?

Being a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Nigel Pearson’s Treading The Mill

Part One: Introduction

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

While the copy of this book in my possession is the second edition (bought from the very kind @leaping-hare-witchery ) I’m going to start this analysis with the introduction in the first edition, as the introduction to the second mostly just explains what was changed and why (why don’t more authors do that?). It’s very helpful to see what the author decided to change, although I might wish that we had more revised books showing the original material, the changes, and why those changes were made. Author’s commentary would also be interesting, in the style of revisions to Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance.

At any rate, let’s begin. Almost immediately (literally the second sentence!) we run into an issue which will be repeated almost constantly though this book – that traditional craft, as described by Pearson and others (let’s just say the Three Hands / Xoanon / Troy Books crowd? Does that work?), is somehow older than other versions of witchcraft:

“This volume aims to present some of the methods deriving from an older stratum of belief and practice, albeit in a modern context, which generally come under the heading of Traditional Witchcraft, Old Craft, or simply Craft”

There’s a great huge [citation needed] that I want to break out here and I’m going to need to use that a few more times as we progress. Suffice it to say, in brief, that Pearson attempts to use this club several times through the book, not stating outright but rather implying that what he describes is somehow better because it’s older. Just how much older he never really says, nor does he ever provide sources for this or numerous other strange claims, but I suppose that as a practitioner of Traditional Witchcraft his innate superiority to Wiccans should be assumed, or something.

Person goes on to state that Trad Craft predates Gardner’s Wicca by ‘decades or centuries’ and has ‘been passed down in continuous transmission outside of modern, known traditions that do not derive from or have any connection with the modern, Neo-Pagan belief systems’. Precisely what these practices  are is left to the reader’s imagination, and as we will shortly see, the claim that it has no connection to modern neo-pagan religions (which ones? Wicca, presumably) is a bold lie. This isn’t the first place I’ve seen the statement that Trad Craft is in some fashion totally separate from Wicca and has Literally No Similarity, Honest You Guys, and it’s not going to be the last, but the following pages have material that has literally no daylight between it and Wicca. Defining itself solely through its being anything but Wicca is evidently the only way Pearson’s Craft can be described, as further issues (?)of Treading The Mill Tuesdays will show.

Pearson then goes on to say that Trad Craft stems from personal relationships with the powers of nature, learning from those powers, and adding what is learned to one’s own knowledge to form a living and changing path. Again, the implication here is that Wicca does none of these things (has Pearson ever actually met a Wiccan? This book strongly implies that he has not). He suggests that Trad Craft has no founding fathers but only ‘a few well-known practitioners’.

The esteem in which most Trad Crafters I’ve ever talked to hold Robert Cochrane Roy Bowers contradicts that a bit, I think.

He claims that Trad Crafters (unlike Wiccans) do not worship the Gods but instead give them honour, respect, and devotion and have too close a relationship to Them to make worship possible, which is, uh, weird.

Working outside is to be preferred, a jab at people who meet in a ‘comfy sitting room with the chairs pushed back’ (motherfucker you live in Suffolk in the UK, have you ever seen a Canadian winter or high summer? Average low in February is 0.8C, oh, you sweet summer child). Life and death in equal balance, OK, fine.

Being a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Nigel Pearson's 'Treading The Mill’

Chapter Four: Censing the Sacred

Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1 |  Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion

I am an absolute derp and didn't even notice that there was an awful pun here until someone pointed it out. Minus ten points for Pearson, that shit is unforgivable.

So I'm super into incense making. I make kyphi, I make deity-specific blends, I tinker with the recipes of others and generally have a good time burning weird woods and resins in my ridiculously ostentatious censer. I'm into incense and this chapter was one of the reasons I went for this edition of the book as I was hoping to get some neat new recipes.

Pearson starts out with reasons we burn incense, as a sacrifice and offering, to please the Gods (remember, Crafters don't worship gods though!), and to cover up the smell of burnt offerings. He tells us that in ancient Egypt incense had magical properties and its manufacture was a secret process done by the priests, which is broadly true of some recipes. He gets a little fanciful here and claims that Howard Carter could smell the incense used for Tutankhamen's funeral when he entered the tomb thousands of years later (citation needed) and that Pearson can detect a subtle lingering magical aura in Egyptian temples and tombs from all the ritual incense that was burned there, which sort of screams shitthatdidnthappen.txt to me.

He also claims that the Catholic Church didn't use incense until the Middle Ages, because of its association with the pagan Romans, which almost makes sense until you remember that the early Christians would have inherited the ritual use of incense from the Jews (early Christians were a weirdo fringe sect of Jews, remember?) and also there are numerous sources detailing Christian use of incense from at least the fifth century CE. Maybe Pearson just didn't bother doing his research here? He states that it was used by magicians and witches but not the Church, which is kind of, uh, not correct. We know magicians used it, the grimoire tradition has had planetary incenses for centuries, but I should like to see a source for the witches.

We go next to practical applications. Pearson tells us about using incense as an offering, for its psychological effects (tying scent to memory, that sort of thing) and as a magical aid. In what I have come to notice is a very Pearson sort of thing, he complains about people using correspondences and then suggests you use correspondences, then says you should use correspondences for the spirits you're dealing with….but says nothing about how to determine them for those spirits. I'm going to be charitable and assume he's referring to spirits telling you how to call them and their preferred offerings as a part of spirit communication, but it really would have been helpful to tell more about that. I'm experienced, many people reading this book may not be and might not make that connection.

As for the burning of incense, he gives us a fairly concise section on how to do it and safety considerations, but then rather strangely (to me, at least) says not to overdo it. My approach to incense in ritual has always been that there's no such thing as too much - if the ritual space doesn't look like a car from a Cheech and Chong marijuana comedy when the ritual is done then you did it wrong. As better writers than me have said, clouds of incense aids spirit manifestation, and it is my opinion that if you're offering incense to the Gods there had better be lots of it in large quantities.

Pearson talks about ingredients and making incense, both in loose and cone form. His method for making cones is rather different from ones I usually see, calling for orrisroot as the powdery filler instead of something like sandalwood. He also stresses something one rarely sees, which is letting the blends dry properly if liquids were added (wine, honey, oils etc) before bottling it. This may seem like common sense but isn't always something people know to do.

Let's look at his recipes! I was excited for this part and I was sadly doomed, as when it comes to incense recipes Pearson is made of disappointment and sits upon a throne of lies, for his recipes do something that was terribly, terribly common on Geocities and Anglefire websites in the early 2000s.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Nigel Pearson stole his incense blends from Cunningham and didn't even have the balls to cite him as a source.

There are nine recipes here and of them five are Cunningham's recipes either entire or with one or two tiny alterations (Universal, Horned God, Healing, House Purification, and Consecration / Hallowing). I'm fairly certain I've seen Pearson's White Goddess recipe somewhere else before, probably as a Moon Goddess or lunar blend. His Wrath and Chastisement blend is literally the Martial incense from Huson's 'Mastering Witchcraft’, which he at least cited.

This is, basically, incredibly disappointing and I can't believe Pearson would be so lazy as well as so rude as to rip off Cunningham without the decency to cite him as a fucking source. If you talk about doing your own thing then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't rip off the Wiccans you condemn, eh?

The chapter closes with a ritual for offering incense to the spirits which I can't find any problems with, but after figuring out this recipe bullshit I can't say I'm charitably inclined towards Pearson and will be carefully examining further parts of this book for more plaigarism.