So time for another book review. Today I want to write about my friend* Dana Corby’s book ‘royal Roads: Pilgrimages through the Four Elements and Beyond’ co-authored with Bjeon-Erik Hartsfvang. I’m friends with Dana on social media and became aware of this book when I saw her posting about it. Its a bit outside my usual purview but I think it overlaps enough with my own witchcraft practices that…
Category Archives: By Land Sea and Sky
Black Eyed Children
One of several topics that I couldn’t fit into my new fairies dictionary was the Black Eyed Children so I thought I’d write about them here today. They present a fascinating piece of more modern folklore, somewhere between urban legend and ghost story yet with sightings across America and Britain. For myself I tend to believe they are either a kind of fairy or a form put on by fairies.
Black…
Sources for Working with Fairies
Since I am asked pretty regularly for opinions on specific books relating to Fairies or more generally recommendations on the wider subject I thought I’d do a full blog on it.
My main resources are folklore, mythology, folk practice, and academic articles and books. I encourage everyone to start there. There’s a large number of books I could recommend here but for a half dozen suggestions:
Elf…
Book Review: Breaking Silence by Mercedes Lackey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a sequel to ‘Silence’ and continuation of the SERRAted Edge series.
It is a significant improvement on the last book: the plot is tighter, the characters have more depth, and the book feels more a part of the wider series.
First things I liked. The book is written in limited third person and like most others in the series does offer glimpses into other…
A Critical Look at Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
One of the most commonly recommended books I see in groups and on reading lists is the 1911 work ‘The Fairy Faith In Celtic Countries’ by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. The book is often hailed as the benchmark in fairylore and a staple of study in the field or for anyone interested in the subject. I also personally suspect its rampant popularity in modern pagan groups is due in part to it being in the…
New Liminal God: The Queen of Apples
Earlier this year there was some talk in a Fairy Witchcraft group on Facebook about a liminal god called the Queen of Apples. Several people felt like they were connecting to her and shared their thoughts on who she was. I was asked what my impression of her was.
It’s important to understand here that the particular type of Fairy witchcraft I practice gets very messy when it comes to Gods….
The Return of the Otherfolk and the Puritan Egregore
For several years now there has been talk among some practitioners (of various sorts) in North America suggesting both that the Otherworldly energy present here has been increasing and that the Otherfolk themselves have been pushing through into the human world more strongly. I wrote about it on my Patheos blog in a piece titled ‘Return of the Othercrowd’ and Seo Helrune and John Beckett have…
Basic Guide To Identifying Spirits
I have taught a class a few times which focuses on helping people learn to differentiate between several types of spirits they may be interacting with. The point of doing this is that what a ghost can or can’t do is different from what a fairy can or can’t do which is different again from what a third type of spirit might be capable of.
This is by no means a foolproof process but was intended to…
Ritual For The Pleiades: The Way Opening
We are reaching the time of year for the acronychal rising of the Pleiades, when they are on the eastern horizon just after full dark, or roughly about 9pm for my latitude, This coincides with the general time of the autumn equinox and I personally choose to celebrate my ritual for it on the equinox. In my constructed mythology this When the time of the Opening of the Way Between Worlds, when…
Review – Carnival Row
There’s been a lot of buzz since last year about amazon’s series Carnival Row. The premise, as advertised, is a Victorian-esque world where fairies and humans live side by side with fairies mostly limited to a neighborhood called Carnival Row; a series of murders occurs which the main character is trying to solve. This is the summary of what we know going into the series, and obviously is the…