Craft of the Land, Craft of Fire
Understanding the Two Branches of Witchcraft in the Modern Day
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As you read through the Scarespite Website, you will see that many of my essays are oriented around a goal called "The Cunning Fire". Some of the essays contain instructions for "arousing" this fire, or rituals for the same, and most Traditional Craft traditions have a very deep element of "Fire"- and when I use the word "Fire", in this sense, I mean they are based on a cosmological notion that early humankind was visited or endowed with a divine gift of "fire" by the Gods or by other spirits, a gift which "set humans apart" somehow from other animals. This gift, this fire, was nothing short of the capacity for Imagination- for it is the divine imagination in humans that sets them apart from other creatures.
The Greek Myth of Prometheus is one such example of the pagan understanding of this universal pattern; the "Serpent's Gift" in Eden is another echo of the same idea: that the ancestors of man were given a special awareness, the capacity to see the world in a different, more self-aware sort of way, and to shape it according to their will.
The Book of Enoch gives a common pattern for Traditional Craft, in regards to the same matter: Azael, the Goat-Horned Lord of Illumination, as well as the first blacksmith, gave mankind the gift of the Sacred Fire, impregnating the "clay of mortality" with the "fire of immortality", which is interpreted in many ways, but essentially, the "fire of immortality" is the capacity for imagination, from whence craft, creativity, and all else spring.
In many branches of the Traditional Craft, this "divine gift" is the very essence of the "Witchblood", the "spiritual gene" that sets some people apart from others- those who can really dream, be creative, think outside the box, and those who cannot. Of course, all humans have the capacity for true craft, true creativity, but in some, the divine gift seems to smolder, and in others, it seems to be fanned into a bright flame. Part of "initiations" into these Cunning Lodges or groups is the experience of having the divine fire fanned higher in the consciousness of the initiate.
It seems to me, after all my learning and interviews and research, that there are in fact two main branches of the Old Craft today- one that involves the mysteries of which I speak above, that of Fire and Cunning, and the older "Land Based" mysteries that are oriented around the continuance of the Land's fertility, and the protection of the Land and it's holy places.
It is of these two branches that I wish to speak, to point out their differences, and their relationship.
TWO STRANDS of the RED THREAD
One can see that the Craft seems to be divided into two main "strands". One strand, the Land Based Craft, is concerned with the Protection of the Land. The other, The Craft of the Fire, is concerned with the Acquisition of Wisdom.
The Land Based Craft
Concerning the first strand, that of the Land-Based Craft, Fredrick Lamond, in his article entitled "Notes on Gardnerian Witchcraft in England" writes:
"Since time immemorial, family witchcraft traditions in England have been concerned with ensuring the fertility of the land, and protecting sacred sites from destruction or interference. Not all family traditions did both. There is no known link between any of these family traditions and Gerald Gardner."
The Land Based Craft is the older of the two strands. It is the direct survival of the true pagan religions of the British Isles, as well as other rural pagan religions around Europe. It comes from the most rural of areas, where people who dwelled in farming communities and other people never lost touch with the idea of their sacred relationship with the Land upon which they lived and depended, even after Christianity had replaced the previous religions.
The Land Based Craft is "feminine" in nature, and is not nearly as concerned with "magic" or the operative side of "Craft" as most people think of it. Instead, these people were the ones who ensured the fertility of the land chiefly by lighting bonfires on hills on certain special nights, kindling sacred fires in the hearths and centers of their farms and villages, and did the famous "circle dances" amid crops, and carried the blessing fires around their fields, perhaps even burying embers in the ground.
The old customs of pregnant women wandering about the fields or touching blossoms to "give" some of their fertility to the plants, and countless other "survival" rites, such as young couples going away to have sexual encounters in the fields, or coupling on the ground, or of the shedding of blood or sexual fluids on the ground itself, and of charming plows and doing "sympathetic sacrifices" to the ground, are all examples of this primal expression of Craft.
Isobel Goudy seemed to have encountered a traditional group that had a charm to ensure the fertility of the ground- the plowing of the ground by a toad, harnessed to a ram's horn.
The "hidden festivals" that you hear so much about seem to correlate to these strands of Craft. Holding dances, wassailing, sacred fires, secret orgies, blessing tools of agriculture, making sacrifices to the Ground itself, visiting standing stones or ancient sacred sites and wells and the like to pray for the fertility of the Earth, and, (as I stated above) the famous "circle dances" of "Sun Circles" all seem to be related to the protection and promulgation of the Land's fertility. Some say that the phallic pole, held between the legs, as women (and perhaps men) leaped about was originally a fertility rite, and also the origin of the witch "riding the broomstick".
I think this may be only one part of the origin, for as Nigel Jackson has pointed out, there are other places where poles were "ridden" as part of a ritual to "fly" or "leave the body behind" and project the spiritual body into the Other World, to enter into a direct communion with the Powers of the Land and the Underworld.
The dreaded pre-historic sacrifice of the Sacred King, whose dismembered body or blood was given to the fields has a relationship to this idea; it is likely that the sacrifice of a final stalk of grain or corn, or a bread-man (John Barleycorn) to the ground itself is a survival of this impulse to the Ground's need to be renewed by sacrifice, by "giving back" power, that it can be renewed.
The protection of Sacred Sites is the second most important function of Land-Based Craft; the people who dwelled around these sites would have known, on levels ranging from the subconscious to the occasional full awareness, of the spiritual forces present at these holy places, and responded to them in a variety of ways. At some places, the people didn't approach the site as a "home for spirits", as much as a "place of transformation"- at some holy sites, the mortal mindstream finds itself coming into touch with a mysterious phenomenon of "otherworldliness". This by itself is a very important aspect of Sacred Sites, and one that is often overlooked.
Not all ancient sites have to be homes to forgotten Gods or spirits. Some are simply places that are "very thin" to use the old term- that is to say, there isn't much between a person who is standing in the site, and the strange, eldritch realities beyond. Places like this are often "contact points" for the people living on the Land and the Ancestral spirits of the Dead who have "passed through" there to merge with the Land, becoming the People Below.
Other sites are, indeed, places that are homes to local Guardians and other spiritual forces, who themselves may see to the fertility of the Land, or a dozen other things. Some sites can be both.
Either way, Land Based Craft practitioners realized these things on many levels, from just-barely aware levels, tainted to many degrees with Christian understandings, all the way to fully aware, "pagan recension" levels, to the point that they realized they were dealing with distinctly non-Christian and pre-Christian forces and realities. In all cases, the practitioners of Land Based Craft protected these sites, and there was nothing they wouldn't do to keep them safe. It was a sacred duty for all who lived on the Land to keep the Land's "heartbeat points" safe.
The use of certain sacred plants or other spiritual techniques to "fully contact" the Spirits of the Land had to have been part of the earliest forms of Land Based Craft; recall what I said above about the "broomstick rides" or the "pole rides" that witches made to "cross over" and meet with the Old Powers. Today you will find that these sorts of techniques are mostly to be found in the other Branch of the Craft- that of the Craft of Fire, which will we discuss next. But originally, I feel that they were a part of the Land Based Craft.
One of the other very important features of Land Based Craft was Herb lore and Herbalism. The rural folk of course knew everything there was to know about Herbalism; Wortcunning and herb-wives went together since time-immemorial, and the only real "medicine" the rural people had was the tradition of the herbalist. One of the hallmarks of the Land Based Craft is the profound knowledge of the properties and uses of herbs. As herb lore tended to be seen as a feminine craft, one can see why it fits into a rather broadly feminine category such as "Land Based Craft".
The Craft of the Fire
Most of what people think of as "witchcraft" today is a part of this strand. This is the more "Masculine" strand of the Craft, in which acquisition of wisdom, use of magic, and personal spiritual transformation is sought. Guardianship belongs to the Land Based Craft; what we call "magic" belongs to this one.
I talked about the "Gift of the Fire" at the start of this article. Fire itself was not seen as a strictly masculine thing to the Old Pagan religions- there were (and are) as many fire-associated Goddesses in the British Isles and Northern Europe as there were Gods- but on the whole, how fire was used certainly had gender-based boundaries. Blacksmithing, for instance, seemed to have been a mostly male-dominated craft in England, while the ancient task of kindling and smooring the hearthfire, or any domestic fire, was the task of the Woman of the House.
Fire itself becomes the symbol not only of vitality and life, but also of imagination, passion, transformation, and many other aspects of the magical art. It was Fire that allowed mankind to create his societies, to "tame" the natural world and to achieve a measure of dominance. It was fire that allowed him to forge weapons of steel and to keep wild animals at bay; and so, the connection between the Gift of the Horned Master, and man's personal power, is made very clear.
This form of Craft is the more obvious of the two branches of the Old Craft. It is more obvious because the feminine branch is more "down home", more earthy, more subtle and just so much a part of everyday life in the country, that it didn't stand out. This is also why it survived as it did. The few sorcerers who were executed for crimes related to occult misdoings weren't the people who were just taking part in some local harvest festival; they were the ones that were performing forbidden rituals and the like, rituals and things that "stood out".
So much of the Craft that people know today is oriented around doing "magic"- "rousing" or "raising power" to bring about some desired change in the world or in the individual; this is magic, and this is also an intentional use of the Internal Fire that all humans possess.
Acquiring visions, esoteric knowledge, deeper understandings about reality, and achieving states of spiritual "ascension", "immortalization", and "realizing the divine within" are all goals of the Fire-based Craft. Where one can see protection of the Land and acquisition of the Land's bounty as the goal and focus of Land Based Craft, we can see acquisition of Wisdom, esoteric self-knowledge, and Power as the goal of the Fire-based Craft.
After the crusades, there was a great influx of metaphysical knowledge and practises into Europe. Saracenic mysticism, Cabbalism, Hermeticism, and all the rest filtered into Europe, and "Lodge workings" in the form of various mystical lodges, some peripherally related to Masonry, others simply independent streams completely, all became layered on top of the remains of surviving Land Based native Pagan impulses and practises. This is not to say that this sorcerous Craft tends to have a lot of Land Based elements- because it doesn't. Very few groupings of Traditional Crafters (who tend to be Fire oriented) have some older Land Based practises or understandings. But most do not.
When witches are invoking "Lilith", "Tubal Cain" and "casting circles", and when Gardnerian witches are using a Greek Hermetic "Four Element" system, as well as four elemental tools, as well as using ceremonial pentagrams, hexagrams, and the like, we can easily see the influence of Hermeticism, Ceremonialism, and other strands of Eastern esoteric knowledge that came into medieval Europe. The emphasis on magic and personal transformation is the single largest indicator of how different in focus these traditions are, from the older Land Based Craft.
The Fire-based Craft, in all of it's hundreds of different forms, up to and including the legendary "craft" of "Cunning Men", is the kind of Craft that most people are familiar with, simply because you can buy hundreds of books about it, and meet people who practise it in some form with relative ease. The Land Based Craft is not so easy to encounter or understand, without actually traveling to rural areas and experiencing it for yourself. The Land Based Craft doesn't appear in books; it appears in trees, in the ground, and in quaint local customs.
THE LAND AND THE FIRE
People often wonder if the Two Strands of the Craft are related, and the answer is "certainly!"
My own craft is very oriented around the arousal and use of the Sorcerous Fire; anyone who looks through my site and reads my other writings can see that. This is not something that bothers me personally; a quick walk through the practises of Crafters in the Isles will show that the Horned God, the "Coal Black Smith" or the Old One, was the focus of many traditional groups.
The presence of a 'Goddess' was almost unheard of, or at least unrecorded, and no one, before the modern day, really considered the implications of the pagan origins of rural festivals and survivals of old fertility customs, or of their hidden relationship to the Land.
I have been fortunate to speak with people who deal with Land Based Craft, and I tend to view a lot of the rites that I practise, from the perspective of both strands of Craft. For instance, in the Rite of "Ward and Wane", (given at my site) we are dealing completely with a "Land Based" working. One can tell just by looking at it: it's simplicity and power is obvious. One of the hallmarks of the Land Based Craft is a kind of "simplicity" of form.
The Red Meal or Housle seems to be a very "Land Based Craft" type working; but if you look at the "Hissing of the Serpent", you can see that it is a very Fire-aligned Craft technique.
A person can see the distinctions in feel between the two, and you can use this understanding to analyze any working of Witchcraft that you come across in a book, or in conversations with people. But is there a true relationship between these two?
Yes. Just as Masculine and Feminine have their relationship, the Sun and the Moon, the Land and the Sky, these two branches of Craft have an intimate overlap. The answer is right below your feet, in the Land.
The Great Serpent Force, aroused as a serpent of vital fire in the body, and used as the primary mode of spiritual undertaking in the Fiery Craft, is the same power that sleeps coiled in the Land itself. The fire in the body is the same fire in the ground; this is the key to the relationship of people who dwell on the Land, to the Land itself.
The Land Based Craft is the more primal of the two strands- but Fire is as old as Earth! What seems to have occurred in the spiritual history of our race is that the Land Based Craft was expressed first, the ground level, organic participation of ancient peoples with the Land that they were a part of. The Fire-Mysteries were the next logical step of the Craft, the rising of the serpent- and remember, the mythology doesn't say that the Cunning Master gave the Fire to mankind late in history; it says that He gave it to mankind at the beginning. The Old Serpent was there from the start to bless mankind with his Sacred Fire.
Fire-Based Craft cannot be separated from the Land. It "completes the loop" that begins in the Land, and leads to the Transformation of the people on the Land, as well as the Land itself. These mysteries are Vital, and it should come as no surprise that the church was threatened by the divine Fire, in whatever form it took- Hermetic schools, ceremonial magic, or Witchcraft.
I think that in the future, Witches need to study and realize the differences between Fire-based Craft and the Land-based Craft, and approach them both as separate entities, understanding the pure essence of each, without trying (as so many Overt Crafters do) to assume that one way is better than another, or that one way was "always the way it was done" or that one way somehow encapsulates the other, because they don't.
The Sky and Ground can be seen as parts of one Nature, but still, the Sky and Ground are different things. Fire and Earth are different things, even if they do have a deep relationship to each other, and if we really want to taste the "Old Persuasion", we need to go back to the beginning, go back to the "Old Country" where rural life was unchanged in essence for hundreds of years, and try to immerse ourselves in the simplicity of Land Based Craft. To protect sacred places and live next to the Land, dancing on fields and in forests on seasons of the Sun, silently communing with the forces below and within stones and ancient trees, this is the Primal Craft that so many people are attracted to, when they feel the call back to Paganism.
Those same people can be turned off by the over-ceremonialism of The Fire's Craft, and I feel that this can be avoided through understanding the origins of it all, and how they relate to each other. Then we can understand and practise both without "uncomfortable forced overlaps" which always feel clumsy. But there is a natural progression from Land to Fire to Land, from one to the other, and then BACK to the other. It is a neverending Spiral of beginning, transformation, and return, followed by a new beginning. We must never forget that. After all, "It's power is complete, when it returns to the Earth".
