"In country" in Coppett's Wood

Today saw the first praxis for the Magical Geography course currently underway for premium member's on Gordon White's excellent website Runesoup. You can find it here.

My own mission is to humbly do my bit to re-enchant the world. Gordon is developing a metaphysic to create epistemological models to carry this forward. His main one being what he calls 'Big Table Animism' or BTA for short.

He introduced a concept 'on country' to describe how the aboriginal players in his native Australia talk about their relationship with the inhabitants of place. As he points out land is too narrow country takes into account all relationships with human and also importantly with the 'more than human world' to be encountered there.

Our task for this praxis was to open up consciousness  and acknowledge 'country' in our own location. Hence Coppett's wood.

Coppett's Wood is to be found along Colney Hatch and is that rare specimen a bit of the remaining forest that originally covered Finchley before it became a common and then the suburb that it now is.

I decided to start by making an offering to the wood which in this case was a dram of dark rum,  a traditional spirit offering and one that I've used on many an occasion. This is, I feel, a most important ritual activity and all part of "getting their attention", that is of the spirit(s) of place.  I stamped on the ground three times (a popular choice in magical lore!), and poured out the offering whilst at the same time calling out "I acknowledge country".

To help move things along it was suggested that we do some mindfulness exercises moving through the senses. Listening, looking, touching, tasting and smelling as well as noticing the arrangements upon the 'inner' or spirit landscape.

It was evident just how quickly a sort of dream state arose. Surfaces morphed into faces and bodies, what was evident was that nothing is hidden but more a case that the shift allows the eyes to see and the ears to hear. The sounds become meaningful as do the shapes.

There were certain points where I stopped because there was something about this or that particular spot. The first time was by a large ash tree and I felt an urge to communicate... but what to say? I don't have much experience of  talking to trees so fell back on simply asking if it had anything to impart?  I heard nothing on my inner ear. However, I was drawn to pluck and taste a haw berry from a nearby hawthorn. The leathery skin gave way to an avocado texture and momentary sharp taste. I cleaned the stone and sent it on its way spreading the genes on maybe to their next incarnation.

Moving on, and following a winding path around hedged in by the sounds of the nearby North Circular road, I began to have some paranoid thoughts. I thought someone was following me. Looking around I could not see anyone. I did pass a couple of dog walkers and again thoughts arose of danger but this time as if I was the one under suspicion?

I did wonder if this is just the residual split that Western humanity has in its relationship with the so-called natural world. We have 'othered' something out of ourselves and inevitably have to meet this prejudice if we are to integrate it once more.

Finally I made it up to the main path out of the wood's canopy. As I passed the final tall oak tree, a timely acorn fell landing behind me. I acknowledged the greetings and added my 'goodbye' for now.

On my way out I stopped to pick some dandelion leaves for tonight's meal as well as a few mugwort leaves for tea before sleep... perchance to dream!

A Church Walk

Before Finchley became the classic suburbia that it is today; it was a common and before that a wood.

Swallowed by the behemoth that is London the capital sought to remake the landscape into its own sprawling image. A palimpsest of ‘A’ and ‘B’ roads, high streets, the all important transport systems that prevent an isolate reversion to previosity and mnemonic regression. Progress, like entropy, is only supposed to flow one way.

However, like those re-used manuscripts traces of it’s past remain.

Apart from the corralled woods and waterways, a small network of paths criss-cross the borough; evidence that those feet in ancient times did indeed wander well-trod paths about their business.

My latest walk  took me along such a walkway from the old hamlet of Totteridge south to what was the hamlet now known as Church End, and the church of St. Mary after which it is named.

My starting point was the entrance to Church Walk by Swan Lane Open Space. This small park was previously the site of some gravel pits that were turned into this open space in the early part fo the 20th century. Given the rather less glamorous name of ‘The Pits’ these excavations remind us that:

“Much of Finchley lies on boulder clay. Between this and the underlying London clay is a layer of gravel. The best conditions for early settlement were where this lay exposed: thus Nether Street, an ancient local road, links the sites of old farms along the gravel line. elsewhere, near the gravel, were the three hamlets that formed Finchley’s earliest population centres now fully connected by 20th century building.”

(The London Encyclopaedia, pub Macmillan 2008)

Giant redwood trees line one side of Church Walk’s entrance, whilst en route I was rubbing shoulders with the more conventional flowering elder, holly, chestnut and sycamore. 

The walk is bisected by by a number of avenues and roads belonging to the newer suburban ontological layer.  

This walk yields a memory of the deep topology that once ran across both wood and common. 

A number of other old paths still intersect with this path before it joins the northern edge of Nether Street where the surface strata roll back to reveal the gravel which also gives name to the hill running down by the side of St. Philip's Church to the south of Church End. 

Nether Street meanders left, right, up and over rolling hills defying the linear planning of its suburban branches. At its southern extremity as it turns east to re-join Ballard’s Lane my eye was drawn to a building entitled ‘St Ronan’, who is an Irish Saint who gave it all up to become a hermit in Brittany. In one story he is accused of sorcery and lycanthropy and proved his innocence by taming two wild dogs. I’m immediately reminded that the dog has the association with the ‘Nether’ realm or the world below - through three-headed Cerberus and Anubis the jackel-headed god who escorts the dead into the Hall of Judgement. Finchley was not a law-abiding place but was notorious for its highway men and brigands whose ‘manor’ it was until the foot patrols of the early 19th century saw them off.

Such walkways, green and pleasant now, must have made going to church an ordeal!

 Listening carefully - the whispering leaves can be heard reciting the rosary echoing the urgent petitions for protection from lips long ago.

…………………………………….

A River Runs Through It...

Friary Park, located to the East of the Great North Road close to Tally-Ho, was originally owned by the Knights of St. John Hospitaller, keeping our connection with the patron saint of this borough.

The formal layout was arranged by the Edwardians maintaining parkland, ancient trees, a formal garden, Friary House and a monument to the ‘peacemaker’, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, who managed to keep his belligerent cousins from war for a few years prior to WWI. The family Christmas must have been dire!

My trip on Sunday, governed by that belligerent archangel St. Michael, saw nothing more warlike than dog walkers, joggers and parents corralling small children on a sunny and warm May weekend.

The trees are in bloom and I was greeted with bright colours and a small breeze as I said my prayers to the Blessed Trinity, calling on St. Cyprian of Antioch to make visible something of the spirit world of this place.

A standing stone marks Blackett’s brook near a bridge. This tributary of Pymme’s brook runs into the River Lea which joins Old Father Thames east of the Isle of Dogs.

I can find no information on on this monolith and therefore cannot think it of any great antiquity.

However, whether by design or not this standing stone does share one thing in common with its more ancient forebears. Standing stones and tumuli are not uncommon where a river bends. For some reason our pre-historic ancestors considered such changes of direction worthy of note and as ‘hotspots’, entryways to the otherworld. The tumulus that marked the bend in the River Effra in Kennington Park, springs to mind as well as the standing stone in the churchyard of Rudston in North Yorkshire which marks the bend in the river known as the Gypsy Race.

The strata of the stone face showed human effort to make a hole but seems as if there was a change of heart part way through the endeavour. Holes through stones also being indicative of seeing through to the other world.

This is an example from Vorau in Austria, which has a number of examples from 7,000 BCE, these ‘holy’ stones are considered to show places of power when peered through. In fiction there is that strange ITV offering from the 70s from the pen of Alan Garner, The Owl Service which also uses the stone for remote viewing in its story line.

There was a children’s sports day in full flow during my visit so I escaped the flurry and shouts of parental encouragement when I caught sight of the Church of St. James the Great. Entering into this small 12th century church on Friary Park Lane; I realised that it was no longer C of E but Greek Orthodox. According to the Eastern calendar I missed St. James’ feast day by one week.

Old ladies in black lit candles to icons. There were offerings of bread and food as the saints get hungry too.

An offering was also visible on the War memorial in the churchyard - in memory of the dead - we assuage the guilt of survival and debt by praying for them.

Before leaving the park I made my own offering to one of the older trees taking a small piece of loose bark. This mummia was used to manifest the tree spirit via the method known as the menstruum of undines first used for the project called ‘An interview with Austin Spare’.

Both Celtic and Greek tree spirits were generally considered female - dryads. However the Greek version do allow for male tree spirits called Drius.

This one is clearly sporting a full beard.

Ready for the close-up!

Talking Heads

A first excursion to the Church of St. John the Baptist at Chipping Barnet (from ‘ceap’ or ‘cheap’ meaning a market); which overlooks the road leading to London to the South and the hyperborean regions to the North. 

 Directionality is important here as we are on the road, Barnet being a stopping point before the noise, smell and crush of London and its Hi- and Lo-life. 

A ‘meaningful coincidence’ as its book of local ‘saints’ for April 14th, situated at the rear of the church, was for Mary Carbery (1867-1949), and her paean to the wandering life, the soul that is attracted to the wilderness and a diet of locusts and honey. In a different age might the Baptist have opened a hipster organic café for post-veganuary refugees in this place? More on this book later.

The walls of the church are made up of nodules of flint an old protection against the faerie and the devil. Perhaps we should be on our guard as the fae must be particularly active in this place.

Out front are two branches tied together by a rope that remarkably forms an inverted pentagram with a cross, seemingly, hastily thrown over it to contain the beast. Is this an example of a Christian false-flag Satanic panic?  Maybe we should be doubly on our guard today.

Our patron saint being headless and sited upon a hill the thoughts naturally turns to stories of heads buried under-the-hill, something which London boasts under Tower Hill in the form of Bran the Blessed. As Brian Haughton explains in his ‘Haunted Spaces, Sacred Places: A Field Guide to Stone Circles, Crop Circles, Ancient Tombs and Supernatural Landscapes:

“The mythological origins of the Tower of London are described in a fascinating tale in The Mabinogion, a group of stories from medieval Welsh manuscripts, parts of which probably date back to older Iron Age tradition. The tale involves Bran the Blessed (“Bendigeidfran” in Welsh; probably “Blessed Crow”), the giant king of Britain, who invades Ireland and is fatally wounded in the foot by a spear during a battle. At the end of the battle only seven of Bran’s followers remain alive. Before he dies, Bran orders his head to be cut off and carried to Bwynfryn (‘White Hill’) in London, thought to be the site of the [White] Tower, where it is to be buried facing in the direction of France. As long as the head of Bran the Blessed remains buried in this place, no invaders from across the seas can come to the island of Britain.”

The crow family is also represented in the church by the small chapel/tomb of Thomas Ravenscroft situated to one side of the main altar.

A head buried under a hill connects us with the underworld and the seer who has the foot in both worlds. his body above and his consciousness communing with the spirits. As Tobias Churton points out in his book on this saint, we have the incarnation of spirit into matter from heaven in the form of the dove. As Jake Stratton Kent remarks in Geosophia the underworld of the dead evolved over time and took its place in the heavens. 

Thus the Church of St. John the Baptist is our local node connecting North and South, above as well as below through time. Such a node ‘makes holy’ or sacralises and reminds us that in Christianity’s early years the making of saints was not the prerogative of a centralised bureaucracy but was a grass roots local movement taken over to establish control and orthodoxy. 

A visitor to Cornwall can attest to a profusion of saints there established before the iron grip of Rome reached out to snatch away this power. So it is heart-warming to see that the Diocese of St Alban, another headless saint to which Barnet belongs, re-introducing this practice by making its own book of days. This takes the form of local historical figures who are to be venerated for their virtue and example allotted to the calendar. As the introduction  to Barnet’s own ‘Golden Legend’ makes plain these ‘saints’ are not above but from the people. The fact that they share the same selfish impulses as the rest of us and yet were moved by a ‘Holy Spirit’ to some service for their community or the wider world can only validate further the power that lies under-the-hill.

Welcome to Barnet's funambulatory pathways!

A warm welcome to you, dear reader, for you have stumbled upon the path direct.

A mish-mash of psycho-geography, genius loci, occult wittering and meandering through the hyper-thickness that the Borough of Barnet has to offer.

We seek the dragon paths that run under our feet from  the High Empyrean reaches of EN4 to NW2 and N11 to HA7; In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

The task is to unpack the Borough as spirit realm, saints, devils, elementals and the dead.

 Our patron is St. John the Baptist whose turf is marked at the summit of High Barnet Hill looking south across the borough as he enfleshes the heavenly forces through the radials that spread out from  Ground Zero.

Welcome to areas of resurgence where spirit and matter infuse and break through, to hotspots and the places where the dead hack into the minds and dwellings of the living. This is a vertical investigation, leaving no thought unturned until we are fluent in reading the signs and omens that reveal the oracles of the sleeping bride under St. Mary's at Church End.

St. John the Baptist, pray for us.
St. Peter's Arkley, pray for us.
St. Mark's Barnet, pray for us
St. Stephens Bell Hill, pray for us.


Image:

St. John the Baptist (c. 1513–16), Leonardo da Vinci... By Leonardo da Vinci - http://www.artworkonly.com/artreproductions/st-john-the-baptist.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15678525