Or ARCANA VIRIDIA; A GRANARY OF THE FAUNS, BEING AN OCCULT HERBARIUM. Images by Benjamin A. Vierling It is a truism that for much of humanity’s existence its medicines have been derived from Nature. For, from where else would they be obtained? Over millennia, the slow and no-doubt fraught process of discerning the medicinal benefits of the world’s 400,000 plant species (of these, only 15,000 have been used for medicinal purposes at some point in history) has resulted in a […]
Tag: Witchcraft
REVIEW: OF CHALK AND FLINT BY VAL THOMAS
One unexpected aspect of Val Thomas’s book ‘Of Chalk & Flint’ is this: it provides an interesting insight into the activities of a community of magickal practitioners. Not necessarily in terms of an organised coven, secret confraternity or structured school, but a loose group of folk who come together at key points in the year to perform ritual and engage with the land and its spiritual denizens. Val quite often prefers ‘we’ over the personal pronoun ‘I’ and there’s a […]
REVIEW: WALKING THE TIDES BY NIGEL G. PEARSON
After reading his book ‘Treading the Mill’ a few years back, while camping in deepest rural Suffolk, I performed a few simple rites. They yielded powerful, unequivocal and almost instant results. It convinced me that the bond between practitioner and land is fundamental to magick. And the deeper the bond, the greater its potency. For me, the deepest bond is derived from practicing in the place I was born, which is why I return to Suffolk so often despite not […]