On the morning of the 25th of November 2022, after a night of little sleep, and much reflection, I went outside at dawn, and spoke these words : no notes, nothing written : spontaneous, inspired speech. Poetry.

I was driven to this gesture by my conversations with my friend Terra Vance, who likes my voice-messages. I thought :
"I could make a series of them: poems sent as messages to Terra....
Elegies for Terra..."
And that was how it started. I went out the next day, again at dawn, and shot the video : a delicate frost in the garden of the place I live.

With help from Andrew Rose, who cleaned up my voice-audio - just taken on a simple phone voice-recorder app - and then with the incredible collaboration of Heather Bentley, who composed the soundtrack, entitled "Ungovernable Music", and performed it on viola and cello, then did the sound-mix, and with the encouragement of Terra, who has been there every step of the way, we arrive at this.
This film.

It is, obviously, not for me that I do this.
It's for Terra. It's for our Beautiful Ungovernable World.
It is an Elegy, and it is a Warcry ; it is a Lament, and it is a Call to Arms.

If you find this film inspiring, or moving, or heartbreaking, or it fills you with the same love and rage that fuelled it, then please consider joining the kind of radical protest that is needed to act on it.

Protest, create, resist ...
Re-wild. Re-enchant. Re-member.

Rather than pledging to this publication, please consider making a contribution to your chosen cause. For us, Extinction Rebellion was the only one that made any sense. But I know that there are thousands of local, national, and international groups that are fighting for climate, community, to help the bereft and to struggle against the Dark. You know who they are. Reach out and offer your time, your money, your presence. Show up now.

The Hour is very late; it’s not too late.
But Money is not the Object.
Rather, we are.
We are the Object, and the Subject.
And the Earth is also Us.

O Beautiful Ungovernable World !
What have we done ...?

What will we do now …?

Here’s the text of the poem, which came to me out of the Great Beyond, and which I channelled through my person and the words and phrases of that substrate of “fragments shored up against these ruins” that is my literary heritage. You’ll notice a lot of those magpie-gathered fragments which surface in the flow of words.

It is a Gift.

o beautiful ungovernable world

what have we done

you say: how dare you come to me at this late hour

with love letters

with protestations of my undying loyalty

my undying regard

and I say no

I come not to praise you

But to bury you

I no longer speak just love

I’ve come to say goodbye

o Terra

what have we done

you shall be put to rest with muffled drum

we shall carry black banners

and in silent march shall bear you aloft upon our shoulders

and set you down once more within the earth

o glorious ungovernable world

we could not tame you

we could only enslave you and try to break you

and we did

but you will always escape our paltry grasp

we are but a flicker

then the light goes out

and you remain unshackled

untamed and wild and free

o Terra what have we done

ourselves even we tried to discipline

to make us march in lockstep

to make us stand in pyramids

with archons above us

with serfs below us

we knew our place

but that is not our place

you are our place

and that is not the body in which we might thrive

but you are

o what have we done to our body

this strange and self-abuse

we have pushed it to the limit

and we have thought that virtue

we have tried to wring every last ounce of effort

ounce of work

ounce of wealth

out of you and ourselves

that is not how we thrive

we were not made for this

you were not made for this

you were not made

no one made you

you pre-existed all such thoughts

you are our home

we are not your owners

we are your servants

we are your caretakers

and the dereliction of our duty has left you derelict

has left you Wasteland

Wasteland is all that’s left to us

and in the wilderness

some solitary voices raise that cry

o glorious ungovernable world

we cannot force you

we cannot tear from you all your fruits

and all the nourishment of the earth

give nothing in return and hope to thrive

but those voices crying in the wilderness they say

there is another way

that those who have tried to put you on a leash

to harness you

to make you drive the motors of this system of the world

have done the same to us

and we no longer have to take that

because we too are part of you

that beautiful ungovernable world

and these last years there have been hints

there have been moments

when we have escaped the watchful eye

of those cold Masters and run riot in the streets

with revelry and Carnival

and we have said no to the orders of those

who would put the yoke upon our necks

and drive us hard with scourges

make us run till exhaustion

make us push the wheels of those dark evil mills

no we are only some among your many children

we are only one small part of what does make you

no one made you

and at this hour though very late

the hour is not too late

to light the beacons on the hills

to pass from heart to heart

The Flame

and then with torches and our lances borne high

we shall take the black banners

with which we marched in your funeral cortège

and make them our standard and our battle cry

raise high the black flag and the white flag of surrender

for only in surrender to you

beautiful ungovernable world

shall we escape

and lay you finally to rest

we too I hope will come to rest

and all this ceaseless fretful stir

that only serves to profit those who torture you

and enslave us

all this desperate feverish stir will end

and we will come to rest

and you shall be appeased and gentled

we shall not tame you no

but hold you in our arms

as we would soothe a sleeping child

who murmurs and cries out in nightmare

and then from our own nightmare awaken

and look up

as I do now at dawn

and look to the eastern sky and say

the sun will always rise

and whether it rises on the Wasteland

or on some new world

we’ve yet to see

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The seventh chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I, the second part here: Chapter II, the third part here: Chapter III, the fourth here: Chapter IV, the fifth here: Chapter V, and the sixth here: Chapter VI

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

The story so far: Elizabeth Harding, a young English woman, finds herself - not totally of her own full volition - in a teacher-training programme for Functionary Magicians of the Imperium of the Unseen in Bordeaux, France. Hi-jinks, obviously, ensue …

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Iris took her hand again, and she felt that little tingle of … something, at her touch. She led her back to the main corridor, and along it, stepping around and over the sprawling teenage bodies. At one point, when the huddled masses giggling around a phone blaring some snippet of silly video became impassable, Iris raised her voice.

“Coming through! Convoi exceptionnel! Bip-bip!”

The students hustled to the sides to leave a passage, and Eliza could see how they looked at Iris, her bright silhouette, her black corkscrew ringlets, her dancing eyes. They smiled back with delight. The Glamour was working, even at a glance. Was it too late to …? She was pulled along by the hand, and felt helplessly swept up in the wake of her colleague, and shrugged smilingly at the students as they went past, and the kids seemed to shake their heads in amused wonder too, at these teachers who moved like girls in the schoolyard, gaily and gladly and insouciantly … The Glamour was strong.

Arriving at a certain closed door, Iris turned to her and pointed. “Here we are! Got your keys?” The teenagers in the vicinity began to stir up from their slumps against walls, to turn from their scrums of secrecy, towards the door, and their new teacher.

“Oh yes, the keys …” Eliza fumbled in her bag, and pulled out the heavy bunch of various clanking keys that Khadija had given her. “I can’t quite remember …” She was fumbling through them, totally unable to figure out which one might work on this door: Room 717E.

“Now,” Iris gently lifted them from her hand. “Let me show you.” She held up each key as she spoke. “These ones, that open classrooms: each has a planetary glyph – that shows you the building, see, here we’re in E, so of course that’s Saturn,” (Eliza frowned: What?) “and then there’s an astrological glyph, which shows you the floor it works on, so as we’re on the seventh floor, obviously that will be Scorpio …” (again, Eliza tried to calculate how this could be the case, and failed) “Then look, you’ve got the keys with the symbol in yellow, like this one, and that means they’re Lightside keys, and you’ve got the ones in blue, which are Shadeside keys …”

A number of students were now watching with some interest; Iris was undeterred. Eliza was hopelessly confused. Her comrade went on:

“So! The Lightside keys work in the classrooms which have East-facing windows, while the Sun is rising: they function until the Exact Zenith (even if the Sun isn’t literally shining in the window at that moment, it’s an Astrological thing …), and then those rooms switch over to being unlocked and locked by Shadeside keys, whereas the other rooms which have West-facing windows, and during the morning hours worked with the blue Shadeside keys, are now unlocked by Lightside keys. Got all that?” She hadn’t, but Eliza found herself nodding helplessly, desperate to please her teacher. She half-noticed that several of the student onlookers were nodding sagely too.

“Now, just to be clear,” Iris held up a finger and looked around smiling that tricksy, brilliant smile at her audience. “There aren’t any classrooms facing South, or hardly any: only administrative offices. Those can only be opened by the red Fire-keys, and there’s every chance you’ll never even see one. There are very very few facing North – just a few very particular labs and studios – and those are opened by Nightside keys, not Shadeside mind you, Nightside. You will also, in theory, need a Nightside key in the early morning classes in the Winter, and maybe if you’re teaching after five or six o’clock in the evening, but you’ll have to ask Khadija for them specially, and sign them out leaving a piece of personal Activated jewellery as collateral or a Binding Sigil or something, they had too many people forgetting to give them back, or ‘forgetting’, I should say …”

Eliza just looked at her, stunned. What?

“And which key …?”

“Oh! Right, yes. The initial question. So. We’re in Tower E, Saturn, seventh floor, Scorpio, here we go, morning on the East-facing side of the Tower, so the key with the yellow glyphs … Here you go!” She held out the right key, the rest dangling in a thick bunch like the fruit of a tree of secrets and interdictions. Eliza took it, and … oh! Iris’s hand brushed hers, and she felt the same electric pulse. A thrill. Surely, this was not just her new colleague’s back-to-school Glamour? No time to think about it. She turned and unlocked the recalcitrant door, almost dropping her document-bag, and swung it open. The students didn’t move. Iris caught her eye, and gestured to her. You go in first … she mouthed.

Eliza did so, and then turned as they filed past her. Iris was still there, in the background. She shaped the words, silently again, ‘greet them’. Eliza began saying ‘Hello … good morning … hello, come in …’ as the students went past her. Some responded cheerfully, some with a grunt, some with a nod, but she understood, as she watched Iris watching her, and followed her looks and expressions, that she must meet their eyes, and catch their attention, each one, as they entered. Make contact. She had never thought of this before. Most of her few university classes had involved all the students coming in and taking their places and being ready when she arrived. She had never even considered greeting each one personally at the door.

Now, the teenagers were finding their places, choosing their seats, squabbling and chatting. Iris remained outside the open door. The students could no longer see her, but Eliza could. She looked intensely at Eliza, making sure she still had her attention – though now she must split it with her class – and then mimed very succinctly, this: let them find their places; wait until they are silent; make them all rise, those who have already sat down; now make them greet you as one. Her movements, expressions, and gestures were so eloquent that Eliza had no trouble understanding, and following, this silent tutorial. She found herself, eventually, in front of a silent room of standing students. She stood up straight, spoke out loudly: “Good morning, everyone!” and they chorused back, more or less in unison, “Good morning, Miss!” She lowered her hands, to allow them to sit.

She looked to the door, but there was no-one there now. Iris was gone. Her work was done, for the present. Eliza sighed, and turned to her class. Apparently, there were twenty-seven of them. And now they were waiting for her to tell them what to do. She closed the door.

The students looked at her expectantly. A few were starting to fidget and whisper. Okay. Fuck it. Elizabeth took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She hadn’t taken the time to prepare it, but it was a – let’s say – a here’s one I made earlier. A Glamour she had used on many occasions, a powerful one. Even just a touch of it would help her here, and it was the first thing that came to hand as, in her mind, she reached for something … The Woman Crowned with the Sun. She felt a gold light shoot up her spine and radiate out from her head in an aureole of light. It had something of the Byzantine icon, this Glamour that she had worked on, for so long, in such detail. A halo-effect, so to speak. She opened her eyes, and she could see the difference in the quality of their attention; the fidgeting had stopped, for now, and all eyes were on her.

“Good morning! My name is Miss Harding, and I am your new teacher of Magical Arts in English.” She opened her administrative folder to the class-lists. “So. You are Seconde – Magie Générale, Group G, correct?” There were a few nods and one loud ‘Oui!’ “I am now going to take attendance, and I would like you to say ‘here’, or ‘present’, when I call your name …”

She went down the list, and it was a nice way to buy some time and look around to see who she was dealing with. These were a class of ‘Secondes’, which meant they were all about fifteen years old. The French system has a bizarre way of counting school-years: primary school is even worse, with multiple levels of acronyms, but in secondary, the students begin at ‘Sixième’, or ‘Sixth Class’, when they’re eleven, and count down to ‘Première’, or ‘First Class’ when they’re seventeen; what are they counting down to? Lift-off? Who knows. In any case, the final year of secondary school is ‘Terminale’ – terminal velocity, perhaps – at which point they’re finished, and they’re launched into adult life. Collège (confusingly), or middle school, is from Sixième to Troisième, and Lycée, or high school, is from Seconde to Terminale. It takes a long time to get one’s head around this, and Eliza was only just managing, having to perform the conversion in her head every single time, almost like Imperial to Metric (which, well … it was quite funny now that Système Internationale – metric – originated in a New Imperium, whereas the holdouts of Imperial measures were – allegedly – parliamentary monarchies or federal republics. There will be cause to speak more of this later).

The Écoles Ésotériques were no different, and counted their classes thus as well, with some deviations and specificities when it came to the arcane appellations of the different specialisations that one might choose at the lycée level. Indeed, the Fully Operative schools were almost invariably only from Seconde onwards: that is to say, lycées. There were vanishingly few establishments that offered fully magical instruction to collège students, but they did exist, usually as combined with a lycée upper-school; rather, there were middle-schools that had covert magical teachers, whose overt roles were as teachers of mundane subjects. Many of us will have encountered such, even in our mundane world: teachers who were not fully of the Ordinary, but seemed to have access to a secret symbolism and sense beyond our own, which one might pick up in hints and allusions and clues and fragments.

As Eliza went down the list of names, and looked at her new young charges, she realised a number of things: the student body was diverse; there were names of many origins, some very French, some Northern, some Southern, some Basque (she thought she could recognise the Basque touch in a name by now); many also were Maghrébi, or Middle Eastern; not a few, also, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, one or two maybe Polish; or again, West African, or even a couple of East African ones. The overwhelming impression was of mixture; this was quite typical of France, today, but even more so of the South-West: it had been a crossroads for cultures from the four corners of Europe for millennia, and it wasn’t about to stop now. And it pleased her. She looked at all these different faces, and did her best to get all their names right, and she was glad.

However, the other thing most salient, at this first roll-call: fully eighty percent of the class … were boys. She ought to have expected it, ought to have known! But she just had not thought about it. Albertus Magnus was famously a Science and Tech focused school; the professions for which it prepared its young people tended to be male-dominated and masculine-coded: was it any wonder that a lot of them would be boys? The girls, six of them in this group, stood out: four sat together in the middle, and she could tell they were allies. Two sat either side, alone, and she could tell they were isolated. They were all quite prettied-up, but only to an extent; hair and makeup carefully done, some jewellery, but their clothes were much the same as the boys’: baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirts, jogging pants – all in shades of grey, and black, and cream, and white. And the boys … well. This might be a problem. Even as Eliza could immediately tell the girls apart and differentiate them by a certain look, or hair colour or style, or physiognomy … the boys … all looked the same. They all dressed as similarly as if they had been inmates in a grim prison factory (perhaps they were?); they all seemed to have exactly the same haircut, a short back-and-sides that puffed out on top like a mushroom, a wispy moustache and some acne. Some carried it better than others, but basically, the look was precisely similar. Later, she would tell Iris about this, who would laugh and say, “oh yes, the broccoli-heads!” They both laughed together, and when Eliza said she hadn’t expected to be teaching a cohort of young men who looked like they were just about to be conscripted and sent off to fight at the Somme, they both laughed even harder and Iris started quoting from “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and Eliza thought, oh wow she really is amazing, and gazed at her with the kind of eyes she usually reserved for … well. Other circumstances.

Back in the classroom, that first day, she started the group of Secondes with a sort of “getting-to-know-you” exercise. Just as she launched into it, she remembered something else she had to do: establish the Class Rules. She was making them up as she went along. She Had Not Prepared. But it struck her as a good idea. She made a list on the whiteboard: Attention, Respect, Effort. If they would give her these, she would give them in return. She looked at the list. English, she added. We’ll do everything in English, of course. She quickly scanned the list on the board as a PDF with her phone, for future reference. Yes, she thought. That’s actually not bad. Covers a lot of the bases. No doubt, she would think of more later. She outlined to them the first unit she had planned: they were to work on “The Story of My Life”. This is, she explained, how we begin to weave our spell: how we tell our story. How we present the bare facts of our existence as a consistent and enchanting narrative. Which parts we choose to tell, in which circumstances. Which parts we choose to tell, to emphasise, to ourselves. The story that we tell others is the impression they receive of us; the story that we tell ourselves … is ourselves. As she spoke, she looked around at all of those young half-formed faces. What can you have lived? What might you not have lived? In a few of them, she saw immediate recognition of what she was trying to tell them, in clear, simple sentences, her voice pitched strong and bright, towards the corners of the room, her eyes alighting on one set of other eyes, and then another, and another. In some of those eyes, puzzlement; in some others, boredom, or sullen resistance. We’ll see about that.

“Now,” she mustered the Glamour once more, and gathered their attention with an outstretched hand, then snapped her fingers with a loud crack. Several of them jumped. “Here is the most important part: some of you will be thinking, oh I have nothing interesting to say, nothing has ever happened to me … Indeed. And so, the secret: you must lie.”

A few faces perked up, that had been erstwhile impassive.

“Nobody has a very interesting life. Those few who do, it’s often for the wrong reasons: they have seen things no-one should, been through things that hurt them. In both cases: we must lie. When you tell me the Story of Your Life – as I said, Written Evaluation – (What’s it marked out of, Madame? What’s the coefficient? they asked, in French) I want you to tell me some of the truth, and I want you to invent and imagine other things. Only make it interesting; only make it believable. Lying well is the beginning of Enchantment: it is this, among other things, that I am here to teach you.

“To begin with, let us practice lying, and telling the truth. Let us practice listening, and telling each from each.”

She quickly explained to them the game, ‘Two Truths and a Lie’, icebreaker beloved of corporate group-workshop facilitators everywhere. She encouraged them to choose their path: three banalities, or three enormities, only one of which was false; or an obvious lie that was true, an ordinary truth that was a lie. We want you to fool us. And the rest of you, meanwhile, we want you to judge: what’s true, what’s false, what’s probable and improbable. She demonstrated:

“I’ll start: I come from right near the town where Dracula originally landed in England; my mother was a famous folk-singer; I came first in France in the Magistère trials. Now. What is true, what is a lie? What is believable? What is probable? What is truthy, but not true? What rings false, but might just be?”

It was strange, as she had begun speaking, she had begun to lose her anxiety: she let fall the Glamour, and sailed on upon the plain world’s wind. She felt the rhythms and the sense constructed of eloquent speech: this was one of her most precious Gifts of all. Ex tempore argument, persuasion, elucidation of an Idea. This was – chief among other reasons – why she was so damn good as an academic: she was a brilliant communicator, an eloquent orator. The Gifts of the Bard. Though she might stumble and fall awkwardly silent in conversation, once it became Rhetoric, she soared. She had not been good at making friends in school. However, she had excelled on the Debate Team. This had not helped, in making friends. Even her team-mates, with their grudging admiration, were also her competitors, and tended to deploy her as a weapon more than consider her a comrade. She caught herself, as she conducted the class, directing the flow of the parole from person to person, taking it back up, rephrasing and questioning, feeling suddenly more competent than she had imagined. Enjoying herself. Why couldn’t she speak with such ease, always? Why couldn’t she feel so capable, in mere society? Why couldn’t she make friends? She thought of Iris, and godsdamn, she blushed and stuttered, and lost her place.

The fifteen year olds, more or less, were getting the hang of it. They had guessed and guessed, about her own truths and lies, and she had refused to tell them. They had laughed uproariously at the tall tales and outrageous lies proferred by their classmates, and ruthlessly found them out. She heard their delighted laughter, and knew that they were also learning, and within, she glowed.

By the time they had all presented themselves and their brief histories of true and false, the hour was nearly up, and she graciously dismissed them, and watched them file out, saying ‘Goodbye’, and ‘Have a good day’, and even (bless that girl) ‘Thank you, Miss’. She took a deep breath, then remembered she must enter the attendance details into the ClassWiz app. Leaning over her desk, trying to figure out how to do so, she realised: there was a whole other group of fifteen year olds at the door, waiting to come in.

Her heart sank and her stomach knotted and she went to the door, to greet each and every one.

The sixth chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I, the second part here: Chapter II, the third part here: Chapter III, and the fourth part here: Chapter IV, and the fifth here: Chapter V

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

The story so far: Elizabeth Harding, a young English woman, finds herself - not totally of her own full volition - in a teacher-training programme for Functionary Magicians of the Imperium of the Unseen in Bordeaux, France. Hi-jinks, obviously, ensue …

Subscribe now

As she approached the shadowy gateway that led from the Cour d’honneur to the more modern courtyard beyond, she noticed once again the enormous stones plaques on either side of the gate: lists of students, ‘morts pour l’Empire’; one was from La Grande Guerre (1914-1918), one from La Seconde Guerre (1938-1947), and one was from La Guerre des Ombres, the Shadow-War. For this one, no dates were given, and the names were often clearly code-names rather than typical French given names. The Shadow-War has no beginning, and it has no end: there was quite a lot of space left at the end of the second plaque, and she could imagine a third going up next to it, a fourth, a fifth, until they reached clear to the corner, and then continued on around the courtyard. The Shadow-War in the Inner World was now mirrored by the Forever War in the Outer – but there too, no beginning is specified, and no end is in sight. Mundane media and governments do not call it that either, but all know that it is being fought.

She passed through the gate, and the shady, echoey space within the gatehouse, where some students huddled together around stone tables, their faces lit by the glow of their phone screens. None of them even saw her, she imagined. What need we spells to Pass Unseen, when nobody is ever looking anymore, she thought. And then she remembered Bertrand had spotted her across the courtyard while in the middle of a class, and felt obscurely annoyed.

She briefly popped in to the Grande Salle des Profs, where there were some couches, some tables, a couple of coffee-machines, multiple notice-boards, and where everyone had their casier. ‘Locker’, she thought, and shook her head. Not that. Just a little slot for mail and documents, with their names on them. ‘Pigeon-hole’, that was it. Why was …? It suddenly struck her: it’s for your mail. Delivered by carrier-pigeon. Of course. To ‘pigeon-hole’ someone: to place them in an already-established, prejudiced, stereotypical box in your head. She thought of Bertrand again. Dammit! Stop thinking about Bertrand! She thought of his arms, when he crossed them. No!

There were a few colleagues sitting and chatting, others lingering by doorways, or the coffee-machine. None raised an eye when she came in. She checked. No mail. She went down the dark corridor at the back, off which were a few rooms for shared computers – all occupied – the printers, and the common room for the teachers of Ancient and Modern Letters. These, along with Philosophy, were disciplines one might have expected to fall under Art-Magic (at least Eliza would), but instead they were firmly ensconced in the Scholarly-Magic Domain. They did not, apparently, let anyone forget it, particularly their colleagues who worked with other, lesser languages. She spotted one of them coming out, who she thought must be a postulant as well, as she seemed to have seen her at the Institut. She had long red hair, a solemn face, and was dressed just the correct amount of quirky to be chic. Eliza looked down at her own outfit, dubious. The Red-haired Girl went past her with what seemed a slightly hostile look, and was gone.

Fleeing the Grande Salle des Profs, Eliza went to brave the labyrinth of Tower E, where most of her classes would take place. Through a massive set of fire-doors, down long square corridors with blinking neon lights that barely illumined the lime-green walls and squeaking linoleum floors; up several flights of steps, but you must choose the correct stairwell, or you would come out in a different building altogether. Turn a corner, along covered walkways halfway up another tower-block. Many of the buildings in this part had bright-coloured panels or accents, supposed perhaps to help one orient oneself: but if one were not told what they meant, then the different colours and signaletic efforts only added to one’s disorientation, and the colours were, in any case, faded and of unsettling shades. She found herself, by accident, in the Centre for Documentation and Information (what used to be called ‘the Library’), and immediately apologised as her clattering entrance seemed to disturb a profound hush. The Archivist – tall, spare, bespectacled, severe – merely put her finger to her lips, and then pointed across to a different door which Eliza had not noticed. Ah yes. Can’t go out the way you came in. Crowd-flow management. There were only two students there, heads bowed over a gigantic leatherbound book at the corner of one table, but still. The Archivist did not lower her pointing finger, until Eliza followed her silent instruction and tried to dash while tiptoeing across the room, past the first rows of shelves, and out through the hidden door. It could barely be seen under all of the posters announcing events long-past, but she located the handle and pulled. It would not turn, nor twist, nor yield. Finally, she pushed it. And went through.

After what seemed like an eternity (she checked: thirteen minutes), she found her way to the seventh floor of Tower E. Here were most of her classrooms, and the tiny teachers’ room that served most of those in the Art Magic Department. Blaise would tell her, later on, that it was at first referred to mockingly as the ‘Niche des professeurs’ by the teachers in other disciplines, as it was barely more than an alcove, and for barely-relevant subjects. ‘As is often the case, however,’ Blaise remarked, with an erudite finger raised, ‘the pejorative applied to the oppressed minority was adopted and contracted, becoming NDP, and then, as the sound suggested, it migrated to becoming “Nid de Pie”, or “Crow’s Nest” as you would have it. Which is rather pleasing. I myself have been known to call it the “Nid de P.I.E.” And he smiled shyly at his own joke. However. Eliza, at this point, had not met Blaise yet, and could not yet benefit from his kind and gentle guidance.

Inside the Proto-Indo-European Magpie’s Nest, then, she found three colleagues starting their day: one larger-than-life, dramatic-voiced woman with theatrically extravagant clothing, all beads and scarves and feathers, who seemed to be in the middle of an indignant account of something; one very slender and poised young woman with black curly hair and sparkling eyes, dressed in bright colours, with something of a children’s TV presenter effect; one very small and wispy man, wearing a flowery shirt and a corduroy suit, with small halfmoon glasses, and a long, silky, soft pale beard, and gently undulating hair of the same quality that fell either side of his face. This was Blaise: you see, she had not had long to wait, to meet him. Blaise and the younger woman – who looked very much like a ballet dancer, in the way she held herself, thought Eliza – were paying close attention to the operatic tale of woe recounted by their colleague, or at the very least trying to look like they were.

Dolores – for that was her name, it would transpire – was speaking to them in French, but with a quite pronounced Spanish accent. Eliza knew, for she had looked into it, that in the school they numbered some twenty teachers in the Department of Enchantment who working in foreign languages. Of these, over half taught English, with a handful of Spanish, and then one sole solitary German teacher, Frau Hetzel. Eliza did not even catch sight of her for quite some time, reclusive as she was, and indeed there were a few of the Art-Magic teachers that she never did see at all. As for the wider staff of the school, the brochure that she had been poring over at the weekend – distributed at the orientation day – said there were over four hundred teachers, and as many various support staff, for three thousand students. She imagined she would never even see half of them, over the course of her singular year here, and not even a fraction of the students.

“… Wands! They let them have Wands!” Dolores was exclaiming. “How am I supposed to run my class knowing that there are students among them carrying their own pre-attuned Wands? It will drive me crazy! It’s bad enough that we have to worry about their phones, especially during assessments, but if I can’t even be sure about the magical tools they’re carrying on them, I ask you … How many ways to cheat do you want them to have?”

“For my part, I make them give up their phones at the start of every lesson,” said the young woman, whose name she gave as Iris, when she introduced herself later. “I would get them all to turn them off and put them in the Faraday Box at the beginning. After a while, it just became second nature to them. This was in my previous establishment though. Do we have Faraday Boxes in the classrooms here?” she asked brightly. She must be new too.

Blaise and Dolores sadly shook their heads. “We don’t, if that’s what you mean,” said Dolores. “Some of the other departments have them, but we haven’t been given the budget for it.”

“What about Leaden Strongboxes for their magical items?” Iris ventured.

Blaise laughed hollowly. “Now that would be a luxury! They’re not supposed to bring any personal magical items to school, but it’s on the, ah, ‘Honour System’ … so you can imagine how that goes.”

“I used to find it quite fun, actually,” Iris said. “Have them all come up and empty their pockets, and the secret compartments in their clothes, if they were flashy … Sometimes you’d get a kid who would just keep on producing more and more trinkets: amulets, talismans, charms-bags, coins … I remember one who made a game of it: he would take out tools, and potions, and objects, and then he’d pretend he’d finished, and then mime remembering ‘just one more thing’ … Like a clown with a never-ending handkerchief coming out of his pocket. But it was impossible to get them all. Some of them had Activated tattoos, or some piece of unobtrusive jewellery, a piercing, that they had had Enchanted for them. One girl even had her … what do you call those trendy travel mugs?”

“Stanley Cups?” offered Eliza, edging into the conversation.

“Yes, that’s right, Stanley Cups! Well, she had one of those Enchanted as a Chalice, and used it to transform Water-into-Vodka during class! I don’t know. If I have to police their bloody sippy-cups on top of everything else …”

“Back in my day,” Blaise mused, “we used to really make an effort to cheat. We would copy out our little aide-mémoires on the most miniature of scrolls, and hide them inside our watches, or sneak into the room and tape them to the undersides of desks beforehand. I once managed to clip notes inside my hair where it hung down around my face – it was the style, at the time. And I would take the expression ‘Off the Cuff’ back to its origin, and before an oral exam have made copious tiny invisible notes on the insides of my ‘French cuffs’ – as you lot call them …” He nodded to Eliza, clearly having already spotted she was an English speaker, somehow. He looked wistful. “You know, I think that with all the effort we put into cheating, we nearly might as well have just learned the stuff. But this way, you learned it by accident, all while feeling like you were getting away with something …” He smiled, and held out his hand. “I’m Blaise, by the way. You must be Elizabeth. Welcome to Lycée Albertus Magnus!”

“Oh, you’re the new English-Magic-Teacher!” exclaimed Dolores. “Well, let me tell you, you’re in for a rude landing in THIS place …” And she proceeded to detail many of the terrible impositions, obstacles, and enormities that Eliza was sure to suffer in the weeks and months to come. She did not stop. She was relentless. Blaise and Iris gradually gathered their things, checked their piles of papers and registers, and began to slip away. Dolores seemed like she was only just getting started. Eliza looked at her watch. Classes would begin in three minutes.

“I’m very sorry, I have to …” she stammered, and Iris interrupted her.

“Yes, of course, how thoughtless of us, I told you I’d bring you to your class, didn’t I …?”

“Thank you, yes!” Eliza grabbed her satchel and her document bag, and quickly stowed her lunch-bag in a corner (there was no sign of a fridge or microwave or coffee-machine).

She felt, as they rushed out of the room, that Iris had taken her by the hand and whisked her away, and when they found themselves in the corridor, she had the strange feeling that they had been running, hand in hand, now breathless, laughing, having fled the teacher, playing truant … Wait. None of this had happened. It was just something about how Iris had seemed to pull her out the door. She felt like they were schoolgirls, in cahoots, up to no good, thick as thieves … She looked at Iris’s face, puzzled, and saw her look back with a kind, impish, complicit air. Eliza realised that this was the operation of a Glamour, but she could not be at all sure that it was done on purpose; there are people who just have that quality, without even trying: the quality of making you feel in on it, privy to some shared secret, some conspiratorial glee. Maybe Iris had this effect on everyone (and a tiny voice in her head said, no, not everyone, you’re special, she loves you the most …).

She decided to address it head on: “Does everyone feel like this about you?” She had switched to English without even realising it. Iris followed, and turned out to have a beautiful English accent, very proper, slightly posh, with just a touch of French for added charm.

“Oh dear me no!” she exclaimed. “Only my favourites …” She smiled again that mischievous smile. “Come on. We’re going to be late for class.”

“Wait!” Eliza stopped her. There were students now streaming down the narrow gloomy corridor, clumping in groups, jostling, larking, loudly teasing – but many with their faces riveted still to the handheld glow of phones. “Wait a sec. Were you just Glamouring me just now? I felt like … I felt like we had just skipped class together, and were Best Friends Forever. What was that?”

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t do it on purpose, truly! You see … well, just before I came into the school, I found a quiet place and prepared that Glamour: you know, complicity, camaraderie, fellow-feeling. But it’s for my students! Hang on …” She pulled Eliza down a short dead-end corridor where there was no-one, for the moment. “Can’t have them hear me talk about this. Anyway. I do find that a little sprinkle of pixie-dust on the first day goes a long way, don’t you? This way I get them on my side from the start. I didn’t mean to let it spill over onto you …! Although, of course, we probably could be best friends, couldn’t we?” She smiled a secret smile, that flashed.

“You’re doing it again!” Eliza laughed. “Okay. Yes, I understand. I was thinking about it myself. Whether I should go in using Glamour on the first day. Or whether I should … I don’t know, save it for special occasions?”

“You have to be careful how you dose it … I’ve known teachers who got too dependent on it. They end up using it all the time. They don’t even know what it would be like without it. And then … well. That’s exhausting. And eventually, it cracks. Sometimes with quite spectacular results.”

“Yes …” Eliza bit her lip. “There’s the same temptation in everyday life, isn’t there? I mean, to use it all the time. Whenever you meet new people. In any stressful social situation. And then even with your friends. With … people you love. To try to keep up … the Performance.”

“I mean,” Iris rolled her eyes. “I’m not tempted to use it all the time in ordinary life. But that’s only because I’m so naturally effervescent and charming …”

“Whereas me …” Eliza looked at the floor.

“Whereas you …” Iris said softly, and leaned in to her. “You are lovely. You don’t need it switched on all the time. I think you’re just a bit shy.” She put a hand on Eliza’s shoulder, and Eliza looked up, and their faces were very close. Iris looked down at her lips, and then back up at her eyes, and for a moment Eliza was sure that she was about to kiss her … but she did not.

Iris breathed in and out, closed her eyes, and then opened them and smiled.

“You are lovely, and we are going to be best friends, Eliza. Come. I’ll show you to your classroom.”

How had she known to call her Eliza?

After the sudden surge of writing on this new project last week, I’ve had to take a few days away from it to attend to family and social commitments; of course I did, it’s August and I live in France: if I wasn’t occasionally having leisurely apéritifs and barbecues, and going to swim at the lake, and going to the fête du village with the insane cabaret show and fifteen different food-trucks and the dodgy fair-ground rides and shooting ranges, binge-watching Hilda with the kids, and mildly supervising their no-sleep sleepovers and taking them bowling, or haranguing them out of their holiday sloth to tidy their rooms, or spending a whole afternoon in the supermarket trying to figure out their insanely detailed and exhaustive back-to-school lists of necessary supplies … Well.

I thought it might be interesting though, before I begin to publish a new set of chapters, to write a little about the experience so far: I’ve not really tried anything like this before, and it’s been very stimulating and encouraging. It may not exactly be going viral (and I’m not sure I ever will), but I have had a lot of interest and support, and I wanted to talk about that first.

As I’ve noted, it was when I published the very first chapter of The Department of Whimsical Enchantment that my friend Franklin Habit picked it up and shared it with his fans, encouraging them to read it. Franklin is a dashing Knitting Influencer (it’s hard to fully explain, just go and look! Franklin Habit on Instagram), with sidelines in being an American in Paris and a historical ballroom dancer, among many other things. Franklin correctly calculated that people who enjoy his work might well like this project too: whimsy, humour, magic, France, etc. And when he recommended they check it out, they really did! My subscriber-count on Substack went up by nearly 200, from 142 to 325 in the space of a little over a week! Not all of these come from that one source, and it remains a low number in the grand scheme of things, but I was genuinely delighted.

To all of you who are new subscribers to The Hollow Behind the Hearthstone, and more particularly to the serial novel The Department of Whimsical Enchantment, welcome and thank you! I’ve been so hugely encouraged and motivated by the influx of interest. To those of you who signed up from other social media, and are opening these newsletters and chapters as emails, don’t hesitate to pop onto the app or the web-browser version of Substack sometimes and say hi, drop a comment, check out what else is there … I would love to hear from you, and already have heard from some of you. It’s great to know when people really are reading.

Some of the new subscribers were so generous as to take a paid annual subscription, and for that I am eternally, eternally grateful. Two weeks ago, I had zero paid subscribers, and now I have six! Again, in the scheme of things, etc … But. I have never made a big push to ask people to become paid subscribers, and I am committed to always keeping these writings free to access for everyone; what this does, though, is goes some way towards helping me in my struggle to “take time away” from paid work, or domestic or family work, for writing. It’s been very difficult to do so in the past couple of years, as I detail here ("Why I would not allow myself to write - and why I must, regardless"), but to know that Someone has paid for this has a certain kind of magic to it; we enter into a contract: I have an obligation. It helps. And so, to those people whom I do not know at all, but who were willing to bet some of their hard-earned money on being entertained and enchanted by my work: thank you. Thank you, so much. Not only that, but some of the new subscribers who discovered me through Franklin went so far as to ask if I had any other work available, and went and bought my already-published novel, Unreal City! (which you can do here! - or rather, you can read about it here, and buy it from all disreputable outlets, including Mammon-zon, if you must … Unreal City) I couldn’t be more delighted. As I say in the piece I wrote a few weeks ago, I never really expect to make a living from writing. I know I’ll always have to find time for it beside other work. This, however, makes it feel like people are listening, like I have managed to pique their interest. And there’s something quite different about selling your book to people you know in person, or those who have followed the story of its publication online and were already invested in your writing, to having people search for it and buy it on the strength of their impressions and recommendations they’ve received. Long may it continue!

Not all of my new subscribers, however, came in that particular wave: there are many other people with whom, little by little, I’m developing dialogue and banter and mutual appreciation for each other’s writing through Substack itself, and that also is a very strange and lovely pleasure: unlike writing friends on other social media, here I am connecting with people that, most often, I know nothing else whatsoever about. There’s something very magical about that: all we have are the words. I have been very much enjoying these new-found connections.

Also, among the annual subscriptions were not just those kind souls I do not know, but several I do know! I’ll be writing more about this very soon, but let’s just say: Amelia, Heather, and Greg, dear friends … I cannot thank you enough. You’ve always supported my work, and I thoroughly appreciate this further mark of your belief in me. I won’t let you down.

§§§

As to the writing itself: this project is one that I have been turning over in my head for the past year. It began on the very first day of my own induction to a year as a trainee teacher, at the end of August last year. It’s a very long story, but basically, after twenty years as a teacher in France, at university level while I was doing my post-graduate work, then at a private lycée in Paris, and then as a vacataire (somewhat like being an “adjunct”, but with its own whole set of contorted complications) at several different universities, and then as a contract-worker substitute teacher in local schools here in Aquitania, through an alternative educational project I started (The Hedge School – teaching kids, teenagers, and adults through conversation, creative activities, getting outside in Nature … yeah, it does sound cool. I wish it could have taken off!), I ended up deciding that I needed a stable salary again, for the good of my family. So, I resat the very difficult French teaching qualifying exams in English, did very well again, and found myself a trainee teacher in Bordeaux, with a placement in a lycée and taking classes, lectures, and workshops for half the week. The grand setting of that first day inspired this flippant post on Instagram …

But then, the idea didn’t go away. It occurred to me that it might make a rather good setup for a “Dark Academia Romantasy”-style story, but of course with my own personal spin on it. There is definitely a satirical aspect to the project: I love the foundations of both the Dark Academia style (is it a genre? I’m not sure … more of a vibe …?), and Fantasy and Romance, of course, are dear to my heart. I’ve read quite a bit of the more modern flourishing of the genres, and find some of it good, but much of it very bad. Still, as Sturgeon’s Law will have it, “Ninety percent of everything is crap”; we can’t expect every example of a popular genre to be good; often, it is popular because it does a great job of fulfilling the genre expectations, which means that of course it is formulaic: that is the whole point. The foundational texts of these genres were often not written as part of a genre because they helped to create it. That, too, is the whole point. I’ll have to write more about this in the future, as the study of popular genre fiction is what my PhD was about, and I would love to dig into my thoughts on all of it. Suffice to say, I dipped my toe into Dark Academia and Romantasy as someone who is deeply interested in these generic evolutions. Not precisely a fan of them, I would say: rather, an aficionado. I write this novel not as a send-up of these genres, but as an affectionate subversion of some of their tropes, as a delighted piece of play. I wanted, for my next writing project, to write something that I could absolutely have fun with; I wanted it to be light, amusing, a little frothy, witty, cynical, whimsical (of course). I wanted it to be fast-moving, agile, not to dwell or ponder too much: I wanted it to be entertaining, both for me and for the reader. Take the tropes, twist them, run with them, lean into them.

The question of whether I have succeeded so far is up to you. However, I note with some amusement that I have not been able to just keep it light and frothy! I think it’s funny enough – I’m definitely amusing myself, if no-one else! – and I do think that the tone is relatively light. I absolutely have not made it very fast-moving and plot-driven though. There are endless divagations on etymology and magical history; I have spent time dwelling on various aspects of the setting, which may be rather an egregious case of “setting the table”, and delivering world-building exposition through dialogue … although, that said, having them being set up as part of an introductory classroom situation kind of takes the curse off a little, maybe?

Another thing that I contemplated, when thinking about this experiment, was to try and make my writing style a bit more straightforward and to-the-point: much of the best genre-writing functions as a highly effective delivery system for plot, character, tropes; it doesn’t need to be – indeed, should not be – overly ornate, or overly self-conscious. A page-turner doesn’t have you pausing on every page to contemplate the eloquence of the writing, or its surprising and poetic qualities, or its philosophical insights. That is what it proper to literary fiction, rather, and as it should be. The writing, in much genre fiction, should get out of the way of the reader’s experience: of their immersion in the plot, the characters, the world. They should be wrapped up in these things – rapt, indeed – and hardly notice the pages going by, up way past bedtime. They should not be asked to stop and notice the writing, as that is not the point. The writing should grab them by the hand and shout “Come with me if you want to live …” Not contemplate, not appreciate, not ponder: live. Live the story. Live with the characters. Plunge into it all, forget where you are. And I … well. Let’s say, this is not my strong point.

I have never been able to restrain myself from reaching for effects. From trying to turn a sentence, spin a phrase, spark a thought, capture a moment or an experience. I cannot refrain from Poetry, if I’m honest. To try to hear the song of the lines as they spool out onto the page. To attempt colour, tone, rhythm. To attempt to evoke certain mysterious feelings of wonder and yearning. Now, I’m not saying I always succeed. That’s for you to say. I know, however, that if I am to be myself, then I must write as myself. I’m not going to be one of these literary writers who looks at genre fiction and says to themselves “oh, anyone could do that” … Because it’s just not true. Simplicity and efficacy of prose are much, much harder to achieve than they seem, to someone who does not respect them. This is also true of, say, Romance plots, Fantasy worlds, Science Fiction concepts, Detective Fiction investigations. You can’t write this stuff without actually loving it, and having read a lot of it. And I do, and I have. But that still doesn’t necessarily mean I can write it.

I cannot forbid myself from writing as it comes to me, from being myself – it would ring hollow and inauthentic and condescending if I tried to write “down” to an imagined audience. The thing is, though. As I have begun writing this serial, having already worked out much of the background and the characters and the plot in my head (I wrote hardly anything down, but all year I was thinking about it, and stewing it in my imagination), I have found myself continually happening upon new details and plot-points and character aspects. The plot, as it was in my head, is now twisting and ramifying ahead of me, changing as I write. I run into new minor characters that seem to spring up fully-formed as I write them; Bertrand, the Jock Energy-worker, popped up out of nowhere, and then demanded a name and a recurring presence; the Wicked Uncles, I only knew by function: as I wrote them, their names, their physicalities, their backstories just … coalesced. Suddenly, I knew where they were from (I can hear their voices, their accents, in my head. I’m not sure you can hear them in the writing, but I’m not trying to make them broadly caricatured). Nettle showed up, and imposed herself, based on a long-ago encounter with a Witch in real life. Nick seemed to arrive fully-formed. Eliza herself, who I had thought about for some time, seems to solidify, to become more real and complex and herself as I write her. And I am strangely grateful to her, that she has allowed me to tell her story.

Indeed, this is the alchemy: one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever had was from a friend who has had a brilliant career as a Hollywood screenwriter, mostly for TV. When we first met, he was just starting out, and I was a teenage aspiring writer, and he told me “Make sure that the protagonist is not you … You’ll spend all your energy trying to make them look cool, trying to present them in the best and most accurate and most complex way, the most flattering light … Make sure they are someone else, who things can happen to.” Wise words. Here, I am not at all writing about myself. I am writing about a young woman in her twenties, which is a more typical profile for a student-teacher (let alone a student-teacher-magician) than mine. Indeed, her portrayal is informed, as are those of the other students in her group, by those wonderful people I met this year, my colleagues, my comrades (if any of you are reading, obviously: “All resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental and plausibly deniable”). For a protagonist of a Dark Academia Romantic Fantasy, in any case, nobody would want to read about a middle-aged man: it just makes no sense. He is not the Hero on this particular Journey. No, she is. It makes far more sense. This is a young woman’s story. It could be a young man’s, too, I suppose? But no. We don’t need that, not here, not now. No more of that. This is her story to tell, to share. And she will tell it, through me. I am merely her amanuensis. I feel warmly affectionate and protective towards her; it is a privilege and a pleasure to spend this time in her company. I love her very much. Almost like a proud parent, wanting all good things for her, slightly afraid for her, very proud of her. Is this how we all feel about our characters? I don’t know. I do. I feel some of this tenderness for most of my characters, even the ones who are not the most appealing. I think that deep sympathy for the human experience is profoundly necessary for a writer; sympathy for people, curiosity about their lives, their dreams, their aspirations, their deep fears, their worst flaws. I feel it, as each one of Eliza’s classmates begins to take shape in my mind, and I hit on the configuration of details that suddenly seems to make them cohere. I think, “oh yes, that’s it … now I know you.” And it is strange, and intimate, and satisfying. It is beautiful.

You see now? I had meant this piece to be so much more down-to-earth and factual! And yet, here we are.

The alchemy, you see, is also the one performed upon my own life. All this last year, while I attempted to keep my interest and enthusiasm alive, I was forced to confront frustrations, set-backs, tedium, incompetence, maddening administrative Catch-22 situations, hoops to jump through, boxes to tick … And I thought: well, what if we made that part of it? It will have escaped no-one that another big aspect of the novel is the commentary and satire on French administration, education, society. Also, more generally, a commentary on school, higher education, academia, all of that. It struck me that, instead of some twee and cosy fantasy of Wizard School, we were confronted with how the sausage is made: how teachers of magic are trained, how, by mixing up the concept of Magic as an academic field, with all of its (literally) arcane sub-disciplines, with the actual experience of academia in the real world, and in France – how this might make an interestingly incongruous and potentially intriguing setting. With all of the attendant petty rivalry, backstabbing, one-upmanship, tedium, labyrinthine administrative quests, soul-destroying bureaucracy. Somewhere between the Romance of Dark Academia, the Wonder of Fantasy, and the Discomfort of the Campus Novel social satire.

As I made my way through this strange year of teacher-training, of teaching itself, of discovering the Mysteries of Bordeaux (a city I did not yet know), I kept making notes to myself, thinking “ah yes, that must go in!” And as for any writer, the idea of gathering and guarding these gems of detail and experience and characters encountered performed that alchemy on my everyday life of giving it a secret symbolism and sense, known only to me … This was my secret: all this, this Life … this, too, shall be my Art.

§§§

The final interesting consideration is this: it got me writing. One of the things I’ve often encountered in my writing life has been that I will embark upon a project, and then work away at it, a little at a time, for maybe years. I have written two complete novels, the first of which, Quai de Montebello, was my journeyman piece: it took me about six years, and it taught me to write. I tried to get it published for quite some time, and though I came close to getting an agent, it didn’t work out. I thought I might consign it to the desk drawer, but then some other stuff happened. It was taken on by a UK publisher, and I signed a contract for it (two years ago? Three now?), but I haven’t heard from them in a long time, and I am starting to wonder if they really exist at all. I wrote Unreal City as a distraction from my PhD thesis, for a competition run by Shakespeare & Company in Paris, specifically seeking novellas by unrepresented and unpublished authors. I wrote the first version quickly, to that deadline, and boy did I write! I got longlisted, but not shortlisted, and the eventual winner turned out to be a bit of a nepo-fraud who already had an agent and a publishing deal. So it goes. I have written the first few chapters of several other novels, all of which I do think would merit being finished, but I lost momentum, and then was taken up with my “real work”, both professional and the work of having a young family.

This has been a bit different: after practically forbidding myself from writing for the last two years, as I’ve discussed, I had so much energy bottled up, so many words crowding against the gates, that when I opened them, it was like a flood, like a shook Champagne bottle blasting (… yes, I’m well aware that that sounds a bit … there honestly was something of a long-delayed climax to it …). That first day I sat down to write, I hammered out 4,000 words straight away. Which is a lot. To put it into context, many writers set themselves goals of 1,000 a day, or sometimes even less: I’ve heard people who try to achieve 300 words a day. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s actually really good. Because if you do that every day, well, you’re writing a novel a year. Let’s say that the standard page of a paperback novel is about 250-300 words, then 300 words is pretty much a page a day. And so, a 365-page novel in a year. Very good indeed! I sometimes wish that I could have such a regular discipline, but I’ve always been more of the “nothing for a few months, then 3-4,000 words a day for a concentrated period”.

I was even like this when I was writing my PhD; I remember, back then, there were days that I hit the 5,000-word mark. Let me tell you, writing 5,000 words of academic, footnoted prose in a day is a heady experience; afterwards, I felt dizzy, spaced-out, almost out-of-body. It required me to get into a sort of deep ZONE that was not often accessible. I did manage though, at times. Particularly in that last year, in which I wrote almost all of my 600-page thesis. In Britain, for example, a PhD thesis is much more typically between 200 and 300 pages. It’s much more achievable in three or four years, and much more easily convertible to a book project, if it merits it, afterwards. Even in France, where longer PhDs are more common, mine was considered to be a “thèse à l’ancienne”, a big doorstopper which took me five years and much heartache to write, and put me off academia for good (story for another time). I remember when I was on my exchange year in Berkeley, happening to read Papillon, by Henri Charrière (better known now in the Anglo world for the film version with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, though the book was a huge international bestseller). In the introduction, it was noted that Charrière, when he was finally convinced to write his incredible story down (and it really is incredible, as is his wild energy and verve in writing), would knock out 5,000 words a day on his typewriter – this was considered an almost inhuman feat. Many years later, I thought “yeah, well I bet Papillon wasn’t looking up citations and putting in footnotes as he went, was he? Truly, doing a PhD is my Devil’s Island prison colony in French Guiana …”

The point is, I don’t think anyone can keep up a rhythm of 5,000 words a day for very long. It is almost inhuman. I’d be interested to know how many words Kerouac claimed to write, and at what speed, when he was famously composing On the Road on a continuous roll of typewriter paper taped together (I saw it on display in a manuscript museum in Paris once … it really does look cool). I know that doubts have been cast on that claimed feat, and I think it was Truman Capote who said: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Because, yes, anyone can write a continuous stream of drivel for however many thousand words at once, but what if it also has to be good …?

There were a few times over the last few years when I would plunge into a topic and bang out a 5,000-word essay in one night on it, but they were far too few and far between. I need some way to get back to a more assiduous practice. I knew that The Department of Whimsical Enchantment had the potential to be something that I would have a lot of fun with – the potential to be something good. Something that would be successful? I have no idea. I’ve had to stop thinking of things like that. For one thing, no-one knows. For another, I must concentrate on writing something I want to read, not something I imagine some imaginary reader or demographic wants to read. And in writing this new novel, I found myself doing just that. I want to read this, and therefore, I want to write it, and I want to share it. I want people to discover it. I think it’s a great adventure. I think it’s a yarn, a lark, a hoot. Please read; please share; please let others know.

When I wrote that first piece, I was not to know what would happen, but then, on a whim, I decided on the serialisation idea. I don’t know that it’s even something I’m trying to emulate: there are very very few serialised novels on Substack that have actually held my attention; indeed, for some reason, very little fiction at all. I think I come here much more for essays, and that’s what I want, so that’s what I get. I’m sure there are very good fiction pieces being posted, and I’d be happy to have recommendations. But I haven’t really found them yet. What I wanted, I think, was the idea that I would throw my hat in the ring and say “Here we go! I’m going to write a novel! Who wants to watch?” Shades of Monty Python’s “Novel-writing Olympics” … It’s not really a spectator sport, but if it were, Substack would be where it happened. This is why I’m writing this: to give you all an insight into the process. Writing as a spectator sport! A bloodsport! De l’écriture considérée comme une tauromachie …

And then, for the following week, I wrote FIVE chapters of around 4,000 words each! This is more than I’ve advanced on a writing project in a week, ever. What that means, is that up to the end of Chapter V, I’ve written a total of over 20,000 words … That means about 65-70 pages of a standard novel. This is about the place that several previous projects have stalled, but after months of writing. This is a place you can falter. However, I have to say … I’m only getting going.

And there was something that happened: you know that thing … do you know that thing? When you’re writing the opening chapters of a novel, when you’re still feeling your way, when your writing is … exploratory. You’re reaching for something. You’re not quite sure what it is yet, but you know it’s there. You’re figuring out your characters, their relation to their world; you’re trying to figure out what makes the whole enterprise tick …

And then this happens: you suddenly stumble upon a magical combination of words and circumstances, you hit that rhythm, you strike that chord. Suddenly, you have unearthed something of the emotional heart of your story. This is where it is. This is where it lives.

I wrote these words one night, about a week ago, at my desk. The music that Eliza is listening to in the text was playing – as it should be – the words fell where they should. The sweet spot struck. It hit, just so. Tears started spilling from my eyes as I wrote, and I felt like yes, yes, this is something.

Yes. I have something here.

Yes. This must live.

Thank you for helping it live.

This is the passage where it came to life:

Eliza headed for Home … (‘Eliza’, she repeated to herself, in the train … ‘Eliza’, she tried on, like a new dress she was not sure of. ‘Eliza’: a gift from a man she was not sure of, neither. It felt, somehow, good upon her skin: better than any other version of her given name had, or any other byname she had been given) … the train from Bordeaux Saint-Jean would take just over an hour: she arrived at a moment where she had forty-five minutes to wait, and spent them at the rather grand bistro across the way, drinking a citron pressé and watching the world go by. She had not yet found accommodation in the City, and so must return to where she was staying, with her Wonderful Wicked Uncles.

Uncle Harry came to the station to drive her back the twenty-five minutes to their place. The light now was fading, as it did earlier and earlier in these early-Autumn days; she had ridden the sunset home, turning the sky red, out of which she fled, over the hills, the vines, the little towns and tumble-down farms of stone and ochre tiles. She played ‘Cybèle’s Reverie’ by Stereolab on repeat, as seemed most fit: she set an alarm for five minutes before her stop. She fell asleep, the flickering landscape flying by. She awoke, when it was near-dark, and she was nearly Home.

When they arrived at Lammas House, Uncle Harry, tall and saturnine, dark looks of an ageing matinée idol, seemed to half lift her from her seat; she felt like a little child at the end of a long Summer’s day, dozing off on the car-ride home. He picked her up and carried her, half-asleep – or so it seemed – the house windows glowed amber in the dusk. Soft music playing; dinner would be cooking. Uncle Trevor, brewing up a storm. Harry brought her to her room, and whispered: “You go straight to sleep now, my love, if you wish. But if you’re able, Trevor will so want to hear about your day …” He laid her down upon the softest eiderdown, and kissed her forehead, and retreated through the door he left ajar.

After a few moments of suspension in that delicious in-between – day and night, sleeping and waking, hunger and satiety – she wriggled herself into wakefulness, and went down to the bright kitchen to regale them, to be regaled, with food, with comfort, and with love.

Later, beneath the willow-trees at the bottom of the garden, by the stream, she wandered with her feet bare and felt the moonlight upon her skin. She counted blessings, questions, things to-be-done, things known and things unknown. She thought of all she’d seen and done. And her Wicked Uncles, for their part, watched her slim bright phantom wander in the shadows there, and thought of how she reminded them of their dear departed, their beloved, her mother.

The fifth chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I, the second part here: Chapter II, the third part here: Chapter III, and the fourth part here: Chapter IV …

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

The story so far: Elizabeth Harding, a young English woman, finds herself - not totally of her own full volition - in a teacher-training programme for Functionary Magicians of the Imperium of the Unseen in Bordeaux, France. Hi-jinks, obviously, ensue …

Uncle Trevor saw them off at the gate, in the dark before the dawn; he didn’t like to drive much anymore, especially at night, and so Harry did most of that. The car’s lights cast a glow upon the hedges opposite. “Right then, my darling. Got everything? Got your packed lunch?”

Eliza held up the whole separate bag that contained the extensive picnic he had prepared for her. “Yes, Uncle Trevor … I told you, I tried the canteen, and it’s perfectly fine …”

“For your first day though … You’ll be glad to have it, you mark my words. And I’ve made enough to share, so that you can give some to your new friends …”

“Oh Trevor …” she sighed, and then gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “What would I do without you two …?”

“Well, you’d be homeless and hungry, for a start. Your mum would never forgive us if we didn’t send you off right on your first day of school …” He sniffed slightly and appeared to have something briefly in his eye, then pulled her back and gave her a hug. “You go give them what for!”

In the car, Harry cleared his throat loudly. They mustn’t miss the train. Just to be sure, she had to take the one that left at 6am, and so leave their hillside farmhouse at 5.20am. Just to be sure. This would get her to the City at 7.15am, and after the ten-minute walk to the Lycée Albertus Magnus, she would have time to have a coffee, gather her thoughts, run through her prep for the day, before starting at eight o’clock most days, or half-past. That was the idea anyway. She was running through the timing again in her head, and in her belly was an aching ball of queasy anxiety. Her first day of school – not, this time, as a student, which had become a delightful ritual to her by now, but rather in front of a class of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year olds. She had never done this before. A few seminars and tutorials teaching undergraduates close enough to her own age. But school-kids, never. She remembered school vividly; it was not that far away. She had loved school, but her fellow pupils … rather less.

And this was her first real day, her first Monday morning … and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, would creep in this petty pace from day to day, and on … She shook her head, banishing the thought; it didn’t have to be forever. There were ways out, she knew, though difficult to find. What did it mean that she was beginning her “career” as a functionary teacher-magician, and already contemplating her exit-strategy …? It meant she shouldn’t be here; she shouldn’t be doing this … Inside her, a voice screamed “THIS IS ALL A TERRIBLE MISTAKE”, and she shushed it and tried to banish it. She hadn’t realised that her self-soothing ‘shhhhhhh’ had been out loud, or that she was cradling herself, slightly rocking herself in her own arms, until Harry looked over from the wheel.

“Everything alright, my love? I know it’s not easy. Sometimes we just have to do what we just have to do, eh?”

She nodded, and felt a tear run down one cheek. She had to try not to cry. She had carefully applied just a little ‘healthy-glow’ makeup, judiciously conceived to make her look like she wasn’t really wearing makeup, but she could not forego the dark spider-lashes, the mascara, slight winged eyeliner, that had been part of her armour and persona since she was a teenager. Not, now, the full-on Goth racoon-eyes, but just enough. It contrasted pleasingly – to her – with her very pale freckled skin and white blond hair, and she would feel a stranger to herself, should she catch a glimpse of her naked eyes with their blond lashes in the mirror of a bathroom outside home. She dabbed her cheek with a tissue, and thought she must remember to check it on the train. Harry patted her shoulder awkwardly, and they drove on in silence. Unlike Trevor, he wouldn’t try to make her ‘talk about it’.

At the tiny country station nearest their village, she alighted from the car, and Uncle Harry patted his pockets and pressed a fifty-euro note into her hand – ‘Just walking-around money’ he said – and then kissed her on the head. “You go on now, my girl. You’ll be brilliant. All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Off you go.” The words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress, were his habitual benediction and valediction. Her mother had used to say that, too. She walked through the gates onto the platform, still lit by lamp-posts in the gloom, and looked back to where he stood, a tall, dark figure against the silver phantom of their Bentley. He raised a hand, and she waved, and then she turned and left, and walked down the platform to where she knew the end of the train would roughly be, when it stopped. There was no-one else there, and the sky was starting to glow deep blue to the East, presaging the dawn out of which the train would arrive.

The Wicked Uncles, Harry and Trevor, had had their house in Dordogne for thirty years: she and her parents had used to come on holidays from her earliest childhood, and they even before. It was only in the last ten or fifteen years, after they had retired and managed to extricate themselves from their various activities in Glastonbury, that the Uncles had lived there full-time. Harry had been a promoter and manager in the folk music scene, and thus had they first come into contact with Annie McCarthy, Eliza’s mother, at the beginning of her career. He had helped her to her first successes, helped her to navigate those treacherous waters. Trevor had been an antique dealer and antiquarian, with a particular focus on esoteric and magical books and objects; both of them were very involved in the English Folk Revival, especially in its Pagan and mystical aspects: they knew the movers and the shakers of the Craft, the Druids, the Psychic Questers, the Reconstructionists, the Companions of the Grail; they knew the hierarchies of the Lodges and the Orders, and all that that implies. Unlike in France, where the neo-Pagan and folk renaissance had never really taken root, and were only now flourishing as an import for the amusement of the mundane population, giving rise to a festival circuit and a burgeoning sector of New Age online mail-order businesses and multi-level marketing schemes masquerading as spiritual self-help, in Britain all of those currents were closely interwoven with the actual Traditions and Practices of the Unseen. France had made its choice, from the First Imperium onwards, to suppress and demonise regional and folk traditions, and consolidate the control of magic under the Mysterium, to regulate its use as laid out in the Codex Mysteria; there were just a few notable regions, such as Brittany, Corsica, the Basque Country, where this had not worked as planned. Britain had no such codified magical law; the Star Chamber and the Templum Aulae had amassed a centuries-old body of precedent and magical jurisprudence, known as the Uncommon Law, and it seemed to work quite well indeed, thank you very much. On both sides of the Channel, of course, they scoffed affectionately at the ways of doing things on the other, all while being quietly fascinated with their Outre-Manche counterparts.

The village where the Uncles lived – in a rambling homestead they had named ‘Lammas House’, several farm buildings combined into one, overlooking a steep valley down which their property extended – had turned, over the years, into quite the colony of ex-patriate English owners of second-homes, lovingly restored, which for many had become first and only homes, especially since the Secession, and all of the tax and legal wrangling that it had imposed upon them. Many of them, implanted there for ten, twenty, thirty years, still barely spoke a word of French, and those few they did, with an execrable accent. They did not really seem to feel the need to ‘integrate’; they loved the landscape, the climate, the food, the wine, the fine old tumbledown mills, farmhouses, manors, châteaux they had bought for a song in the eighties and nineties; they did not quite see the point of the French, in all of this, except to provide them with said food and wine. They kept much among themselves, sunburned and loud-voiced, demanding to be served or accommodated, in the language of the colonist. Some local French folk, while pleased to take their money and to see them preserving the old-stone bones of the countryside, joked darkly that they seemed to still think themselves in Aquitania of Old, when it was indeed a part of the Kingdom of England. The village was called Neymet, and it was a bit of a sorting-mechanism for the Uncles, to hear the pronunciation a new-met local attempted: an example of ignorant ‘hyper-correction’ meant that many of the English said it ‘Nay-may’, or ‘Ne-may’, assuming that ‘-et’ at the end of the word, as usually in French, was pronounced ‘ay’; in fact, in this case, it was not: it was not a French word but rather an old Occitan one, pronounced ‘Ne-met’, with the ‘t’ voiced. It came from ‘Nemeton’, or ‘sacred grove’. The locals all said ‘Ne-met’, and rolled their eyes when a blow-in got it wrong.

Harry and Trevor actually made an effort. They both spoke very good and idiomatic French, though they could not quite shake their accents (Harry’s, Welsh; Trevor’s, East London): but they had chosen to keep their accents back in the old days, in England, when they might have chosen to lose them to get ahead, and they would not now give up this pride in their roots, not even for French. It was part of their personae, they would say. They tended to associate mostly with local French eccentrics, and those from many other countries too, along with a sprinkling of the more assimilated and curious British. The Irish and the Scots, as it happened, tended to blend in better, particularly the Irish. Harry said that it was because they actually retained a memory of what it is to be a true emigrant, not just a standard-bearer of Empire, on a Boy’s-Own jaunt to far-flung exotic corners of the globe, where they were everywhere At Home, and all belonged to them. He added, knowing something of this himself – being Welsh – that it certainly helped that they were conversant with another language all their lives, and knew what it was for English to be the language of the Oppressor, the Occupation. They knew how to integrate, assimilate. Trevor would chime in, “using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use: Silence, Exile, Cunning …” Harry would roll his eyes: “My love, use more Silence, please, lest I need to Exile you to your kitchen …” Trevor would look gleefully affronted; and so it went, between them.

The train ride, in the few days she had been doing it, had become a ritual for Eliza. She would make for one of the seats at the very back of the train, ideally on the side facing the direction of travel, ideally at the window. Ideally with no-one else in the four seats with her. Easier in the morning, the early train, when most people sat alone and widely-spaced, dozing or reading. She would watch the landscape flying by, as it gradually coalesced out of the gloom: on the right, to the North, the forested hills, the isolated farmhouses and châteaux, the villages nestled between the slopes; on the left, to the South, in the flood-plain, the fields of vines, the paddocks of a few proud horses, the level-crossings, silos and hangars, the glimpses of the river, Dordonia Herself. The clouds red and gold behind them, the gleam of light upon the Land, gradually growing. She would note the stations, and gradually learn their names, and their order. She would, as time went by, begin to recognise certain other travellers, who took the trains at the same time as she did, and which stop they got on, and imagine where they might be going, or to what: what job took them each day from the hinterland into Bordeaux, those two middle-aged women who would save a seat for each other, and put away their books when the other would alight, to quietly chat and laugh; what school they might be going to, what university, those pretty Maghrébi twins, that awkward boy with thick glasses and massive headphones, the young man with the natty line in different hats, for every season.

This first day of school though, she attempted to calm herself, and centre herself, performing an abbreviated Body of Light exercise (the bright ball of the Golden Sun, beneath your feet, that rises up your body, sending a glow of Energy through your limbs, that come alive in its Holy Light; at each point on its journey, activating the Centres of your Power, your Spirit-Body); (the more complete version of this exercise could be the prelude to attempting to astrally project your consciousness, in the form of your Spirit-Body, to travel in the Outer World, and in the Inner; astral projection was not Eliza’s strong suit: she had had some terrifying experiences as a child, doing it by accident, and had never felt very inclined to work on it assiduously; it was also, needless to say, rather of the Domain of Spirit-Work than of her own area of expertise, and as such, she had not had to concentrate on it as a core skill. These days in France, of course, it was often more the ‘Remote Viewing’ aspect, of tactical utility, that was emphasised, rather than travelling the Inner Planes, or Pathworking the Tree of Life, or other Otherworlds, which would have interested Eliza more. There was a strong overlap between these though, and the Art Magic Discipline of Dreaming – journeying in Vision, to meet the Other, or to see and manipulate the Weave of Time: of which, more anon).

Having centred and consolidated her potentia, Eliza would then often draw a spread of Tarot cards, and muse upon them throughout the journey through the vineyards, or scribble in her magical journal, recording dreams, signs, portents, abstruse clues, obscure plans. She might, if she felt like it, compose a sigil for some particular goal that day, scribbling the letters, reducing them, until they made a pleasing, charged glyph, which she would then activate at some point, and set to work. Sometimes, with the help of her choice of music in her earbuds, she tried to conserve the half-awake shadow consciousness of Dream, dipping in and out of the hypnagogic state, allowing herself to doze and dwell on the symbols and scenes which her dreams had apported to her in the night, perhaps noting words and lines as they arose, perhaps attempting some little making of a poem. She rarely showed her poetry to anyone; it was her way of talking to herself. From it, she made incantations, spells, songs, charms. She Wove. And this was part of it too, the business of Enchantment. To live with one foot in the Dreamworld, and to thread upon that long bright thread the words and phrases and images that could bridge the gap between the Waking World and the Nightworld. This is what we do. This is who we are. We walk between these Worlds.

Of course, as the term went on, she more often had to concern herself with administrative tasks: answering emails, correcting student papers, entering marks into the Espace Numérique de Travail on her computer or on the app (which had the twee denomination ‘ClassWiz’), planning lessons and sequences and evaluations. The previous week there had been two more days of ‘induction’ at the Institut; they had been treated to a sprawling series of divagations from the Instructrixes, Hortense and Gertrude, on the proper conduct of a class, the construction of a lesson-plan, a scheme of work, a sequence of lessons; how to adhere to the new directives on themes and contents, on methodology and pedagogy. None of it made sense; none of it was clear; none of it helped. When the Weird Sisters gave them one of their own sequences, as a model, it was incoherent and indulgent, and appeared to act as an apologia for Elders and Tradition, all while posing as a ‘modern’ and up-to-date unit; its theme was Passing on Traditions, between Generations, on the Internet. Eliza couldn’t keep her attention fixed on their pronouncements; she couldn’t read their faint transparencies projected like a shadow-play upon the screen; she couldn’t concentrate on anything. They invited in some other intervenors, a postulant from the previous year who told some horror stories about dealing with parents who tried to embroil him in a conflict between rival factions in the local Mysterium; another young woman who came to bear witness to the ordeal she had lived through, as a newly-qualified teacher in the Paris suburbs. This was presented as the nightmare posting, and possibly the inevitable trial by fire of all new Magisters: to deal with rowdy, barbaric, uncouth, violent youths (all issued from Immigration, was the subtext) in the housing projects in the banlieues; Eliza could practically hear the steam coming off Fatoumata as she seethed at the casual racism of the thing: she said nothing, and it was Malachi, in fact, who objected to the tenor of the presentation. The Weird Sisters laughed awkwardly, and dismissed these concerns. This is just how it is! they beamed. Malachi later told Eliza that he felt he must speak up on this, and other things, because as a middle-aged white English-speaking man, he might permit himself liberties that … others … could not. She thought it not untrue. He didn’t seem happy about it though, or proud, but rather bitter at the necessity. Eliza thought again, of what Uncle Harry had said about the Irish experience; her own mother came from an originally Irish family: it’s true that it was not the same.

She felt – after these induction days – not better prepared, but worse: anxious, confused, overwhelmed. The feeling seemed somewhat general, among her classmates; even Gustave, who presumably had been through all of this before, seemed terrified of what the new school year had to bring. On the last day of the pré-rentrée at the Institut, they had been subjected to the Ceremony of Nominations: Hortense took out, with a flourish, from her carpet-bag, a dark green velvet pouch; within were the jetons, the little round wooden counters with bevelled edges, each bearing a number, that they must fish out of the pouch, thus choosing their allotted establishment for the year. These are the very same jetons that we did choose, the Sisters declared, in Our Day. It was, they told them, a tirage au sort, a ‘drawing of lots’. Eliza knew, as she was sure did most of them, that this formulation was not deployed idly: ‘tirage au sort’ was a draw, but the word ‘sort’ meant ‘lot’, and also ‘fate’, and also ‘spell’. To ‘draw lots’ was also ‘sortilège’, any kind of Divination involving a random choice of objects; one did not only ‘draw’ a lot, but also ‘cast’ them: ‘jeter un sort’ was to cast a spell, to make one’s Fate: the principle of manipulating material objects not only to tell one’s fortune, but to create one’s Fate: it was intimately linked to the notion of ‘sorcellerie’ – French for Sorcery (and Witchcraft), and the source of that same word. This is why, in common parlance, the Crafts of Material Magic – Divination, Herb-cunning, Necromancy, Spell-casting, and other Workings of Matter and Fate – had come to be most often called in English ‘Sorcery’: with all of the dark, deceptive, untrustworthy associations of the magic practiced by the common folk, and Cunning Folk, throughout the ages. Eliza was protective of these practices: her father had been, himself, a hereditary Cunning Man, of a family of Cunning Folk. Here though, today, in France, one merely referred to ‘Material Magic’, or ‘Practical Magic’, and there was no value-judgement implicit in it; Eliza found that it left something missing, of the thrill of Darker Arts, to only speak of materia, and Craft.

She drew the jeton with the number ‘15’, which caused her a slight sharp thrill: it was a number that she had always had a penchant for. She wondered aloud, “But … if there are only thirteen of us, how does that work …?” Gertrude remonstrated: “Oh, but the numbers are not consecutive or sequential, ma petite … Each one signifies a certain Establishment, by correspondences pre-determined! And what luck for you! Fifteen! You have made a lucky draw. Lycée Albertus Magnus!” The others looked around in mild envy; it was a good placement, indeed.

There were three large fully Operative lycées in Bordeaux: Albertus Magnus, specialised in Magical Sciences, Lycée Comte de Saint-Germain, more oriented to the Magical Arts, and Lycée Pierre de Lancre, which provided many of the future magical jurists, Lictors, Quaestors … Inquisitors, so-called. For each of these three institutions, two of the postulants were named; with Eliza, would be Malachi; at Saint-Germain, Charlie – ironically in her own previous school – and Lamia; at Pierre de Lancre, Gustave and Mitra. The other students were spread among schools within the City and its environs which housed significant presences of the Mysterium, though they were not fully run by its hierarchy; those postulants needs must navigate the line between the overt roles they had to play, and the shadow-roles, between the exoteric school and its esoteric inner-workings. Both schema were complicated in their own way. Eliza was obscurely pleased to know that the droll, melancholy, mysterious fellow who called himself Malachi McGill would be around, should she need him; she felt somehow that should she need him, he would be there.

There had been a pré-rentrée day at the school too, the Friday before the Monday beginning of term: a large gathering in the salle polyvalente, one of the newer buildings towards the back of the vast complex occupied by Lycée Albertus Magnus. The principle, a tall bald fellow, with a shining brow, thick-rimmed glasses, a natty suit, near sixty or so, had addressed the hundreds of assembled staff and personnel. His presentation included complex graphs and pie-charts demonstrating the respectable results and encouraging growth of the establishment. Eliza had felt totally lost, and not found any of her department, nor had she really spoken to anyone at all: at one point, desperately looking for a toilet and only finding one locked and with a cleaning-hazard sign in front of it, she had turned to see a lank-haired, narrow fellow leaning on a mop, who squinted at her when she asked how to find an accessible amenity. He had suddenly lit up, and smiled, and whisked away the sign to let her in – just this once you understand – and grumbled about students making a mess of the facilities before the holidays. His name was Bruno, it turned out, and she counted him her very first ally in the place.

She had arrived late to the on-the-house lunch in the echoing canteen deep in the depths below the rear courtyard, and there was little left of the alledgedly locally-sourced, organically-grown delicacies to eat. The long tables were still mostly full of people finishing their meals; she recognised no-one from the presentations of new staff and department heads of earlier, and dared not approach any of the voluble, chatty groups. She took some bread-rolls and some cheese, for later, and fled back up the wide ringing stair into the sunlight. She sat on a bench in the cour d’honneur, the first courtyard, lined with lime-trees and arcaded arches, clock-towers at each end and gateways, spires topped with complex lightning rods, and nibbled on her bread and cheese, and tried gamely to suppress a sob.

Now, on Monday, on her First Real Day, she arrived along one of the major street arteries of the South of the City, from the station. She had stopped off at a French coffee chain she liked to buy a large latte with an extra shot and a cinnamon roll, and walked through the vaguely seedy neighbourhood that extended from the Gare, all sex-shops, barbers, derelict mobile-phone repairs, halal kebab or chicken places. Gradually, the streets became more salubrious, and she reached a pretty park with colourful modern art installations and a co-op café for food-delivery-folk on one end. The buildings became more grand and Art Nouveau, and then, there we were, the long railings and the neat little gardens and the high and stately gates, just off the main street, of Lycée Albertus Magnus. As far as the Outer World was concerned, it was a prestigious scientific and technical lycée, and thus it was announced upon the portals, in stone engraved.

She walked up the path to the looming gatehouse, the magnetic key-fob in her hand, and unlocked the entrance, stepped inside. She had made a point of chatting to the attendant at the reception desk, and already knew about where she liked to take her holidays, and the breed and disposition of her beloved dog; her father had taught her this: a shy man himself, he had always made these efforts, and they had always stood him in good stead with every little acquaintance that he made upon his way in the world. He used to tell Eliza: there is nobody on Earth that is not interesting – all it takes is you to treat them as if they are, and you’ll see. They’ll tell you everything, and it will be fascinating. Dear old Dad. He never was bored for a minute in his life, and he never ever met a taciturn tree-stump he could not become buddies with in fifteen minutes

Khadija, the Gatekeeper, waved her through, and gave her a big thumbs up “Bon courage pour le premier jour!” she called, and Eliza saluted gaily. She did not feel so cavalier at all, but hey. The sentiment was appreciated.

Through the brief dim coolth of the gatehouse, she emerged then into the grand first courtyard, the Cour d’honneur, where she had eaten her solitary snack a few days earlier. Now, it was much more lively: students and teachers went to and fro, and on one side, without the allée of plane-trees, she saw a whole class of teenagers performing a sort of slow-motion dance, almost like tai chi or a karate kata; she knew that they were working on Energy Manipulation, indeed she could nearly see the humming auras around them – she would need to sit and enter a trance-state of concentration to see them fully: some could do so without even trying; it was not her case. Suddenly, she spotted the teacher that was leading them through their paces … and recognised him. It was the finely-bearded, man-bunned fellow from the first day of induction at the Institut. Oh no. She put her head down and hurried her pace, and was just composing a Pass-Unseen charm under her breath when he saw her. He shouted to his group to take five, and jogged over to intercept her.

“Mademoiselle! I mean, hello …! Miss Colleague! Are you posted here then? I didn’t see you at the orientation!”

She stopped, and closed her eyes and took a deep breath to suppress her irritation.

“Monsieur! Cher collègue! Yes, I suppose it turns out we’re both nominated here. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

“Please wait,” he said softly, and placed a hand upon her arm. “I haven’t stopped thinking about … our encounter. I wanted to say sorry again. I really shouldn’t have made fun of you like that. Accept my apology, I pray you.”

She looked at him. Really, his beard was so terribly well-groomed. Oiled as well, she had no doubt. Once more, he wore a cut-off workout shirt, this one scooped also at the neck, where it displayed his fine collar-bones, golden-tanned, gleaming with perspiration. His bare arms were … very very finely-muscled. Nothing exaggerated, not a body-builder’s look: rather, toned, sculpted, like a dancer’s. His tattoos were black curves of vaguely Celtic, tribal designs. His face was open and guileless. She tried to look away, and could not.

“Maybe you’ll let me make it up to you? Buy you a terrible coffee from the machine in the staff-room?”

“I might permit it,” she allowed.

“Tell me your name at least! I know I can find it on the roster, but I suppose we are some three hundred teachers here, and it might take me a while ...”

“Eliza. Eliza Harding. Department of Art Magic.”

“I’m Bertrand Pozzo. Postulant in Energy Work. Enchanté …” he took her hand, and for a terrible moment she thought he was going to kiss it, but he did not. The arch look he gave her when he said “enchanté” … that was enough. She held onto his hand for, she suddenly realised, quite a bit too long, and then dropped it like a dead fish. He gave an impish grin, and jogged backwards towards his class.

“See you around, Mademoiselle Eliza,” he called. She smiled a quick tight smile back at him, turned on her heel, and fled.

The fourth chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I, the second part here: Chapter II, and the third part here: Chapter III …

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

The story so far: Elizabeth Harding, a young English woman, finds herself - not totally of her own full volition - in a teacher-training programme for Functionary Magicians of the Imperium of the Unseen in Bordeaux, France. Hi-jinks, obviously, ensue …

The door opened, and a thin, pale woman with a cloud of woolly grey-blond hair peeked around it. “Oh. Nick. I suppose I must be in the right place then. Sorry I’m late, I was picking figs.” She floated in, placed her laptop bag on the desk, and looked around at the class.

Antoinette was of an indeterminate age, somewhere between thirties and forties, and wore a simple dark blue-green shift dress and flip-flops. She pushed her wild mass of hair back from her face and nodded at them. “Nice to meet you all. I’ll be telling you a little bit about the support services and how to take care of yourself and your students. There’ll be a more detailed seminar on this later in the term, but for now I just want to make you aware of a few things that you’ll need to know. Let’s see; I’ve got a PowerPoint …” She took out her computer and looked for where to hook it up to the projector. Charlie caught Elizabeth’s eye and mouthed “POWER-POINT! OOOH!” Elizabeth chuckled behind her hand.

“Not always easy, getting the technology to work, is it? Nick, this is supposed to be your thing, where’s the HDMI cable?” Nick gallantly, but half-heartedly, rummaged around behind and under the desk. “You’ll notice,” continued Antoinette, “that it’s a bit difficult to connect to the wi-fi at the Institut … To log in, you need to use a fingertip sensor to offer a drop of blood every time. You can get an external sensor that connects to a USB port, like this …” she held up the device. “Apparently, they can also run on sweat or tears, but I’ve never been able to get that to work. Best is just to use your own phone as a hotspot. Although, most of the Institut is a network dead-zone … Ah, there we go!” The projector was on, and her screen gradually coalescing out of the mist.

The title of her presentation was “Institute for the Instruction of Imperium of the Unseen Functionary Magicians – Support Services” … It was simple, clear, and as she clicked through the slides, things appeared and were added-to in logical and easy-to-parse fashion. Elizabeth could almost feel a gasp of relief from the class at being shown something that was intended to be understood. The woman’s accent was a soft Lancashire one, her timbre pleasant to the ear, which also helped.

“So, my name is Antoinette Lovelace; you might as well call me by my work-name, ‘Nettle’ … Oh, did you do the bit about names yet, Nick?” She turned to her colleague, who was sitting to one side and looking at his phone.

“What?” he looked up. “Oh, the names. No, I didn’t. We can do that now. Where’s the sheet?” He cast about, and found it abandoned on a front desk on one side of the room, having done the rounds up and down the class to be signed. He snatched it up and flourished it.

“Yeah! Should have mentioned this earlier. Before you start school in a few days, you’re going to have to make a few decisions on how you present yourself. You’ll be hearing more about that. For now, we need to talk about your names. How many people here are already using a magical name rather than their given name?” Some hands went up. “You’ll want to think about that. As I mentioned earlier, you’ll do well to scrub your online presence of all mention of your given name, and any social media accounts will need to be completely anonymised. It’s important. Not everyone goes in for that ‘True Name’ stuff, but let’s just say, you wouldn’t hand someone who wishes you ill a lock of your hair or some toenail-clippings, so best to keep your True Name out of their mouths.”

Antoinette followed up. “It’s also an important part of how people see you, how they respond to you, now that you’ll be not only a magician, but a teacher of magic on behalf of the Mysterium, in public, as it were. Most of us find it useful to adopt a nom de l’ombre, a shadow-name, in the vein of a nom de plume, nom de guerre, nom de scène … and for much the same reasons as those are used. However, some people find also that their given name already has the right energy and aura, and that it is even more powerful to embrace it and use it openly. It’s a bold move. Maybe not for beginners. Right Nick?” She smiled wryly at him.

“Yes, thanks Nettie.” (they noticed he neither called her by her given name, ‘Antoinette’, nor by her magical name, ‘Nettle’, but by another diminutive … a sign of intimacy, or an attempt at dominance?) “Personally, myself, I used my own name: ‘Nicholas Graves’, or ‘Mister Graves’, is already ideal for the kind of magician I am. I suppose I should thank my parents for their foresight – literally, haha. Now, let’s go through the list. If I mispronounce your name, don’t bother to correct me, I genuinely don’t care …” He ran his finger down the sheet. “Now let’s see.”

“Sibilla. You’ve just written that. Is that your real name? Almost too on the nose for that, I suppose.”

“Of course. Why would it not be?” She stared at him, deadpan.

“And what’s your surname?”

“My … my nick-name?”

“No, sorry, your family name. Do you … have one?”

“Cupido. Sibilla Cupido.”

“Okay. Sibilla …” he properly pronounced the Italian double-l just as she had. “And you mentioned that you’re specialised in seership … right. I mean. Perfect. Moving on.”

“Next, we have Fatoumata Sarr. Your given name?”

“It is,” she confirmed. “And my mother is just known as ‘Mama Sarr’ … She is well-known, by that name; one of these days, I hope I will inherit it.”

“That’s good,” said Nettle. “If your name indicates lineage or inheritance, it can be significant to keep it, and to live up to it. I’m sure you will.” She beamed encouragingly at Fatoumata.

“Next,” said Nick. “Ambrosius Aurelianus de la Roz. Bloody hell, that’s a mouthful! Don’t tell me that isn’t a shadow-name …”

“As it happens, no,” said Ambrosius. “That’s my birth-name. My parents … thought I would be the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy … so …”

“Ah I see,” said Nick. “Ouch, mate. Many such cases. Anyway. Moving on.”

“Charlie Kowalski. Given name?” he pointed at her, the elfin fuchsia-haired alt-girl, who gave him a long, cool look back.

“Yup. Well, my parents called me ‘Charlène’. I chose ‘Charlie’, as it fits my persona better. I think ‘Charlie Kowalski’ sounds like a post-apocalyptic-punk wasteland-warrior. Like Tank Girl, you know?”

Nick’s face brightened. “Yes! Wow, spot-on. Love Tank Girl. I used to collect the original strips in Deadline …”

“Course you did, Nick,” laughed Nettle. “Because you’re so old … Yes, Charlie: good name, and you worked with what you already had to sharpen the persona you wanted to project. Nice.”

She took the clipboard with the list on it and carried on from where he had left off.

“Malachi MacGill. Ah, yes. There you are,” she looked at him, with a hard-to-read expression, somewhere between interest and apprehension. “Yours is a chosen name, I’ll wager.”

The man straightened up in his chair, and seemed to look wistfully into the distance, the past. “I have had many names. This is merely the one I have settled upon for the moment …”

“Okay, good for you! Moving on,” Nettle swiftly passed to the next person. If Elizabeth wasn’t mistaken, Malachi looked slightly put-out at not being asked anything further about his obviously extensive Lore. He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, possibly counting Invisible Things.

“Elizabeth Harding; given name, I presume?” Nettle looked up from the clipboard and found her gaze when she raised her hand. “What do you go by?”

“Yes, that’s my birth-name,” she said. Her mother used to say to her that it was a name that could lend itself to many personae: she could be Elizabeth, or Ellie, or Liz, or Lizzie, or Beth, or Betty … She had experimented, just a little, trying on these various selves, seeing which one she might recognise as her. “At Oxford, everyone called me ‘Liz’. And then, in Paris, they pronounced it the French way and called me ‘Lise’ [Leez] … So, I know it’s not very magical, but …”

Nick interrupted her: “Bloody right it isn’t very magical. ‘Liz Harding’ sounds like a Guardian columnist who does TV reviews and occasional think-pieces about influencers. We can do better than that.” He mused for a moment. “Now, Eliza Harding, that sounds like the name of one of the accused in a seventeenth-century witch-trial. Or like a nineteenth-century spirit-medium and campaigner for Women’s Suffrage …”

She looked at him – he looked pleased with himself, as ever – and turned it over in her mind: ‘Eliza Harding’. Yes, she realised. Yes. She spoke up quietly. “I like it. Thank you.”

“Okay, Blondie. I mean, Eliza. I told you we’d get on well.” He winked at her, and she suppressed a shudder of cringe. Or of something.

“Next then,” said Nettle. “Rima El Khoury. Your given name, or your chosen name?”

“Both.” Rima stated it, bluntly. “They gave me this name, and then I took it. It is not the name I was born with, but it is the name I earned. Long story.”

“That sounds good,” beamed Nettle. “You’ll have to tell us some time! I’d love to hear more about that. All of you, in fact. How you got your names, how you chose them, what they mean. Maybe as part of a little presentation about yourselves for next week? We need to really get to know each other, as we’ll be working quite a lot together. What about … Mercurio?”

Mercurio gave a flourishing bow. “My nom de scène, and my magical name, of course; I had another name, once. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” They stood, and intoned sonorously, one arm held up: “I am become Mercurio, Employer of Words! … That other name and self is written now in the Book of Dead Names; however: that is not dead which can forever lie, and with strange play-on-words, a name may die.” Mercurio performed a reverence, arms spread to the sides, and Eliza found herself among those who broke out in spontaneous applause. The words had been declaimed with such theatricality that it only seemed fit. Nettle had clapped along, in delight; Nick had not.

“Oh, marvellous! That’s brilliant,” said Nettle. “You must be the one from the family of travelling performers!”

“Tis myself,” confirmed Mercurio.

“Well,” Nettle continued. “A good example of how the taking of a name can be about more than just one’s magical persona, but also one’s deeper identity. Not every mundane name becomes a Dead Name, but when one becomes truly Other than what one was, one can choose to bury it, as you demonstrate.”

“Reminds me, also,” said Nick. “If anyone is inspired by all of this to actually go in search of a new nom de l’ombre – I mean, ideally, it involves a whole quest and personal mythology, dovetailing with the other mythoi one adopts – as is obviously the case for Mercurio here – but sometimes it can just be research and leg-work, and finding le mot juste; in that case, I suggest consulting the Pseudonomicon: there’s a copy of it in the Institute’s library, if you can find it. It gives lists of magicians’ names in France going back to the First Imperium, when it became obligatory to be officially registered. There are also multiple appendices which give you methods of ‘finding’ your name: using methods astrological, elemental, mythological, alchemical, botanical, cryptozoological, numerological, tarological, teratological, geomantic, necromantic, New Romantic … the whole lot. Especially useful are the etymological tips and tricks – they don’t call them ‘tips and tricks’, obviously, this is a grimoire, but you know what I mean. The registry is particularly handy – not easy to use, it runs to about forty-two volumes now – to make sure that your chosen nom de l’ombre is not currently in use: and to make sure that if anyone has borne it before, you can accord your actions and persona with theirs, maybe even ask their shade, or their descendants, for permission. Also, I shouldn’t need to say this, but the world does not need another ‘Morrigan StormRaven’ or whatever, so don’t go all ‘American Wiccan’ on us, yeah?”s

“You really don’t like Wiccans, do you?” Charlie asked. Nick pantomimed whistling and looking around with his hands in his pockets, nothing to see here …. Charlie added “… or Americans …” in a mutter.

“Well! Thank you, Nicholas, that was … exhaustive!” Nettle went on, brightly. “Now, sorry, where were we? Who’s left? Next, we have … Mitra Mardévirin. Is that your given name?”

“No,” said Mitra, with a slight toss of his long, black hair. “I took that name when I moved to the Métropole. A reminder of my heritage and culture, both from India and from the Île Bourbon.”

“Perfect,” said Nettle. “And then Lamia Talafsa?”

“My name is the one I was given. But, it just so happens …”

“Yes. Lamia works beautifully. Good,” said Nettle.

“I do have another name, within Candomblé,” said Lamia. “A shadow-name I couldn’t even mention, unless to initiates.”

“And good for you,” said Nick. “But you’d wanna watch that: don’t be too overt about being initiated or practicing in other traditions. Non-French ones. Or, I should say, non-Mysterium ones. Looking at you here too, Ambrose. It won’t be to your advantage.”

Ambrosius cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.

“Then we’ve got … Morgane Astete. Your given name?” asked Nettle.

“It is!” beamed Morgane. “And I’m very fond of it. Of course, it’s magical too.”

“Of course,” said Nettle. “And finally, we have …” she looked around, puzzled. “Cécile Vô Danh …? Is she …?”

As everyone looked around, Eliza suddenly realised that she hadn’t seen Cécile for a while, but just as she was looking, suddenly there she was, sitting at the back behind her laptop screen. She was almost sure that she hadn’t been there a moment ago. It was entirely possible that she hadn’t wanted to be there, and so, effectively, was not.

“Oh, there you are! Is that your original name?”

“Mostly.” She offered, laconically.

“It’s just that …” Nick started. “Cécile … it’s just very … ordinary, isn’t it? What does the rest mean?”

She rolled her eyes in ennui. “My parents wanted me to have a very ordinary name. Because they wanted me to be French. I was called Cécile Vô. But I go by ‘Vô Danh’, in my work. It means ‘nobody’, or ‘nameless’ … Because I have had to learn to be no-one.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Nick, clearly, and uncharacteristically trying to win her back. “That’s really cool though. ‘The Nameless’ in Vietnamese is pretty bad-ass …”

Cécile just turned away and sighed in quiet exasperation. Eliza looked closely: was Nick … slightly blushing? Surely not!

“Okay!” Nettle swirled her hand over them and pulled it back, as if to net and gather their attention, which it did. “Now that that’s done –”

“Hey!” It was Gustave.

“Oh, sorry Gustave. Forgot about you. Well, we’ve been over this last year, haven’t we?”

“I told you Gustave,” said Nick, shaking his head. “It would be a lot better if you went with ‘Gustav’ without the ‘e’ at the end, but you didn’t listen. And now look! Back to square one!”

Nettle tutted and said something very quiet to Nick, and Gustave hung his head in grief and shame. Elizabeth’s heart went out to him, but then, like everyone else, in a moment she passed on to other things.

Nettle took up the presentation once more. “Now, that’s good, it was very important to talk about that. There’ll be more where that came from. Particularly for you lot, as teachers of Art Magic, we want you to be highly conscious of your projected persona, how you present yourself. I know that all of you must be artists of some kind, but not all of you will have been performers. And as teachers, that’s a huge part of the battle: performance and theatrics. And of course, that really takes a lot out of you. I’m here to talk to you about that: about taking care of yourself, your physical and mental health, and that of the pupils in your care. I’ve been fighting for five years to get them to include a unit on care and well-being, and this is the first year we’re doing it. They’ve only given me a couple of sessions with you, but we’ll see what we can do. I’ll be your referent for this sort of thing.

“As I said, my name is Antoinette Lovelace, and my title is more properly Doctor than Magistra: I have a doctorate in Physick from Old Holloway, near London. That means that when I’ve been placed in mundane schools, I’ve most often taken on the overt role of school nurse, school psychologist, school counsellor: I’m really a bit of all three. I specialised in Pharmakeia, but I’ve also worked quite extensively in Alchemy and Astrology. And I was lucky enough to be able to apply some hereditary gifts as well, which are very useful in my work: in little miracles – laying-on-of-hands, that sort of thing – Thaumaturgy. Jack-of-all-trades, you might say.”

“Better than Trade-of-all-jacks …” muttered Nick, sotto voce. Nettle shot him a Look, and Eliza flinched at the crudeness of it, but when she looked around, only Malachi’s raised eyebrows seemed to indicate having understood. Nettle went on:

“I do have an office up at the Château, which you are welcome to try and find if you ever need help, or resources, or just someone to chat with about what’s going on, have a cup of tea … My door is always open. Sadly, I can’t tell you exactly where my door is, as it keeps changing. They didn’t give me a stable address, so to speak. I’m not sure they actually want people to be able to find me. I’ll put my email address in the PowerPoint, which I’ll send on to all of you anyway. I may be able to guide you through the maze to find me, if you need to see me …

“Point is, this can be a very testing year, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. I’m sure you all knew this to begin with, but I cannot stress enough: it’s tough, and you don’t need to feel like you’re facing it all alone. You will be each other’s best resources, each other’s best allies. Please do your utmost to make and keep connections between you. It’s vital to your getting through the year in the best way possible. I’ll also be doing a talk to the wider cohort, all Domains, about ‘L’école ésotérique inclusive’, and about psychological well-being for teachers and students. We’ll be talking about disability, neurodivergence, gender, all of that. I’ll be bringing in other specialists. These are very real issues, obviously, and it’s great that we’re finally having these conversations.”

Fatoumata raised her hand. “Will we be talking about race and ethnicity in the Mysterium system, or …?”

Nettle bit her lip. “That’s … a very good question. Of course, the Imperium does not recognise ‘ethnicity’ or immigrant origins in census figures. And whether we should is … We should certainly talk about it. We should.” Fatoumata slowly lowered her hand, and slowly nodded. She understood.

“Now, the next thing I want to move onto –” Nettle began, but then the door burst open, seemingly of its own accord, and showed a silhouette in the entrance, against the silver late-afternoon light: a tall woman with very long flowing hair. She moved into the room, and Eliza, for a moment, seemed to see her black hair floating around her, as if she were underwater, her arms waving, undulating … and then the impression was gone.

The personage who entered was grand and elegant, wearing a black dress, black tights in despite of the weather, high heels. Her face was regal and commanding, with golden skin and very dark eyes and brows: she gave an impression of some hard-to-pin-down origin; her features could have been Magrébi, Middle Eastern, Central Asian. She stood behind the desk, her head high, imperious, and looked at them all a long, long moment. As she approached, Nettle had shut her laptop and backed away. Nick seemed to sink into his corner. She took up all the space; she absorbed all the oxygen.

At length, Nettle slunk forward, and began: “Class, I’d like to introduce you to –” The woman silenced her with a commanding gesture.

“I am Her Eminence Arch-Quaestor Suraya Merkandi!” Her voiced pierced every corner of the room, and resonated back. Her Voice, one might rather say. Or did she just sound like this all the time? Eliza looked around: everyone seemed to almost shrink behind their desks; their attention was rapt, and frozen. “I am the Chief of the Inquisitorial College of Aquitania, and as such, your Fate is in my hands! Your final trials, observed while conducting a class, shall be performed by myself or one of my team. We are five. You shall learn to know us better …” She trailed off, and her eyes widened, just ever so slightly. She was staring at Malachi, who sat more or less in the middle of the room. “… yoouuuuuu …” she hissed, and suddenly her hands were raised to waist height, fingers splayed, palms down, as if in readiness for … one knew not what.

“Yes, Suraya, it is I,” said Malachi, loudly and clearly, sitting up very straight. “Or should I call you, ‘Your Eminence Arch-Quaestor Merkandi’…?”

She slowly lowered her hands. “You should. I’ll wager, you will not. I cannot say it is good to see you, old friend.”

He answered: “I can only say, you have not changed a bit.”

And they remained like that, on guard, each assaying the other, for a moment that seemed to stretch into Eternity. If something other passed between them, than their crackling gaze, then it was in secret, and in a silent language no-one else there knew.

§§§

Eliza headed for Home … (‘Eliza’, she repeated to herself, in the train … ‘Eliza’, she tried on, like a new dress she was not sure of. ‘Eliza’: a gift from a man she was not sure of, neither. It felt, somehow, good upon her skin: better than any other version of her given name had, or any other byname she had been given) … the train from Bordeaux Saint-Jean would take just over an hour: she arrived at a moment where she had forty-five minutes to wait, and spent them at the rather grand bistro across the way, drinking a citron pressé and watching the world go by. She had not yet found accommodation in the City, and so must return to where she was staying, with her Wonderful Wicked Uncles.

Uncle Harry came to the station to drive her back the twenty-five minutes to their place. The light now was fading, as it did earlier and earlier in these early-Autumn days; she had ridden the sunset home, turning the sky red, out of which she fled, through the hills, the vines, the little towns and tumble-down farms of stone and ochre tiles. She played ‘Cybèle’s Reverie’ by Stereolab on repeat, as seemed most fit: she set an alarm for five minutes before her stop. She fell asleep, the flickering landscape flying by. She awoke, when it was near-dark, and she was nearly Home.

When they arrived at Lammas House, Uncle Harry – tall and saturnine, dark looks of an ageing matinée idol – seemed to half lift her from her seat; she felt like a little child at the end of a long Summer’s day, dozing off on the car-ride home. He picked her up and carried her, half-asleep – or so it seemed. The house windows glowed amber in the dusk. Soft music playing; dinner would be cooking. Uncle Trevor, brewing up a storm. Harry brought her to her room, and whispered: “You go straight to sleep now, my love, if you wish. But if you’re able, Trevor will so want to hear about your day …” He laid her down upon the softest eiderdown, and kissed her forehead, and retreated through the door he left ajar.

After a few moments of suspension in that delicious in-between – day and night, sleeping and waking, hunger and satiety – she wriggled herself into wakefulness, and went down to the bright kitchen to regale them, to be regaled, with food, with comfort, and with love.

Later, beneath the willow-trees at the bottom of the garden, by the stream, she wandered with her feet bare and felt the moonlight upon her skin. She counted blessings, questions, things to-be-done, things known and things unknown. She thought of all she’d seen and done. And her Wicked Uncles, for their part, watched her slim bright phantom wander in the shadows there, and thought of how she reminded them of their dear departed, their beloved, her mother.

The third chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I and the second part here: Chapter II

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

After lunch, when the elusive others had rejoined them, they returned to the low stuffy pre-fab (again, Elizabeth was not sure exactly how many had been missing, how many they were … There was always that eerie phenomenon in magical groups of there being just one more person than there should be with you, or one fewer person than you might hope … The number of the group was never quite stable; not all of its members could be counted upon to be entirely corporeal, entirely present, all the time). The sky overhead had cleared; the blue empyrean rained a hotter atmosphere down upon them. As they filed in, they saw a tall, scruffy man standing at the desk at the front; he wore a corduroy jacket, despite the weather, over an ironic graphic t-shirt; his hair was dark and tangled, his trousers skinny, his boots pointy. He did not look up as they found their places, and not even then: several moments passed, as he appeared to consult his notes, in despite of their presence and their waiting. Elizabeth judged him to be mid-thirties, pale skin, good cheekbones, unshaven but in a ‘just-so’ manner: he was, like a Wizard, precisely as unshaven as he chose to be, neither more, nor less. His hair, it had to be admitted, did flop particularly well, just over one temple, just so. However, it was clear that he was arrogant and haughty, merely from the way he stood. Ugh. She hated him already.

Finally, after an almost intolerable interval, the new Instructor (one presumed) raised his head, and appeared to notice the gathered student-teacher-magicians for the first time.

“Oh! Art all here, who art here? Hands up anyone who’s absent!” he declaimed, in self-regarding tones. “I have a – what’s the word – a feuille d’émargement here, which I’ll pass around. I can’t be expected to learn all your names right off the bat …”

Immediately, Elizabeth rolled her eyes to herself; she couldn’t stand it when Anglos pretended they had forgotten the English terms for common phrases: she herself would immediately have proposed “sign-in sheet”, or “attendance sheet”, and foregone the pantomime. But oh yes, he was so assimilated, so Frenchified, wasn’t he. She crossly crossed her arms, and looked for validation to Morgane who was sitting to her left: Morgane was all eyes and ears, her pen at the ready to take notes, hanging on his every … Le Sigh. The Instructor proceeded.

“So, little intro, the name is Nicholas Graves. You can call me Nick. Or, some of my friends call me ‘Rob’. For ‘Robber’.” He paused, and raised an eyebrow quizzically. Nobody reacted, except Elizabeth, who let out an involuntary groan. He pointed finger-guns at her.

“Blondie, shoot. You get it?”

Very unwillingly: “Nick Graves; Grave Robber,” she sighed. There was no audible sign of anyone else grasping the feeble joke.

“Boom.” He nodded. “You and I are going to get on fine, Blondie. The rest of you, try to keep up …” He twirled a chair down with a practiced sweep, planting it, its back facing the class, and straddled it. Ugh. “So. Where to begin? Where to begin, indeed …”

To Elizabeth’s ears, he sounded like a posh public-school boy, with a veneer of Estuary English overlaid, to take the curse off. She knew his Type; Oxford had been riddled with them. It was all she could do not to mime sticking her fingers down her throat and retching, to Morgane, but the latter seemed still rapt, her full attention on their Instructor. Don’t be childish, she thought. There is always Something to Learn, even from people who are Wrong, in every way.

“Few words of warning, this is important: some of you will not make it to the end of the year. Feature, not a bug. It’s baked into the programme. Don’t take it badly. I’ll put this bluntly, because they won’t tell you until it’s too late: not everyone is cut out to be a magician, let alone to teach magic. You know the old saying, ‘Those who can’t do, teach’. Well, you may not have heard the next bit: ‘Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.’ Worth bearing in mind, for all you’re about to undergo. Bit of soul-searching might be in order: if you don’t think you’re up for this, if you have the slightest doubt, run away now. The Trials and Ordeals are bad enough – you know a bit about that, you’ve got the Magistère already. But imagine: all of that, plus you have to deal with teenagers on a daily basis. Everyone’ll say, ‘oh yes, but you get good holidays!’ Don’t be fooled. The holidays are rubbish. Every six or seven weeks you get two weeks off, to barely recover from your imminent mental and spiritual breakdown, catch up on your marking and your planning, vaguely think of doing your little Wiccan Wheel of the Year ceremony,” – dripping with scorn – “give up on that, then start all over again. Every Summer, you get just enough time to start to relax and seriously question your life-choices, and then you … start all over again. I would be delighted if two or three of you were to come up to me after class and quietly tell me that you were quitting. Of course, the only ones who would have the self-awareness to say that are exactly the ones who actually do have what it takes. Dunning-Kruger is a bitch, when it comes to magicians. The worse you are, the less you realise it, the more likely you are to experience self-induced magical psychosis or demon-possession. But don’t worry. It’ll catch up with you.” He paused and looked around. “Anyone want to run screaming from the room yet? No? Good. Let’s get on with it.

“The ‘Grave Robber’ line was supposed to be my segue, but I fumbled it: so, a few words about myself. I’m not a specialist in Enchantment, originally. My research and practice has mostly been in Necromancy and Divination: the Dark Arts and Fortune-Telling. So yeah … Sorcery. Burned at the stake stuff. The reason I’m here though: most of the faculty at the Institute are either stuck in the 1950s, or are literally from the 1950s, or before. Some, long before. And France, as you know, lags about twenty years behind the Anglophone world both in pedagogy and magical research. I’ve developed a handy sideline – strings to my bow, you know how it is – in Chaos Magic and Technomancy. Just what I’ve picked up along the way. Both of which they consider new-fangled nonsense. I’m here to tell you, you won’t get away without significant investment in both. You may not identify as a ‘Chaos Magician’ of any stripe – I know, it’s seen as a bit passé for practitioners who actually live in the 21^st century – but it’s an indispensable tool-kit. Consider it an operating system on which you can run whatever Specialist Domain you want; it allows you to customise and switch-up the different bits and bobs, as-and-how. I know it sounds a bit nineties, but you need to be able to hack your magic, jail-break your paradigms. And then, Tech-Mage stuff, well, I don’t need to tell you, the world we’re living in, which is more and more virtual, this stuff is key. Most people around here don’t even Know their Memes; with your students, you’ll have to, or they’ll be unleashing brain-rot hexes on you before you can say ‘boo!’. You need to be thinking about AI; constructing awakened Servitors to do your homework for you, and avoiding falling into the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey Mouse Trap; you need to be building out fully-modded brain-wave-responsive autonomous-environment Memory Palaces in the Cloud; your online presence – which, by the way, you have to make completely anonymous as of yesterday – has to be a multifoliate, rhizomatic Hypersigil, working to create your chosen reality; you need to be … Techgnosis-maxxing …”

He paused, as if waiting for … applause? Gasps? Oohs and ahhs? Elizabeth didn’t know. She quickly scanned the room: fully half of her fellow students appeared to be engaged and taking notes. Though it was possible that the laptop kids at the back were playing Tarot Solitaire or sourcing magical materia on eBay. She caught Lamia’s eyes, which were cast quickly up to the heavens when they met Elizabeth’s: good to know, someone else who wasn’t buying this. Malachi too seemed sceptical: he had a leather-bound notebook out, and was assiduously taking notes with a silver-blue fountain pen – she could see though, from where she sat, that in fact he was constructing a very elaborate doodle: an Activated one, if she was not mistaken. Rima was slouched very far down in her chair, overtly scowling, and tapping her fingers impatiently on her (closed) notebook. The others were all at least affecting a polite attention.

Ambrosius raised his hand. “So you’re saying that we need to be studying things outside the Domain of Enchantment then? I mean, I did a module on Chaos Magic in undergrad, but …”

“I’ll stop you there, mate.” Nick pinched his temples with a slightly pained expression. “First of all, yes. That’s a tip kids, write it down. Just because you’re specialists in Enchantment, it doesn’t mean you can completely let go of everything you learned for the Magistère trials. At this point, everyone in this room is considered to have reached the level of Adept; we expect you to be conversant in the primary Paths and Pillars of all of the Domains. You will have been tested on them; you passed the tests. And don’t be fooled: very few of you are going to end up in establishments where you are only teaching your Specialist Domain; you may not even end up in schools that are Fully Operative. You mustn’t forget how few there are: mostly, to get into one of them is something that you manage towards the end of your career. No, you’ll often find yourself working in a mundane school, with only one or two colleagues, if that, that are covertly teaching magic: their exoteric roles are those of maths teachers, PE teachers, school nurses or psychologists – or, for Enchanters, most probably foreign languages, maybe art, maybe French. Remember this. Not everyone gets to go and work in Lycée Albertus Magnus, or at Saint-Germain …”

Charlie desultorily raised her fist. “Shout out. Whoop whoop. Alma Ma-terrrr …”

“Oh you went there?” Nick managed to look both slightly impressed and mostly sceptical. “Nice one. Anyway. As I was saying … Another thing you need to know: terminology.” He stood from his chair, and as he talked began to scribble words, arrows, circles on the white-board with a faint red marker, to illustrate his propositions. “I know quite a few of you haven’t been studying or teaching in France in the last few years. Those of you who have, bear with me, no spoilers please! The last-but-one Hierophant of the Mysterium, Apollyon de Vermiis, brought in some ‘sweeping reforms’ last year” – he did the air-quotes – “of the magical Baccalauréat, as well as the hierarchy, the admissions to higher level institutions, and the ‘accepted nomenclature’” – he did it again – “for the magical Domains, Disciplines, etcetera. You’ll have to make sure you’re au fait with all of that. Everything’s available on the Bulletin Officiel du Mystérium, but that’s about eighty-thousand pages or so. I’ll be brief: they wanted to bolster the image of the French Fifth Imperium as the home of no-nonsense, rational magic. Very Cartesian, very logical, no superstition or mumbo-jumbo. So, whatever you do, try to avoid saying anything about deities, demons, angels, familiar spirits, fae-creatures, whatever. It’s expected that you will work with these entities, but anything other than a purely scientific catch-and-release for research purposes, or an instrumental relationship of task-oriented practical working, is not to be discussed openly. No religion in our magic, innit? You’ll be getting whole seminars on this, the question of Secularism: the Law of the Separation of Powers, splitting the Ecclesia, Mysterium, Imperium … I’m sure you all know this off by heart. Well, you’re going to have it hammered into you all over again.

“The other thing is, like I said, ‘correct terminology’ … Don’t go around calling yourself or anyone else a Witch, whatever you do. Definitely verboten … I know that in English, we’re still pretty loose about these things, but instead of referring to the Domain of ‘Sorcery’, you’ll want to talk about ‘Material Magic’, or ‘Practical Magic’; for the scientific and scholarly disciplines, you’ll want to call the general Domain ‘Theoretical Magic’, or ‘Experimental Magic’: even ‘Empirical Magic’ – I know that’s a bit of a contradiction, but hey, get used to it. And obviously, this being France, the ‘Hard Sciences’ of Magic are the ones who get all the funding, all the prestige, and all the babes … Joking about that last one.” He smirked around for a reaction, and, getting none, proceeded. “Don’t whatever you do, talk about ‘Spirit Magic’, or ‘Spirit-Work’; spirits are out, we don’t talk about them at all if we can help it. We all know they’re there, we work with them, we’re just too polite to mention it. Best practice: call it ‘Energy Work’ – or else, ‘High-Energy Magic’ has been gaining traction recently. Spirit is Energy, Energy is Spirit, that is all ye need to know on Earth, blah blah blah. As for actual spirits, well, they’ll bring in some American Plastic ‘Shaman’ once or twice a year to give it a bit of the ‘Reincarnated Indian Chief–Spirit Animal–Sage Smudging’ woo-woo – you have no idea how racist these people are, even I find them racist – and call it a day. Best not to think about it too much. Finally, your field is a problematic one: they tried to get away with calling it ‘Psychological Magic’, or even ‘PsyOps’, but obviously that doesn’t cover it. ‘Psychism’ is slightly better, but still, not a good global term. They were trying to align the four Domains with the Magical Models – Psychological Model, Technological Model, Energy Model, Information Model, and so on, but it doesn’t quite work. Anyway. I would avoid ‘Enchantment’ and ‘Envoûtement’; ‘Illusion and Influence’ isn’t bad; some occult linguists were trying to make ‘Modal Magic’ happen, as in ‘modal verbs’: possibility, probability, capability, obligation. But I told them, stop trying to make it happen, it’s never going to happen. ‘Art Magic’ is still pretty acceptable, as it makes a good cardinal division between Art Magic, Scientific Magic, Spiritual – sorry, Energy – Magic, and Craft Magic. But look. We’re getting bogged down. Maybe some of you know this stuff. Maybe you don’t. Just be aware: words have meanings, which have effects in the world. You’re magicians. You know that.” Nick ran a hand through his floppy curls. The board was now totally full of terms, bullet points, lines, circles, arrows, scribbles: it was almost entirely incomprehensible, and that was almost certainly quite on purpose. He murmured, almost to himself: “Ah, the Thin Red Line, the shortest distance between two unrelated concepts, red string on the cork-board, where the Secret History of the World takes shape …” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “Well then. Smoke-break, anyone?”

He fished a packet of Benson & Hedges from his jacket pocket and made for the door.

The group, slightly stunned by his lengthy tirade, seemed to gradually wake from their torpor and some rose to follow him, including Morgane. Elizabeth didn’t smoke, but she went out with her anyway, to stretch and blink in the rustling sun and shade, without. Nick was leaning insouciantly against a tree, looking at his phone and blowing plumes of smoke into the air around him. Its volutes seemed to swirl and catch the shafts of light between the trees, and Elizabeth wondered if he was giving it a little Smoke and Mirrors Glamour, just to look cool. No doubt.

“Well!” she turned to Morgane, who was vaping something fruit- and candy-flavoured. “That was all a bit … much, wasn’t it?”

Morgane smiled a coy smile. “Oh, he is a lot, isn’t he? I think he’s rather dreamy …”

Elizabeth wondered briefly if her friend had been learning her English from 1950s romance novels, but passed on. A few of the others had filtered out. Malachi was sitting on the picnic table, ostentatiously packing and then puffing on a pipe; Lamia came to join them, finishing an expertly-crafted roll-up. She gave Elizabeth a frank look.

“So what do we think about …?” she nodded towards Nick.

“I want to say at least he was better than what we had this morning, but I’m afraid I … don’t think I can,” said Elizabeth.

“Well, I liked him!” Morgane beamed, through a cloud of pink-smelling vapour.

Ambrosius joined them. “I though it was all very interesting,” he said. “I took a lot of notes. Not much we didn’t know before, but he has a way of putting it …”

Suddenly, Sibilla seemed to appear in their midst. She had a knack for this.

“He speaks the truth,” she intoned. “There are those among us, who shall not make it to the end. I have seen it.” Everyone just looked at her for a minute, then looked away, up, down, elsewhere.

“Um.” Ambrosius took up the suddenly-deflated conversation gamely. “Anyone see who we have next? What does it say on the time-table?” He took out his phone and thumbed through a carousel of open apps.

“Oh, is there an official time-table?” Elizabeth asked. “I didn’t get that information.”

“Yes, look here, on the Espace Numérique de Travail of the Institut; you should have received an email about activating it on your academic email address …”

Elizabeth had not seen it, and indeed had not managed to activate her academic email; the platform was not only archaic and user-hostile, but appeared to require five-step authentification, including a phrenology-scan, a certificate of good conduct from the Inquisitorial College of the Mysterium, a validation of one’s Imperial military service or exemption therefrom, and a genetic karyotype document proving claimed ancestral lineage by a sworn alchemical clerk. Maybe French magicians tended to have all of this documentation to hand at any given time – probably the case, considering – but she had been stuck for weeks in the Ninth Circle of Bureaucratic Hell trying to convince people at the end of crackling phone-lines that were only open forty minutes a day, or in impossible-to-find offices in warren-like bastions of the administration, that these documents and tests either didn’t apply to her, were unavailable to her, or were – allegedly – in the post, somewhere. Seeing her seething frustration, Ambrosius just sent her a screenshot of the time-table on the class WhatsApp group they had created over lunch. The next intervenor was to be, apparently, Magistra Antoinette Lovelace, on “Wellbeing and Safeguarding”. Elizabeth eyed the subject title sceptically.

“Wellbeing and Safeguarding …” she mused. “Not very French, is it?”

“Not very!” It was Nick; he had popped up beside her. “All the rage these days though. They do pick up on trends and fads from the Anglosphere. Eventually. This kind of health-and-safety, politically-correct, Woke nonsense. Sometimes I wish they would just stick to their dusty old ways. You knew where you stood then. Do you know what the French for “Care”, as a concept, is?” Everyone shook their heads. “It’s ‘Care’ … Typical that there’s no word for that in French … Actually, that brings me on to … Let’s get everyone back inside.” He pointed to the door. “Awright everyone! Back to work!”

The group assembled once more, Nick stood at the top of the class and cracked his knuckles, eager to get into it.

“So! Just been doing a bit of smoke-break thinking, as you do … While we’re waiting for my colleague Antoinette to arrive – lovely girl, you’ll like her – I thought I might just say a word about this: you know we’re supposed to conduct the majority of our training in English, as of this year. You, also, will be expected to do most of your teaching in English. Now, I know that not all of you were aware of this. It’s a decision that’s been taken just this year, at the Summer Conference of the Mysterium. See, they’re starting to finally admit that We Have a Problem. French – and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know – is just not an international language anymore. And French cultural influence has been on the wane for fifty years. As in art, so in magic, in particular Art Magic. I mean, can anyone name one single French writer that’s been actually influential internationally in the last … thirty years, let’s say?”

Mercurio raised their hand. “Michel Houllebecq?”

“Yes!” Nick pointed at them. “Bingo. And if you can imagine a more dis-Enchanted version of the world than his, please let me know. But if you had to name one single other French author who’s had any impact in thirty, forty, fifty years? There’s no-one. Nobel prizes notwithstanding.”

Charlie spoke up. “Hey! I like Annie Ernaux!”

“As you should!” crowed Nick. “She’s good! But she’s an example, just like all the ‘French Theory’ crowd you get if you go back fifty years – Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard – of something that was initially great in French, and then got taken up, mistranslated, misunderstood, misused, by an Anglophone intelligentsia. She’s one of the ones who gave us autofiction, for fuck’s sake (pardon my French). But nobody outside the Academy cares about any of these things. France can still hold its own in certain areas of high culture: notably, cinema, haute couture, haute cuisine, gastronomy in general, even though they’re losing ground … And they are still doing okay in the sciences, and in artisanal work, craft, luxury hand-made goods, all that. What they realised though, is that it’s in this area of the arts that they’re really falling behind. And that goes double for the Magical Arts. These are the arts of seeming, of meaning, of communication, of poetry, of music, of entrancement and Enchantment. And they were nowhere. They used to treat Envoûtement, as I said earlier, as basically a kind of PsyOps thing, a branch of espionage, propaganda: influence, persuasion, disinformation, seduction, illusion, disguise; as a way of infiltrating, subverting, mind-controlling; a way of tipping the scales of Fate, of optimising strategy: a Great Game tradecraft Domain of Magic.

“The problem was, they had forgotten something: the point of Enchantment, no matter how you call it ‘Psychism’ or whatever, is to enchant. It had to have something more than utility; it had to also have Beauty. It had to also have humour. Do you know what the French word for ‘humour’ is …?” Everyone shrugged. “It’s humour. And it’s a loan-word from English. The French have no word for humour. Oh yes, they can be witty, diverting, amusing, all of that. But they’re just not very funny. It was British philosophers in the 17^th century in Paris who introduced them to the concept of ‘having a bit of a laugh’. And they thought, ‘ooh la la, what is theez strange theeeng called ‘hu-moour’…? And so, they adopted it. But they never quite got it right. As you no doubt are aware. Or maybe not, if you’re French. Anyway. Point is: the French have no word for ‘humour’. They have no word for ‘whimsy’. They have no word for ‘quaint’, or ‘queer’, or ‘odd’. These are fundamentally English things. And they are fundamental to the proper practice of Enchantment, as it would seem.”

He sat down on the desk at the front of the room, seemingly drained by this impassioned tirade. The postulants, this time, were wide awake. They looked around at each other. These were things they had also known, or thought of, but never perhaps so succinctly.

“France is tired,” he eventually went on. “The Imperium is tired. French is a language of the past, and they can’t stop dwelling in it. But they are going to try and start. And you lot are a part of the pilot programme: to regain influence and the illusion of grandeur on the world stage, we must be able to work in English. That’s why I’m here. That’s why you’re here. Everyone in this room speaks French, English, and at least one other language fluently. I checked. And that is why you have been chosen, among other things, to make up the first cohort of the ex-Hierophant’s Vita Nuova project. About which, more anon. Okay! Here’s Nettie.” He flourished a hand to the entrance.

The door opened, and a thin, pale woman with a cloud of woolly grey-blond hair peeked around it. “Oh. Nick. I suppose I must be in the right place then. Sorry I’m late, I was picking figs.”

The second chapter in a continuing serial novel, The Department of Whimsical Enchantment … Find the first part here: Chapter I

What if we combined Dark Academia Romantasy with a School for Teachers of Magic, set in France, with all the soul-destroying bureaucracy, petty rivalries, and obscure rules that nobody ever tells you that that implies …? Well. I suppose you’re about to find out! Please subscribe to receive the ongoing updates!

“Ah! Here are our young charges …!” said the taller of the two presumed instructorss.

“Here they are indeed!” said the other.

“Come, come! Shall we begin …?” again cried the taller.

They both shepherded their new students towards the doors – now wide open, as it appeared – of the pre-fab classrooms. Elizabeth, her new friend Morgane, and their new-found classmates, all gradually percolated in through the doorway, and to the low and gloomy room within. The way people placed themselves within the space was as interesting as usual, to Elizabeth: four of the younger student-teacher-magicians (did they know each other already?) sat in a row towards the back, in the middle, and took out their laptops – a barrier between them and the instructors; potentially a means to distract themselves from the intrusive content of the session. Other postulants arrayed themselves along the sides in ones and twos, leaving a distinct gap front and centre – just as their own students would do in turn. Just as they would do themselves, the instructors tried to beckon people to fill the empty rows, to sit in front; two or three people moved forward a row, or one seat closer to the centre. Elizabeth sat with Morgane on the far side of the room from the door, under the long, low windows, not too close to the front but not too far away either. As the two teachers busied themselves with their paraphernalia and a projector, Morgane turned to her new acquaintance.

“So! Are you English then?” she asked breathlessly, switching to that language. “I did my year as an auditrice at Canterbury, I loved it so so much …”

“I am. Is it that easy to tell?”

“Well, you do have a tiny accent. You speak French much better than my English. Where in England?”

“Oh, ‘oop North’ … I’m from Yorkshire, originally.”

“Yorkshire …! Brontës! Moors! … Puddings! Rippers!”

“That more or less sums it up, yeah.”

“Also, you do have that English style, you know. The way you dress.”

“Do I?” Elizabeth was never sure if being told she looked or sounded “English” was entirely a compliment. She decided to take it as one though. Morgane seemed to delight in their immediate rapport – indeed, Elizabeth observed, she seemed the kind of person to delight in all things. She herself was wearing a black vest-top, and a long, light skirt covered in dark flowers which enveloped her legs completely. She had a noticeable limp, and one leg seemed very stiff. Marking Elizabeth’s glance, she raised her skirt to show her left leg was in a complex, articulated metal brace.

“Yes, you see my robot leg! I’m a cyborg. A clanker. It counts as a disability – well, it is a disability – and I get extra points on my applications in the inter-academic and intra-academic movement …I’m thinking of getting my heart replaced with a steam-punk one with gears and valves. Maybe my brain too. O, to be fully inhuman …”

“I think about it all the time …” Elizabeth murmured as they both hushed and turned back to the front of the class, as the conveners began their welcome address.

The taller of the two instructors began.

“Now we are all here …” she turned to her colleague, and spoke sotto voce, in French. “Are we all here, did you take attendance?”

“I didn’t take attendance, did you take attendance?” the shorter one hissed back.

“Uh, Magistra Gertrude, we are thirteen postulants present, if it might help you,” it was a young man who spoke, dark floppy hair that fell either side of his face, hollow-eyed, gaunt-cheeked, sallow-skinned, haunted-looking.

“Ah! Gustave! Such a pleasure to have you back with us! Well, though I deplore the reasons, I applaud the outcome! Everyone, Gustave is repeating his postulant year, aren’t you Gustave?”

Gustave looked at the floor, and a flush of feverish embarrassment flared in his pallid cheek. He mumbled that it was enchanting to meet everyone (“enchanté” as a response to being introduced was such a very obvious and ancient joke to make among Enchanters that it had practically become a cherished convention among them. Notably, it is perhaps the only instance in contemporary French where the verb “enchanter” is ever used).

Gertrude recommenced: “Now that we are all here! I shall present ourselves: I am Gertrude de Javerzac” – Gertrude pronounced with the French ‘g’, as in ‘je’, making her name alliterative: ‘Zhertruuude de Zhaverzac’ – “Magistra of the Mysterium, Instructrix of the Académie of Aquitania; this is my colleague, Hortense d’Alembert, equally Magistra and Instructrix. We are your guides and teachers in this year as postulants that is ahead of you. Is it not, Hortense?”

“It is indeed,” Hortense wittered. “We shall accompany you through the … Trials and Tribulations! of this year to come. I remind you: you received the Magistère, all of you, at Midsummer this year; you have a year and a day to attain the Consecration; if you pass all of the tests, if you excel in all the tasks, if you successfully face all ordeals … You shall be Consecrated, and the Magistère shall be confirmed. If not, as you have been pre-warned, the Magistère, the Elixir that is in your blood, shall turn to poison … We do not need to tell you what shall be the result.”

“Now!” said Gertrude brightly. “Let us make a ‘tour of the table’ to present yourselves! We must know with whom we have affair! As we do, you shall speak in English … You are aware, without doubt, of the reasons for this choice.” She gestured at the closest student, nearest the door, on the side opposite to where Elizabeth and Morgane were sitting. “May you tell us of yourself!”

A petite girl in a halter-top and denim shorts, vivid fuchsia-dyed hair, septum piercing and other parts pierced as well, heavily-tattooed, glasses, took her cue: “I’m Charlie Kowalski, and I’m from here, from Bordeaux. I received the Magistère after my studies at Bordeaux-Mériadeck. Before that, I was at the Lycée Saint-Germain. Should I say more?”

“Perfect!” Gertrude waved her hand at her. “We shall learn further, by and by! Who is the next?”

“I’m Mitra Mardévirin,” said a young, dark-skinned man, with shoulder-length straight black hair. He was wearing a vintage skinny t-shirt and jeans. “I’m French, from the Île Bourbon. I went to the École Saint-Ange on the Island, and after that to Université de Paris–Nouvelle Athènes. That’s where I gained the Magistère, on my second attempt, this year.”

“Our pleasure! So nice to see the Citizens from Outremer come to join us in the Métropole,” beamed Hortense.

Next was the boy who had spoken up earlier, the student repeating the postulant year.

“Gustave Nádasdy,” he mumbled. “I gained the Magistère by the correspondence course of the Club Pythagore in Strasbourg. This is my second attempt at the postulant year. I was graciously allowed to try again.” He seemed mortified by it all. It struck Elizabeth that he looked not unlike the famous manic self-portrait by his namesake, Gustave Courbet. She kept it to herself though. It would be a palpable hit, if Morgane got the reference, but a signal embarrassment if she did not. The next candidate indicated by Gertrude’s long, imperious finger stood.

“Please allow me to introduce myself! I am Mercurio …! A Them of wealth and taste!” The speaker twirled; they were slender and dressed in tight black clothes and pointy shoes, with a page-boy haircut, giving them something of the air of a medieval squire, but drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. “My training was at the feet of my parents, who are Travelling Folk of the Carnavale, and I attended the École Paranormale Supérieure de Lyon, and then the Université de Bordeaux-Mériadeck, where I received the Magistère! My greetings, gentles all!” They swept a deep bow at the attendance, and then sat with some sort of flourish that just escaped the eye.

The following person did not rise nor raise her voice.

“Sibilla, I am called.” It was the older woman with the perfect ash-blond chignon and the stylish outfit. “I am from Siena, in Italia. I attend the Scolomancia, the École du Dragon, studying with the Solomonari in Romania. Now, I am here for other reasons. I am a Seeress, by profession. I see what will become.” A frisson ran through the room at the mention of the infamous Scholomance, and of the premonitory gift. This would be grist for future milling.

“My name is Lamia Talafsa,” said the next candidate, a woman in her forties with henna-bronze hair, a few tattoos, dark-rimmed glasses, dressed a little hippy-ish. “My origins are Algerian Kabyle, but I grew up in France. I studied at Invisible College London, and then I lived for quite a while in Brazil, where my husband is from. I was initiated into Espiritismo and Candomblé there, and I was an external candidate for the Magistère, which I gained this year.”

“Oh, an external candidate! Felicitations!” said Hortense. “Quite the achievement!”

The next postulant was a tall and muscular fellow, long blond hair gathered in a top-knot and flowing down his shoulders, well-trimmed beard framing a face of near-impossible handsomeness. Elizabeth simply thought: “Thor”, and that was that.

“I am Ambrosius Aurelianus de la Roz,” he rumbled, like a sportscar idling. “I was a pupil at the Collège de Brocéliande, and then the École Paranormale Supérieure de Paris. I gained the Magistère at my first attempt, this year.” Again, there was a little stir: Brocéliande was notoriously renegade, teaching the ancient Celtic ways of Druidry; despite all attempts to bring it to heel, it was a centre of heterodoxy in the lands under the sway of the Mysterium. Brittany, more than any other region, had retained some of its native character, language, and independence, in the face of the iron rod of the French Imperium.

“Cécile Vô Danh,” said a bored Asian-looking girl: dark hair and glasses, baggy grey minimalist clothes, somewhere between skater and dystopian drone. “My paternal grandparents were political refugees from Vietnam. My mother is from Essonne. My father is a wine-merchant. I’m an Enchantrix. What more do you want?”

“Oh, that will be eminently sufficient, my dear!” exclaimed Hortense. “Who shall be next? You? How about you?” She jabbed a little finger at the next postulant. It was the older fellow, somewhere in his forties perhaps, with the drooping moustache and little point of beard below his lower lip (he told Elizabeth later that this style was quite pleasingly called an Impériale), a head shaved to stubble, and a somewhat dandyish version of the garb of an archetypal “Professor”: a light check jacket, in deference to the season, a dark waistcoat with a pocket-watch and its chain hanging from the fob, a velvet tie.

“Malachi MacGill, by your leave,” he said. To Elizabeth’s ears, his accent was a refined and melodious Irish one. “I have been of the number of the Midnight Court; I am an initiate of the Temple of the Alchemical Rose; I was a Druid of the Comhaltas na bhFia Bairr in some olden days. I have been a Magister at the Faculty of Magical Arts at Université de Paris–Nouvelle Athènes. I have been all of these things. But I am no longer; and thus I submit myself to your good care.”

Here there was a significant stir. The two instructors shared a glance askance: they had been warned of his advent. They were not quite sure what to do with him. They swept the moment past with fluttering gestures.

“Oh how nice to have you! A British postulant, no less!” chirped Hortense.

“IRISH,” uttered Malachi, with a such leaden boom in his Voice, that made everyone in the room wince heavily at its impact.

“United Kingdom, I should say! Pardon me, pardon me!” squeaked Hortense.

“Thus spake Samuel Beckett: ‘Au contraire Madame, je suis irlandais’,” Malachi intoned. “You shall do me the courtesy of GETTING IT RIGHT.” He once more let a clang of force into his Voice, and the Instructrixes reeled back. This was really quite irregular. To employ one’s Guile and Wiles of Voice in a classroom situation – as the student – was just not done. Nevertheless, they passed on as if ‘twere naught.

“And you? Yourself? Please share!” Gertrude gestured at the following postulant, a young woman of thirty or so, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with very black skin and high cheekbones, natural hair in two bunches at the sides of her head.

“Fatoumata Sarr. I’m from Paris. I learned from my mother, who was Marabout and Chief of her village in Senegal, and I attended the Collegium Invisibile Parisii. I attained the Magistère this year on my first attempt.”

“Well! Very nice. Let us pass on,” said Gertrude brightly, without further comment.

The next candidate looked somewhat secretly amused. She was another woman in her thirties, with dark hair, dark eyes, and lightly-freckled skin. She wore baggy shorts past the knee and an oversized basketball jersey.

“Rima El Khoury is my name. I’m originally from Lebanon. I worked at the Consulate of the Mysterium in Beirut for a few years, and then I pursued further studies at the Université de Bordeaux-Mériadeck. I received the Magistère for the first time this year.”

“Ah! Very good!” exclaimed Hortense. “And you? Tell us of yourself!” She gestured to Morgane, who pushed herself slightly awkwardly, but insistently, to her feet.

“I am Morgane Astete, and I am from the Basque Country. I learned at home from my mother, a hedge-witch, and I had no intention of attempting the Magistère, but she insisted that I should.”

“Did she say why?” inquired Gertrude.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask. She’s been dead seven years.”

There was a palpable lull. Morgane looked at her desk, and then sat abruptly down again with a just-audible clink of her leg-brace. Elizabeth grabbed her hand under the table and squeezed it. She whispered: “Me too. My mother. Seven years.” Morgane looked back at her, sidelong, and smiled a brief, tight smile.

“And you, Mademoiselle?” said Hortense with a sweeping-things-along-and-under-the-carpet gesture. She gathered the attention of the room and rolled it out in front of Elizabeth.

“Hello, All. My name’s Elizabeth Harding. It’s in my family: my dad’s a Cunning Man, and my mam was a Fairy Seer. They sent me to a Grammarye School in Yorkshire where I grew up. I got a scholarship to Wainscot College, Oxford, and then I came to prepare the Magistère at the Collège Invisible in Paris. I attained it this year.” She looked around, nodding at the others, as if to include them all in her achievement, which was quite fair: they had, all of them, or nearly, gained the Magistère this year.

“Wait, Elizabeth Harding, is that right?” Mercurio had theatrically whirled around in their chair. “Are you that Elizabeth Harding?”

“I can’t imagine how many others there are …” Elizabeth deflected.

“Yes! You’re the one who came first! The École Paranormale Supérieure de Lyon took most of the top-ten places; two were from Para’ Sup’ Paris. But first place was neither! A candidate we had never heard of! An English girl! So that’s you! Zounds! Well met then, O Vanquisher!” Mercurio swept a very elaborate bow towards Elizabeth, which gave the impression of a broad-brimmed long-plumed hat being involved, though it was not.

“Charmed, I’m sure!” simpered Hortense.

“Charmed, more than I can say!” Gertrude raised her. “Such an accomplishment! And for one who is not from the Système, who was not raised with the Méthode! How delightful!”

Elizabeth would have blushed, but she had thrown up a little wall of protective membrane around herself: not enough that anyone would notice; just enough to shield her from emotion. She stole a glance around at her classmates, who, she realised, were all still looking at her, as at some fantastic creature. An English-speaker who had braved and surmounted the ordeals of the French Magistère! Such a thing was unknown, and she knew it. Those who tried usually failed, sometimes spectacularly – sometimes mortally. The road to Hell was paved with nice young English or American girls who thought they could have a quirky, picturesque, bohemian life as an art-magician in Paris … Their frozen corpses were skated-upon by the sleds of homebound demons, trampled by the hooves of herds of Devil-Swine. It had not been her plan to stay in Paris, to stay in France; but her year as a lectrice had turned into two, had turned into starting a Research Masters. She had fallen in love: with the subject-matter, with the City and its graceful rituals – and, accessorily, with Pierre Pellegrin, cursèd be his name. If anything, it was his fault that she found herself where she was now, and in this fix. This was not where she was supposed to be, but damned if she wasn’t going to win at this too.

As the student-teacher-magicians of her cohort had introduced themselves, Elizabeth had been carefully cataloguing the information they gave; one of her teachers at the Grammarye School had told them, once, that the minds of worldly folk could only hold, at most, seven things in them at once; beyond that, all fell out, higgledy-piggledy; part of their training had been to do very much more than that. She engaged her practice of the Ars Memoria, and opened, in her Mind-Palace, a new room. Within it, in a third-floor addition to the East wing, in a series of alcoves, six to a side of the room, she placed a statue of each of her classmates, and gave them attributes that signified each piece of information that she had about them. At the end of the room, she placed upon a dais the figures of the Instructrixes, with their distinguishing features and what she had so far learned about them. As she set these things in place, she learned them, they became fixed within her Mind’s-Eye. They were Known. Thirteen of us, in total, she thought to herself. Are we a Coven? And who, then, shall be the High Priestess? Are we the Apostles? And who, then, shall be the Christ? Her parents were not Catholic, in the usual sense, but both had come from that culture, and it was one that she had absorbed from them, despite all. It had been one thing that drew them together: in the North of England, being of long, old Catholic culture like her father, or an Irish transplant like her mother’s family, had meant something. She had always thought: better to be an Apostate Catholic in England than a merely drifting, lukewarm Anglican. There were no passionate, extreme Anglicans. It was a religion of eternal compromise. Catholics though, regardless of whether you still believed: there was fire and blood and oppression and inquisition and arcane ritual there, and if it was in your past, it was in your past, and it was worth drawing upon for many of the Workings of our Thing, if you could get past the many and valid objections to it, and concentrate upon the deep ritual inheritance, the grandeur and the pomp and the mystery. She loved a dim, vaulting church interior; she loved the smell of incense and old stone. She kept up with Saints and the Virgin, or the Lady, or the Mother (and knew that they were not the same, and that even within each category, there were multiple facets and personae).

Now that all were introduced, the Instructrixes began: they fumbled with their overhead-projector; they laid upon it transparencies, first upside-down and backwards, and then only backwards, and then in place. They called Gustave to help them with the “technical aspect”, and he jumped from his seat as if stung by a hornet and dashed to their aid. The “slides”, such as they were, were of elaborate Copperplate writing, faint and close, and elaborately sketched diagrammata, almost nothing about them legible. They waved away any and all objections, saying “oh, you may take pictures of them with your phones”, which two or three of the postulants attempted. They seemed more or less unconscious, in any case, of what was actually written upon the slides, and presented a session that laid out, in excruciating detail and almost no specific instruction, the Shape of Things to Come that term. Nobody but was left utterly confused.

There were dates and times and syllabi and programmes and technical details galore, but hardly anyone could make head nor tail of them. The few raised hands and questions were waved away impatiently; the requests for clearer information, or maybe a shareable PDF or PowerPoint were dealt with, with expedient dispatch. Nobody, after the long, fastidious presentation, was any the wiser. At its tortuous conclusion, the two Instructrixes seemed highly pleased with themselves.

“Now!” brightly exclaimed Hortense. “Are there any questions?”

Her audience, cowed into submission, said nothing.

“I believe we have been abundantly clear, then,” added Gertrude. “All of this shall be – potentially – on the final trial. You would do well, at all times, to learn by heart all that we tell you!”

“And what if you tell us things, as you have today, that contradict themselves?” drawled Malachi, the older Irish chap. “Are we to learn tout et son contraire?”

“Ahaha, how droll,” smarmed Gertrude. “Of course, your discernment shall tell you what is the correct thing to commit to memory. Everything we say, if you doubt, it is done by no accident: it must be a Test, you tell yourself. It is to you, to decipher the True Lesson, in all cases.”

“If we are ever wrong,” intoned Hortense, “it is not we who are wrong, but in all certainty you who do not understand what right and wrong mean! Bear this in your minds!”

With that, somewhat stunned and disoriented, they were dismissed for lunch. Some of the class had thought to provide themselves with pre-prepared packed lunches, Tupperwares of leftovers (for those who had families, households, where there had been Actual Cooking the night before: therefore, not many of them). Most of the rest, then, went across the road outside the gates to the Boulangerie-Traiteur, which was a rather superior establishment. It was the only one within several kilometres’ radius which provided lunch, and so, much patronised. The whirringly efficient and smiling staff moved the queue on as fast as could be, until everyone found themselves outside with their rather delicious sandwiches of jambon de Bayonne and chèvre, or poulet crudités, or thon à la niçoise, or their slices of pizza or tartelettes, and decided to head back over to the grounds of the Château together. They were falling companionably into groups of two and three; they were beginning to find their place among the others. Morgane announced that they must all follow her and eat together; nobody was brave enough to resist. They found the few who had forethought their dishes, almost all of them, and annexed two close picnic tables to their purpose, and ate their first meal together.

Elizabeth noted: Gustave, the repeat student, was missing, as was Sibilla, the mysterious Italian lady, and Cécile, the young French-Vietnamese woman. Everyone else seemed to be there; if someone other was missing, she noted, it was something in itself that she failed to notice it. They were unmemorable, or they were consciously dissimulating their absence. When it came to Enchanters, both were eminently possible: noticeable charisma, or pass-unseen discretion; these were among the elementary lessons of Glamour: to be Visible, or to be Invisible. We had learned both.

The lunch-break was convivial: they shared stories, they learned to know each other better. Elizabeth found herself quite readily welcomed by the mostly-French cohort; she found a little side-wise fellow-feeling with Malachi, the only other native Anglophone. Occasionally, they shared a Look, when their colleagues were being Particularly French. She learned that Ambrosius, apart from being an adept of art-magic, also was an esoteric blacksmith, and had a large following on Instagram where he shared his spooky blades, pendants, and other pieces. They asked him why he had not chosen to integrate the Material Magic stream, rather. He answered that Enchantment ran in his veins; as a Breton Celt, he could do no other.

Lamia told them with self-deprecating humour of her misadventures teaching magic in Brazil, and of returning to France with her two French-Brazilian teenage sons, whose practice did not sit too right with the Establishment in the magical school where she had enrolled them. Mercurio allowed them an insight into what it was to be On the Road with a travelling family of Carnavale Magicians; this was their inheritance and birthright, tightly held, lightly evoked. Fatoumata, shyer at first, warmed up and recounted her early life in the council flats on the North boundary of Paris, between Montmartre and the flea-markets of Saint-Ouen, where her mother, a respected village chief back in Senegal, received sorcerers and marabouts in her place, offering their services to the wider community. She had grown up watching all of these practitioners, and vowed that she would not only acquire the power and status that was theirs, but also that of the French Imperium establishment in which they lived: effectively, she had done both.

Mitra told them of his life upon the Île Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, one of the smallest and the furthest colonies of the Imperium: how his ancestors had come there from India as indentured servants; how they had gained foothold and community, how they had syncretised their Hindu beliefs and magics with those of the Africans and Europeans gathered in that strange Island of Meetings. Morgane hilariously recounted her tentative steps in witchcraft, guided by her eccentric mother, outside all the institutions: healing, cursing, blessing, finding, charming all things for their village neighbours. She had had no choice: she must be this. But she had never wished to pursue the academic path of magic, until that dream, heavy with significance, she had had last year. After that, there was no other way. The attending audience fell quiet: all could identify with a moment in which they seemed pushed in the direction they had gone. Who would choose it, freely? Who would wish this upon their worst enemy? The trials. The tribulations. The ordeals. Becoming a Magician, or a teacher of Magicians … it hurt. It was deeply, deeply dangerous. They had all lost someone, along the way. They all knew how quickly they might be Lost.

After lunch, when the elusive others had rejoined them, they returned to the low stuffy pre-fab (again, Elizabeth was not sure exactly how many had been missing, how many they were … There was always that eerie phenomenon in magical groups of there being just one more person than there should be with you, or one fewer person than you might hope … The number of the group was never quite stable; not all of its members could be counted upon to be entirely corporeal, all the time). The sky overhead had cleared; the blue empyrean rained a hotter atmosphere down upon them. As they filed in, they saw a tall and scruffy man standing at the desk at the front; he wore a corduroy jacket, despite the weather, over an ironic graphic t-shirt; his hair was dark and tangled, his trousers skinny, his boots pointy. He did not look up as they found their places, and not even then: several moments passed, as he appeared to consult his notes, in despite of their presence and their waiting. Elizabeth judged him to be mid-thirties, pale skin, good cheekbones, unshaven but in a ‘just-so’ manner: he was, like a Wizard, precisely as unshaven as he chose to be, neither more, nor less. His hair, it had to be admitted, did flop particularly well, just over one temple, just so. However, it was clear that he was arrogant and haughty, merely from the way he stood. Ugh. She hated him already.

Okay, what the hell. Here we go. I’m about to start publishing a novel in “Real Time” (as opposed to what … made-up time? fake time? what a stupid phrase) … I will break it into vaguely digestible morsels that do not necessarily correspond to the eventual chapter-breaks.

It is inspired by my just-finished year as a student-teacher (again) in France. What if one were to combine all the magic and wonder of the idea of a School for Sorcery with the insanely complicated bureaucracy, petty rivalry, and cruel power-dynamics of the French education system?? What if, Dark Academia Romantasy, only make it crushingly tedious for the characters, who gradually lose their will to live, if not their lives, to the murder-machine of the Educational System? Yes, I knew I was onto something FUN. And now, I have a month left to finish it before term starts again. Can I do it? Almost certainly not. Do you want to watch me fail?

I don’t know. What kind of monster are you?

Let’s go.

THE DEPARTMENT OF

WHIMSICAL ENCHANTMENT

PART I - NEMORALIA TERM

August-October

Chapter 1 – La rentrée

The last days of August announced themselves thundery and heavy, with a flat silver light that lined the bulking black masses of the lowering clouds. Elizabeth Harding alighted from the tram and watched it glide away into the distant, unknown banlieues of Bordeaux, before consulting once again the slip of paper that bore her convocation: date (today); time (soon); place … she looked around. Straight ahead of her, behind tall railings, among formal landscaped grounds, stood a stately 17^th century building. There were no signs or indications, nothing so vulgar, but the tram-stop was called “Château Mondésir”, and she presumed this must be that. Beside it, a long high wall around a leafy park; on the opposite side of the street, a tobacconist’s, a bakery-delicatessen, and a pet-grooming salon. It was not certain, however, that this château was what she was looking for – the place to which she was officially summoned: the IIIUFM, the Institute for the Instruction of Imperium of the Unseen Functionary-Magicians. She discreetly took out her pendulum, and, turning to shield the action with her body from passers-by, raised it with a steady hand. It swung once, in the direction of the Château, and did not swing back, remaining immobile, off-plumb, almost straining towards the building like a hound on the scent. Elizabeth nodded and palmed the pendant (carnelian) with a practiced motion.

Of course this must be where the Institute was – it had just seemed almost too obvious, too ostentatious. The Unseen Empire did sometimes hide in plain sight, after all. Only now did she take out her phone; the apps which had served her well in England were unreliable here in France, but despite having spent most of her time here for the last three years, for some reason she resisted making the switch completely. French magical apps always seemed clunky and ill-designed to her. She tapped the icon for the Vegvísir app, which was the eponymous compass-rose of crossed lines bearing Norse runes on each: a “Way Pointer” as the name implied, though derived not from a Viking Age bind-rune confection, as mundane Norse Paganism enthusiasts often mistakenly thought, but rather from 17^th-18^th century Icelandic sea-faring magic influenced by the grimoiric tradition and first attested in the Huld manuscript from 1860. Elizabeth’s inner voice actually trotted out a shorthand version of this erudite tidbit every time she used the app (or indeed saw the symbol on a t-shirt or a tattoo). She didn’t necessarily say it aloud; she just loved to be exact, and she loved to be correct, whether anyone heard her or not. In any case, it was a clever name for a psychogeographical GPS application, showing the mundane geography on top of which one could add layers as desired: ley-lines, sacred sites, holy wells, energy nodes, hidden paths and portals, intensive spirit activity, seasonal and astrological fluxes, that kind of thing. Now she activated it and saw that the street-map all around the Château warped and distorted in the orbit of the powerful nexus that it appeared to house. There were even a number of red, green, or gold dots: individual entities of sufficient potentia to register as moving blips, and who weren’t bothering to hide it. There also appeared to be some kind of artifact or holy relic of vast Radiance in the pet-grooming salon. This might well be a glitch, however.

Elizabeth shook herself and headed for what looked like the gate. Strangely though, as she walked, she did not appear to get any closer to it. Ah, she thought. Here we go. This was the kind of little game one must become accustomed to in dealing with the administration and the hierarchy of the French Mysterium, the branch of the Imperium concerned with the regulation and the instruction of magic. Labyrinthine office-buildings in which one must solve riddles and discover secret passages in order to proceed; switchboards that required the composition of magical formulae on the phone’s keypad in order to be connected to the next interlocutor; gates that kept themselves. This one ought to be child’s-play. She hurried her pace and tried to catch a better glimpse of the ever-receding entrance. It suddenly appeared to be behind her. She checked her watch: twenty minutes to the appointed time. Right. She looked, and could not make out where the gate delineated itself from the railings. Perhaps there? It blurred, as if a mirage. She glanced left and right, and, seeing that there was no-one on her side of the street at that moment, pulled out of her satchel and unclasped a small pocket-knife with a handle of white wood inscribed with glyphs. Squaring her shoulders, closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and swiftly drew a sigil in the air in front of her with the knife-point, and then traced a rectangular frame. This is the door, she said silently. Ceci n’est pas une porte. She stepped forward, and pushed. The gate opened. She was in.

Just inside the entrance was a little gate-house where an elderly man in uniform sat reading a newspaper by a boom-gate for motor-vehicles. He ruffled his broadsheet (who still reads those?) and put it aside, harrumphed, and asked her for her “convocation et papiers d’identification, s’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle” (who still says ‘Mademoiselle’, indeed?). She handed over her paper and her ID, along with the laissez-passer that allowed her, as a British citizen and operative magician, free movement in the French Fifth Imperium. He peered at them with a frown, until Elizabeth, sighing internally, gave him a smile and a tilt of the head in which she allowed just a little burst of Glamour to detonate. His face cleared and he returned her smile, but his own was not that of a man enthralled, rather one of recognition.

“Ah! You’re one of those! Be you welcome then, Mademoiselle l’Enchanteresse! They’ll be waiting for you.”

“Merci, Monsieur,” she dipped her head, in a movement that very subtly evoked a curtsey.

“Votre serviteur,” he sketched the tiniest of bows in return, his eyes twinkling, one almost might think with a Glamour of his own. Elizabeth did wonder. Perhaps he was of the Art? What better Path for a Gatekeeper, after all? She hurried on, along the curving paths that led to the Château. That seemed to lead to the Château. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not more of this. She stopped to take stock of the way ahead.

Here, to the right of the main building, one path swerved over towards the large porticoed entrance, passing beneath a gigantic cedar tree, and around a graceful pond that was centred on the façade of the Château, with pebbled allées in geometrical lines and parterres of flowers, topiary’d box-trees, pillars, Classical statuary in white marble. Another path branched off before the Great Cedar, and led over towards another building complex, much more modern, and into shady lanes beneath pine trees and yews, with scattered benches and tables, and more and lower buildings. Looking around at all of this, Elizabeth noted that she was far from the only new student-teacher here for the pre-rentrée induction at the Institute. There were a few dozen young people – and some older – wandering the paths, checking the details on their convocations, searching for any indications as to where to go, some alone, some in groups of three or four. A few just to her right were sitting at a picnic table and appeared to know each other already. They were chatting and laughing, much at ease. She decided she must just take a chance, rather than wandering around feeling lost, like an idiot. She went up to them.

“Bonjour, excusez-moi,” she began, taking in their appearance: good-looking and graceful all, wearing loose-fitting and yet revealing clothes that allowed for movement. Oh. Énergéticiens. “I’m looking for my induction meeting … How can I find out where it is?” As ever, when speaking French, she noticed the subtle shift in their attitude as they heard her English accent. She prided herself on the perfection of her expression, but there was a stubborn intonation that betrayed her origins. The Uncles told her she ought not to try and lose it, but rather cultivate it. It was part of her persona, they said. Like Jane Birkin.

The lithe, toned young people stared at her a moment, and then one particular specimen with a sculpted beard, a man-bun, and the sleeves cut off his top to show his tanned, tattooed arms, stood up to address her. He was over a head taller than she was (she was not tall).

“There are cyphered signs at each branching of the paths,” he said. “You have to find them, and then you have to figure out how to read them. But maybe I can help you.”

“That would be most kind of you,” she said, calling him “tu”, just as he did her; she had learned that among students, and among teachers, this was standard: it was assumed we were all colleagues.

“Ah! Do I hear a little accent? You’re English, are you? What’s an English girl doing at the Institut?”

“Training to teach magic, just as you are I assume.”

“They let the English do that now?” drawled a dark-haired young woman, leaning on the table. “I thought that was all over after the Secession.”

“Some still can. Special dispensation,” Elizabeth replied, curtly. She didn’t really want to get into a big debate on Cross-Channel politics. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes. “Now, can you tell me where to go?”

“Depends on what field you’re in,” said another young man, this one in an expensive velour tracksuit. “We’re High Energy Magic, over there in the Cube …” he pointed to a large, square, modern building further down the path. “Theoretical Magic is up in the Château, of course. The Material Magic meeting is back through the trees, by the wall next to the park, in the Lodge. And then …” They all watched her face as he spoke, the penny dropping.

“Oh, you’re in Deception and Manipulation are you?” laughed the dark-haired woman. “You’re an Envoûteuse?”

The first speaker laughed too. “An Allumeuse then? I thought you were all supposed to be seductive sirens!” He looked Elizabeth up and down, rather broadly telegraphing his not being convinced.

The more old-fashioned terms for the magical fields and disciplines were something of a minefield in translation; the name of Elizabeth’s area of specialisation, Enchantment, was derived from the French (en-chanter, from Latin incantare: to put a charm, song, incantation upon), but in actual French one referred to Envoûtement, which had a stronger semantic load of domination, control, and manipulation. As was so often the case, the feminine form of the noun had sexual connotations: Envoûteuse was frankly seductive; Allumeuse just went one step further: floozy, flirt, tease – fire-starter (from allumer, to set alight – or to turn on).

The man-bun wearer looked at Elizabeth’s expression, and seemed to think better of his mocking tone. “Apologies, I’m only joking with you. The Envoûtement Section meets in the pre-fabs, over there.” He pointed to a clearing to the right, around which were a couple of low, ugly boxes with barred windows: 1970s pre-fabricated classrooms, still apparently in use.

Another one of the young women – tall, tan, blond – seemed not to have done with picking on Elizabeth. “So, la Petite Anglaise, enjoy pulling your rabbits out of hats and playing dress-up!”

This garnered a general laugh, except for Man-Bun: he had seen the look on Elizabeth’s face. Now he looked worried. She did not disappoint him. She took a sudden step towards him, right into his space, and raised her hand swiftly to his cheek. She let a blast of steely Glamour show, and pushed a sibilant, dissonant resonance into the Voice she turned upon him:

“YOU WOULD DO WELL TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS BEWARE OF WHO THEY TRIFLE WITH.” She stroked his cheek, as her Voice whipped out at him, traced a line down to his chin which she tilted up with one finger. “IS THAT UNDERSTOOD MY LITTLE PRETTY BOY.”

He was shocked, had clearly never experienced Glamour and Guile used so overtly or so expertly. He fell to his knees, and she held his chin in her hand, twirling a tuft of beard. She kept his gaze a moment, and gently patted him on the cheek, looked around at his group with a small, satisfied smile, and then was on her way. They all remained slightly stunned in her wake, and she muttered to herself, in English, as she left: “… All shall love me and despair …”

Still smiling to herself, she quickened her pace towards the shady clearing where the pre-fabs were situated. Typical. The Scholars get the Château, we get the cardboard boxes. Here under the trees, the scent of the thick red carpet of pine-needles was pungent; warm wood, cool shade; the dying Summer begins to build its pyre. Soon, she thought, the first chill of Autumn would insinuate itself into the air, and the brisk, bright days she loved the best begin. It seemed she was doomed to the rhythm of the academic year – it had been her life since she was a child, and she could not imagine things ever being otherwise. She loved everything about that early Autumn time when school began, when the universities gathered in another year’s harvest of students. That feeling of anticipation – that quickening – that came after languorous, still Summer. The shiver of newness, among old buildings. New books, new work, new people, new discoveries. The smell of a freshly-pared pencil, the tang of black ink, the warm leather of a satchel, the wheeling golden motes in a shaft of sunlight in the library stacks, the polished wood of floors, the dust of chalkboards. There was no real word for it in English, just the signs in shops from early August shouting “BACK TO SCHOOL”: a threat, an imperative, ordering children to repent, for the end was nigh. But in France, this was called “la rentrée”: it meant the going back, the return, the coming home. In France, everyone was on holiday in August (try getting anything done then), and so everyone was returning. It was not just a return, but a “re-entry” into the ordinary world, the world of work and commuting and habit. She remembered from her time in Paris how the flat glare of August, the empty streets braved only by tourists and the insane, would suddenly give way to that frisson of energy of la rentrée: the terrasses of the cafés in her neighbourhood would be suddenly thronged with tanned, well-fed, relaxed-looking Parisians, eager to compare notes on places they’d been, what they’d eaten, what they’d seen. For those in academia however, la rentrée was not a return to the ordinary world; no, it was a re-entry into another, stranger, cloistered world, bypassing the ordinary altogether: and for those who studied, taught, and practiced in the magical institutions, colleges, academies, and schools, it was a rarer, stranger, more secret world altogether. She would never tire of it. Every time, a sense of strange homecoming, to a home she’d never known; a sense of adventure and discovery, never knowing what was to come.

And this year, though it was not what she had wanted, not what she had chosen, should be no different; if nothing else, it would be an adventure.

As she approached the clearing where the Envoûteurs would assemble, she briefly polished her appearance: not through Glamour, but rather with a swift alignment of the persona she projected with the one in her mind’s eye. She straightened her spine, gaining a little height; she measured her gait, becoming more confident; she raised her gaze and opened her expression, becoming more curious and approachable. She saw herself: plain white sleeveless shirt, corduroy pencil-skirt, brogues with white socks, the outfit she had chosen to present herself in; blond bobbed hair, black spider-lashes her only obvious makeup. Her trusty leather satchel, well-worn and well-travelled, the strap across her chest. Yes. She saw herself, and she was satisfied. This is who she was. Today, at least.

She saw a number of others gathered around a picnic table in the centre of the clearing, and a few more on the periphery. Mostly young, mostly women, but not all. A dozen or so. These were to be her classmates, her cohort. She again unfrowned her forehead, and attempted a smile as she approached. The little voice that told her nobody is going to like you was very quiet, barely audible. She stopped at the edge of the group.

“Here for the practice of Illusion and Influence?” a young woman turned to her and asked brightly. She was a bit taller than Elizabeth (though that wasn’t saying much), and was buxom and pretty, with very long brown curly hair that reached all the way down her back. “I’m Morgane. And I’m here for it.”

“Oh yes. Deception, Manipulation, Espionage, and Seduction!” Elizabeth grinned back at her. “I’m Elizabeth. And I’m here for it too.”

“I’m trying to figure out who the teachers are. And who the cool kids are,” Morgane murmured, and then lowered her voice further: “We’re obviously the cool kids.”

Elizabeth joined her in looking around. Everyone there was dressed with at least a touch of that eccentricity and theatricality that Enchanters typically affected. They were a varied bunch, ranging in age between early twenties and, what, mid-fifties perhaps? She chose two she thought might be instructors: a very beautiful middle-aged woman with her immaculate ash-blond hair tied in a perfect chignon and an intense gaze; a man in his forties with a drooping moustache and an old-fashioned waistcoat, who was checking a pocket-watch on a chain. Time to call this session to order? There were three or four more who looked a little older, but half of the group seemed close to her own age, mid-twenties. These would be the ones that had come straight from their studies; the others would all have interesting stories about how they had found themselves here, retraining to qualify as teachers of the magical arts in the Académie of Aquitania. What must have driven them to this, Elizabeth wondered.

There was a stir behind them, and they all looked round. At the entrance to the clearing two women had appeared. Ah. These must be the instructors. One was tall and elegant: her blond hair coiffed and swept, her profile aquiline, her white shirt perfectly tailored, her Hermès scarf perfectly tied, her trousers and bottines giving the impression of jodhpurs and riding-boots though they were not. The other was plump and matronly, her dress a floral Laura Ashley, her tight, bright perm evoking a mid-century propriety. They looked somewhat as if one had requested “Englishness” at Central Casting, and been given two perfectly emblematic examples. There was a touch of Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous about them, only not quite as fabulous, and only absolutely. And of course, things being what they were, they were both French.

“Ah! Here are our young charges …!” said the taller one.

“Here they are indeed!” said the other.

“Come, come! Shall we begin …?” again cried the taller.

Thinking about that idea of “Poetic Fantasy”, and it brought this to mind: a novel I’ve been working on, on and off, for years. I struggled to find the “voice” of the book, for a very long time. But something happened with this passage. Somehow, something took off, took flight, within me. This was it. Here it was. This was what I had been looking for.

I would love to know what you think. I hope to be able to bring myself to finish it one day.

They had done this before. The dawn flit. Bills had come due, presented by thugs with cudgels, or the Watch had come running, whirling their rattles, bells rang out in the streets. A town had risen against the villains in their midst. Blades at dawn, the shadow of the gallows. They had thrown their stuff into knapsacks, splashed their faces in water, run with bundles from the inn, weapons drawn, through the slowly waking streets. They knew this drill.

From the beds of painted women, from smoky gambling hells, shutters barring the light, from piles of straw in stables, they came. The boy had run for his money, from inn to inn, from pillar to post; they had awoken in seconds, and knew it was time to go. The tide was turning, the sunlight must not catch them here.

First to the Moon on the Water, where Mirlo had roused the boy next door from where he slept three to a bed, a silver coin flipped, and the boy, understanding, ran headlong. They dashed to the docks, and the ladies of the Siren met them before they had left Old Shambles; the baby crying in Ewina’s arms, she rocked and shushed. Merimée d’Arault blew a kiss to a high window, where a fair maiden sighed, and turned and ran. Tiarnán Iasc quickly swept his winnings into a hat, and backed out of the room, and ran. Anbold the Wolf and Simnell Trout rolled from the bed where they had fallen, swords in hand, as Colum Bán hammered at the door. They swept out, cloaks flying, hurling a spray of coins at the inn-keeper’s lame daughter.

At the docks, as the sky shot molten red and gold across the Eastern horizon, across the hills on the other side of the Tarnemouth Bay, the Shadow shifted at anchor, a greyhound in the slips. They threw gear across the side, stowed it under the oar-benches quickly, quietly, as Nila and Demira made ready to cast off. Léono, running, puffing, his fine gaudy clothes trailing out of his open pack, jumped from the dock as they heaved the oars, at Thorgrim’s cry, and he caught the side by inches, heaved himself over. With a surge, they were away. Arnauld, curled in a ball in the stern, shivered and wept, red eyes looking back over the water and the wake as they left his home behind, his master, and all he had ever known.

They kept the land to starboard, out beyond the ninth wave, catching the wind in their square black sail. The Shadow slipped across the waters, cut the swell. The sail bellied out, they shipped the oars. They reached the open sea, beyond the headlands, the spray leapt at the dragon-prow. Rogrim stood in the bow, the black sword point down at his side, as the sky paled behind them, as they pursued the edge of blue darkness in the West. His body knew the lurch and plunge, his feet found their shift and roll. He threw the edge of his cloak over his shoulder, and leaned forward, staring into the spray and mist, where sea imperceptibly met sky, where night met day. They had almost no provisions. Only Simnell Trout and Tiarnán Iasc had liberated one cask of water and three of wine, a barrel of salt-pork, a sack of turnips, kicked them rolling down the dock as the others ran to help. Arnulf Legless, perched between the barrels, even now measured out water by the wooden ladle, eking it out. They would put in up the coast, near Ellerine, the White City on the Hill. The day was bright, their clothes were stiffening with salt-spray; they looked at each other, the pirates, and fore at their captain, and they exchanged quick smiles of stirring glee.

Aradia sat by Arnauld, her hand on his shoulder, lost in thought. Ewina was beside her, suckling the babe. The others had all taken their habitual places on the shallow benches, their gear stowed underneath. Heverick Kane skipped forward and leaned beside his captain, his eyes bright with the wind and waves. He murmured something to him, and Rogrim the Shadowblade turned, and looked back; he saw his crew, in their accustomed places, or so he supposed. Kane gripped his shoulder. Karlo, before the mast, caught his eye, and tilted his head up. The Shadow flitted across the waves. Fionn Dá Lough began a shanty, and voices joined his, a rolling round of mysterious song with nonsense words, learned long ago from long-gone sailor fathers, who sang it over cribs in Winter. High above, flew a raven and a hawk, riding the world’s wind, out of the dawn.

The small port of Kerveren, East of Ellerine, in the light of evening two days later. Fishing boats at anchor, and a salt-cod soup. On along the pleasant hills, they passed the shining white city, reaching up in stepped levels, stairways running up between cobbled courtyards with fountains, up, up, to the graceful white towers, like a spray of flowers at the head of the bay. Merimée d’Arault spoke a picture of his city to them as they passed, and recited the verses of the Lay of Léonore, who wasted away for love in one of those high towers.

Quiet coves and rolling hills, river-mouths and vineyards, windmills and bustling ports, they passed. Where the Rhennish met the sea, they saw a fleet setting out from Yonne, and curved away out to sea, passing wide beyond them. South-West to the tip of Harronia, with favourable winds, they passed between the Straits of Aliano, and saw the great Temple of the Star of the Sea rising on the mountain off the headland, shining in the dawn. They could see the Baraban coast, white in the gloom, across to the South, and they navigated the Meeting of the Waters, as the calm Middle Sea gave way to the wild Western Ocean. They turned North. On along the coast, past Ernagur’s towering cliffs and rocks thrusting up into the Heavens, the spray rising a hundred feet around them, on they went. Days dawned clear and cold, nights brought frost to beards and ice to seal the water cask. The stars were bright above, and Taril discoursed on the constellations; the Silver Road across the sky, the Morning Maiden off in the East above the land as the little lights winked out one by one, as the Heavens turned deep dark blue, then slowly paled. They put in before Sotaris, and in the high fortified little port-town of Temeris, they saw the Knights of the Flame, the Sun Templars, the black-robed Justicars, in the streets. They kept their heads down. They ate buttery crescent-rolls and drank mulled cider in a chilly tavern with sawdust on the floor, high narrow windows, a Sathar-Flame burning in a great censer in the centre of the room. From Daserne, a sheltered spot before you reach the shipping lines that come out of the Great City of Adra, where smugglers and pirates meet, they took on provisions and loaded up with water and ale. There they had to wait a week, for the storms of Winter were starting, and the wind was not favourable, and they twiddled their thumbs in a great beer-hall, where a dancing bear sadly plodded to the sound of skirling pipes.

In that week, Rogrim and Aradia had a room up under the roofs, thick dark beams cutting the sloping ceiling. It snowed. They lay under woollen blankets, a small fire banked in the grate, and she forced him to start the Practices of the Hidden Way. He couldn’t concentrate, and her dancing dark eyes in the firelight teased him. They sat naked, cross-legged, face to face, the flickering glow burnishing their skin, and he couldn’t even close his eyes, let alone still his mind; only when he lay in her arms, his breathing slowing gradually, his whole body glowing, could he ever think of nothing at all.

When the weather turned, Karlo roused them all from their torpor before the dawn. He’d been to the docks every day, furs wrapped against the snow, and tasted the wind, gauged the light. Now they could leave, for the last two stages. Across the iron-dark Winter sea they scudded, beneath the stormy skies, racing before the wind, whitecaps whipped up, the Shadow pitching and rolling with the swell. They made Trelor Port, two days off the Adraean coast, and stayed a night in that strange town, where many of the lads went to visit the famous weapon-smiths, and lust after Trelorian steel longswords, or spiked maces with elongated square heads, wielded in two hands by the knights of that island. They had no money, but what little they had carried from Negalia. Taril became accustomed to the sidling approach, the bashful glance, the wheedling request. He only ever advanced them a florin at a time, enough to pay for food and drink, the night’s lodging; Heverick Kane made a case for a coat of mail, but was rebuffed.

On around Trelor, and past the Isle of Eld, where they live in forts of vitrified stone, and all is rocky passes in high mountains, with nary a bit of grass or a tree, and the people keep themselves to themselves. Gekkeli Dhrineh, of all people, had been there once, and still remembered the great hall of the tiny keep where the strange pale people had hosted him, still remembered the lord’s iron bracelets and cold eyes, and the pale and shapely body of his daughter, uncovered in her tower room on a high bed piled with furs, under the eyes of her pet tawny owl. The ladies of fortune egged him on in the telling, when he glanced at them and cleared his throat, and soon there were tales exchanged of conquests and bedmates all around the Middle Sea, and all up the Harronan Western Coast, and ribald laughter, and roars. Merimée had possibly had the most lovers, but he was discreet; Anbold the Wolf, ugly as he was, could boast of women in the most ports, of children in many, of angered husbands in not a few.

From Eld and Trelor, they went North-North-West, and the weather grew fresher and milder, and rain swept down across them. Massed thunderheads on the horizon never reached them, and the sky at evening was a slipping stream, with silver shoals of clouds in its wide and limpid light. On the third morning from leaving Eld in their wake, there was an anticipatory stir. They knew this journey, knew it well. They knew that before noon, they would raise the Isle of Mists. They would sight the green hills of Ariú. The men shaved and trimmed beards in their shirtsleeves that morning, and drew out creased clothes they had kept free from salt-stains and rime. Heverick Kane donned his blue surcoat, with the golden lion of his family on it, its paw resting on the head of a dragon couchant. They dressed as if to meet a long-lost lover. Fionn sang, songs of home, songs of homecoming. As the sun rose to its height in the Southern sky, it was lost behind a haze of clouds, and only appeared as a glowing ball of pale light in the soft grey, from time to time. The Negalians and the other ones from the Lostlands far away looked on indulgently as the Tíriani, and the Lochlannach, strained forward, crowding to the prow. Rúairí Óg Crannoch climbed the mast, eager to be the first. And there, was there a dark stain on the horizon? Rúairí shouted “Ho! Ariú abú! Tíranann!”, and a cheer went up, and Karlo roared to them to unship the oars, to speed them in. They crested the waves, the ship fairly flew, the oars sending her skipping along the surface of the grey sea. There was a fine mist of rain in the air, that left a skein of droplets on woollen tunics, on hair, on eyelashes. The raven and the hawk were suddenly aloft, and flying for land.

Rogrim took his place in the bow, Thorgrim pounded the oarstrokes, Karlo roared each pull of the oars. Aradia slipped to his side, her sailor-love, and gripped his arm, as he looked ahead, trying to pierce the softness of the mist and rain, that hung in visible sheets, veils of ever increasing opacity before them, as the land seeped across the horizon, grew broader, gained relief and contour. There now, there were headlands disappearing fainter and fainter behind each other to the West, and to the East, a long low coast. They would reach the land near Maelgwyn’s Head, and follow the coast a little West, before entering between the Arms of Rígana, into the great long harbour of the South, at the head of which, at the mouth of the Sinann, they would come to Aveston, the great port city of Galloia, the seat of the Angathar kings of Ariú for a hundred years, once called Ava’s Dún, when it was a Lochlannach port, and before that, it was Inber Scéne, the beach where the Fír Bolg first landed, and blessed their homecoming. Fionn Dá Lough recited these things, in a high ringing voice, and all were silent, at his incantation. He was raising the land, as a bard should do. As they passed between the Arms of Rígana, he invoked that goddess, and told how the arms that now embraced them were the arms that bent apart the ends of the heavy golden torc, to place it around the neck of Gallos Great-Hearted, to bestow on him the sovereignty of the land of Ariú, as First High King, in the Time of Legends.

On either side of them, the land rose in the mists, low clouds blurring the tops of the green hills, grey hills, they raced between the Arms of the Goddess, and passed a couple of little fishing boats, whose men waved at them as they swiftly surged away. There, a little village nestled in a cove, and oh! a wisp of the smell of turf-fires, little trickles of smoke above the huts. The Tíriani and the Northmen, whose home this also was, were cheering in delight. It had been years. They pulled on their oars with a will, in time to the stroke beaten heavily by Thorgrim, called by Karlo, sweeping them on towards home. All through the early afternoon, they sailed up the harbour, and then, when they sighted the docks on either side of the mouth of the Sinann, when they saw the grey walls rising on the horizon above them, then they made out the dark Keep of Kings on the hill, and saw, as they drew closer, the huddled, serried houses, roofs of slate on the high houses, wet thatch on the low, the grey stone city, as it emerged from the gloom of the soft mist, all was damp and dripping, the rain began sheeting down now, imperceptibly heavier, then palpably heavy. Rainwater ran down their straining faces, they grinned and bore it, pulled again, and tilted, and cut the oar into the water, and pulled again, clenched teeth, rain running into their mouths, their hair slick to their heads. Veils of grey fell away, and revealed the docks, the masts, the hulls of a hundred ships. And Fionn stood up before the mast, and boomed the Song of Landing, the “Song of Amergin”, which that druid of the Fír Bolg was said to have chanted as they beached their ships on Inber Scéne, the song of the Land, of its beasts, the song that invokes the Fire in the Head, that claims identity with Ariú. As the last words of the incantation resounded, in the Oldest Tongue, as was spoken before even the Children of Anú or the Iron-Folk of the Everni had returned to the green shore, Rogrim felt a surge and rising in his chest. He almost understood the words, they stirred a thrill in his belly, and kindled in his head. He was coming home.

I just had the strangest experience.

I was working on a translation, correcting it for XXXXXX. It’s a translation into English of a 1930s French Guide to Beauty. She had warned me that it was precious and over the top, and full of repetitive nonsense, and it was. But as I read it, and her very skilful translation, I added flourishes and little grace notes to it, little filigrees of beauty to the words; the me of before would indeed have found it frivolous and ridiculous, but after watching Dangerous Beauty, last night, (and falling asleep an hour in), and after talking to you about Glamour and Mirror Magick, I found that this text was not at all as superficial and light as it appears, and indeed it seems to contain Deep Magick. It speaks to the Art of the Courtesan. It speaks to that feminine magic that the French understand so well, and which has not disappeared. And I thought I must send you the translation (about half the text is done now).

But as I sat at my desk, in this quiet and lovely time, where XXXXXX and I are both peacefully working side by side without speaking, I was finding it hard to focus on the words, swimming on the screen in front of me. Only through an intense effort of will could I stay awake and conscious. It’s been like this for some days. Sometimes, I can apply myself to tasks, indeed I sweep through the house as if possessed of a New Wind, an Energy, an ability to see what is not useful, what is messy, what is decrepit and rotten, and rip it away, sweep it away, with a batting of the back of my hand. I stand taller, I walk more swiftly, I am capable.

I thought : “there has been never any doubt about my ability to achieve almost anything, should I apply my mind to it; it’s only the application of the mind that is problematic”. And then, I thought, why should I sit in dark and squalour, when all I need do is blast away cobwebs and swirl a broom, when all I need do is gather the detritus that mocks us, lying in uncared-for piles, the dust of years, the accumulation of useless clutter, in my mind, my heart, my living room. Why not be swift and ruthless, for once, instead of lying in useless contemplation, waiting for my life to happen, waiting for the Other to take things in hand, knowing she will not, both of us passive aggressively letting the other fail in their duty, resenting, bitter-tasting on the tongue, letting the rot build up and lie in wait? I have been so long wallowing in the mire of myself, in the stagnant pool in which I contemplate my own reflection … There must be fresh water, from the Source. There must be a Bright Wind, that carries all before it.

On Christmas Eve, Lughaidh and I took our walk. I thought only to check the boundaries, to have a look. But the weather was crisp and cold, and dusk lasted all afternoon, and in the bright burning leaves against the soft greys and greens, I saw the Past, the Present, and the Time to Come. I bore my staff I found at the Faery Market in the Summer, Lughaidh his Sorcerer’s stick, with the gnarled top, cut now to his size, which I had thought was mine, but he has appropriated.

We walked past the hollow tree in which we fed the body of the Toad to the ants, around which they made their hill of black earth, and stripped the bones. We walked among the vines, and then along the Hollow Path. We went to the Menhir, and there we spoke to the Spirits of the Land, and I quietly told them : “I am to be your Steward, and your Guardian, custodian of this Land. I pretend to no lordship, nor no fortune ; I am merely he who comes to carry the torch ahead, and pass it on. This boy you see, who lives half in and out of Thisworld and the Otherwise, he is my heir. I cannot inherit, only hold in trust. He will one day look at all of this, and say, “This is mine, this is my place, I am of this.”

And then we walked on, and threaded our devious way through the vines to the rise on which squats the Fallen Tower, the Windmill o’ the Mage Kings. Lughaidh said we must climb up, and we found our way up through thorns and brambles, up the path that is worn by other feet than ours, too. We are not the only ones who go to make observance. The crooked door open, we descend into the green-molded Well of Souls : there the holes around the door where nest the Parliament of Owls, who have seen me, and swooped down upon me, who have studied me and loved me, and who have come to my window on a night of Eclipse and called their hollow howl to draw me out to play. I shuddered and refused, for I would not have found my way back, should I have run bare-chested, bare-footed, into that intoxicating night.

In front of Lughaidh, who accepted with only a few little questions, I drew out my grey-horn-handled knife, and held the staff in the left hand, and with the right, the blade, I drew the wounds in the world, and I called in the Quarters, on a rise and fall and rise again of music, I call ye in “Bel, Crom, Lir, Dis” … The Four Fathers. In each quarter, with the blade, I draw the cross (North, South, East, West) and I encircle it deiseail. The Celtic Cross is far older than Christianity : the four-armed equal cross within a circle. This is one of my “pentacles”. The others are the Triskele, and the three-pointed knot. I spoke a spell of welcoming and inviting in. Lughaidh watched, rapt. I told him he too would one day know to do this.

Christmas Day, and all its perennial enchantment came and went, and on that, I pass.

But on the Feast of Stephen, the 26th, I went out at dusk, and went tuathalach, widdershins, around the boundaries of the immediate Domaine, and went to the Druid Rock in the Glade, below the slope of the wood. There I called upon them all ; the Angelic Powers of the East, the Light, Saint Michael and Saint Raphael, Hermes, and Odinn is there too, the Wanderer, good old friend. His version of it is more tricksy, more subtle and ironic. The Angels are Blasting Light of All-in-One, and I like little to deal with them. But Saint Michael has made himself known, and wishes to be a part of the Work. I must grant Him that, for when an Archangel speaks, it would be well to listen. In the South, I called all the Living Beasts, the Souls of Blood and Embodied Fire : the Torc na Coille, the Fia Bairr (the Boar of the Woods, and the Horned Stag) the Toad of the Marshy Ground, the Screech Owl, the Dame Blanche ; these are Real and Fleshly, and yet they are also mystical avatars of the Land of the Domaine. In the South, the Living Souls, the Animal Kingdom, the Fauns and Fauna. The screech, the bellow, the howl. These are my Calendar Beasts. To the West, the Sunset Lands, the Fae : here the Good Green Folk, the Hidden Folk, the playful dancing presences just outside the line of sight.

I had not realised, before, to what extent they have been always with me. I had not realised, had no idea, that I was of them. That in some important way, I am not the child of my parents, not the child of the Sunlit World, but that I was born between the Dark and Light, in the half-light of the dusk, that I always did perform my solemn dance, alone, to music only I could hear. That my words and visions, from earliest childhood, spoke of another life that happened far away, under Other Stars, that do not set, that do not twinkle : bright pinpoints in the velvet night, the gathering gloaming. Under those eternal trees, that never lose their leaves, but only change from green and pale to the Fires of Autumn, and back again, in a wheel of seasons that we cannot see ; there is a Far Home that is mine, that I have never known, that I have never seen, only in the wildest and the most vibrant and violent of dreams.

When I think, sometimes, of taking ship into the West, to join my own people once more, I weep bitterly, for I never never will. I have had moments, opportunities. There have been times when I might disappear. When I felt them, close, close as breath, close as my shadow, but unseen. They were next to me, then, and their chiming music sounded, on the edge of hearing, and I rose, and nearly went. But in the end, the World called me back, and I could not leave the ones I loved. I could not leave this life, for all its pain and frustrations, its sterile dull and aching moments of impotent yearning. For I learned to see the unfurling magic of a flower in every fleeting moment of the turning of the light upon the walls of cities, of the crisp silvering of frost upon the grass, or the crackle of the hearthfire and the singing kettle boiling to make tea. I learned that all these day-to-day magicks and mysteries, the homely, the wholesome, the nourishing ; these were mine too, if only I would accept them. In Elfhame, there is nothing comforting and cosy ; there is only terrible beauty, and enchanting song, wild revels and dreamy wandering all the night. There is never a warm bed, a hearty meal, a child’s hot sleepy limbs that you enfold as they murmur into dreams, comforted by your steady presence. None of this belongs to the Fae, and how they envy it. Their breasts are only perfect, they give no milk. Their sexes are only furled flowers and proud stamens, dripping with the ichor of unimaginable pleasure ; they bear no children, they are unfruitful. Just as I am. But for whatever strange design they had, they left me here among the Living Folk, and left me gifts and talents, and then left me to myself. I would sink or swim, depending on how well I learned to Pass. I did. It nearly killed me, but I did.

And now, though years have gone by of merely passing, merely trying to survive according to the laws of Thisworld, I realise that I cannot renounce my nature and my inheritance either, but must be blessed and cursed to live between the worlds and cross back and forth the Hedge. Walk between the Worlds, and lead others on their journeys too, for I am that rarest of things, a Native Guide, the Familiar and the Strange, how one becomes the Other, so easily, so liquidly, so quicksilver, so elusive. That haunting strain of music, that little phrase that dallies just beyond our common hearing : I must not grasp at it, but only tune the ear to Nowhere, turn the Sight to vague and soft, and then I feel and hear and see the Things that go on all around us, around me, and they are mine and I am theirs. But I am my human family’s too, and there never was more Human, than the one who had to learn it as a Stranger.

We are more human, we live the joys and pains, the agonies and ecstasies more vividly, more raw, because we were never meant for these brute days, these nights of sweat and lust and blood; the Fae do not lust, nor mourn, they only tremble in an ever-yearning agony of Desire, that can never be satisfied, that can never be extinguished. Do I make myself clear? I hope not. I am not clear, and simple. I am Hidden, behind layers and layers and veil after veil, and having once shed them all in a ritual dance, it becomes apparent there is no substance underneath, but a swirl of dead leaves and twigs, Autumn’s leavings, and whoever me is, is already gone, vanished, always-already somewhere else.

Do I make sense? I know not, only the deepest, darkest senses, only the ones we learn early to discount, as leading us astray. The Ignis Fatuus, the Fool’s Fire, that lights our way out upon the marsh, away from the path, and leads us to our doom. Their Doom. We are the ones that hold the lantern, not the ones it leads astray. We are the strays, the Hidden Ways, the Fae.

And finally, all that being said, an envolée lyrique, there is the North, the Stone, the Tomb, the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, where we lie down where all the ladders start. The silence of the grave. The chthonos, the Underworld. This is the one that scares them the most, and this is the one they are all warning me about. Because She, the Veiled One, the Dark Lady, this is her Realm. Death, my Bride. Hella? Hekate? Persephone? All, and none. Black Annis, Mother Crone, Baba Yaga : they warned us about Her. But we know better. We know that long ago, there was a deal made with the Dark, and that only those of us who are Chosen can venture there, to pay the price and claim the prize. Most will lose their way, and that way madness lies. Most will die of horror, and, confronted by the rotting corpses and the carrion birds, the dank chill of the Tomb, Her Womb, will shudder and shut the door, and hang up charms against Her and Her many Daughters, for the Night is not their element. Most want to live by Day, and banish all thought of the long oblivion through which we all shall pass; She is the Void, and the Abyss : we have gazed into it, and It into us, and we liked what we saw.

They warn you: there is a Dark Thing that sucks your lifeblood, it feeds upon you, your vital fluids are sapped, this way leads to disaster and destruction and despair. What little they know! If I open a wound upon my breast and bring the Darkling Bird to suckle at it, am I not blessed? If I leave my window open at night, and the Screech Owl, and the wildly wheeling bats, the Death-moth, the Conqueror Worm ; if all these come to my Call, the Toad, the Serpent, the crawling, lowly things, the things of Earth and Darkness, do they not see that I am Gifted, Chosen, Wise beyond compare? For who can call upon the Powers of Darkness in full knowledge that there is no Evil here, no wrong, no malice, only that which goes so far beyond those petty concepts. This is the Great Dark Before, the Silence After. This is the Night, Lila. This is the Formless, that came before the Firmament. This is the Chaos, the Materia, the Rotting, Fruitful Matter from which all blooms. Spiders weave upon our skin, and skittering beetles spew from our mouths.

The Ancients knew it, and the Few, today. This is not performative Dark Aesthetics. This is pourriture, and rot, and decay, and the End of All Things. This is to embrace the glorious transience, and the here and now, sub specie aeternitatis. Small beneath the sky at night. In darkened sylvan amphitheatre, I, light headed, heavy footed, cast eyes to the Heavens, and reel beneath their void expanse. The Night. You know my thoughts on this ; it is where we are begotten, born, and die. It is our Last Home, the only one that will never cast us out. Under the cover of the Dark, beyond the Veil, we dream, we fuck, we whisper our names to each other, for nothing yet can take this away from us.

And so that night, I went down to the Spring, to that little altar to Manannán, my patron, my foster father. There I called him in, and called in Aisling, my fetch-mate, my companion : in meditation and vision she showed herself to me, all arrayed in Autumn, flaming reds and browns, her hair alight with bronze and fire. She lay me down among the crisp dead leaves, and her berry-brown raiment did she open, and cast off, and her long lithe pale limbs did she entwine me with, and her wild-honey kisses did she bestow, and the crisp fur of her was like the moss upon the trees, and wept for me. But for all her lover-sister-companionable embraces, she knew I had to go much deeper and much darker, later that night. I drank a bottle of stolen wine, and reserved some to pour out for the Dead.

In moonlight, in freezing cold, I went down between the mere and the frog-pond, and to the Ruins. There, where in the Summer it was hidden by the flourishing weeds and wildflowers, the Winter had laid bare the entrance, a broken doorway set deep, now, in the mound that Time has erected around what’s left of the old keep. A deep door into the Undercroft. I had feared to go there before. Superstition, or a worry about how solid those walls are, about falling debris and masonry. Not now though. I went to it gladly. We had explored it, a little, by daylight with the children for our first time. I knew the lay of the land.

Inside, the floor is wet earth, now, oozing mud from weeks of rain ; around, the cold damp stone is solid, the dirt floor mounting towards it in each corner. But towards the back of this underchamber, the floor rises, a pile of debris. In the middle of it, an opportune rock, a place to sit solidly ; I did, and faced the doorway, above which is a murder hole. The pale-lit door back out into the World reminded me of a great keyhole, and I sat in the midst of the Dark, and looked towards this weak and silvery light from the door. And in my right hand, the grey-horn-handled knife, and in my left, the Faery Staff, fire-hardened. I sat in meditation, and let the Dark and Cold come in.

I sat in perfect stillness, and silence, and then my vision flickered out, my eyes half closed, and I could see nothing, but only Darkness Visible. I whispered, chanted, called Her in. Invocation. Drips of frigid water echoed in the corners of the chamber. I was in Death’s Antechamber, I knew once more what it was to be a Soul that patiently awaits its Incarnation. I felt soft veils of cold, cold silk sweep round me. I felt a whisper, rising, unutterable silence. I spoke to Her. I went to her, not as a supplicant and subject, but as a proud Magician and Warrior. I recited to Her all my titles, all my Traditions, all my Works of Hands and Days, for she does not wish me for an acolyte or a blind slave ; no, she welcomes me, a prodigal son at last come home. A brother, a comrade, a lover. I intoned my titles and achievements, to show Her, yes, I am a worthy mate for you.

There was a soft whisper of wind around us now, even within the Chamber. I felt the Night draw breath, and then exhale, and Her quiet chill breath upon the back of my neck. I threw myself into Her embrace, and it felt like Home. And I felt my body sway with the sublime power of it, the mystery and the madness of it. I bowed beneath its weight, and then leaned forward, as if my chin was drawn by a long slender finger, cold as ice, pale as corpse. And I felt Her kiss. The soft, cold, blast of it, harnessed now into the gentlest of kisses; this is my body, this is my blood ; drink, eat, and be merry, for tomorrow, we die.

I felt her kiss, even as I reached for it, yearned for it. Her cold and speaking tongue slithered into my mouth, and the pale and freezing life within sought echo in the Outside, and found it. And then, once done, I turned from the stone seat, and struggled up through the “hole in the Ritual Chamber”, above. I planted my staff as I clmbed, and struggled out through bindweed and ivy, and then brandished my knief int he RItual Chambner; bursting out of the “HOle in the Ground” I came back up into the air that seeme so suddenly crystal cold and Clear. I was in the Ritual Chamber, under the Moon, once more. A bird fluttered and burst out of ivy and bays to flutterng explosion off into the Nihght. There were hootings and holerings. I cast the Circle again, and thanked na, marbh, no o pj

My Love. I can barely keep conscious; the Dark is pulling me in iince again. I myst wwrllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

[the communiqué ends here, trailing off into the Dark of the Unconscious …]

I do not wish to rehearse here every detail of my writing life; it would take my entire autobiography to do that, and I have no interest in that project for the moment. What I want to explore is this recent conundrum that has beset me: a sort of self-inflicted writer’s block. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write; my mind is teeming with subjects: three or four ideas for novels that I’m working out, at least two non-fiction books, countless germs of essays. It’s not that I lack confidence in my craft – I’ve come to accept, without bravado, that I’m really very good. Excellent, even. It’s not even that I fear not finding an outlet, not getting published, experiencing rejection. I’ve been there and I’ve done that, and it doesn’t scare me: never before has it been easier to take matters into one’s own hands and publish online (and I have, on Substack and elsewhere), or to set up a miniature publishing house to put one’s work out there.

(I’ve done that too, and I’m very proud of the result, which you can have a look at here: Unreal City on Goodreads. If you like what you see, please do buy it, it’s great. It’s available from all disreputable outlets, including A-Mammon-zon, but the very best would be to order it from your local indie bookshop, or order a copy direct from me, which comes with fulsome dedication and personal seals, stamps, and sigils, lavishly applied)

It’s not even that I fear I won’t find an audience: I’m resigned to the fact that some very few strange people, now and then, will find my work and absolutely love it, read it like I desperately wished it to be read in my secret heart, and hardly anyone else at all will. It is almost certainly doomed to remain a recondite pleasure.

This is closer to the problem though. I love writing, and I love creating mood and mythos around my work; I love making the podcasts I’ve made, the videos, the blog – my own weird little world (you can find it all here: A Tree of Links). However, for the last two or three years, and at certain other times in my life, I have forbidden myself from engaging in these creative pursuits from which I derive such joy and satisfaction. I do let slip a poem now and then; or an artful combination of words and image that I publish on Instagram; maybe a comment on another person’s post which has inspired me, and that I let meander on a bit too long and then turn into a post in its own right. Scribbled lines in my ever-present notebooks. A ceremonial poem to mark a family occasion. No sustained effort though. No bigger projects.

I do not let myself write, because writing doesn’t earn me any money. My family finances have been precarious, and apparently it’s frowned upon not to adequately feed and clothe one’s children. It’s a genuine conundrum. Without pouring massive time and effort not only into writing, but into online community-building, branding of myself, marketing, advertising, travelling to events and readings, there is no way that writing could become a viable source of income for me. There is also no way to skip all that “building” part, where one invests, earning nothing, in the hope of a pay-off, someday. And even then …

I know the economics of the thing all too well: it is almost impossible to make even a modest living purely from writing and writing-adjacent activities these days, as a mid-list, slightly esoteric author. Indeed, it would appear that the whole idea of the “professional writer” is not exactly something that we have lost; we never really had it in the first place: it was actually just a very strange blip that lasted through most of the twentieth century. Before that, almost all “serious” writers had patrons, scrounged money off their friends and families, had rich families in the first place, published privately or by subscription (yes, like Kickstarter), or were actually more like journalists than writers, in the sense that their primary publishing venues for their bestselling fiction were the pages of journals and newspapers, where they were paid by the word or the line for their serialised thrills. Basically, they already had the equivalent of the Hollywood adaptation or the Netflix deal. That’s right, The Strand Magazine was Netflix.

I was lucky though. I had given up on the idea of “making a living” as a writer many years ago – just as I was trying to embark on a serious career as a writer, as it happens. It was in my early days in Paris, when I was working in the bookshop on the Avenue de l’Opéra (it was the year The Da Vinci Code came out; Paris’s first Starbucks had just opened right across from our shop; it was the summer of the first great murderous heatwave of the twenty-first century in France: Signs of the Times, all). I was living in a garret up under the roofs; I was drinking cheap wine by the Seine at night; I was falling in love, over and over again. I was doing everything right. More on all of this another time, if I can stomach it. Anomaly in Paris. Just like all the other boys …

It was also the year – or was it the next? – that John Banville won the Booker Prize for The Sea. I was delighted. He was one of my literary heroes. I pressed it on many customers in the bookshop, who had come to depend on me for my latest recommendations, like a sort of book-sommelier. “And what is Madame in the mood for this afternoon? I have a cheeky little vintage from Siri Hustvedt that might pair well with the erudite melancholy and ennui I can see in Madame’s eyes?” I admired Banville’s work intensely: there were lines in it I knew by heart, symbolic and mythological schema that dazzled me. This was what a serious writer was supposed to be like. Unfortunately, I met him soon after, when he came to give a reading at the Irish Cultural Centre in the Latin Quarter, an old building that had once housed the Irish College, for Catholic seminarians fleeing English oppression to the Continent, and had also once housed me – for the first few months of that first summer. Again, more on that another time. Banville read quite drearily and self-regardingly, and the passage he chose, with its particular insistence on the voyeuristic, queasily inappropriate erotics in the relationship between its two characters, made me sink into my chair with an all-consuming cringe. He seemed pruriently smug, too, about his own “transgressiveness”, and the whole thing was just embarrassing. I can’t even remember which book it was, and perhaps I’m imagining it, but I think it’s a fair characterisation of a lot of his later work, when it’s dealing with sex (which it most often is). Afterwards, I went up to get a different one of his books signed, one I had brought with me for the purpose, and stood in the queue. I had composed in my head what I considered to be a really good line to deliver when meeting a favourite author for the first time: “I first encountered your books when I was much too young for them, and thankfully I have never quite gotten over it.” Something about that now seemed not arch, but creepy. One of the characters in the passage he had read had been a child. I handed over my book when I got to the front, and fumbled over my bon mot as he scribbled a vague signature. He looked up and frowned, said “Ha?” Then shook his head and barked a short sharp dismissive laugh. “Oh right, so.” He handed the book back to me and I took it and fled. He did not seem like a nice man.

This was not the lesson, however, that was to prove so valuable to me (although yes, it did teach me that it was better to not be a creepy aul’ bollocks, and probably better never to read at a live event, or to meet your readers at all). In fact, this had come some months earlier. In the wake of the Booker, Banville had been interviewed by the Sunday Times. This was one of Ireland’s best-regarded authors of literary fiction, at the height of his powers and celebrity, and now, with the Booker, his success. He told the interviewer that writing had never earned him more than enough to pay for, say, a family holiday once a year, and that the vital conditions for a writing life were to have a) an understanding spouse who also earned a good living (which he did), and b) a day job. Admittedly, his day job was as literary editor of the Irish Times, so a pretty good gig for a writer. But still. I remember being shocked: this was one of the top Irish writers of the time, and he couldn’t make a living from his writing! I realised then and there that I never would. One might think, perhaps, of the success twenty years later of an Irish writer like Sally Rooney: generally considered a “serious” and literary writer, but far more of a bestseller than Banville ever was. However, her work is much more accessible than Banville’s, less self-consciously “high-brow” (I say this without judgement on either of them; it’s just the way it is). And she has the Netflix adaptation, doesn’t she?

And so, at the time, I continued working in the bookshop, and hammering away at my first novel during my free time. I was immersed in literature, reading constantly; I was revelling in the bohemian life of being young and poor in Paris, hanging out with poets and artists and the wonderful team of young, international, and eccentric colleagues I had in the bookshop. All the conditions were in place. I finished the novel, after agonising over how to manage the ending, writing and rewriting it: I remember so vividly that moment, sitting in a café on my street, typing the last few lines. I announced the news proudly to my girlfriend at the time, and she punctured my elation with a sarcastic: “oh, I suppose we’re going to be rich now, are we?” Reader, I did not marry her. Neither, of course, did I get rich. I switched jobs around that time, and became a lecteur, a language assistant, in a Paris university. It was even better suited to the writing life: I had very little preparation to do for my classes, which were basically just conversation and practice of oral English.

I remember printing out my cover letters and sample chapters when there was no-one around in the English department staffroom, assembling my submission packets, sending them off to agents for whom I had some introduction – they represented friends of mine, or they were friends of friends. They all answered, kindly but firmly, that they did not represent the kind of work I offered (they were more into plot-driven “commercial fiction”, which my novel was not), or they thought it was good writing, but just weren’t “in love with it”, and only took on work they really felt passionate about; etc etc. I was a bit crushed, but kept going. Started another novel, thinking that first one might just be for the desk-drawer. I could see that it was a bit of a classic “angsty young man” début novel: very self-conscious, very introspective and reflective; not very much really happened in it. I was really trying to be literary, and the effort was too apparent. Even my friends, my fellow writers, found it lacking: often they criticised the unsympathetic protagonist; he was not “relatable” enough; why should we care what happened to him? I was adamant though, that it was written that way on purpose: he’s supposed to be kind of awful, and not very proactive. That’s what the novel’s about. I did get one reader – an ex-girlfriend from Ireland, who was in the process of becoming a very successful writer – who told me that all the things other people disliked about it were, to her, the strengths of the book. Sometimes, one gets a reader like that, who understands exactly one’s intentions. Sadly, she had no power to make something happen for it, and I didn’t insist. Maybe later, as she won more prizes, scored more publications, she could have made an introduction, or passed it on to a publisher or an agent. But I was not then, and am still not now, any good at actually following up on valuable contacts or avenues to aid in my success. Never mind the fact, for example, that at that time I still had an open door to a job in Hollywood, as a writer’s assistant on a series, with a possibility to pitch a script or two. Again, perhaps I’ll write more on that another time. I had decided, having tested it, that the Hollywood life was not for me; I had rather wither in poverty and obscurity in a Paris garret than go to glamorous parties in the Hollywood Hills. My friend and mentor, who held that door open for me still, would laugh about this with me: we were just very different people. When he read my novel, he told me he didn’t really feel like he could give me feedback: he compared it to someone who specialises in writing bubble-gum pop tunes being asked what he thought about a modern jazz concept album.

I’m getting lost in these reminiscences and digressions: on every link of these chains, a heart does dangle, of a day that I have loved, and wronged. Each one could be the occasion for a whole other essay: perhaps the autobiographical impulse is in fact alive in me. Perhaps I have a lot to share, a lot to say. And this is, in fact, the heart of the problem.

I’ll pass more swiftly over the time that came next: I was tempted back into academia, discovering research and falling in love all over again. I kept thinking: the life of a university professor surely offers time and space to read and write. Surely I could write fiction there, too, as many have done before me. I continued on the second novel, then wrote another that grew very much out of my research, and became Unreal City. But these forays into fiction started to feel guilt-ridden: after all, wasn’t I supposed to be writing my PhD thesis? It paralysed me: I couldn’t work on the thing I was supposed to (it felt like homework, but homework that is due in three, four, five years – crushing, ominous, abstract, open-ended), but I couldn’t allow myself to work on the things I wanted to. I finished my PhD, which I only managed to do after the arrival of my son, my first child, put it into context: I was no longer the centre of my own world, he was; I wasn’t having an existential crisis, I just needed to do my damn job. So I did.

I tried to get a permanent teacher-researcher job (the equivalent of “tenure”, but the French system is very different), and couldn’t. There was nothing going that fitted my research profile. I ended up getting offered a good job in a private school in central Paris, as teacher at lycée level (high-school) and head of the Native English programme; I had small classes of wonderful students who were fluent English speakers (either bilingual or very close to it), with lots of teaching hours. It was challenging and rewarding – I thought I must take this steady, prestigious job to support my family (we had just had our second child, a daughter). And surely, it would also leave me time to write…? But it did not. One (jealous) toddler, one newborn baby, a lot of hours of challenging, stimulating classes, administrative responsibilities, planning trips and outings, syllabi, entrance exams … No, I did not have time to write. And I was beginning to think I might have to give up on it altogether, and “settle” for “just” being a teacher. I loved being a teacher. And I did then and do now consider it a noble, meaningful, wonderful profession. But it’s HARD.

Something happened a few years in. Just after my fortieth birthday. And this, I definitely must write more at length about: my wife organised that my birthday present would be everyone chipping in to send me on a writer’s retreat for a week. I was seriously considering the idea that I might just have to grow up and put away childish things, and realise I was not a writer, and never would be. After all, I was hardly writing. But things changed. That week changed me, deeply. And then I blew up my life completely. And then COVID happened, and helped me ease out of that job that had become untenable (not because of the students or the work: purely because of the administration and a few very toxic colleagues who didn’t mix very well with my flare of mental illness … another story for another day). And at the same time, we left Paris and came to live in the South-West of France, in Dordogne. Having negotiated my redundancy, I was entitled to two years of unemployment benefits, and I made the most of it, managing the renovations on the house we had bought, setting up my little publishing company and putting out my first book myself. That really was an amazing thrill. I had lined up a number of other writers whose work I wanted to publish too. I launched the book in Cork, surrounded by the whole supporting cast of my early life, friends, family, even my old English teacher; I had another launch party in Paris, where the staff from one of my favourite bars rolled out a themed menu of fin de siècle cocktails (absinthe punch in a silver tureen!), where we screened a short film by my cover artist that dovetailed beautifully with my book. A heady time. But I did not have the follow-through to really sell my book. I moved enough copies to cover my costs, and I knew that that was not too bad at all.

Meanwhile, I launched an educational project, The Hedge School, in which I offered English classes to kids and adults that were based around playful activities, walks in Nature, games, art, conversation, storytelling, poetry, theatre. It was a good idea. Everyone thought so. But in that first year, I only had a handful of students, and it wasn’t enough. I took on private students through an online platform; I took on teaching hours in the university in Bordeaux (the equivalent of adjunct teaching, in North American parlance). I loved it. I had been teaching a full course-load in a Paris university too, during my transitional phase, staying there three or four days a week. Teaching literature, translation, what I loved. I was even – as it was a private university – allowed to be research supervisor for Masters students, and to teach Masters seminars. These university jobs – although they were not permanent – were perhaps my favourite teaching that I’ve ever done. My students agreed. I remember one of them, in one of my favourite classes, in the week before Christmas when I had done a class with them on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, who came up to me and asked “Monsieur, do you like what you do?”. I asked her, “What do you think?”; she said, “I think you adore it, and that’s why you’re our best teacher.” I have never had a greater compliment. Yes, I am good at it. Because of my knowledge, my experience, my gifts in communication … but above all, because I adore it.

So I was teaching three days a week in the university in Bordeaux, running my classes on Wednesdays and Saturdays, teaching individual students online several nights a week, I was taking on academic and literary translations when I could. I was still trying – vaguely – to sell my book, filling individual direct orders. However, even with all of these things put end to end, I wasn’t making enough money, and my unemployment benefits were about to run out. I was benefitting from a scheme to encourage entrepreneurs whereby one could get full benefits while still making money as long as one was self-employed. And they say the French have no word for entrepreneur ! My wife – who is also self-employed as a translator – said, basically, “well that’s all very nice, but now are you going to do something to make money?” (it reminded me forcibly of that long-ago sarcastic “oh I suppose we’re going to be rich now, are we?”). She didn’t believe that my literary projects were ever going to make any real money (and I was pretty sure she was right). She also didn’t believe that my Hedge School project really had legs. I disagreed, but again I was confronted with the fact that my idea was good, my execution was good, but I just wasn’t good at marketing and communication, at finding clients. So many people told me they would like to sign up, or sign their kids up. Hardly any of them actually did. And so, while I was negotiating this financially precarious moment, with a lot of balls to keep in the air, I could not justify spending time “just writing”, either for my blog or on longer projects. It felt like I was … cheating on my work. Cheating on my family. How dare I do something that required significant effort, but made no money?

And so I would limit myself to writing little micro-blogging pieces, little texts I would publish on Instagram and FB under my “literary page” (The Hedge School there too). Occasionally, I would make a short video to upload there and to YouTube. I even dabbled in Tiktok for a while, but could never really see the point of it, for me. I would write short poetic fragments, and pair them with a picturesque or mysterious image, and send them out into the Sea of Stuff like messages in bottles, hoping that they would come to rest on stranger shores, and be found by someone who did not even realise they had been looking for just that. And it did happen, from time to time. I would quite regularly get messages from total strangers who were touched, moved, inspired by these little things I would write. But I wasn’t allowed to start another novel, or to get into one of those research-heavy book-length essays I had in mind.

This is the thing: I did have projects. I do. I have a sequel to Unreal City planned. I have a straight-up fantasy novel half-written (of a genre I might call “Poetic Fantasy”, in the vein of writers like LeGuin, Vance, Wolfe, Cooper); I have a whole series of “contemporary occult fiction” in my mind; I have a book on the Theory of Magic, and a book on the concept of Adventure (drawing on my PhD thesis) bubbling away. But I cannot start writing them. I do not let myself do it. It would be a betrayal.

The answer – flawed as it is – to my conundrum was to buckle down and once again get a day job. I thought I had escaped from the quotidian world of ordinary work. I hoped, I prayed, I begged that it might be so. But when, in the space of one year, my various projects didn’t take off, didn’t become sufficient to support my family, I was forced to go back, hat in hand. “Please sir, can I have some more steady employment?” One year wasn’t really enough. I needed more time. I should have got my shit together sooner, started earlier, worked harder, sold better, hustled more. But I did not.

I ended up going back and retaking the very difficult competitive exams required to be a French public-school teacher. I had passed them before, and done stunningly well, then deferred my placement to follow the university research track (this is standard practice). But when I was offered the private school job in Paris, I was forced to renounce my qualification. People (French people) thought I was insane to do so: once you’ve passed one of these exams you become a permanent and pensionable civil servant for good. It’s almost impossible to be fired (or even to quit, it turns out). So I took the exams again (a slightly lighter version for people with doctorates who want to go back to secondary teaching). The first time round, fifteen years ago, I came second in the country (unheard of for a non-French candidate, who usually have a hard time passing at all). This time, I came first. And so I went back to school. Part-time teaching, part-time teacher-training. Strange days. And I came out the end of it, with a placement in a middle-school, teaching 11-14 year-olds basic English. Not ideal. However, then there intervened a deux ex machina, and everything changed again. That’s not the story for today. Maybe not for ever.

Here’s the thing: I got a dog. Two years ago, not long after we moved to our current house, we finally got a dog. A childhood dream, now finally fulfilled. I had never even thought it possible. That’s her in the picture above: Naya. A beautiful hound. A harebrained mutt. She’s wonderful. And while, before, going on long walks around the village, along the river, through the vineyards and up into the hills and forests surrounding us had been a passion, it was an almost guilty one (shouldn’t I be working?), now it became an obligation, a duty. Got to take my dog for a walk! And so, every day, at first, and then as often as I could once I was back to working in schools, I would take her for long rambles through the woods, exploring, discovering, having adventures. At first, I would sometimes listen to music or podcasts, but I realised that this was totally wrong: I needed to be here and present in the World. All of the senses engaged. Observing, feeling, sensing. What I found was that this turned into an incredible kind of walking meditation. My body and my perceptions engaged completely, my mind was free to turn over and over the things that were obsessing me. And more and more, it was my writing. I would be hiking along the crests of hills looking over into the further valleys, finding strange ruins, isolated empty houses, weird glades of haunted atmosphere, and I would be going over the situations and ideas and characters for my novels, or working my way through my theory of magical practice. More and more and more. I would hardly ever even write anything of it down later, though sometimes I did, just a little. I was working on these constructs in Pure Mind: like a Palace of the Ars Memoria, I would elaborate the structure bit by bit, the scenes, settings, dramatis personae: the chapter headings of the magic book, the text of the introduction. And the next day, pick them up again, and work on them again, without actually writing. Writing is cheating on your family, remember? Writing doesn’t earn money. You cannot write, you must not write. Ah, but the mind’s its own place, and can make a Heaven of Hell, or a Hell of Heaven! In your imagination, you are free. If they take away your pen and paper, you shall write only upon the Book of Your Heart.

And now … it is inevitable. There are all of these novels, these essays, these books of ideas, that are clamouring to be written, that are bursting out, that are overflowing. I can no longer stop the flow. The dam is burst. If you are having writer’s block, consider: consolidate the block, make of it an impregnable wall. Forbid yourself from writing. Then see what builds up against that self-imposed obstacle. Then keep up the siege until the walls come tumbling down. You are both the attacking army and the defender. As Yeats said: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” … Quarrel with yourself. Fight against yourself. You are your only worthy foe.

A few days ago, I came home from my walk between the hills and the woods and the vines, and sat down and started writing, the surge that came as the walls fell. Wrote 4,000 words that afternoon. I’ve decided to start with something just a little fun and silly (though, me being me, I’m sure I’ll manage to make it quite un-fun and serious as I go): I had an idea for a “Dark Academia Romantasy” novel, based on my year of teacher-training, but make it teacher-training for Magicians: magic-university meets French bureaucracy and labyrinthine administration, petty rivalries between academics: both a genuine attempt to write in the genre, but also a gentle satire of it, and of the French system and academia and teaching in general. I think it’s going to be quite amusing. For me, at least. And as in everything in life, that’s the most important part. If nothing else, at least amuse yourself.

A few months ago, my Uncle Tony passed away. As on a few other occasions of my family's history (a wedding, the death of my grandmother, the birth of my godson), I felt Called to make a poem.
There is something so powerful to this: to be the one who makes and speaks an occasional poem on a solemn occasion. I want to share it now, and so I do.
You need only know: Tony was predeceased by his incredible and wonderful wife Mary, only a year or so before (I could not be at her funeral, and I could not find the words to say). Their children are Paul, an incredible musician, guitar player, composer, teacher, and Claire, a flame-haired physician, doctor and specialist.

This is what it means to be the poet of the clan.
This is Inspired Speech, the duty and the gift of the File, the Bard.

"Just after I heard the news of Tony's passing this morning, I took my dog Naya out for a walk along the River Dordogne and up through the vines to the woods. As soon as I reached the river, a poem started to bubble up, from words I had used before and words I had yet to use. I couldn't stop to write; the hound pulls hard if I linger! At one point, I tried, but she barked and wouldn't let me concentrate. And so I went along the path between hedges and vines, and rehearsed it to myself in my head, and then began to speak it aloud; it wouldn't wait. And so I just put on my voice recorder and and spoke it out, along the path that skirts the edge of the forest. This is basically how it came out. I changed a few words here and there, but hardly at all. It would not wait; it seemed urgent. Later, and you'll see why, I thought I must make a recording of it, and so went to the river at nightfall and did just that. It's for you, Paul and Claire, first and foremost, but for all your families, our families, my family. I hope you feel what I tried to put into it. And yet I feel I put nothing in that wasn't there: it just demanded to be spoken, and I could do no other."

They asked me to speak a version of the poem at the funeral.
There is no greater honour.

The text is below.

LULLABY

For Tony

Your bed is a boat

So I would tell my restless son

When he could not find his way to sleep

And I’d say, come, we’ll go by river

Your bed is a boat, I’d say

A whisper, sing-song, song-spell

In his ear as I stroked his brow with never the same words twice, but always the same river

Your bed is a boat, and at the slipway at the port, I push you off

The current takes you, gently carries you to midstream

And off you go, the boat turning, swirling, you wrapped up with your blanket and your pillow and your stuffed rabbit

Your bed is a boat, and on you go, down the long, dark river of dreams into the Nightland

Past the mill, past the forests and the hills

Past the vineyards and the golden fields of barley

Past the town upon whose fortified walls and quays hang lanterns glowing ruddy brightly in the night-time

Under the great arches of the stone bridge you go and on down the river into Dream-Country

Beneath a sky that’s elegant with stars

Into the Forests of the Night between whose trees peep strange fantastic creatures and twinkle lights of will-o’-wisps and tinkling laughter and song of fairy feasts

And then you come to rest upon the shore in the dawn and there I’ll find you and we shall return throughout the day and do it all again

That’s what I said to my son

Now, to you, I say the same

This Lullaby

The words are different, but the river is always the same I say to you:

Your bed is a boat

But not some small boat packed only with provisions for one night, no

Yours is a more sturdy and noble boat, as befits a man of your stature

With a raised prow and a dragon’s head upon it

A strong rudder, high sides slung with shields

For we’ll give you a Viking funeral, as is only fitting

You there now, lying crossed arms upon your chest

Within the hull of that strong bed

Around you we shall place all the treasures that you’ve earned and that we owe you

We shall place all the things befitting a man of your stature, wrap you in a bearskin cloak that looks well on you

As befits a man who’s strong but gentle

Who’s shy but charming

Who’s serious but funny as hell

Who’s happy enough living the quiet life but who loves to throw a party

And all these beautiful balances we shall place within your arms

And around you all those goods and riches that you earned and that we owe you, all those gifts

The loved ones that you loved

The great love that you made, with her, your Lady

The places that you lived, no backs of hands were better known than those!

A knife beside you that’s as sharp as your mind

And a treasure of gold that’s as bright as your heart

The honours and achievements and accomplishments, not only yours, but those of all your children and their children, displayed with pride, just as your parents did before you

We shall pack around you all the things you loved and all the things we loved about you

All these combustible things

And we shall gather at the shore at nightfall, a little sandy bank under the trees, and we shall light a sacred fire there, which shall flicker upon our faces as we look from one to the other and catch glistening tears and smiles

And when we have said the words – never the same words, always the same river – we shall gather round the boat and put our hands upon the hull and gently push

And your small ship shall set sail upon the long dark wave

And your son, a Child of Air, from that quiet air shall pluck the plangent notes of a keen lament upon the strings of the instrument

And your daughter, a Child of Fire, shall pull from the embers the sharpest lancet that she has, shall change it into an arrow which she shall set aflame and wait

And as the current takes your noble boat it shall set sail with its precious cargo – you – surrounded by all of this, our love

These combustible things

Then, just as you’re about to reach the first bend in the river, beyond which we shall no longer see you, though we know you’re there:

The bow bends, the string stretches, the arrow arcs, parabola of fire in the darkening sky

Strikes sweet, strikes true, just within the prow of the boat

And all these combustible things ignite

An ardent flame, a funeral pyre, a beacon that sets off into the night along the dark river, to go ahead of us to light the way

And turns the corner where we shall no longer see it though we know it’s there

And you turn the corner and set off on your journey into the Nightland

And though we no longer see you, we shall know you’re there

And we shall each take a piece of the flame, each carry an ember burning home with us, from which we shall strike sparks

Because the river upon which we set you sail is not the Lethe, not the River of Oblivion, nor Styx, nor Acheron

It is Aletheia: the Unforgetting

And in its waters in which you bathe you are Unforgotten

And from its waters when we drink, they taste of flame

And we remember all you dreamed of

And you will remember all the dreams we ever have

10 January 2026

Once upon a time, there was an ugly, smelly old witch who lived alone in a murky pond. She got up when she wanted, and went to bed when she felt like it; she had frogs and toads and bats and rats and snakes and a couple of goats for pets, and she fed them all sorts of strange and venomous mixtures. She larked about in the pond all day, and occasionally went for walks around the neighbouring woods and hedgerows, gathering curious and fragrant things. These she used to decorate her pond, or to mix her heady brews. By night, she watched the sky, and sang softly to herself.

One day, a little girl called Josephine came upon the murky pond, and saw the witch taking her ease on the bank. She asked the witch what she was doing, and the witch replied “Nothing! What does it look like?” Josephine was puzzled. She had always been told not to answer “nothing” to questions. She asked the witch why she was so old and ugly and smelly. “What’s the point in being sweet-smelling and pretty, like you, except to please others? I’m very happy with how I am. And as for being old, well, it’s far preferable to being young, if you ask me! I’ll have you know, I get up when I want, and go to bed whenever I please! I laze around my pond all day, and I feed all the verminous and creeping things. I gather all the strange weeds and flowers from the hedgerows, and I make them into special brews. I answer to no-one and nothing, and I only please myself!”

“Golly,” said Josephine. “It’s a witch’s life for me! How do I go about becoming a witch like you?”

“Well,” said the witch, “it’s a long and arduous process. If you wish to learn to be a witch, there are a few things you must do first: learn all you can about plants and herbs and flowers and trees, listen to them, care for them, gather them, and brew with them; learn all you can about the sun, the moon, the stars, their turnings and their changes; learn all you can about the seasons, learn to smell each one coming, and to see everything that each will bring, and that each will take away; learn all the secrets that you can, and all the stories that you can; learn to tell, and not to tell, learn to lie, and how to find the truth; learn all the magic that you can, learn how to enchant, and to be enchanted, learn how to become invisible, and how to see; finally, you must learn all the mysteries of the human heart; learn love, learn pain, learn fear, learn joy and sorrow, learn hate and grief, and reverie and melancholy: learn peace. You must learn all these things by studying them closely, by living them fully - by sucking all the juices out of life, and going back for more.

“Then, when you have done all this, you come back here, and I’ll teach you how to be a witch like me.”

Josephine went away thoughtfully, and from that day forward, she lived her life rather differently. She thought of all the things she must learn, and all the things she must see and do and experience, and it seemed a lot. But she was quite excited about the prospect, and especially about one day beginning finally to learn to be a witch like the one in the pond.

And so she lived, and learned, and changed, and grew. She loved, and lost, and gathered herbs by the light of the moon, and rose at dawn to learn the songs of all the birds that greet the sun. She married, twice, and had some children, who she loved. She made things, and grew things, and saw and heard things. She kept secrets, and told stories. And every time she thought of going back to the pond, to finally learn to be a witch, she hesitated; perhaps there was still more to learn, still more she had not done yet? Perhaps there was a little more juice to be sucked out of life, before it was time to learn to be a witch.

One day, when she was not so young anymore, and when there was a weight of things she carried with her that she would not have traded for the world, had it been offered, she finally went back to the witch’s pond. She called out for the witch, and said she had finally come to learn. There was no answer. The pond was still and silent, empty. Josephine looked up and down, and all around, but there was no sign of the witch.

And she understood.

She threw off her clothes, and unbound her hair, and slipped gratefully into the murky water of the pond, and the toads and rats and snakes began to gather round her.

The concept of a Patron Deity is more or less a modern one, and suits contemporary Paganism because the relationship tends to be an individual, solitary, private dynamic rather than a community-based public practice. It is not without precedent though. One finds examples throughout the Ancient World of petitioning various gods for their various areas of influence, but also of particular, specific devotions, or of people becoming an initiate or an acolyte in the service of one Power, or even one shrine or temple. However, when it comes to Gaelic Celtic Deities, we know very little about their actual worship, or indeed if anything that we would give that name to was done in their honour; we have votive objects, locations supposed to be sacred to them, rare inscriptions or depictions: we know but little, and the Early Christian writings which preserve their stories do so through a lens in which they were explicitly no longer the centre of the culture, or the cultus. So what can we do now if we would pledge ourselves to them, offer them devotion, propitiation, petition, adoration? Is it coherent to even speak of “Patron Deities” at all? (or even “Deities”, for that matter? Are these shadowy figures of mythology and pseudo-history gods at all, in the way our culture understands it? Are they culture-heroes, Euhumerised half-forgotten ancestors? Literary devices, cobbled together in the scriptorium by monks who only half-remembered the stories that they wrote down for posterity, making sure to slightly distance themselves from those bad old pagan days …?)

I tend to look to the Medieval Irish culture of claiming a Patron Saint to devote to, to become “Maol” or “Giolla”. For example, Maol Choilm is what gives us the name Malcolm. It means a devotee of Saint Columba/Colm, specifically one you have become “maol” or “bald” for, ie cut your hair into a tonsure (Irish style, of course - that is, the hairline shaved back from ear to ear across the top of the head, to give a weirdly high forehead look, rather than the “bald spot” on the top of other monastic traditions. This “Celtic Christian” tonsure was one of the things that was banned, when the Roman Church took upon itself to bring the Irish Celtic Church back into the fold, as it had become quite heterodox. Pelagianism, among other things, if I remember correctly). Giolla, on the other hand, meaning “servant” or “devotee”, gives us, for example, the name of a comrade of ours, “Fitzpatrick”, which in the original Irish is Mac Giolla Phádraig, “son of the devotee of Saint Patrick”, after a 10th century king of Osraighe who gave himself the name Giolla Phádraig, and transmitted the name to his whole sept and clan; it also gives the Scottish “Gilly”, meaning “retainer”…

I project this practice into Gaelic Paganism and imagine that it must have come from a practice of devotion to a god or goddess, just as, perhaps, it does where it is attested elsewhere in Medieval European Christianity. Thus, I myself shave my head “for Manannán”, and claim the title “Maol Mhanannáin”, as part of my personal practice. I don’t claim it’s “authentic”, but I know that it is in keeping with a part of the ongoing, evolving tradition.

What shall we do, then, in a World in which the Old Enchantments seem departed? In which Disenchantment seems to be the default State of the Image-in-Nation? In which we can visit these Old Places, Old Ways, and feel a melancholy sort of emptiness, a grief, a bereavement?

I think that’s part of it: the old Sacred Places are seeming derelict, abandoned. Practices and groups that claim to preserve or revive the “Old Ways” seem hollow and tawdry, seem pretend and pretentious. But have you tried focusing your Subtle Senses in the filthy alleyway behind a Denny’s on a Full Moon recently?? Some pretty wild shit going on there, if you ask me! I’m being flippant, but do you see the point I’m making? The places where we used to constrain and focus the Numinous are leaking, they have run dry. I mean sacred sites, but also Churches, Institutions of Power like law courts or government-buildings, the Ancien Régime. Wild strange energy is abroad though, in the world we thought profane. It is profoundly frightening, if you are attached to the Old Ways (which we all are to some degree). But the High Strangeness of an abandoned housing estate at night, or neon-lit service-tunnels of an underground shopping mall, the vague, troubling expanses of train station concourses, the non-place of the food court in the weak tired filtered light, perambulated by shuffling half-alive creatures, the muzak a mindless piping of instrumental soft rock hits you can just about not remember, as the Idiot God at the centre of this numb and purposeless creation stirs from its millennial slumber and the Time is Out of Joint…

We may seek, in places that themselves are emblems of the Loss and Grief and Emptiness we feel. We may seek to revive, reanimate, reappropriate half-forgotten, long-effaced practices, traditions, names, concepts … Are they Authentic ? Are they Real? These are just not the right questions.

I think of the conversation with Paddy Bushe that recently was podcasted on The Hollow Path (see here for his interview with Malachas Ivernus, our Esteemed Leader and Benefactor : https://www.buzzsprout.com/2136267/12548744 - it’s also on Spotify, and see below for YouTube video), and how he describes the continuance and the persistence of the myth of a very obscure figure in Gaelic lore, linked to the very specific island just off the coast of Waterville in Kerry, in view of his house; he circles it in a tiny canoe, conscious of the echoes through the ages of this shred of Story. It is linked to Donn, one of the Milesian brothers who led their landing, and if I remember correctly, dies and becomes assimilated with a Death God, and associated with that small island off the Kerry coast called Tech Duinne (“The House of Donn”), where the Dead were supposed to pass through, and onwards…?

It’s interestingly a near homophone with the Welsh Dôn, who is a mother-ancestor, but here is identified as male and given a psychopomp role … I tend to associate it too with the Roman-identified Gaulish God that they claimed as cognate with “Dis Pater”, but who I don’t think is mentioned by a local name (classic Romans, TBF… Interpretatio Romani). So, the Lord of Wealth, the Dark Father of the Underworld…

Having read much, and thought much, I’m inclined to think upon the similarly-named Danú (presumed Patroness and Matriarch of the Túatha de Danann, though mentioned almost nowhere else than in this presumed genetive form “de Danann” meaning “of Danú” ) and identify her with a primordial, almost elemental force that perhaps long-predates the later God-folk and their genealogies and adventures. I feel a similar case can be made for the Cailleach (also interestingly paired with Bríghid as a later avatar, or with whom she operates a seasonal alternation). These “Elder Gods”, if you’ll excuse my going a little bit Cthulhu Mythos on you, seem to leave a strong “trace”, but not to really interact with the later stories. I surmise that the Celtic culture might have associated them with the vestiges of the Neolithic Megalithic cultures …? As we know, the ruins of previous cultures become the houses of the gods or the Otherworld Folk of the next.

And again, this is more a hunch than anything else, and I will have to one day do more digging on it, but I might suggest also such figures as Lír, the Sea-God father of Manannán, who might in turn be seen as his later avatar or successor. Is it possible to draw a direct line between this Lír and the later one, who features in the tragic tale of “The Children of Lír”? It’s hard to say: but there is a continuing thread there of troubled fatherhood. How not to also bethink ourselves of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Similarly, three children. Similarly, one of whom heroically resists through her honour and stubbornness. But there it ends. Or does it? From the Irish Lír/Ler (meaning “sea”, it would appear), to the Welsh Llŷr, to the British Leir, whom Shakespeare was aware of from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Chronicle, by way of Raphael Hollinshed, this legendary British King was supposed to have flourished around the time of the Founding of Rome, in the 8^th century BC. Who is this Primal Embodiment of the Western Ocean? Why does the single lilting syllable “Lir” evoke the Wave, the Sea, and Loss? Can you not feel it though? Does it not somehow speak a deeper sense to you?

And again, there is Crom, whether Crom Crúach or Crom Dubh, a figure of fearful sacrifice associated with the monoliths, with harvests, with blood … A Dark God of the Standing Stone, the Crooked Idol, before whom Tigernmhás (the “Lord of Death” …? Maybe?) worshipped, with thousands of followers on Magh Slécht, the “Plain of Prostration”, at which they were all struck down, and only Nemed and his few followers survived to flee and give rise to all the succeeding generations of Invaders of Erann … Obscure, lost, forgotten tales. Crom Dubh, maybe merely a Dark Double of Lúgh, His Day marked on a day in August not far from Lúghnasadh. What does that hard, dull syllable mean? “Crom” : Crooked? Head? What is “Crúach”? A pile, a mound? Of grain … of stones … of severed heads … It goes too far back, it goes too deep. Only echoes remain. That Fallen Idol. “Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and despair … Nothing beside remains.”

One might even want to attempt such speculation about shadowy figures like “Bel”, who is unattested except in a doubtful etymology of Bealtaine as “Bel-tinne”, Bel’s Fire (which seems to be pretty clearly erroneous, but resonates with the Continental Belennos). At one time, there was much speculation that “Bel” might be an insular reflex of the Canaanite Baal, subsequently a theory dismissed, but recently explored again by some scholars (I can’t remember where I read this, but trust me, brethren and sistren, I did!). Or even the Horned God Cernunnos figures, again of whom scant written attestation remains. Cernunnos only appears in a handful of inscriptions, is only tentatively identified with the famous figure on the Gundestrup Cauldron, and people delight now in saying “oh, all that Horned God stuff was an invention of Gerald Gardner and Wicca” … But it’s not so simple. Of course there were Horned Gods, many many of them. Some horned like a goat, some a ram, some a stag. Cernunnos is just the name we have for that Archetype; an Archetype is not a “god”: it is a typology, a classification, of an identifiable energy. It is a construct, it is modern - but it is useful. I’ll have more to say about that in a future essay (“In defence of Maiden, Mother, Crone - and Other Artificial Archetypes”).

It feels often like there are these huge, mysterious, Chthonic Deities, looming in the mists of pre-History, upon whose footprints we may stumble, whose long-echoing voices we may hear the last reverberations of … The sacred history of our Land is like the waves of the sea below which glide the vast shadows of the whales, and we know them only by their wake….

But I can tell you: this is how I make sense of it. I cannot claim to know. I cannot claim Authenticity, only that I attempt a practice that can resonate, can rhyme, with what little we know. I pick through the fragments. I glean. I gather, small remains, scant reminders. Traces, imprints, signs. I cobble them together: this is bricolage, a modern syncretism. This is métissage, a way of making mixture and admixture into a virtue, a thing beautiful for itself.

I know the ways of orienting oneself, from several sources: to the Celts, to the Gaels, the compass points were of vital importance. I know the lists of associations of the Directions of the Four Cúige, the Provinces, North and South, and East and West, and the Fifth, the Centre, Mídhe, where the Ombilicus stands, the Lía Fáil, the Stone of Destiny which cries out at the touch of the rightful High King. I know, and have lived deeply within, the Elemental Correspondences proposed by other lineages and traditions: I first learned of one imbricated within the other, in Yeats’s Occult Stories, where he attempts to propose a Celtic Golden Dawn, and places the Sword of Nuada, the Spear of Lúgh, the Cauldron of the Dagda, and the Lía Fáil at the obvious Cardinal Points. I followed Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, in “Rosa Alchemica” and “The Tables of the Law”, as they pursued their mystical dreams to a strange temple on the Western Shore. These things are Where I’m Calling From. These things were, to me, a Call.

And so, I do perform that classic opening ritual, and Call the Quarters. But am I casting a Circle, or setting a Compass, or placing myself at Axis Mundi? (for the concept of the “Witch’s Compass” in Traditional Witchcraft, I cannot recommend enough the work of my friend and his book of that name; for a talk and a taste of his work on the subject see here: The Witch's Compass). All of these, surely; I do not create a barrier, but rather situate myself in relation to my world, both its physical geography around me, and its metaphysical topography in the Imaginal. With Knife or Wand, I face East (or as I will, depending on the purpose), and draw, not a Pentagram, but rather a Cross, Encircled (drawn North-South, East-West, Circled Deiseal - which is how we say Sunwise). The Celtic Cross, the Quartered Circle; the Compass Rose, la Rose des Vents: the Rosy-Cross. All of these things, and more: the Signs Sought by the Seeker, Will Stanton, in The Dark is Rising, which is as good a book of legendry as any, to the child I was, and still is, if I am honest: as good or better as any others that are out there. Not for Authenticity, but for Poetry, certes. At the East, I sing out BEL; at South, CROM; at West, LIR; at North DIS (for strangely, that’s what stuck: it should be DONN, and I try. The very sound is like a bell, and that is as it should be). And sometimes I start one place, sometimes another. And sometimes I work Deiseal, and sometimes I work Tuathalach, which is Widdershins. And sometimes I close, in reverse. And sometimes, I leave open. And sometimes, I use Spirals, and sometimes Pentagrams. And sometimes, I Call In. And sometimes, I Cast Out.

These are the Four Fathers; my Elder Gods, my Primal Gods. They are not Authentic: they are echoes of forgotten things. They please me well. I please Them too. I propitiate them; they are not amenable to Knowledge and Conversation: They only ARE.

Another time, I’ll write of the Matronae, the Ladies, the Maidens, the Weavers: they are not so easy to piece out; they are not so four-square. They are Triplicities within Wheels within Spirals: Danú/Anú/Ana, na Mórrigna, the Three Bríghids, Arianrhod – the Silver Wheel and Her Sisters, the Cailleach, Áine/Gráinne/Gréine, Medb the Queen, Sadb Amhaltach, Síle Ní Ghoill: so many Strange Sisters, so many Washers at the Ford, and Women of the Mounds, Dread Phantoms, Night Riders, Great Mothers.

For now though, I only offer as an example of this rewriting, reappropriation, reviving: a prayer I wrote, made, cobbled together, from the bits and pieces I had gradually gathered about that One I call “Patron”, Foster-father, Friend. It was for the purpose of defending, and avenging, a loved one of a loved one, who had been sorely hurt. It was, it transpired, for me myself as well, and now, it is for you, should you ever need it. Here: a New Prayer to an Old Tune; a spell to guide and guard your life.

“The Invocation of the Protection of Manannan Mac Lir”

Assemble on your altar or working space the following: a sea-stone in the North, a goblet of spring water in the West, a burning censer (or stick!) of incense, perhaps myrrh, frankincense, in the South (the more visible and thick the smoke, the better), and a sharp blade in the East. In the centre, a scrap of material from a cloak or coat that has protected you, or them, from cold, rain, harm, and loneliness.

Make a heartfelt prayer to Manannán, Son of the Sea, Wanderer in Mists, Magician, He Who Hid the Tuatha de Danann in the Sídhe, Foster-Father to Heroes, Giver of Gifts, Warrior of Renown. He will appreciate any offerings of fresh water, bright flames, sharp knives, or the promise to send your children to him for instruction and protection (for a very loose acceptation of “your” children, “send”, and so on … fostering is part of his Gift; the children of others are also our children: that is his Lesson). He would love a painting or drawing of the sea-foam-wave (Caiple Manannáin – the Horses of Manannán).

“Oh Disappearing Man, oh Druid who was here before the Shining Host landed, oh Sailor out of the Western Sea, oh you man who comes in sunset, who makes your way to us from beyond the Ninth Wave, who fosters our children, who gives us our weapons, who wraps his cloak of mist and silence around us; You who led our forebears into the Mounds, on the Day of Sundering, you who led each to their appointed place; you who apportioned the Kingdoms of the Unseen, who passes us through the Veils to the Otherworld … Hear my plea, for it is Justice. Hear my cry, for it is Suffering. Hear my heart, for it is broken.

Grant unto my Dear One, your Three Things. Grant unto my Dear One, the spinning wheel of the Triskele, and the passage between the Three Worlds: from Underworld, to Thisworld, to Upperworld. From Sea, to Land, to Sky. Let them fade, as the People once faded, into the Otherworld; Let their troopings and their revels, and their sorrowful path, and their weeping for the World, be enfolded in your kind mists. Give unto them your gifts, your Three Things:

The Mist of Forgetting, the Cloak of Protection, the Sword of Answering.

I thus invoke the Three Things of Manannán Mac Lir :

“féth fiada : brat bhaoil : Freagarach”

(repeat three times. Continue to repeat three times the Three Things every time you need to. It winds up the whole charm and repeats it. The pronunciation is “Feh Feeatha : Brot Vweel : Fragarach (“th” as in “the”, not “thing”)(-ch as in “loch”) …)

The Mist surrounds the Sidhe and their Mounds, to hide them from Mortals; the Cloak will turn any blade, and if placed between us and someone else, makes us forget each other completely; the Sword, the Answerer, will only flash out in just retalitation, but when it does, it is unerring: it never misses, and always kills.

This is a follow-up piece to the previous one, from that same time five or so years ago, reflecting on that Crucible moment that was 2018-2019 … I read it again now, and I laugh bitterly at how right I was, but also how naïve … I didn’t realise the extent - I mean, who did? - to which all of the things I spoke about here would get WORSE, but I also could not have known the extent to which all of it would just become … banal. The urgency has left me. I’m just trying to survive. I think I was on fire with Rage and Love back then. I think I was ready to take to the barricades. But I … I couldn’t find them. I couldn’t find the allies I sought. I couldn’t find the battle I was ready to join. And now? I’m tired, and sad, and angry. And all I can do is just attempt tiny acts of rebellion in my daily life. Just try to keep being kind. Just try to keep showing love and curiosity and care. And it’s … pathetic. It’s useless. We’re losing. We’ve already lost. But as I said to a comrade yesterday, who told me that he despairs: yes, but maybe this is the only courage that remains to us, the only heroism that is still possible: to keep on fighting against these insurmountable odds, to keep on trying even though we know it’s futile. This is what it means to stay alive now: the hour is very late - indeed, it’s already too late.

We’ve already lost … Keep going.

You’re going to fail … Keep going.

You will lose everything … Keep going.

I love you.

It was mid 2019. We were all talking about the End of the World. Like many other people I spoke to, I had been having crazy dreams as well. I had been on a Writer’s Retreat a few months earlier, and while there, overlooking a stormy bay on the West Coast of Ireland, on the Beara Peninsula, birthplace of the Cult of the Cailleach, alone in that quiet house of reading and writing, of reflection and inspiration, I had some vivid and shocking dreams that hurled me from my bed at 4am with an urge to vomit and drink loads of water. The Wise Woman who runs the retreat, on hearing about this, just nodded and said “oh yeah. Purging dreams” … It perfectly described how they felt. Like I was getting the poison out.

I had another one a couple of weeks later where I came into contact with some kind of Hermetic Magical Order, who, it became apparent, were Fascists. They were White supremacists, patriarchal, homophobic … I woke up full of anger and anxiety. And I went and sat and smoked in the kitchen thinking about it.

It struck me that if I’m on this spiritual, magical path, and other people all around the world are discovering it too, then obviously the Bad Guys are as well. It’s naive to think that today’s Fascists aren’t learning magic, using it, and organising. They’re good at that.

And it struck me that the message of this dream was: “Find the Others. And prepare to do battle” … Stirring stuff. But I felt a bit lost. I didn’t know how to go about it. How do we actively use our spirituality and magic to fight for good in the world? Or is it just a way to disappear into ourselves, to hide from what’s going on, to Spiritually Bypass all the real issues? To engage in endless online feuds and gossiping with the “Occult Community”, such as it is? I wished there were a Druid Grove, a Coven, an Order, a group that I could join. My dreams were telling me there was work to do … I needed to find my team!

I had been thinking about this more and more. It was absolutely right to talk about Julius Evola and René Guénon … Even though many of the Occult Revival magickal orders were pretty progressive and free-thinking, in a very 19th century way, many more of them were naturally classist, with an “aristocratic” bent of mind, and naturally racist, Imperialist, misogynist … This idea of them “scooping up lonely frustrated young men” reminds me very much of the phenomenon that we saw raise its head in Gamergate, in the ructions in fantasy and sci-fi fandom, and roleplaying circles …

The Ubernerds, who used to be often socially maladapted young men, feel totally embattled as women and people of colour, queer people, non-Europeans, and basically everyone else has now “been admitted” to geekdom, despite the best efforts of these wannabe gatekeepers. RPGs, fantasy and sci-fi fandom, have always had a very interesting split between the very progressive, idealistic, romantics that they attracted, and the right-wing ultra-traditionalists, who like these things because they seem to them to tell a very Western European Hero tale, in which men were men, women were women, and might meant right. OF COURSE magick is much the same. Particularly, I would argue, Hermetic Ceremonial Magick, and Chaos Magick – male-dominated, and traditional, for Hermetic Magick, and plugged into geek culture, for Chaos. One thinks of Jordan Peterson; in his misuse of Jung, he might as well be INVITING young men to become fascist magicians!

In the dream, this magickal order that I discovered was something akin to the Nazi occult; I had been reading about how some Norse Pagans are attracted by the kind of Aryanist, White Supremacist thinking that the Nazis engaged in, how they use the symbols of the Runes and the Norse gods to advocate an ethnically pure Northern European supremacy. I know that there are also people who use this kind of thinking in conjunction with Celtic symbology and gods. Obviously, it’s totally contrary to the mainstream of these pagan groups right now, but that fringe is there. However, in the dream, they were not so much magic-practising pagans, as rather a type of Golden Dawn style Hermetic magickal order. It’s interesting that the “Golden Dawn” is now being used in Greece as the name of a Far-Right political party. I think that Hermetic Ceremonial Magick has always drawn a certain number of power-hungry fascist-leaning men. It’s often been quite a boys’ club, homosocial, and not very empowering to women; current claims about “Western Civilisation” being under threat from immigration and Leftist “Cultural Marxism” seem to me to map all too easily onto the concept of “the Western Magical Tradition”, and the idea of its being “special” to Western Civilisation can all too easily become a reason to believe in a neo-Imperialist way in the superiority of Western European culture …

My fear is that there are orders and organisations out there who are allied to the Dark Powers of Fascism, Capitalism, Imperialism. Someone said recently “If you want to see today’s most successful sorcerers, look at the billionaires”. I’m afraid that because those of us on paths such as Nature-based spiritualities and Animist and Eco-aware ideologies tend to be a little bit all “peace and love”, that those ruthless and organised magicians that are no doubt gathering on the Other Side are going to brush aside our efforts easily in sacrificing the living world to their greed and power-obsessed egos. I’m afraid they’re already doing it … Extinction Rebellion shows that there is a groundswell against them; they even have a magickal sigil now! Perhaps their ranks are full of magicians, witches, and druids … I wouldn’t be at all surprised, and this gives me hope.

So what can we do? Well first of all protect ourselves: I feel myself under the protection of my gods and spirits, and I believe there is great power in meditating, especially in groups, for peace and for the future of the Earth. But somehow this dream seemed to be calling me to action. To do something more direct. To actually fight. What that exactly is, I don’t know yet. I find it encouraging, for example, that there seems to be a general resurgence or a coming out into the open of interest in magic, the spiritual, the pagan, the animist. I also work tirelessly in my teaching (I’m a high school literature teacher) to reflect my eco-aware outlook, and to arm my students against disinformation and the lies of modern society … without teaching them to be paranoid and scared, of course; I just constantly emphasise the ideas of “how to live the good life”, and “how to live in harmony with one’s world, and one’s soul” … They rarely even notice I’m doing it. But there’s more we can do, as Druids and as magickal practitioners (I have a background in witchcraft and ceremonial magick and Chaos magick as well, before I came to Druidry formally). We need to be ready to stand our ground; remember, the Druids of the Celts would use their powers in war as well as in law, lore, and teaching.

I think that one of the key concepts that we must centre in our efforts is Animism. The knock on effects are immense, everything from engaging in permaculture to debunking materialism. Materialism and rationalism have held sway for pretty much the last three hundred years, give or take the romantic poets and the symbolists, but it’s the foundation of not only our modern world system but also capitalism and consumerism. And actually, though it’s anathema to mention it in the academy, many academics, particularly those on the cutting edge of physics and philosophy of mind are coming down more and more on the concept that consciousness is primary, if not ALL there is! They’re mostly afraid to talk about it for fear of losing grants/tenure, but they’re there.

As for the Chaos Magicians and the financial sorcerers: they are basically using capitalist magic. Chaos magic has lost a lot of its punk aesthetic and become a way of playing the system with sigils and invocation of powers that you don’t respect or have a relationship with for personal gain. We know that the Uber rich have been will-working in more or less occult ways for the last hundred years at least. They’re using the international finance system as a magic system, and sowing discord and conflict among the slave classes to keep them busy. All the Culture War stuff is that: a distraction. None of them actually cares about those hot button issues, but they foment them to keep us divided and at each others throats about gender pronouns and bathroom bills, or abortion and immigration. You think for a minute they actually CARE about immigration and Brexit? Not at all! They’re immune from all the effects of it. Trump himself was transformed into an Egregore, an avatar of the whole dark seamy side of America. And boy did it work. His Twitter presence was a vast hypersigil of hate and fear. And it was hypnotising all of us.

In the Autumn of 2018, I was going through a very dark, depressive, hopeless period. It was reflected in my teaching: with my Final Years, I did a big unit on Dystopias, where we’d basically read 20th century dystopian fiction, and then just read the news … It was all happening. I’ll never forget assigning the first couple of chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale one week, and then, right then, were the Brett Kavanagh hearings. One of the best and the brightest of my wonderful students put her hand up straight away as I asked for reactions, and said “Brett Kavanagh getting elected to the Supreme Court is how Gilead begins to happen” …. We read Nineteen Eighty-Four, we read Brave New World, we read The Road …. But then I had to tell them, had to reassure them somehow: “If this is indeed the Apocalypse – and it is – it doesn’t mean it’s the End. It just means that the World we have known is going to have to come to an end. Whether in Catastrophe, or a mass-awakening, or, more likely, a bit of both. You are the ones who are going to build the New World that comes after. Let’s learn about how to do that.”

It was powerful stuff. These kids are amazing. They were out on Climate Strike. They were blockading the school in solidarity with the lycée kids that had been rounded up and made to kneel, hands on their heads, while heavily armoured robocops patrolled among them and joked about how they could fuck them up. These kids all want to change the world. One will study robotics, to make machines to help the disabled. One wants to be a space-engineer. One wants to specialise in women and girls’ education in developing countries. One wants to become an Arts promoter and bring artists to their audiences (she’s also 2nd in France Tae-kwon-do champion, and a jazz singer!). Another one wants to study neurobiology and psychology with a minor in literature, so that she can explore the human soul …. Others are seeking degree courses that enable them to fight climate crisis, on the scientific and also on the sociological/humanities side.

And one of my kids turned in an essay entitled “Animism, Pantheism, and Alternative Religion in Willa Cather’s My Antonia” …

I teach these kids, with a huge weight of knowledge that their generation is being asked to be heroes, by the previous generations, including mine, that failed to step up to the challenge. I’m getting too old to be a young hero on his quest now; I’m becoming the Mentor, the Teacher, the Historian. And that’s why I need to be a Druid. I want to minister to them, and to all of us Seeking. We have lost our way, lost our Spirits, lost our ceremonies, our rituals. We need a new spirituality that recognises us as part of a Spirit Ecology that includes all living and all “non-living” parts of our Earth. This way lies our salvation. But it’s a desperate struggle. It’s against all the odds. It’s a 100 to 1 shot. But you know what Terry Pratchett says: “Hundred to one shots ALWAYS work.” … They always do. Because we have magic on our side. And the Earth. And the Spirits.

It feels like I slip into a rant about all of this at the drop of a hat. It’s just that it is so GODSDAMN vital. We need to get out there and not just use our spirituality and magic as a means of personal growth. It has to be about community and rewilding the Earth too. We need to connect with the masses. Little by little, we will. We’re on the cusp of a Reawakening. I have to believe that.

But where do we find the sources we can legitimately draw on? It seems that in the Occult and Pagan communities, more energy is spent on scolding and gatekeeping than on actually doing anything, sometimes. I think that there are ways of engaging with other cultures’ spiritual tech and worldviews that are respectful and honest. We have a lot to learn from each other. But we also have to do it from a place of humility, recognition of our sources, and to do the godsdamn research! Far better is to actually go and learn from the People themselves, whichever People they be. If they accept you, if you come to them with humility, if you ask permission, if you have their blessing, then good. If you take some clichéd stuff and then start setting yourself up as a Shaman or whatever and charging money for it, then you probably suck.

I mean, I’m Irish, and Anglo people, especially Americans, have been appropriating our spiritual shit forever. Wicca in particular. Our gods, our practices, our festivals … All in a sort of Celtic Mist kind of way that has little to do with the actual lore, the actual practices, and the actual history of them. But you know what? That’s okay. Because we’re Irish, we get the best of both worlds: we get to be White English speakers who ALSO have a genuine and rooted Native tradition. Our own language. Our own rich paganism that has passed down, admittedly in colonised and adapted and adopted forms, but in our folk traditions and in our Celtic Christianity, and in the medieval writings that recorded much of the earlier oral culture (albeit in a way that reflected the Church’s version), we still have something. The Irish Brehon legal system survived Christianisation. The fili or poets/bards survived up until the 17th/18th century. They kept much of the old lore alive, and living, and changing, and adapting. I’m finding neo-Druidry of the Tradition I’ve joined a pretty good fit for me, but it’s very British for the moment; it mostly relies on the Welsh sources, with a few nods to the Irish here and there. But sometimes I wonder: If English Druids are using Welsh and Irish material based on the fact they are linked to the Ancient Britons, isn’t THAT cultural appropriation? Do Anglo-Saxons have a right to Druidism? Or should they be basing their paganism on Saxon and Norse sources, and invoking Wotan?

And my answer is: no, it’s actually okay. The British Isles are a melting pot of ethnicities, it just happened centuries ago. All the White British and Irish come from six or seven distinct ethnic groups, with different belief systems and spiritual cosmologies. But all of them have been brewing and changing and mixing and melding for all that time. We are one People. It’s the same with North American First Nations: there are hundreds of them! Some of them have a lot in common, some very little. But I WANT a world where we can respectfully practice Japanese martial arts, or Buddhism, or Indian Tantra, or Arabian Geomancy, or Kimbanda or Santeria, or Hoodoo, or, yes, Celtic Mist style neo-paganism, and where that can all be okay. We just have to realise that we are the privileged ones, and try to go to the sources, the authentic sources, and try to respect and be humble before them.

And what happens next is then not so much appropriation as syncretism. As evolution, as spiritual expansion. The more other worldviews we truly try to understand, embrace, and incorporate, the richer we are, spiritually.

It’s a case of recognising the commonalities, and then picking up the divergences, and trying to create a coherent whole from them, or for each person to create a coherent and respectful path. I’m a firm believer that there as many paths to the Divine, if you want to call it that, or the Otherworld, the Ineffable, the Cosmic, as there are traditions. Maybe even as many as there are Seekers. Respect, humility, and asking permission must be our watchwords.

But it’s not cultural appropriation to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day or honour Brighid, despite your lack of Irish blood. It’s not cultural appropriation to try to experience the genuine cuisine, traditions, folklore, religions, magicks, of a given place, as long as you’re not stealing it and profiting from it. If you come truly meaning to learn, truly open-hearted, truly filled with love and recognition for our fellow-passengers through Eternity.

So often these days, the discourse in the Occult and Pagan communities has been cannibalised by the question of Cultural Appropriation. And you know what? It kills me. It kills me that we, mostly White, privileged Westerners, are sitting here tearing each other apart about our White Guilt, which is actually itself a form of privilege. I note of course that there is a significant minority in Druidry, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Paganism who are People of Colour or non-Western themselves ; we ought to be foregrounding those voices ; what’s more, the vast resources and teachings of African Traditional Religions, Asian Spiritualities and Mysticisms, Indigenous North and South American Traditions, Syncretic Carribean and Latin American/European Traditions, Oceanian and Pacific Indigenous Traditions ; these are not resources to exploit for European-descended people, but they certainly are things we would do well to pay attention to, to learn about with respect and humility, to exchange, and learn and grow together with. But while we’re tearing each other to shreds over who is and isn’t allowed to practice what, to believe what, to claim what, you know who is laughing at us? Yes, them, the Fascists. They love that we spend all this time hand-wringing and pointing the finger at each other about wrongthink and cultural appropriation, or so called political correctness (which, by the way, was invented by the Right as a derogatory term for basically respecting diversity), as we here on the Left do (because we’re Druids and Pagans, right? I choose to assume we’re mostly progressives, Earth-respecting, diversity-respecting, human-rights respecting)(NB I’ve noticed that while this might hold for a slight majority of Druids and Witches and Pagans, it is absolutely not the case in the wider Occult community. There is a large proportion of practicing Occultists, as discussed above, who are pretty fashy. They’ve really come out of the woodwork lately, and particularly in their intersection with the Conspiracy Theorists. Both Old School Occultists and New Age Woo-Woo have more than their fair share of bullshit Imperialist wankers in them).

But they LOVE seeing us do this. They have no such qualms. They are United in their White Supremacy, in their authoritarianism, in their pillaging of the environment. They love nothing more than seeing us going into conniptions over subtle questions of semantics and respect. And playing “holier than thou”. They don’t care. It keeps us busy.

And meanwhile, they are taking our symbols of North West European paganism and using them as powerful Runes of Fascism. Look what the Nazis did to the swastika. They turned it into an Egregore-Sigil of enormous power. And it is returning. It is being sprayed on Jewish tombs and shops in France. On the houses of Jewish people. The Norse Runes are under consideration of being banned in Sweden, so bound up are they becoming with blood and soil narratives and movements.

And this is the danger for us. Our movement IS also partly about ancestry and the Land. And that is EXACTLY why it must be open to all. We must be generous with our heritage. We, as Irish, Welsh, British, Norse, French, whatever else, have gifted our paganism to the world. We must accept All within it. This is not cultural appropriation. This is syncretism. This is the way forward. What the French call métissage.

But meanwhile, what do we DO?

I consider such literally Down-to-Earth ideas as permaculture, as reclaiming unused Land and growing community gardens. I’ve heard of a recent scientific report that recommended fighting climate crisis simply by …. planting billions of trees. Rewilding the planet.

We can do this.

We can March and protest. We should. We must.

We can enchant for peace, and to protect the protesters from government Fascist violence.

But I believe we must also re-enchant the world.

We must live with recognition of the Spirit in everything. In effect, we must readopt an Animist worldview. And that has so many corollaries. It implies respect for all living and “non-living” beings. Because they are all living. For all human and non-human persons. Because they all are persons.

We must also see the world as magicians. We must perform conscious ritual. We must work in vision, with the spirits, the ancestors, and the Fae, the elementals, and whoever else you happen to work with. We must reinstate the Gods, the Goddesses.

And we must tell our stories. We must teach our children, and our charges, that there IS a spiritual dimension to us. That we are not just dross matter. That the world is living, breathing Spirit.

We must teach the ancient tales, the folklore, the new stories of magic and mystery. We must treat each day like the glorious opportunity for magic and synchronicity that it is.

We must draw attention to the everyday magic we all engage in.

We must fight the Materialism, the Capitalism, the Consumerism of the Dead Monoculture, in every way we can. Rewild the human experience. Re-enchant the world. Sing it into being.

Only thus will we beat them. They are using magic against us. The symbols and rituals of Capitalism, of Consumerism, of the Cult of the Living Dead, are everywhere. The big brands and corporations have created powerful Egregores that the masses bow down and worship, and feed with their worship. They grow stronger. You’d be surprised how many billionaires and CEOs, and politicians actually have a (twisted) understanding that they are doing magic. They may call it “branding”, or “marketing”, or “spin”, but they are literally changing reality through the force of their will and their powerful system of symbols and correspondences. And most of us, despite ourselves, are also part of it. And the Fascists are merely their tool, but what a powerful tool.

I think that some of the things being suggested as paths of resistance are already happening.

I see these things happening in communities, going back to what’s local.

My vegetable Co-op, sourcing and pre-paying locally grown vegetables. The meetings and distributions happen in my local Co-op café, where they run workshops on sustainability and time-bartering, on cooking, writing, reading to children.

My friend who dedicated her paid unemployment time to the Zero Waste Movement.

People thinking about co-living situations and self-sustaining permaculture. I think it can happen, by spreading the word globally online, and then by organising locally.

But then again, is this enough to counter the Fascist machine?

Movements like Extinction Rebellion give me some hope that it is a start.

Companies are accused of “green-washing” now, but only because it’s become trendy to be Green for many middle-consumers. But these are mostly privileged, urban folk. how to reach the vast swathe of disenfranchised struggling people?

We need to be asking all these questions.

How to topple the technocratic Centre Right that is our only option in Europe against the Fascist Far Right?

And in America …. Every bit of news I hear dismays me. But there are millions wanting, needing to take action. They must be moved to act.

Resist, rewild, re-enchant. Make ritual, connect with the Land, travel in Vision. Meet your helper spirits, and make your pacts with them. Find the Others. Prepare to do Battle.

We need to recentre the discussion. Instead of throwing around accusations between ourselves about who’s “holier than thou” and who’s a “wrongthinker”, just because they have concerns about the ways in which our discussions around gender, or race, or immigration, or sexuality are polarising us …. Let us stop trying to demonise and ostracise those who are part of our own community, who are fundamentally on the same side as us. Let us rather turn our attention to the real Enemies, who are tirelessly working to fuck the world. Let’s not get distracted by dissension in our own ranks.

In my quest to “Find the Others” as Timothy Leary advocated, I called together a meeting, that Summer of 2019, of an Occult Dabblers’ Discussion Group. We were from a variety of backgrounds: a Wiccan Buddhist, a Catholic mystic, a Steiner-trained Initiate who is just starting to explore her Cuban background with Santeria, a concert pianist who is clairvoyant and has had out of body experiences and works with energy, a yoga and meditation woo-curious person, and me: who started off with Wild-Magic initiations, and then studied Hermeticism and Chaos magic, before realising I had a calling to Druidry.

The thing I really like about Druidry is that it’s NOT just about manifesting material success, getting wealth, power, women … Druidry is about living in the world with Love and Compassion. About recognising our place in the Natural World, and connecting with the gods of my ancestors. About fighting for the Land, and the Spirits, and the People. But it also needs to be about stepping out between the warring armies, and calming them with words. It also has to be about speaking poems so powerful that they change minds, invoke storms, and rain down destruction on our enemies. Neo-Pagans are all about peace and love; EXCEPT the ones who are all about hate and White Supremacy. They’re willing to fight. Are we?

My eclectic rag-tag bunch of Seekers decided that night that we would start meeting at full moons, and exploring the basics of magic together: we would combine our powers and energies in group ritual. It will not be Wiccan, or Druidic, or Catholic, but a melting-pot, an Athanor, in which we would transmute the base metal of our flawed souls into a holy blast of energy, which we would direct where it was needed. There was work to do. There was a war in the Otherworld as well as this one, and to think otherwise was to be naive.

We were to engage in direct action. We were to teach, and preach, and campaign, and protest. We would get out on the streets. We would work at re-enchanting the world. We would carry this attitude, this awareness of the signs and synchronicities and guides that show up for us, and direct it at fighting the Enemy, and working for the Enchanted World. We all needed to wake up out of the comfortable dream of self-reflection and self-development that so many pagan paths can end up in. It’s a dead end ….

However, it was not to be. There are as many valid paths as there are practitioners. Ask a group of five Occultists or Pagans a question, and you’ll get ten different answers. Our little Magic Circle imploded as soon as it was created, riven by ideological differences, personality clashes, differing values. And then the World was shut down by the Pandemic, and all bets were off. But thinking back to a little over a year ago, I see the urgency and the need to act, and they have not gone away. There was a time of Solitary Confinement, and, for those of us with the privilege of food, shelter, and broadband, a time for reflection and deep confrontation with what our lives might mean. I believe we will come out of this Initiatory Experience with more readiness, more urgency, than we ever had before. The fragility of Everything is only too apparent, now. As is the precariousness, the vulnerability, of all these Systems of the World that we were led to believe were inevitable and eternal. No. It can be stopped. We’ve seen it. The Plague Year has exposed the Crack in Everything ; it’s where the light gets in.

There’s an expression in French : reculer pour mieux sauter. We back up to take a better leap. We pause, gather ourselves, take a run up … and leap. A leap of faith. A shot in the dark. A hundred to one chance. But … they always, always work.

Note: this is a piece I wrote in the dark days of the end of 2019, as I was wrestling to become. What am I? Who am I? Who must I become? I had just realised that I must formalise my magical and spiritual practice, and choose to embrace a Path. The one that I found, at that moment, after years of solitary bricolage, was OBOD - the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids. I still hold to the idea that this was a good choice, for me. However, I did not pursue it much further than the first level, the Bard Grade. Perhaps I will, some day. I still am very attached to the idea of Druidry. But what I have realised since was that the Bard Grade was where I needed to stay. My work here is not done. At that moment, I was very concerned with how to define what type of Magician I was. I realised, later, that it didn’t really matter so much. There was a moment, when I came into contact with a beautiful soul, and we exchanged much, passionately sharing ideas, and she said to me, not long after knowing me: “oh, I know what you are! You’re a poet!” And she was not wrong. That covers most of it. I am a Poet, in the most fundamental and magical way. Maybe that’s enough. But here, I wonder about and interrogate the idea of “what kind of Magician must we be?”. I have edited it for clarity and hindsight. I hope you appreciate it, and that it speaks to that moment, a few years ago, where we all were. As ever, you can find the original version and everything else, accessible to all, on my website. Should you feel the need to dive deeper into the lore : Credo : Rage and Love – Plan for Utopia, Act for Apocalypse. As ever, all is open and accessible, and will remain so. If you wish to support the project of The Hollow Behind the Hearthstone, please consider subscribing for free or for money. Both are much appreciated.

So. I’ve been doing some pretty demanding soul-searching on the question of what to call myself, how to identify, spiritually and philosophically. I have had been thinking, too, of the word “Warlock”, and this response just poured out of me. I suppose it’s this: I’d LIKE to be a Druid. But that’s not really an adequate response to my reality.

“Warlock” : there is quite some debate about the etymology of the word. But it would appear that this is part of it: Oath-breakers. Renegades. Outcasts.
As an ex-Catholic, the idea of embracing my apostasy appeals to me. I used to be much more mild. I described myself as a “committed agnostic”, ie I strongly believed we couldn’t know, and I was a “lapsed Catholic”; that is, I wasn’t practising, but I often attended Mass at holidays with family, and felt much nostalgia and respect for the Church.

However, as time has gone by, and as I’ve learned more, thought more, experienced more, I’ve become more radical and uncompromising in my rejection of the Church. One cannot have lived through the revelations of systemic sexual abuse, cover-ups, murder through neglect, the hiding of the bodies, that have been coming out these last years and remain indifferent. Increasingly, I have come to see the Church as a Monster, and an apparatus of Empire.
This is not to say that I deplore Catholicism or Christianity per se, as I can see a lot of the appeal, the beauty, and the solace they have brought to millions.

[Interestingly, I have now mellowed again a little on this: I still abhorr the institution of the Church itself, but the places and the practices of it have become more dear to me than before, especially as I have learned of the “Folk Catholic” magic practiced in my own family, and in so many others, over the years]

But organised religions are the spiritual arm of Empire. They have colonised our souls, and they have extracted their raw materials. They have commodified our relationship with the Divine and sold it back to us. They have ruled through guilt, fear, secrecy, and obfuscation. Their paths are littered with destruction and suffering. They have twisted our relationships to our bodies, to our spirits, to each other.
And, in my deep, questing search these last years, I have begun to embrace the identity of oath-breaker, of apostate, of heretic. I would be a pagan gladly, but my world and my culture are post-Christian, not pre-Christian. No amount of communing with Nature and being one with the World, no amount of reconstruction of gods and spirits and rituals from vague and fragmentary relics can erase two thousand years of the Empire of the Unseen.
And so, the part of me that yearns towards the Light, and integration, would call himself a Druid. That is a noble and beautiful identity.

But the other part of me, for whom history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, the part that has lived with guilt and sorrow, and has hated himself for his Nature, that part says yes, I break your oath. I go beyond the Hedge into the Wilderness. I reject your poor promises and faint hope.

Now, lest you think me crazy and irrational: these are not ill-considered simplistic superstitions. This is not hashtag occultism. These are intensely considered philosophical positions. These are nuanced beliefs about the nature of reality and consciousness.

I am not a delusional idiot. I am a sane man fighting for his soul.

These are not statements of “objective reality”. These are not anti-science, anti-rational positions …. This is … a metaphor, if you will. And metaphor does not deal in empirical rationality. This is a playful and powerful way of reclaiming the spiritual narrative that has been stunting our growth, without falling into the equally simplistic trap of “fundamentalist atheism”.

[TIMESTAMP]

Saturday, November 9, 2019
1:38 AM

THIS is the problem. We want to be Druids; we NEED to be Witches, Warlocks, Sorcerers, Outcasts: Rebel Angels. We need Horned Gods and Scarlet Women to be howling in the streets. Peace and Love is beautiful; we need Rage and Love. The time for peace is past.

I’ve really been struggling with this. It’s not so much that I NEED to define myself, it’s rather that I’m starting to realise that such definition is a magical act. You see, I think that in a perfect world, we’d be content to call ourselves “spiritual” (which is what I do now in mixed company, instead of my old “agnostic”; it does actually cover the bases!). When I was teenager grappling with these questions, I used to call myself a “Seeker”, and that still really describes the fundamental thing.
Since I started my magical and philosophical experiments twenty years ago, I’ve most often leaned towards “Magician”, which, again, is basically it, right? But in the last couple of years, I’ve felt the call to be more than a Magician. I want to minister and serve others. I want to teach and to help others on their Paths, whatever they are. I truly believe that there are as many ways to Enlightenment and to Wisdom as there are people, and that some people benefit greatly from a system and even a hierarchy to work within. Just as some are better off forging their own path, picking and choosing, going with instinct, taking what works.
About ten years ago, when I started my first formal magical diary, I entitled it Leabhar Draíocht [“The Book of Enchantment”, or “The Book of Druidry”; thereby hangs a tale: the tale of how I lost that book, of how I drowned that book]. I pondered in the opening entries whether I might not be on the Druid Path. Then in the last two years, as I heard the call to neo-Druidry, I felt that here, finally, was a Path that really made sense to me. I began pursuing it with gusto. But something was missing, something was blocking me. I had never felt so at home with a belief system and philosophy. I have been working with the Irish Celtic gods for twenty years. The initial lessons of the Bard Grade clicked into place beautifully. They were not even really new to me. They felt more like remembering than discovering. These were in my heart’s blood.
But I kept voraciously reading all around me. I kept reading not just about Druidry and Celtic paganism, but also about Ceremonial Magick, Goetia, Chaos Magic, Witchcraft, Shamanism, Christian Mysticism, the History of Religions, Philosophy of Mind, theories of Consciousness, Animism, Spiritualism, Anthropology, the Paranormal, and many other things. I have been insatiable.
And just recently, I have realized this (for me at least, I can’t speak for others): being a Druid is wonderful. It is noble, it is in harmony with Nature and the World, and the Otherworld. It is inspiring, healing, it makes us better people. I WANT to be that.
But isn’t there a certain luxury in claiming that identity? Druids were wise, respected elites of their society. They were suppressed, to a degree, by Christianity, but in many ways they continued in all but name: the Bardic orders continued, the Brehons still made and gave the laws; the monks, priests and nuns in many respects continued the work of the Druids. Celtic Christianity adopted much of the Druidic cosmology, attitude, poetry, and even magic. Most of the Insular Celtic saints were pretty great Magicians! And so it went on.
But. It didn’t go on forever. The Bardic Colleges were eventually suppressed. Celtic Christianity was suppressed. And, something I only really started thinking about recently, in Ireland the integrated, holistic, almost animist Catholicism of the populace was also suppressed. The time of the Penal Laws and the Plantations was utterly savage, and involved a violent repression of Irish culture, language, and belief. Catholicism was similarly stamped out in England, but in Ireland it was every aspect of the Culture. And then the Famine … We weren’t taught the full truth of the Famine, even in school in Ireland in the ’80s and ’90s. We weren’t taught that it was tantamount to calculated genocide. That not only was there more than enough food in Ireland, not only was it being exported to England in the face of the horror of Famine, but that some of those responsible for this were consciously and calculatedly doing it as a tool of repression and subjugation. They thought it would usefully destroy the backbone of Irish culture, and rejoiced in the fact.
And who stepped in to fill the void? The Church. The Catholic Church in Ireland after the Famine basically seized power and became the institution responsible for all the horrors that they perpetrated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Don’t get me wrong, i know that they did also provide much in the way of social cohesion (education, charity, social organisation etc), but it was all on their terms. They were the only game in town. And if you didn’t grow up in Ireland before 2000, you have no idea of the horrendous damage that was done. I’m sure you’ve all heard the more egregious stories (mother and baby homes, Magdalen laundries, the Kerry Babies, the mass graves of children killed by neglect, paedophile predator priests, protected and hidden by the hierarchy …. the list is too long and too painful to go into just now). But it’s impossible to give a sense of the all-pervasive warping of a whole society’s relationship to guilt, shame, sexuality, sin … Many Catholic priests and nuns were also genuinely good and brave people. Many gave their lives in service not only to their god but to their fellow human beings. But the institution was rotten, and clung on like death to the power, privilege, and prestige that they held.
And meanwhile, over the last three hundred years, in Britain, we have a Druid Revival. But by whom, and for whom? The elite and the powerful. Educated, privileged White Straight Men. Freemasons. Anglican Vicars. Gentlemen Archaeologists and Antiquarians. And, lacking a romantic enough pagan tradition of their own, they looked, as ever, to the Celtic Fringe of their oldest colonies to provide a touch of myth and magic. All the while working for the suppression of the Celtic cultures as living traditions, they caught and pinned and collected them like butterflies on a page in a book.
I don’t mean for a moment that this was their conscious project, and I think that much of the work done by the Druid Revival, the Romantic Movement, the Celtic Twilight, was not only vital work of conservation, but also provided much wonderful original material (sometimes passing one off as the other, of course!). However, there is a fundamental irony in the fact that the men (and it was almost always men) engaged in these pursuits were product and part of that very Imperial English Establishment that was not only fighting to suppress analogous belief systems all over the world, but also fighting to crush all opposition, independence, and revolution in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. To clear the Highlands, to plant the Irish farmlands, to kill off the languages and cultures of their very own Celtic Fringe, in case they gave too much of a sense of national identity and independence to those who practised them.
And then, in the 20th century, we have neo-Paganism and Druidry. We all know the history now. We all are well aware and have made our peace with the origins of these revivals: hint, they were not the resurfacing of an ancient and unbroken lineage of Witchcraft and Druidry. Margaret Murray was wrong (but maybe not as wrong as we have thought …). We know that they are products of their time, and that, flaws and all, they gave us what we have today. We must never forget that. But the fact remains that they are inherently elite, conservative, privileged, English and male, at their root. It’s wonderful that they have given us such rich soil for growth, especially in terms of feminism and women’s role in spirituality. I thoroughly applaud and revel in how Neo-Paganism has put women at the forefront of spiritual practice and leadership. But let’s face it, we’re not there yet, even on that. And gods know, modern Paganism has its fair share of scandal and abuse of power, of sexism, homophobia, racism, etc. In fact, it sometimes seems that there is an obsession with recreating the hierarchies, the quibbles over dogma and practice, the purity and authenticity contests, that have always characterised the very Church we sought to escape from.

I love the philosophy of Druidry, especially as expressed by OBOD. That’s why I chose it. I love its egalitarian ideals, I love its deep promotion of Peace and Harmony.

However. We cannot pursue Peace and Harmony in a bubble. We cannot be apolitical. Druidry, it strikes me, is a Path of Integration. We are so lucky to be able to choose it. But we must recognise that privilege, and we must be aware that not everyone has it.
And this brings me back (finally!) to my point: to name oneself a Druid is a magical and political act. It is a beautiful one.
But it cannot express the Rage and Love that I believe I myself must now embrace. A Druid is wise and peaceful. A Druid is respected, integrated, a pillar of a Utopian community. A Druid is a leader, a teacher, a philosopher, a storyteller, a historian, a magician. A Druid is learned.
But a neo-Druid has their roots not only in the land and the Old Ways, but also in Empire, in White Supremacy, in Patriarchy, in Anglocentrism, in heteronormativity. We are not those things, not now. Many of us fight those things, now. But they are also part of our heritage. We must own them, own up to them, denounce them, destroy them. Even in Druid and Pagan Orders (again, i really do think OBOD is doing well on this, especially compared to some), these things are rampant.
And so, while we need the Druids, for they are the leaders of the Culture that we hope one day will come about, we also need the rebels.
I did not choose to be Catholic, at least not at first. But at one point, I made an oath. And I now renounce it. To define oneself against something has power. It is the power of counter-culture, of subversion, of transgression. To be a Witch, to be a Warlock, a Sorcerer, an Apostate, a Heretic, is to rebel. To rise up. To refuse to serve the Empire. To work for its downfall.

We need the Druids, for they represent the leaders of the World we wish to live in. But we need the Witches, for they represent the refusal of the World we have.

They are perhaps two sides of the same coin. Or they are the inward and the outward spiral. The Druid turns deiseal from the East: his is the Light of the Rising Sun. The Witch turns tuathalach from the North: for hers is the Dark of the Moon. The Shaman dances whirling in the South, for theirs is the Fire in the Blood. And the Dreamers lie dreaming in the West, for theirs is the Otherworld, across the sea, forever out of reach, forever present, forever lost.
We must be all of them, now. Each of us as we are called, each of us as we are gifted.
For there is a War in Heaven, and we cannot be the Forgetful People, who carried on their revels, who never chose a side, and who faded from the world full of the beauty and the sadness of twilight.

Rage and Love. We must be both.

I wrote this one five years ago now (five!), just coming out of the First Plague Year. It was published on Medium, back when I thought that was a good idea (it didn’t last, but I left my stuff up there; it regularly gets a handful of views still). The initial considerations on that awful 2020 Vision will seem dated and tired now, of course, but what I was getting at, and aiming for, in the piece was a more broad approach to our place in history, particularly those of us who, like me, had come of age in the ennui and anomie of the 1990s, thinking that all the interesting stuff was basically over, and we would live on past the End of History in disaffected irony forever. Silly us. Perhaps more relevant here and now is the effect that I see these times of tribulation having on fiction: I predicted then that tedious, highbrow literary fiction was becoming totally irrelevant. I mean. I was right. But strangely, people keep doing it. It’s like a dead chicken that keeps on running after the axe has already descended, the blood spurted, the head rolled. Anyway. I offer it up here and now much inspired by J David Osborne’s latest at Serpent Logic … A piece I found bracing, appalling, and inspiring in equal measure. Please do give it a read.

Serpent Logic

A Pile of Dead Animals

I’m rewatching Twin Peaks. It’s my wife’s first time seeing it. We’re well into Season 2 now and it’s remarkable how singular the series is. Even when Lynch isn’t writing and directing, it’s still this perfect balance of soap opera and avant garde filmmaking. There have been imitators, but nothing has ever come close…

Read more

4 months ago · 21 likes · 5 comments · J David Osborne

It struck me a few months ago, and I have been struggling with the idea of putting it into words ever since. I did not want to admit that this was true. But the signs are everywhere. There are these phrases that seem to jar and clang when I hear them “The New Normal”, “Fuck 2020”, and “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”, many other things like that. A friend reported a dream she had : she was horrified to find herself in a job interview, forgetting herself to the point of committing the grave faux pas of shaking hands. The sequel of her dream had her checking under her car for car-bombs, but because she, a brave and wonderful woman, has literally done this in real life, it was less disturbing. I said to someone the other day : “My children will not remember anything else … Their earliest years will have a world where they weren’t allowed to hug their grandparents, where they hadn’t seen their little cousins grow up, except on screens … We’ll tell them, once upon a time, there was easy travel between countries, there were cinemas, there were restaurants.” These things will come back, yes, surely they will come back. We may return to some shape or form of normal. But then I read something else today, about snow, and about how those of us who remember it, from our childhoods, will have to explain to our children about seasons, and what they used to be like; my son is just learning seasons, he said “so Winter is when there’s snow?” and I had to say to him, “Well, not really. Not anymore. Maybe far up in the mountains. But not where we live. Not anymore.” All’s changed, changed utterly. So many of us, who have the words of “The Second Coming” running in our heads, all this last year. We think back to a year ago, and what concerned us then, what was going on then. And we think : little did we know. A year of solitary confinement.

I am lucky, I keep telling myself, so lucky. I have my wife and kids. Even when it’s just the four of us, there are people here. The schools are still open, for now. But my six year old son has to wear a mask all day. When I first met his new teacher, his first year of big-school, I saw a woman in a mask, and I filled in the rest of her face with my imagination. At a meeting, a few months in, she briefly showed us her whole face, and it was a shock, because not what I had imagined. How did this become the reality that we live in, where a new acquaintance has a face you could not imagine, though you had met them? And it brought me back to that thing that I’ve been thinking about:

I cannot read fiction anymore; I can hardly read any book.

I can hardly sit through a film. I can hardly sit down and think for a few minutes, without a terrible unrest and distraction.

Someone else said it: are you having that thing where you’re watching a film and you’re shocked by the fact that people are hugging, or going into a crowded bar? How no one is wearing a mask?

The Plague Year has had many many repercussions, and all of them have been discussed at length, everywhere, constantly, forever. There have never been more thinkpieces. There has never been more profound questioning of everything we took for granted. And we were already on the cusp of such self-questioning: climate strikes. Remember them? The gilets jaunes in France, the popular uprisings on the streets around the world, in Hong Kong, in Haiti, the Unite the Right and Antifa clashes. And then suddenly, confinement. In America, at the same time, the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter suddenly, finally, reaching the forefront of the public consciousness. What is this world? What on Earth has happened? We have been plunged into turmoil, and as soon as we start to pick apart the threads, we realise that all of this has been inevitable for twenty, thirty, forty years. All the signs were always there, and we were spinning like a gyroscope on the edge of the Abyss, forever. How did we get here?

But this is the thing I do not see discussed : all of contemporary realist fiction has been consigned to the dustbin of history. From now on, every piece of “literary fiction” that doesn’t mention COVID has become historical fiction, or alternate reality fiction. And every piece that does becomes a sort of single issue social commentary, obsessed with that ONE thing …

Don’t they realise that people continue to struggle, be born, and die, of other causes? That there is still heartbreak and loss, and triumph, and agony, for so many many other reasons? Of course; but the Plague is the Elephant in the Room, and the Emperor’s New Clothes. If you do not mention it, you are not part of reality. If you do, you are not part of Reality, because not everything is about that, is it? How do you write a novel now? How can you even care to read a novel? I have no appetite for literary fiction. How could anything written about by an author that’s “made up” compete with actual events, for compelling, gripping drama? How could any study of loss, drama, despair, hope, triumph, how could any of it compete with what people are going through in real life, all the time it seems? Who needs to read about invented struggles? Who does not have their own: urgent, dramatic, bizarre, unprecedented?

Whose life has not been turned upside down?

Who can read fiction, now?

Suddenly, all of the literary fiction written forever has become a historical curiosity. Suddenly, we’ll be able to date it immediately : “ah, that must be from before 2016. You remember, the year when suddenly it seemed we’d slipped sideways into an edgy political satire written in the 90s by, oh, I don’t know, Chuck Palahniuk or someone.” Trump is part of the same thing. Brexit. Johnson. These vulgar puppets. Part of when reality went from a fragile, infinitely nuanced thing of shades of grey to a gross caricature of what we used to know. Ah, reality. It ain’t what it used to be. Oh Brave New World.

I remember as a teenager in the 90s, having that sort of strange blank relativism common to my generation. We’re not called Generation X for nothing. Remember that? It seemed there was no truth, no real right or wrong, only a vague, blankly staring detachment, a refuge in irony, a harsh cry of pain in our music, and a hip pose of ennui. Remember that? It seemed our Generation, devoid of great conflicts, devoid of great drama, would live forever in the shadow of Real Life, which had happened in another place (but by our time had all been used up).

In the 90s, people dressed in shades of grey and unobtrusive plaids and woolly hats, and stared out windows smoking cigarettes, and then made films in which Winona Ryder and Matt Dillon did the same. The soundtrack was good though. I remember, the very very last gasp of that Lost World, when we thought it was all over bar the shouting. Remember? The End of History? Silly silly people. Lulled into that state of vague and directionless anxiety, when we wondered what it must have felt like to have any meaning, urgency, true conflict in our lives. Where was the drama, we wondered? Why had history already ended, and Postmodernism come and gone, and where did that leave us, now, with nothing left to do but watch infinite Progress, Democracy, and the American Way solve all of our problems, and those of us disaffected and strange, not wanting money or success or to buy houses, we would be left forever on the margin, an odd little rump of very late Romantics? We had lived on after our time, and History had left us behind. We were remnants, of a time when things happened, to care about, to strive for, to struggle for, to surmount. What was left but to rake in ever finer detail over the coals of history, in footnotes and commentary, and to wonder what it must have been to live through War, or Plague, or Terror. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens round here. I spent the year of 1999–2000 in Berkeley, in California, attending the university there. I remember the hordes of socially aware, politically active youths, desperately searching for causes. Sure, there was still injustice, there were still problems, but didn’t the arc of History bend towards Justice? No wait, that was later. I remember trumped up outrages at minor articles of bills in California. Proposition 20. What was that again? Was there corruption in student government? Had the editorial team of the Heuristic Squelch gone too far this time?

Then it was 2001. And all changed then. As we know. I became addicted to the news, to the thinkpieces, to journalism, to world events. Suddenly, urgently, things were happening. But it all seemed so contrived and false. What was the real story? What were they hiding from us? Planes crashing into Towers. History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to Awake. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and they have all been lying to us all along. And just like that, we lost all faith in Reality. Reality Bites. Indeed. And Fiction has no Teeth.

Prophets of Doom had been ranting about all of it, on the Berkeley Campus, on each corner, “God Hates Fags”, and the Naked Guy (I never saw him), and that guy called Stoney who looked like a standup comedian from the late 60s. He used to rant. We gathered, and watched, bemused, before buying a latte at the Free-Speech Movement Café (opened that year). Commodification, Reification, False-Consciousness. Poetry is impossible after the Holocaust. We thought: Never Again. How little did we know. Reading Baudrillard in the 90s. What fun; it seemed so eccentric and wonderful. And then it happened, and the Gulf War Did Not Take Place. It was a video-game on a screen. Simulacra. Simulation. Everything. Virtual Reality. Fiction does not function the way it once did.

And it may be just the paroxysm of a wider movement. Because our generation, those born between the sixties and the late seventies, Generation X, we were the last ones born in an analogue world, who then grew up and saw everything go digital. We remember what it used to be like. We could read fiction written in the 1950s, or the 1970s, or even the 1930s and recognise the commonalities with our own childhoods. We remember having to memorise telephone numbers, and if you wanted to phone your girlfriend, you had to dare to dial the number and possibly be interrogated by her parents first. We remember those things. We remember Summers, and Winters, and everything in between. Remember that? In Europe, these things are of the past. In America, it seems that every year brings further devastating climate events. Every year now is the hottest year on record. Every year, parts of the Old World disappear. The Lost World. Everything will soon be lost. And then, as the juggernaut of Everything seems unstoppably doomed to plunge us into the Abyss, suddenly, Life calls a Halt. And we grind to a shuddering stop. And all is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Trump, Brexit, COVID. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didn’t Advent, and Christmas, feel so desperately poignant this year? Each time like it’s the last. Didn’t we wonder what the end of the world would look like? Didn’t we read our TS Eliot, and think, with a whimper, not a bang. And here we are, whimpering our way into the Dark. This seems like the Long Extinction. The Lights are Going Out All Over Europe. America has ended. Democracy has ended. Do I seem to be overdramatic? It’s the tail-end of a very long year, a terribly long decade, which has been hyperspeed and crept like a murderer towards our door.

The Revolution never came either. The War never came. The high drama, where we got to test our mettle, and see what we were really made of ; would we be Resistants, would we refuse to give the names of our Comrades? Would we face torture and worse, and keep our courage burning deep within? Or would we Collaborate? Would we sell our Comrades up the river for a mess of pottage? And we did. We sat and watched Netflix True Crime, because the greatest crime, the most awful con, the terrible fraud, had already been perpetrated, and we had sat back with our vague grasp on security and we had taken it lying down.

And fiction could not deal with this. How to care about the love lives and dead grandmas of the kid in our Creative Writing class? How to read that twee and precious literary fiction that was de rigeur at the end of that tired century, where a middle class person has a vague and troubled epiphany because a lot of not very much kind of almost happens to them?

There is no answer. We cannot teach our children that literature resides in small moments, in tiny triumphs, in the adversities of love and loss among lattes and Social Media profiles in gentrified neighourhoods; none of that makes for anything to write about any more, and all of my generation, poor Brand X Generation, who once wondered what on earth would be our story to tell, well we have received the greatest gift, the most Poisoned Chalice. Interesting Times. The Tribulation, the Revelation. The End of the World as We Know It. And it IS NOT FINE.

But never again will we read academic poetry in little magazines, where privileged little college kids meditate on the vicissitudes, and drop reference after reference to obscure figures from Mythology, the Spear Carriers, the ones slightly to the left of centre. No. We are all tragic heroes now, though we are certain that even now, even with this, we do not know real suffering. We cannot tell our children that it matters to read stories of self discovery by gap year kids in exotic locales. They will be Burning, those Places. They will be underwater. And we will keep going to our middle management “creative” jobs. We will bake bread, and rediscover gardening. For a while.

But then one day, we will say to ourselves : Greta Thunberg just turned eighteen. What had you done at that age? Discovered you liked hazelnut coffee in hipster cafés? Fallen in love with your oblivious best friend? Started that band, that too self conscious novel. NO. IT IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE. The only Fiction that we can possibly read or write now has nothing to do with the “Real World”. The Real World is no more. It has nothing to do with “Realism”, or “suspension of disbelief”; everything now beggars belief; everything is more grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, un-real.

The only answer is to read and write our way into the Mythic Time we’re in. We must all take on Quests and Battle the Eternal Foe. Because finally, there are Good Guy and Bad Guys once again. The bogeymen of our earliest childhood came out from under the bed and turned out to have been waiting in the wings all along. There are Nazis, again. There is corruption and hate and deadening dross everywhere. We must teach our children not the literature of the commonplace, but of the Common Dream. We must dream our way into Eternal Stories untethered from an out-of-date reality effect. Nothing now says “out of touch” like a slice of life. Let us devour the whole cake. Literary fiction is over. The Real World is over. Only Myth and Poetry and things that shake our souls now matter.

There is a War in Heaven, and we must choose our sides. No one is coming to save us, in this Last Battle : we are the Ones we have been waiting for. We must, finally, blessedly, take up our swords and go and save the World. It is not naive to believe in things anymore, nor to fight for them. It is no longer unhip to be earnest, and to seek out the things that make us weep with fierce joy and loss. It’s the End of the World; who can ever read “Fiction” ever again? Raise your banners. Hoist the Black Ensign, or the White Flag of the Great Surrender to the fragile and breakable beauty of it all. The Children’s Crusade is now. The fight for survival is now. The Plague Year is upon us. Could the Famine Year, the War Year, the Death Year, be far behind? The Horsemen are saddled up and drinking one last stirrup cup. They are coming to take away everything you ever knew and held dear. We held the wrong things dear.

I cannot read a book. I cannot write a line. I cannot pretend to live another life, more various and more textured, that someone else wrote in a book. My own is now as urgent and as vivid as I always feared it never ever would be. My heart fails me, but I would go on.

There are no more small epiphanies and wry observations ; there is only heroism, or despair. The world needs this now ; not escape into the tiny struggles of Anguished Men with existential indigestion : no. It needs us all to plan an Escape Route, together. If one falls, we all fall. We are tied together, and there are no handholds, no outcrops or ledges, within our grasp. Pull yourself up the cliff by force of bloody minded will. Don’t let go. Don’t look down.

Re-enchant the World. Rewild it. Resist the Nothing. Remember. We finally finally have our chance. We will not read about tiny struggles in the lives of nobodies. We will write epic tragedies of an unwinnable battle against insurmountable odds, of desperate rescues and daring feats. And none of it will be winning prestigious literary awards or gaining us entry to a well-respected MFA. It will be saving people’s lives, and saving our own souls.

You have your battle now, be thankful. You have your meaning now, be grateful. You have your torch to pass on, finally. Little matter that you only lit it now. The hour is very late. It’s not too late.

It’s time, now. Go to Work.

This is an extract from a longer piece that you can read here This Must be the Place (part 1) : On Making it Home … or indeed in its original form on The Hollow Behind the Hearthstone blog … After a conversation with a good friend and comrade, it struck me somehow that it was a good time to share this passage in particular. For those of us who feel called, by the times and their terrors, and feel we must act …

This is not just any time, is it.

It is That Time. Illo tempore. Kairos.

Let us have the courage to face the time that is given to us.

What does it mean to be in the Right Place at the Right Time?

One might say, that This Time is always the Right Time, for it’s the only one we have; but there is a difference, isn’t there?

Between the Ordinary Time, that creeps in its petty pace from day to day, as they say, and on to the last syllable of Recorded Time…

There is time that’s measured out in coffee spoons, and dusty rooms, and etherised upon a table, or pinned to a page like collected coleopterae?

These words ring like a bell, don’t they?

They do to us.

But I had been thinking, last year, very much of Right Times, and Special Times; those times that are set apart, that are not counted in the ordinary calendar of days, that seem to stand out brightly burning against a long procession of the quotidian.

I would say my thought on this was nourished by my reading of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. I would here possibly cite Beckett’s That Time, I would give scholarly sources; but this is not that kind of text; my books are still packed up in dozens of boxes; the bookshelves are not yet built. We must be content without the footnotes, and the scholarly rigour; surely, it’s not for nothing that I left that life: surely, I should be allowed to have my fun, now that those obligations are no more, and with them, all of the advantages?

I read something in The Sense of an Ending about this; it was one of my talismanic scholarly texts: something written with deep insight into literature and life, before the rot set in and academic texts divorced themselves wholesale from Life. There are still, occasionally, scholars like this writing, but they tend to do so outside the Ivory Towers and the Well-Kept Gates. I am one of theirs now. Itinerant scholars, Masters of the Hedge-School! Rejoice!

O Children! Lift up your voice!

So, this: the difference between Kronos and Kairos, between simple chronological time that creeps in its petty pace, and That Time, that time that’s set apart and strange, in which all takes on that feeling of Extraordinary Significance. A Time of great deeds, of tribulations, of heightened experience. I had been discussing this with friends. We all agreed, the Time is Out of Joint: but is that not an invitation to Great Deeds? To Significance …? Nothing is, but What is Not. All’s changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. How strange and wonderful to have one’s whole life-experience informed by these drifting fragments of poetry and scripture, both secular and sacred (like the Time) which are our inheritance! … these fragments, shored up against these ruins; yes indeed, yes indeed.

It seemed a time of Gods and Monsters, a Crucible, in which we must go to die and be reborn. Alchemical dissolution, reformation, resurrection. One of the things that had haunted me was this statue, beneath the cloisters of the Invisible College where I worked. A robed and hooded Lady, seated, holding an open book: I could not help but see in her the Papesse, the High Priestess of the Tarot. In her joined hands there was a hollow, in which I (as others had before, and will again) would sometimes, arriving very early on the campus, place a flower for her to hold, a symbol of the Mystery of Things. I have found out since that she is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose mysticism and sacred life were dedicated, justement, to that mystery and holiness of small things, of the day-to-day. Each day, when I passed her, Mysterious Lady with a wise smile and an open book, I would bless her, and ask her blessing in return. And on the plinth (or on the pages of the book? I misremember), were written words that seemed to resonate with all I felt, was going through. They spoke of “Illo tempore”: That Time. Eventually, I managed to properly decipher them and take the time to look them up:

In illo tempore respondens Jesus dixit : Confiteor tibi, Pater, Domine cæli et terræ, quia abscondisti hæc a sapientibus, et prudentibus, et revelasti ea parvulis.

Which, as I found, means:

“At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”

And I thought: How wonderful, for this inscription to be written in the book held by the Lady, in the Hallowed Halls of Learning, here, in this Place. There is so much that is hidden from us, the wise and prudent, the Professors. And the young ones, here, have so much revealed to them that we ignore. May we always be open to that learning.

I went then (and it seemed fitting, in a place so imbued with the wisdom and learning of the Church, but a kinder, now, a gentler version, without the tyrannies and terrors of the Dark Ages, which lasted elsewhere until now, and still persist), and I read the rest of the chapter, Mathew 11, in the King James version, and I found there lines I knew, lines among the ones that float in this substrate of language and scripture that we know, those of us born to it, whether we embrace it or no. It is of That Time, when Jesus and John the Baptist first learn of each other. Of what it means to be a prophet, and more than a prophet. Of the rejection by society of John for his austere and wild ways; of the rejection of Jesus for his more urbane and community-oriented ways. And of the Young, how they, without the prejudices and expectations of their Elders, may have much to teach us, must be listened to. And, to end:

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

And I remember reading that in bright Winter sunshine, in the Court of the Fountain …

“In the Court of the Fountain, where the water endlessly falls, where the sunlight in the leaves seems to ask and answer an eternal question that is Who You Are … A single tree has blossomed, dreams of Spring”

My own poetry, my own fragments, now float up in my mind’s-eye’s Vision, all imbricated with other writings, other images, other scraps of paper, floating messages in bottles, paper boats all bobbing endlessly downstream, endlessly falling, endlessly gone, never to return, forever coming Home … (“dark brown is the River, golden is the sand …”)

Do I seem to make sense? Do I make sense to myself?

I read those words, and wept. For I did not know who was speaking.

Someone is speaking. She doesn’t know he’s there.

Who is this, who offers to give rest? Shall I finally have rest? Or am I the one that speaks? Shall I be meek, and lowly in heart? Shall I offer rest to others, and to share their burdens? Who shall help me shoulder mine?

It was an overwrought and passionate time, it could not last.

I must, in the end, collapse, all restraint forgotten, fall, crash, dissolve, dissipate; Solve.

And, in that Rich Earth on which I fell, a Richer Dust concealed … Coagula.

But shall I cast myself upon the rocks, or in the thorny, tangled Waste?

How shall we find the rich, good Earth in which we might take root once more?

[on reading the musings of some elderly magicians on “urban magick”]

Have they ever even MET a City? Pfff. Preposterous bollocks.

Here’s a magical practice : Métromancie. You start off on a Situationist Dérive ( a “drift” where you let the signs and symbols of the City guide your steps, as theorised by Guy Debord), and it becomes a kind of walking mediation. It’s an excitatory practice rather than inhibitory (so like gnosis through dance or whirling or drumming, rather than through silent still mediation). It’s ecstatic. Your senses start to become overloaded, and the layers of the city, like a palimpsest, are clamouring to be read through, over, under each other.

You let the signs guide you. Street signs, shop fronts, random snatches of conversation, blasts of music. Then...

You begin your Divination. You read the City like a Tarot Deck. You read its Runes, its signs, its symbols. You are the Magician, and the Cityscape your greatest recombinatory constantly shifting Grimoire.

It leads you on a quest. You become legendary, in your own lunchbreak.

These people cannot hear the Spirits of the City, for their senses are tuned to the spirits of long ago, when there was no Metropolis like today.

The Spirits of the City speak in high whining voices, in bursts of static, in a shattered street lamp, in the strange sigils left by mystical graffiti artists and urban adventurers who plumb the Undercity.

Tramp-sign, thieves cant, the patois of the urchins. They know.

And when you tune in to their frequency, you realise : They could not hear them, these stodgy old men, these relics, because they are old, and slow. They could not see them, because they are as a flicker of neon in the dusk.

And they could not count them, for they are Legion: Innumerable, and electric. Those old men only know the light of candles and midnight oil. We know the Red Light, and the Black Light, and the Strobe.

The Spirits of the City need their Speakers. They are HOWLING.

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