The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘elementals’

It was Lenten Moon – the February full moon – on February 25th. Kal and I discussed where we might go to do some work: I wanted to stay local but he wanted something more exotic. Sometimes we agree to differ, so I was left to work at home. As it turned out the moon wasn’t making an appearance anyway, with thick cloud covering the night sky all evening.

I decided to work with the available energies anyway, and to ask for inspiration about a subject to do some work upon. The answer I got back was “Elemental sigils”. Just that at first, so I did some more digging. I remembered that my new spirit guide had been saying when I met him that I would have no need for tools any more whilst I worked with him. This had been initially quite disconcerting, but subsequently I felt it was more liberating. There was one thing bugging me, though – what about the powers in my staff – the elemental forces that were independent of me, and which were linked to the Elemental Masters of Tinkinswood? How could I access these powers if I didn’t use my staff?

I was now being offered a method – The Elemental Sigils. I needed to dowse for the patterns that I could use to trace when I needed access to these elemental forces, and then they would become accessible to me.

I began by getting the agreement of the various elemental spirits that I have been working with for years. Normally I accessed them via a crystal set, but now I was abandoning that method I wanted their approval to transfer the ability to call them by these sigils. One by one I called them forth and asked if they agreed with the new method. One by one they agreed, and I dowsed out their call sign – the elemental sigil for each element.

Here is what I dowsed:

Elemental sigil forms

These symbols are personal to me – they would not have the same effects for anyone else. Sometimes I work with objective information  sometimes it’s very personal. This is one of those personal times. Yet, if you are seeking an alternate method of working with the elements yourself, then why not try to find out their “call signs” for yourself? You might be surprised at what results come back.

Well, I see that Kal got his summary out first. Still, “if you can’t beat them…”

Generally, what type of year it has been? Dis-jointed, slower than last year’s breakneck speed, measured, with lots of deep synchronicities. When I come to review the year I realise that I still made lots of progress on the various tasks that I was lead to perform in order to progress along my path of Druidry.

Below are the main topics that I have picked out from this year’s blog posts. I have tried to keep the explanations to a minimum, so have included links back to the original postings if you want the detail for each of the topics. What I thought was a quiet year has actually turned out to be incredibly packed and busy. The topics are in no order whatsoever, which kind of fits with the way that the year’s learning has come about – seemingly haphazard, but all threading into and through itself like some kind of cat’s cradle whose overall pattern will only be known when the final moves have played out.

26 topics I have been involved in this year:-

a) Healing – Most of the year has been spent developing healing skills, whether that was using remote energies, balancing the chakras, healing with the hands, or with crystals. I have realised that I am more attuned to healing places than people currently, but that is changing. The healing energies can be attuned to different colours for particular effects. To work with these energies I need to understand which “colour” is missing from a site and then call upon the energies of the local living entities to gather together to create this missing colour and thus heal the site. [related posts: My Five Healing Rays, Healing Rays Explained]

Also, in conjunction with my friend Mike, we created a new healing centre at The Bridestones in Cheshire. [related posts: A New Healing Centre]

Chakra colours, energy frequencies and healing may be linked

b) Re-discovering the bard - Discovered great new music (and that I like the new forms of folk music) at The Green Man Festival, and saw Roy Harper in concert in London. This year music has really connected with my heart and stirred great emotions. I have written more poetry this year than in other years too. [related posts: Green Man Festival, Roy Harper]

c) Astrological links to Venus, Orion’s Belt and Sirius affirmed at almost every site. Also Scorpius, astrological links to Arthur and the Great Bear constellation. The constellations of Serpens, Corvus and Perseus have been especially meaningful to me this year, guiding me along a very meaningful path from one end of an energy ley to another. [related posts: Serpent at Castlerigg, Arthurian Archetypes of Corvus, The Berth and Death of Scorpius, The Three Stars of Fertility, Absorbing Orion at Lud's Church]

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With about as much preparation as a shotgun wedding Kal and I decided to meet up “half way” in Chepstow in order to explore the South Wales area for megalithic sites. We both had different quests to pursue, but sometimes the quests are secondary to the much more enlivening act of just being out together at sacred sites, for there is no more pleasurable experience to me than to be with my old mucker dowsing and discovering things druidical and deep at the darkest and dingiest neolithic remnants these fair lands have to offer.

So we pointed a random finger at the map and with only a name to follow and the promise that something worthwhile may be there we headed towards Parkmill village just beyond Swansea in West Glamorgan. I had already travelled for three hours to get to Chepstow, but such is our zeal for our quests that I was prepared to venture another hour or so into the furthest corners of west Wales just on the off-chance that this place might be good. Luckily, it was better than good!

We arrived at Parkmill and took what we presumed was the right track past the Heritage Centre and ended up at a small car park. We checked the maps but couldn’t decide which way we ought to be going so I went over to check a nearby information board supplied by Cadw. It showed the area of Parc le Breos (Park Le Bruce, or Park Wood) to be full of interesting sites – a reconstructed long cairn, a cave and possibly a well. Frankly, I didn’t read past the long cairn – already I wanted to see it. We made our way up the well-made path, eager to see what this reconstruction had to offer.

Information about the Park Wood site

The long cairn (or more properly I should say it is an Initiation Chamber) had been excellently rebuilt. It looked beautiful, and gave us a very good idea of how the front may have looked in its original form. These builders clearly knew how to make a great structure. I took some pictures then put the camera away. It was time to have a look around inside. I approached the entrance and introduced myself to the place. When I walked forward I asked if I may enter and waited for a response. I got one – a horrible push in my stomach that felt like a nasty prod in the guts. Hmmm…rejection. It would seem that I wasn’t in the right state to enter at this time – maybe not at all?

I got my dowsing rods out and asked if there was something I could do in order to prepare myself for entry into the chamber. The rods directed me away from the building and towards the nearby line of trees. As I broke through the tree line into the woods the rods swung around to point at the moss-lined back of a large oak tree. “Sit here!” they seemed to be saying. So I sat down and lit some incense sticks, hoping they would assist me with the cleansing process. I felt I ought to rid myself of my “worldly” energies – the energetic clutter and state of mind that comes from driving in the modern world. I wasn’t in a megalithic state of mind yet!

Minutes later the oak had helped me to divest myself of all my detritus, and I felt cleaner and really “tuned in” to the place. I thanked the tree and went back to check whether or not I would be able to get back into the chamber to do some work.

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Earlier in the month I was asked to go on a training course with work. The course was down near London, so this meant that I would have to travel for several hours to get there, yet I didn’t have to arrive until 1:30pm. By my quick reckoning if I started my journey early enough I would be able to go visit a megalithic site on the way to the course – bonus! Which one, though? Given my route there was only one that I wanted to consider – the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire.

As I neared the site a thought struck me – I didn’t have a purpose to go with! I racked my brains – then I remembered my liaison with a water spirit in Cumbria and how I had made a connection with this element quite strongly. I felt like I had not made the same connection with the other three elements yet. Perhaps this site was the place to do that? It was a sunny day (fire), the stones were buried in the earth, and there was a slight breeze (air)….I would have to see whether it would work when I arrived.

View of the Rollright Circle

I was practically alone in the circle except for the occasional visiting party of one, two or three people, but as is usually the case they only stayed for the merest time. I barely had long enough to register most of the people who visited, so brief was their stay! I would love to survey people about why they visit these places and then do nothing when they get there!

Ritual for three elements

When I started druidry I wasn’t “into” ritual. I didn’t see that it was necessary, but I was being too narrow-minded. What isn’t necessary is a prescriptive ritual. You know the type of thing – in “The Heathen’s Book if Rituals”, page 24, it says that if you want to summon a fire elemental you will need a red candle, to face south, hold a crystal of Tiger’s Eye in your left hand, then say the words, “O Element of Fire, come to me in my hour of need….” blah blah. Whose ritual is that? Is it YOURS? Certainly not. It’s somebody else’s. So I follow a path whereby the ritual is completely impromptu. If I have certain things with me at the time then I might use them, such as candles, incense or crystals. Even my staff can be involved. But none of these things are necessary, and so I could just as easily face in a particular direction and simply imagine a connection with some elemental force and that will work just as well. In our world it can take a strong mind to ignore the “teachings” of other spellworkers and vote for your own method because we are so often seeking to know the “right ” thing to do. The right thing to do is do what feels right!

Now to discuss the ritual part of the visit.

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After spending an oxymoronic fortnight of exhaustion and relaxation in Canada it was a relief to finally be flying home. Much as I love visiting other countries, there really is no place I feel better than my home islands of Britain. Before I reached home soil, though, I had a relay race to go through – Calgary to Seattle, Seattle to Amsterdam, and finally Amsterdam to Liverpool. That would get me close enough to get a taxi home.

I was mentally prepared for the flight. Having been outside watching the solstice lunar eclipse the night before I was looking forward to a long sleep on the transatlantic portion of the flight. As we settled into our central seats (I have long legs, so this is the worst place for me to be sitting) M looked across at the couple with the toddler and raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, “That looks like trouble.” I whispered to her, “I think it’s going to be okay, the parents look quite responsible.” I’m sure they were, but it didn’t stop what was about to happen!

For five and a half hours!

For the next five and a half hours the toddler wailed. Incessantly. And I mean WAILED. Bawled at full volume, occasionally lapsing into prolonged sobs in order to catch breath before starting at full bore again. Using the various entertainment mechanisms – film, radio, games – you can sort of shut that out for a while. Then it really starts getting to you. I don’t care who you are – five hours of someone else’s child at full volume will make you go crazy.

What was the parents’ response? “Shhhh!” and soothing pats. Well, that ought to do it then! When that failed to quieten the boy down they….just did it again! Huffing and sending daggered glances in their direction I hunkered down into myself to try to read the book I was wading through. The book was about Elementals, but I wasn’t making any significant progress because I couldn’t concentrate with the yowling going on near to me. I looked again at the cover – Elementals – wasn’t there something I could do about this if I made contact with some helpful entities? I smiled. Let’s see what happens!

They're up there if you look for them

I went into a light trance by going deep into my own head away from the noise of the airplane cabin. In that space I was free to push my aura out into the air surrounding the plane and to begin to call for the assistance of any nearby air elementals. I presumed there might be some, but it was done rather in hope than expectation.

I felt a slight change in the atmosphere even though I was still deep inside my own head – the sounds around me seemed if anything even more distant, and though I came back to a sort of wakefulness my focus was so intent upon the baby that I heard and saw little else. I began to draw upon the air outside and to bring it into the plane in the form of “bandages” or threads of soft air. I began to wrap the toddler in those bandages in a spiral fashion from below its feet to above its head and back down and around it again, circling all the time anti-clockwise – the direction of soothing, the direction that removed the active elements out of a situation. Importantly, all the while I was sending energy from my heart chakra along these threads as they wrapped the baby into a cocoon of loving energy.

At the same time as I was doing this binding I called upon the air elementals who may have answered my call and asked them to wrap themselves around the child, the soothe and cuddle it, and to reassure it that all the noise and strangeness was normal and that everything would be okay. This was in complete contrast to the way I had initially approached the situation, and I had to get over my feelings of annoyance.

As I finished this ritual and came back to waking consciousness there was already a change in the behaviour of the child. The loud wails were becoming more intermittent, as though punctuated or interrupted by something distracting. Then the wails subsided into the low murmured sobs. Another half minute later the child went completely quiet – much to the surprise and relief of the mother who was still cradling the toddler and still trying to get her “Shhhhh”s to work.

For the rest of the flight the baby made no noise at all. Even when we came into land and there were changes in air pressure and landing gear being extended the most that the child did was a faint murmur of discontent. Something had worked some magic and for the first time ever I felt that it might have been me!

As I left the plane I gave thanks to the air elementals for their assistance, and I dis-engaged and dismissed all my energy from the child, Job done.

Gwas – learning new skills every day.

The Hedge Druid blog has reached 300 posts! Thanks to those of you who are reading our posts regularly, everyone who has contributed to the comments section, and to casual visitors who may just happen on by. We hope you are enjoying the journey along The Path. Our experiences seem to resonate with many of you.

Since late 2008 we have delivered three hundred almost-believable, sometimes vaguely interesting pieces of information to you all. For Kal and I the blog began as a means of recording our experiences whilst out dowsing, and for me particularly it was a means to record the cross-over that I was experiencing with my newly-emerging interest in druidry. Since then we have developed spiritually and the metaphorical goal-posts have shifted somewhat.

It has been to my personal delight that you have followed our progress in increasing numbers. Good on you, but shouldn’t you be out in a field kissing a flower or something? Only kidding. It’s great to have you here, and we hope that our exploits inspire you to try some of the unusual things we get up to for yourself. You’ll notice we often leave the detail for you to work out for yourself? That’s deliberate.

Two years after we started blogging we have hit a major milestone. I feel like we readers of this blog are a small band of Spartans facing the hordes of rationalist unbelievers in their many guises and poking them sternly in the eye with experiential evidence. Of course, we’re all mad. We need to acknowledge that, If anyone asks, you don’t believe a word of this, right?

Over that time we have indeed covered many esoteric and “flaky” subjects: crop circles, crystals, healing with energy, earth energy lines, coincidences, elemental spirits, ghosts, power centres…and many more that I can’t bring to mind but which make me muse and ponder. We aim to test them all in time.

Over that few years we’ve been spending less time dowsing and more time on energy work/magick. Dowsing has currently (and unfairly) been relegated to an aide to our other work. In the near future we’re going to go back to re-investigating the dowsing principles because we think there’s more to learn from that. Expect some updates to the Sacred Sites page with its map of energies. Expect some new ideas to emerge from our findings.

Here is just a flavour of some of the topics we will be covering soons:-

• Lammas – what it means to me and what I will be doing
• Crop circles – our ideas about where they come from and who’s making them, and how they are made, and what their importance might be
• Stone circles – are they schools for passing on mystical information?
• The newly-discovered wood henge near Stonehenge – our first dowse of it
• The power of numbers : five, seven and eleven

Hope you’ll stay with us for the next three hundred. Charge!!!!!!

Gwas.

In the previous post – Part 1 – I mentioned that one of my purposes for this Spring Equinox day was to discover the purpose of the time period between Spring Equinox and Beltane. I had done this in the first half of the day, finding that the theme of the period was the seeking of neutrality, of balance, of integrating with the concept of the Neutral. Obviously, much work would have to be done to unpack that revelation and discover what it meant.I guess many years of study may be required.

What remained to be discovered on this day – what other tasks had I set myself? I was going to attempt to reconnect with the four elemental forces of Nature and try to initiate my year’s direction by engaging with those forces. With that in mind Kal and I set off towards the popular valley fo Eskdale. Eskdale seemed to offer the prospect of sites suited to all of the elements: a waterfall for water, a hill fort for air, more stone circles for earth, and then we planned to have a small fire in the dunes of nearby Ravenglass to finish the day.

Stanley Force

There is a small car park conveniently situated at the floor of the river which the waterfall flows into. We parked there and began the ascent up the slopes of the Eskdale valley like Stanley himself, trekking through the Cumbrian jungles to reach the meeting point with our Livingstone. OK, it wasn’t anything like that at all. Instead it was what could only be described as the most idyllic path that I have ever walked on in my life. And this was in March, well before the leaves and flowers had begun to decorate the path with their own wonderful colour.

At the official entrance to the Stanley Force path, gated and with a helpful information sign, we stopped to admire the first of several sweet chestnut trees that grace the way up to the waterfall. All around us mosses and lichens draped the place in regal green robes, and a variety of old trees leaned towards the river, yearning for its sparkling clean fell water.

We were both highly energised by the place, and were enchanted by the scenery. Kal grew particularly fond of the trees that lined the way up to the waterfall, hugging many of them spontaneously. Luckily no-one else was around to be disturbed by this and I was getting used to it now, ever since his encounter with what he cunningly called ‘Tree’. Leave him be, he has obvious problems!

The climb got steeper and the trance that we were getting into with the rhythm of the walk got deeper. By the time we had reached the refreshing spray from Stanley Force itself we were in silent awe, or was that Kal quivering at the steep sides and plunge into certain death, I couldn’t be sure? No handrails here. A steady mind and steady feet were required on the slippery rocks and muddy track.

Here was my first opportunity to engage with the elements. Using some crystals I had brought with me for the purpose I dowsed a pattern to lay them out into, and then, standing with my staff and allowing myself to mentally fall into the waterfall I asked for the assistance of the spirits of water in the furtherance of my work this year. The dowsing rods were out again afterwards checking the progress of the communing and with positive results, so we headed back down. More tree hugging antics, and a near twisted ankle if I recall. Well, he will jump around so – what does he expect? He’s 42 not 12!

We headed off up the Eskdale valley road heading for our next destination, the Roman hill fort of Harknott Pass – a notoriously steep route.

Hard Knott Fort

The car struggled up the steep inclines and we both got a whiff of gear oil burning as the automatic clunked and whirred, straining and grinding as it switched to drag the car and its payload up the unfeasibly engineered twists and turns of the thin strip of tarmac that calls itself a road up to Hard Knott . Mist veiled the view and soon we were squinting and peering trying to make out what we felt sure woudl be a huge neon sign indicating the position of the hillfort up there. We saw nothing.

Soon we were on the cusp of the hill and the nose of the car tilted downwards. We were beginning to descend. Surely some mistake? The fort must be nearby, I reasoned, having been here once before twenty years earlier. Oh, faulty memory! For the next half hour we struggled like the car up the steep sloped of Hard Knott Hill in search of a thick stone wall. We found none. Sweating and dripping from the mist we returned to the car disoriented. Where could it be? I decided that it was time for my Active10 GPS to earn its keep, and we waited for the unit to find enough satellites to get a reading. It was a mile back the way we had come. What? How could we have missed it going at such a slow speed as we did?

Ten minutes later we found a lay-by with a tiny sign, sideways on to the road, which indicated the nearby presence of the fort. But where exactly? Again we wandered off course in the mist. Only the sound of other tourists brought us back on course again, and finally the walls of the fort reared up in the mist like a great square stone snake.

Once inside the fort we were slightly protected from the bitter wind. The clinging mist made our hands cold and so dowsing was again at a minimum. I decided to check whether this was a suitable place to connect ot the element of air. The answer was that it was highly suitable, so I urged to rods to find a spot where I could make a connection to draw down this air energy. I was taken across  the site towards a nearby slight rise that ended in a corner of the fort. It was a quiet place, free of other people, and as I arrived there I felt the wind tugging at my clothing and tousling my hair. Yes, this was the place alright!

Minutes later I was heading back to the centre of the site where we had deposited our bags. Kal had gone wandering on his own mission, but I had another request. As there was a heavy scent of earth in the air I asked if this place was also suitable for connecting to the elemental energy of earth? I got a positive response again, and asked the rods to lead me to a suitable place again. I was taken to the opposite side of the site and the rod circles over a flat and rounded rocky outcrop that was inside the walls – why would the fort builders not have removed this rock from the site, I wondered? It was covered in old lichen and looked beautiful, with shallow pits and smooth curves. Minutes later I felt the forces of the earth arising and infusing me.

I can’t really explain how this communion takes place. It’s a form of meditation; a connection that envisions a descent into the earth and a connection with the primary planetary bodies. Beyond that, I don’t really know what happens to make it work. Sometimes it’s a thought, a feeling or an intention. Sometimes it happens of its own accord.

We left to head back down the way we had come up. A short steep and scary descent to be sure. The final destination was to go light a fire on the beaches of Ravenglass. Ravenglass looked like the perfect and closest place to do this, as it seemed to have vast expanses of sand banks and dunes. When we arrived the weather had beaten us to it. All the shops were closed. Al the people were safely indoors. The tide was in and the dunes were isolated. A quick glance made the decision – we were going home! The fourth elemental would have to wait.

Cumbria had been a balanced day – lovely in the morning and getting progressively worse, weather-wise. The whole day had felt like that – the morning had been immensely successful, but progressively harder as the day wore on.

Gwas.