An Carow Gwyn Quotes

“To take Elder wood from a living Elder tree without reciting a very special spell- which I call the Green Pact- was to risk death or torment at the hands of the offended Elder-spirit. The spell went like this: "Old gal, give me some of thy wood, and I shall give thee some of mine, when I grow into a tree.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Whatever form it takes, the monster is there- he’s called the Dobarcu- that means “Dark wet hound”. It’s an otter, actually, in our symbolism. But it refers to a water monster, even a serpent-like one. Otters are like hairy snakes, to see them swim. It’s the guardian of the underworld, the dark wet hound. Everyone has to go through the Underworld eventually, and no one gets through without facing the Dobarcu and its terror.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“In the end we are faced with the truth that lurks behind all that we know: everything is eternal, but nothing is constant.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“The cock or rooster that is met by the well, or the entrance to the Otherworld, represents the presence of the Psychopomp himself- the King of Spirits, who opens the ways to and fro between Seen and Unseen. Mercury, as he was worshiped by the Romans in Britain, was often depicted with a bag of riches (the riches of the underworld) and a cock or rooster at his side. The fact that Mercury was often synchronized by the Romans with Native underworld or chthonic Gods (Gods who were seen as controllers of the wealth below the earth, as well as chief of the spirits below) is well known; this association with the rooster is thereby quite telling. The cock's crow at dawn was seen, anciently, as an apotropaic sound, driving away evil. Even the image of the cock or rooster still carries and projects apotropaic power, and is often used to decorate homes or adorn weathervanes.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“As an interesting cross-cultural side observation, in traditional Inuit cultures that lived by the sea, a cult devoted to a powerful entity called "The Sea Mother" grew up in later centuries. The Sea Mother, in some places, absorbed all of the attributes of the earlier Earth-Mother, and even sometimes absorbed the powers of the weather-controlling Wind-Indweller, becoming something of a nearly supreme being to those Inuit. When the Sea Mother was angry with humans, she stopped them from being able to successfully hunt sea creatures. Angagkuk (shamans) among the Inuit had to visit the Sea Mother to rectify the situation. The Sea Mother only became angry when humans were violating taboos, strict rules for how humans were supposed to spiritually and lawfully live in the world, and among other beings. Human taboo violations had an impact on the Sea Mother in her undersea realm: they dirtied her hair, made it full of filth and mess. The shamans had to descend to that realm and apologize, and work to clean her hair. When that was done, she would relent. In the story of Frau Holle, we also see an ancient tale of taboo violation. I think there is a spiritual law- call it a taboo if you want- that is binding upon all to be helpful, and to move and live in such a manner (symbolized by the chores of the girls) that we aid the order of the world thereby, and not hinder it. The pitch that falls over the lazy sister is, to my way of seeing, a manifestation of the same symbolic filth that dirties the hair of the Sea Mother in Inuit lore.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“I believe that Frau Holle's "reward," to both our heroine and to her less likeable step-sister, is based on something more than mere demonstration of "industriousness." Our heroine's hard work in Frau Holle's house helped to maintain the order of the world in an important sense: by doing her "chores", the snows came on time, and in the right amount, and goodness knows what else. Her sister, however, probably helped to put the world sideways through her lack of fulfilling her duties. For a brief time, these sisters cease to be human girls and become Grey Women- the Fayerie or Otherworldly female assistants or serving Daimons/spirit-helpers to the Earth Indweller, whose many tasks uphold the Fateful flow of the world's power. For a brief (or perhaps timeless) time, the two human girls become Fates.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“There is a minor element of Christian bogeyism here, in which earlier powerful entities or beings are presented as ogre-like; but it isn't only an attempt on the part of Christian culture to villainize the older powers. Even in Pagan times, you can be sure that entities like Holda/Cailleach were in possession of terrifying aspects. Often, the Earth-Goddess was culturally storied as a Giantess or a Titaness herself, placing her previous to the Gods in generation- a true elder force, and often one that was presented as ambiguous or dangerous for many reasons. Her capability of showing a terrifying or ugly face, alongside a youthful and beautiful one, is the oft-repeated motif that identifies her for who she is.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“There are very influential beings in that world. The Queen of that world- the Earth Indweller herself and her co-ruling "Lord"- are just as important and generous among the spirits in subtle ways as they are in more tangible ways to the breathing and living up above the land. Perhaps they sustain or nourish every being in that deeper condition in some manner, or hold the strange laws of that world together in some kind of deeper harmony. Sometimes, breathing humans find their way into the Fayerie world, or sometimes they get taken. Sometimes Fayerie beings make their way into the breathing world, or get taken. Sometimes Fayerie beings visit the breathing world, or hunt there. In the deep world, fateful powers and beings see to it that those living above whose time has come to go below (to die and become spirits) get taken down when the time is right. There is a back-and-forth between the worlds that can happen on multiple levels. The worlds overlap and communicate. They give and they take from one another.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Fayerie beings and their world came to occupy an uncertain place in the Christian mind. In a sense, everything about the pre-Christian world that could not be incorporated into Christian cosmological thinking became incorporated into the Fayerie tradition. Fayerie even becomes the home of diminished or forgotten Pagan Gods and Goddesses. They are stuck firmly between heaven and hell, not in one place or another, an independent yet non-Christian society or class of entities that still carry all the dangers and menace that populations of non-Christian or heathen people carried for Christian folk.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“In the same manner that the mystery-initiates of Dionysos ages before believed that their ecstatic revels with their beast-like lord in the nighted forests would lead to a state of lasting divinity, union, and joy with Him beyond the boundaries of this mortal life, witches who bound themselves to their Master and his company likewise created the conditions for entry into a paradisal condition in the Unseen.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“When we look for the pre-Christian origins of paradise, however, we don't have to look far at all. Countless Pagan sources reveal the nearly universal Pagan belief in "happy afterlife" realms for various kinds of persons, vocations, or mystery-cult initiates who made special personal bonds with certain Gods or Goddesses, qualifying them for existing in the unearthly beauty or power of that divinity or those divinities forever, or until the world's ending. It is those hallowed spiritual conditions and stories about them that came to be incorporated into the Christianized "paradise" notion; it was the only metaphysical place they could be put, even though they were swiftly forgotten, or outright denied as heathen delusions. Witches from the pre-modern period who attended the Otherworldly and extra-temporal Sabbat revelry reported the powerful ecstatic delights of that experience, and believed that they would be transported, in death, to a perpetual Sabbat. A witch told Pierre De Lancre "The Sabbat was the true paradise… where there was more joy than could be expressed." Another told him that "the joy that witches had at the Sabbat was but a prelude to a much greater glory.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“That Thomas was even venerated as a "once and future" being- a hero who was rumored to not be dead but simply removed from our world, and due to return one day- firmly positions him in a much larger tradition of mythical and folkloric heroes, like Arthur in Britain.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Every being, every phenomenon in our world of experience represents a pre-existing relationship, or a potential for new relationship, an opportunity for change, transformation, and co-creation. Thus, every time a being vanishes from our world, every time a family of animals goes extinct or a family of plants vanishes, the range of transformative and insightful, creative potential that our entities might express is forever lessened. We are forever diminished, whether or not we consciously realize this. The more of the world we destroy, the more of ourselves we destroy and degrade.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“The Unseen might poetically be considered the dream of this world. I like this phrase, because it captures something hard to express.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“So House Spirits originally (and even today) were pre-existing nature spirits that became enmeshed in the new human activity of creating and inhabiting permanent houses. Over time, when humans lived and died in houses for generations, connections between the house, the family, and Ancestral spirits were made, too- and thus the ancestral element of House Spirit ecology became a reality. Today, as in the past, the tutelary spirits of houses can be Ancestors, pre-existing land or nature spirits who have incorporated themselves into the structure and living spaces, or both.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Followers are entities that appear to be linked to the birth, life, death, and destiny of a living man or woman. They are connected to a breathing human throughout life, and though they typically remain unseen throughout a life, they work to protect the human being they are connected to. For ordinary people, the first sighting of the fetch-follower is typically shortly before they die, when this entity departs briefly from them to "go and get their place ready" in the Unseen before returning to guide them away from this life and into the next. Thus, having a vision of the follower is a standard folkloric omen for approaching death. The follower would seem to be the same as the Old Norse fylgja- and it can assume an animal shape as well as a human one. It is the source of an individual's luck and somehow mediates their destiny to them. It's chief service, aside from spiritual protection through life, is to act as a psychopomp in death.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“The Fayerie aspect of humanity may be its primary aspect; it may be the way our entities exist in the long (or timeless) periods between brief periods of human life- the relatively short periods in which we gain breath souls and, with the aid of human mothers, express our entities as humans.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Clumps of moss in certain Eastern European nations were described as "forests" for both spirits and dead people.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Wentz sums it up best: "The Fairy-faith belongs to a doctrine of souls; that is to say, that Fairyland is state or condition, a realm or place very much like (if not the same as) that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as Gods, daimons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits… (seers) say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because (it is) incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“The fairy was originally encountered and venerated as the spirit of a dead person. The Fairy Faith is, from its foundation, a continuation of an extremely archaic European cult of the dead. This kind of veneration of the dead- the Ancestral dead or otherwise- is not specific to just one region or a handful or regions in Europe; it is a Europe-wide and worldwide human cultural phenomenon which has taken many unique local forms.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“Fairy, in this sense, is synonymous with the most archaic layer of the Greek term daimon, which once referred to spirits and uncanny, unseen other-than-human powers that dwelled within an area or within and around human families and individuals. Over time, daimon came to take on new meanings; daimons could be minor divinities, and later the word could be used to refer to the great Gods and Goddesses themselves. Daimons could be spirits of place, responsible for good or bad fortune, or mediator spirits between the Gods and human beings. The personal daimon could be a guardian spirit for a man or woman, following them through life, or it could refer to the aspect of the mortal being that was daimonic, and thus immortal. Finally- and quite in keeping with what became of fairy- daimons became demons, malevolent spirits that the church forbade contact with.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“This is sorcery; the strange connections between things- even the invisible ties that bind us all- and how they might suddenly roar to conscious life in surprising ways. And I pay it forward, even right now: whoever you are, if you find yourself in deeply troubled times, push forward like you're needed. Because you are. None of us can see the extent of this whole system of life we're all in, but the need for you is there, somewhere. Trust it; live like it's real, because it is. This is a radical act of trust in Fate, but also an act of radical solidarity with our countless kin-beings. We need you. We need each other.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith

“The core reality of the fairy as postmortem being for deceased humans (or other breathing creatures in our world) has been laid bare. When we bring to mind the intimate overlap and interchange that the Fairy-world or spirit-world has with the ordinary world of experience, we must remember that fairy-beings can just as easily and accurately be described as the pre-natal beings of humankind or other breathing creatures.”
― Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn: Sorcery and the Ancient Fayerie Faith