The Clovenstone Workings Quotes

“So everyone is giving their soul to someone or something; it’s not just Witches. Witches just have enough cunning to give their soul- relationships to powerful entities that can make their breathing lives into occasions of more strange joy, more extraordinary capability, and more power.”
― Robin Artisson, The Clovenstone Workings: A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft

“Through dreams, we can fly; and through flying, we can transition beyond the world of sleeping bodies and enter the world of souls and spirits. Where death will lead one day, dreams might lead every night; what death will reveal as a timeless underlying ecology of sentience, only dreams will offer precious glimpses of beforehand.”
― Robin Artisson, The Clovenstone Workings: A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft

“But the educated and often upper-class men who owned these Grimoires typically had the money to protect themselves from prosecution for their strange occult pastimes. An enormous difference remains, aesthetically and metaphysically, between the Witch who obtains familiar spirits through meetings with The Devil or the Queen of Elfhame, and the Mage who, through appeal to Christ and the saints, forces a demon to serve them. A demon so bound by the faith of the Mage and his endless ecclesiastical incantations may help to bring about or accomplish extraordinary things for him, but the relationship of familiar to Witch is of a strikingly different sort.”
― Robin Artisson, The Clovenstone Workings: A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft

“Man further reported that the Queen of Elphen could be “young or old as she pleased”—a trait clearly displayed in the Romance of Thomas Rhymer, and in other strains of old lore—and could “make any that she pleased into a king”—a hint of an ancient sovereignty-granting power that suits the Great Queen dwelling inside the Land, in a fairy-Underworld or otherwise”
― Robin Artisson, The Clovenstone Workings: A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft

“Whether or not dealing with the Devil might mean the forfeiture of one’s soul was likely not a major concern of ordinary or uneducated people in Early Modern times, either—beliefs on the afterlife were also not uniform and neat across Folk Europe. The idea of taking up residence in the Fairy World after death (to make an example) was a genuinely held belief among many people in the British Isles in the Early Modern period. This was a complete alternative vision of the afterlife which stood alongside the official narrative that one either went to “heaven or hell” when they died.”
― Robin Artisson, The Clovenstone Workings: A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft