An Introduction

This is a strange work. I don't really know where it is going anymore than I would know if I was beginning a book. I don't know how this will end. I'm not entirely sure what it is. It is largely inspired by the American Folkloric Witchcraft blog. It is an attempt at doing some kind of work to explain, principally to myself, what that form of Craft is, to have something worth saying about it and perhaps it is to console myself for being tossed off the 1734 Facebook page where I had begun to do, without meaning to, a lot of articles exploring the Craft. But even then I never sought to teach. I was throwing out ideas and seeing if they would resonate with other witches, which is what I think I am doing here. I am exploring many ideas and practices of 1734 especially as reflected in American Folkloric Witchcraft, that brilliant Way created by Laurelai Black and her one time partner in romance but still fellow partner in the Craft, Glaux. This page is only an exploration of an expression of Craft mainly influenced by American Folkloric Craft and 1734. For more information on these interwoven ways, there is the American Folkloric witchcraft blog, as well as the 1734 page, short but dense.

This is my reflection on Craft, and I do not seek to tell you how to lay a compass, or tread a mill though I may often speak of how I do these for myself. That the compass contains for points, North, South, East and West, is common not only to all who practice the Craft, but any navigator.  But what is not common is the system of Castles as opposed to Watchtowers. For what we use in laying the compass is not only the four cardinal directions, but the Castles to the northwest, the northeast, the southeast and the southwest, and these have their correspondences, not to the great Quarter Sabbats, but to the Equinoxes and the Low Sabbats. These Castles are Glass Castle, the Golden Castle, the Castle of Stone and the Silver Castle, sometimes called the Blood Red Castle. All of these are inspired by the writings of Robert Cochrane, but discovered an elucidated by Glaux, Laurelai and Natalie, the mothers of the American Folkloric Tradition and its constant discoverers. For some reason, it has been given to me to discover as well, and so we begin not with the first of the Castles, as would be straight and fair, but with my favorite, as is Crooked and very much in the spirit of the Craft, and this is the Golden Castle, the Castle of Revelry, that which stands on a hill to the North East.