Lee Morgan > Quotes

“Would you teach me, Seth?’
Seth smiled and leaned back in his seat.
‘You do realise, of course, that you have no idea what you ask of me?’ Seth replied after a moment.
‘Of course,’ Christopher replied quietly. ‘Could you tell me?’
‘No. That is the problem you see,’ Seth said. ‘Magic is something you can never prepare someone for. Magic will make you, Christopher. It will find all the secret empty places of longing in you and fill them more surely than any other love. And magic will break your heart.’ A slight, rather sad smile crossed Christopher’s face for a moment. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think your heart is already broken, you think that this crooked and winding way is the only path left for you now. But you’re wrong. The heart breaks like every wave on the beach and there’s a darkness you’ll have to pass through that you can’t even see from where you are now.”
― Lee Morgan, Wooing the Echo: Book One of the Christopher Penrose Novels

“When the beautiful and benevolent Queen of Elphame still has to take True Thomas through a dimly-lit ordeal full of an ocean of gore before he can reach Elphame, it is clear the Faerie Faith that gave birth to Witchcraft was originally linked both to the chthonic realm and to a shining one. Christianity2 had no place for such ambiguity in its moral universe yet it still crept in through the third path that the Faerie Faith held firm to. Witches, or whatever the humans who worked with faeries were called in each country, were associated with darkness and death because they were the liminal guardians of the threshold of harrowing and initiatory Underworld descent, a required experience before a human could enter Faerie.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“In Italy the mistress of the magic witch mountain, flowing with milk and honey, was called “wise Sibillia.” It was said the ancient sibyl of mount Cumae had taken refuge in a cave at the crest of the Appenines. In Reductorium Morale (c. 1360) Pietro Bersuire wrote about her Underworld paradise entered through a grotto in the mountains of Norcia, a region famed for its Witches.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Pocs remarks on the prevalence of Witches with fairy characteristics in the trial records throughout central and Southeastern Europe.43 It seems she believes the “white sabbat” to have been the original before the “black sabbat” was invented by the inquisitor and demonologist. But by white she really means ambivalent, because despite the bells and music, faeries everywhere are associated with elf darts and blasts of disease as much as they are with helping with the spinning.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Rusalka are female spirits of the forest or waterways. Their faces are pale like the Moon, and they wear robes of mist or green leaves, or perhaps a white robe without a belt. Their hair is green or brown, decorated with flowers. In the middle of the night, they would walk out to the bank and comb their long hair or dance in meadows. If they saw handsome men, they would fascinate them with songs and try to take them away. Or they would simply come out of the water to comb their hair or climb trees. Their underwater home is a place of vast marbled chambers hung with crystal chandeliers, its walls and floors set with gold and precious stones. When summer approaches and the waters are warmed by the rays of the life-giving light, they have to return to the trees, the so called “houses of the dead.” Like the Vila, which they are sometimes conflated with, they are also known for being great spinners. They hang the results of their labors from the trees and lay it on the banks, where anyone passing should be wary of stepping lest they be caught in it like a net. The Rusalki are also explicitly known for being spinners of fate, who possess a powerful ability to affect the lives of local inhabitants. The Rusalki “decided who died and who would be reborn, who prospered and who perished, who married and who would be barren.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Shakespeare also expresses the knowledge of faeries coming in different colours, and hints he has some understanding of their origins in the following quote: “Fairies, black, grey, green, and white, You moonshine revellers, and shades of night, You orphan heirs of fixed destiny, Attend your office and your quality.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The faerie is ever of the mid-country, neither human nor angel, neither plant nor animal, living in a world with neither sun nor moon, always on the edge of dawn, with one foot on either side of the hedge, riding the barriers—just like the Witch.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“It is noted that witches were inclined to fly on brooms, stangs, pitchforks, distaffs and even ladles which can initially seem a little strange. But when we realise that in Hungary, for instance, when the drum became something that could no longer be owned for fear of being caught using it to go into a trance state, it gradually became replaced by the sieve, a common household object that could be pressed into the service of the unseen.[5] These common household objects are a testimony to how the world outside the hedge continually interpenetrates with everything inside it, everything mundane and seemingly normal and unthreatening remains subtly imbued with its Other. In a world where ‘witchcraft’, a practice always partially hidden, became something that had to hide, it was able to hide, behind every teapot, ladle, broom and kettle on the stovetop.”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“In earlier times soul wasn't a singular finite entity, it was possible to speak about giving soul to something in return for spirit. Soul is vitality, spirit is consciousness. The human sells, or more properly exchanges, their soul essence to the demon, who gives them heightened enhanced consciousness and skill in return.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Shakespeare also separates the human dead from faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards,” etc. To which Oberon replies— “But we are spirits of another sort: I with the morning's love have oft made sport;”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“As a cultivated, human food not found in the wild, bread is sometimes used to ward against the faeries, and at the same time, when it's baked just right (neither cooked too well nor raw as the faerie wife insists in Wales) it and the aroma it creates is used as an offering to faerie. The same thing that under one circumstance can ward them away can also feed them. This is a concept that returns to us again and again whenever we discuss traditional ways of maintaining right relations with the faeries.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“This vein of poetry they call Awen, which in their language signifies as much as Raptus, or a poetic furore; and in truth as many of them as I have conversed with are, as I may say, gifted or inspired with it. I was told by a very sober and knowing person (now dead) that in his time there was a young lad fatherless and motherless, and so very poor that he was forced to beg; but at last was taken up by a rich man that kept a great stock of sheep upon the mountains not far off from the place where I now dwell, who clothed him and sent him into the mountains to keep his sheep. There in summer time, following the sheep and looking to their lambs, he fell into a deep sleep, in which he dreamed that he saw a beautiful young man with a garland of green leaves upon his head and a hawk upon his fist, with a quiver full of arrows at his back, coming towards him (whistling several measures or tunes all the way) and at last let the hawk fly at him, which he dreamed got into his mouth and inward parts, and suddenly awaked in a great fear and consternation, but possessed with such a vein, or gift of poetry, that he left the sheep and went about the Country, making songs upon all occasions, and came to be the most famous Bard in all the Country in his time.”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“But there are many other than Alice and her Robin who do, such as Isobel Gowdie's sexual passion with her “devil” and Andro Man's ongoing relationship with his Faerie Queen and almost worship for Christsonday who sounds angel-like. Ann Jeffries not only experienced romantic love with her faerie man but was bravely defended by him when she was threatened and Thomas the Rhymer was treated with affection by his Faerie Queen at the very least.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The word “God,” even “a God” as opposed to “the God,” is tainted with the brush of hierarchical, nationalist fantasy. If we aren't careful in how we frame it can take us a little distance from the great and powerful teacher spirits that shamanist and animistic societies worldwide turn to as their familiars and helpers. When you call something a God, a little of the thinking we associate with the God in monotheism, is evoked by accident alongside it. Yet, when it comes to the Queens and sometimes Kings, Princes and Princesses of the realm of Faerie most people acknowledge that we are probably dealing with entities that would have once been local Gods. Or in some cases even more widely-spread Gods.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Fylgia’, the fetch is the follower or guardian that often appears in animal form. In the North it is clear that the Fylgia was inherited, an ancestral being, carrying on the person’s behalf the ‘luck force’ of their family. Most people only saw the fetch close to the time of their own death, but some people were born with a particular gift for ‘sending the fetch.”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“We have already said that Robin Artisson, whom Alice Kyteler was devoted to, was a demon by the estimations of the times but most likely also a kind of faerie. In many cases the true “religion” of Witches, if they could be said to have religious feelings that come through to us from the records, is toward their familiar spirit, who was sometimes but not always associated with the Devil when they were probably often a devil.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Rhiannon is just as clearly a Faerie Queen as Gwynn is a king. She is even first spotted on a special mound, likely an old Neolithic burial mound like many faerie beings before her. Similar to True Thomas's Faerie Queen she appears on a hill riding a white horse. Like Mari of Basque folklore she wears a gold gown, you could almost imagine her owning a gold comb to brush out her golden hair. She is a woman of Annwn, clearly a faerie otherworld where the hounds are all faerie dogs with pink eyes and white fur. She gets further away the faster you ride, a typical “faerie inversion” example of a back-to-front world, much like weeping instead of laughing and laughing in the place of weeping. But there is more to this motif of Rhiannon's; one has the feeling that Pwyll is being given a lesson in right relations with Faerie. He is being told firmly that all of his spurring his horse, all of his striving to capture and dominate and show off will mean nothing to her, he simply needs to learn how to humble himself a little and ask for what he wants.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The Gwragedd of Annwn are somewhere between being grey faeries who follow the pattern of emerging from water to comb their hair or remove a garment, and the more archaic faeries who unite the characteristics of many realms. It is often in the outposts of Europe where you find this, around its edges. One begins to wonder if this itself is “the fall” that later became Christianised into an angelic story? The loss of the archaic faerie who could be almost everything, beautiful woman and beast, and who fell into differentiation, into black, white, green, and grey, becoming linked with separate parts of nature. Could the story of the fall into the realms described in the Celtic stories be a folk memory of this division of the once integral nature of the fae?”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“With Witches or faerie magicians this concept of an energy exchange takes on a different manifestation, one that empowers the human partner. Here you start to see the results of human pacts, marriages or agreements with faeries. Like True Thomas who had a powerful faerie patron, the returns on engaging with faeries are only there for the initiate, everyone else is potentially damaged by the experience, or even lost. This fact remains exactly the same whether the spirit is called a demon and worked with in a Goetic circle, or a faerie worked with at crossroads or standing stones,”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The similarities between the Basque laminak and the other faerie creatures of Europe, along with the link to megalith sites and burial mounds, tentatively suggests a pre-Indo-European substrata to the faerie belief figure that was later overwritten by the fallen angel narrative due to internal similarities in story.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The Iele are said to live in the sky, in forests, caves, isolated mountain cliffs and marshes, and are reported to have been seen bathing in springs or at crossroads. They mostly appear at night by moonlight dancing in secluded areas such as glades, the tops of certain trees (maples, walnut trees), ponds, riversides or abandoned fireplaces, dancing naked, with their breasts almost covered by their disheveled hair, with bells on their ankles and carrying candles.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“think the easiest way to understand the difference is to point out that in Roman pagan thinking all things had their own ‘geni’ and every person possessed their ‘genius.’ To some extent this same thinking can be found among the Greeks in relation to the daimon. The sages understood every person to possess both an eidolon and a daimonic self. For the uninitiated the ‘eidolon’ (much like what is today called an ego) is all they know and the daimon appears as an external agency. But the goal of initiation is to unite daimon and eidolon into a ‘whole self.’ In the language of this book so far we could equate the eidolon with what we have been calling ‘the Shadow’ – this is the normal everyday consciousness of the person. The ‘Skins’ are other forms that may be animated by the Shadow, but the daimonic aspect of consciousness is the most mysterious of all, subtly working through the Shadow at all times, a direct spark of divine fire, the ‘godhead’ dimension of the self that few ever become aware of.”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“It is not known how laminak reproduce but when they do they seem to require human midwives to deliver their children just as in other Celtic areas. In fact it is difficult for laminak to complete their life cycle without some form of human intervention as humans are also sometimes asked to say a “mass” for the dead so a laminak could die at last. Whether in the process of being born, suckling with milk or passing on, it seems that human participation in the laminak's lives is as necessary as laminak participation in human lives.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Familiars were sometimes put in another person by blowing them into someone's mouth”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“For practical dealing with them it should be noted that the realm of Faerie seems to thrive on contradiction and ambiguity. They love twilight and between times. Stale bread is considered a defence against them and yet bread is often an offering to them. Faeries prefer reciprocation or remembrance of a good deed rather than ‘thanks.’ They may take offence to being thanked. They also do not like to be given money as a gift or payment for their benevolent behaviour. Iron is a kind of poison to them and most Faeries enjoy milk.”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“As Eva Pocs puts it: “The masked figures of the Calusari [can be placed] among the wolf, horse etc, masked representatives of the dead returning home at the time of the winter solstice. On the other hand, the oppositions of the dead and the fertility bringing goddesses is not exclusive: fairies are in one of the aspects themselves the returning dead; while the winter demons and especiall St Theodore's horses also have a fertility-bringing role.”7”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“So it might be fair to say that though some dead are to be found in Faerie, the ranks of Faerie are not made up only of the human dead, but also of those who do the “taking.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“The concept of a pact, particularly one with the Devil is a relative latecomer to witchcraft mythology.[23] Early examples of magical grimoires such as the Greek Magical Papyri and even the Key of Solomon both present the occultist as ‘master of spirits’, just as the tribal shaman is in traditional cultures. In fact the Greek Magical Papyri actually shows the mage extracting an oath of allegiance from the daimon, rather than the other way around! It seems to be a uniquely post-Christian idea that the witch obtained his or her power from a pact with the devil or other powerful familiar”
― Lee Morgan, Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

“In Folger 26 Oberion and a variant of Queen Mab are listed with demons such as Lucifer with no real essential differences between them noted. The faerie presence in the grimoires from the seventeenth century onwards is extensive.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity

“Under the plural form Sânziene, there is another annual Romanian festival in the fairies' honor which takes a more feminine vent. Etymologically, the name stands for sân (common abbreviation of sfânt—“saint” or “holy”) and zână (a word used for fairies in general). In other words “saint-fairy,” which tells us a great deal about the way new concepts of holiness mixed easily with folk beliefs around faeries. Because the zână are described as a “gentle type of faerie” this aspect of faerie mythology has been less threatening to the Church. In Romania the Sânziene holiday annually is celebrated on June 24. This is similar to the Swedish Midsummer holiday date and seems to suggest the faeries being honoured are of the “Shining Court” summer variety.”
― Lee Morgan, Sounds of Infinity