Robin Artisson > 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

“I will state it clearly: witchcraft or sorcery operates only fully within a pluralistic, connection-based, spirit-involved background, context, or worldview. This is the sort of worldview that the witches of old consciously, half-consciously, and sometimes even unconsciously carried within them, due to the circumstances of their times and places.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“A humorous, but powerful Zen parable tells of two brothers in the womb, one of them very pessimistic, and the other more laid back. The pessimist brother complains often about the womb-space getting smaller, and more cramped, but the laid-back brother tries to see the bright side and points out how warm and cozy it is. The pessimist brother tells his sibling that he's heard of a thing called "birth", and how much it worries him, but his brother dismisses it as another day's problem. One day, they both feel strong spasms and begin to slip away from one another. The pessimist is quite distressed and calls out to his brother. His brother can only say "sorry, I'm going away, I don't know where"- and the pessimist finds himself alone in the womb. Just as he begins to feel himself pushed downward into the unknown, he cries out "Surely, this is the end of everything!”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“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

“you can spiritually revitalize yourself and your world, in accordance with what is possible for your own age, and the Strangers occupy an inner world of timeless power, which is still available to all that have the courage and love to make the fires on the stones and spill some blood for them.”
― Robin Artisson, The Witching Way of Hollow Hill

“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

“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

“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

“By your Owl Ever-Watchful By your Broom that sweeps the Land of souls By your Geese who bark in the Sky By the Deer who are your herd in the wood By your Caudle that boils the dark remains of former worlds, By your loom that weaves dreams and nightmares, By your Black Dog that menaces the wicked, By your Wheel, Key and Thrice Locked Door, Let the cup overflow with your shadow and your ardor- Let me drink and be whole by your mighty leave; Let me greet the stars and touch the earth Made Red by your beneficence.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“When I was a child, I could keep myself busy in the backyard for hours with nothing more than sticks and rocks. Since becoming an adult, I have lost that great power, that intense connection with the heart of things, which blossomed as nothing more (or less) than simple imagination- unquestioned, untroubled, and unbounded.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“After observing animals for millions of years, as our most important intellectual activity, we deformed the messenger itself. We made our animal fellow something to be possessed rather than someone to be encountered as a spiritual being. Our prehistoric “agreements” with the animal nations, our “negotiations” with wild animals, were once the biggest part of human culture. This was not a simple “identification with nature,” as the conservationists phrase it today. It was a lifetime work, to build covenants, or treaties of affiliation, with the nations of the Others.

With domestication wild things became the enemies of tame things, materially and psychologically. The wild unconscious of mankind, its fears and dreams and subconscious impulses, lost their affiliation or representation by wild things, and those were the very things by which, for a million years, we had worked out a meaningful relationship with the sentient universe. The wild unconscious was driven away into the wilderness. We began to view the planet as a thing, rather than a thou.” We began to see our world as an organism to be possessed, rather than a spiritual moment to be encountered."

-J.T. Winogrond”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“For every ill beneath the sun,
There is some remedy, or none
Should there be one, resolve to find it;
If not, submit, and never mind it."

-Ancient West County "wise saw" or saying”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“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

“This is why he appears in so much folklore and in so many of the myths of earlier religions as a mysterious chthonic and land-based figure, not just a sky or air-based presence. So great is the aesthetic distinction between the realm of sky and the realm of earth, that we see in the evolution of myth (in nearly all places) two distinct Gods often forming from this: a fatherly, usually more severe and distant "Sky" God, and a more sensual, wild, tricky, or dangerous "Earth" God or spirit, who might be his son and sometimes his adversary.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“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

“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

“Autumn nights are the most fickle: good and bad weather All in five days, and more than that in a month.”
― Robin Artisson, The Words of Odin: A New Rendering of Havamal for the Present Age

“The ancients worshiped the dead, fully. They respected them, prayed and made offerings to them, because they had become sacred in a new manner, and gone back to the sources of life.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“This isn't grim. Life's radiance and intensity wouldn't be there without death. We can make friends with it. It is not contrary to our natures, nor destructive to our ultimate good as beings. It is not a curse from the Gods nor a mistake in the structure of the universe. Death cannot undo anything that is real. Nothing real can ever be destroyed; Great Nature is not so shoddily designed.
Death is Nature's agent of passivity. "Come, rest a while, and understand that "not doing" can do many things.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“In my perfect world, no one could believe stories of far away "heavens" for the dead, because the dead are always so very close. And no one believes stories of "hells" because hell is only the feeling you have when you think those you love the most are far away.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“I was young once, and I wandered alone; The wide road was bewildering; I didn't know much. Then I met a friend and I felt very rich, For man is ever the joy of man.”
― Robin Artisson, The Words of Odin: A New Rendering of Havamal for the Present Age

“This is our home, at the deepest level, and we can't be lost from it, can't "go missing", can't vanish into a fictional nothingness which is only a fearful abstraction. We are involved in this earth and sky, the deep abyss below, the boundless field of stars, forever. It's not an optional participation.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And we will die ourselves; But fair fame never dies For the one who can achieve it.”
― Robin Artisson, The Words of Odin: A New Rendering of Havamal for the Present Age

“There was a time when the mighty powers were enough- to be under the infinity of the circle of the sky, to taste the earth's richness, to see deer running through thicket and wood- to sit around fires and taste meat sizzled over coals, and bread baked directly in clay ovens- for countless millennia, that was enough. To be awed by thunder's crashing display, without the super-safety of modern buildings to shield you, that can be a real "religious" experience, if you catch my drift. One understands what "power" really means when one faces the Storm in that way. To see night fade into day- or see day pale into night, in the way we seldom do- that too, can fulfill a soul, can teach it wondrous things.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism

“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

“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

“The overlap between the human and animal dead who go into the spiritual dimension of the earth and the natural spirits”
― Robin Artisson, The Witching Way of Hollow Hill

“The Indweller is a power immanent inside of a particular phenomenon. By indwelling the phenomenon, the phenomenon is rendered "real" or rendered potent, powerful, and able to be interacted with by others- it becomes a vibrant presence in the intersubjective world. Merkur quotes Nicholas Gubser's description of the Indwellers in this way: "An inua (indweller) is not the personality or even a characteristic of an object or phenomenon, although an inua itself may have a personality. The spirit (or indweller) of an object or phenomenon may be thought of, in the case of so-called "inanimate" objects, as the essential existing force of that object. Without an indweller or spirit, an object might still occupy space, and have weight, but it would have no meaning, it would have no real existence. When an object is invested or inhabited by an indweller, it is a part of nature of which we are aware.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“Praise the day at evening, a woman on her pyre, A weapon after it's tried, a maiden at her wedding, Ice after it's crossed, ale after it's drunk.”
― Robin Artisson, The Words of Odin: A New Rendering of Havamal for the Present Age

“If I went to some spirits and busted my arse for them to help them, and then heard them telling one another "All the humans are really one human", so let's thank Human for what he did!" And then I heard them later saying "I wonder if the Robin Artisson aspect of Human can be called upon for help with anything else?" I think I'd be looking for other beings that were mature enough to take responsibility for actual relationships, and accord other beings the dignity of full personhood.”
― Robin Artisson, Letters from the Devil's Forest: An Anthology of Writings on Traditional Witchcraft, Spiritual Ecology and Provenance Traditionalism