Round the Herne

When the router died, I spent a bit of time adding more to this story. It's never going to go anywhere (from a publishing perspective), but it's providing a relaxing diversion for me to write.  CHAPTER 1 is  here CHAPTER 2 is  here   CHAPTER 3 is  here   CHAPTER 4 is here (if you haven't already read them) CHAPTER 5   As the induction class drew to a close, Catriona glanced round to see the other members of the group looked as stunned and bewildered as she felt. A rueful smiled played on the Principal’s lips as his kindly blue eyes took them all in. it was doubtless far from the first time that he had turned people’s worlds upside down. A painfully thin lad with a prominent Adam’s apple and bad acne set further along the bench, staring at the copious pile of notes he had taken and looking as if he might cry. The light from the three large stained glass windows cast hypnotic patterns across them all. The Otherworld, which she had always taken as ...

 Bit of a meander into some of the issues linking the realm of artistic creativity (be that painting, music, sculpture, cinema or whatever else) to ethical issues. Partly this is in response to events over the last year or so where a few prominent creative types have fallen off their pedestals and quite a few former fans have sworn off reading/watching/consuming their output. Be interesting to hear how followers of this channel respond to ethical concerns about creativity.

 Chapter the fourth in my serialised meander into the world of YA fantasy. I'm amusing myself if nobody else, so will write a little more before the q=burdens of the quotidian world get in the way, CHAPTER 1 is  here CHAPTER 2 is  here   CHAPTER 3 is here (if you haven't already read them) CHAPTER 4    “The Fourth House?” Dylan mouthed the words as if he were saying something obscene that he did not want overheard. “Who on earth told you about that?” Catriona recounted the scene she had witnessed in the bookshop. Her books were currently teetering on the dresser. She had opted to skip the hurley shop and acquired a sackful of herbs and a pocket-sized sickle at Demulcent’s Herbarium. The herbs were filling her room with a heady aroma. At Morwenna’s insistence she had gone into Stang and Treen’s stavewright shop to acquire a staff. A polished length of oak has caught her eye, engraved with a stag design. She felt rather silly carrying it home (catching...

This is just a bit of whimsy to give my three remaining brain cells a bit of exercise (been under the weather lately and lacking creativity). I like the idea of a serialised story, so here is the first entry in a highly derivative YA fantasy, praise be to St Plagiarus. Not sure how much further, or how regularly, I will continue this but at least it has kickstarted the grey matter once again. CHAPTER 1    Catriona stood before the stone doorway, her fingers traced the triquetra carved into the ancient wooden door. It looked early medieval, ancient in a city where every other building seemed steeped in centuries. The carved symbol matched that on the letterhead that she had received back in March inviting her to study Celtic History at Gorsedd College, Cambridge. Catriona had applied to study in Cambridge, but at Peterhouse not at this college. She hadn’t even heard of Gorsedd College much less applied to it, but the offer was excellent and especially sweet with the bursary...

 A reflection on Jung's ideas around the Intuitive personality type, mainly for the benefit of members of the Suffolk Jungian Circle preparatory to our monthly discussion group. Hopefully I haven't made all Intuitives sound like Professor Trelawny out on the screaming piss with Doris Stokes - that's not what Jung wanted to say at all. They are just very good at picking up on things that most other people would miss!

 A few random thoughts about Carl Jung's notion of participation mystique and how it can link into animism, paganism, and the creative arts. It would be interesting to hear other views and experiences around this topic (especially what might pretentiously be called the "death of art", touched on towards the end of the video).

The announcement of Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor Who has flooded social media with rivers of bile, both from those who loathe the idea with every ounce of their being and equally those who love it but despise those who are even slightly equivocal on the subject. As so often, some people make a great show of tolerating everyone - except those who hold a different opinion. I have seen a lot of rather sneering claims that large swathes of science fiction fans are lost in a world of fantasy and emotionally inadequate because of it (or vice versa, depending on whether a given pontificator thinks the chicken came first or the egg). Observing these shenanigans, I have been reminded that many readers openly wept when they read the death of Little Nell when Dickens' serial hit the stands in 1841. When one business tycoon read A Christmas Carol two years later, he was so stung by his own similarity to Scrooge that he immediately gave his wage slaves the rest of the day off. People famo...

In previous years we have held Pooka's Pageant (a celebration of polytheism through the performing arts) in August. Due to an excess of events in that month, this year we have transferred it to November 7th - still in it's usual Ipswich venue. I am currently scouting for polytheist storytellers, poets, singers, puppeteers, or other performers who want to celebrate the Old Gods and spirits through their performances. Each year we try to get a good mix of cultures ~ previous years have included Irish, Welsh, Greek, Germanic, Scandinavian, African, Arabic, Native American, Chinese, Indian, and Inuit tales. If you are a polytheist performer (or know someone who is) within easy travelling distance of Ipswich, do get in touch via robinherne@hotmail.com

The Londonist magazine ran a storytelling competition in February for original short fairy stories set in London. I entered, but didn't win (c'est la vie) but here is my entry below.... By the Forest Gate All that summer I waited for him, patient outside the Forest Gate watching the unseeing come and go. One warm day stretched into the next and the next, the squirrels’ antics at first distracting from the growing sense of concern. Yet those flashing red tails conjured thoughts of his burnished copper hair spilling down his back. Humans are so fragile – a simple accident, an ague, or an imaginary dread will render them bed-bound for weeks. Or leave them broken so beyond repair that they must shuck the warmth of flesh and assume another, fresher guise. They call us shape-changers, yet they alter their form far more often than we. Yet I confess myself drawn so strongly to that strange fusion of softness and angular strength that I found in his body that I yearned to...

I have entered this short story competition in which the task is to write a contemporary fairytale set in London, the city I was born in. Win or lose, I'll post the story here after the closure date. I like magical realism as a genre, and intend to write more in that style in the future. I am particularly struck by the idea of modern mythology, working the realm of the mystical and magical into current times rather than it always being seen as part of some far-off time period that makes spiritual figures seem like museum pieces. Doing so consciously - such as through meditating and allowing the spiritual realms to tell their own stories before putting them to paper.

I'm not a massive fan of the elemental framework that Empedocles and others built up, or the four humours promoted by Galen and other medics. It strikes me as rather too simplistic. However, it does form a convenient tool for exploring ideas. Much is made in education of learning styles, but we might as equally talk about teaching styles. Earth teachers (Jung's sensation function)  are practical people who prefer to demonstrate skills which students can then emulate. Not that I've ever attended such a class, but probably best suited to teaching pragmatic crafts like carpentry, car mechanics or catering. The hands-on approach to mastering the implementation of talents. Air teachers (thinking function as Jung would have it) develop the intellectual approach, uses the tools of chalk and talk to stimulate the minds of students. Discussion and debate are regular features of the air/thinking class. Air teachers are those who find their own specialism fascinating, and convey t...

Many readers will doubtless have one or more works by Marion Zimmer Bradley on their shelves. Whilst she became a Christian in the latter years of her life, she had a tremendous impact on the emerging pagan community of the English-speaking world – most especially through her Avalon stories. Bradley has now joined the ranks of those tarnished celebrities whose unsavoury sexual tastes have been exposed during the last couple of years. Her ex-husband and fellow author, Walter Breen, had himself been arrested for child molestation in the early 1990s and died in prison. Recent claims by Bradley’s daughter, Moira Greyland, have declared that not only was the late author aware of what her husband got up to but, to some extent, participated with him. How accurate such claims are it is hard to assess, however many pagans on the Net are declaring that they will clear their shelves of her books, feel unable to ever read them again, and so forth. Without dwelling on the specifics of this cas...