www.owlsdaughter.com/twenty-years... This is something I have done for years. You can tailor it to your own practices, it is a lovely way to take some time out during the season. #witchsky #witch #pagan

Black Mandrakes

Last night a mystical frozen fog covered the whole village and when I awoke in the morning everything looked like Jack Frost himself touched it. It's like when sleeping beauty touched the cursed spindle and the whole castle became covered in brambles. Everything is spined and thorned.

There are lonely churches to be found where old saints live in strange stone boxes. When we say saints, that word has to encompass those spirits of place which were there long before the cross came along. Relics of both Christian and folk faith may be the same bone. – Dr. M. Benn

Sampson Mordan perfume bottle, 1884.

Early Bronze Age bell-shaped beaker which was found at Stanground in Peterborough - an area rich in Bronze Age activity. Now part of the collections at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery. 📸 My own. #Prehistory #Archaeology #Peterborough

In Hookland, many a folkloric tale starts not with ‘A long time ago’ or ‘Far, far away’, but with the line: ‘Out across the dark moor where strange songs are still heard …’ For folklore tells strongly of place and our relationships to it. – Dr. M. Benn #Folklore #FolkloreThursday

In Scottish Gaelic folklore, the cat-sìth was a faery being in the form of a black cat with a white patch on its chest. The cat-sìth would attempt to steal the soul of a laid-out corpse, but on Samhain would bless a house if given a saucer of milk. #WyrdWednesday 🎨Aedsu

At midsummer, the witches of Zennor would light fires on top of the ancient burial chambers and in the rock stacks, until it seemed like the whole moor was ablaze. Zennor Quoit for #TombTuesday!

Looking out from the Table des Marchands tumulus in Locmariaquer, Brittany, June 2023. #TombTuesday

We wake to mornings of cold magic. Exhale dragon-breath, crunch frost-frozen leaves as we walk. The year is dying. We feel it as rush of ghosts, a shivering that foretells the blade of ice upon its neck. No wonder this is the season where folklore burns bright. – #DAKilroy, 1982 #Folklore

‘It is a good face by any standards, strong and kind, but you are sure it could be very stern if the occasion demanded it. The head is covered with strong, curly brown hair that is tinged with red and gold at the ends.’ — Leo Vinci, ‘Pan: God of Nature’ (1994) 🎨Thalia Took

The apothecary of the Hôtel-Dieu in Baugé founded in 1650 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph. It is one of the oldest and best preserved apothecaries in France.

Mother: Excellent. Can you do me another? Me: Thanks Mum. What were you thinking? Mother: Holly and ivy with snowman. Me:

It can feel as if the stones cast a spell of perpetuation upon the landscape. Archetypes of transmission and reception echoed into a manifesting modernity. This is fanciful, but it's also one of the ways the Long Neolithic works – it infects our imaginations. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

"Hearth" 🔥 Art by Elisabeth Alba #cats #winter #cozy

A proud moment this summer: bagging a stone that isn't already on the @megalithic.bsky.social (very rare occurrence!). On the Beara peninsula east of Adrigole, a little way north of the Drumlave row. It involved crawling under barbed wire but then we saw there was a gate. #StandingStoneSunday

A dark stone looms over the landscape at Stanton Drew, Somerset, July 2023. #StandingStoneSunday

A schoolteacher friend told me the kids in her class believe the Stay Belows are now 'at mud'. Usually such gossip is a good signal of how things are. However, my trip to Wystan Lumb suggests otherwise. The shadows in the water still whisper. – #EmilyCBanting, diary entry November 15th, 1982

When you feel depleted of enchantment, walk the wood. It is where magic lives loudly. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982

You can walk and after two miles of tangled lane that's untroubled with being on the Ordinance Survey, find a feral church. These are the chapels beyond bishops, untethered from parishes. Existing in green communion, their gathered ghosts sing wild hymns. – #DAKilroy, 1982

The witch works with the season. When the year begins its slow striptease, she reads the language of the trees' wooden bones. Reads tomorrow in a fall of phyllomancy. When birds come to harvest high berries, auspicy is her share. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Coltricia perennis - Tiger’s Eye #FungiFriends

#StickOfTheWeek Xylaria hypoxylon & a single Mycena.

Dyers Delight!! I believe these are Hydnellum fuscoindicum, or the Violet Hedgehog. Tooth fungus are some of my favorite to find, this was the first time I've found this species. #TwanohStatePark #FungiFriends #NaturalDyes #Fungi

Colotois pennaria - Feathered Thorn. Named after those impressive antennae on the males. What a cracker! #DevonMoths

The end of an era. I started going to Bloodroot in the early 90s regularly and it was always such a wonderful experience. Great food-the chocolate devastation cake was amazing. Do plan to make at least one more trip next week. www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/b...

There are infections of blood. There are infections of the soul. There are I believe, infections of the place. For the land itself may be wounded by our traumas. Where its psychic skin cracks, the spoilings of rot and wickedness can set in. We call such infections hauntings. – Rev. A. Morley

The witch walks and plucks wild omens, picks plants for the curing of tomorrow. Jack by the hedge, wood sorrel, the fertile hope of navelwort. The witch walks and harvests auguries, the gossip of trees. Her movement across the land is a magical act. – #EmilyCbanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Capstone of the Er Grah tumulus at Locmariaquer, Brittany, completed c. 3,300 BCE. #TombTuesday 📷 June, 2023

50 years ago today.... www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzT...

Pan was a pastoral god, but he was also a god of the hunt. He is sometimes depicted wielding the lagobolon, a club used to hunt hares and rabbits, as in this Roman bronze from the 1st century.

An illustration of poisonous Black hellebore (helleborus niger) from "Medical Botany" by John Stephenson and James Morss Churchill, 1836.

November’s early darkness enfolds us. The smell of applewood fires and rot is a constant companion at twilight. We hurry between home and evensong, home and pub. Ghosts crowd the lanes, our folklore becomes filled with tales of cold teeth. Winter begins to growl. - #CLNolan

Botanical illustrations of deadly wolfsbane species by Irish sisters Katherine and Frederica Plunket. They are part of a larger series of wildflower illustrations presented to the Royal College of Science in 1903.

A *slightly belated* #fridayfinds post to brighten your day! If you’re dog lovers, like most of the ASP team is, you’ll love this gorgeous ostracon depicting a canine, found in the fill of the Tetisheri Pyramid! Read more here: www.instagram.com/p/DQxwDx_iSv...

A lone standing stone at Milton of Clava - a Bronze Age cemetery close to the more famous Clava Cairns in the Scottish Highlands. The stone may have been part of a larger stone circle. 📸 My own. #StandingStoneSunday #ClavaCairns #Archaeology #Prehistory

Watch Croft menhir. There are ancient cairns close by and you can see the tower of Ding Dong mine on far horizon. Somewhere down there is Boskednan, the Mên-an-Tol and Mén Scryfa. But where? (Next time I need to bring binoculars.) #StandingStoneSunday

Here’s Sarah of the break-spell Here’s cousin Jem of the curse Give me Bloody Emma who twists the knife and makes it worse - Trad. Hookland witch rhyme

‘Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came—bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howl- ing crescendo’s up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness.’ — David Jones, ‘In Parenthesis’ (1937) #BookWormSat 🎨 David Jones

Even at the unfashionable end of Ashcourt Necropolis, there are houses of the dead that try to lord it over their neighbours. For all the grand statements made by their stones, they still whisper lonely sorrows. Inequality wins few friends. – #CLNolan

Mycena haematopus #FungiFriday #FungiFriends

The wooden bestiaries of England's churches offer a library of carved folklore. Here a giant wyrm or ghost bear to keep you company as you pray. There a manticore, flown from far Persia, to growl at tedious homilies. – John Betjeman, The English Alphabet , BBC Two, 1972 #Folklore

The year limped on with a malign heart, never quite letting go of its fever. Even as it moved towards the inevitably of ice and long hours of darkness, the village sweated out visions. Evening chatter in both pubs was filled with augury. Ghosts gathered. - #CLNolan, The Growling of the Land, 1912

Mooning

moon gravity

Hydnum repandum - Wood Hedgehog. Delicious. I scrape off all the spines where I find them, ensuring the spores will spread and create more. #FungiFriends

I like properties where spirits have thrown their ectoplasmic weight around to the point the owners have fled. More so, I adore a property so phantom-plagued no estate agent can find a willing renter. Ghosts that defy the property market are worth studying. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

‘There was a sense of intolerable loveliness, of brimming life, of rapture. The thousand faces lifted like a cloud. They heard the piping close. And so He came.’ — Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Touch of Pan’ (1917) 🎨Arnold Böcklin, ‘Idyll’ (detail), 1875.