Pt1 Cornish Adventures in Paganism and Witchcraft Blog
Cornish Adventures in Paganism and Witchcraft Blog PART 1
My wife and I both love CORNWALL! The gorgeous amazing, ancient and pagan as fuck celtic south west peninsular of England!
Lone before we ever dreamed of running a traditional witchcraft supplies store, or a wicca supplies online store, long before we even met each other, Cornwall was always our love.
In fact, in many ways, i am pagan BECAUSE of Cornwall. Your see, once upon a time... When I was nine years old I used to attend a little Christian Sunday school with my sister on Sundays. Those were safer days and the Sunday School was just a few blocks walk from our house in East London. It was unusually an evangelical church (evangelicals are a very small minority in the UK). We were too young to question their dubious bullshit, so off we trotted every Sunday. One Sunday I did like most kids do, and took something I was very proud of to show the pastor. It was a huge book called "Life Before Man" and had 1000s of pictures of all the different dinosaur species from the different periods. I lover ALL things Dinosaur and it was my most favorite thing in the world. The pastor said "There were no dinosaurs, they were lies created by scientists in league with Satan to lead the faithful astray". I was shocked and said I had been MANY times to the famous Royal Natural History Museum in London and had seen all the fossils in The Hall Of Dinosaurs... He became annoyed and said "THERE WERE NO DINOSAURS"... In that moment was my end of innocence... I became aware that grown ups, adults, the very people young children trust and think have ALL the answers can be idiots, liars and morons, I took my book and ran to the park. I never went to church again... I would just walk to the park instead. The pastor showed up at our house after a few weeks and told my parents I had not been showing up. My parents asked me in front of him why I had been skipping Sunday School. So I told them what he said about Dinosaurs being a lie. They asked him if it was true what he had told me. He said yes. My parents then said I would never be attending again as they did not want my head filled with nonsense... Thus ended my Christian period...
The next summer my parents took me for the first time to Cornwall on vacation. We stayed in Penwith, the extreme southwest tip in a gorgeous coastal village called Carbis Bay near St Ives. I fell in love. The beaches, cliffs, endless wild flowers, forever skies... Knowing how much I loved pre-history, they took me up to the old standing stones and dolmens on the high moors... To the iconic holed stone, Men-an-tol, and Lanyon Quoit, and the Nine Sisters Stone Circle. All up on the moors above the famous fishing village of Zennor! BLAM! When I stood in that stone circle... My hair stood on end, every follicale on my arms and legs stood up. I could FEEL the power. I felt energy that i had NEVER experienced in dusty churches. THIS IS RELIGION! THIS IS ME! I was nine, I had no idea what a pagan was. I had no way to describe it... But, somehow, I knew I was home and that these ancient mysterious places of land sea and sky made 1000 times more sense than dead Jewish zombie carpenters. And Cornwall and the high moors and standing stones of Penwith have been my spiritual home ever since. Below is a pic of the Nine Maidens I took at sunrise on Midsummer morning about 20 years ago...
When I met Pat we had much in common. Long before we met she had taken a long vacation in England with some pagan friends, to explore the old Celtic and neolithic sites. She even remembers visiting the Nine Maidens and Men-an-Tol.
Just before we started Artes And Craft and opened our famous witchcraft supplies store and wicca store online, we took a long vacation together in Cornwall and North Wales. We explored the high moors of Penwith, the Men-An-Tol and Lanyon Quoit complex and the wonderful holy well of Madron, with its Kewpie tree, named after the Celtic goddess Modron. The ancient village of Zennor with its dolmen and its famous legend of the Mermaid of Zennor. Paul went up to the Witch Rocks high on Burns Down, an ancient place of witchcraft and performed the famous rite of self initiation after midnight on Beltane. We also explored Bodmin Moor and the wonderful merry maidens complex of stone circles and of course visited Boscastle and the famous Witchcraft Museum. We also went to Tintagel of King Arthur and Merlin fame. Then to Padstow for the famous May Day Obby Oss and maypole celebrations. Then finally to Snowdonia in North Wales and the mystical Isle of Anglesea where the Druids took their last stand against the Romans.
These adventures will be shared in pics and commentary in the forthcoming parts in this series of witchcraft blogs.
But first... Enjoy the glory of Penwith... Close to Lands End, where the "toe" of England is but 10 miles wide with high moors plunging down to the sea with dramatic cliffs. Penwith with its world famous "neolithic field systems"... These small stone walled fields have been this way, untouched, since the first people, the neolithic builders of the stone circles, made their home here 5000 or more years ago, This was THEIR fields and land....
In this shot you will see patches of blooming BLACKTHORN! Sacred to The Fae Queen and the Fae, fearsome and nasty, Saturnine and used for making wands for cursing and blasting. This is where Paul hand cuts and gathers Blackthorn for making wands for sale in our Traditional Witchcraft Supplies store!
Wind swept Hawthorn and Rowan Trees and wind carved rock formations.
And valleys with running creeks and waterfalls...
In Part two we begin properly... With the Tale of Paul's initiation to the Horned One one witchy night after midnight, high on the witch rocks on Burns Down, so named because witches would burn torches and bonfires on midsummer night. It is a place locals still fear to step after dark. And more from around Zennor and its Mermaid...
Paul pointing at the Witch Rocks on the summit of Burns Down. Aleister Crowley is even associated with the area!!! The bad old witch and ceremonial magician stayed at a now derelict artists cottage to the right of where Paul is standing! We of course carry his many books in our witchcraft supplies online store!
Article about the cottage and Crowley's association with it... Bryan Wynter and Aleister Crowley: twin ghosts of Zennor Carn
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