The Lords of the Outer Spaces:
Notes on the Unusual Guardians of Feri Witchcraft
Brian Dragon
The Feri Tradition of Witchcraft as taught by Victor Anderson possesses some peculiarities of ritual practice and associated belief regarding the spiritual powers associated with the directions around the ritual circle, peculiarities which are different from most forms of modern Witchcraft ceremony and have become, thereby, important elements that define the Feri Tradition. Firstly, there is the fact that we recognize six such directions: the four cardinal points of the map which are universal to modern Witch ritual, as well as the additional zenith (up) and nadir (down). Such an ensemble is common in American Indian symbolism but rare in Witch and Neo-Pagan practice. But there are several further details related to these directional powers in Feri Lore – indeed, some that are not accepted by all initiates – which make them a fascinating topic and the subject of the present collection of notes.
Lords of the Watchtowers: A Background
As most readers are aware, nearly every form of presently practiced Europe-based Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-Paganism incorporates the calling upon some sort of spirits of the four directions to aid in ritual. Most commonly, these are thought of as some sort of super-spirits or lesser gods, not only of the directions but also of associated classical Four Elemental powers who are invoked to guard the Circle. In Gardner-based Witchcraft (more precisely, covens descended from Alex Sanders' initiates), these are more formally called the Mighty Ones or the Lords of the Watchtowers of East, South, West, and North and they inherit much of their symbolic associations from grimoire magick which, in turn was distilled from Biblical elements. The animals, human (or eagle), lion, serpent, bull were from part of the visions of the Book of Revelations of John. The association of these four spirit beasts with the so-called Four Gospels that begin the New Testament occured early in Christian art, and many of the most famous illuminated Celtic gospel manuscripts – including the Book of Kells -- feature them in stunning artwork. The associated archangels, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel derive from Old Testament and related Judaic sources -- sources probably reaching back to before the Jews were monotheistic. In the grimoires, there were supplied alternate 'demon' names of the directions, but early Wicca eschewed association with diabolic practice. Early Gardnerianism and later Alexandrianism used the archangel's names. As the Neo-Pagan movement grew, there was better scholarship and a trend away from anything derived from Biblical sources, leading to many covens having no set names for the so-called Mighty Ones of the Four Directions or Lords of the Watchtowers or the adoption of names from Celtic or other Pagan pantheons according to the taste of each group.
The best Witch scholars have realized that the ultimate foundation of these Watchtowers is in ancient angelic magick associated with constellations of stars in the sky. Hence the term 'Watchers' for those who, on their very high 'towers,' look down from the night sky over the four quarters of the world. In the antique world, the famous Three Magi associated with the birth of Jesus would have been understood to be part of this stellar tradition, which is why they were studying the heavens and why they were called ‘wise.’
The apocryphal Book of Enoch touches on these matters and elaborates on the legend, alluded to so tersely in Genesis, that outlaw angels or stellar Sons of Heaven descended to Earth in the earliest of times and took wives from among the earth women. Apparently, our women are some of the most seductively beautiful things in all the universe. It is because Enoch, according to legend, was translated in his physical body from Earth to Heaven, that his name became associated with the surviving threads of pre-monotheistic Babylonian/Jewish stellar-angelic mythology. The idea was that, since he was taken in his body to the stellar spheres of the angels, that he could learn their secrets and, as a man, leave to us a testimony of their workings. In fact, a large (and somewhat boring) part of the Book of Enoch is taken up with a mythological exposition of the 'details' of how the cycles of the sun, moon, and earth are accomplished by the angels assigned to the governing of their movements. This is because it is precisely the 'secrets of heaven and earth' that Enoch was expected to have learned -- secrets that seemed completely insoluble by mortal speculation alone.
It is a Jewish tradition that the outlaw angels or Sons of Heaven or Nephilim, as a matter of course in their dealings with their forbidden mortal wives, taught sciences and arts of heavenly origin to the humans, as well as spawning a race of half-breeds said to be ravenous giants. The story further proceeds that it was to exterminate these semi-divine offspring that IHVH sent the Great Flood. Various later theologians, both Jewish and Christian, have made excuses or explications on this -- seeing as how it seems unusually cruel that the slaughter of almost every single human in the world was considered 'acceptable' loss in a move to kill a few ‘giants’. My favorite explication is a Christian story (that I see on late-night TV from an Arkansas evangelist) that explains that God had ordained from the beginning of the world (or at least from the downfall of Adam and Eve) that the Messiah would come directly descended from the line of David from the line of Adam. When the Nephilim stepped outside of the law and came to Earth, their progeny introduced a line of descent not solely from Adam. In this story, God appears unable to control all the sex that generations of folks might have over time (who could!) and therefore --since God is the Word and the Word of God is Law, and nothing can break the Law -- God decides to exterminate any possibility of introducing an outside lineage by destroying every living thing in the Flood excepting only his carefully saved gene pool on Noah's ark. In this story, the offensive lineage are called the Cainites, that is, the descendents of Cain. Why? As best I can tell, from the whacky mythology of Arkansas Television Christianity, they believe in a translation of the Bible that uses the English word "seduce" in the story of the Serpent and Eve. The Serpent 'seduced' Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. They then believe that Cain was born too soon after the Expulsion to make sense if Adam was the father. Therefore the seduction was more than just metaphorical and Cain was not the son of Adam and Eve but, rather, the son of Eve and the Serpent. This means that, since Cain, there was a lineage not of Adam living on Earth -- the line of Cain, the Cainites.
There is a Jewish story that Cain or, more likely, one of his descendants -- usually Tubal-Cain -- knew that the Stark Fist of Removal was coming and therefore recorded the best of the secret teachings of the Nephilim, the secrets of science and magick, on permanent media. By one story, two metal pillars were the medium. These are called the Pillars of Tubal-Cain in Freemasonry and in some Witch cults. After the Flood, one of Noah's children or grandchildren was off in the wilderness to establish his kingdom -- a great city in the Wilderness of Something-or-other. While building the foundations, he discovered the antediluvian Pillars upon which was written the forbidden wisdom of the star gods from before the Flood. He knew that the proper choices of action revolved around informing his elders and destroying the forbidden knowledge. But he found himself unable to do the proper thing and instead kept the pillars as a treasure.
From there is descended all forbidden knowledge, including all the
magickal arts and sciences.
The Watchers in Scotland and Outer Space is Under Water
So far, I have discussed two connected topics: first, a summary of the four directional Guardians in standard Wicca with their derivation from the dominant religion (Biblical), secondly, the introduction of their more esoteric precursors, the stellar angels or Nephilim who -- if the utter condemnation of the Jews is any clue -- must be remnants of an extremely ancient tradition of how sciences came into the world and how some people carry a non-Edenic bloodline of the divine (or hellish, take your pick). It is impossible to say whether this prehistoric tradition had its birth in Mesopotamia or Africa, but Victor believed it was Africa.
Back in the early '70s a paperback grimoire of Witchcraft appeared called Mastering Witchcraft by a some-time actor from Scotland named Paul Huson. It addressed all aspects of learning and practicing the Craft of the Goddess and Horned God, but was able to avoid most of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows material as well as the later trend of Celtomania, proposing a sort of alternate practice of the Witch religion. It was clearly influenced by the works of Margaret Murray and it had an unusual tolerance for a lot of the 'spooky' practices that Christians have accused Witches of through time. He even recommended reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards as a self-dedication rite and then he wrote it out backwards to help the pronunciation of the reader!
It was Huson who, seeing that Witchcraft was hungry for a richer mythology than the seasonal vaguaries of Gardner's Sabbats, introduced the legend of the Nephilim as a sort of 'origin story.' But, taking a cue from Murray's fascination with the Picts and the Fairy Cult in Scotland, he then proposed that these Witch-people/spawn of the Nephilim made their way out of Mesopotamia or Ethiopia, northward and ended up in Scotland as Picts.
This is where Victor Anderson comes in.
It is impossible, now, to judge when and how Victor Anderson began his tenacious concern with what he called the 'small, dark people.' Although he would represent it as being lore at the center of old Witchcraft, that does not necessarily mean that he got it from his 1930's Harpy Coven. The modes of data acquisition that Victor called astral work and past life recall were not something that he felt inclined to seperate from what we call factual history. To him, the question was "Is this true Witchcraft," not "Did a Witch tell me this once." And so how, when and why Victor came to feel as he did about the small, dark people/Kruithin/Picts is something forevermore overshadowed by his conviction that they were essential to Feri Witchcraft. And he was convinced that their origin was in Africa, and that they had 'outer space' gods, and that they associated themselves with the preternatural creatures that people in Scotland came to call fairies or elves.
Now, a key twist in the shading of this lore as it passes through Victor is the shift from stellar angel-demons to outer space god-demons. An element in this that cannot be omitted is Victor's interest in physics, a science which he investigated first-hand by means of his psychic travels. He was especially fascinated by any facet of physics which reinforced the theology of Witchcraft. For instance, since he understood the Son of the Goddess to be Light or radiant energy as taught in the Gospel of Aradia, he studied every aspect of the behavior of light, from the atomic to the cosmic level. He once mentioned in a letter to me in the early 1970's that he disagreed with the last few digits of the constant C, the speed of light, because his own travels at the speed of light led him to think that the standard scientific figure was slightly amiss! As always, he said this not as a joke but as a fact. And so, because he spent so much time in outer space, he spent much thought about the concept of immense, very much non-human intelligences. That is a trait he shared with a certain author of wierd fiction from New England, H.P. Lovecraft.
Victor was also quite aware of the ancient esoteric metaphor of water as the 'astral plane,' that strange place one can access in dreams where the laws that limit reality in the waking world are more fluid, shifting, and liquid. By the rules of this metaphor, the seas, the astral plane, and outer space are all equivalent to one another in that they are all dark, infinite, receptive, and the pure realm of the unknown and unexplored. In my own parlance I call this The Wave Country, Falmanor. Victor once taught us an incantation to say when one has trouble returning to the body during astral travel: "Elvar rides a steed of black/but the blue god Atho shall fetch him back." We assumed that this meant someone named Elvar was riding on a black horse. It was only decades later that I discovered my mistake! For the being is in fact Elbhear, the great black horse that Mannanan Mac Lir (of Irish mythology) uses to pull his chariot over the waves of the ocean as if they were meadows. The line of the incantation is really to be understood as "Elbhear rides, (he is) a steed of black..." And so the charm alludes to astral travel under the metaphor of riding over the waves of the sea.
Now I begin to pull my coil together.
In antiquity, it was not only widely held that all the lands of Earth were surrounded by a great encircling sea (or the river Okeanos), but it was likewise conceived that the lands of the world rested ON TOP of the same vast, all encompassing water. There is a Jewish legend that tells of something that happened when Solomon was digging the foundations to build the Temple. At the deepest point , a large strange stone was found, covered with strange carvings. In his curiosity, Solomon ordered the stone dug up. But as soon as it was budged, a tremendous flood of water shot out from underneath and quickly threatened to drown everyone. Only by the greatest efforts of Solomon and his djinni were they able to replace the stone and stop the flood. Solomon then discovered from his djinn the nature of that stone. Recall that in the Bible story of the great Flood, God not only loosed the great fountains that are above, but also the great fountains that are below. To stop the Flood, he had to stop the rains AND plug up the hole below with his special stone plug, the stone that Solomon found. So you see from its behavior, it is as if the world is a boat floating in the water: if you are stupid enough to pull the plug out of the bottom of the hull, the water shoots in.
It is important to grasp this world-conception in order to understand the Feri concept of the Wells by which we communicate with the Lords of the Outer Spaces. In the archaic thought, and this can still be detected in the Celtic areas, since the world was surrounded by and floated over water, then all water issuing from the earth must be connected underneath the earth. And so, openings where fresh water flowed out of the ground represented points of access to any other point of access. Now, to some degree these things are also true for dry openings into the underground world -- caves and graves, etc. They all lead into an Otherworld. But caves might have scary things in them and graves are something most people would rather put off till the end. Whereas fountains and wells gush with life-preserving feminine goodness, and their underworld is one of dreamy currents. And, by way of the metaphor of “water=astral,” there is the extra message that the whole background ocean of the ether and space/ocean is a life promoting feminine field of potential.
And so, for all these reasons, our Feri Tradition
elemental/directional "Guardians" didn't just
descend to Earth from the sky long ago but, in a way, our still out in
space. Various kinds of
"space." And we go to visit them or call them to us not with reference
to Watchtowers but
through the appropriate Wells: the Well of Air, the Well of Fire or
Plasma, the Well of the
Watery Abyss, the Black Well of Space or Earth. Each of these Wells has
a sigil or sign that is
drawn in the air with the tool. Also, there is a seperate sign or
gesture that signifies the specific
Lord. In Feri we also have a Guardian of the zenith above and the nadir
below, but these
directions only have one gesture each, instead of two.
Concluding Notes on Some Eldritch Names
Not everybody who practices the Feri Tradition uses the names of the Lords of the Outer Spaces. There are two main reasons for this omission. The first is that their initiators didn’t use them and therefore didn’t teach them. This is in every way a valid strain of traditional practice. A second reason not to use the names has to do with those who “refuse” them. Why would some practitioners refuse the names? Generally, the answer has had to do with a resemblance – sometimes a striking resemblance – between some of the Feri names and certain other names to be found in a handful of literary works, including works of popular fiction. It is felt that such resemblances would threaten to make the Tradition vulnerable to ridicule and therefore, by definition, ridiculous. Therefore, many of those who refuse these names do so in order to protect the reputation of the Tradition and, of course, that is an admirable motivation.