Magic in the Landscape

Reviews

"I heartily recommend Magic in the Landscape to anyone who aches to be proactive during these heavy days of fear, propaganda and forgetting. The simple opening exercises, allowing you to feel and receive the magical guidance of place, will not only liberate your soul but echo as a healing balm into your immediate community and from there out to our troubled world." “Pennick is especially strong when talking about temporary fairs, drawing on personal experience as a participant in the Rougham Fair in Suffolk, and Lyng Fair, Norfolk. It’s also reassuring to read about Stonehenge, in terms of its continuing relevance to communities, from the post-medieval period to the festival of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and beyond. There is real passion, and at times anger, about the treatment of the landscape. This is particularly noticeable when he is talking about enclosure, a process of disenfranchisement which saw the common land in England divided up into individual allotments for landowners.” “Richly researched! A fascinating insight into a practice in need of returning, one that will go a long way in healing and reclaiming a magical relationship with the sacred landscape.” “More often than not, modern humans have stumbled obliviously and deleteriously across the landscape they inhabit. Accordingly, their perception of reality has become ever more shallow, superficial, and desacralized--or, worst of all, may now be abandoned entirely in favor of virtual simulacra. Swimming against this tide for over half a century, Nigel Pennick is a tireless explorer and surveyor of the ensouled and eldritch world that still persists around us, despite our blind and clumsy attempts to constantly ‘develop’ and smother it for short-term gains. At its root, Magic in the Landscape is a treatise about the authenticity that results from meaningful human interaction with the earth and its myriad energies. In this modest ‘spiritual gazetteer,’ Pennick reveals some of the countless crossroads where local traditions and topography intersect, always with the aim of shedding light upon the deeper soulscape that these practices reflect.” “In this book, Nigel expertly weaves together a narrative exploring the power of place and humankind’s changing relationship with it. It is a thought-provoking and well-written exploration of the physical and spiritual aspects of the landscape, revealing the world about us to be more than an impersonal backdrop against which we live out our lives. Within these pages, Nigel reminds us of the importance of how we choose to orient ourselves within this ensouled world and of the necessity for discernment in any mundane and magical interactions we might make with the land beneath our heels.” “In this book, Pennick does what he does so well--wears his deep learning lightly and makes more profound and highly readable connections between magic and the visible world than you could shake a geomantic staff at. He reminds us of the necessity of sacred space and the disenchantment of the world, demolishing the prettification of rural Britain and our loss of magical tradition. He also shows that what we now call feng shui existed in Britain long before it got fashionable and that just a few centuries ago major buildings were founded at times and places indicated by astrology. Should we need such a reminder, a postscript on magic makes it clear that Pennick is not some tenured academic toeing the scientism party line but a practicing magician who is writing from real personal experience.” “This book ignites the imagination and enchants the spirit in unexpected ways.” "For me, the old stones also stand as reminders--to jog our collective memory, as it were--of something important the human race has lost, or at least forgotten, yet might find again. They are mystical places of 'earth magic' where the veil between the worlds is thin, especially at solstice and equinox sunrises and sunsets, with which many of them are aligned. All such things make Nigel Pennick’s latest book all the more timely and essential, not only in emphasising the enormous value of re-enchanting the land through an honouring and internalising of the magical traditions of our ancestors, who lived more in harmony with nature and cosmos, but also in its potential to influence a new generation of readers hungry for meaning in a conflicted world." Expand reviews