Guardians
All sacred sites and places of power will have their guardians, and they must be treated with great respect. When greeting a site, you should consider finding your own way to acknowledge the power and importance of the place, honour the guardians, and introduce yourself. Show that you come with pure intent and integrity and that you mean no harm to the spirit of place or to the land itself. These are things that may be shown through energy and action in harmony, and any impurity of energy will be sensed easily by Faery beings. Any attempt to deceive them or to simply feed the human ego through your magickal endeavours will result in a descent into illusion and loss of true connection.
Guardians may take many forms, both energetic and physical. Energetic forms vary wildly in appearance, nature, and size, according to the nature of the site. Your ability to sense their nature will improve with the amount of time spent building connection with the land and Faery. They will usually display an inclination towards the elemental strength of that area—for example, white ladies at water sites, giants at mountains, dryads in forests, and so on. Guardians often take the physical form of wild creatures, so be very aware of the behaviour of any animals you encounter when visiting places of power. For example, once when collecting water with a friend and fellow priestess for a ritual from an ancient pool, one of a crowd of wild ponies on the site left the others and walked some distance to stand directly in the path in front of us, blocking our way. We all stood there for some time until it occurred to me to ask politely if we may take the water from their pool, at which point it nodded agreement and rejoined the other ponies.
You can see a most dramatic example of wild creatures acting as guardians in some film footage that was captured at a protest site in Newbury, UK, in the late 1990s. As ancient oaks are felled, two wild black horses seem to come from nowhere and start to confront the workmen, the police, and, in a most moving moment, the police horses. If you search for “wild horses of Newbury” on YouTube, you can watch this extraordinary footage for yourself.
At other times guardians may be as small as a garden robin, but they are no less powerful and should never be disregarded. Awareness of the world around you and its intimate link with Faery is key.
Finding Your Power Place
Even in an urban environment it is possible to find a location or several locations that resonate with your energy, enabling you to establish a profound link to the inner landscape. The Walking in Awareness exercise at the end of this chapter is a useful technique to find the areas in your landscape that you are energetically drawn to. Spend as much time as you can outdoors without distractions, keeping the mobile phone and portable music player switched off. Be open to all sensory input, see where time and again you feel most drawn to, most energized, or most at peace. It could be a particular tree in a city park, a spot in the garden, or an overgrown patch of land.
If you can find somewhere that you will be able to spend time undisturbed, this can become a power place for you, a place where you make strong connections with the guardians and spirits of place and are renewed by the primal energy of the inner landscape. This connection can be built through offerings and meditation, as well as the exercises and suggestions in this book.
Wild horses near standing stones
Dowsing
You may wish to use dowsing techniques to aid you in building an energetic map of your area and help you to find places of power in the land. Simple tools such as a pendulum or dowsing rods can be used very effectively for this purpose, or if you are naturally energy sensitive, you may find that with your palms open and receptive, you are able to feel physical sensations such as changes in temperature and tingles, almost like static electricity, when beings or places of power are near. The more you practice this, the more attuned this sense (or extension of the senses) will become, and the more detail you will start to receive. Don’t try too hard—this can result in the mind creating illusory results. Instead, take your time, be patient, and allow yourself to feel the authentic energetic nature of the landscape.
Energy Lines
Energy flows across our landscape in interconnected currents, sometimes known as dragon lines or ley lines. Consider this matrix of energy to be something like the nervous system of our planet. Like rivers, these currents of energy may change their course over time and be affected by activity in their surroundings, such as roads, power lines, mobile phone signals, and construction. If sites such as stone circles were created to harness these energy currents, it is worth considering whether in some cases the lines may have changed their course. In any case, there is an ever-shifting landscape of energies laid out in front of you, full of places of power that are yet to be discovered.
The Walking in Awareness Exercise
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to…”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
This exercise begins as an extended version of
