El: Landvættir of the Anthropocene (Patreon)

I’ll be delivering this talk in July, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons I’ve written it a month early.

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So, I’m going to be both delivering this talk to a heathen group and posting it on Penn’s and my Patreon. One of those groups is all going to know what the Landvættir are, and the other is going to know what the anthropocene is, but no matter how you slice it, I’m gonna want to start by defining some terms.

Let’s start with Landvættir. Vættir is one of a bunch of words in the Germanic languages typically translated as “wight,” which in the broad case means “being” or “thing,” although it commonly has a supernatural tinge to it—think Tolkien’s barrow-wights, or the D&D monster. That’s definitely the case with vættir, which specifically means a spirit. I should add, for Sága’s sake, that the root of all of these words is the Proto-Indo-European “wek,” meaning “to say” or “to tell,” and if you don’t think I’m going to pay that off later in this lecture you clearly don’t know how I work at all.

Anyway, Landvættir are, as you’d expect, land spirits—specifically spirits of place or location. They’re often associated with specific geographical features—there’s a bunch of evidence of spirits living in rocks. These sorts of spirits crop up in various spots in the lore. There’s an injunction against having figure heads on your boat when you approach land, lest you make the spirits think you’re a threat, for instance. Egil’s Saga sees him curse the Landvættir to compel them to drive his enemies from Norway. And, of course, as we all remember from Northeast Thing there’s the dragon, bird, bull, and giant who serve as the guardian spirits of Iceland. 

The anthropocene, meanwhile, is a proposed geological epoch to follow the Holocene, and marking the period of the planet’s history in which humanity began having a significant impact on the planet via climate change, urbanization, mining, deforestation, and all those other great things we do to the planet. It’s often seen in the context of the “anthropocene extinction,” the currently ongoing extinction event caused by, well, us. 

So how do these two concepts interact? What does the anthropocene mean for the landvættir. I don’t mean that in an environmental/practical sense; that’s easy. The anthropocene fucking sucks for the landvættir. No, what I mean is how the anthropocene changes our understanding of landvættir. 

Now, one answer—I suspect the most common one among pagans—is that the anthropocene is simply destructive to landvættir. If we understand them as spirits of natural spaces then you’ve got to figure the anthropocene extinction is hitting them about as hard as it’s hitting bees. As we clear cut our forests, choke our oceans with plastic, and strip mine our mountains to dust we kill the spirits, and the world becomes a less magical place. And I certainly don’t want to rule that reading out. Like I said, the anthropocene is clearly not a great time for a lot of landvættir. But I don’t actually think it’s that simple. 

Let’s go back to the lore, specifically that story of the dragon, bird, bull, and giant guarding Iceland? You know what’s really weird about that story? They’re guarding Iceland. No, really. Why are land spirits nationalists? Now OK, I’ll grant, Iceland also refers to a specific island, so maybe those four spirits are just guardians of that. But what about Egil’s Saga, where the land spirits are compelled to drive people out of Norway? The curse there, as translated by Bernard Scudder, sees Egil curse “the nature spirits that inhabit this land, sending all of them astray so that none of them will find its resting-place by chance or design, until they have driven King Eirik and Gunnhild from this land.” Not only is the same word used both for what the nature spirits inhabit and for the political region that Eirik Bloodaxe is ruling, the pretty clear implication here is that Egil expects the nature spirits to understand where the border of Norway is, and to identify themselves in terms of the fact that they live within it.  

But this shouldn’t entirely surprise us given that there are also husvættir, or house spirits—a fact that makes it plain that vættir are not simply spirits of raw and primal nature but also of manmade places. And really, that’s implicit in that etymology I promised I’d come back to. If the vættir are rooted in the act of speaking or telling, it suggests that the act of naming them is in some sense central to their existence. 

Now, we could take this all the way to the point of “vættir are created by humans”—what we might call anthropic animism, whereby it’s human perception and thought that animates the world. I have any sympathy for that idea, but you don’t have to go that far at all. But there is still an important aspect of vættir that’s captured here, which is that they’re spirits of specific things—that is, vættir emerge when something becomes distinct from their background/surroundings and becomes defined as a coherent object in its own right. Sometimes nature does this for us—a mountain doesn’t need people to come along and name it in order to stand out. The Rappahannock has banks all on its own, and even a possum recognizes the difference between it and the shore. 

But crucially, people can also define things. Sometimes we do it physically—houses, obviously. But sometimes we do it socially—punk, which I’ll fucking fight anyone who tries to tell me doesn’t have a spirit. But often it’s a mixture of both, as with Norway. This has huge implications for how we think about landvættir in the context of the anthropocene. Because I think we tend to imagine landvættir as requiring some sense of unspoiled nature. There’s this idea that if we want to commune with them we need to get out of the cities, go out into some forest or national park, and get our hippie on. And even when people do look for them within urban areas they tend to favor the bits of nature that crop up there—parks and rivers and the like.

But once we understand vættir as emerging out of thingness it becomes apparent that we have a lot more options. Streets, neighborhoods, even cities themselves are all going to have their own landvættir. So will smaller components of urban spaces: sewers, bus routes, or bridges. There’s also quite a lot to be done in thinking about urban animal spirits—surely every city is suffice with rat spirits, pigeon spirits, raccoon spirits, and the like. Gods help anyone foolish enough to piss off the cockroach spirits. 

Let’s start at the top of the spiritual food chain, as it were, with cities. Borgvættir, just to coin an old Norse neologism. I suspect this is one we all get intuitively—the living city is reasonably common trope in fiction, and we all know that New York and Paris and Lagos have different characters and personalities. In a lot of ways cities embody the idea of “Landvættir of the Anthropocene” better than anything, because they’re both big and entirely manmade. There are generally historic reasons why they are where they are—the mouth of a river is common—but they’re built of steel and concrete, and that river is sure to be bottled through canals and speared into the earth by bridges. And yet they buzz and hum, self-evidently alive. 

Perhaps one of the most beautiful things about anthropocene landvættir, then, is that cities by and large love us. I don’t want to suggest that they’re unfailingly benevolent—I in fact have a vehement grudge against Dubai that I am easily set off on at parties. But for the most part we built them to take care of people, and they are inclined to do so. I cannot recommend enough that animists spend time befriending their city; the dividends are incredible.

But their sheer size can make cities difficult places to start in thinking about anthropic landvættir. They are in many ways the closest things to manmade gods since, arguably, the gods. But this means they can be vast and austere in many of the same ways. In personal practice, it’s often easier to start on a smaller scale and try getting to know a neighborhood first—your own is a perfectly good start. And the absolute easiest way to do that is to just go walking in it. This should be a relaxed and observant walk. You shouldn’t impose any sort of fitness goal on it, and while you can readily listen to music I really recommend against podcasts or audiobooks or anything that’s going to occupy that part of your brain. You really want to focus on the space around you. Note sensory impressions, but also just the way things work. What are the major roads? Where are the boundaries between one kind of space and another? Where are the people? Where are there open spaces? How does water move through it? And how does it change over time, whether the day, year, or decade? 

One thing you will notice is the way in which urban vættir are networked. Blocks, corners, and alleyways all have their own character, which is both made up of the notable things within the and which in turn make up the character of the neighborhood. This, of course, expands outward into the city. The same is, of course, true of natural landvættir—the forest is made of individual tree spirits, deer spirits, and spirits of stone and stream. But the density of scale in an urban environment—especially a larger one—is striking. It can be helpful to think about things like ley lines, and apply similar concepts to urban spaces. By this I both mean “you should also look at a map some” and that it’s helpful to look at the lines and paths that move through the space. I mentioned how the water moves, but consider also people, traffic, power lines, styles of architecture, hills, anything that defines the larger shape and form of the space.

This can be expanded to a meditative practice, and quite productively. One approach to this, albeit one from outside paganism, can be found in the essay “Theory of the Dérive” by the French Marxist Guy Debord. Debord was part of a group called the Situationist International, whose big thing was a sort of culture jamming strategy of disrupting the ordinary flow the world by getting people to see things from new perspectives. And one of the things they were most interested in getting people to rethink was cities. They eventually almost manage to overthrow the French government in 1968, but about a decade before they came up with an entire school of thought called psychogeography, which is a rabbit hole that basically goes infinitely deep if you want it to. But we’re only going to go as deep as “Theory of the Dérive.” 

“Dérive” means, “drift,” and describes “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” within an urban space. It describes a roughly day-long process of moving through a city with an eye towards crossing among multiple neighborhoods and breaking out of both the paths and boundaries that define ordinary life in the city. (Although Debord, in a pleasantly impish clarification, notes that you can perform a dérive within “a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough” before suggesting that one could actually do one in a single train station if one were minded to.) The idea is to uncover rhythms and structures of the city that are obscured from day to day life, and in doing so come to know it more intimately.

Now, so far I’ve talked mostly about how to go out and understand urban landvættir. But let’s talk a bit about what you might do with them once you get to know them. Because there’s a lot of art and writing out there that builds off of Debord’s ideas. One of the largest pockets of this came out of the UK, where, in the 90s, the London Psychogeographical Association and the Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture both sprung up. The result of this is that there’s a whole modern British psychogeography scene, with the authors Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair being at the vanguard of it. In strict terms of the dérive the most interesting work is probably one of Sinclair’s, a book called London Orbital, which traced a series of walks Sinclair took around the M25 Motorway—the London equivalent of I-495. Here’s a passage of the sort of stuff he conjures out of the landscape:

“The landscape is provisional. Strategic planning runs up against sulking real estate, tacky old businesses that won’t fade away, inconvenience stores, revenants from Thomas Burke’s Chinatown. Marine provisioners have decayed into monosodium glutamate takeaways that leave you orange-tongued, raging with thirst. Merchant marine outfitters peddle cheap camping-gear, unisex jeans, diving suits for non-swimmers.”

Among Sinclair’s devotees was comics writer Alan Moore, who drew on his work when writing an installment of his and Eddie Campbell’s Jack the Ripper comic From Hell. This installment saw the Ripper give an occult tour of London focusing particularly on the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor. But in the course of writing it, Moore found himself penning a line of dialogue for his Ripper character in which he proclaimed that “the only place gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” As Moore tells the story, he sat there for a minute patting himself on the back for writing such a clever line until he realized that he absolutely believed this and was going to have to change his entire worldview because of it, resulting in him terrorizing his friends and family by proclaiming himself a wizard at his fortieth birthday party.

So what I’m saying is, these approaches have some pedigree.

Moore went on to do a series of spoken word performance pieces that are also worth looking at. These were site specific performances, tied to where Moore delibered them, and were overtly intended and presented as magical workings. Most, though not all, have audio recordings that can be tracked down, on YouTube if nothing else. And they’re all, if I may be so bold, phenomenal. They’re very much building on the Debord/Sinclair model of psychogeography, some more straightforwardly than others. Here’s a bit from his first one, The Moon and Serpent Grant Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, where he’s talking about the notion of the London that exists in our minds, built of memory and imagination. 

“Mnemonic highways made from smears of field glimpsed once through glass at speed, or from the jaundiced strobe of gone-by sodium lamps, hot amber necklace on the night's bare throat, monoxide dabbed upon her pulse-points. Strung between the shimmering fabricated towns, inroads of anecdote, synaptic rails to bear the trains of thought, a beaded web across our gazetteer of the interior. Seen from above, the glittering threads of meaning run like mercury, converge on the imaginary capital, a shadow London, our idea of London, flickering in the forebrain. When we are not here, this apparition is our only London.”

I quote this passage not just because it’s really good, but because it points towards another important thing to think about in terms of urban landvættir. Implicit in the notion of psychogeography, as Moore notes, is the idea of a mental city. But that also means that urban landvættir are defined heavily by history. This shouldn’t surprise us—at the end of the day many of those hidden lines and boundaries within a city are shaped by history. A railroad can be gone sixty years, but you can still see which side of its tracks were the wrong one. A hundred million year old sea evaporates, but its shoreline is still visible in the arc of Black majority counties through the American South. The past doesn’t go anywhere.

But of course this is true. It’s implicit in the idea of anthropic landvættir. If these spirits are built by human activity and around human meaning then they will inevitably be shaped around history. It is worth thinking again about the vættir in terms of telling. What is history, after all, if not a story? 

This, then, marks another path to explore in coming to know a city’s land spirits: learn its history. I do not simply mean its textbook—named after so and so, site of this or that battle, George Washington slept here, et cetera. The most fruitful history for understanding a place on a spiritual, intimate level tends to be much smaller scale. Ideally—and this can be a big ask depending on where you’re talking about—you can find the history of specific neighborhoods, streets, and buildings, adding it to your mental map of a place.

It would, perhaps, be more clarifying at this point to speak in specifics. In 2022, while I was mourning my father, I undertook a writing project. Over the course of six days I wrote a four thousand word poem entitled Ithaca a Saga. I’d long been aware of the suggestive parallel between the lone description of Sága’s hall as “a sunken place where cool waters flow” and the geography of my home, and had wanted to explore the connection in detail. 

Now, I’d done a fair amount of inadvertent prep for this—I spent the first year or so living in Ithaca getting my ten thousand steps in and learning the shape of it. So most of my work ended up being on the historical side of things. I knew a lot of the kind of big picture things I wanted to talk about—we’ve got a famous murderer whose brain is preserved at Cornell, for instance, and there were a couple years in the early 20th century where we were a major hub of film production. But mostly, as I was working on it, I was looking for oddball details. And perhaps the most surprising thing is how often they were just there, waiting to be found.

So, for instance, I mentioned that murderer. Turns out he moonlighted as a mildly fraudulent philologist with a bunch of crackpot theories about how the sounds of words have inherent meaning. Which, when you’re writing about the way in which a city is sacred to a language goddess, is a really nice find. Likewise, when I was doing the silent film section I discovered that none other than Aleister Crowley had stopped by Ithaca to advise on an occult exploitation film, and that this was shortly before he coined his great “magic is a disease of language” phrase. Which, again, inject this straight into my veins.

My point here is not to pat myself on the back for my clever research, but rather to highlight a thing that will generally mark the point where you know you’re really cracking the case in understanding your urban landvættir. There’ll be a point in your meanderings and observations and research where you’ll start finding that things are slotting into your existing framework. Even surprising information—I was floored by that Crowley detail—will just sort of calmly slot into the picture. Just like, once you really know an area, you can turn down a side street you’ve never been on before and still broadly know where you’re going to end up, once you’ve really gotten to know a place’s spirits you’ll be able to look into a new part of it and find it entirely familiar. 

Past that, though, there’s a degree to which talking about this kind of work is like that old maxim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I could talk all night about psychogeographic art—do a deep dive into some of the Alan Moore, or even really break down Ithaca a Saga. I could give you a virtual tour of Ithaca. I could try to wax poetic about the relationship with space that you can develop—the way in which it’s humbling and beautiful to have the city itself as a protective spirit. But none of that would tell you anything. The only real way to learn about this stuff is to get out there, where your city is just waiting to meet you. So instead I’ll close with one final, absolutely crucial piece of advice.

Wear comfortable shoes.