Fixed Earth: containers, support, grounding

Some people see the container as a capacious space to experiment in, and some people feel it is a barrier that needs to be broken down.

Fixed earth: salt crystals, haunted forests, deep rest

The cocoon is not about shame and fear and perfection but it does allow those elements to be held; it contains multitudes. It allows those things to decay and to be renewed. It is miraculous.

Fixed earth: sensitivity, grounding, sensuality

It was Kali Malone’s core artistic principle, ‘cherish sensitivity’, that helped me to think about sensitivity as one of my most precious resources.

Cardinal Fire: deity, divination, world-yielding

The bridge between deity and humanity isn’t so special, we call it dying

Cardinal fire: prismatic storytelling, intensity, wholeness

The film is formally beautiful. Long, slow takes. The drama of light through a circular window. The harrowing beauty of autumn leaves against a whitewashed exterior. Mortality is conjured in the changes of seasons, and the gradations of light.

Cardinal fire: immediacy, fire, creativity.

Unlike the click of a lighter, a match creates a suspended moment in time. The weight in the hand, the sound of the strike, the little fire glowing, and the curl of extinguished smoke.

Mutable water: liminality, precarity, recklessness

Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.

Fixed air: systems, ancient wisdom, collective practices

This can become the container for all of your rituals, devotions, and divinations, and a space to process what your subtle body is experiencing when you generate, edit, and share creative work.

Fixed air: hacking, repurposing systems, linguistic play

Berg’s collection offers this small hope, this tiny act of witchcraft in a collection that both reproduces and interrogates patriarchal violence and its necrotizing effect.

Fixed air: revelation, visions, futures

These everyday objects take on a plastic significance, the ashtray is a repository for waste, and the mingling of the ash with the ‘pink seat’ suggests an uneasy disruption of categories.

Cardinal earth: initiation, deep future, building

When you have been inhabiting a world so deeply, it can feel like a loss to turn it into something that other people can perceive. In some ways, the more fully-realised your imaginative space, the more difficult to let go of your vision.

Cardinal earth: rapaciousness, growth, deep roots

Hedges, like lawns, are of no use to the witch unless they are overgrown, wild, and generative.

Mutable fire: film screens, spectrality, excess

‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’

Mutable fire: flickering light, limit experience, neural reactions

Like the experience of being on a psychedelic trip, whether you perceive bliss or horror is down to your state of mind.

Mutable fire: wild fire, contamination, neon.

Anna and Melissa ate with some ceremony, taking tiny bites and washing them down with tea.

Mutable fire: emergencies, cinematic glimmers, glowworms

The dark spools forward and I grip the branch. I lunge into the deep mud and my holy communion dress is ratted at the hem.

Mutable fire: mass psychic currents, desires, teaching and learning

In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.

Fixed water: hopes + fears, unknown pleasures, the void

A snake isn't worse than a rose if you are looking for a way to kill a character. A jewel isn't better than a tornado if you want to move the action of your story somewhere else.

Fixed water: unfinished business, deep emotions, divination

We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.

One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.

Only five come back.