---
title: "An Interview with Robin Artisson: Exploring Folklore, Witchcraft, and Spiritual Ecology"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/an-interview-with-robin-artisson-exploring-folklore-witchcraft-and-spiritual-ecology/
date: 2024-10-08
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction Robin Artisson, a writer and teacher on topics of folklore, witchcraft, and spiritual ecology, recently participated in an interview for Perseus Arcane Academy in October 2024. This interview covers..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "divination"
  - "Herbalism"
  - "Spiritual Ecology"
  - "Witchcraft"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/278511439_400111145451170_7828167210692019323_n.jpg
word_count: 11073
---

# An Interview with Robin Artisson: Exploring Folklore, Witchcraft, and Spiritual Ecology

## Introduction

Robin Artisson, a writer and teacher on topics of folklore, witchcraft, and spiritual ecology, recently participated in an interview for Perseus Arcane Academy in October 2024. This interview covers various aspects of Robins work, including his views on pre-modern European traditions, herbalism, divination, and soul-flight practices. He also discusses his published works and how they relate to mainstream academic perspectives on these subjects.

> Robin Artisson has been studying folklore, mythology, and the interior metaphysics of sorcery and pre-modern European preternaturalism for over 30 years. His specialty areas of knowledge include spiritual ecology, prehistory, herbalism and wortcunning, divination, and soul-flight or trance induction, along with a vocational interest in the extraordinary exploration of the hidden dimensions of the mind, the soul, and the world.
>
>
>
>
>
> [Robin Artisson - Yonder in the Forest](https://www.robinartisson.com/robin-artisson.html)

Robin lives in the countryside of Maine, near the craggy coast, under the shadows of the mountains and their forests. There, he carries on the relationships he has with the spirits he has allied with over the years, and watches his daughters grow with much joy.

We really appreciate Robin for spending the time in answering our many questions.

---

![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/forestfooter1.jpg)

## Interview

**PAA: Please provide a brief introduction to your work and how your journey got started. **

I was given to ecstatic visionary experiences from a young age, but in those days, I had no conscious  awareness of their meaning for me. My writings, which began to enter public awareness in the later  1990’s and early 2000s, were driven by two main forces. First, my still-deeply-held belief that the  historical phenomenon of Witchcraft in Europe (and in other parts of the world) was a continuation of  different forms of folk-level animism or spiritual ecology, native to various lands, some forms of which  could have some very old or primal distant origins.  

The second was the maturation of my own vocation as a visionary person, a person with the capacity to  incubate dreams and visions. Ten days before my 23st birthday, in 1998, I had a potent experience in  which a spiritual being became attached to me and has acted ever since as a kind of protector, teacher,  and empowerer to me. And thanks to that being, and several other factors, I began to deepen in my own  understanding of the Unseen world and how to interact with it at times. 

I spent my entire adult life in the company of Neopagans and occultists of many stripes, and researching the occult topics and histories that interested me- and that research continues to this day. My writings  matured in a symmetrical way to my own spiritual growth, and in 2015 I and a partner created a society  called Covenant DeSavyok for people who practiced sorcery based on Early Modern sorcerous patterns  and on some ancient patterns, too, as the sorceries and magics of the Ancient world (what surviving  portions of them we have) are carriers of a lot of critical information about the hidden realm of things,  even today. 

In 2018, I started a virtual community of people called Cylgh An Carow Gwyn which is devoted to  interanimistic reverence under the organic historical banner of the old Faerie Faith. In 2022 I wrote and  created a very lengthy and substantial course in Witchcraft called *Upon the Rood Day: The Witchcraft of  Christsonday and the Queen of Elphen*, which I have been teaching ever since.  

In 2023, my school, Serpent Hall Institute, was created to be an educational institution about Witchcraft  and the Old Ways of spiritual insight. I also reached a point in my own development in which I was able  to create an initiatory, direct-contact transmission of what I believe are the timeless spiritual forces that  stand behind historical Witchcraft, which led to the foundation of the now-growing Elphane Witchdom  or the Elphane Cultus in 2023. Through the years, I have written 13 published non-fiction works on different topics relating to  Witchcraft, Sorcery, Divination, the Old Ways, and Spiritual Ecology, and two small fiction collections. I  am currently working on my next book, *Cantivalerion’s Kin*, which is about spirit conjuration.

## Spiritual Ecology and Environmental Ethics 

**PAA: How does spiritual ecology redefine the relationship between humans and nature compared to traditional environmentalism? **

I would say that spiritual ecology comes at “environmentalism” from a very different angle. Most of  environmentalism is aimed at managing the natural world or environment, and generally managing its  (so-called) “resources” and the health of its biomes and bioregions such that human civilization as it  exists now can be sustainable, or more directly, so that we can sustain all the different reaches of  consumption that we require right now. Spiritual ecology would never begin from a place of managing or  manipulating the natural world in ways that protect human convenience or sustain human consumption  and growth.  

Spiritual ecology asks very different questions and has some very different starting assumptions. Spiritual  Ecology as I understand it is basically a recognition that modern day environmental and social problems  all have a spiritual component to them- the problem is never just that humans are taking too much or  that we are being wasteful and damaging to the environment. The problem runs deeper, into our souls,  into the heart of what humans are and how they are supposed to exist within the world. We have a  spiritual sickness in us, a sickness largely brought about by disconnection from the world that is our  origin and our destiny, which leads us to do damaging things to the environment and to each other. 

And so, spiritual ecology is about humans as much as the environment, and it is about treating humans as  inseparable aspects of the environment- as humans absolutely are. And if humans have this spiritual  illness in them, then the world does too and the world will suffer from it- and the world does. Countless  other forms of life, and maybe all forms of life, suffer because of this illness.  

Many ordinary forms of environmentalism have the understanding that humans and nature or the  environment are inseparable, but spiritual ecology’s aim isn’t just for the good of humans via a healthier,  healed environment. It’s about the good of all beings and all aspects of Nature- for even hills, or forests, or  lakes, or grass clumps, or rivers can be understood- and experienced- to have indwelling spiritual forces,  indwelling intelligences of a kind. This is true for all other ordinary living creatures and non-human  animals that we experience every day: they matter too, and all of them had come-into-being and created  kin-groups and communities in this world long before humans did. 

Some might say that ordinary environmentalist movements could embrace the idea that the good of all  beings, and all bioregions, is part of their goal, too- but spiritual ecology brings the real existence of those non-human creatures and those landforms into a place of actual reverence. Spiritual ecology’s goal can never be “secular”; it is always profoundly spiritual, laced with reverence. The hills or lakes or even the animals and trees can be approached at times like divine beings, worthy of offerings and prayers.

This definitely creates a radical departure from the ordinary environmentalist sentiment, and it brings us into  the primal and once-universal dimension of animism, and into interanimistic-type relationship  potentials that most environmentalists in the world definitely don’t consciously perceive or go into. 

In the spiritual-ecological vision as I understand it and live it, humans are not the hierarchical “masters”  of the world; we are a special group of beings, a kin-group of beings, related to all other beings of course;  we have a special capacity for imagination that allows us to manipulate the things of the world (and other beings) in ways that can be incredibly damaging if we are not restrained or wise- and because of our  illness (mentioned before), we are seldom ever collectively restrained or wise.  

The wisdom that we need to heal this comes from embracing a rare kind of reverence and worshiping  Nature and its countless families of being, not thinking ourselves very super-special and apart from  Nature, or “above” it somehow.  

**PAA: In what ways can pre-modern European spiritual practices inform contemporary ecological  movements? **

Some Medieval and Early Modern “folk” level spiritual practices in Europe, and a lot of Ancient spiritual type practices (and here, I am talking of charms, spells, and the like) appear to contain in them the  assumption that the world and the different portions or beings of the world- such as different plants,  animals, and even landforms- have a spiritual powers inherent to them, or indwelling intelligences of  some kind. Even if it isn’t spelled out, some of these practices appear to take it for granted or assume it. 

This could indicate very distant, leftover remains of former animistic belief systems that were distributed  throughout many cultures, and over time fell into a partial state of decay, but remained preserved within  culture. The decay was caused by the rise of Christendom in Europe, which banished or pushed further  below the surface of collective awareness the older animistic or spirit-indwelled realities of the Pagan  past. But old practices and folk-customs do persist, and even if common belief in earlier metaphysics  fails, folk-forms remain and continue to get passed along and used. Sometimes they get used in new  contexts, and the rest of the time, they just remain curiosities that no one really remembers the real  origins or meanings of. 

If there was once a more conscious sequence of animistic-type understandings that were consciously held  throughout Europe, or any other part of the modern industrial world, that matters greatly. I don’t think  anyone would try to argue that Paleolithic and Neolithic Europe weren’t permeated with the same kinds  of animistic and organic traditions and understandings that we know the rest of the world had; I doubt  many could or would argue that those animistic impulses didn’t transmit into the Bronze Age and into  the Iron Age, and finally into the modern ages, albeit in more diminished forms. 

If our Ancestors- far enough back- were living in a state of animistic awareness, and experiencing the  indwelling forces of our world, and having relationships with them, then what are we doing now? And  why are we doing it? If these men and women whose life-force has been passed directly to us once saw and understood a deeper reality within all of the forms and shapes of this world, and further, if they  depended upon them for countless thousands of years before the roots of this modern sickness began,  could we be living in a condition of deep and destructive, unwise blindness? 

I’d say the answer there was definitely “yes”, and further I would say that any older practice that gets us  out of the trance of modern mindsets about things, and into the natural world more, which gets us  thinking about the natural world in terms of a sacred community of life, is exerting a healing power upon  us, in deep levels that we might not even realize. 

All of this would certainly add a real fire to modern “environmentalist” type movements, I would think. 

**PAA: How does the concept of "interbeing" in spiritual ecology challenge the dualistic view of humans and nature? **

Interbeing is simply reality. Whether or not we consciously experience it or believe in it doesn’t change  that it is reality, it is the way things exist. Interbeing asks us to cease considering “being” as a thing we  own all to ourselves, and to start considering “being” as a thing we share with everything else, to some  degree. 

This is a very hard sell for most modern people, because we are very deeply “individualist” now- radically  individualist- and our starting assumption about who and what we are is that we are very separate  “beings” with very definite boundaries around whatever we are, separating us from everything else that  is. But of course, as definite as we feel these boundaries are, those boundaries have no real names; we  have no language to discuss where “we” may end and “everything else” may begin- and further, if we  really study it, we begin to see that it’s impossible to draw hard lines between ourselves and everything  else. 

At this point, Interbeing says “that’s because being is shared, and everything overlaps in a very intimate  and natural way.” Interbeing doesn’t say that we simply have no beings or no “real” being; we very much  do, it’s just shared. Our beings participate in the lives of other beings and receive from them so much; we  received our own lives from our parents and countless Ancestors before them. We receive food and  sustenance from countless other beings. We receive everything we learn from the efforts of other beings,  and from the powers of the world that generate experiences with us. Our own “beings” are a great and  dynamic concentration of all these things, a powerful flow of experiences and memories, all connected to  other beings and to other places and forces.

When most people think of the arguments regarding the “dualism of humans and nature”, they assume  that either humans and nature are very different things, or humans and nature are simply “all one”. I don’t  think either of these conclusions is correct.  

The world is filled with countless entities; we could call them “beings” if we wanted; they definitely all  partake in being, in existing; but they are not “all one.” They *are *all relationally connected somehow, and  if we wanted to say “There’s just (ultimately) one great web of relationship”, we could definitely say that,  but that doesn’t mean “all are one being” or “all is one”.  Our civilization has a tendency- thanks to monotheistic philosophies that have been so prominent for the last 2,000 years, to rush to “oneness” for everything in a very extreme or absolute way. But that denies the importance of how different beings actually *do *exist, and the dignity all beings have for existing in different ways.

**PAA: What are the implications of viewing nature as a living entity with spiritual significance in the context  of environmental stewardship? **

The implications are staggering, and sadly, have become so staggering that modern humanity can  probably never collectively respond to them in any complete or appropriate way. Things that happened in  our history have led us into places where we have become helpless to make an adequate collective  response to the world we live in. 

Just at the most general level, that ancient humans eventually domesticated tons of plants and animals,  and then became completely dependent upon them, has left us with no place to really go; we can’t undo  our reliance upon massive quantities of domesticated plants and animals. We can’t let all our crops go and  let the plants return to some previous wild state; we can’t let all the domesticated animals go; if we did,  the great majority of humankind would perish, and our civilizations would collapse.  

We can’t back out of our reliance on what we’ve done to these plant and animal creatures, and we can’t  just decide to stop mining the earth and doing all the other things we do to sustain what we have come to  consider “normal” or even “civilized life.” If economies crash, civilizations crash and a lot of people die.  All of this might happen anyway- and I would say the chances get higher with every passing year that  something like this will happen. But until it does, people will do everything they can to not allow it to  happen. 

And yet we know it’s all unsustainable, ultimately. And we modern people are not the creators of the  “unsustainable civilization’ problem, by any means. Nearly every civilization that has ever existed before  now has collapsed; no civilization has ever been entirely sustainable.

If we (humans, collectively) really and truly viewed Nature and Nature’s processes as sacred things, as  expressions of not just a potential living entity of an enormous and vast sort, but also all of the living  aspects of Nature as individually sacred things, and their many relationships as sacred things, and if we  acted in accord with that view, everything we see around us would (again) be heading for collapse. No  one can really imagine we’re “living in a sacred manner” these days.  

If we really viewed Nature as a living entity with spiritual significance, we might also abandon the word  “stewardship.” Nature is timelessly ancient and filled with incredible power; human existence is a recent  aspect of Nature. The idea that latecomers like us could give themselves the honor and title of “stewards” to something as ancient and powerful as Nature might already be a sign of our arrogant disconnection  towards the world, this disconnection we feel, or this feeling we have of being smarter than everything  else, and “above” everything else. 

If anything, Nature is dealing all the cards here, and we are hoping for a good hand, like any other family  of life might be. If you study our history, you see that so many cultures and civilizations before us were  knocked right out of existence by something as simple as slow climate changes that happened in  prehistoric times, or the wrong combination of earthquakes and volcanoes erupting. Sometimes, several  of these things happening at once was enough to change the course of human history and end a lot of  human lives and efforts. Nature is doing that; we are subject to Nature, not the other way around- and  that remains true now, no matter how much we style ourselves masters of the world, and no matter how  brilliant or complex our machines get. Nature doesn’t need stewards; it deserves worshipers.  

If we viewed Nature and its portions to be of spiritual significance, we would have to not take from them  or harm them as much as we do, and if we ever got a second chance at living in this world, to never let  ourselves get into situations wherein we find ourselves stuck having to harm and trapped having to take  as much as we do now. Taking some is always acceptable; relationship demands it and allows it; every  living being (plant, animal, or spirit) takes from the world as it asserts itself as a living relational entity.  Taking too much, and taking disrespectfully, is of course always the essential issue. 

Even if we can’t collectively mount a proper response to the impasses of modern life, we can personally  and in small communities certainly make strategic decisions to live and co-exist in better ways with each  other and the world in our local surroundings. This may not “save the world” in the larger sense, but two  things do count here: we have seen that small movements can certainly become large and impact the  world in amazing ways that no one could have foreseen. And, we can purify that portion of being that we  experience as our own beings, which could have some positive impact on what becomes of us beyond the  boundaries of this life. Even if a little bit can’t save the whole, the whole is still many parts, and what’s  meaningful and healthy, or spiritually transformative to smaller parts still matters.

**PAA: How does the notion of sacredness in nature challenge anthropocentric views prevalent in modern  society? **

My answer here is a continuation of what I was just discussing in the previous question.  Anthropocentrism is a severe denial of relationship, above all. It is a denial of how relationally humans  exist now, and have always existed, since beings we call “humans” came about. We think of ourselves as  related in some direct way to some other creatures who have a lot of traits and features in common with  us- the apes, the other simian beings. And as much as we know that we share DNA with every other plant  or animal that exists, we reserve “relationship” in the truly felt and authentic sense only for other humans,  and only vaguely for the pre-human and proto-human ape-kin relatives. 

And even now, a lot of people who live reject even that; this idea of tangible relationship to the apes or  other such creatures is rejected wholesale by many people. It doesn’t matter what some people believe; we  *are *related both to the other hominids and to all other creatures besides; but the anthropocentric  worldview is predicated on the “especially special” nature of humans, apart from all other creatures.  Everything that would be expected from us via our real relationships to other beings is put aside; we  excuse ourselves from those relational demands and we make sure that whatever happens in the world,  humans get the maximum comfort and benefit from it.  

If whole other families of life must be displaced or die for human convenience, we’ll do it, we’ll accept it and almost no one thinks about it or cares. The idea that human good must be the highest good is a very  dangerous idea; thanks to secular humanism, focusing on the good of humans is tantamount to being a moral or a good person, but this kind of morality is weak because of its countless layers of hidden danger dangers that threaten to really reduce the well-being of all families of life now, including the human one. 

I’m not sitting here claiming that if a choice had to be made between the survival of the Hermit Thrush  and the survival of a city full of humans, or the human race as a whole, that we should just flip a coin to  decide; I’m saying that anthropocentric madness and disconnection has led us into a world, into  situations, where choices like that have to be made- and we should never be in such a place. No species  should be living in such a way that choices like that should ever be an issue.  

We need to be examining the impact of our beliefs and philosophies upon the world, but humans seldom  do that. They are too entranced by their stories, lifestyles, and comfort, and our organisms, though  having incredible powers of imagination, still suffer from a collective and general inability to really  consider the future, because the future is too abstract for us. 

Nature’s sacred dimension was real before us and will be real after we’re gone. We came from it. Modern  society’s anthropocentrism denies that, ignores that, and most people alive now never had a chance to  know or believe that. And the longer we ignore it, the more bad things happen, the more bad taking  happens, and the more precarious, wasteful, and deadly things become. So I would say that Nature’s sacredness simply disallows stories like anthropocentrism; it shuns it and scorns it. And it shows its scorn  in all these bad outcomes and dangers we are forced to live with. 

**PAA: In what ways can the stories and myths from pre-modern European cultures provide guidance for  contemporary ecological ethics? **

Not all stories and myths from pre-modern or Ancient times can necessarily give that kind of guidance;  even as far back as the Bronze Age, and potentially at times further than that, stories- and sometimes  stories that became myths- were being formed that moved in poor directions, regarding the nature of  human life and the relationship between humans and the world.  

There were ancient stories and myths, chosen and favored by human social elites, that enshrined and  justified authoritarianism and violence and even sometimes a sense of human election and exploitation  of the land. Long before the myths in the Old Testament did this very same thing (and some of those  biblical myths stem back to the Bronze Age), there were Pagan myths doing this, too. Anthropocentrism,  anti-environment ideologies, and things like patriarchy had their mythical basis ages before the Old  Testament was even a thought in anyone’s mind. 

And yet, some ancient myths and stories are very much beautiful repositories of wisdom that could help  contemporary ecological ethics, I think. Stories of humans being born from the earth or from the plants  of the earth, or the waters- these reinforce the truth about where we truly come from. I don’t mean to  refer to stories in which “Gods” act as though they are craftsmen and collect up some raw materials and  shape humans like humans were a craft project; those are always later stories that have lost some  connection already; I mean stories in which the generative and birthing/creating power of Nature itself,  or the Earth, waters, and sky themselves, in an act of holy creative force, give birth to humans and other  animals, or to life in general. 

Beyond such primal concerns as the emergence of life, I think that ancient stories that reveal spiritual  beings requiring help from one another, or any beings needing help from others, are very important. We  have a difficult time imagining it now, because of how bloated and crazy our idea of “god” or “divinity”  has become, but our Pagan Ancestors didn’t view the Gods as all-powerful beings. The Gods could get  into situations in which they needed the help of another God, or sometimes even the help of special humans, to get through a problem. 

In some primal stories from around the world, creatures- animals- or the divine Ancestors of the animals  we see now- can go on adventures in which they find themselves in a bind and need other creatures to  assist them. Sometimes humans might help, but often humans need the capabilities or wisdom of animals  to learn something important or overcome obstacles themselves. These kinds of stories remind us of a most critical truth: we are all related and we can all impact one another, for good or for ill. We can find  help in nearly any place; and no one is so wise or powerful that they don’t sometimes need help from  others- even the Gods can need help. We are all sitting at a table of subjects; we humans are not alone the  subjects in a world full of objects. We are at a table full of intelligence, powers, and perspectives. We need  to reach to the sides and across the table to learn, and to become stronger and wiser and to and help  others to be stronger. 

An example of this in modern ecological terms might be in how wolves fight erosion. Allowing wolves  back into places where rivers were eroding stopped the problem, because the creatures eating so many of  the plants that were holding the riverbanks together were no longer able to do that, owing to natural wolf  predation. And with the river’s re-strengthening, more creatures and communities of life were increased.  

It wasn’t human brilliance that made this great transformation happen, it was what wolves bring to the  table that did. It was human stupidity that killed all the wolves that used to live in that place before; it was  a fluke that some humans let wolves return- a decision that humans should never need to make, because  the wolves shouldn’t have been killed in the first place. We wiped the wolves out originally for selfish and  very anthropocentric reasons. If we were wiser beings, we would see a myth in the making right here, and  a very good myth for the world. 

**PAA: How do contemporary movements like ecospirituality reflect a shift in values towards a more holistic  understanding of nature? **

Much like “environmentalism” or “spiritual ecology”, “ecospirituality” probably means a lot of different  things to a lot of different people. But in general, anyone who sits down and really tries to re-organize  their thinking (and in time, their feeling) towards a sense of basic reverence or protectiveness to the land  or world around us, to the land and to Nature that gave birth to us, is taking the first steps towards some  kind of holistic perspective. 

“Holism” and “holistic” also have an array of meanings, depending on the context. Here, I assume you  mean to refer to the general idea of the inter-connected nature of things, and to refer to the holistic  approach as the opposite of a reductionist one. The world being not reducible to super-disconnected  parts, but instead being seen as connecting, relational parts that, all together, even create a field of  circumstances that seems to have a character and a causal power greater than you’d expect, might be the  idea. 

I’d love to feel that some new age of the world was creeping up on us, in which older or more holistic  views of Nature and the natural world were re-emerging, but I fear that things aren’t that simple.  Environmental crisis has certainly tripped alarms in the heads of some people, even some very important or influential people, but it hasn’t really penetrated as deeply into the collective of humans, and mostly (I  think) because the way our technology works, and the way our civilizations themselves are structured,  stops it from penetrating. 

We can have intimations that we have fallen into unsustainable chasms of living, and we can even have it  spelled out to us at rare times; we can see disasters happening on a computer screen, and hear a story  here and there about some glacier collapsing, or climate change, or some animal species going extinct,  but we’ve become very used to all these different virtual inputs, all the time. Our disconnections have  made us feel small, alone, and unable to do anything about it. We’re more focused on survival day to day  and trying to make a paycheck or reach our next meals, and the idea of future coming environmental  collapse seems far-off and abstract to most. 

There are certainly groups of people who have seemingly embraced a shift of values towards more  Nature-reverent or Nature-centered ideologies or themes, but even most of their members are trapped in  the same technological web that everyone else is. They rely on the same Earth-destroying technology that  everyone else does to spread their message, and to try and do something about the destruction. They get  their food from the same unsustainable places, and they have little choice in that matter. And everyone  gets numb to the constant (often mentally and emotionally traumatic) dataflow. 

It will take more than a value shift, even though value shifts are good. Without value shifts, nothing else  can really happen. It’s just that the context we’re all living in now blunts the power of most value shifts.  Something bigger and more transformative will also have to happen, and sadly, those aren’t likely to be  very nice or comfortable things. 

That “ecospiritual” movements should exist at all must signal that value changes are happening at least in  some places. And by telling people that Nature isn’t a secondary reality to human existence or human  needs, they are certainly setting the stage for better values to form. 

**PAA: How can the revival of ancient practices inform modern approaches to sustainability and  environmental ethics? **

The first answer that springs to mind is that when people come together in natural spaces- spaces they  deeply reverence and take very good care of- their reverence for their natural gathering place, this place  they gather to express this kind of spirituality within, always spreads out from that place to embrace the  rest of the natural world. Every forest will come to resonate with the same love or respect they have for  their own sacred forest; they will not go to some other wooded place and treat it poorly. That would be an  unimaginable idea. 

Once you experience the real sacredness of a powerful tree-entity, you see the sacredness in all the rest of  its many kin, and from there it spreads. Many ancient peoples (and some modern ones) utilized outdoors  spaces for sacred rituals or rites, and for obvious reasons: when your feet or hands or skin is in direct  contact with dirt or water or plants, you are in direct contact with the very forces of life itself. These are  the Sacred Powers; these are our origins. The forms of “Gods” may emerge from within them, and always  did to so many ancient people before us, but this is the fundamental field of truth. The holy, the sacred,  the real- it’s easy to feel such things in such places, once one’s mind and heart are opened and oriented  towards it. Our souls and our bodies will remember, if they are oriented properly. 

If some ancient practice once venerated the Earth Mother as the Great Mother of Life, and some modern  people genuinely attempt to re-create and re-experience it, and if they *succeed *at experiencing it, there’s  no possibility that they could go into the world and mistreat the ground beneath their feet after that. Real  experiences change people, for good. Genuine reverence changes people.  

One of our biggest issues now, spiritually and collectively speaking, is that what passes in the mainstream  for “religious experience”, or “spirituality”, has grown cold and stale, and become little more than an  adjunct to social belonging or social participation. We wonder at how a modern Christian could claim to  have experienced “Christ” in some mystical way, but still live as a human in very selfish and awful ways but that’s not mysterious to me. True spiritual experiences aren’t happening in the mainstream much  anymore. Mainstream believers think they do, but they don’t.  

Spiritual traditions can lose power in this way, but human societies are conservative, and people will go  on dragging the traditions behind them, identifying with them (as so many generations of their ancestors  did) and paying lip-service to it all, but it doesn’t have the power they hope it has much anymore. They  want to believe that it must still have some kind of strength, but really it only has the strength of social  identity after a long enough time. But the language they use is still real and shared by many, and can still  win social acclaim or social influence, so people will “name drop” Jesus or what have you, but there’s no  real transformative fire in any of this. 

Really profound experiences change people. If revived ancient practices can somehow bring people to  really profound experiences, and if those practices are predicated on reverencing the Land or the spiritual  beings within the Land, then as far as they are able, the transformed people will work to create better  communities together, to treat the Land and world around them better, and always support wise  initiatives to help local bioregions and populations (human and otherwise) to thrive better, always  bearing in mind how everything relationally connects. Even small efforts can have big impacts, and when  spiritual fire drives people, they won’t find efforts like this to be a chore at all.

## Herbalism and Wortcunning 

**PAA: What metaphysical principles underlie the practice of herbalism in pre-modern European traditions,  and how do they differ from modern herbalism? **

My understanding is that in Early Modern Europe, herbalism was based on several old strands of cultural  history and reality. First and foremost, there was a long and unbroken tradition- with countless local  forms- of using herbs for medicinal purposes. Obviously, before modern chemistry and medicine, it was  the herbal remedies that the natural world produces so generously that humans turned to, and that’s a  good thing. And that continued throughout history, and continues to this day, too.  

And so here, if we push back far enough in our imaginations, we can surmise that in the most ancient  times, there were humans who related to the spirits of various plants to learn and discover what kinds of  powers they had- to heal, to dull pain, even to kill. And when those primal understandings and  relationships were established, humans just continued to exist alongside them, helped by them.  

In Early Modern Europe, as with other places, I think that even when those old animistic understandings  were long lost or passed into unconscious places, there was a metaphysic still at work between people and  plants that centered itself there: the knowledge that plants each had unique powers and virtues or  capacities to affect humans and other creatures in different ways. 

And then there was the old ‘Planetary” system, by which different herbs had first become associated with  old Pagan deities, and then that association became mediated by planetary currents after the deities  themselves were either banished or sidelined in other ways. The Bay laurel, for instance, may have been  sacred in very ancient times to various solar-type deities, but after the Pagan world was diminished out of  conscious cultural existence, the Bay was still classified as a “solar” herb.  

> So herbs, even in very rural folk culture, had planetary associations in this way.

So herbs, even in very rural folk culture, had planetary associations in this way. Some were known to be  “bright” or warm and healing herbs, or sometimes “dark” and sedative or dangerous, which could be  Saturnian in nature; some herbs could be productive of lustful outcomes, or promote fertility, and these  could be Martial or Venusian in nature, and so forth. 

Early Modern herbalism also (in my understanding) often contained practices or information relating to  how herbs had to be cultivated or gathered, and if these rules weren’t followed, the power of the herb to  offer its special powers or gifts to human use could be endangered. This strikes me as potentially related  to older ideas, taboos, or ceremonies relating to the spirit of the plant, and to a mystical kind of human  knowledge. 

Modern herbalism has mostly fallen into lockstep with modern chemistry, or adopted explanations from  the sciences regarding why different plants do what they do- and in part, there’s nothing wrong with this,  with using this language. Modern herbalists are trying to legitimate their craft against chemistry and medical sciences, and the if they can do that, then a very beneficial outcome is still there for people who  can benefit from herbal remedies. Whether we like it or not, people these days (both the herbalists and  their potential patients or customers) feel like things are legitimated or more trustworthy if they can be  brought into agreement with the modern sciences. This kind of legitimation is part of the modern  worldview, and it’s not always a bad thing. Modern chemistry has brought us a lot of extra understanding  of the substances that exist out there and how they mingle and can be safely utilized.

I just think some modern herbalists have come to look at their craft as primarily a “chemical” art, in ways,  as just another kind of medicine, perhaps a more holistic or natural one, and lost the deeper spiritual  layers. And they wouldn’t be the first grouping of people to either lose the deeper spiritual layers in  things, or who have never had a chance to know about them. That’s what “progress” includes for our  cultures. 

**PAA: What are the challenges faced by spiritual ecologists in reconciling traditional beliefs with modern  scientific understanding? **

There are many challenges, and an entire book could be written on this. There’s an enormous pressure in  our culture for everything to be “reconciled” against modern scientific understandings, and if a person or  a people fail to make that reconciliation, they are definitely going to be labeled kooks or ignorant or just  people living in some kind of fantasy land. For most people in our world, “science” equates with “reality.”  

Science has won the deeper culture war in the hearts of our main institutions, even if many religious  institutions refuse to see it; scientists are our new priests, holding the keys to understanding the universe.  And like the old priests, scientists have enormous faith that their methods of inquiry and their  assumptions about the world will solve all problems and unravel all mysteries, eventually- that, or their  methods and assumptions are simply the “best that have ever been”, and all pre-scientific, pre-modern  peoples were simply ignorant and knew no better. 

This is nearly identical to what the first Christians believed, and what their priests said: that faith in their  God (at last, the one true God!) would transform the world by grace into a perfect world, would bring an  end to sin, war, and corruption, create the “new man”, bring real peace to people’s souls, and that all  Pagan people who came before simply knew no better. And part of the reason why they seem so identical  in ways is because our modern scientific institutions and means and methods of scientific inquiry emerge  from Christian intellectual traditions (with generous borrowings from certain Greek philosophers, of  course) and from Christian educational institutions. 

> My point is that modern Western “science” is not an epic break with Christian culture, but a direct, linear product of it.

My point is that modern Western “science” is not an epic break with Christian culture, but a direct, linear  product of it. And our new science-priests have just as much, if not more, cultural power and acclaim as the priests once did. We look to science now for everything, and science has created all the technology  that created the modern world, and which the modern world requires to exist at all. We can dislike  science or point out its flaws- and it does have flaws- but we can’t exist without it now. We can’t even  really understand ourselves and others without it, because it determines how we see and experience  others in so many ways.  

We are left in a position, collectively, that wants to hear easy or simpler answers to things, even though we  live in a world of unimaginable complexity, and even though our technology is unimaginably complex.  There is a contradiction here between human desires and how things really exist.  

Some people- many people- for a long time were content to hear that “God” created everything somehow,  and that was that. The problem of existence was settled. Now, many have been just as content to hear that  a “Big Bang” made everything come into existence, somehow. The “Big Bang” let people settle the  problem of existence in themselves and still seem modern, intellectual, and reconciled to science. They  could have an answer to a big question like existence without having to seem “superstitious”, but the  emotional reality here is the same. It’s just another ideological solution to a question that doesn’t have an  easy answer. 

And of course, most scientists understand that there are no easy answers to anything; it may not be their  fault that collectively, people can no more understand the real depths of science as the Early Modern  peasantry could understand the depths of Christian theology. But we must deal with how the average  person understands things, because it is the masses of people that really define the everyday character  our cultural reality. 

When modern spiritual ecologists face the challenge of reconciling or integrating their feelings and ideas  with modern science, this is the context they are operating within. And it’s not an easy context. The most  important institutions within our culture (government institutions, academic institutions, medical  institutions, and media institutions) have embraced science as the new “religion”, the true meaning discovering and meaning-declaring institution that will tell us who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. And if those institutions have done so, the collective of us have done so, even if some  of us have beliefs to the contrary. 

We have (as a culture) heaped all our deepest expectations upon science, and that might not have been  wise. We may have gotten ahead of ourselves, in our rush to “discover who we are”- an understanding that we once had as beings in this world, and that we never should have lost to begin with. Science may  be a brilliant, rational means of studying what we can see and touch, and determining how those things  interact, and being able to predict them; but the idea that such a method for analyzing what we can see  must also be the thing that’s going to answer every question we have about who and what we are is almost  certainly not right.

Spiritual ecology brings people into emotional spaces, into feeling spaces, and into spaces that are  definitely trans-rational; these kinds of spaces, which are the heart of real mythic matters, simply defy  rational examination and explanation or prediction. Something other-than-rational sits at the heart of  ancient cultures, and ultimately at the heart of life, and earlier peoples than us had some comfort with  that. Not everything “makes sense” in a neat or tidy way, but this idea really violates our modern desire to  make everything make sense. 

So the problem lies in how we can make space for the “holy wildness” that is also an aspect of reality. It is  an aspect of human beings, and it is an aspect of Nature. How do we make space for the emotional side of  our beings, too, when the rational side is all our culture effectively approves of, and the only side that our  culture believes can ever be trusted to tell us reliable stories about who we really are?  

Scientific attempts to explain our emotions as just chemicals or chemical reactions will always fail  because a chemical is not an emotion. Certain emotions may sometimes cause certain chemicals to form  or appear, or the injection of certain chemicals into our bodies can sometimes lead to certain emotional  states, but to fully reduce these things to one another is a mistake, and it’s a mistake that nearly everyone  will fall into because most people want fast and easy answers to complex things. 

Spiritual ecology will lead people into mystical spaces of experience. They are unique things; they can’t be  explained by other things, and we must be okay with this. We need to become satisfied with the idea that  different realms of experience exist, and they may not have a reductionist “master key” that unites and  explains them all. This goes back again to something I said earlier about how so many people want to  reduce a world of many beings into “One Being”. It can’t be done without wrecking the actual and real  dignity that individual beings have, and the rights individual beings have to exist in unique (but always  relational) terms. 

Traditional beliefs don’t generally set out to explain the world or everything within it, in any scientific or  rational way; it may not be possible to do such a thing. Traditional beliefs apart from “creation myths”  (which are often badly misunderstood by modern people) tend to be about important events that  happened in specific places in the landscape. They tend to be about important people or beings who did  important things long ago that still impact a place. They can be about spiritual forces that once touched  the lives of people in a place, and still might do so again if certain conditions are present.  

These kinds of beliefs aren’t out to explain the world, but to define and give meaning to the historical and  present reality of the (usually smaller) group of people that were born into these beliefs. “Meaning” is  born in these ways, from emotional and intimate connections between people, and places, and their  shared past. To believe that the love of a mythical Ancestor for another mythical being gave birth to the  spirit of a local river adds a sense of mythic meaning to the experience of that river. A scientist saying that  the river is XYZ combination of chemicals, and was formed by XYZ combination of geological forces isn’t speaking the same kind of language and isn’t creating the kind of meaning that the mythical dimension  does. We must find a way to be okay with not “reconciling” these two things together, for there’s no way  they really can be reconciled. And further, it’s okay that they are unreconcilable.  

The scientist could be right about the river, according to his own language, but the people who live  around that river are the people who know and feel that story about the mythic Ancestors. That’s who  they *really *are; they are not the people of a list of chemical and geological forces; they are the people of  that story and the other stories like it. In this, real spiritual identity is found. And spiritual identity is  radically important to the health and wholeness of human beings. 

A lot of scientists, or people taken by scientism, would dismiss those people at the river as silly or  “superstitious” and simply say “those mythic Ancestors never existed, that’s ridiculous.” In this, we see  again how similar modern science-motivated people can sound to the early Christian missionaries who  went among ancient Pagan peoples and said the exact same things to them. One is a cultural continuation  of the other.

## Divination and Soul-Flight

**What techniques are commonly used to achieve trance states or soul-flight, and what are their intended  spiritual outcomes? **

Trance states are typically created when the center of an entity’s awareness is led to focus on certain  powerful things. In that focus, if it gets strong enough, new aspects of the entity’s deeper awareness start  to open and present themselves in more conscious ways. Deeper aspects of the world that are normally  unseen can also present themselves in more conscious ways. 

Some trance-induction techniques are well known, such as meditating on a singular point, like a candle  flame, or losing one’s ordinary awareness in a repetitious sound like a drumbeat. Other techniques are  more involved, but they all aim to paralyze the ordinary workings of the mind and body so that  extraordinary workings can come to the forefront.  

Soul flight is an advanced kind of experience, in which the awareness of the entity is allowed to sink to a  deeper place, and the ordinary awareness of the physical body is more or less lost. From that point, if  other conditions are proper, the awareness can shift further from the vitalizing principle of the body and  more fully towards the “mobile” or “separable” principle of life, a principle that can ‘wander’ or seemingly  move in extraordinary ways apart from the body as it is usually felt or known. 

Any kind of trance state that becomes deep enough might lead to soul-flight, but in general soul-flight is  sought as a special outcome, and special techniques of trance are used to reach it. Also, powerful spiritual beings can reach into the human entity and cause the conditions to form in which the awareness is  “lifted” perceptually “out of the body” and into a journey beyond, which can seem like flying, but not  always. Certain substances- entheogenic substances- can also create both the trance and the conditions  needed for this experience. Entheogens were certainly used for this in ancient times very regularly. 

The intended spiritual outcome of Soul Flight is to move, in direct (but extraordinary) experience into  other spaces and there to meet with different spiritual beings. One might receive counsel or  empowerment from them, if one can meet them and hold it together long enough; this requires a strong  mind and a stronger body, too, because everything comes back to the body. The body is the  sensualization of every power we have, ordinary and extraordinary. What you receive from the Unseen  world comes to lodge or live in your body, at least while you’re alive. 

Trance states in general aim to do many things. Often, they aim to make one more aware or receptive to  the subtle world, without having to “leave the body”, so that one can feel the presence of other powers, or  relax the body and soul in certain ways so that different kinds of insight might arise or certain kinds of  healing might happen. ** **

**PAA: What are the potential dangers associated with soul-flight practices, and how can practitioners mitigate  these risks? **

If a person doesn’t have the proper mental and physical strength or health, or lacks the proper kind of  grounding in a community of caring, understanding people- people who embrace and understand these  kinds of experiences, that person can encounter things that shock their mind and bodily systems in ways  that don’t get resolved. That can lead to emotional instability or disturbances. That can lead to wrong  conclusions about what just happened to them, which can lead to false or distorted beliefs or ideas,  inflation of the ego, and just bad guidance or bad directions in the world. 

These kinds of risks are largely mitigated by having strong, aware human allies with which one can share  these experiences with and process them, but also having strong mental stability and physical wellness in  one’s own being. People with too many emotional issues or injuries are vulnerable to increasing harm to  themselves without real help from caring and understanding others. 

Ancient spiritual experiences like these were always done as part of a community- even if it was just a  community of other spiritual practitioners. But more than that, the whole idea of ancient people  “questing beyond” the ordinary world always had a goal of helping the people of a tribe or a band or a  place, somehow. Selfishly questing for personal power might be thought a pathway to a kind of evil, in  ancient terms. These days we’re a bit more comfortable with what we call “personal development”, and it  doesn’t have to be an evil, but I can’t see how “personal development” can be done without regard to a wider social context that we all must live in. If we change ourselves significantly, that will impact  everyone around us, and everyone connected to us, and so personal development without taking that  into consideration is definitely a dodgy kind of development. 

**What are the psychological and spiritual benefits of engaging in trance induction practices, and how do  they relate to personal transformation? **

I don’t like framing things in terms of “psychological” benefits, or even “spiritual” ones, if I can help it. I do use those terms at times, but when I have a chance, I like to shift from those terms to “development of  the relational entity”. Because that’s what we are; we are more than just a modern notion of psychology  and we are more than just whatever passes for “spiritual” in many people’s minds, and “spiritual” has so  many meanings now as to be a nearly meaningless word. 

The benefits to the relational entity, when engaging in trance induction practices, definitely come from  experiencing how connected we are to stranger, deeper forces. But no matter how strange they may seem  or feel, they are deeper kin of ours, somehow. They are part of our real origin story. They are parts of the  world that feed into the life of the world, and so being able to know them, and situate ourselves as living,  existing beings within the same intimate system as them, helps to bring the whole vision of spiritual  ecology to tangible life. 

We don’t feel so cut off, small, or alone anymore, when we really feel these things. And this can relate to  personal transformation (which is never *only *personal) in the sense that people who don’t feel so cut off,  small, or alone anymore become stronger, more joyful, more confident, and braver. They feel belonging  and the rightness of belonging, and they feel a healthy sense of wonder at the world. And in these things,  there’s also the possibility of a rare kind of peace. 

## Questions about your Books 

**PAA: What are some of the key themes and ideas explored in your [writings](https://www.robinartisson.com/the-books.html) on folklore, mythology, and pre modern European preternaturalism? **

A lot of the key themes in my writings have been described in my answers to the various questions in this  interview, so far! Beyond what I’ve said here, and to add to it, I think the key themes of my writings are  the need to re-appraise our Ancestral past in terms of both its strengths and its occasional weaknesses,  and come to realize that our Ancestors weren’t just ignorant pre-moderns, but highly intelligent beings  who knew critical things about this world that we don’t know now. 

One of the most painful aspects of the modern myth is that we are now stronger, wiser, and better than  our Ancestors ever were. We make ourselves the judges of our Ancestors, but in truly spiritual terms, they  are the judges of us. It is those who have passed into the depths of the world- those who came long before  us- and who have seen the true face of Reality in the depths that have the awareness required to “judge”  anything. We who are still living in the broken-up, windy world of life aren’t usually able to see the whole  picture.  

At special times, we can obtain a kind of brief wholeness of vision, and the hope is that we can come to  live in that kind of vision more and more, as time goes. But until then, we shouldn’t be so hung up on our  own brilliance; our brilliance, even with its bright moments, definitely has limits. 

Aside from basic ancestral reverence, the themes in my work include seeking out times, places, activities,  and materials that help induce the condition of liminality, conditions that allow our words and deeds to  cross over more easily into the Unseen side of life. This is one of the main pylons of ritual, as I understand  it. I have also written an enormous amount about how people might make pacts or two-way agreements  with spiritual beings, to gain favors from them in return for certain gifts or favors. 

I have spent a great amount of time analyzing traditional reports or beliefs about spiritual beings and how  those beings appear to behave or interact with humans in different ways and at different times. In these  reports, I have sought to attempt a kind of discovery of a “spiritual code” that can (at times) tip us off or  offer us guidance on how to navigate certain extraordinary situations, should we find ourselves in them. 

I have also focused a lot on historical workings and spells, analyzing them from spiritual-ecological  perspectives and from modern perspectives, too, situating them within their own context, showing how  that older context might still be very valid today, and suggesting means and methods of bringing those  workings to life in the modern day. 

**PAA: How do these writings challenge mainstream academic perspectives on these topics, and what  alternative theories or interpretations are proposed? **

Thanks to certain very fortuitous evolutions of the academic perspective on pre-modern sorcery or  Witchcraft, my writings don’t generally challenge what kinds of understandings are coming to exist now.  The works of the great researcher and academic Emma Wilby, as well as the incredible work of the  scholars behind The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft (and others) have begun to reveal a perspective on  Early Modern sorcery and Witchcraft that not only agrees in most ways with my own past assumptions  or understandings of these topics, but has also influenced me in my developing understanding, and thank  goodness for that.

My writings certain do challenge, in ways, the older skeptical academic appraisals of what Witchcraft and  sorcery were in earlier times. Many once-prominent (and some still-prominent) scholars definitely think  Witchcraft was never real or was a product of Christian hysteria. Some prominent scholars still think that  traces of genuine Pagan culture could not have survived, through folklore or in any other way, into the modern day.  

I disagree there strongly and believe that some traces did survive- but I don’t think they were being held  in a conscious “Pagan” context by the people who held them in later centuries, of course. My most  important belief is that certain aspects of Early Modern Witchcraft, and thus certain aspects of Medieval  and Ancient Witchcraft, were continuations of primordial animistic experiences that I think are universal  to human cultures.  

I agree with Emma Wilby here- and her works surely changed my life in every way for the better. Wilby  posits that the famous Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie was experiencing spontaneous “soul flight”  experiences that reflect a near-on universal “Shamanistic” type reality that can be found in many parts of  the world. She posits also that “dream cults” existed, that spectral relationships between the souls of  different men and women formed, and that they appeared within dream-spaces together (in co-dreaming  experiences) to do strange things, often beyond their own understandings, and reports of these dream  meetings could have led to charges of Witchcraft in Early Modern times. 

This is how I understand Witchcraft to exist, in the most profound and authentic way, and how I believe  it has always existed. That some people in Early Modern times or before may have met in the waking,  ordinary world to honor these special mystical realities is something I think happened too. It may not  have been so common or organized at all, but I think it did happen. And I know that it still does. 

These are my positions, and they don’t disagree with certain ranks of modern academic thinking on the  topic. 

**PAA: In "Letters from the Devil's Forest," what insights are provided regarding the practices of spirit-pacting  and spirit-allegiance? **

Letters from the Devil’s Forest is a collection of earlier writings that I did over a space of years. Some  people feel that many of those writings have a lot of good things to say about fighting our way through  modernist thought-traps and re-embracing an older (or better) way of seeing, where Witchcraft or  related matters are concerned. I do talk about relating to spiritual beings in *Letters*, but some years later I  wrote a book called *The Clovenstone Workings*, which is specifically about spirit-pacting.  

The main insight regarding spirit-pacting (or “allegiance”) is that the relationship is predicated on both  parties benefiting. There are things that humans can do that spirits cannot; spirits do not have tangible hands, and so they can’t make things from the ordinary substances of the world in the way that humans  can. And because of this, human crafts- things humans make- can be considered very valuable to spirits,  or at least, the power, strength and effort put into them by human beings in those unique ways that  humans can is valuable. It’s something that has metaphysical potency. 

This gives creative humans a real corridor to advantage with underlying spiritual forces, and it’s not the  only corridor that humans have. Pacting of this sort is just an example of one of the extraordinary aspects  of relationship itself. In every “ordinary” relationship, we exchange power and gifts and influences with  our partners; we share knowledge, we exchange money, we share emotions, confidences, we offer  support, we learn. We see that as ordinary, but in reality there’s real metaphysical exchange afoot. 

Pacting is about extending relationship to a deeper level. The gifts or offerings we make to spirits in  exchange for what we could receive from them is another example of relational exchange, only this time  the relational exchange crosses between two worlds, or is aimed partly at a deeper layer of the world, the  reality that spirits indwell. This is a very ancient practice, found in many forms all over the world. 

Some relationships are predicated on more than a very simple-to-see “exchange”; Pacts do not define  every kind of relationship possible between humans and spirits, but in every healthy or constructive  relationship, power and other influences are always flowing both ways somehow. Pacts are very practical  arrangements, though, and have been made throughout history, as well. 

“Allegiance” generally refers to a deeper kind of relationship to a spirit or even to another human person.  To have allegiance to another means that deep emotion and sentiments of some kind bind you to them.  One might have allegiance to a very great spiritual being, a spiritual being that can have greater influence  over one’s destiny in a broader sense. A “pact” on the other hand generally refers to favor exchanges  between humans and lesser kinds of spirits, but pacts can be extended to greater beings too, so long as  one is reverential about it and that greater being consents and signals their consent to the arrangement. 

**PAA: How does "The Witching Way of the Hollow Hill" serve as a guide to the animistic worldview and  spiritual communion with the Unseen World? **

Like nearly all writers, my writings have greatly evolved over the years. They evolved as I deepened my  own understanding. *The Witching Way of the Hollow Hill *was my first real book, and it laid out the  foundations of a more “Traditional” or historical approach to understanding spirits, to understanding the  Unseen world, and to even doing things like spells or trying to gain initiatory experiences.  

In the sense that I was always working to deepen myself in the inter-animistic worldview as I felt it  existed historically, and as it might still exist in deeper, hidden layers of our souls and the world, *Witching  Way *was the first announcement of such an approach and such feelings. It was rough, but it was passionate, and it contained powerful seeds that grew into powerful things. It definitely presented a  different view of Witchcraft than most people had encountered up to that point, and it was very  connected to the old Balladry tradition- as several of my works are, because within the Ballads (I mean to  refer to the Child Ballads here, generally from the region of the Scottish borders, but also to ballads from  other places around the British Isles and Western Europe) we find a lot of traces of old animistic and  indigenous-level spiritual beliefs from Europe. 

The *Witching Way *really had a lot of energy that inspired a lot of people; it inspired a lot more people  than I had realized. It got people thinking in new ways about how we might relate to spirits or understand  ourselves within a mythic framework that was instantiated in old folkloric sources, like the ballads. And it  got people interested in doing works- devotional works, mostly- to the spiritual forces within their local  landscapes, which I think is one of the chief cornerstones of the “True Old Ways”. 

**PAA: Thank you for your time and the amazing information you have shared with us. **

* * * 

Copyrighted material, © 2024 by Robin Artisson and Serpent Hall LLC. Full permission is granted to the owners  and admins of Perseus Arcane Academy to distribute these interview responses with attribution to the author on  any platform or in any format, subject to ordinary US copyright law. Robin Artisson and Serpent Hall LLC also  assert the right to utilize this material in any manner apart from the usage of Perseus Arcane Academy.

---

## Useful Links

##### Home - Serpent Hall

##### Robin Artisson - Home Page

##### Books

---

[
](https://www.robinartisson.com/the-books.html)