The Home Cultus with Briar
Radical Elphame
UPG is a term I find to be often misunderstood. Short for “unverified person gnosis,” this phrase is sometimes wielded as a criticism in the world of spirituality – pagan, polytheist, or otherwise. It’s the word “unverified” that stands out in this instance, that seems to be contextualizing someone's “personal gnosis” – about a spiritual path, or being, or myth – as dubious, or heterodox. When used disparagingly, UPG can feel like a corrective. In many ways it can feel like a tool within so-called “alternative spirituality” to reinforce the kind of strictures of the...
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Fröja's Apples with Sara Bonadea George
Radical Elphame
What can change a goddess into a nature spirit? What can change a nature spirit into a witch? A hasty answer might simply be "colonization." This was the evolution of Fröja in Sweden. I don’t think we can have an intellectually honest discourse about folklore without confronting the forces of colonization head-on. What has this ongoing process done to the gods, the spirits, and the myths of a people? However, stopping there might miss the point. I think we also need to ask: what is the agency of a Goddess during a religious conversion? Does she merely recede into the past, or does she...
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Animistic Astrology with Teagan West
Radical Elphame
There may be no clearer gateway drug to magic in 2026 than astrology. You don’t need psychic abilities, or a spirit court, or a wider mystical philosophy to dabble in astrology. Just a birthday. I’ve always been a proponent of practical magic – the kind that helps you get stuff – not as an end goal, but as a necessary step, for many, in re-enchanting their minds. Astrology can do something similar, though, with merely a natal chart reading. What do the planets have to do with who I am? It doesn’t really matter why astrology can tell you about yourself; the power is in simply...
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The Immense Hauntology of Things with Lee Morgan
Radical Elphame
I sometimes wonder why, of all the occult and magical currents we have on offer, Witchcraft manages to still have such a powerful pull on our contemporary culture. We find ourselves on the other side of a century of occult revivals and magical trends, and yet Witchcraft somehow stil retains a timeless appeal. More recent spiritual trends, such as the “New Age” movement, which you would expect to be a better gateway for contemporary Western people to explore spirituality, have aesthetically aged far worse than Witchcraft generally, and what once appeared modern and enlightened would now be...
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The Old Line with Aidan Wachter
Radical Elphame
When you look at the oldest and most intact spiritualities around the world, you will find that, at the center of their practice, is ancestral veneration. For many of us who were raised in less intact spiritualities and in cultures with a tendency to mold prevailing religions to the will of Empire, venerating our ancestors can feel complicated, to say the least. The same cultures that tend to mold religions to the will of Empire, also have a habit of tainting our ancestral line. It doesn’t take long tracing back the family trees of many of us to run into the stains and wounds of colonialism,...
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Raising the Dead with Corinne Boyer
Radical Elphame
Folk magic has a powerful pull. It can express complex metaphysical ideas that, for most of us practicing today, had once felt like the purview of the “New Age.” Magical ideas that once seemed fantastical, through the lens of folk magic, can suddenly feel earthy and vital. Techniques that once felt silly can begin to feel ancestral. The source texts go from channeled writings, to myths and folktales, and academic papers. There’s an artistry and intelligence grouped in with modern-day practitioners of folk magic that give the disenchanted “Western” mind permission to think...
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Hillbilly Woodwose with Nay Noordmans
Radical Elphame
They’re on bumper stickers, they’re on bags of jerky, they’re on bars of soap, and if you're not seeing an ancient alien on the History Channel, you’re almost certainly seeing someone searching for them in the woods. Big Foot, Sasquatch, Oh Mah, Sunk Ape – they go by many names, and are spotted throughout North America, and beyond. For some, they are a myth; for some, a monster; and for the rest, a mascot. The loudest amongst their fans will tell you they are a flesh and blood relic hominid, and describe their migration patterns, their use of infrasound to evade capture, and, of...
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Cursed Films with Sfinga & B. Key
Radical Elphame
What is it that draws occultists to horror films, when by in large, the history of horror cinema is essentially anti-occult propaganda? Despite what can seem like a counterintuitive interest on the part of practitioners, the fact remains that the horror genre is the last bastion of regular engagement with the spirit world left in contemporary media, and therefore a natural draw for people who see the spiritual as fundamental to everyday life. Another consideration is the cathartic embrace of the shadow on display in horror, and often staring death right in the face. Both things our culture in...
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The Black Book of Norah Fornario - an Audio Essay
Radical Elphame
I had to reschedule an interview for the first half of this month, but I didn't want to leave you hanging this week, so I recorded an essay I put out on our Substack recently for your listening pleasure. Nora Fornario has always been a deep fascination of mine, whom I find to be misunderstood and often explored in ways that ignore her most interesting aspects in favor of a more lurid true-crime bent. This essay is less focused on the infamous death of Nora Fornario, but rather a deep dive into what we can speculate about her own ideas and magical practice. The TL;DR is Witchcraft. ...
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28 Moons Later with J.M. Hamade
Radical Elphame
When we think about the Otherworld, we tend to do so from the perspective of this world. What is this hidden world that seems to operate so differently from our own? Who are the beings who dwell there, and what do they want with us? In J. M. Hamade’s fascinating book, Procession of the Night Theater, they explore the “night side” of astrology, offering a poetic vision of the Lunar Stations, not to be defined or calculated so much as dreamed with. It’s this study of the nocturnal side of things, the hidden side of things, that not only eloquently elucidates the ancient art of...
info_outlineWhen it comes to exploring animism and the magic of and with place, I like to borrow a term from the world of wine: terroir. Terroir is generally understood in the wine world as the sense of place – soil, geography, seasonality, and even culture – that can be expressed in a glass of wine. When it comes to “magical terroir,” we are referring to how all of those same factors develop into unique and co-creative spiritual practices.
There are many unique features to the land I’m living on that converge to form a magical sense of place. A crow’s fly away from Mount Shasta, I live in the middle of a rain shadow that divides the region into dense mountainous forests and desolate prairielands. Although abused and unforgivably wounded, the native tribes of the region are deeply present with strength and resilience. The Shasta, Karuk, Wintu, and Modoc are very much alive, telling stories and carrying traditions that were co-created with this place over millennia. Although Mount Shasta is more often thought of as a UFO hotspot, it was also arguably the birthplace of Neo-Paganism in the United States on May Day in 1915, when the self-proclaimed Druid, Ella Young, brought the notion of the “wheel of the year” along with other Celtic Revival reconstructions with her from her native Ireland to her newly founded Fellowship of Shasta. An hour to the North and fifteen years later, in Ashland, OR, Victor Anderson (who co-founded the uniquely American Traditional Witchcraft Tradition called Feri) was initiated into a secretive group called the Harpy Coven, which would profoundly influence the foundation of his own order.
Zooming in on my personal home, backyard, and the bioregion it is situated in, reveals the distinct influence of an alpine terroir. We live in a valley on the edge of a forest of cedar, fir, pine, and maple. Jutting 5,000 feet above us are the Marble Mountains, which are some of the last to give off snowmelt each year that flow into – sometimes rugged and sometimes bucolic – creeks and streams that eventually feed the Klammath River Basin. In the darkest months of winter, the snow lingers in our valley sometimes weeks longer than in the neighboring valley just twenty minutes away. The summer begins with morels and wild dogwoods in bloom, and gives way to a foraging season of Elder flowers and Elder berries, feverfew, mugwort, blackberries, and rum cherries. All this is to say that my magic is deeply influenced by this alpine land and the spirits that inhabit it.
One of my favorite magical rabbit holes is looking into the folk magic practices of other Alpine cultures to find ideas and inspiration that I can fold into the mystical soup of these California Alps. Christian Brunner has made it a personal project to translate and collate the magical terroir of the European Alps and share it with the rest of the world. In his new book, Alpine Witchery, Christian dives deep into the witch trial records of the Alps – which he translated himself – to mine for the lore, ritual, and spirituality that paints a fascinating picture of the folk magic of its day, and possibly exposes elements of the survival of an even older and deeper Alpine magical terroir to explore.
SHOW NOTES:
Get the book: Alpine Witchery
Christian's Website: Services and Author Page
Christian's IG: @christianfbrunner_author