The Elphane Witchdom is a cultus of The Nameless Religion. It is an inter-relational path of sorcerous praxis and cultic expression which seeks potent, transformational connection to, and communion with, the mysterious spiritual ecologies of power that make up the strange and fecund world we inhabit. 

 

We honour the liminal, the wild, the local, the spaces between and the very edges of experience where tutelary and titanic beings can be met and holy alliances forged. 

 

" We vouch praise to the Mighty Ones, those women and men who in ancient days did manifest the Powers of Nature and Preternature through their flesh, their bones, their blood, and their souls, increasing the pleasure and virtue of our foreparents. From the Great Ones came forth joy and healing in abundance, alongside the darkest Arts and communion with the dead."

- The Elphane Liturgy

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We honour the body of the Earth as the Sacred Vessel that is the physical body of The Great Mother, and therefore, holding this relationship core to our Witchdom, we hold our physical bodies as Holy microcosms of Her being, vitally issuing from and never apart from that Divine Creatrix. Nor do we understand ourselves to be separate or superior to any of Her other, myriad creatures here on Earth. We call upon our Great Rhizomatic Mother and her Serving Spirits in our sacred rites and offer Her our deepest respect and devotion.

 

This Animist world view is at the heart of our work and rightly assumes the inspirited intelligence of these varied and diverse life forms, be they vegetative, geological, aquatic or air-breathing. All of these things being issued from Her and rising directly from Her source are our natural siblings in Life by birthright and can be appealed to for tutelage. 

 

We honour the meaningful and relational connection and tutelage from those beings of power from Deep History, whose wisdom arises from within the layers of the landscape around us. Starting from wherever you are, we encourage any walkers of the path of The True Old Ways to seek deep relationships with the indwellers of their immediate surroundings, the Powers within the Land, wherever that may be; those beings whose undying presence calls to us from the dark mulch of the past, beckoning with an eldritch glimmer from oral ballads, folkloric myths and fairytales. 

 

We honour The Great Serpent, The Old Horned One, The Light in the East, whom foolish men call The Devil; that Mighty Lord of Winds and Storms whose vitalising spark and whose thrashing coils fill us with his compulsive, raw and untameable intelligent spirit. It is through Him that we draw our first breath and come to roaring, reddening life. He is the Inspiration of All Thing, the Wild Master of all living creatures and Father to Witches. It was he who was clumsily ‘cast down’ by the Midianites and resultingly assumed his place as chthonic Herder of The Dead and Master of Souls. We give him our devotion and allegiance as we work our rites in his Great Name. 

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" We honour the Great and Dark Power that moves all things;

We surrender to it and yearn to know its mysteries.

It shall be forever as the Shadowed Matriarch is forever.

None are more like unto it than the Old Serpent Forefather.

The Lords and Ladies of Hell are its undying ministers.

It is the Storm whose mighty winds compel us to and fro:

Let us become wise to the Darkness that weaves woe and delight. "

- The Elphane Liturgy

 

We recognise our souls to be twofold, both inspired within us as our Breath Soul ~ that holy portion of us that is given directly to us at birth from The Great Serpent Himself as we draw our first breath in life, and our Free or Dreaming Soul ~ that sacred and mysterious portion of our being that is never separate from the vast intelligence of The Great Mother. It is this soul that flies forth in dreams, in visions and in ecstatic ritual to The Otherworld. Through our dream soul we may receive non-ordinary messages and teachings and develop our powers of psychism and spirit flight. 

 

We honour the extraordinary knowledge and power that our conscious and active devotion to the Holy Ones, our Great Foreparents: The Cosmic and Earthly Mother and her Serpentine son and consort brings about. We seek to draw ever closer to Them in both our mundane and spiritual lives through our rites, rituals and daily practices. We seek tutelary relationships with all manner of beings, both seen and unseen, to empower our Craft, our bodies and souls and bring us ever deeper into communion with those Great Powers of Creation, the root powers of all life and of the Cultus of the True Old Ways. 

 

We honour the Powers within the Land. Those Mighty Ones who have lain in death under the Earth and are now dwellers Below The Mounds. The Good Neighbours. The Lords and Ladies of Elphame. We seek them as embodied intelligences within the Land, those beings who may be appealed to and allied with to lend their potent teaching, lore and craft to empower our Witching Ways. These Mighty Ones, who reach back to us from the depths of time offer ways by which we can return to wiser relationships with one another and the multitudes of beings that we inhabit the Earth’s body alongside. Through their teachings we bring back the sanity of wiser times, reaching back to the primal, vitalising force and relating to it through all practices of ‘sorcery’.

 

Our Witchdom opens all who seek it out into ways of re-membering, beginning with the intimately local and widening out from that locus, piecing back together the lost and fundamental means by which we can discover our natural birth right, that state of interconnected communion with the Seen and Unseen ecologies and intelligences of life. 

 

This is a transformative and tempering path to walk, at times necessarily discomfiting and challenging. It requires intelligence, diligence and dedication from all who heed its call, but in these doom-laden  and distracted times,  it is an act of courageous wisdom to devote yourself to The Great Foreparents of Life Itself and cleaving to these Good Old Ways, find your way to the healing power of re-enchantment, of Self and Other than Self. 

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" From the height of barrow-crowned Aravia
To the shadows of the Giant’s Dance, 
From the charnel grounds of far-off Babylon 
To the green western land of the horned serpents: 
Holy Lord, Master of things seen and unseen,
When baneful arts work we, be thou our awful strength; 
When wealful arts work we, be thou our good blessing. 
Lord of Amity, Lord of Venom, know us as your own:
When the hounds of malice pursue us in our ways, 
Be our protector and our advocate- 
Let thy serving men and valets enfold us, 
Preserve us, instruct us, and requite injuries done on us. 
For as long as the briny oceans are bitter 
And the fires beneath the earth blaze hot, may this be so. "

- The Elphane Liturgy