It is not often that an exorcist will be called out to deal with issues regarding the land, but it can happen, and the land itself and any inner contacts connected to the land can also reach out for help, and often do. Apart from the usual issues of hauntings on patches of land, there are a whole host of things that an exorcist can be presented with in way of service to the land and beings inherent within the land.

There are a wide range of issues that can present as land problems that would need an exorcist—for example, beings trapped in land areas, parasites, and lesser demonic beings (for want of a better word) terrorising an area, sleepers that need help, sacred ground that has been disturbed or built upon, faery beings trapped by building projects, or faery beings getting into feuds with locals, deities awakening in the land or reaching out to humanity for recognition, land imbalances caused by interference that need attending to, feral guardians, desecrated burials…the list goes on and on.

An exorcist who has natural inner sight will be roped into ‘jobs’ wherever he goes. It is like a little light goes on in the inner landscape that heralds the arrival of the cavalry…the inner powers-that-be just forget to ask and instead manoeuvre you to where the jobs are that need doing. Then they will smack you over the head until you get it and go do the job.

Sometimes these jobs have major consequences for the land, and when you have finished the job and look back over the previous few weeks, you will see how you were gently played chess with to get you into a situation where you would engage and work. Those larger jobs are often echoes of mythical patterns that are deeply embedded within the land, but you do not realise the full meaning of the myth until you have done the job and are then able to see it from a different perspective.

Here is a good example of such a job: a few years ago I moved to Tennessee and went to live in a house that was beside a lake full of poisonous snakes, snapping turtles, and aggressive fish. From the moment I moved there I started to have bad dreams, low energy, and a feeling that all was not quite right. The house was on the land path of the Trail of Tears, so I assumed it was some psychic resonance from that suffering. I went in vision to talk to some of the tribal elders from that time and did a job that they asked of me. But the deeper problems persisted and it became obvious that what I had dealt with was just a symptom of something deeper going on.

I finally got to a deeper level of contact which was pre-human and offered service to do whatever I could to help ease the suffering in the land. I got no reply and assumed that I was being told to piss off politely. Over the following weeks, I began chatting with neighbours who all had a similar experience. Since they had moved to that lake they had become depressed, weak, plagued by nightmares, and overcome with exhaustion. I wondered if it was pollution, I wondered if it was burial grounds (which it wasn’t), and eventually I gave up guessing and got on with my day job the best I could.

At work a certain name started to pop up over and over: Beowulf. It was in books my students showed me (they were choosing ideas for a project), a film advert started to appear, and finally a friend, out of the blue, gave me a copy of the poem on a whim. Hmm….

So I read the poem which went in through the eyeballs and out through the ear…I wasn’t getting it. In the meantime, I was dumping my ritual implements in a canoe with a friend (complicated reasons) and went out at night at a new moon (it was against the law to be on the lake at night) and dumped the sword, cup, wand, and stone in the lake.

Another wee while passed and in a dream one night, I saw a large tick-like being that was the size of a big house at the bottom of the lake and it was sending out odd-looking creatures that would go into peoples’ houses and suck their life force as they slept. The dream repeated itself a few times until I got the hint. I was starting to get quite sick at the time and I didn’t know if I had the strength to do such a task. Then I got a call that my daughter would be coming home to stay and she was heavily pregnant. I did not want her exposed to such a parasite while she carried a child.

So at the full moon, I went and sat at the side of the lake and went into vision. I swam down to the bottom of the lake and there glowing in the muck was my sword, all shiny like Excalibur…. Well cheesy!! I got the sword and swam deeper and found the tick with all the parasite beings huddled around it, preparing to go out and feed on people.

I rolled in the mud to cover myself and then went at the big tick. It was obvious it had been operating unchecked for a very long time as it had no defences at all and did not see me coming. I killed it and then got into killing off all the other parasites. Normally I would have worked with various beings to put the parasites back where they belonged, but this was not that sort of situation. It was very clear that they no longer belonged in this realm at all and that they had been prolonging their spell in our world by sucking people to death. Time to go, dudes.

The difference was immediate: everyone started sleeping soundly and getting more energy. The lake took on a different feel and nature began to return. When I first moved there, no birds, no nature (other than the snakes, scorpions, ticks and mosquitoes) were to be seen. Within a month of the work, ducks, geese, herons, all sorts of birds, turtles, raccoons (little bastards), a couple of peacocks, guinea fowl, wild turkeys…the list goes on. It was like everything came out of the cupboard again…very peculiar!

A few weeks later, I sat down and read the Beowulf poem again—holy shit, now I got it. It took the inner contacts quite a while to get it through to me (I’m a bit slow sometimes) but I found it really interesting reading that poem in light of what I had just been through and I began to see mythical stories in a different light—it is as if they are guide books or maps on how to deal with inner beings that manifest through the land and the people.

From that story you can see how the inner contacts tried to get the information to me many times about a job that really needed doing. Even the inspiration to throw all the ritual implements in the lake was probably part of it, as they worked with me during the vision, and protected me while guiding my actions.

These ancient parasites seem to be a lot more prevalent in the U.S.A. than in the U.K. and that got me wondering about the ancient stories of slaying dragons in the U.K.—if the stories were sometimes relaying information regarding the clearing of some of these very old beings that were not compatible with human settlements.

Bridging work

An interesting form of land work that one can get dragged into is bridging work: literally, building inner bridges for beings to get out. Again, the exorcist is usually called out to a place because of disturbances, or is drawn there by instinct, or led there by inner contacts.

Here is another land story for you (Jeez, I spend so much of my time being dragged from one land disruption to another): Whilst living in Tennessee (which I have to say is the most haunted and weirdest place I have ever lived—Wisconsin was the second), I had a visit from a friend of mine called Peggy, who is a priestess. As is the magical rule, get two magical people together and trouble begins….

Sooo…we made plans to go visit an ancient Indian pyramid burial and as I was going out of the door, the sword (remember the sword? This is the pre-dumping-in-the-lake era) decided it wanted to come too. So off we went, travelling south out of Nashville and we promptly got lost. We looked everywhere for this damn burial and could not for the life of us find it.

We were just about to give up when the sword woke up and the inner contact that flows through the sword said that something of great importance was near by. We parked up and started walking (with sword under arm) until the contact said “stop, look up.” We stopped and looked up and half way up the small cliff was a cave entrance. It was obvious that whatever was to be done was in that cave.

So we climbed up into the cave and sat looking at each other. Peggy beamed a big smile. “Look behind you,” she said. On the cave wall, just behind me, was a perfect cross indented in the stone. It was either a very old carving or a natural formation. To me it looked natural. We had been talking about cross, anchor, and cruciform magical shapes all the way down in the car. We knew we were on the right track.

We looked around, slightly confused. We knew we were where we were supposed to be (try saying that line when you are drunk) but we didn’t know what to do next. In such circumstances, my failsafe is to switch the lights on and see who is home. So we both went in vision deeper into the cave and we found an area that was blocked off in the inner worlds as well as physically blocked. The inner landscape of the place, the inner realm that expresses through that place, was blocked.

So we started to unblock it. We didn’t expect much more than that as such a block can cause all sorts of energy problems for an area of land and we assumed that was the job in hand. Wrong.

We dug through the inner blockage and when we cleared it, thousands, and I really mean thousands, of small, amphibian part-human-type beings came out. They were so relieved but shocked. They were looking for the sea and nothing was there— just a small river mumbling past. They were desperate to get to the sea, so I told them that if they went into the river, they would eventually be carried to the sea. They couldn’t make it to the river on their own so we bridged them using our bodies—they flowed through us and out into the river.

Now I am not sure if we needed to bridge them because the world was so different and they could not recognise the water, or if they had some magical binding on them. A lot of the time, particularly when working with ancient land beings, things that happen do not make much sense. But don’t worry about that, the world tends to not make much sense anyhow.

We were both trashed after it and we sat quietly for a moment in the cave to get our breath back. As we sat silently, a young man walked past, a local young farmer by the look of him. Something made him look up and his face was a picture. From his vantage point, deep in the shadow of the cave, was the outline of a woman covered in a shroud or shawl, leaning on a very impressive sword with a single tattooed arm exposed as it held the blade. He looked like he had seen a ghost, which is obviously what he thought he had seen (TN is the Bell Witch state). He looked like he needed a toilet as he scuttled away, poor man.

For nights afterwards, I dreamed of those strange creatures from the cave and I decided to do some research. I did find local Indian myths about beings who were half fish or lizard and half human, and then loads of ridiculous David Ike poop so I went no further.

To my mind, they are some ancient spirit beings that just needed help to get to where they are meant to be. The land has many levels of being, and if one gets badly out of balance, the whole area becomes problematic. This is reflected in European myths such as the Arthurian myth, to name one of many.

There are many early Norman churches that have reference to the tower pinning a dragon below the church, or St Michael/St George churches sat on top of volcanic or granite outcrops, caves, and circles. These early churches are often pinning an older power of the land down—for good or bad? We don’t know until we let them loose….

If you are drawn to or are called out to a land area that is disturbed, you might want to go into the land itself to see if there are any such issues that can be actively addressed. Sometimes what can be a seemingly small issue can have a devastating effect on the surrounding land, conversely something that you think might really impact a land area (like nuclear dumping, etc) can sometimes turn out to be no more that a minor irritant. I think the key is to keep an open mind and just do the job that presents rather than sweep the land ready for action!

Sacred ground

Another land issue that can manifest sometimes is where there seems to be an energy stagnation which results in a build up of ‘inner goo’ (deeply technical term, huh?). Such stagnation or blockage in land energy can often be very pronounced around sacred sites, ancient churches, etc. Sometimes this can come from ritual pinning that was a favourite act of land suppression exercised by the pre-Christian Roman priests (usually to Apollo).

This action of ritually pinning the land is also practiced by some orders of Tibetan Buddhist monks. By pinning the Goddess, they pin and control the power of the land and are able to then channel it through their rituals. The land tends to take exception to such behaviour and it can cause all sorts of imbalances—it is those imbalances that normally draw an exorcist in.

If you are called in to an area where there is a lot of disturbance in the land, the first thing to do is map out what sacred sites are in the vicinity, and what has been done to them. In the U.K., a lot of the Norman churches were built on earlier Saxon sites, which in turn were built on top of Celtic hermitages, stone circles, burial mounds, etc. Some of the churches were built on previous Roman temples (which were built on top of previous pagan burial mounds and stone alignments) and those churches tend to be sat on top of Roman pinning.

Another method of ‘pinning’ or trapping land power was a Masonic habit in the U.S.A. in the 1700s and early 1800s: sacred Indian burial mounds, usually the biggest and the best, were used to build state capital buildings upon. The power of the ancestral land and its people were overlaid by the central core of civilised power.

If you should take on the task of unpinning or releasing ancestral spirits, land powers, etc, there are a few considerations that you have to take into account before you take on such a task.

The first consideration is to be sure you know what you are releasing. Some powers just really don’t need to be out in the world anymore, and some powers were pinned for good reason. If the land around it is disturbed, it might need retuning, or the inner landscape working on, rather than a massive power of destroying fire releasing.

The second consideration is the pissed off-ness of the consciousness you release. This tends to happen more in European mainland and the U.K. than in the U.S.A. The land beings and consciousness found in the U.S.A. tend to be a wild, ancient nature-based flow of power that takes on forms of strange animals, earth beings, and weird weather.

In the U.K. and mainland Europe, the powers can manifest more in the forms of deities because they have been consciously interacted with by humanity and given human structures to flow through for thousands of years.

When you have a deity consciousness in the land that has been pinned for a thousand or so years, it might be a little pissy when you release it. For example, Pete and I worked on a pinned deity in the land in the U.K. We went through a whole series of steps in visions to slowly release her and restore her to the land. It was exhausting and very demanding work, but we got it done.

The last night of the work this Goddess appeared, her hounds around her, and she was rather put out, to put it mildly. She wanted revenge, she wanted all men dead, she wanted to destroy the powers that had pinned her—she wanted to know where they were. Hmm…raging goddess bent on destroying civilisation. Oops, there goes another red button….

The other major issue that can surface is the inner goo around stone circles. If the circles don’t like it, they will call you if you live near or are visiting. For five thousand years those stones have been hanging around and the ones that are still standing are largely unpinned. (Sites were pinned by building upon them and ritually putting a blade in the land upon commencement of building.) The stones have had the occasional vicar or bishop ‘cleansing them’ but apart from that, they have more or less trundled along in life until just recently.

Now, over the last hundred years or so, they have become the focus of every magical group that has an agenda, no matter what that agenda is, so certain stone circles are used for rituals of all kinds, regardless of the land energy or the needs of the land. Modern day Pagan activity at stone circles can range from careful intelligent tending, prayer, ritual of acknowledgement/gifting to the spirits, to all out selfish psychologised parasiting of the stones, vicious cursing, weird sex dramas, and the general dumping of modern shit on an ancient site (along with plastic flowers, nylon ribbons and chemical incense…yum).

Some sites just brush it off, but in other areas it attracts large parasites which contribute towards a land imbalance and it affects all the humans within the vicinity. That is where the exorcist comes in: remove the parasite, clear the site, get the energy flow working in harmony with humanity, and ask if there is anything else needed.

Certain power sites that have not been tuned either too heavily or at all towards humanity (i.e., where there are no stone circles, just an unmarked power centre) often have a strong faery presence. For the people living nearby this can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what type of faery being it is, and what their relationship to humanity is, and also how the humans interact with the land.

If there is a faery presence, and you have been called out because there are problems in the area, then the easiest way to try to solve such issues is to go into vision and talk with the beings and ask them what you can do to help the situation. If they ask you to get rid of all the humans, then you have a problem—some form of negotiation and compromise has to be reached so that faery and human can live on the same patch of land without killing each other. This is where the exorcist becomes politician and conflict manager—it is great fun getting between faery and human, particularly when neither side believes in the other one and both have a sense of their own sovereignty to the land. Then you have to really work on your negotiating skills.

A good example of this in regular working practice is Iceland: the government of Iceland employs faery experts who ensure new building or road works do not infringe on faery territory, and they also smooth over interracial conflicts between beings of the land and the resident humans. This led to an overall better relationship between the old and the new, the civilised and the wild. Now buildings and bridges don’t fall down, costing the government millions in rebuilding costs, and the faeries get to stake out their territory and only occasionally poke the humans.

When you are working to try and bring some sort of rebalancing to an area, patch of land, or residence, and faeries are involved, sometimes the solution can be very simple: they might ask you to take something away, or move something, or bring something. The other simple solution can sometimes be asking the affected family to change something in their house/garden, or to ask the family to offer regular gifts (rent/payment) like honey, little mirrors (faeries like shiny things), fruit, coins, or a service like making bread for them, or singing to them on a regular basis. It can often be very simple and can smooth a lot of ruffled feathers in territorial disputes.

Sometimes, though, it can be bigger issues that can become violent and when that violence comes from a host of beings who are feeling invaded or slighted, then the choice has to be made: do the humans move out, or do they lock the faery beings out of that area? That is easier said than done (there is a lot of traditional advice that often doesn’t work in practice) and having tried it many times under very difficult conditions, the best advice I can give for locking out faery beings is to work with bigger, more powerful beings. But then you can be swapping one problem for another.

Another method of calming faery beings that are infesting a human area and causing chaos is to give them things to do that they will like. Faeries like reenactment of stories and myths. Pete and I were having problems in our home for a wee while with a bit of an infestation that I brought into the house. In the end, I painted mythical creatures and faery people on the walls in bright shimmering colours. They are still busy ‘playing out’ in those images and have become part of the household. They are not causing trouble now, as they have lots to do and have also become default guardians within the house, willingly telling me when something or someone tries to intrude. It’s like having hyperactive naughty children in the house—just give them lots and lots to do.

Vortexes

Vortexes in the land can be very interesting things but can cause chaos for people living nearby if not worked with. Like all natural power, it clashes with modern living a lot, but if it is interacted with, then it can flow through the human world without causing chaos. In fact, when worked with consciously, these vortexes can be very advantageous to the land and the people.

They often act like interfaces for deeper powers in the land that can manifest in strange mythical ways, and that teach the beings living on the land how the power works, and how to work with it.

A recent example was a friend of ours who lives in Cornwall next to a powerful vortex. When I went to visit, the vortex was shouting at me to come and visit. I had no idea what it was, just that a land power was waving its hand wildly at me for attention. It was easy to find: it was like having an inner lighthouse and fog horn all going at once—pretty hard to miss, really.

Out of the vortex, once I got ‘speaking’ to it, came a large giant who was carrying a little child on his shoulder—the exact image of St Christopher, except it wasn’t a Christian saint I was looking at. It was a very interesting land power manifesting through the human image. The most powerful of the two was the little child or dwarf sat on his shoulder. I was told very clearly that if the child was not kept well fed, it would call or sing in the storms that would kill the fishermen, and it would feed off them instead.

So this is obviously a local power of the vortex that works with condensed earth power (hence the big gentle giant and the little ferocious child) which in turn works with the weather patterns that come off the sea. So, having given us this information by way of a visual cue, we now know that the vortex on that land is one that can be worked with to keep the weather in balance. Such knowledge could become very useful in today’s climate crisis.

I have come across other such sites in Ireland and Cornwall where the stone alignments are connected to the weather, but I have never had such a strong human-style visual that I got at the Cornish vortex. This means that it is a power that has been worked with by humans for a very long time—the interface is well established and the cues would tell the people exactly what power it is.

When you get called to or come across such a situation, it is a very rare opportunity to make contact with these powers to see what they need and how they work. Just the simple interaction can be enough to make a major difference to the human issues on that patch of land. At that vortex, a little ways off across a stream and up a hill, is a fairly modern chapel. I sat in the chapel for a while and found myself being dragged down into the underworld to a bright sleeping maiden who needed something.

I saw that she was held down by something, not pinned, but blocked in someway. I had to find a way to free her up without waking her, and once I had figured it out, a beautiful light shone out of her and filtered up to the surface world. Again, it is a deep land power that needs to flow freely for the health of all the beings that live there. To me, I felt that she was a version of the land power that some would call Brigh, a deity I have worked with on and off for many years (I grew up next to one of her sacred springs).

Land work can be very illuminating and can teach us a great deal about the powers that flow through the lands where we live. It’s the most positive (sometimes) work in the field of exorcism, and it is a branch of the work I dearly love. It is very exhausting, though, and if you make contact with a being that hasn’t been listened to or interacted with for a long time, they can really blow your socks off by trying to converse at all power levels at once.

Sleepers, burials and guardians

One of the most common reasons for house problems outside the cities is where the house is on top of or beside a burial or on the path of a guardian. In Britain there are some areas where you just can’t get away from the buggers. Wiltshire, for example, is knee deep in burials, sleepers, stone circles, etc, all of which have guardians. So if you live there, chances are you have come across problems at some time or other.

If you get called to a house where there is a disturbance and you trace it to an ancient burial then it is possible that something is happening in the house, or something brought into the house triggered a guardian. Another option is if there is a child or adult in the house who has natural sight or psychic abilities and the burial has been disturbed or the sleeper is waking up. Then they will try and communicate with the house occupants—they will expect the people there to know who they are and to have a spiritual pattern in place to help them do what they need to do.

More often than not, where there are problems in these circumstances, it is a matter of doing the job that is needed, i.e., release the sleeper, change something in the guardian’s path, etc, and then it all goes peaceful again. Sometimes these burial sites can be extremely peaceful once they are balanced and well kept.

I was called to one site where the occupants were having really bad nightmares night after night. They were all having the same nightmare, and the children were becoming distressed. I went to the house, which was built on top of a burial mound. I went down in vision to the burial and there was a sleeper beginning to wake up, but there was no one there on the land to bridge the sleeper into death. (The soul of a sleeper stays in the body for an allotted length of time, which can be very long, and then as they awake they would be bridged into death by someone.)

The sleeper was awakening and reaching out for a living human with the knowledge to bridge him and no one was there, so he reached out to any available and receptive human nearby. As there was no active magical or spiritual tradition within the people who were nearby, the messages filtered through in their dreams, hence the ‘nightmares.’

The best way to release a sleeper that is ready to go is to build a fire and open a gate within yourself and let her pass through you, which is what I did. The being came up through me, into the fire, and through the fire to the inner worlds. End of problem and end of nightmares.

Guardians that cause trouble, on the other hand, are not quite as easy to manage. A guardian of a sacred site can appear in a variety of ways depending on what sort of being it is. Some guardians are very intelligent, active, and occasionally aggressive. The most common of that type appear as black dogs of huge proportion, sometimes accompanied by a man. Another type of intelligent guardian can appear as a female child, often appearing with crows, and that guardian being tends to observe or nudge you away rather than threaten you.

Some major sites are protected by very large earth beings that walk around the site and knock away anything that gets in its path, but they are not bright and cannot really be communicated with very well. Best to just get out of their way.

Later temple sites can have quite elaborate and complex guardians that are a mix between elemental beings and inner contacts in service—they are the best in that they can be communicated with and learned from. The down side is because they are intelligent and of human consciousness, they can be very temperamental, stubborn, and unwilling to compromise. They do not accept modern civilisation, and they usually want to continue to work under ancient rules. This can be a problem if, for example, they want a blood sacrifice and your offer of a glass of port and a chicken leg is turned down….

The work in general with the land is huge, never ending, and once you get on that merry-go-round, they will not leave you alone and do not understand the meaning of ‘burnout.’ It also makes it very hard to just go and visit a piece of land. Once you have worked as an exorcist on the land, it is like they put a badge on you that says ‘idiot, willing to work’—so it makes tourism and that strange elusive state of ‘relaxation’ a mythical ideal that you never quite reach.

So if you do get dragged into land work, define your boundaries from the very beginning, and limit what you are willing to take on. There will always be someone else who will come along eventually and do the job that you didn’t.