The Way of the Eight Winds: Elemental Magic and Geomancy in the Pagan Tradition

by Nigel Pennick

Overview

• Examines the Eight Directions and the powers of their Winds, the Tides of the Day, and the eightfold year of modern Pagan practice

• Explores geomancy practices, how to work with spirits of place, and the power of mountains, rivers, caves, standing stones, and crossroads

• Shares spiritual exercises, including runic practices and divination techniques, as well as how to craft your own magical tools

In this guide to the Way of the Eight Winds, Nigel Pennick explores the history and practice of traditional European Pagan spirituality, a path that recognizes and celebrates our relationship with the Cosmos and the creativity of Nature.

The author looks at the Eight Directions and the powers of their Winds, the Tides of the Day, stations and houses of the Sun, and the eightfold year of modern Pagan practice. He explores practices for restoring a connection with sacred places in the landscape and the eldritch powers that inhabit them, including working with spirits of place (the Anima Loci), interpreting the lore of trees, and recognizing magical, otherworldly, and auspicious features. He describes divination techniques, including ostenta and signs, as well as sigils and emblems that emerge from the Wildwood. He explores geomancy and the magic of the landscape, including both natural and man-made features such as standing stones and crossroads. He shares spiritual exercises, including meditations, runic practices, and geomantic walking, and explores how to craft your own magical tools and build labyrinths, from small talismanic ones to those large enough to be danced in.

With re-enchantment of life as the goal, Pennick emphasizes the Way of the Eight Winds as a spiritual path that reconnects us to Nature, brings us back to the present, and helps us see the world our ancestors venerated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888500750
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	51 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nigel Pennick is an authority on ancient belief systems, traditions, runes, and geomancy. He is the author and illustrator of more than 60 books, including The Pagan Book of Days. A lifelong artist, researcher, musician, and craftsman, he lives near Cambridge, England.
Nigel Pennick is an authority on ancient belief systems, traditions, runes, and geomancy and has traveled and lectured extensively in Europe and the United States. He is the author and illustrator of more than 50 books, including The Pagan Book of Days. The founder of the Institute of Geomantic Research and the Library of the European Tradition, he lives near Cambridge, England.

Read an Excerpt

1

Points of View

Alternative Viewpoints

There are two fundamental philosophical viewpoints of human existence, contradictory to one another. The viewpoint with the greatest currency at present in developed countries is that human life is a finite phenomenon hemmed in by time, essentially random and meaningless. As long ago as the seventeenth century, the English utilitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) saw human society as potentially the war of all against all. In this viewpoint, human life is no more than a constant struggle, "nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes was writing at a time when traditional spirituality was questioned by the result of brutal, ruthless wars and new technical inventions, and the order of the world seemed to be disintegrating. It is clear that this grim and bleak view of existence underlies current materialist doctrines that promote the accumulation of power and wealth as the sole aim of human life.

Another way of living is the traditional spiritual view, that human life can be active and purposeful by being integrated with Nature’s eternal return. Whether or not this has a religious dimension, the human being is integrated with Nature, not an alienated individual. Traditional rites and ceremonies—which are related to place, time, and the prevailing culture—link individuals into the wider community and through collective action to Nature and the Cosmos. As an expression of this eternal spiritual current, traditional rites and ceremonies across the world are concerned primarily with being in the right place at the right time.

The Power of Imagination

Nature itself would give us the impression of a
work of art, if we could see the thought which is present
at once in the whole and in every part.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834)

The imagination is a human ability of paramount importance. Creativity, the outward expression of the imagination, is the common property of all humans. Our mental power of image-making can liberate the human mind from the daily grind of conflict and survival, elevating us to another level beyond the material conditions with which we must cope. Early in the nineteenth century, the nature philosopher and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that the imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. It is a reenactment of the eternal and transcendent act of creation in finite minds. As a "synthetic and magical power," Coleridge saw the imagination working through metaphor, which is "the perception of similitude in dissimilitude" (Coleridge 1920, 197).

Familiar reality generally obscures the eternal realities that exist just out of sight. The struggles of everyday life often mean that we must concentrate on surfaces, appearances. Those whose job it is to sell things create beautiful and beguiling artifacts that we must work to buy. They are presented to us by their shiny surfaces presented through highly skilled advertising. But there are glimpses through the cracks, for it is our imagination that unifies and shapes our relationship to the world, bringing us new meanings presented in a way they never were before. This is, according to Arthur Machen (1923, 48), "the magic touch that redeems and exults the dull mass of things, by tinging them with the soul of man." The incomplete reality that we experience is thereby given meaning. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) perceived that our imagination emerges from the same source of coming-into-being that gives the Cosmos its presence and allows us to remain alive. It has an infinitely plural and multiple expression of possibilities, always finding fresh forms expressive of the eternal. Johannes Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks (1864–1932) pointed out that the creative act is a transposition from the spiritual realm to the sensory, or the fixing of a visible form of something that previously did not exist (Lauweriks 1919, 5). Science, the law, divination, magic, and religion are not true reality— that is irreducible; they are only methods for investigating reality, more or less successful in their outcome, but nevertheless essentially flawed and incomplete. Only when the imagination is applied to any of them can deeper truths be glimpsed.

A Symbolic Worldview versus the Madness of Literalism

The psychologist Alfred Adler (1870–1937) observed that "In literalism lies madness." There are a number of ways of viewing the world, and today literalism is the predominant one. But the symbolic, upon which all spiritual systems depend, is an alternative to literalism. A symbol is not a sign, for literalism recognizes and uses signs. A sign represents being, or the world, but a true symbol denotes being-in-the-world. The sign exists in a fixed form, indicating a particular meaning that only requires human awareness; the symbol involves the participation of the individual. The symbol expresses or reveals the connection between the participant and itself thereby transforming or enlightening the individual. A living symbol is never received ready-made; it is re-created within the person. Religion and esoteric traditions are presented in symbolic form, though some institutions insist on a literal rather than a metaphorical interpretation. Symbols are doorways leading toward the invisible—they are a means of transcendence, not mere information. Existence is multilayered and our understanding of this tends to be limited because everyday experience requires us to concentrate upon the necessities of living. However, symbols do not exist to be deconstructed or decoded.

The traditional presentation of symbols and the worlds used to describe them vary from culture to culture. The Way of the Eight Winds presents them in the terminology of the ancient European Tradition while recognizing that in other cultures and at other times, these features have other descriptions. But the essential core remains the same. So, within the basic framework, there is always the freedom of personal experience. This is the epitome of the creative force, a personal exploration of a system that emerges from the deepest structure and meaning of existence. Any observation that can aid this vital flow of creativity and prevent it falling into the trap of claiming to possess absolute exclusive truth is of great value. There is no religion higher than the truth, and truth can never be the exclusive preserve of blinkered, dogmatic people.

The same mythic forms and symbols exist in many different cultures. They differ only in their cultural expression and historical context. They emerge from our shared experience of the human condition and our being in the world. Because symbols appear less real than physical objects, their reality is often dismissed as metaphysical constructs that have no place in the "real world" of science, medicine, technology, politics, and war. However, all of these spheres of human wisdom and folly can be viewed through the lens of symbol, and their structural and spiritual meanings seen in a deeper, nonliteral, way.

It is a human trait to seek the simplest solution to understanding the world. The medieval English philosopher William of Occam (1270–1347), known by the epithet of "Unique and Invincible Teacher," is best remembered for his Latin razor, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda," literally: "Entities are not to be multiplied." This means, that when we are seeking the cause of a problem, we must be as sharp as a razor, slashing through the temptation to complicate matters, and first look at the simplest, the most obvious answer to our question. If we fail to do this, then we will be led away from a proper sequential process of investigation and fail to get to the roots of the matter. It does not mean, of course that simplification of complex matters is the right way to approach them. Later, in industrial times, an ironic engineer devised the acronym KISS—"Keep it simple, stupid!" In practice, however, engineering rarely adheres to this maxim, consistently producing exceedingly complex and overengineered products that are destined to be rapidly superseded by even more complex ones.

The propensity of modern engineers, politicians, and students of the esoteric to ignore the simple, basic roots of things and to make them more complicated than they need be is one of the greatest failings of contemporary society. Often it is driven by hubris and encouraged by the profit motive. Looking at the history of human institutions—whether religious, military, political, economic, or technical—we can see recurrent refusals to go for the obvious, simple solutions. Time and again, such institutions have chosen routes that led to catastrophic failure through following unfounded beliefs even when the evidence demonstrates unquestionably that they are going in the wrong direction. It is a very human tendency to be unaware of what has been done already in the past, and so to repeat the same mistakes. Even those who do study history and recognize mistakes that occurred often feel immune from the way of the world and act as though "this time" the failings of the past will not happen because the present is somehow materially different from the past. But it is not, and the "way of the world" has not changed, for it is innate.

Table of Contents

PREFACE
An Ever-Changing and Ever-Flowing Cosmos

PROLOGOS
Origins of the Way of the Eight Winds

PART I

Philosophical Viewpoints

1 Points of View

2 The Recovery of Ancient Wisdom

3 Unity

4 The Eternal Tradition

5 A History of Authenticity

6 On Spectacle

7 Divination and Chance

8 Human Personifications of the Divine

9 The Naming of Names

10 Ørlög and History
The Formation of the Modern World

11 The Eldritch World

PART II

Cosmic Principles

12 The Four Elements and the Cosmic Egg

13 The World, the Cosmos, and the Human Body

14 Temperament and the Divine Harmony

15 The Planetary Spheres and the Ogdoas

16 Myths of Coming into Being

17 At the Center of the World
The Omphalos and the Spindle
of Necessity

18 Time, Space, and Fate

19 Our Place on Earth

20 The Four Directions

21 The Eight Tides of the Day

22 The Winds

23 Specific Winds

24 The Right Place at the Right Time

25 Nature and the Eldritch

26 The Sacredness of Manifested Phenomena

27 Places of Spirit

28 Trees, Temenoi, and Places
of the Ancestral Spirits

29 Numinous Places in the Land

30 Feng Shui

31 Crossing the Borderlines

32 The Locus Terribilis and the Locus Amoenus

33 The Sacred and the Profane
Archaeology

PART III

Geomancy

34 Physical Elements of Geomancy

35 The Cosmic Axis

36 The Road Leads Us On

37 Stonehenge

38 The Crossroads

39 Labyrinths

40 Geomantic Protection

PART IV

Makings

41 The Spiritual Arts and Crafts

42 Sacred Geometry

43 Specific Geometric Forms

44 Spiritual Exercises

45 Tools and Techniques

PART V

Metaphorical Texts

46 The Labyrinth
Ariadne’s Dancing Ground

47 Wayland’s House

48 The Wayfarer’s Legacy

EPILOGOS
Confluence

APPENDIX 1
Number Symbolism

APPENDIX 2
Musical Ratios

APPENDIX 3
The Tides of the Day

Glossary

Bibliography and Sources for Further Study

Index

Editorial Reviews

This beautifully illustrated compendium distills the wisdom of Pennick’s lifetime of research and more than 50 published books. Across cultures and millennia, he describes the ‘ever-changing and ever-flowing cosmos’ and how uniquely human intelligence and creativity have evolved in relation to the complex immutability of the laws of nature. This book should be on university reading lists and essential for those who seek to restore balance and harmony in our relationship with the natural world.

Linda Kelsey-Jones

The author writes about the spirit of place and pagan geomancy and magic from a traditional and pluralistic viewpoint, describing true principles that are universal and then detailing their expression in the European tradition from antiquity to the arts and crafts movement. For the first time, the material on the Way of the Eight Winds is brought together in one place. A long-awaited gem.

author of The Geomancers Guide to the Vastupurusa Patrick McFadzean

Nigel Pennick is one of Britain’s living treasures. Like a latter-day Pythagoras, he reveals the unity behind existences, upholding the cosmos as animated, not as dead matter. This wonderful book of lore discerns the essential harmony connecting all things while exploring the geomantic art of placement that helps us make sense of the order of each place. An indispensable guide to understanding our dear world.

author of The Complete Lenormand Oracle Handbook Caitlín Matthews

In a world yearning for a deeper spiritual connection, Nigel Pennick’s The Way of the Eight Winds offers a timeless animistic approach to living in harmony with the natural world. Born out of a need to bring ancient wisdom to the pressing dynamics of modern life, Pennick guides readers toward a more harmonious relationship with nature, themselves, and their communities. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to rekindle a land-based identity and interdependence with ecosystems.

author of Runic Book of Days S. Kelley Harrell

A complete compendium of symbolic and geomantic practices derived from the fourfold layout of the human body.

coauthor of A History of Pagan Europe Prudence Jones

Nigel Pennick has spent a lifetime as a multitalented artist and artisan, author, and pagan practitioner, and The Way of the Eight Winds brings together many branches of his verdant work. The resulting system—which illuminates everything from higher cosmic principles to the more modest cultural arts of craftsmanship—is rooted in the timeless lore of how humans interact meaningfully and reciprocally with their living landscape and its myriad inhabitants, seen and unseen.

Michael Moynihan

Nigel Pennick has an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional magical practices, which is evident in the well-researched and clearly explained material in this book. Highly recommended.

editor of Chaos International magazine Ian Read

Employing his wide-ranging scholarship and years of experience, Nigel Pennick presents nature as numinous, imbued with subtle energies, a gateway to the unseen, reached through geomancy—the art, as the author puts it, of ‘making ourselves right with the earth.’

author of The Hearth Witch’s Kitchen Herbal Anna Franklin