The Way of the Eight Winds, by Nigel Pennick
Nigel Pennick, The Way of the Eight Winds, Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2025
Review by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold
When I received The Way of the Eight Winds for review, I realized how it marks 30 years of readership. The first book I read by Nigel Pennick was Secrets of East Anglian Magic (Hale: London, 1995), which I read in 1995, the year it was published. This read was so rewarding that it was immediately followed by, Practical Magic in the Northern Tradition(Thorsons: Glasgow, 1989). Since then, Pennick has been a personal reference and a point of preference for Traditional Witchcraft, as well as the Northern Tradition, in such a way that I have the feeling we have walked many of the same tracks and trails of mystery and magic since then.
The Way of the Eight Winds is the culmination of several decades of thought, practice, and spiritual cartography by one of Britain’s foremost geomancers and cunning men. The book is structured into five comprehensive parts and augmented by appendices and illustrations. This work is both a manual and a memoir, a synthesis of traditional European nature-based spirituality, elemental cosmology, folk geomancy, and symbolic magic, grounded in Pennick’s personal experience with rural and urban mysticism. The strong suit of the book, however, is in the way he presents tradition and Wyrd – or Fate – as a philosophical basis for a Craft in harmony with Nature and moved by an enchanted world view. The opening lines in the book's preface read:
The Way of the Eight Winds is a spiritual path that recognizes and celebrates the plurality of the Cosmos and the creativity of Nature, of which we are a part… The Way of the Eight Winds recognizes the essentially false nature of all dogma and doctrine and the destructive results of literalism. (p. xi)
This sentiment sets the stage for the work and opens for an atmosphere of nostalgia, a world becoming ruins and memory as we walk through a world in rapid change. By calling our attention to what is taking place, how the Enchanted World is also by now the Vanishing World… It is through memory and ancestry, through responsibility and realization of our One-ness with Nature that we become dewar or custodians of tradition and nature. Sometimes it is only death that can teach us about this importance, as in the prologue where Pennick opens with highly personal accounts from childhood and his encounters with death, writing:
It was clear to me that the culture I lived in was the successor of many earlier ones that had almost disappeared except in surviving fragments. (p. 2)
This was a perception born from his first encounter with death and aided by his near-death experience at ten, temporally blind and deaf from infections, where, at its peak, he left his physical body and nothing ever became the same, as a sensibility for place, atmosphere, and energies took shape and marked his life. That in death we touch the other world, the invisible realm, it may be a fairy, an ancestor or other denizens in the world of spirits. The sensitivity and sight taking form is only natural, as those of us who have gone into the realms of death and back again would know.
From these personal accounts and encounters with death, he immerses himself in the spirit of London and its cryptogeography. Places have power, and the cunning one will know how to recognize and use these places of power. In his exploration, we can hear and feel the faint echoes of Arthur Machen and William Blake, perhaps even a brush of William Hodgson and M. R. James here and there. And here evolves what might be the most central part of The Way of the Eight Winds, a technique of being present and attentive in a world that is falling apart, namely, the art of wandering. Pennick has in mind here, the art of wandering, in the sense of Breton’s “wandering in search of everything”, which is about an involved engagement with the world, a search for the miraculous through ‘found objects’ that contain the sprowlor essence of places of power. As an avid traveller and wanderer myself, it is comforting and amusing to see these traits being presented as an art form because it certainly was, like for Mr. Pennick, also for me, a way to make my mind agile and flexible – and as I see now, receptive and immersed in being.
The art of wandering has nothing to do with ordinary tourism and sightseeing, but rather it is about being within a given atmosphere, where one is immersed in the walk and its places, the Baudelairean flâneur, where one is a part of the “influence of the surroundings” (p. 9). If we pause here, it is interesting to see the tradition of walking through history. There is a quiet lineage in the history of philosophy that does not sit in chairs or gather in lecture halls, but rather it walks. From the shaded colonnades of Aristotle’s Lyceum to the forest paths of Heidegger’s Black Forest cabin or Wittgenstein’s hut in the deepest end of the Norwegian fjords, walking has not merely been a mode of movement, but a method of thought, a choreography of mind and world. To walk is to release oneself from the tyranny of destinations. Unlike travel or commuting, walking – especially the kind done without purpose – is a voluntary exile from linear time. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when he suffered persecution, took to solitary rambles where he could speak with the sky and the trees, forming what he called his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. In these aimless meanderings, Rousseau found clarity that society had denied him. In the wilderness, the self would unfold. Kierkegaard, stalking the cobbled streets of Copenhagen in a long black coat, used walking as a solvent against stagnation. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” he wrote, mirroring a conviction shared decades later by Nietzsche, who composed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the echoing silence of Alpine trails. The rhythm of the feet became the rhythm of the mind, where each step became a syllable, each climb a revelation.
Walking is philosophical not only because it cultivates thought, but because it repositions the body as a site of knowing. Thoreau, who paced the edges of Walden Pond, believed walking was a sacred right, one that restored wildness to the soul, and dislodged the illusions of civilization. In walking, he felt himself not a subject contemplating nature, but a creature within it. Even in the city, walking can be an act of philosophical resistance. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the idle urban stroller, drifted through the consumer drenched passages of Paris with a detective’s eye and a poet’s heart. To walk in the crowd without purpose is to interrupt the machinery of production; it is to observe, to reflect, and to reclaim one’s time from the economy of efficiency. In our age of screens and speed, walking may be the last remaining act of slowness, a wordless conversation between body and world. It teaches presence, patience, and the art of being in between. For in walking, one is always leaving and never arriving, always in motion yet deeply still. The philosopher who walks does not seek to escape thought, but to let it breathe, to feel it stir with each step, to allow the horizon shape the question. In this pursuit, the philosopher, the poet and the cunning man share in similar ambitions, but for Pennick, the art of wandering is also the method used to encounter numinous and special places that give way to visions of the Otherworld as a psychogeography unfolds.
Visionaries all, they understood that every place could be experienced on levels other than the obvious surface of everyday life and that certain of them were gateways to the unseen. (p. 11)
I found this ingress into the art of walking quite brilliant because after all, the witch-father, Cain, is the prototypical wanderer, similar to Odin and Khidr. Khidr is a mystical, sacred wanderer who walks not because he is lost, but because he is a vessel of divine wisdom. His presence transforms the world into a spiritual landscape, and his footsteps mark the unseen will of the Real. Hence, I found it vital to spend some time highlighting the art of walking as a spiritual tool, one that is most important and ingrained in The Way of the Eight Winds. The book presents the Eight Winds not merely as directions, but as living archetypal forces in a pluralistic multifaceted Cosmos, designed for both the cunning ones and the geomantic flâneur, offering practical advice alongside philosophical foundations.
The philosophical foundation is offered in part I (Philosophical Viewpoints) and part II (Cosmic Principles) and is perhaps the more important segment of the book, given the outline and discussion of tradition in a craft context. Part I, Philosophical Viewpoints, articulates the metaphysical premises of the Eight Winds tradition, which can be partitioned into non-literalism, symbolic epistemology, and imaginative reality. Drawing from Coleridge, Blake, Tolkien, and Agrippa, Pennick challenges post-Enlightenment materialism by reinvesting meaning into the symbol as a doorway into the Craft, as he writes: “A living symbol is never received ready-made; it is recreated within the person.” (p. 23) This sentiment is crucial to Traditional Craft, as the resonance between land and practitioner is essential to a personal and traditional formulation of the Craft as something living and fluid, far removed from dogma and rigid protocol typical of more religious cults and faiths. Pennick comments in this regard that the craft or tradition doesn’t need to have a “religious dimension”, which is well perceived in relation to the concept of the traditional aspect of the Craft, where the art of imagination as a faculty of liberation might be said to take the place where religion is attained by a devotee of the Abrahamic faiths for instance. Pennick strongly criticizes modern materialism and literalism with its inflexible biases and binaries, its consumer mentality and disregard for ancestry and nature, in what he has referred to throughout the years as the Vanishing World. The critique of “literalism as madness” is presented as an antidote to spiritual reductionism and the brutalism of modern sociocide, with its consequences for culture and ancestry. The antidote suggested by Pennick is “the traditional spiritual view, that human life can be active and purposeful by being integrated with nature’s eternal return.”(p. 20) The traditional spiritual view elevates the faculty of imagination and clairvoyance. It is through imagination that we can touch the other side; it is here that we find the crossroads between the material conditions of post-Enlightenment human beings, “the incomplete reality” (p. 22), and the enchanted reality of Nature’s fullness, with all its expressive forms of the eternal.
From this Pennick concludes that symbols “do not exist to be deconstructed or decoded” (p. 23), a statement that for sure would make Derrida and Lyotard raise their fingers of objection. This observation is related to what he writes later on: “This is the epitome of the creative force, a personal exploration of a system that emerges from the deepest structure and meaning of existence.” Hence, the symbol must be integrated and participate in the soul and imagination, so it can be fully integrated into the fullness of being. Or, in the words of Arthur Machen: “the magic touch that redeems and exults the dull mass of things, by tingeing them with the soul of man”. (p. 22)
Accomplishing to be anchored in Nature and its cycles, to understand that winds that move time, the breath that has witnessed the worlds unfolding since all was water and earth, will lead to an understanding of myths and symbols of the past as they enact themselves in the present day along interpretations symbolic, literal, spiritual, esoteric and exoteric of our experiences and our being. Pennick is presenting a call for the remembrance and recovery of Wisdom that is about to evaporate, calcify, and fragment itself in our digital reality, overrun by nominalism and materialist polarities, so far away from the axiom In One is All, because the oneness of Cosmos is reflected in the unity of mind and matter.
His discussion of tradition echoes Julius Evola in his Men Among the Ruins (1972) yet he speaks favourably of Ockham, the father of nominalism and hence the seed of this extreme materialism that causes the vanishing world to become a memory as it becomes more and more disenchanted. And I find this to be a forte of the text, namely that it invites you to discuss and argue, to make this material yours, to “recreate it within the reader”. And let me take an example: William of Ockham is a complicated figure in the evolution of modern materialism and the decay of the Eldritch World. In Ideas Have Consequences (1948), Richard Weaver identifies nominalism, which is the denial of universal truths or essences, as the intellectual starting point for the disintegration of Western civilization, and I would say the genesis of the disenchantment of the Western world. Ockham’s nominalism rejects the existence of objective forms or ideals, claiming that only individual, material things exist, and that universal concepts are merely names (nomina) without inherent reality. It is easy to argue that this anti-idealist stance leads to a rejection of transcendent order that causes modern materialism to take shape. Meaning is no longer derived from metaphysical truths but from sensory experience and utility; everything is limited to names and material existence. In this worldview, value becomes subjective, morality relativistic, and tradition disposable. Man, once seen as a participant in a divine cosmos, in unity with nature, is reduced to a consumer and technological manipulator of matter. The consequence is cultural decay: the erosion of honour, the collapse of ethical standards, and the loss of spiritual aspiration. Materialism, unchecked by ideals, gives rise to hedonism, nihilism, and the fragmentation of society. Without belief in universal truths, civilization drifts into decadence and despair. Hence, Ockham becomes the grandfather and root cause of modern alienation and the spiritual impoverishment that follows from seeing the world only in terms of what is physically measurable and economically useful.
I wanted to comment on this merely to demonstrate that this is how the traditional craft works, through disagreement and “by being integrated with nature’s eternal return”, the same truth is affirmed, and the landscape is made richer. This is because the landscape, nature, is a tapestry of power and potencies, spirits and entities, the land, both what rests beneath our feet and through the winds and air is a part of us. As Pennick writes, quoting William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. (p.57)
And this perception is as true now as it was in the past; for instance, mythological beings personify ideas and concepts of a timeless character. Let’s take Hermes, the god of commerce, communication and transport, who remains active today in the same domains even if the means of communication have changed. Mercury continues to be the ruler of the same areas of life as in the past, even in its changing forms and modalities. In this regard, the classical gods and planetary deities can serve as a model for us and how their integrity and sameness are not destroyed over time, rather the flexible and agile interaction with change makes these spiritual presences immortal. Pennick explains the traditional basis for such phenomena’s in the books second part, Cosmic Principles where he engages with the four-element theory, the planetary spheres, and the winds as archetypal energies embedded in space, time, and fate. Here, we encounter the “tides of the day”, geomantic currents, and the sacred architecture of the place as he moves from crossroads to omphaloi, to cathedral to creek. This is the esoteric core of the book, where myth, cosmology, and land-based wisdom converge and where it is explained how the human being is a part of nature and, of course, the winds.
An ancient Jewish legend of the creation of human involves the winds, which are an outward manifestation of the breath of life that sustains our physical being. (p. 87)
This breath takes the shape of winds, the winds of the eight directions, related to the winds and also to man as microcosms, representing the directions of the cross as being mirrored above, eight in all, bonded by the magical quintessence.
This resonates with the eight tides of the day and the eight winds and airs. (p. 127) From these cycles follows the natural magic of the yearly round. And here Pennick enters into something crucial, namely how the place, time, geography and practitioner are essential in assessing the wind. For the stormy winds of the Boreas, the north was in the Northern Tradition ascribed to the wind giant Hrælsweg at the Eagle’s Mount at the end of the world. (p. 144) In ancient Mesopotamia, the winds that brought storms and illness, which came from south or north, were associated with Pazuzu, Lilins and other storm spirits of disease. The same wind is known as Dryth in Cumbria, given its cold and dry temperament. Pennick emphasises the importance of incorporating the symbol into the practitioner as a means of preserving the tradition. As he postulates: “European traditional spirituality is intimately tied up with landscape, climate and the cycle of the seasons.” (p. 176) And as we know, seasons and cycles are bound by both chaos and order, the wild and the contemplative dances together, and it is as the mistress of chaos, this substratum of creative matter on its way towards order, that we find the importance of Ananke or Necessity. A key principle of the Craft, also embedded in the importance of the rune Naud, for traditional Craft. Pennick writes:
Plato depicts the whole spindle turning in the lap of Necessity. Each of the circles has a Siren, carried around with it. She sings one single note, and from each of the Sirens’ notes, eight in number, comes the harmony of the spheres. Around the rotating spindle, at equal distances, sit the daughters of Necessity, enthroned. They are the three Fates. (p. 105)
For Plato, necessity is not merely a physical force or constraint – it’s a cosmic principle that exists alongside reason. Necessity, by rejecting the perfect form and thus being allied with chaos, being the substratum of matter, governs the cosmic order, planetary movements, and fate precisely because of this virtue. In Plato’s perception, he saw the Spindle of Necessity at the centre of the universe, rotated by the goddess Ananke and her daughters, the Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, mirroring the Nordic Norns. Necessity and her Fates are responsible for upholding the metaphysical law of fate and order, free will, choices and their consequences, which translates into örlog and wyrd in the Northern Tradition. As he posits:
The religious observance of pre-Christian northern Europe was centred not so much upon a chief deity, as upon the ancestors´ spirits, located at an ancestral place. (p. 179)
Here he has in mind a concept intrinsic in his work from the outset, namely örlog and wyrd. Örlog, within the framework of the Northern European esoteric traditions, aligns with both historical heathen beliefs and modern esoteric thought, drawing from sources such as the Poetic Edda, rune lore, and the concepts of fate and necessity. Wyrd is the concept of destiny in the form of a living web of reality shaped by the actions and outcomes of all beings. It surrounds us, is woven through us, and constantly evolves with every choice made. Wyrd is envisaged like a web, and these threads that link actions to their consequences are örlog. The past shapes the present, the present shapes our actions, and our actions shape the future, which in turn becomes the past. This cycle is not linear or isolated; it is a flowing, interwoven process. The deeds of others influence our path just as our deeds ripple outward to affect theirs. These ripples form patterns or new webs that result in new outcomes, creating new actions, all forming the intricate weave of the Web of Wyrd. Reality moulds our actions, yet our actions also sculpt reality. The power to consciously engage with this dynamic, to weave the threads of Wyrd if you will, lies at the heart of the Northern Tradition. In Pennick’s cosmology, örlog is laid down by the Norns as part of the shaping of the Web of Wyrd. The Norns (Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld) perceived as divine spinners of fate who establish the framework (örlog) upon which individual life events (wyrd) are woven. Örlog determines the pattern of one's fate, while free will allows people to weave their wyrd within that pattern, serving as the primal law or decree laid down at the beginning of time (reminiscent of the concept of dharma in Asian philosophy). It is the inherited pattern that every being brings into this world. We interact with this patterned web through runes, ancestral rituals, geomantic alignments and the art of wandering. Every being, visible and invisible, partakes in this web of profound and beautiful unity. As he points out:
The Way of the Eight Winds seeks to discover, express, and enhance the essence of the spirit present at any place.(p. 171)
This brings us into the third part of the book, which deals with geomancy. In Geomancy, this web is given form through lay lines and labyrinths and the elements of geomancy, be it mountains, river falls, burial mounds and streams, places of power where crossroads, stone circles and spirit tracks converge. Here, he presents practical geomantic work that is responsive to topography, historical layers, and ancestral spirits embedded in the legacy of the land itself.
This third part, Geomancy, is a richly illustrated and methodologically clear segment. It presents us with practical geomantic work involving ley lines, labyrinths, stone circles, crossroads, feng shui and places of power. Unlike much modern geomancy, Pennick resists abstraction: geomantic practice remains deeply localised, responsive to topography, historical layers, and ancestral spirit. Moreover, geomancy has also been at the heart of Pennick's work alongside his work on runes.
Geomancy represents a traditional understanding of the defining elements of any landscape, both natural and human. (p. 230)
This is perhaps the part of the book that some readers might find wanting, because here the road goes on through spirit paths and fairy tracks, labyrinths and royal roads of many crossroads of magic, maze and myth. But geomancy as divination is entirely left out in favour of the geomantic principles themselves, more related to symbols and feng shui. This part gives way to the Fourth, Makings, where he uses sacred geometry and geomancy as a basis for the tools and rituals of the craft. In this section, Pennick offers practical crafting techniques grounded in traditional arts-and-crafts ethos, avoiding any New Age bricolage as he emphasises ritual intentionality, material resonance, and cultural rootedness in each magical object. Thus, the art made with intent, patience and resorting to nature, its material and spirit protectors, that is magically created, is wholly other from what is mass-produced, soulless and forgettable. Here he also discusses the differences between sanctification, which is organic, and onlay, which is mechanical and more and more the onlay or the changes in a landscape, disregarding the relationship önd holds with the Anima Loci, hence sickness and disturbance is introduced to the natural element and we create spaces of illness, suffering and haunting. He discusses the principles of sacred geometry, knots and measurements, and its importance in transmitting sacred knowledge through symbol and form as a way for timeless spiritual principles to be brought into matter before he again devotes attention to the journey:
Seer’ journeys can take one of two forms: journeying inways, as in pathworkings; or as a physical pilgrimage to a place of mantic power. (p. 300).
And with that, he comes full circle in his musings on the art of wandering, making the Way itself the objective of the text.
The fifth part, Metaphorical Texts, offers a poetic and reflective close; these chapters explore Wayland the Smith, the Labyrinth, and the legacy of wandering – blurring myth, history, and inner journeying. In closing, Wayland becomes grand symbol of how modernity and nominalist materialism usurp the sacred, a mythopoetic template for how the Eldritch world has become the Vanishing World…
Pennick’s offering in The Way of the Eight Winds is not a system but a worldview: that Nature is never fixed, and that sacredness arises through symbolic participation, seasonal attunement, and conscious engagement with place. His insistence on re-enchantment is both a metaphysical and political act—a rejection of technocratic nihilism and a return to imaginative gnosis. In an era of spiritual consumerism and ecological dislocation, The Way of the Eight Winds asserts that spirituality must be local, rooted, symbolic, and handmade. It resists abstraction in favour of geometry as prayer, walking as divination, and landscape as living myth. The Way of the Eight Winds will become a cornerstone text for those seeking a path that is intellectually rigorous, esoterically valid, and deeply of the land, and with that let’s give the last words to Pennick himself:
The only way to be true to one’s existence and the common good is by constant referral back to real, lived experience. The Spiritual Arts and Crafts are a metaphor for our being-in-the-world, and one means of living real experience, because the Spiritual Arts and Crafts are just one segment of the wider symbolic order that is the cosmos and life on Earth. (p. 338)