If I go to my rural grocery store today, amongst the tabloids, gossip rags, and boomer nostalgia slop in the magazine section, a strange artifact awaits. There, as it likely has been since the place was built in the fifties, is a row of Old Farmer's Almanacs. Ostensibly a relic of homespun wisdom and a tangible reminder of an agrarian lifestyle that a few generations ago would have been intrinsic to survival, but is now merely a hobby. The Farmer's Almanac can seem like an object of tradition more than function, like Coke in a glass bottle or cowboy boots: a tool to embody and experience the past. Less remarked on, though, is how the Old Farmer's Almanac is essentially a grimoire of agricultural folk magic that is somehow as ubiquitous as the TV Guide. 

In the Old Farmer's Almanac, you'll essentially find half the categories of the New Age section in the bookstore: weather predictions, astrological timing, home remedies, and a lunar cycle planting guide, and somehow it still manages to feel as kitschy as a Norman Rockwell painting. What this apparent dichotomy between content and presentation reveals to me is just how old most of what gets called "new age" actually is. Interestingly, by going back to the land as a form of self-care or hobby, a vocation, or an intentional lifestyle, a hermetic dialectic opens up between that most rooted and embodied experience of growing food in dirt and all the seen and unseen cosmic influences that make it possible. When we remove the barriers between our human lives and the processes and activities that support them–such as agriculture, energy generation, and cooking–we start to realize how much modern life has become almost a simulacrum of living. When we allow ourselves to reconnect with the actions that foster our lives and turn down the distractions and toils of modernity, the "big questions" feel closer at hand. What can feel like interests of fantasy or eccentricity to the modern world–those subjects beyond the scope of what we can quantify, dissect, and extract from–in this more embodied life, take precedence.

This is why I think some form of engagement with the "natural" world is fundamental to what we now call magic, and in the past, we probably experienced as just part of being alive. I think something unlocks when we see ourselves through the lens of the earth, and the ways in which we are grown by it and governed by the same forces that influence it. Magic removed from this gnosis is always going to be handicapped, and any life not guided by it will be stunted. Although I don't think the Old Farmer's Almanac at my local grocery store is a sacred text, the persistence of its metaphysical approach to the most practical of tasks is something I find heartening. But what would an even Older Farmer's Almanac look like? What if it were written by Agrippa instead of Garrison Keillor? What if it could explain the hermetic principles it was emulating? What if it traced these practices to their ancient sources and explored the perennial wisdom of agrarian magic found across the globe? It might look like Todd Elliott's new book, The Cunning Farmer. 

SHOW NOTES:

Todd's Book: The Cunning Farmer

Todd's Substack: The Cunning Farmer