magical realism, urban fantasy, speculative fiction, contemporary folklore, mythic realism indigenous storytelling, poetry, articles, activism, gritlit
CROW MAGIC
Introduction to the Legends of the Sidhe Series — Novella
Myth and ecology in writing
Book 1
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The stories first released in When I See the Wild God, 2002, are reproduced here in preparation for the audiobook/published work: THE LEGENDS OF THE SIDHE SERIES,:The Quickening, The Shining Isle, Under Snow, The Changeling
HUNTER, the First Forest who presents as a man.
BRIGHID, shapeshifts between C’av’arn, raven queen of the Bentley Fort High School corvid cabal and a small, pale woman with many braids, faded ink tattoos and an acerbic, bitter attitude caused by the cruelty of an unseelie fáidh.
RAVEN, feral dark faerie who’s empathy gets him into some harsh and unlovely situations and who loves or hates with an intensity none can match.
KATHRYN, VINCENT, MERRIN, ALEXANDER SHILTON, MIM, DIMITY, THE BAND CALLED THE FIANA, the dogs, the hounds and THE MYSTERY.
SCÁTHACH, HOLLY, CHARLIE, a jaded professor, murder, love and revenge not necessarily sensible but in accord with the curse of exile — to go beyond the seventh wave — and the author’s origin of the first of the stories—a dream that changed her life.
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THE QUICKENING
Magic, Myth and Mayhem
Legends of the Sidhe, Traveler Series
Book 2
BOOK | eBOOK
AUDIOBOOK:
Genre: magical realism, contemporary folklore
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“We don’t use the f word”
The shape of a woman moves from the darkness of the stone’s shadow, a cloak of moths surrounding her insubstantiality. She takes HUNTER’s head between both hands, her fingers melting deeply into the thick fur ruff.
Kathryn and MERRIN seem as different as light and dark, but a common thread weaves them int a thread surrounding the determination of one man to remove the magic from the world, a man whose own motives are hidden even from himself. Among u walk a race older than time, around us are doorways to other realities and people who are not seen, for who and what they truly are. Such are Hunter and Brighid, Black Annis, Willie and Raven, and the many others who keep magic alive in the world and who touch, in passing, those who seem lost merely because they have been blinded by disregard.
The Quickening is a tale of human cruelty and its redemption. Of enchantment and lore. If you are lost, and need finding, perhaps the folk will come if you whisper your longing to the night. Winner of the COVR Visionary Fiction Award, 2006, USA.
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THE SHINING ISLE
An Ancient Secret, a Threatened Place of Magic
Legends of the Sidhe, Traveler Series, Book 3
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THE SHINING ISLE is the island of Inishrún, small and forbidding, that occults a deeply protected secret. It is the stronghold of the sídhe, a magical race as old as the earth, also. It means the Island of Secrets
Holly Tremenhere, jaded and disillusioned by the ordinary world, travels across the wild sea, from the coastal village of Weary Bay, to the island on the second-to-last ferry before winter closes the crossing. She is there to unravel the mystery of who she truly is and the only living person who can tell her is her beautiful, estranged aunt, Mim and her wild faerie lover Connor. What Holly does not know is that some men will do anything for greed. Some she thinks are untrustworthy are good, and not all dogs are just dogs. She is about to be thrust into the heart of a mystery, a time out of legend and an inheritance that will forever change her; one that culminates in a magical but deadly redemption and a journey in time where love reunites.
Including an Author’s Note on the usurpation of indigenous lands and the entirety of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, this faerie tale is unique
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UNDER SNOW
Love that transcends both time and continents
Legends of the Sidhe, Traveler Series
Book 4
BOOK, eBOOK
AUDIOBOOK: Audible, Spotify
Genre: magical realism, folklore
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Before the us we’ve come to relate to—cell phone and air travel and debt—there was wilderness. Oceans, vast skies, mountain chains frozen or volcanic, seasons of swelter or snow, endless, unchainsawed forests, and the sídhe mound beneath roundhouse fortress known as Castle Pook.
ROSE (Irish gypsy) WEN’s father is murdered, seemingly senselessly, Rose buries him in Ireland near the grave of her mother. With secrets being unearthed, of ancient magic, king’s legends, and horsehair talismans, Rose is thrust into a way of seeing the world—an understanding of love—she never would have thought possible if he had not died. A deal made with a faerie man long ago.
ROBIN (NO LAST NAME) is a mixed race being. The offspring of the First Forest, known as a god, and Puck a once mortal other. He has destiny with Rose and loves her as only faeries can do. Utterly and beyond the confines of ocean, time and words. And yet it is poetry, the language of living earth, that allows hi into her life. That and a spell or two. Is anything random? Or is everything that happens predestined?
Third in the acclaimed Legends of the Sidhe, Traveler Series this is a love story between us and earth, and the depths to which life will go to embrace humans, if only they would listen.
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THE CHANGELING
FROM WINER, SPRING IS BORN
Legends of the Sidhe, Traveler Series
Book 5
BOOK, eBOOK
AUDIOBOOK: Audible Spotify
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MERCY RILEY is thrust into life in the cramped, cold little room down back of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Mother and Baby Home. In the rarely-visited coastal village of Weary Bay. A place of shame, Mercy is born and raised a secret. Never permitted to know her mother, her name concocted for expedience by strangers. While social acceptability is not her destiny neither is obscurity and around the age of thirteen she escapes. She is discovered and aided by Black Annis, not even slightly mortal. Taken in by the Travelers she is sequestered, for her protection and education, with Maisie Raith the Weary Bay’s generations-long practitioner of witchcraft.
THE CHANGELING | FROM WINTER, SPRING IS BORN is not a pretty faerie story. It breaks the rules. It confuses and disturbs. Mercy fulfils one part of her destiny, when one part does not make a whole in a storytelling that is, hopefully, never ending.
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BRAVE | FOR THE UNCLAIMED PEOPLE
SELECTIVE FREEDOM WRITINGS
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Bravery isn’t something a person experiences. It is the compliment given by others, along with those that reflect courage and fearlessness. It’s the subjective description, usually retrospectively, made by an observer or even a stranger. Bravery is not the experience of the individual (or group) referred to. The drive of the brave, triggered by events; experiences of seemingly insurmountable odds, is fear.
Brave is a series of poetry, realisations, life musings, liberations and anarchistic demand for the liability of harm. Unable to publish until the courts legitimised her identity (2020) Ly de Angeles kept this collection in silent storage for many years.
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ADVANCED TAROT
A TEACHING MANUAL
BOOK
Genre: tarot, training, self-help, philosophy
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ADVANCED TAROT | THE VOYAGE OF PROPHECY teaches you how to read cards, using tarot, authentically. To be a Wayshower. This is a no-holds-barred honest appraisal of the work of a practitioner of forty years. People, like every species, are travelers through life, in a body, ship-like, on an adventure-voyage to the portal of death-the only truly absolute destination.
Without a wayshower, a seer, a worker of witch-lore; without those who have learned the maps and who can advise of treacherous shallows, bergs and submerged reefs of cruelty and lovelessness, and who are courageous enough to say what they see, the psychic muscle is flaccid and tame. We can be called charlatans with impunity.
ADVANCED TAROT | THE VOYAGE OF PROPHECY is a relearning of the journey of destiny through word and image. It guides the seer to anarchy and heresy. The advice offers a choice to wildly and willfully reject the story created for us by an outmoded, colonialist, bigoted, ecologically ignorant and heteronormative domination
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MAGDALENE
WITCH OF THE GRAIL LEGENDS
INTERSTITIAL & SPECULATIVE CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
Based on the Legends of the Grail
BOOK eBOOK
Genre: mythic realism, feminist conceptualization, contemporary folklore
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MAGDALENE | WITCH OF THE GRAIL LEGENDS, is the grail mother of the Templar legacy.
Miriam (Magdal-eder), young, naïve initiate of the Asherah tradition of law holders and wise women, is of the ancestral house of the Hasmonean line. The chosen initiatrix/bride of a warrior-prince, Yeshuah ben Miriam.
In a time of war and usurpation, between Judea, Cornwall, Glastonbury, the druid isle of Mona and the mists of Ireland, Miriam—visionary, witch and prophet—becomes a stranger to the woman she once was, stronger in the face of the savagery and brutality of war than she ever could have thought possible, closer than even she could have believed to the powers within nature to heal in the face of adversity.
This is a controversial love story and an adventure into consciousness, and a recognition pf the defamation of women of power for unrealized reasons of ownership and breeding.
Complete with an extensive glossary and bibliography de Angeles’ tops off the book with GOD’S BASTARDS, an addendum of research and commentary.
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WITCH
FOR THOSE THAT ARE
Selective Writings
BOOK eBOOK
Genre: interstitial folklore, culture, mysticism
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Witch people, like magicians and sorcerers, conjurers, druids and hoodoo hexers, like cunning women and cunning men, kurdaitchas, shamans, manitous, angakoks, curanderas, bruxas, enchanters and shapechangers are needed in this world. We are the stories not bound by dogma or displayed as relics in a museum. We cause disquiet. We summon questions but it’s not our way to give answers. They take us to the wild and the frightening places. The cave entrance under the ice at the base of that crevasse. Blue handprints on the rock face imprinted with an ochre of confusion. By people we cannot name and from a time we cannot confirm. Once Upon a Time people. People of the reindeer. Volcano people.
WITCH | FOR THOSE THAT ARE is a compendium of lore and consciousness-altering wisdom from an elder and practitioner of this, an animist and magical acknowledgement of connectedness. It reflects on the twentieth century revival of a non-theist understanding of wonder and educates on the deeper reason within legends and myths that are spoken of as significant without examining the learning inherent in filtered and regurgitated stories, nor the language used and the psychological ramifications to culture.
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THE SKELLIG
A SHAPESHIFTER Futuristic Story
with Melaine Knight
BOOK eBOOK
Genre: magical realism, contemporary folklore, science fiction
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The year is 2156. Dystopia. Misrule. Pirates, badlands, transdrone sex slaves, cowboys, rebellion. THE SKELLIG is the story of hope and redemption where hard tech and stainless-steel meet legend and myth.
The skellig is a shapeshifter who goes by the name of Gamble. She’s all woman. Most of the time. On the black of the moon she’s another creature altogether, a deal she made, with the soul of earth known as the Grace, a few thousand years ago. Sometimes, over a couple of days, she’s a bit of both. A desperate escape across the border is the only hope for thousands of runaways.
Guided by an indigenous and immortal starman, the shape-shifting skellig, a Māori mystic and a good-looking scientist, who should be the enemy but is not, they make the journey. Bull and Rattlesnake Lil drive an Airstream, the Midnight Express, packed to the rafters with escapees and hybrids. Alice, in his armoured all-terrain tank, raises his rainbow pennant on a fifteen-foot high middle-finger to the drone-swarms overhead.
A militarized force, not far behind, is intent on annihilation. Freedom is beyond the northern border, a mighty, raging river, guarded by a mythic race called Álfur.
What’s the adage of a true life? Live free or die.
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INITIATION | A MEMOIR
ABOUT
INITIATION | A MEMOIR is a voice reflecting the moral and ideological changes of the last sixty years. Particularly for women, particularly in the mysticl traditions of ‘western magic’. Written in a perennial voice de Angeles rewilds her own story and transforms cultural stereotypes into the language of myth.
Witch people, like magicians and sorcerers, conjurers, druids and hoodoo hexers, like cunning women and cunning men, kadaichas, shamans, manitous, angakoks, curanderas, bruxas, noadis, enchanters and shapechangers are needed in this world. They are the stories not bound by dogma or displayed as relics in a museum. They cause disquiet. They summon questions but it’s not their way to give answers. They take us to the wild and the frightening places. The cave entrance under the ice at the base of that crevasse. Blue handprints on the rock face imprinted with an ochre of confusion. By people we cannot name and from a time we cannot confirm. Once Upon a Time people. People of the reindeer. Volcano people.
Born in 1951, taken from her mother through the use of shame and intimidation—her culture, history, ancestry and name were hidden away in vaults, supposedly for life—de Angeles was sold to strangers for £300.
In 2020, through a high court of Australia, she achieved freedom.
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PRITENI – THE DECIMATION OF THE CELTIC BRITONS
BOOK: SONANT EDITION only
Genre: historic fiction, indigenous Celtic culture, memoir
ABOUT
The Celtic magic and mysticism, prior to the Roman invasion of Britain, is written in a scholarly but storytelling weaving—a tapestry of history—because this story would not be true otherwise.
Many books have attempted to present the paganism of the P/Briteni people, and most have failed for one simple reason: the indigenous inhabitants are described in the past tense, alleging that they have long since died out. The brutal invaders, killers and colonisers of what is now known as England, Scotland and Wales have attempted to eradicate the lore, law, customs, language, culture and spirituality of those first people. In many instances rape and assimilation through force would have come close to breeding us out.
Ly de Angeles delivers the soul of an ancient and magical people, their valour and humour, the battles they fight to maintain a traditional way of life, and that still live. The author is a direct descendant of Caradoc (C’radoc ap Cunobelin of the Catuvellaun), one of the main players in that distant pasts’ struggle for self-determination. To many reading this it will be the first time they have heard the names of these real people, let alone celebrate kinship with them. This could very well be your own family.
Forgetting is the sleep of freedom.
The sonant version is for the author’s grandson who has had difficulty explaining the names and words in language.
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GENESIS | THE FUTURE
BOOK, eBOOK
Genre: magical realism, science fiction, contemporary folklore
ABOUT
What if we never grow up? What if we grow in?
‘And you about as much a ghost as Raven here is a pigeon. As for having a need of you, that’s as may be.’ She pulled something smelly, brown and dry, like an old mushroom, from a pocket hidden within the folds of her clothing, chewed slowly, pulling me gently, slowly, towards buildings.
Life continues beyond a cataclysm of climate disaster and, unlike the militarized and corporate dimness of sectors of the northern hemisphere, the southern lands have recovered.
When a young woman, abandoned as a child and named Ghost because of albinism, takes possession of an empty book, with a red leather cover and embossed with the word GENESIS, she teaches herself the almost obsolete art of writing. What she doesn’t yet realize is how deeply into the mists of myth her record is destined to travel. Or how it will impact the inhabitants of that land, thousands of years after the coming Ice Age.
What if time is a fractal, forever mimicking itself. Like seasons? Like life?
What would we do differently if we knew?
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THE FEAST OF FLESH AND SPIRIT
BOOK
Genre: poetry, essay, short story
ABOUT
The Feast of Flesh and Spirit is duende. A piece of night. Summoning. Evocative. Dangerous. A selection of poetry, prose, short stories and conversations with archangels, genius loci and the demons of the mind. A work spanning decades.
Occult and shamanic. Reflections on every kind of ecstasy and agony. Open at any page. Like an oracle it discusses the depths and madness of love or reminds you how to live. Leave behind the day-to-day-world of office, mortgage, marriage, mansion or ghetto, and enter into an occult landscape where enchantment and animal people dwell.
Dedicated to artist Lisa Engeman, who just made it out alive after a seemingly impossible surgical procedure to remove a brain tumour wrapped around her carotid artery, this book is a celebration and a look down the barrel of a smoking gun. The one we’ve all had. The one we escaped by a whisper.
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2005 CE
2003
2004 CE
2005
2007
ANTIDILUVIAN ALMOST
UNITY/PRISM, ENGLAND
1987
Prior to 1997
Publisher, Unity/Prism, no longer available
UNITY/PRISM, ENGLAND
1990
PRIOR TO 1997
PUBLISHER, Unity/Prism, NO LONGER VIABLE
also published as
QUEBECOIS/FRENCH
2010
ALSO PUBLISHED AS
PORTUGUESE/BRAZILIAN, 2000
Articles published independently to books
2018
ARCHER MAGAZINE (click for website)
SHAME, GENDER AND AGEING ‘GRACEFULLY’
“I recently upgraded my bodybuilding regime because I wasn’t hitting certain muscle groups, and today I’m getting on with the new program. After my warm-up I completed four sets of pullups, before heading to the Smith Machine for a weightless squat session. And then the day goes to shit.
Green-arm Tattoo Guy walks away from the squats rack, dragging his knuckles along the floor, wafting hypermasculinity like too much deodorant, and heaves a pair of dumbbells to the incline bench. In gym etiquette I communicate with him, mouthing the words You finished here? He nods and grunts.
He’s left 160 kilos of plates on the bar and I again get his attention.
“Can you put your weights away please, mate?”
He drops his weights, grinds me to dust with a look, and swaggers over. When he’s close enough to bite me he says, “You’re a fucking pain in the arse, you know that?”
THE CRIME FACTORY (15th ED) for COMEUPPANCE
(Winner of the 2020 Canada Gritlit Award)
COMEUPPANCE
Genre: gritlit
ABOUT
“It’s late afternoon but Louisiana’s still at it. Sweat staining the armpits of her T-shirt and down the centre of her back and the shovel grinds a monotonous melody of scratch, flump, her elbows pumping to the rhythm of her breath.
In 1990 her parents made a lot of money, quickly, and had to spend it just as fast so they sent her brothers Marley, aged eight, and Ty, who was four then, to be minded by their Uncle Ray across the other side of town.
Louisiana was conceived in sweat, in the back room of a shack on the Bayou, and was so named. Louisiana Maria Sadi, born to be beautiful, destined to be a killer, only daughter of Pepper and Harry Sadi. She had been such a silent child that her mother had once confided to Harry that perhaps their daughter’s soul was pissed off that she’d been born here, in the red dirt, and not in the swamp. Not true, though. Louisiana instinctively knew to shut up, even before she could speak.”
2017
BAKERY HILL | A Novella of the Eureka Uprising
ABOUT
Rain. Bullets from a gunmetal sky so low it bows the backs of the people hidden beneath the peril of black umbrellas that blanket the cemetery. A crowd of two hundred. Silent men in cloth caps, pointedly ignoring each other, angry and impotent without their guns. Thin-lipped at the death of this hero.
They turn away, shoulders crowding their ears. Wet fags useless between blue lips. Heading to the pub for the laments and the safety of closed doors. The whisky. The drowning moments before it all begins again. Women’s coats, heavy against the December bleakness, drag in the mud of the track that the walking trundle back to Dublin. Holding the hands of silent children, knowing about sin already and the war they’re growing up in. All move in a wave away from the maw in the ground. The coffin of James Fintan Lalor glinting at handle and crucifix, seven foot down in the deep rectangular black, covered with a snowing of white roses.
THE NAME OF THE WORLD IS ALIVE
ABOUT
The tradition and ritual of naming a human person is to bestow identity and authenticity.
Amongst indigenous cultures the practice of naming is not only to attach a meaningful identity to the newly alive individual but also to confer a place upon them: of wetlands, seasonal shapeshiftings, thin-iced fjords and desert vastnesses realised only by a night filled with star myth. Maps of ancient territory, they are numbered amongst ancestors from whom we have all unfurled or been spawned.
Naming is, or was, a profound and welcoming endowment and embrace. A nest from which to train wings. A burrow within which to sharpen claws. The process opening a page into some spoken, danced or sung unwritten book of wisdom’s lore, of future knowledge; of heritage.
ALL ELSE
TAROT (for 42 years) ADVANCED TRAINING
DIRECTOR/FILMMAKER/SCRIPT AND MS ANALYSIS
STAGE & STREET
RIVERS IN THE SKIN WORKSHOPS
IMBAS WRITING COLLECTIVE
CONTACT
lydeangeles at gmail dot com