Northern Earth will be uploading early issues of the magazine as freely downloadable PDF files. These are not generally available in their original paper-based format so it will be an opportunity to capture the essence of earth mysteries and neo-antiquarianism as it evolved. We shall also be making other issues available as and when we can.
For starters, please take a look at our ‘Pan-Demiotic’ issues. These were produced during the lockdown of 2020, when printers, retailers and much of society were closed down. Not wanting our readers to feel deprived, we put together these issues as free open-access downloads.
The name comes from a play on the word ‘pandemic’, importing the word demiotic. A demiotic discourse is one of two broad discourses encountered in any community or subculture, according to Gerd Baumann in Contesting Culture (1995); the other is dominant discourse. Demiotic discourse, Baumann argued was an internal mode employed when the self-referent community feels it appropriate to subvert or deviate from the dominant cultural discourse. Which sounded appropriate for Northern Earth’s alternative perspective, and we transformed the ‘pan’ of ‘pandemic’ into Pan, the nature deity – who also seems appropriate to our subject matter.