Yuletide

 May the reborn sun bring a little warmth into this world. 

Yule log tutorial

Samhain

 

Passages

Back in January, drummer Neil Peart of the band Rush died, and in the wake of that, I started binge-listening; I'd always liked the band, but in the aftermath of Mr. Peart's death, I came to love them. And out of all those songs, one in particular grabbed and held me, to the point that I found myself listening to it multiple times a day, even hearing it in my mind upon waking and sleeping. The song is called "Time Stand Still."

Turns out it was a prophetic song, as the world I knew was about to be changed, in ways both temporary and permanent. The pandemic, of course, has brought some of those changes; another change is in progress now, as one of my beloved cats transitions from this life into whatever comes next. At the moment, I'm feeling the helpless dumb disbelief that is rather preferable to the other state, which is a panoply of wretched emotions held together by bitter weeping. Being a witch and understanding the cycles of life and death doesn't make the pain any lighter, or the loss less acute. In days to come, my spiritual life will (I hope) be a source of renewed strength and comfort as I grapple with the space his absence leaves in my life; but for this moment, I can't summon the strength to so much as light a candle. I will, in time. Right now, I wait, and I grieve.

"Freeze this moment a little bit longer," says the song; "make each impression a little bit stronger. Experience slips away." Please do, if you can. Because of the song, I remembered to do so, a little.

We're All Solitary Witches

And just like that, the world changed.

Not long after my last post, we started hearing about an emerging virus causing first localized, then more widespread infections in China. Fast-forward four months and we're now in a global pandemic, a situation of a magnitude never before seen in our lifetime (well, save that of a handful of centenarians who lived through the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak). Regular life has changed--schools, businesses, restaurants, nearly all forms of outward public life are closed indefinitely--and with that, our spiritual lives have changed as well. However active we might have been even a month ago with coven or grove or meetup or moot, today we're all solitaries again, even as we strive to turn social media platforms into ways to keep in contact with our chosen spiritual families.

Both the Wiccan trads I am connected to have provisions for the individual practicing alone. I personally have the added advantage of living with/being married to my magickal partner, so we have the option of working together as well as separately during this indefinite period of social isolation. Most everyone has access to books and the internet to guide them into developing a personal praxis (which you should already have done anyway, pandemic or not). We've all got a lot more time on our hands now thanks to COVID-19, so what are you waiting for?

These are weird times--wyrd times. Paganfolk like to talk about liminal states, but this is what it feels like when the whole world we know slips sideways into one. The earth is changing because of this. People are changing because of this. I can think of no better time than now to get grounded in your practice, reconnect (or connect for the first time) with the spirits of the land you're on, get in touch with the ancestors, get in touch with your gods. Develop a simple daily rite, if you don't have one already, even if it's something as simple as just pulling a Tarot card. Magick won't make the virus go away, but it can strengthen you and shape the ways you respond to the situation in which we now collectively find ourselves. Being grounded, being rooted, spiritually makes a profound impact on our ability to contend with what mundane life throws at us. We need that right now in ways that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago.

Following John Beckett's suggestion, I've started keeping a plague diary, a handwritten personal memoir of life during the pandemic, and it's a discipline I highly recommend. Not only is it helpful to write out what you're feeling and experiencing, but it gives you something to look back upon later, and something for those who come after to look to and learn from. I've found myself looking into personal accounts of life during the flu epidemic in 1918 to see what we can learn from them. All of us have ancestors who lived through that--we wouldn't be here otherwise--and now is a good time to try making contact with them. Some day we ourselves will be those ancestors that our descendants, physical or spiritual, will turn to when their worlds erupt.

Above all else, stay home, stay well, stay sane. Wash your hands. Wear a mask (you can easily make your own with a bandanna and two hair ties). Social distance of 6 feet when you must go out. As the governor of my state tells us in his daily briefing, we will get through this together. I believe that. Stay strong, my friends.

New Year, New Title

As my focus has shifted over the past couple of years, and my admittedly sporadic posts took on a different tone, I came to the conclusion that it was time to change the name of the blog. When I started it lo these many years ago, my intention was to write about capital-W Witchcraft, the sort of bats-cats-and-hats stuff I came to call Classic Witchcraft. And while that is still entirely appealing to me, the fact remains that I'm more focused these days on my practice as a traditional Wiccan--a practice which encompasses Witchcraft in all its lovely permutations.

The title is Scots Gaelic, which honors a part of my ancestry, while the subject matter--the harp and the sword--honors two of my interests, along with the deeper symbolism inherent therein, which I invite the reader to ponder as they will.

Defining "Classic Witchcraft"

It was not that long ago that I reached the realization that at no time in my life have I ever known witchcraft that was wholly divorced from traditional Wicca.

When I first became fascinated by the concept of witches and witchcraft, I was a child growing up in the 1970s. It was so long ago, and so much has happened since, that I couldn't say for certain how or when that fascination truly began--but begin it did, however it was triggered, and if I try to think back the earliest images that come to me are those of the familiar Halloween figure. Solitary, immeasurably ancient, black-clad, cat-accompanied, hideous and yet somehow appealing rather than appalling. Stirring a cauldron, stirring a potion, stirring up trouble, she was a defiant and transgressive figure, one not to be trifled with, the wielder of powers unknown and highly enticing to one so powerless as I. My first source materials were, naturally, children's literature and fairy tales, joined as I grew older by encyclopedias and books specifically on the subjects of witchcraft and magic, the occult and the paranormal; and all of those were very much products of the 20th century and the sometimes dubious scholarship and spurious claims of that century's witchcraft promoters.

Thus, I was early on introduced to such key concepts as "the Old Religion," the "Book of Shadows," even "the Cone of Power" and "the Burning Times," and of covens of witches performing their circular rites by the light of the full moon. I was not an exceptionally critical reader as a child; I read voraciously and indiscriminately, absorbing all sides of a thing and then letting the information simmer until my brain boiled over from the cognitive dissonance, demanding I sort it all out. I've since done so, of course, only to discover to my chagrin that what I always knew as witchcraft is indelibly, inextricably enmeshed with the trappings of the 20th century neopagan religion of Wicca (along with the borrowed elements of other systems that form parts of its composition).

Knowing this, how, then, do I define Classic Witchcraft? As an aesthetic as well as a practice, for one, because atmosphere can make or break a ritual. Bats and cats and the occasional pointed hat. Cauldrons and candles, owls and serpents. Skulls and bones. Incense and bonfires. All things eldritch and uncanny. Once the scene is set, the practice itself can take, well, almost any form that suits the situation. It could look like a fairly standard Wiccan ritual with a cast circle and all the trimmings, or it could be as spare as a steady silent gaze into a candle's flame. It might be performed robed, or skyclad, or in street clothes. Elaborate ceremonial with a lot of prep time and research, or completely off-the-cuff at a moment's notice. Indoors or outdoors. Better it be when the moon is full, unless it isn't.

What Classic Witchcraft is not is rote and regulated. The classic witch, that enduring figure that has never let go of my imagination, is not a person hemmed in by rules and restrictions or a lengthy list of Things That Must Be Done to make the practice "valid." The only real test of validity for the classic witch is, did it work? What works is what is key, and it will vary from one witch to the next, and it can only be discovered through experimentation. One witch can share ideas and experiences with another, and practices can (and should be!) handed on from one to the next; but those practices will likely look quite different from one generation to the next, and I've come to see that as not lamentable but laudable. A practice that isn't adaptable (which does not mean that it cannot also be grounded in tradition) is ultimately as relevant as a set piece in an old roadside museum: interesting, perhaps, but not very useful in practical application.

I am a traditional Wiccan; it's taken me years to not only accept but embrace that fact. I am also a classic Witch. This craft to me is the sum of the materials and practices that have been passed on to me through the tradition in which I was trained, with my own stylistic touches and my personal interpretations and methodology. But it's also conjurings by candlelight, a cauldron bubbling on a stone hearth, a full moon shining through October leaves, a black cat's silent passage, an owl secreted in a hollow tree. It's incense and starlight and all the mysteries held within a dusty tome, a stone, a bone. It's brooms and bats and pointed hats. It's everything I thought witchcraft was before anyone ever told me differently--and, having come full circle at last, I realize that I knew in my very bones what it truly was all along.

Full Circle or Downward Spiral

It’s always around this time of year that I feel the most nostalgic. It was just after Lammas that things began ramping up for me, leading up to my initiation in the fall: doing rituals, attending my first trad gathering, the excitement and anticipation of the Samhain season itself. And so I remember all of this, and both nostalgia and melancholy come in equal measure as I remember the young woman I was, and all that came after. Those ended up being very challenging times as I floundered about navigating the intersection of multiple new roles that I was entirely unprepared to take on—times when I came to understand that the bit about “suffering to learn” was nothing less than the literal truth.

In those days, my partner and I sometimes joked about being the Mulder and Scully of the Wicca, but there was more than a little rueful truth about that as well. Despite having grown up as a consistently bullied kid, I was still terribly innocent of the types of intrigues that people in groups could get up to, and even my devoted X-Files viewing didn’t quite prepare me, though it did at least give me some small comfort—after all, bearing the brunt of an admittedly ugly witch war still wasn’t quite as bad as being infected with alien viruses and forced into hiding from the entire corrupt US government. Just like Mulder and Scully, we exiled ourselves in the aftermath of a negative situation, and went on to live our lives and do our things with varying degrees of success. (When I sit here now and think about it, the parallels are so close as to be disturbing. We never broke up, though, in spite of some peoples’ efforts, perhaps because we didn’t have Chris Carter scripting us. Thank the gods.) Still, the nostalgia never quite left me, though at times it lay dormant as other things took the fore.

Our mutual practice evolved, but never strayed so very far from the root stock, even though at times our focus shifted elsewhere and led us down different paths of inquiry and exploration. I’ll admit now that even skeptical as I tend to be, I have come to believe in the power of initiatory experiences, and of the bonds we form by our rituals and our oaths. I can find no other rational explanation for the persistence and the tenacity of my attachment to a system of working that ought, given the scope of these past negatives, to fill me with revulsion. (The thought of certain people absolutely does; the system, no longer. Despite my early antipathy to dualistic thinking, I’ve also come to the realization that there really are positive and negative aspects to nearly everything, and that walking the line between them is my natural state. I’ve also realized that people can do bad things for seemingly good reasons—and that some people are simply utter shitlords.)

This may be another function of getting older, but despite years of raging at sundry machines, I’ve had time to rethink some of my earlier positions and arrive at a more nuanced view of them. Seeing recent outpourings in the blogosphere that remind me of where I was so long ago have certainly been at least a partial catalyst. Some of it I can see now as the end result of where I started, and while some of the shifts that I see are absolutely to the good, others seem to me to go too far. (I’m being deliberately vague because this essay is already in danger of turning into a dissertation.) Some of these seismic changes are going to be a threat to some of the older ways of doing things—a good and a bad thing, to my mind. Good, because in this era of #metoo and consent culture, the more egregious abuses will become harder to pull off; bad, because some ways of doing things will be unfairly and unnecessarily given negative labels when they are merely one way of working among many, suitable to some but not to others. A part of my nostalgia is now for some of those older ways of being and doing, things that still hold value, things perhaps in danger of being tossed out for lack of understanding, or for being seen only for their potential negatives and not their potential positives. (I’ve been there, after all, so I recognize it when I see it.)

I have come to believe that it is entirely possible to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the law while still remaining ethical and respectful. I’m starting to believe there may be others who agree. The public writings of newer-generation BTWs are awakening new hope in me, that this form of Craft may ever survive, and thrive, in a modern culture that expects things like respect and tolerance and consent. I’ve come to believe that it’s possible to honor the past while living in the present, and without fighting the future. But I’m older now, and I’ve had a lot of time to think.

I’m pretty sure I could have handled things better in the past, had I possessed deeper levels of understanding and wisdom and maturity. All of those things come only with time and experience, and back then I had neither. Perspective may be the greatest gift of age, and it’s a damned shame that it takes so long to acquire it. I still don’t know that I’ll ever again want to train and initiate people, into any of the systems I have that right and ability in—I’ve lost quite a lot thereby in the past, and I’m gun-shy now—but I won’t rule out the extreme possibilities. The fact that I’m here writing all of this would have been a near-impossibility at one time, maybe not even that long ago. Change truly is the only constant in life.

Mulder and Scully ended up back in the FBI after a long period of exile, a return that brought its challenges and rewards. I can easily imagine both of them, during those years away from their work, thinking and reviewing, considering their paths. I can so easily see Mulder turning his badge over in his hands, wondering if it was all worth it; can see Scully taking an afternoon at the gun range, keeping up her skills just in case (she always was the better shot). I can imagine the fear and hope and hurt and anticipation they would have felt over those years. I’m feeling some of those things now. I have no idea how any of this is going to play out, but I am feeling like making a tentative foray out beyond my comfortable place might not even be the worst thing I could do.

At least, I want to believe.