Category: Lineages of the Craft

Before the gods had names, before the Olympians sat in their bright halls and quarrelled over mortals, before even the earth had taken its shape beneath a sky – there was Night.

Not the absence of day. Not a gap between sunrises. Night as a being, vast, self-sufficient, older than anything that followed her, so ancient and so powerful that even Zeus, lord of the gods, would not cross her.

That is Nyx.

She is one of the first things that ever existed, born directly from Chaos. The yawning void at the beginning of everything. Along with Erebus, the deep darkness of the underworld. She did not have to earn her power. She did not have to fight for her domain. She predates the entire architecture of the Greek cosmos. The Olympians, with all their thunder and glory, are her descendants. Death is her child. Sleep is her child. Fate is her child. The dreams that visit you in the dark are her grandchildren.

In the wilderness beyond the garden, in the screech of owls at midnight and the howl of wind through a desert canyon, Lilith has always been there. She is older than the Bible that tried to erase her. Older than the demonology that tried to contain her. Older than the patriarchy that tried, and failed, to make her obey.

She is the woman who said no. The exile who became a queen. The darkness that refuses to be civilised into light.

Few figures in the magical and spiritual traditions have undergone as dramatic a reclamation as Lilith. For centuries she was cast as demon, child-killer, and night terror. In the hands of contemporary witches, she has become something altogether different: a patron of sovereignty, a keeper of buried rage, a goddess of the wild self that cannot be domesticated. And one of the most powerful presences a practitioner can choose to work with.

If you choose to.

Who is Lilith?

Picture a Halloween party in 1969. Not just any Halloween party. A Mensa Halloween party. The kind of party where the puns are layered and the costumes are elaborate and the conversations go on longer than they should because everyone in the room has an opinion about everything.

At this party there is a woman in her late thirties. A Michigan public school teacher, a mother, an elementary school educator who has spent more than two decades teaching children how to read. She is also, she will tell you without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, a witch.

The head of the Psychology department at the University of Michigan is at this party too. He starts talking to the witch. By the end of the night he has invited her to come and speak to his students.

By the end of the year, Michigan has a celebrity.

In 1921, a fifty-eight-year-old British Egyptologist published a book that changed the history of witchcraft. Not because it was right, but because it arrived at exactly the right moment with exactly the right idea, in exactly the right voice.

The book was The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. The woman was Margaret Alice Murray. And the idea, that the accused witches of the early modern witch trials were not deluded, hysterical, or innocent victims but actual practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian religion that had survived underground for centuries, was, as subsequent scholarship would show in some detail, largely wrong.

And yet.

She rises from the water at night.

She is impossibly beautiful. Her hair is long and falls loose around her shoulders. Her eyes hold the particular quality of deep water, dark, reflective, suggesting depths that the surface does not reveal. She may wear a snake coiled around her body like living jewellery. She may have the tail of a fish where her legs should be, or she may appear entirely human, more human than any human you have ever seen, which is itself the sign.

She is Mami Wata. Mother Water. And she has been present in the spiritual life of West and Central Africa, and the African Atlantic world, for longer than any written record can reach.

She is not a goddess in the distant, untouchable sense. She is immediate. Capricious. Generous and dangerous in equal measure. She takes lovers and brings them fortune, or she takes them entirely. She heals. She curses. She appears to those she chooses, often without being asked, and the encounter changes the person forever.

To be chosen by Mami Wata is not

Before Confucius. Before the dynasties that gave China its recognisable historical shape. Before the texts that would define Chinese philosophy and religion for millennia – there were the Wu.

They danced in long-sleeved robes until the spirits entered them. They spoke in the language of gods and communicated the will of the dead to the living. They performed rain ceremonies, healed the sick, drove off malevolent forces, interpreted dreams, and predicted the future through divination. They were called to the oracle bones, the ancient Chinese practice of writing questions and submitting them to flame. And their voices were recorded in the inscriptions that survive as some of the oldest writing in the world.

And they were, predominantly, women.

The wu (巫) ~ the word translates as shaman, sorceress, spirit-medium, or ritual specialist depending on context and century,

There is a two-roomed cottage in ruins on a hill above Kilbarron Lake in County Clare, Ireland. The roof is long gone. The walls are worn down by a century and a half of Atlantic weather. The lake below it is dark and still in winter, silver and unremarkable in summer. There is no marker. No plaque. No monument of any kind.

But people still go there.

They have been going since before the woman who lived there was in the ground. They walked miles across bog and mountain to get to that cottage. The sick, the desperate, the grieving, the merely curious,

Half her face is living flesh. Warm, pink, the face of a woman in the fullness of her years. The other half is the blue-black of a corpse left in winter ground, or the pale grey of bone from which all warmth has long departed. She does not hide either side. She does not turn her living face toward you and keep the dead one in shadow. She stands before you whole, and she watches you with both sets of eyes, and she waits to see whether you will flinch.

Most people flinch.

Hel is the goddess of the dead in Norse tradition. Not the dramatic dead, not the glorious battle-slain who ride to Valhöll with their wounds still bleeding and their glory still fresh. Those belong to Odin. Hel receives everyone else. The ones who died in bed, shivering with fever. The ones who drowned at sea. The ones who grew old and slow and let go quietly in the dark.

On 13 April 1662, in the village of Auldearn in the Scottish Highlands, a woman walked in from her ordinary life, the milking, the bread-making, the weaving of yarn, and confessed to everything.

She confessed to making a pact with the Devil at Auldearn Kirk, where he stood at the reader’s desk with a black book and baptised her in her own blood, giving her the new name Janet. She confessed to flying through the night sky on corn stalks, crying Horse and Hattock in the Devil’s name! She confessed to feasting in the halls of the Queen of Elfhame beneath the Downy Hills. She confessed to transforming herself into a hare, a crow, a cat. Slipping out of her human skin with a rhyme and returning to it with another. She confessed to making elf arrows, those sharp flint points whittled by elf-boys in the fairy world, and shooting them at the people of Auldearn.

She confessed to all of it. Freely,

She arrives before the light does.

In the deep, iron cold of January’s end, when the ground is still locked and the trees are still bare and it seems, as it always seems at this point in the year, that spring is a rumor rather than a promise. She comes. Not dramatically. Not with thunder or storm or the kind of announcement that the harder goddesses make when they arrive. She comes the way the first morning light comes – quietly, from the edge, a brightening that you notice is already happening before you can name the moment it began.

The snowdrops are up. The ewes have milk. The days are longer, just barely, just enough to feel. Something is stirring in the ground that was frozen solid a month ago. Something is stirring in the creative self that went dormant in the dark.