Grimoire

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,

In the spring of 1662, in the small parish of Auldearn on the Moray coast of Scotland, a woman named Isobel Gowdie began to speak.

Over six weeks, between April 13th and May 27th, she gave four separate confessions to a panel of ministers, landowners, and a public notary named John Innes, who wrote everything down. She was not, as far as the records indicate, subjected to the spectacular physical tortures that characterised some witch trials. She simply spoke. At length, in detail, with a richness and internal consistency that scholars have been returning to ever since.

What she described was a world saturated with magic. A coven of thirteen, each with a named spirit attendant. Meetings at Earlseat Hills and the Kirk of Nairn and Darnaway Palace. The Devil as a large, dark, cold man. The Queen of Faerie in white linens.