Tag: Lineages of the Craft

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.

She comes before the battle, not after it. She does not wait for the dead. She announces them. A crow settling on a warrior’s shoulder before the first sword is drawn. A washerwoman at the ford, scrubbing the armor of those who will not survive the day. A beautiful woman on a red horse, watching from a hillside with eyes that have already counted the cost.

By the time you see the Morrigan, she has already seen you.

She is one of the oldest and most formidable presences in the Celtic tradition. A goddess whose name translates as Phantom Queen or Great Queen, whose triple nature encompasses war, death, prophecy, and the deep sovereignty of the land itself. She

She rides a beast with seven heads across a crimson sea. She holds a golden cup – and the cup is full. She is drunk on the blood of saints and the wine of fornication, robed in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and precious stones, and on her forehead is written a name: Mystery. Babylon the Great. The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.

The Book of Revelation meant her as a horror. A warning. The ultimate symbol of spiritual corruption, worldly excess, and the empire that devoured the faithful.

It did not work out quite as intended.

Because the magicians got hold of her. The visionaries. The rebels and the heretics and the poets who understood that the things the church called most abominable were often the things it feared most .

Before the storm breaks, there is a change in the air. Something electric. Something that sweeps through and tells every living thing, bird, tree, blade of grass, that what is coming cannot be stopped and should not be.

That is Oyá.

She is the wind before the lightning finds the earth. She is the wall of air that precedes the hurricane, the dust devil spinning in a dry field, the cold front that arrives in the night and leaves the world unrecognisable by morning. She is the force that clears the old away so entirely that new things have no choice but to grow.

She is the oriṣa of winds, lightning, and storms, and she is the only oriṣa capable of controlling the Eégún. The spirits of the dead. That combination, storm and death, wind and the ancestors, is not coincidental. Both are forces of total transformation. Both sweep away what was and leave behind a changed world. Both move through you whether you are ready or not.

In Yorùbá, the name Oyá is believed to derive from the phrase ọ ya, “she tore”,