Wildwood: The Tradition that Initiated Me
Tradition is not the worship of ash, but the preservation of fire. - Gustav Mahler
Traditions don’t make witches. Witches make traditions. Witchcraft continues as long as there are witches. Hail Ara, the First Witch, in whose living lineage and legacy we are. Hail the Altar of the Potent Art and Craft! Where the First Witch is, always witches are. Where there are witches, there is Ara.
A lot of people assume that I am the founder of the Wildwood Tradition. I am not, but I can understand why people think that (or want to think that). Most modern witchcraft traditions appear to have a figurehead you can point at. Often these people - for example Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders, Victor Anderson, Robert Cochrane, Z Budapest, Starhawk - are published authors or writers and speak eloquently and with some authority. Sometimes their traditions are later named for them: Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and Anderson Feri, for instance. It is also true that all these people were instrumental in the dissemination of their traditions, but each of them was also inducted into something, the full details of which most of us will never know. This is true of the Wildwood as well, and writing about this - having tried for many years - is increasingly difficult. I mostly don’t want to do it, but I am faced with it so that people who assign me as founder will no longer do so, and understand something of the context. Wildwood has flourished into a vital and potent witch tradition with initiates and communities in several continents and various lines of transmission.
The colonised Protestant western mind searches for a founder, a doctrine, a man (usually) that you can point at and say, they started this way of doing things. The colonised Catholic mind is looking for apostolic succession, authority, pomp and ceremony, the gravitas of empire and state. Colonisation and Christianity in general has deeply impacted the popular understanding of witchcraft, to the point that many would find it hard to separate. I name this cultural collision and would bring our attention to the witch trial period and the folklore and hysteria of the time. Witches were either said to become so via initiation by the Devil himself - sometimes at the Sabbath or in smaller covens - or the ‘owning’ of a familiar spirit, largely in the form of an imp, faerie, angel, or member of the dead.
So as always, context is everything.
Witchcraft is unto herself completely, primordial, and cunningly adaptive. She does not always manifest as what we think of as tradition. A lot of us point to Gerald Gardner in our discussions on witchcraft traditions because he was the first known person to come out publicly in the modern era, write a book about witchcraft today, and earnestly declare himself to be a witch. There was also Rosaleen Norton at a very similar time in the media (prior to the publication of Witchcraft Today by Gardner) in Australia being called a witch and taken to court over art that was decidedly pagan, occult, and based on folkloric witchcraft motifs and practices. We know she was in covens and initiated people, we know that it is called the Goat-Fold. We also know that in the United States in the 30s and 40s (Cora and Victor met and were married in Oregon in 1944) what would later be called Faery/Faerie and later spelled Feri was distilling. Initiates brought in during the 60s and 70s - Gwydion Pendderwen, Gabriel Carillo, Eldri, Steven Hewell, Brian DRGN, Starhawk - also deeply shaped the various branches and lines that stem from the teachings of the Andersons, to the point at which it could be said there are multiple Feri traditions.
These people later had their associated traditions named because they were faced with their initiates or folks descending magically from them wanting to discern it, name it something powerful and beautiful. It is also true that witchcraft is a deed without a name, the nameless art, and that ultimately that is the truest essence of the Craft.
This was the Craft as I was brought into it. Nameless.
I was 17 years old when Wildwood initiated me. Yes, I was present at the founding of the Coven of the Wildwood - the mother coven through which this witch house was renewed - but so were three others… each of us fatefully called to the cauldron overflowing with green flame, each of us courting the Mystery we knew was called Wildwood. We had been taught that the Wildwood was the heartland of the witches, that we belonged to it. We had each prepared intensively for this rite of Dedication: the initiation into the inner court - or what I prefer to call the Rose House - of the tradition. A year later I was then taken through the Firebrand Priestex mysteries along with one other Wildwood witch (within that first year the other two had spiralled out). We were wed to the Wildwood and its emergent tradition.
Another year later we were faced with that some issue of naming something that was being passed actively, that others were aspiring to and becoming initiated in, and that was becoming discernible as a Craft thread and House. Another coven was being branched and carried to Britain. Initiates met and tranced, invoking our Gods and Spirits to ask their counsel, They told us to name it as it had already been named, Wildwood. This was and is after all, the whole point.
In those first years I felt - I knew - I was coming into something old. I was one of those witchcraft nerds who had been introduced to various styles and philosophies of Craft by practitioners in the area, through books, forums, and anything that was available. I met people who said they practised Wicca, Stregheria, Traditional Witchcraft, eclectic Witchcraft. The most inspiring group for me personally was a coven based in Kombumerri Country, in the so-called Gold Coast area. From what I could tell from the outside they seemed to be a conscious mix of Celtic poetry and inspiration and Wicca as found in popular books and taught via teachers both in the area and at least one matriarch from the States. I loved the feeling of their public sabbat rituals and the fellowship they offered, but yet again I knew I was searching for something more chthonic, sorcerous, that smelled like the witchcraft I encountered alone at night in strange places.
Throughout my high school years I was focused mostly on the skills of magic and on practising witchcraft and speaking with spirits. It’s all I cared about, but in my senior year I fell intensely in love with someone who lived in another city, from another class and world. The Craft awoke in him while we were together and he was one of the co-founders of Coven of the Wildwood. He lives now in the States, another lives in Britain, and the fourth in a southern city here in so-called Australia. But we were simply present for an awakening and returning, two of these people may have helped to found this first coven, but I would argue that others who came a few months, or a year or two later, were markedly more influential in the development of the tradition. All of these people I would name midwives, not one of us identifies as a founder. There was nothing to found, Wildwood was whole and complete unto herself. She brought us in.
I was in awe of it and still am… I witnessed a whole being-story-mythos-landscape-mystery unfold and reveal themself through and to us constantly, at every ritual, meeting, feast, working, and in between - in our dreams and visions and experiences. Uncanny to the point of bizarre. Witches came, steadily, to learn and celebrate with us. We all learned together, excitedly sharing from our own experience and bodies of knowledge. Then there were the others. Those other witches and spirit-workers, those other covens and traditions and witch houses who danced among us and we danced among, who cross-pollinated and shared intimate lore - led by resonance and synchronicity - in camaraderie and power as older-style witches are want to do.
At the backdrop of this was a context distinct from the so-called western magical tradition that so influenced the late Victorian and Edwardian development of occultism in Britain. Freemasonic, Rosicrucian style lodges of magicians and mystics fighting amongst one another while tapping into what they call hidden chiefs or inner contacts, when a witch would speak of familiar spirits, mighty ones, and the Sabbat. The former have been overplayed to the point of revisionist fetishist worship (or denigration depending) and the latter have been continuously misinterpreted, decontextualised, and almost wilfully misunderstood. Wildwood witchcraft sprung up from a well of folklore and legend connected to complex and rich rivers of power and beauty. My own background in Balinese Hinduism, having been raised around spirit-work, animistic ritual, mediumship and oracular trance, and trance possession and vision. The virtue and practice of Wildwood trance possession differs fro any other witch tradition I have come across, the way in which we give offerings, our devotional magic, reminds me of Bali.
No one human directed this, no one ancestor; natural osmosis, inevitable syncretism, and a keen love of poetry and the wyrd inhabited the early members of the first few covens of the Wildwood and still does.
The emergence of a tradition - especially one that calls across oceans and continents, to people who remember it, who are haunted by the same dreams, visions, and spirits - is a radically complex and cunning thing. The idea that it concerns humans deciding to do things about it is laughable to me. I mean certainly I have been one of those humans at times, and I find it laughable. Ultimately we are only ever responding to larger and deeper patterns and changes. Yes, humans are drawn to turn up, willingly (hopefully) enjoined into the camaraderie and community through which the tradition enacts hirself, but ultimately a witch tradition - a witch house - is formed of the agency and authority of Gods and Spirits and the Body of Initiates wed unto them. A special kind of haunting reverberates here, that some witches understand to be the melody of the Sabbat, the throb in the witch’s forest.
When I think of Wildwood, I think of braiding… the braiding of poetry and life force that spilled forth audaciously and intensely, the braiding of folklore, legend, love, and trust. The nature of our initiatory rites and mysteries are private and I have never written a book - and would never - about Wildwood Craft. I don’t believe it could be done, even when parts of me have wondered into it.
When someone asks me about Wildwood and where it comes from or what it means to me I find myself caught in a web. I think which thread to pluck, what to point at, what to name when this whole web is the gleaming spiralling of the dreadful-wondrous roaring of existence called Beauty? I can’t possibly do it justice and I know I haven’t with this writing. I hope I have made it abundantly clear that no one founded the Wildwood, though the tradition has multiple and perhaps endless midwives. The tradition is incredibly rich, lucid and coherent - she is whole and complete unto herself - and yet what is important to each initiate differs somewhat. I could say that I notice that we are all wyrd poets, strange seers, and over-the-hedge dreamers. We are also deeply of this world, oriented to justice and liberation.
Wildwood sung herself back from across the oceans, through the shipwrecks, and up through the islands wrapped in mist and the valleys and mountains drenched in silver, green, gold, and brown. We’re people of Another Place and yet Time, Need, and Desire has us quaking, willing, daring, here and now.
In Love, Truth & Wisdom
Beware - Beyond is Beauty and Gods gather here. x
