Ten years of professional witchery: things I’ve learnt.

Eleven years ago, at the start of 2009, my book Spirited came out. (You can read a really beautiful review Luke W wrote about that book here.) With this publication and having already been involved in public ritual facilitation and leading magical study circles since 2004 (in Toowoomba and Brisbane) I began to feel ready to push myself forward into what seemed to be calling. What seemed to be calling was specifically the teaching of particular magical skills to practising witches and spirit-workers beyond my own tradition at the time.

For a decade this has been the sum of most of my work. Yes, I attempted two Bachelor degrees during this period – one in Western Herbal Medicine and one in Contemporary Dance – and performed well academically, but both times it became apparent that this profession, this vocation, trumped any of this for me. Perhaps because of my astrological predispositions, I threw everything I had into it. Leo Sun in the 6th House, Scorpio Moon in the 9th House, Sagittarius Midheaven, Aquarius Rising… and that’s Western and Placidus… Whole House is also relevant. Halfway into this decade I also started to more and more identify with my work in teaching and mentoring and became less and less attached to being known as an author or a writer. This became apparent to me when my newer friends in Bali (having moved to Ubud in November 2013) didn’t know I was an author until a year or so in.

During this past decade I also trained in and experienced the initiatory rites and mysteries of three other witchcraft traditions, and through it all, I never once stopped privately teaching and initiating witches into the Wildwood Tradition. My private magic – my personal coven-based and mystery tradition witchcraft, the crooked road wanderings of an initiate – have provided context, orientation, clarity, feedback, and the right kind of magical support for the kind of work I do, and the kind of life I live. Wildwood especially has been the heartland of witches that I have needed in the most harrowing periods of my life… as some of us like to say, the Wildwood belongs to all witches, but some witches belong to the Wildwood… 

I have learnt that humans are very, human. That we fight, squabble, hate, resent and are excellent at operating in scarcity models that promote misunderstandings and miscommunications. I have learnt that we are very human: that we lift each other up, love fiercely, question deeply, and aspire to act from mutual aid, respect, and prosperity. Throughout this friendship has been the stellar stone I have danced around, sacrificed at, and poured out hearty libations… learning how to be ever more human and hopefully becoming a better one at that.

In the offering of workshops, intensives, mentorships, and courses regularly (I can’t say I teach a lot of “classes” in the sense people are used to) I have discovered how passionate and inquisitive witches and spirit-workers are. Over and over I have converged with people aspiring to diligently and excellently practise these Arts and hone these skills that we adore, that teach us so much about living. I have watched experienced people who did not believe full trance possession possible emerge from intensives shaken and awake to new-old realities. I have listened to people exclaim that things finally make sense in ways that compel them to journey deeper into their witchery, into the web of wyrd, into intimacy with the spirits, the land, and the ancestry they carry in the landscape of their own being. I have been humbled at the kinds of people, initiates, adepts, seekers, and wanderers who gather at these immersions into magical technique and exploration. The work of these spirits and mysterious ones catalyses potent convergences.

I am ever in awe of the Work. I have always felt that my job is to turn up, aligned, prepared/not prepared, leaning in, listening, awake to the senses and with my connections to the Spirits fed and ringing out. I have scaffolds, plans, notes, and countless iterations of these workshops to rest upon and that which satisfies the magic the most is to get out of my own way and allow. To do the work as if the magic is relevant (because it IS), necessary, now more than ever… or else – what are we doing here? And this is how I have learnt to teach. They have taught me. You have taught me.

I have spoken before of the braid of the white threads and the red threads. This is language and poetry deeply embedded in understandings that challenge how many are trained to think, feel, perceive, and navigate the reality that societies within countries like the US, Australia, and Britain perpetuate. The notion that spirits, mysteries, are their own centres of agency, their own fates, possessing their own stories, agendas, priorities, ways of doing, being, sensing, interacting seems increasingly anathema in societies that can not tolerate the sensual, experiential, intimate, direct. Regardless of whether or not those societies register the existence and interaction of spirits, to the witch magic is ever-present and spirits are everywhere. And yet what seems primarily true is this: that the spirits are conscious and vital participants in the creative process; that if something is said to be lost, say a magical tradition, that the sponsoring and tutelary spirits of those threads can return them and remarry them to the red. Those living ones who carry that iron-forged blood of the memory of stars in the earth. But not without us. And so one of my most constant passions has been to pass on the techniques, methods, and rites that have helped me and others do this work. The work of paying attention, of sharpening one’s senses, keenly observing patterns, of communicating and relating lucidly and personally with the spirits and gods, of taking them into us as vessels – carrying them – the work of oracular seership, reading omens, divination, weaving with the wyrd, travelling through various realms, cursing, binding, blessing, conjuring.

I have found also that a tension exists culturally. My familial link to living magical, animistic, mindfully ritualistic cultures and the internalisation of this as a strength and blessing has often resulted in misunderstandings and misconceptions. It has taken me some picking apart and dark nights of the soul to perceive the cultural imperialism that thrives insidiously in sub-cultures and alternative networks within the countries that I spend the majority of my time. This is why questions like:

“How do you know the spirits and gods are real?”

are questions that don’t seem relevant or necessary to my practice? What do you mean? This presupposes so many things!

It also means that some people practising the Art tend to divide it into what is deemed “practical and realistic” and what is “spiritual, mystical…” This dichotomy is both reductive and harmful. It also is ridiculous within the context of witchery itself.

The practical mysticism of witchcrafts CAN open us to body-based experiential cosmology that anchors us deeply into place, opening us to the labyrinthine journeys of initiation. The intensive training of the arts of witches, these hidden arts that evoke the spirits, that test and challenge us may hone grounded, vital, aware, and effective Crafters whose work can impact the worlds. Or else, why? I did not become involved in the Craft to stare at my navel and say “Well done!”

One of the most poignant pieces of advice I have ever heard regarding magic was in the movie Practical Magic,

Aunt Jet: I mean you can‘t practice witchcraft while you look down your nose at it.

Instead let the Broken Open Heart help to transmute the parts of us desiring to appeal to the mechanistic, hyper-rationalist, fragmentation of capitalist and imperialist hierarchies into the parts of us that resist continued colonisation and work towards liberation. Let us become the poets, healers, permaculturalists, mentors, teachers, gardeners, scientists, handy-folk, nurses, dancers, warriors… that we need to become in order to artfully and effectively participate in taking responsibility for ourselves and our impacts on each other and the world around us.

I have spent a decade publicly offering this work, travelling, teaching in five continents, and focusing on becoming a better and more human friend, because I can see and sense the effects, the ripples. I trust in the words of one magical and mighty Martha Graham,

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others”
― Martha Graham

I could not have done or become any of this without the aid of wondrous, complicated, and skilled teachers, human and otherwise. You all know who you are. x

Photograph by Luke Brohman and face painted by Mira Melaluca.