A witchcraft of awe, wonder, and holy dread.

This One is Witch. We are Witch and the Body of the Witch is primordial, legendary, assaulted, broken into millions of fragments, scattered in ashes, bones, secrets, shame; our history is the history of healing and cursing, of justice and the breaking of covenants, of the closing of commons and the war against the erotic, of rape and murder, of migration, colonisation, our history is the Story of How Empire assimilates, deludes, and annihilates the vitality of the Mysteries of the Body. And the Body is deeper, wilder, wiser than we know.

Quietly, though some of us are humming, like wandering bees doing the work of the hive, we are dancing ancient tracks – though walking mindfully and watchfully – through the woods. Our Queen’s sign in the beautiful blackness of Night kisses the leaves and the boulders in the stream, our skin is being anointed by Her, Our Most Secret, Most Beloved Goddess. We hear the echoes of taut goat and deer skin stretched across oak and pine frames in a grove before us. We descend down the slopes in which serpents sleep and enter the place of our meeting-ground. Tonight, we come to the Sabbat to go to the Sabbat, to share in the ecstasy that is the promise of Ancient Gods whose Names are but murmurs in our mouths. The magister stands, cloaked heavily, with a wide-brimmed riding hat, and sleek black cloves by the Stang. A candle is set between the Horns of Our Great One and the Priestess of the Lady lays, her legs open and her sex up against the base of the shaft. Each of us falls into full silence as we witness the Great Mystery. The Mystery that initiated us, before the Beginning. We remember how our Bodies are contained in titanic Bodies, the Bodies of long-forgotten giants, angels, ancestors, and we stand here with the Good Folk and the Dead, listening – remembering – awaiting…

A Witchcraft of Wonder, Awe and Holy Dread. This is what I signed the Devil’s Book for. I was sold notions of a different kind of witchery once, it smelt of hoarded and stolen wealth, fanciful curiosities, classicist imaginings, and dualistic didactics… but what of the Serpent’s Tongue! The Crooked Road! The Flame between the Horns! The Holy Queer Gnosis!

I stand in a Circle of Initiates, so I will not write the details of what we do, what we say, who we say it to, these are our seals and signs between the Worlds. They echo across time and join the Holy Song of Forever that bends the brick, moves the mountain, and summons the spirits. I stand with skin, yes mostly pale, descended from the Isles of the Mighty and Fair, just like my mother, and yet I also stand with people of the most ancient country, of snowy mountains, and I stand with beloveds who descends from far to the north where ice kisses pole and from ancient desert peoples who recorded tongues of angels. I am with beloveds who are gorgeously fat, who are thin, who are fit and vital in all the ways this could be. I stand with beings of mysterious genders, perhaps genders that reflect Our Horned Owl who silently swoops in the night hunting, discerning, vigilant One, or the Fox who darts and disappears and changes faster than we can conceive conscious thought… or the Stag, leaping across the River of the Quick and the Dead, gathering in His tines the souls of those who have passed through the Veil and delivering them to the Hag in the Cave, or of the Mother Bear perhaps, strong, efficient, wise, waiting, then – Bodies next to Bodies smelling Bodies growing Bodies changing Bodies tracking Bodies watching Bodies merging Bodies – This is Witchcraft, after all. We are too strange, weird, cunning, animal for the world of men, occasionally they come for our cards, charms and curses, but never for Our Mysteries. Unless they want to be completely undone, unpicked at the etching, at the crevice of consciousness. And who wants that?

A Witchcraft of Wonder.
A Witchcraft of Awe.
A Witchcraft of Holy Dread.

Come! Come! 
We Fly! We Fly! 
Into the Night! Through the Darkness! 
With the Light! Into the Stars!

Our skins shift and turn so easily, so beautifully, so primally, that one might gasp horrified at the twisting and the turning our Kind is made for. We are half-wolf, with the face of lions, and the eyes of turtles, hearts of ravens, veins filled with the iridescence of mineral earth. We are mer-creatures with the wings of seraphs and bellies like cauldrons holding the mix as we are mixed, and altered, shifted, and changed. We don’t dare to do this thinking we will stay the same, stranger. Ever the stranger to ourselves, ever the consequence the world does not risk, ever the chaos you push far away, ever the deviance and heresy concocted for you by deceivers committed to the demons of oppression.

We know the power within the Body. We are God Herself – Becoming. We are the Grandmother Weaver laughing stars, grinding bones to dust, and unpicking reality. We are the Old God – the Grandfather – silent and roaring, always just under the surface until it breaks. We are the magic that happens when Longing and Belonging dance, when Being and Becoming whir, when the Exquisite Loneliness of Existence roars painfully through our guts and mind and the thorns of the hidden way burst through our blood-roots and lay us bare for the Mothers of Fate to read our entrails.

Oh you who would deem to put this here, and that there, and say this is this and that is that, oh honey – please. Our Bodies change quicker than you can summon your stupidity for the hundredth time today. Alas, we will always be the Wonder, Awe, and Holy Dread as long as Our Art – born of Angels fucking Soil kissing Women teaching Goats bending Time eating Ourselves lusting Beauty – persists. And persist They will, for She is the most cunning and excellent creature, and She is made to Yearn, Quicken, Deepen, Delve, and Break Open the Treasure Trove.

Come to the Feast, then, Stranger. For here is the Covenant of the Stranger. x