To usher in the Pink moon's rising light and her verdant, prophetic, and erotic work... and to officially usher out this awful winter... I begin with sharing a sweet little charm with you. I've found this one in Current Superstitions (19th century) and have been using it for about eight years now. Not for dreaming of my future husband, but for all kinds of seductive divinations and dream fortunes. I don't find many other cross references for it, but given the breadth of love fortunes and divinations especially in the annals of North American Folklore, I'm not at all surprised by such a random one-off.
There's no specifics on which wood to use-- it only says sticks and I think the raw accessibility of that makes for good magic. I selected dried bramble vine-- bramble is a bringer of love and a guardian of dreams. I keep the thorns for future dream work; they have a way of deterring nightmares. I bake the wood first before washing in rose and rosemary water and drying again.
Once completely dry, I anointed the thorny woods in Oneroi oil (a blend of opium, Neptune, musk and amber) and selected reed wool for binding. Slide that baby under my pillow and we'll see what dreams come climbing up at night...
“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”- Plato
Educators are my heroes. They are my family. I work for them, in higher education institutions. In my daily life, I spend most of my time surrounded by students and educators, facilitating and organizing their operations. I value the service of education-- any form of it, more than almost any other service. Education is one of the nobler pursuits, and a benefit to humanity. Access to it, by anyone and everyone, should be a social obligation. It should be a ritual we never forget. Not just for ourselves and the future generations, but for everyone who suffered in the name of accessible education.
Hypatia of Alexandria’s story is a misunderstood but tragic one. I honor her day not because of some wild narrative about her being the 'oyster-flayed martyr of pagans'. She wasn’t. She was by all accounts a pious, respected, middle-aged, Neo-Platonist scholar, orator and philosopher who taught maths and astronomical sciences in the open to people of different classes and religions. She was bludgeoned with rooftiles and burned due to her affiliations and associations with controversial social and political figures of the time. She was collateral damage caught in the religious and political ignorance of the burgeoning Christian unrest around her. Hypatia is closer to a martyr of intellectuals and educators. Of those who were charitable and creative and wise, caught living in an ignorant time and place. And those who suffer from guilt by association. And those who are wrongfully humiliated. And those who abhor mobs and adore math. And those crushed under the oppressive wheel of Abrahamic religion. A far deeper role than ‘pagan saint’.
Hypatia represents the consequences of education in the face of political upheaval and mob zealotry. She represents the cruelty that befalls the innocent when ego, religion, toxicity and anti-intellectualism take hold of groups… or entire lands. Like right now. We are seeing the same rotten corruption gnaw at the peace of the world around us. We are seeing a rise in hatefulness for the charitable. Hatred against those who provide humanitarian aid. Hatred against simple arithmetic and recorded history. We are in a land that is returning to a flat-earth; where sticks turn to snakes and the sun stands still and those who do good work are least respected. And are crucified for it. Sounds... familiar.
There is a sickness to finding pleasure in an echo-chamber. Especially an insidiously anti-humanitarian, pro-greed campaign to strip and mine the land like parasites feasting on flesh. I don't know what it will mean to the generations to come to be so deprived of progress and forward-thinking in such a swift move, but I believe that the wheel of this cycle has long been turning, and always will. Did Hypatia wonder, in her last, fearful moments, if the violent, bigoted mob before her would ever come to see reason? Well, they didn't. Her world, like ours, was one overridden with angry, fearful, hateful people who do not truly understand what suffering they bring into this world. I hope to see the pendulum swing back. Or maybe see the string cut.
“If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.”- Epicurus
I wonder if Hypatia’s ghost rubs her forehead in frustration and laments, “Do these fools ever learn?” I’d say she died because the powerful, self-interested, ignorant always seem to win. Because the separation of church and state should be a divide so deep a sea could fill it. Because blind faith makes even good people follow evil men, and sanctify and justify those evils without knowing what they do. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding, as Henry Drummond so eloquently says. Today I am grateful that ignorance could not destroy the legacy of intellectuals like Hypatia. The fact that we’ve been educated on her existence is proof that the preservation of knowledge continues onwards. Will we fail her, in this generation, by, going backwards? By burning heretics and witches and midwives?
"We can be true to her memory only if we recognize the life she led as well as the death she suffered."- Edward J. Watts
So, in Hypatia’s spirit, go forth and protest. Teach. Teach. Teach. Walk unafraid knowing what brutality awaits the thinking man. Teach; with rationality and reason, with openness and scrutiny, with peer-reviews and primary sources-- whatever it is you have to offer. Indulge your curiosity and stop to listen to the teachers today. Teach every soul you can reach who can hear you. Offer it freely. Rebel against the mob and keep the knowledge flowing.
Should a great disease of disruption,
a rotten smell of corruption,
arise around your countrymen,
who let this feral evil in;
and now your neighbors flee their home,
again to somewhere else to roam,
and these traitors to Liberty's words,
are acting like entitled turds;
weave a charm to help your homies--
to hide them from the slave hunters and their cronies.
Remember who made this country free;
and bind all facists, so shall it be.
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| Hoodoo Herb and Root Magic by Catherine Yronewode |
Hag's night in my path takes place on December 11th-- but I hadn't time to post on that day. I've been avoiding my duties for a while. Part of me feels like I have to be woken up. Jolted. Taken from comfort and thrust into the cold. On a creative level at least.
I'm so asleep. Escaping. But always, right under the surface-- an incessant desire to create something... or I suppose, express something. Art, of course, is one of the most common and accessable forms of magic and can conjure, dispell, invoke or abjure as we see fit. Art will transfix or trick the eye; it will outrage with fury and flame, or evoke wonder and stillness. It is a powerful magic that anyone and everyone can do and had wild effect. Remember that when in doubt. It's magic.
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| "Moonshot" by Via Hedera, 2024 |
Guns and witches have history. These weapons were supposed to have been used to fire shots of silver or hair at our familiars or our shadow-selves. These silver bullets or supposed hair-balls were thought to combat witch-dogs, witch-turkeys, witch-hogs and witch-hares. Pokeberry would take care of the bewitched hog, while silver was a good remedy for a hare or a doe. Asafoetida (Satan’s weed) and barleycorns are both referenced in the Frank C. Brown collection for their disenchantment capabilities over firearms, and needles with lye loaded into a gun were intended to do the same. Or, if one needed to get rid of a bewitchment, they could draw the witch or write her/his name on a tree, or on a paper shaped like a heart, and then shoot the image itself, or with a witch-bullet (a type of apotropaic hairball, see more here).
"To the witch was ascribed the tremendous power of inflicting strange and incurable diseases, particularly on children, of destroying cattle by shooting them with hair-balls, and a great variety of other means of destruction; of inflicting spells and curses on guns and other things,--" -Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina (p. 9). [Chapel Hill] : The University. Kindle Edition.
I’ve hesitated to discuss guns in folk magic because they aren’t a part of my lifestyle. Not volentarily at least. It never feels like the right time you know? Because of all of the mass shootings. Because of the outright threats against public figures and private citizens. Because of the unease the clockwork of these events brings in my specific country. I support my country’s constitution and value the art of weaponry deeply, but I also grew up Southern California in the early 90’s… Violence, especially gun violence, was a source of terror for me frequently as a child. I even had little rhymes I had made up to help me feel safe, ones I still say to myself when I hear that dreadful clap in the night. It’s just another tool of blood and war magic—which I suppose I appreciate, but all the same, not my personal tool of passion. Or magic.
When it comes to
our folklore and the folk magic of liberty, protection and steadfastness, a pistol or a rifle is one of our magical and spiritual tools—like it or not. And on another note— Southern and
Southeastern USA folklore does have more than its fair share of charms
regarding the creation of a witch through shooting a silver bullet at the full
moon. I’m not saying it’s how we make
witches… but it is one of our strange ways. It
is specific to us. We climb to hilltops
and shoot through handkerchiefs at a full moon to become servants of the
Man-in-Black and his jaybird. I touch on a bit in my book, and I encourage you to embrace the facinating notion that firearms are intrinsically linked to our cultural history so also our witchlore.
I have a deep
respect for people who hunt their food and defend themselves; I suppose that’s
what I always hoped guns would be used for; practical purposes. I grew up with ethical hunters; folks who
used every icky and squishy part and never took more than their pantry freezer and the shelf
date could withstand. We regularly got gator and elk from cousins when there was enough to share, and damn was it good. My perspective has
long been ecocentric and respectful to the system as I see it. It’s the
violence between us humans I find so distasteful and terrifying. I see the art in sharp-shooting, in weaponry-enthusiasm,
engineering, in the history of liberty behind the weapon, the beautiful
mechanics of this revolutionary tool and the practical applications it's brought into our lives. A weapon of liberty and opression; it's quite the nuanced matter.
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American hero Lt. Holloman's modified M1911 pistol; with a “sweetheart". On loan, Tukwila WA: Museum of Flight |
The human need for apotropaic charms are a deep and personal interest to me; a unifying force shared and syncretic between so many culutres and peoples. Who knew that guns have a lot to do with magic, and with witches? Guns were used to shoot silver bullets at the images of witches or at haunted cattle, they could be bewitched by one touch from a witch. The Frank C. Brown collections, Journals of American Folklore and a few of the general folklore collections of the 20th century have a bit to say about guns and witches, surprisingly. According to these sources, guns were especially prone to witch-tampering. So, I suppose I see why practictioners of old would want to learn some basic gun-bewitching, for their own sake and that of their friends, family and familiars.
We witches had a knack for quelling gun violence I suppose. Our ancestors often thought it was in the nature of charmers, bewitchers, enchanters, witches, sorcerers or conjure folk alike to pass their hands over guns and cause them to misfire, or otherwise faulter in some way. In some cases, these suposed rifle-hexers would bewitch a gun so that it could fire at no beast (likely because witches move in or are served by animal-shaped familiars and as it happens, there are plenty of tales Southern U.S tales of a hare or rabbit catching a bullet and a suspected witch being found with a corresponding wound in place of the hare). Witch-men and witch-women would mutter simple hexes or other incantations to make a gun useless to hunters. Even a witch in one’s presence might make the weapon ineffective to fire. Likewise, one simple charm referenced in Brown's collecion references a wife who was reported to cause her husband’s gun to fail by knotting the corners of her apron.
Witches could reportedly also bless a gun or charm it to never miss as well. Luck played a large role in the matter of North American gunlore I’ve found; the idea that the capricious spirits of the world could make this weapon powerful or useless seemed to be of some worry to some of the common folk.
Notable Gun Auspices: reported in Popular Beliefs and Superstitions: A Compendium of American Folklore: Ohio edited by W. Hand
Gun Bewitching: reported in Daniels' Encyclopedia of Susperstisions, folkflore and the occult sciences of the world
Firearm magic has
an unsettling wildness and indirectness to it despite the very art of it being
aimed and intentional. Typically, a
blade swung is with focus and with great limitation. But a gun… One second of time passes and lifetimes
are changed irrevocably. I suppose that's why I'm facinated by the natural way that we as humans have used magical practices as a rebellion and reaction against this very tool of rebelion and reaction. The way we merge our natural and unnatural fears with our spirituality and creatre tools meant to avert evil, facinates my restless mind. Spiritual and physical protection-- how do we change as we percieve it? What power comes of it? The metaphysical potential of protection magic against any weapon, or the use of hexing-magic to prevent the operation of weapons is a part of that fabric of New World folklore so many of us are working to preserve and restore-- the actions and reactions of time and change. I make no commentary on what this
means in our social climate. I'll keep muttering my protective charms and wishing for a kinder world.
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| Sin-mother of sharpers and shylocks, sharks and showmen. |
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| Fireweed/Willowherb syrup. (true color). |
Another Pink moon rises, and with it, the feast of rabbits and hares. Sadly, the pickins' were slim this year and I just didn't feel the need or desire to do my flower fry. I don't even know why. I walked with the fields and flowers, and even picked a few for the altar, enjoying the sense of sacrifice. But when I got home, the tide felt... less food-oriented and more about transitions.
I took time to garden; transitioning pots to the outdoors to catch the fresh new rain to come. And I sat with my rabbits; Bosley and Sherman. They reminded me of the warmth and kindness and change around me. So, they got a little but of fresh green oat and barley grass from my Holy Grains garden. A quiet tide with family-- loved ones. My commitment to observance of hours and tides continues, even challenged by my own lazy will in the midst of all this sadness, war, anger, change... I keep to the hours.
My newest venture with fellow witchy-people has really helped me recuperate my sense of socialization. I really love Lisa and Tania for that. Shout out to Coleman of Dark Exact Tarot for linking us magical folk together. It's cold out here in the Northwest, I'm blessed to have found such warmth with you all. May the rise of the Floralia, Walpurgis, Beltane and May Day be everything you need, and bring every bit of fire that warms me.
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| Night-flyer by Via Hedera linocut stamp |
Bitch. I wana be you.
You fun, son of a gun.
Gutter queen,
often seen
making bulls flee, way over the hagerleen.
Through a hole, over a creek;
Inspire the bold and scare the meek.
Ride men, drink sin.
By Satan below,
with his fiery glow;
I wana be you
Before I go.
You know what I love most about folklore, fairytales and
fables? The sense of identification we find with the figures we
discover. For some, the idea of a witch and the legend surrounding
them means more than the facts, and over time, what is fact and fiction simply
becomes folklore, legend or myth. I spend most of my time combing
books. I collect and hoard them, and I read them day in and day out
taking notes on everything I find of any interest. As the cold wanes, I
hunker down into my books even deeper and enjoy the stories and tales that help
pass the time as we wait for the sun's return.
“It is known that she was a woman of bad morals.”
I have to say, I really love falling in love with a folktale witch. Cross recounted a tale of the supposed Northampton Witch of North Carolina, Miss Phoebe Ward in the Journal of American Folklore, and it was later picked up and further distributed through the Green, Brown and Hand collections, giving it some popularity. This folk narrative was highlighted in Elizabeth A. Lay’s folk superstition drama/theater piece When Witches Ride: A Play of Folk Superstition. Supposedly, this 19th century witch was famed for the misfortune she brought to those who turned her away, (like the fairy from Beauty & the Beast), and embodied much of the superstition we love about witches here in the West.
What I liked about the witch in this narrative was that she
represents the best aspects of witchery; this unashamed, unpredictable, cunning
creature who could be near death in the freezing cold and still charm a man
into giving her booze and a fire to sit by. The idea of this woman
engenders affection in me. The tale says that she died very old,
surrounded by a life of scandal and superstition, fear and fable. I
want to go out like that.
Phoebe was a beggar, an old woman, presumably a white American person, possibly a traveler, who made her living off of the rare charity of others. The account states that the general atmosphere around her was fearful and negative; with people said to need to perform all acts of inhospitality in order to get her away from their homes where she was well-known to overstay her welcome. People were seemingly quite cruel to this old beggar woman, sticking pins in the chairs they offered her and burning foul odors to drive her away- this was done using pepper, an old remedy for driving away evil spirits, devils and witches, and I suppose, poor old women.
"Through thick, through thin, way over in the hagerleen"
The transformative skin-slipper is very much the quintessential new world witch motif of old, a definite throwback to the most classic fears regarding witchcraft that happen to be shared across cultures (as magical concepts are want to do). I find the skin-slipping witch to be the most fascinating one, a kindred spirit.
Correspondences of her variety of hag:
For these new world
witches of old tales, the slipping of skin was quite literal- the skin came off
by means of a grease, ointment in combination with an incantation of some sort,
or some kind of ritualistic movement like turning round in three
circles. The witch flew either as a beast, succubi,
force or spirit- and the skin would be quite literally left behind, or
otherwise, the “skin” could be interpreted as the body itself while the spirit
flies away. But Phoebe Ward had more gifts than sheer skin-slipping-
that art is basic to our kind, and Phoebe was no basic bitch witch.
Among other mysterious gifts presented within the brief
narrative of this folktale witch, Phoebe could:
A witch like this could be warded off by:
Maybe the idea of Phoebe was just a way to express the narrative of witchery, maybe it was a hogwash tale of nonsense spurred up to to give folks some good fun. Maybe, just maybe, Phoebe was a bonafide witchy woman (or amalgam of women) who went out like a solid boss. I’m not sure I care, I kind of just like knowing that this personification of American witchy superstition has a name, has the wisdom to help pass along to the next generation of witches. So here’s to you, and cheers to you Phoebe Ward the Northampton Witch of lore.
May we meet someday on these nocturnal flights, somewhere far
away from b'needled chairs...
When Witches Ride by Elizabeth A. Lay
Witchcraft in North Carolina by Tom Peete Cross
The Journal of American Folklore: "Folklore from the Southern
States"-by Tom Peete Cross: Journal of
American Folklore V XXII
The Silver Bullet, and Other American Witch Stories by Hubert J.
Davis
