Funny, for
someone who showers twice a day and cleans the home compulsively, I am happy as
a pig in mud when I’m working like a pig in mud… I grew up around god-fearing folk who were
convinced that Jesus himself was looking at every baseboard, running his prim
little finger over every mantle, silently judging our impurity. And yet, I never got the impression Jesus
would have cared. I don’t think many otherworldly
beings do care once they’ve left this tethered place. Why should they care? They know what we are, they know we are
small, slimy, imperfect, puking, farting, bleeding, bile-filled baboons
grunting in the mud and slathering ourselves in chemical compounds daily. They don’t usually care, not unless literal purification
is their game. I will go before the
altar of the Mother and Father of bones, witches and corruptions; with dirty
feet and sticky hands and tangled hair, and they will smile at my plainness,
and celebrate my abandon.
Cleanliness may
be next to godliness, but my gods are not always clean, pristine beings. In fact, I’m not entirely certain the
spirits and entities that typically work with me are what someone would call a
god-- needing all the bells and whistles and applause so commonly offered to
the divine, and they certainly don’t mind some dirt and grime. As a matter of fact, I’d say that the spirit
world in all its vast and varied array, does not always want, need or even
conceptualize our concept of cleanliness. I know from personal experience that the world
of the spirits (which include the long-decayed dead and the nightmarish
otherworldly) that there is a place for all of it, for the grave and the
temple. There must be a place for it in
magic, because it exists in nature, and there is nothing in nature that is without
value. I think we place too high a value
on making magic look clean, pristine without a little bit of mean, and I don’t
care for that power-washing of the dark arts.
We’re just animals, folks. We’re
just rotting animals like the others; covered in bacteria and filled with
viruses. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It just is.
Feral Folk-magic
Do you have any
idea how much filth goes into folk-magic?
The garbage bin or dumpster is a valuable resource in some regards;
you’ll never know when you need the soiled socks of someone who slighted you,
you’ll never know just how useful an outhouse can be until your dropping the
names of your foes down into the shit-pit.
To cause living things to grow in the body of an enemy, it was commonly
recommended to feed them the crushed corpses of snails, lizards and worms, or
to fill a dolly with rotting meat with maggots.
The fresh and bloody brains of hares were rubbed on the gums of babes;
toenails and urine would be soaked in the drink of an errant lover; feces of
beasts would be dried, powdered and sold as supplements (and sometimes still
are).
Humans harvest
the bile of suffering bears for folk medicinal hogwash and the fat of dead men
were once believed to be an effective ingredient in candle-making. Hell, some of my favorite old love charms
referenced in Greek and Roman witchery called for the flesh of children, the
fingerbones of murdered men and the blood of puppies. One charm I’ve found called for the hair of a
desired lover to be sewn through the flesh of a dead man. Another I’ve found in a book on Neapolitan
witchcraft, Italian Witchcraft Charms and Neapolitan Witchcraft (Folklore
History Series) called for the use of a dead man’s finger joints in a
fidelity philter. Horrid stuff, but
still a part of magic—the darker end of it at least.
Dancing With Dirty
Divinity
The ritual of
worship between me and the spirit who aids in my Red Work- Let’s call her Aunt
Lottie for short, does not require that the house is spotless, and doesn’t mind
dancing in the dirt—she requires strong whiskey, coffee-grinds, clothes in
burgundy and blush, perfume bottles, chiles and mirrors. She is an avatar for an old entity, one many
would recognize once you smelled that cinnamon, clove, sticky sweet scent of
the grave. She dances topless, in high
ruffled skirts and laughs readily. She
doesn’t ask for my hands to be clean, or my altar to be well oiled. She, like me, is a creature of her comforts
and can live with the rest.
The Miner,
another spirit who only ever shows up to guide me when I’m lost between worlds
(a bad trip will do that) is another entity who demands no unsullied place to
dwell—he likes the golden sandy dirt of the desert, the rust at the base of an
old pickaxe, and tweed cloth that is worn-in with the musk of masculinity and
labor. He may have been some terrifying
Tommyknocker at one point, but now he travels in that cosmic space, with dirty,
lowly creatures like me for his company.
They are not
like Hekate, who will not let me keep a film of dust on her table. Some spirits of incredible power, once lived in fleshy bodies like ours,
and do not worry for the trivialities they have surpassed when crossing through
death’s doorway.
The Vile Vials of
Via
When I was
young, I was so afraid to allow myself to stray away from what was deemed to be
“proper” and “clean” even though so many of my gifts lie in rot, waste, and
withering. Picture, a little 11-year-old
witch with vials of vile putrid molding and decaying organic matter under her
bed, hiding on the wooden bed boards with my collection of soapstone elephants
and yellow jade toucans. To my mother,
it looked like some gross science experiment, but to me, they were the first
vestiges of spirit bottles- they were places where strange entities would come
to visit, to hide in. I’d read the
decay, the flowering bacteria stretching out in green and white mottled rings,
the black slime of decomposition, the formation of salt crystals in rancid
tones— I would read these changes and metamorphose like some kind of crystal
ball, one that would tell me how well or how poorly a charm was doing. Sometimes I could see disease coming simply
by interpreting the bile in my throat as I watched the anaerobic bacteria make
an alien planet of my glass vials.
Sometimes, I would open one vial ever so slightly, letting the bacteria
feed on the slight bit of oxygen as I breathed an angry wish over the contents,
only to close it back up and put it back in the darkness below the bed.
It seems a
little silly now, I suppose, this strange work of watching living matter decay
behind glass, pouring the blackish, sour ooze from one vial into the mouth of a
dolly, telling the future weather forecast from some mixture of battery acids
and liquified animal tissue… That little
scent of ammonia and that sweet, sickly smell that comes from rot—it didn’t make
me run, it made me curious. It’s life,
it’s death and I am in the service of both realms, and so to me there was
something holy in the rot and the mold.
So much activity hidden in the airless darkness, and it made magic for
me, small as it was.
These days not
much has changed. I putrefy and mold and
rot whatever pleases me. A black bottle
charm is something special, it’s transformative, it’s icky, it’s… real. These days I don’t always bother to wash the
dirt out from under my nails when I’m digging up roots, nor do I always bother
shaking the cobwebs out of my puffy mane after wandering through the laurel
hedges. My work needs a little dirt
sometimes, it needs that sickly grime, as a protective mask, as a blessing from
the earth, as evidence of death and life’s power.
Life is dirty
and I know it well. Life is grime and grease;
it is acrid and oily and in a constant state of withering even as it
grows. I love it. I live for it. I serve the dirty gods of filth and
desiccation just as I serve the gods of purity and sanitation. A balance is struck in witchcraft, between
forces that seem opposing but are working in complete compliment to one
another. Life and death are like
that. Filthy and polished all at
once. Magic is like that, or mine is at least.
Hail to the rust
and rime that devours all with time, hail to the pus and grime, hail to
unsullied and benign. Hail to the
inevitable change that comes for all living things and flings their broken
pieces off into a cold and indifferent universe filled with passionate spirits. I serve all you dead— be you bloated body or
mummified jerky-man. I serve the dirt
where the dead are buried, and the new flowers grow.
Soft may the
worms about you creep…
