*Witches in the Air, Francisco Goya, 1797 - 1798*

“Witchcraft medicine is the medicine of the Earth. It is the oldest medicine of humankind, the healing art still used by the last remaining primitive people. Witchcraft medicine is the primordial wisdom, primordial memory, and the true religio. It is the legacy of our Stone Age ancestors, which has been passed down in a continually shifting form through the Neolithic agricultural period, through the Bronze Age, and through the Iron Age, into the era of the Christain Middle Ages and their belief in miracles.” ~Wolf-Dieter Storl, Witchcraft Medicine

Witch is not a word without controversy and multiple, sometimes incongruent, concepts attached to it. When we hear the word, it may constellate a range of ideas and images ranging from a Halloween costume, the modern witchcraft tradition of wicca, the village healer and herbalist, to the cross-cultural shamanic, prophetic, or mantic practices of sorcery and magic that can be found in every culture on Earth.

Also important to note here is that “witch” and notions of “witchcraft” have been colonized and culturally appropriated along with most all intact cultural tradition that come into contact with white supremacy, patriarchy, and capital empire. From this, our narratives and understanding of “witch,” promoted by mass marketing, has become merely conceptual, without enough conscious, experiential links to ancestral traditions of witchcraft.

The most susceptible to this are those who have lost contact with their original cultures via colonialism and assimilation. Being left bereft of communal ritual links to magic and the otherworld, it’s easy to become fascinated by gathering superficial shiny objects, feathers, and black cloaks that at best only reflect the surface of a profoundly potent heritage. A heritage that requires devotion, and commitment as well as embodied practice that is grounded in rigor, discipline, and truth.

That doesn’t mean not to follow the call coming from a new set of tarot cards or altar cloth; do it, but don’t stop there. Keep seeking, searching, and learning. Follow all leads to greater wisdom including those that call us into uncertainty and even bewilderment. Anyone that identifies as white and is doing ancestral reclamation work, including the rediscovery of European witchcraft traditions, must be resisting and counteracting cultural appropriation and white supremacy at every level.

This type of work can’t be done without some willingness to take risks, make mistakes, and make reparations. Even the meaning of the word Witch and the remembering, recovery, and reweaving of what that word meant to our ancestors, along with the spiritual traditions that may be called witchcraft, must come under scrutiny in the shadow of empire.

One of the ways that our modern ideas of witchcraft have been twisted by colonization is the misconception that it was ever intended to serve the individual will or only self-concern. Our ancestors lived communally and their ideas of separation and personal identity were not the same as ours. Divination and other healing practices were always bound to the community and culture. Living in a hyper-individualist society we have lost track of how we once lived together in constant relationships with each other and our local habitat.

As Dane Rudhyar describes in reference to the archaic roots of astrology:

“Tribal groups, the basic elements of human society at the time, were as bound to the particular land from which they drew their subsistence as an embryo is bound to the mother’s womb. The tribe constituted an organism; every member of it was totally integrated into this multi-cellular organism. Each member of the tribe was dominated psychically by the way of life, the culture, the beliefs, and they symbols of the group, whose taboos he or she could not disobey. There were no real “individuals” at this stage of human evolution.”

Reading Shambhavi Sarasvati’s book, “Nine Poisons, Nine Medicines, Nine Fruits,” she reflects that:

“The Shakyamuni Buddha pointed out that the substrate of our lives is not actually the self-willing individual, but the interdependency….Rather than being independent, we are more like waves arising from the an ocean. A wave is dependent on the ocean. In fact, a wave is ocean. A wave has a quasi-individual appearance, but we really cannot tell where it begins or ends.”

Landscape with a Scene of Witchcraft, Agostino Tassi — *Landscape with a Scene of Witchcraft,* Agostino Tassi

Peter Grey, author of “Apocalyptic Witchcraft”, says:

“Witchcraft is embedded in the landscape, and our witchcraft must recognise that even the landscape of dream is emanated from the physical world, the body of the witch. So when we call our quarters these are what we must include if we wish to honour them.”

Witchcraft is a collection of practices that engage the dynamic and elemental patterns moving between the conscious, material realms and the unconscious otherworld, also called the divine or the ocean of wisdom. We might call it god as well.

This involves being present in both the linear moment and the eternal, and facilitating the integrity of the communication processes nature has designed to keep the worlds in communion.

Not only does the world of shape, form, and time rise up to express the echo of the sea from where creation emerges, but simultaneously, the way in which the waves, our individual selves, and our practical and material lives are conducted, falls back to merge itself into the sea.

What we do with our lives and how we act, the influence we have on creation, and the consequences of that influence echo back into the otherworld.

This is not one sided, as is often believed, that our reality is the physical manifestation of the divine, but also the divine receives the eternal liberation of the physical. As visionary writer Octavia Butler told us,

“God shapes us, we shape God.”

Our witchcraft practices must also support the individual health and emotional well being of the practitioner. It’s not martyrdom; witchcraft is about learning the architecture of creation by being in dialogue with it so as to become better aligned and resonant. It’s about coming to consciousness in the liminal places where form and matter meet spirit, and then holding space for their conversation.

It is not about manipulation or coercing natural forces, but instead about working with them to free and express the agency of all-beings.

“We can’t deny what objects want to do….magic is not about manipulating symbols; Magic is about entering in relationships with people--people who are other than human.” talk with Tim Landry on sorcery in West Africa

There are some significant moments in time we can consider to be pivotal reference moments that shaped the character of what we now know of as witchcraft; the Indo-European invasions of Old Europe, the Christianization of the Roman Empire that spread across Europe, and the conversion from a feudal economy to capitalist that has spread globally. The latter of these was the final blow to last vestiges of indigenous European cultures and what remained of what is commonly known as the divine feminine as well as the independence and agency of the female body.

This was the final phase of a creation cycle that started with Earth being born from the great mother now being conquered and destroyed by the rule of kings. Humans became disconnected from that which once prevented the imbalance of natural forces. As they strove to overcome ecological pressures through the invention of more and more complex technologies, they superseded what otherwise would have dictated that they respect and maintain the relational and interdependent imperatives of living in tune with cyclical phases of nature.

“Mankind has broken the covenant with nature.” ~Peter Grey

From this point until now the non-hierarchical and collective propensity of humans has fallen into the shadows. It has descended, as often the goddess in mythology does, to the underworld as ritual forms and folk magics of indigenous people worldwide has been literally attacked and murdered.

Here we see the idea of witch and witchcraft turning into a form of heresy, as the placed-based, communal, and rhizomatic social structures of the peasantry were demolished and all traditions that upheld the sovereignty of the lower classes, including the use of common land and localized healing methods, were forbidden and/or stolen.

*The Witch Hunt, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1888*

One of the consequences of this was the horrors of the Inquisition, the complete subjugation and oppression of women, and the suppression of all indigenous cultural practices in much or all of Northern Europe*. It is not accurate, however, to say that no European witchcraft or witches survived. Although thousands of people, both men and women, were executed for witchcraft, to the point that many villages were left nearly empty, there were many locations in Europe where the inquisition didn’t reach. One such place was witch sanctuary of Benevento in Southern Italy (La citta delle streghe).

Many practitioners and village healers went underground, were given refuge in rural areas, in convents, or in remote villages. Also, a great deal of this wisdom was transmuted in ways that cloaked them in the guise of Christianity, such as the way spells, ritual, and sacred words became prayers, sacraments, and Catholic magic.

The origins of the word Witch itself are disputed and considered “of obscure origin” but it is most commonly thought to derive from the Old English word wicce (female) and wicca (male). The word wicche in Middle English is considered to be gender neutral. Also coming from Old Saxxon the word *wikkōn and Proto Germanic *wīhaz meaning to become holy or sacred.

“Witch” is first noted in English vernacular around the 16th century and at that time had become used to specifically describe women while the words warlock and wizard broke off to describe men. This coincided with the expanded influence of the gender binary and the oppressive sexual prohibitions enacted by the church as well as the socio-economic imperatives imposed by patriarchal gender roles. Otherwise, the practices performed by witches, and what we consider to be witchcraft, was not limited to people with any particular sexual anatomy.

The Witch has also been defined as the archetypal form taken by the Mother Goddess first emerging as Innana in ancient Mesopotamia, as Ge or Gaia in the Olympic pantheon, and the Earth mother of Old Europe. The witch is the goddess incarnate as diviner, weaver, healer, and link between worlds.

The word witch is also thought to derive from *weik-, the Proto Indo-European root meaning to bend/curve or move.

This idea of bending has been a misunderstood interpretation of witchcraft as a practice that manipulates the material and spiritual conditions to align with the will of the witch. But this is not congruent with the origins of the ritual methods considered to be witchcraft. Witchcraft, sorcery, and magic in pre-Christain and pre-pagan Europe was a somatic ritual practice that likely began as pure divination using tools such as dancing, rhythm, chant, and ritual movement to connect the waking consciousness of the people with the unconscious/otherworld patterns that were reflected in them and vice versa. It was about the convergence and harmony of the worlds both individually and collectively.

*Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Piero Della Francesca/Public Domain*

The magic of the witch would channel the will of god to either the individual querent or the community so that they could learn how to align themselves with it for healing, the continuation of the cycles or creation, and to be in embodied presence with the divine.

Rituals, as performed in witchcraft traditions, are physical anchors as well as symbols that shift our experience of reality in order bring coherence between the conscious and unconscious, the archetypal and the literal, the living and the eternal. This is the same way the philosopher’s stone turns the dross into gold.

“Movement is essential to tactility, proprioception and the kinaesthetic sense. An organism or body’s incessant motion gives rise to its proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and tactile consciousness. As the foundation of the sensorium and affectivity, the moving body is fundamental to, and generative of, gnosis. Aristotle recognised how fundamental movement is to life; he calls it koinē aisthēsis (De anima III, 1, 425a27), that is, the sensus communis or common sense; the primary faculty of perception, as it unifies all the senses, and underpins an organism’s self-awareness or apperception. Aristotle ascribes to the koinē aisthēsis the ability to discriminate or judge, and as such we can link it to understanding: a deep instinctual preternatural understanding”. ~Alkistis Dimech

*The Witches’ Sabbath, Salvatore Rosa, 1654*

One historical reference point where we see this type of somatic expression is the witches’ sabbat, also called the witches’ dance. The exact characteristics of this ceremony/gathering/dance is not known but it mentioned in written records starting around 900 CE.

These events were nighttime gatherings where ritual dancing and other sacred communal practices occurred. One of the most famous of these gatherings is those that occurred around the sacred walnut tree in Benevento. This was a worship site for the cult of Diana and it is believed that witches from all over Europe came to The Sabbat there.

'Nguento, 'nguento,
mànname a lu nocio 'e Beneviento,
sott'a ll'acqua e sotto ô viento,
sotto â ogne maletiempo.

Unguent, unguent,
Carry me to the walnut tree of Benevento,
Above the water and above the wind,
And above all other bad weather.

~Spell to carry witches to The Sabbat at Benevento

*The Witches at the Walnut Tree of Benevento, Guglielmo della Porta, 1534–77*

The material or conscious world is an echo of the divine/archetypal/god world and vice versa. Witchcraft does not seek to mangle god but instead seeks to know it so that alignment, harmony, and occur. This is the magic of all healing arts as those of us who are practitioner know or eventually learn.

The healing isn’t in the “cure” or by forcing the body, mind, or soul, to do what we want, it’s knowing how the elements and patterns of nature are already trying to move and then moving with them. This is how we bend.

And within both worlds lives the social field for where the many languages of all species, entities, forces and ranges of density exist and participate in the dance of the patterns. A witch is one who learns these and can communicate through the realms.

“The evolution of an expansive, rich and fluid lingua franca composed of sound, sign, signal and gesture – elaborated in song, dance, play and ritual – enabled communication with peers, with neighbours and strangers, and with an entire ecology of spirits, ancestors, flora and fauna sharing a common habitat, ‘a single social field’ which is vibrantly animist in character.” ~Alkistis Dimech

In our current times, the many faces of witchcraft are rising with the call to not only keep these traditions alive and sacred but to adapt them, as all traditions must, to meet the needs of the world today.

*“The Witches’ Convention”, William Holbrook Beard, 1876*

“I will argue that Witchcraft is quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. It is not something that can be socialised, standing as it does in that liminal space between the seen and unseen worlds. Spatially the realm of witchcraft is the hedge, the crossroads, the dreaming point where the world of men and of spirits parlay through the penetrated body of someone who is outside of the normal rules of culture. What makes this all the more vital is the way in which the landscape of witchcraft is changing. Ours is a practice grounded in the land, in the web of spirit relationships, in plant and insect and animal and bird. This is where we must orientate our actions, this is where our loyalty lies.” ~Rewilding Witchcraft

Defining “witch” and regenerating the tradition of witchcraft is part of the world building activities of those of us alive right now. There is no standardized system for doing this. Many of us are finding our connections to wisdoms such as this by doing ancestral healing. Others find it through other art forms, religious and spiritual practices, and devotions to various healing methods. Many of us have minimal or no direct connection to who our ancestors were or what they practiced but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing this work.

I imagine it to look like picking up loose threads and spinning them back together. It’s not puritanical and certainly requires an openness to being wrong, making mistakes, and being adaptable when new information comes to us. It also requires persistence and impeccability as it’s far better to weave a few threads of truth than an entire tapestry of illusion. It’s obvious that this is world building and existential reconstruction that will take many lifetimes, each of us contributing to the future.

In the words of Andrea Gibson, one of my favorite poets:

“I said to the sun,

‘Tell me about the Big Bang.’

The sun said,

‘It hurts to become.’”

Resources and Links:

*Please note that witch hunting continues to this day particularly in several countries in Africa. See “Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women” by Silvia Frederici

The Witch’s Dance-https://alkistisdimech.com/words/the-witches-dance

Dynamics of the Occulted Body": https://scarletimprint.com/essays/dynamics-of-the-occulted-body

Rewilding Witchcraft: https://scarletimprint.com/essays/rewilding-witchcraft

“Caliban and the Witch” by Silvia Frederici

“Apocalyptic Witchcraft” by Peter Grey

“Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants” by Claudia Muller-Ebling, Christian Ratsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl

“Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath” by Carlo Ginzburg

“Il Triangolo Stregato: Il Mistero del Noce di Benevento”, by Carlo Napolitano

Strega, by Lisa Fazio

What is a Witch?

Animist Cultural Transmission

Strega