Don’t Call Me Witch

I have long been drawn to the wild edges of things; to the resonance of nature, to the expansion of consciousness, to the testing of boundaries. As a teenager I devoured books by Marian Green and Doreen Valiente. I set out circles, cast runes and read Tarot; I lit candles, wandered in the graveyards at night, and played with all the fire. I wished for the kind of power that I thought witchcraft could bring, and I threw myself on the mercy of fate to test what is real, over and over again. I learned my lessons the hard way, and I know I am lucky to have survived.

It took many years of walking this path for my wisdom to grow into an understanding of how truly magical the realms that we inhabit are; of how what happens in one realm affects another and is therefore real, and true. Of how the universe that we live in is responsive and alive, and that we are responsible, conscious actors expressing consciousness through it.

There is a fundamental and inescapable responsibility held by a conscious being in a conscious universe, whose very thoughts and imaginings can become doorways into new realms; whose actions create ripples in past and future, who understands that time is not a linear thing but a continuum; yet another aspect of the conscious and relational cosmology in which they exist. We are part of the fabric of reality, and we cannot escape our responsibility to it.

If God is dead, everything is permitted, wrote Dostoyevsky, offering morality as an objective force governed by a vengeful man in the sky, but what if we take that same sentiment and replace God with cosmology? What happens then? What if it is not the death of God (or objective moral judgement) we need to fear, but the death of responsibility; the flattening of a cosmology of right relationship which holds balance as the force of “morality” right at the centre into a place to ascend from, or escape.

The idea that we live in some kind of simulation is so far from this understanding of a conscious reality that I find it hard to even fathom. When you have seen and felt the difference between the physical, the non-physical, the unseen, the astral, the ancestral, space-time, reality, and consciousness; between the lands that we can travel to and the places that we can go, you know that “real” is a term bandied about far too readily in the rational world, and that calling anything a simulation is a really neat way of avoiding unavoidable responsibility in this physical realm.

In my understanding of what real, natural magic is, it is healthy power, wisdom, movement, and vitality in alignment with the forces of nature, the forces of creativity and the embodiment of the absolute sovereign responsibility of maintaining right relationship to the living cosmology in which we exist. Magic is not seeking power over anything else, or trying to control reality and the other autonomous beings within it, I’m talking about your love spells, or your “manifestations” of riches, or your hexes, for example. That is something else. I suppose you could call it sorcery. Perhaps you could call it witchcraft, some surely do, but that is not real magic, that is the upsetting of power and the inversion of balance. And that is why I do not call myself a witch. (Bear with me here, if you can, I know this will get many hackles up, because the word has become so heavy and drenched in identity and self-adornment, but that is my point, and I will try to explain myself clearly.)

I want to be clear that this is not a case for reclamation. It is not the case that I am carrying the weight of the word through the eyes of Christian derogation and demonisation, or that I have an unhealed witch wound. All of my life, I have been seen as a witch of sorts. I was born on Halloween, so it naturally followed. I have foraged and connected with plants since I was a child, and I have been called to the old ways since before this lifetime. I have been called ‘witch’ as both compliment and insult, and I have revelled in the power of it too. I understand the allure.

It is what has been done with the word in recent times that it is the driving force here. It is about reverence, for words, for terms, for honour, for who adorns us and with what. The word witch is not an adornment I wish for. I do not wish to be aligned with those practices which seek to control, which step out of alignment with the responsibility that is our birthright and our burden in this conscious, responsive reality in which we live, even while understanding that many who call themselves witch are working with nature, I still think the self-adornment needs more scrutiny.

In its essence, the ancient term which simply derives from knowing and wisdom is perfect, but from the medieval usage to the modern, we have seen a weighting, a maligning, then a flattening, hollowing, and aestheticisation of an ancient word that has led to a corruption of meaning. The reason for my discomfort when others refer to themselves as witch is based on the origin of the word, and it feels uncouth, presumptuous, and perhaps even a little smug to refer to oneself as wise. Surely wise is a title bestowed upon you by those around you who have seen you to be so, who have benefited from that wisdom. Wise is not a title that you bestow upon yourself.

And that right there is the mismatch for me. That is the part that makes me both angry and sad, because in a time when we’ve lost our elders, they have abandoned us for cruise packages and retirement plans, they have forgotten their place, and we have lost a deep well of knowledge and wisdom as a result. Because they have no elders to guide them, people have simply adorned themselves with titles of wisdom, and that is not the way of balance and right relationship.

I am lucky to have found my own guides and elders, to have learned from the plants and the land, to have done an apprenticeship under real people, to walk with the land and to learn how to hear it, to see through into the fabric of the cosmology with a reverence which is burned into my consciousness. I claim no title, I hold no certificate, my allegiance is only to the balance of right relationship and my sovereign responsibility to the whole. I have no name for what I am. And that can make me feel vulnerable and unrecognised in a world of identity badges.

There has been a glamorisation of the idea of the witch, and witchcraft, and even the witch burnings, and it is distasteful and disrespectful to fetishise such things. The amount of people claiming to have been burned at the stake in a previous life is insane. The word witch needs to be released from aestheticisation, if there is any hope of restoring its true meaning. The same goes for our diverse and precious ancient land based spiritual practices here in Europe. Alongside the word witch, they have been fetishised, glamorised, aestheticised, and flattened into an identity with a cottagecore costume and no fucking meaning.

The path of wisdom is a practice of living close to the earth, a practice that needs to be remembered and honored, not fetishised. True wisdom is the ability to go to the land as an equal, to stand eye to eye with the spirits in the understanding that they do not hold the same sense of morality or fairness that we may do. It is to stand in equality with egregores of place, with astral entities, with plant beings, and to hold your space as a being of the earth, as a being of spirit, and as a being of wisdom. No title is needed to do that, your personal identity is irrelevant, what is important is what you bring to the table.

One of the strange things about this polarised world in which we live, is that I feel a pull to qualify what I’m saying, a pull to let others know that they need not argue if they don’t share the same opinions. But I also know that this is a particular word and a particular subject that many have taken as part of their identity when that identity is rooted in an externalised, aestheticised wanting rather than a core of interconnectedness with the magical fabric of reality. And that is a far deeper and more important distinction than the need to defend one’s choices and the way that one defines oneself.

We live in a world of illusions where everybody can pretend to be whatever they want to be. But there is a cost to that pretence, and until we can get comfortable with what we say that we are and whether that is really true, and whether what we say we are matches up with our true, natural selves, we cannot truly know who we are beneath all of these labels that we put upon ourselves. What we say about ourselves matters. Pretending to be something that you are not is a house of cards for the psyche, and for the natural soul, that is a very dangerous thing to do. Sure, you might get to the top of your game by grifting, pretending to be something you aren’t. You might make lots of money. You might convince lots of people of your status and prowess and skill. People might lap up everything that you say, but you know deep down inside that it is not real. You know that it is based on falsehood, and for your soul, who knows what is real, that is not acting in integrity, and it has a high price.

A real path is tempered by a true understanding of one’s own calling. Once the natural soul is heard, there will always be a core that guides, holds, and resonates through it all. That doesn’t mean that we cannot change our opinions, but that once the path is found and walked with integrity, there is nothing that can pull you off. You might falter. You might stumble. You might take a wrong turn, but the path is always there, and the wild, connected heart is always ahead of you.

And so the question comes: if you call yourself a witch, have you sat with what that means to you? Have you sat with its badge of ego or desire for a certification, or its underlying structures of false power? Have you sat with your desire to control the world around you instead of aligning with it? And so I ask, if you call yourself a witch, is there a path through all of the noise where you can stand in integrity? Where you can look to the plant beings and the spirits and see them truly as equals, and understand that you are not always everything that you say you are.

Because the energy behind this word is a shape shifter. It seeks to transmute definition because by its very nature, it is a state of resonance, and it moves, and it shifts, and it changes.

Have you sat with the identity of witch and the word in the dark of the night in the quiet woodland with your heart beating close to the earth? Have you sat with the word, down by the river, with the comfrey bursting up all around you and speaking of community? Have you sat with the word in the bright summer meadow as the yarrow waves in the breeze and speaks to you of sovereignty? Have you asked your ancestors who you really are, who they want you to be, and what they would call you? Have you sat with the word in your community, in your work with others, in your heartfelt wishes of reconnection for all beings? For if you have not, you do not deserve to use that word, and you must step away and allow it to become what it once was.

Until all who call themselves witch can stand in integrity and honour with all that it means, and all they have adorned themselves with, and the weight of that adornment, then the meaning cannot be restored.

So do not call me witch, for what you call a witch is not who I am.