Foxes and Birds

When things begin to happen, how can you feel full of power? Magic isn’t even like that. Magic is a poor name for it. Today, after I have lain naked, stretched out in the dark in the form of a Pentagram, I embrace the name of witch because I embrace the darkness. I embrace that Name because I embrace the Devil. If you cannot embrace the darkness of it, the solitariness of it, the river twinkling at night, the walking through the trees, the transgression, the walking away from the normal order of things and the common way of thinking, then how can you be the witch? If you are trying to turn a coven into a Unitarian church, then I really feel like you should be something else. There is a tendency for those of the Craft to make many many videos of themselves, and show off their grim and depressing altars, and these people are laughingly called darker than thous. But there is such a thing as lighter than thous. There are many faces of enchantment, but the dark face is the face of the witch. If one will not embrace such darkness, perhaps one should use a different name.

At any road, though it is a craft, when things begin to happen you realize at the end of the the day it is a matter of asking and receiving from your gracious gods, from the spirits and elements around you, a matter of simply sitting down to wait, of beginning to become quiet and starting to listen, and how can you do anything but sit up in wonder and clap your hands in gratitude when the working and waiting yields wonders? How can you clap yourself on the back and think of this as your own discrete and personal power?

The Craft is deep and constant. It is a way of life. Like Bon in Tibet, it is a way that underlies many other practices and sometimes can be confused or conflated with them. It is the very radical definition of the word religion, from the Latin religio, the binding together. The Craft is a way that gets deeper and deeper and affects all of what the witch does. For me, it increasingly underlies Catholicism. For a long time I tried to make it replace Catholicism, not understanding that I, like several witches before me, had already been given a perfect skeleton on which to build something which ceases to resemble either conventional Christianity or the Wicca I first encountered in Llewellyn books long ago.  Twice in the readings of a church I do not attend, while still adapting its rituals and using its lectionary, have I read about Jesus calling his disciples, saying “The birds have the air and the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Having said this, having been very hard on those who would follow him and making us certain that the life of dedication is no easy thing,=, he next says  “Follow me.” This reading has occurred three times in the last few days, by a not quite accident of the lectionary, a reading which speaks the same message over and over again: “The path to life is never very easy for very long. That path is worth it. All beside it pales. Devote yourself.”