The Witch Craft

The Work expresses itself through many things. Often the expression may occur through the very mundane workings of life, the simple duties, but very, very often, the witch experiences the work through acts of art and music and ritual, through sex, through strange biddings be new moods and voices to do the impractical, the seemingly ornamental. Once such bidding was to craft a boat for the Sea Altar which has been coming to fruition in the living room. In the midst of working on this simple ship, it becomes apparent that its crafting is Crafting, This is a work. I blow upon it, sing and pray over it, move it about along the currents of the air, remembering that another term for a boat or for anything built for travel is a craft. This little ship I am making is a witch craft. It is my witchcraft. We talked of the Craft being a skill, worked on and practiced continuously, and it is, but we are quick to forget that our Craft, our devotion is the vehicle through which we traverse the Creation.

Witches are voyagers before we are anything, and we know how many approached this road briefly, but were scared or lazy or both and did not go very far. We may have been that person ourselves, content to shudder at mystery, fill our houses with crystal balls and Tarots, dress in black and leave it at that. But the witch is the opposite of orthodoxy. This is not religion that takes comfort in assumed truths and worn out assumptions, nor is the Craft vague and untested hope. We are not camping down in the blessed security of the dogma we have been taught or for that matter, the emptiness of an unexamined mind.

The first impulse of the Craft is to move past what we have been handed and search for something new on the edges of things. Surely there must be more. Surely the something we have felt on the edge of our mind and right outside the church doors must be explored. Surely there is something beyond the subtle and not so subtle versions of an Michelangelo’s old Italian in a pink nightie God, the God, something to the tantalizing whispers in the back of our mind. And so we begin our journey, and though years later I light candles on the Sea Altar, and honor our Lady of the Lake, though I make trips to the water to honor her and bring back sand and shells, that lake points to a deeper water, the water from which we all came and to which we all return, in which we have our being, at this very moment. That thing which upholds us, following an internal North Star, taking us farther and farther from the barren shore where there was really nothing for us, is what Christians call grace, and what I will call, for now, the Witch Craft.