The People of The Witch
Chapter 1 : The sacred vs the rational
Witch I: The Dreamers
A long time ago people lived on berries dropped by our relatives as they walked home along the Milky Way.* They picked and ate. Dropped some for those of us still down here. The dreamers.
The Earth dreams too about those juicy berries and the seeds. The Earth swallows the seeds. And then they grow up like stiff threaded stalks, but still so celestial. The berry plants dream of thorns and 5 pointed flowers. They dream of bees and raspberry jelly. They dream of a child dripping berry juice out of their mouth smiling with red teeth.
Greetings and welcome to this series about witches, witchcraft, magic, and the sacred healing arts. Over the years I’ve thought, learned, listened, and written alot about the word “witch” and the traditions that are called “witchcraft”. It’s a word that has taken on many, many connotations through time since its first recorded use which is thought to be around the 8th century C. E. It’s an English word but what it symbolizes is a set of diverse, local, vernacular healing practices that can be found in every culture on Earth. There are many names for witches and the methods they use are in no way standardized or systematized. Yet, there is some commonalities which will be discussed in this series.
One such commonality is the relationship that witchcraft has with the sacred and the mundane. It exists in the Earth realm where we are formed into matter; earth, air, fire, and water. And we live with time and space as our vessels, our tools, and the base medium for facilitating creation into our reality. A Creation that is always connected to the other realms. The worlds beyond this world. And therefore it has been the practice of the witches, the saints, the mystics and other shamans to keep remembering and noticing that time, space, and matter are only aspects of the universe and not the totality.
The following first part of this series is about how the loss, or forgetting, of the sacred has impacted our current world and lives. It’s about how our science and technology have forgotten their sacred roots even as we continue to teach and use the mystical techniques of our early physicians and mathematicians. Their formulas and laws of the universe, their physics is the foundation of our scientific method and they were the keys to our “advanced” technologies. Yet the mystical and “magic” are left out of the research papers and press releases. Scientist are supposed to be objective, logical, and rational only. Everything else is relegated to “woo” or new age hype. And certainly some of it is. We go to extremes; leaving the sacred for the sterile, gray laboratory and computational thinking and/or we leave the truth of our material condition, our physicality, and our embodiment to dissociate into a fantasy world of pathological positivity. Neither of these are witchcraft. Not on Earth when you have a human body anyway.
Each installment in this series will touch on a different layer or underground rhizome, a connected section of the whole collection. There will be poetry and prose, myth and some stories. Some science-y stuff and some dreamy stuff. I don’t know yet how long it will be or how many parts because it’s still unfolding.
We begin with the unconscious…
i. Unconscious
Not + conscious
The etymology of unconscious is:
"unaware, not marked by conscious thought." Meaning "temporarily insensible, knocked out"
What is not conscious is “temporarily insensible” but what is sensible? Sensible is reasonable, practical, or according to Mirriam-Webster:
having, containing, or indicative of good sense or reason : Rational or Reasonable
The etymology of “conscious” comes from con + scire or “to know”. To be aware and to be capable of perceiving. Or “The sense of ‘knowing or perceiving within oneself, sensible inwardly, aware’”
Something that is not conscious is not perceivable, it’s not knowable. Yet it still exists but somewhere in the recesses of our mind. Bringing something to consciousness brings it into presence with what we are perceiving consciously. We have good reasons to avoid this because when we bring the “insensible” into our sensible awareness we must give it meaning in order to make “sense” of it. It has to be understood and even more, it must be embodied as we are bodies and physical beings, yet always bound to that which is not. We are in collaboration with the not + physical. The not + conscious. This has often been called the “sacred” or that which is divine, that which emerges from the “mystery.”
And the important thing to note about the sacred and its relation to the not + conscious or not + physical, is that any time we use “not” to refer to the truth of existence we are invoking a binary that is real in the sense that it itself is a framework or technique of creation that enables us to make sense out of the ineffable, the transcendent mystery that is non-binary, that is one but that in order for us to become aware of we must use the frameworks of our physicality to integrate. So the sacred and the unconscious are ever present in the totality of the fabric of existence. The sacred is immanent and it is in our magics and medicine that we become aware or conscious of how we as individuals are always interconnected with all things.
The unconscious is often associated in myth with the Underworld and with it being characterized as insensible or irrational we can understand how the Underworld became associated with “hell” in Christian mythology which is directly connected to the Greek myth of Hades a dark and gloomy place ruled by the god of the same name. It is not a rational place, it is unpredictable and full of dangers. Much like our unconscious that when we become aware of can be psychically destabilizing and disorienting, which loops back again to the perception of the Underworld as a scary, evil place and from this we can understand how rationality became so prevalent in the modern psyche to the point where our lives have become largely rational, secular, and disconnected from the divine.
The divine gets laughed at and referred to as “superstitions” or “woo”. Many people who consider themselves scientific completely disregard any inclusion of the sacred or “magic” into their world view, healing practices, or interactions with nature.
But this is where the roots of existence originate; in the Unconscious, in the Underworld.
Our unconscious is a holographic iteration of the place where our original source patterns and archetypes live. Carl Jung called it the “spirit of the depths” and described how it was at odds with the “spirit of time” which is the zeitgeist of our society during the period we are now living. Our current society, in the West, has been dominated by rational thought that values scientific progress, logical thinking, cognitive analysis, and empirical inquiry over all else to the exclusion of spiritual truths that can’t be rationally evaluated but only experienced.
The sacred is a dimension of human experience that has been a facet of all cultures throughout known history in some way or another but has in more recent times been separated from our institutionalized methods of learning and epistemologies. Academics and higher education have sterilized human knowledge in this sense, removing “magic” and even religion (unless you are studying theology). Spiritual practices, healing methods, and cultural values have relocated magic and the sacred to either institutionalized religions with often severe dogmas and/or to “superstitious” behaviors of uneducated or ignorant people.
This does not mean that rationality is not an important and brilliant epistemology or that it should be discarded, in fact I’d suggest that rationality is just as much a tool that can channel the sacred as any other form of magic. That’s right, the rational is magic and if we look at some of the first rationalists, such as the Greek philosopher Parmenides, we see that this was exactly how they used it. There was no separation between the sacred and/or the divine and the tools of rationality that were used to tap into the architecture of the underworld, the unconscious, and the sacred magic of creation that these technologies gifted to humans.
Parmenides, who I’ve written about HERE, is known as the father of modern logic, who learned it from a goddess during a journey to the underworld. Peter Kingsley, a scholar of ancient philosophy and mysticism, explores the relationship between the rational and the sacred as described by Parmenides as well as other ancient philosophers in other cultures understood the rational and sacred as complementary forces that could connect humans with spiritual truths when they are integrated.
Although the techniques of rationality afford humans an essential understanding of our existence, it cannot grasp the full depths and if we relegate, as modern society has done, the sacred to the “irrational”, we lose the dimensions of reality that cannot be experienced or objectively related to using rational methods.
“There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science.” ~Carl Jung
When we expel the sacred from our sciences, we lose contact with the gods. And one thing we know from our traditional healers today and through history is that they never act alone. All of the inquisition testimonies consistently express that the accused did not do anything except to invoke the divine and petition them for healing. Whether it be a familiar, a saint, the devil, or the god Ascelpius, the witches, healers, and shamans worked with a divine pattern of consciousness to affect the corporeal world. Beyond healing we see that all of our modern mathematics, our scientific method, atomic theory, and medical technology can be traced back to the experiences and practices of mystics and magicians.
Rationality is not the only factor that disconnected humans from their direct encounters with the divine, the church laid claim to any and all of the ways that people interacted with the gods and spirits.
The church, through its hegemony, became the sole distribution center of the “truth” and its agents, the clergy, the only intermediaries between god and humans making any non church sanctioned forms of divination (connection with the divine) a form of heresy and those that continued to keep in direct contact with the spirits who did not join the church were suspect. This included those village healers who used plants, prayers, spells, and other ritual practices to care for their communities. The invocation of a spirit or familiar, the invocation of the sacred, was always a primary method of healing and, if the clergy were the only people that could connect to the divine then they were also the only people that could administer healing. This is, at least in part, why herbalists were often tried as witches. These were certainly herbalists, the predecessors of our modern primary care physicians who worked with families to heal all manner of illnesses including the emotional and spiritual conditions. And they invoked the sacred in all of their treatments and practices from the planting of the herbs seeds, to the harvest, to the making of the preparations, to the way they applied it to their patients. They did none of it alone.
ii. The Familiar Spirit
The witch’s familiar is well documented phenomena in not only legends and folktales but also in the trial records preserved by the church though these encounter narratives, whereby the witch was aided and abetted by a familiar spirit or demon have been largely unexplored according to Emma Wilby in her book “Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic”
“Despite the consistent appearance of encounter-narratives in witch trials and pamphlets, historians have made little attempt to explore the popular basis of this dimension of witchcraft.”
She attributes this to basic disinterest as well as simply being dismissed as fantasy concocted by the theologians of the Middle Ages who needed to draw an association between witches and the Devil as a means of developing a popular target for their campaign against those accused. Another type of spirit that was mentioned in the trial transcripts are fairies. In all cases the familiar spirit came to the healing practitioner with an offer of help.
This is a confession from the North of England given by a seventeenth-century cunning man:
“one night before the day was gone, as he was going home from his labour, being very sad and full of heavy thoughts, not knowing how to get meat and drink for his Wife and Children, he meat a fair Woman in fine cloaths, who asked why he was so said, and he told her that it was by reason of his poverty, to which she said, that if he would follow her counsel she would help him.”
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, by Emma Wilby page 66
Another famous witch trial transcript describes how all of the healers knowledge and power were derived from her contact with a ghost:
“In her role as a ‘cunning woman’, or popular magical practitioner, Bessie Dunlop worked at the rock face of sixteenth-century Scottish life: she delivered babies, healed the sick, consoled the bereaved, identified criminals and recovered lost and stolen goods. But the keystone of Bessie’s magical practice - the source of all her knowledge and power- was her relationship with a ghost, a familiar spirit who she called Tom Reid. And Bessie was not alone in this. Of the hundreds of trials for witchcraft which took place across the length and breadth of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, a significant number of produced confessions detailing descriptions of pivotal encounters between popular magical practitioners and some kind of spirit.”
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, by Emma Wilby, pg 3
Bessie Dunlop was tried for sorcery and witchcraft on November 8, 1576 in Edinburgh where she was found guilty and burned at the stake. Her recorded confessions describe how her healing work was not done by her but, instead by her familiar spirit:
“IN the first, That forasmuch as the said Elizabeth being asked by what art and knowledge she could tell diverse persons of things they tynt [?lost] or were stolen away, or help sick person she answered and declared that she herself had no kind of art nor science for to do, but diverse times, when any such persons came ather [?] to her she would ask one Tom Reid, who died at Pinkie, as he himself affirmed, who would tell her whenever she asked.
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, byEmma Wilby, pg ix
We see similar practices in Italian folk medicine or what’s known as “segnatura” whereby a “guaratrice” (healer) invokes a saint or other, usually Catholic, deity to aid them in the healing ritual.
“First, the malady at hand is presented to a higher entity (often the Trinity, or sometimes a feminine deity or natural symbol, such as the Madonna or the rainbow). Next, Christ, saints, or other male spirits are invoked as part of an abbreviated narrative.”
~Ritual Healing in Arbëreshë Albanian and Italian Communities of Lucania, Southern Italy, by Cassandra Leah Quave and Andrea Pieroni
Even the healing ability has often been attributed to a divine gift. According to Alice Imbalzano in her master’s thesis “Segnare la malattia:”
“One aspect that struck me during the research is the fact that the segnitori (healers) do not identify themselves with a precise word: there is talk of "having the sign" (“avere il segno”) or "knowing how to sign"(“saper segnare”)”.
The practitioners “have” the sign, it’s not something they are doing, it is something they are channeling, something that is moving through them.
“Consuetudini terapeutiche dunque antichissime, probabilmente risalenti addirittura a epoca pagana, cui nel tempo si sono sovrapposti nomi e ritualità cristiani. I guaritori di campagna utilizzano infatti una gestualità tipo magico e contemporaneamente invocano i santi cattolici e fanno uso del segno di croce: quella di segnare è anzi una caratteristica costante del loro intervento terapeutico.”
“Therapeutic customs therefore are very ancient, probably dating back to pagan times, to which over time Christian names and rituals have become more prominent. The country healers in fact use magical gestures and at the same time invoke the Catholic saints and make use of the sign of the cross: that of marking is indeed a constant feature of their therapeutic intervention.”
From I Guaritori di Campagna, by Paola Giovetti
The practice of invoking the sacred, appearing now to be solely Christian, was once pagan and invoked the gods:
“Ne consegue che non tutte le parole sono gradite alla divinità, e che non tutte le divinità sono adatte alla risoluzione dei problemi. Si genera così l'idea dell'esistenza di una caratteristica intrinseca alle divinità, che si rispecchierà nella tradizione popolare quando, agli antichi dèi pagani, si sostituiranno i santi cristiani. Le varie "specializzazioni" di quelli che potremmo chiamare "Santi-Taumaturghi", non sono però casuali, e scaturiscono da loro episodi di vita. Ritroviamo la stessa dinamica pagano, dove le opere di un dio sono la base del potere al quale si appellano i fedeli sul principio del "come-così". Il legame tra santi e stregoneria è un elemento peculiare italiano. Per il popolo i Santi Taumaturghi diventano vere e proprie divinità di un politeismo eretico di cui è intrisa la tradizione popolare. Il Santo taumaturgo esula, dunque, da ogni canone di fede o dogma religioso”
“It follows that not all words are pleasing to the deity, and that not all deities are suitable for solving problems. Thus the idea of the existence of a characteristic is generated intrinsic to the deities, which is reflected in folk traditions when the ancient pagan gods were replaced by Christian saints. The various "specializations" of those we could call "Thaumaturgic Saints", however, are not casual, and derive from their life stories. We find the same pagan dynamic, where the works of a god are the basis of the power to which the faithful appeal on the principle of "come-cosi" (just like or like this so, so like that).The link between saints and witchcraft is a peculiar Italian element. For the people, the Holy Wonderworkers become real divinities of a heretical polytheism of which popular tradition is imbued. The holy thaumaturge therefore goes beyond any canon of faith or religious dogma"
~ Andrea Romanazzi (My translation)
iii. The Mystics**
Modern logic and rationality itself comes from people who were in the practice of convening with the gods. And they brought these techniques into their mystical practices and wisdom schools, not as a way to rationalize life, but as a means of understanding what the spirit world is made of while living in the physical. It is a way to access the underworld architecture of the forms we live amongst and the space-time continuum we’re bound to. In this sense, science is a method of channeling, open to interpretation, never fully objective, and always improvisational because it is not the thing, it is a framework that can facilitate the patterns of consciousness that we call the divine.
a2 + b2 = c2
Our modern mathematics, used in all of our sciences, derives from the sacred practices of ancient people at least as far back as the Babylonians. The formulas and computational structures such as algebra, geometry and logic still used today have their roots in the mystics. The pythagorean theorem that is taught in all public schools in the west is named for the great Greek mystic Pythagoras and based in Euclidean geometry.
Pythagoras was born around 570 BC in Samos, Greece. From there he traveled making his way to Egypt where he was taken captive during a Persian invasion when he met a Persian magi and was taken under his wing. It’s thought that he traveled from here to perhaps as far as India where he was influenced by Vedi philosophy and/or he came into contact with Vedic thought due to the direct interaction between India and Greece. Eventually he moved to what is now Crotone, Calabrian in Southern Italy where he established a Pythagorean school of healing, philosophy, and mysticism.
Pythagoras developed a practice of numerical mysticism and sacred mathematics. His school and philosophy were based on the premise that numbers were at the core of the architecture of the universe and could be used to discover and explore the origins of the nature of reality and how it operates. Pythagoreans developed a system of numerology that they used to interpret the elements of life, all beings and to gain insight into the unseen realms. According to some of our first mathematicians, every number had a symbolic and spiritual significance along with a rational meaning and use.
According to modern day mathematician Michael Smith and cofounder for the Center For Applied Rationality:
“The actual soul of mathematics is not about numbers or computations or shapes…..the actual essence is about insight and seeing the soul of what is true and making it part of you…It creates a personal direct relationship with the mind of ‘god’."
He says that math is an art of true insight that offers us the experience of everything in a way that can be channeled through a finite human mind. Math gives us an opportunity to deepen our familiarity with the “structures of truth” and that deepening shapes your intuition and the way you think, it conditions you to think more precisely and clearly.
This is not about discarding rationality at all but, instead, about integrating it with the sacred and becoming conscious of its limitations, when to apply it and when not to. Mysticism, magic, and witchcraft as well as other shamanic practices are the practice of doing just that. Living in the corporeal world and noticing the magic. Working with the magic. Engaging with the magic. And knowing ourselves as part of the universe which itself is laced together with magic.
In Science as a Vocation (1918-1919), Max Weber argued that one of the central features of modernity is its distance from the magical, the spiritual, and the religious:
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.. (155). This disenchantment involves not only the secularization of public and private spheres, but the distancing of the subject from the spiritual on both the personal and the social levels. The disenchanted world is mostly a feature of Western elite and bourgeois urbanites. However, the sense of an interconnected universe filled with spirit and enchantment has persisted in many parts of the developed world, including rural Italy, until well into the twentieth century; in fact, it is still alive today.”
Journal for the Academic Study of Magic - Issue 5
Our mystics, witches, saints, and sages who took on the task of discovering the nature of reality and the divine always found themselves in the Underworld with the beings and patterns of consciousness that exist there with the roots of the world.
The Underworld is not a “place” in time, it’s not oriented like the world on top of the Earth which is why we can’t “dig” to find it, that is the wrong timeline, and if we should happen to find it whilst digging it’s not that we dug until we got to the Underworld, it’s that the Underworld took us while we were doing some mundane activity whereby our soul could drop into the land and into place in such a way as to open a portal to another realm of consciousness, to another world that is part of the whole of the universe and in this sense is also celestial, part of the galaxy of stars and planets with everything made with stardust and carbon atoms. There is no hierarchy of places, no up and down, just different qualities and forms, different types of rhythms and vibrations, different variations of light.
The Underworld of myth is a dark and potent place where one must be prepared to go or risk being trapped there indefinitely. It’s a place that we work with like we do with poisonous power plants; low doses, great respect, and only in rare circumstances. It’s not for everyone, yet eventually everyone must go. Everyone must face the unconscious at some point, hopefully with supportive guides and practices.
From a rational perspective this makes no sense. It’s irrational. Our culture demands a specific type of evidence to validate experiences. We validate using the scientific method and it is certainly useful when applied to certain types of experiences, but it is also limited in many ways. For instance, during an experiment we must “control” for unwanted “variables” in order to observe the direct effect of whatever we’re studying.
A super simple example is how when you put H2 (2 hydrogen atoms) and O2 (2 Oxygen atoms) together they become H20 or H2+O2 = H20 or water.
We can repeat this over and over and get the same results. If we add another element into the formula we will not get water, we will get something else. In an experiment H2O would be the control variable, it remains the same and constant and then we add things to it to see what happens. It’s easy to observe reactions this way. But if we have say a plant with 300 chemical compounds and we add some other chemical to that plant we have no way of knowing which compounds in the plant reacted in what way. We can’t control for 300 variables. And then add that plant to a chemically complex system, such as the human body, and it’s impossible to know how everything works synergistically.
This is just a minor example of why science can’t explain everything to us although many believe that it will eventually. Until then, there are many things about life in this universe that remain a mystery and that mystery is often what is referred to as the “sacred”.
The scientific method that is what all of our technology is based on comes from people who did not have the equipment and advanced tools we have today, yet they discovered the secrets of the universe from which we have explored from the microcosm to the macrocosm. From the microscopic world of bacteria to the stars and planets. Cultures world over held “cosmologies” about the universe that described the functions of patterns and forces in the environment around them.
One thing I learned early in life, long before I took any college chemistry classes was that “nature always seeks a balance”. And I witnessed it over and over. This is not “balance” in the sense of purity or perfection, but balance in that nature responds to conditions by creating other conditions.
One example from my life is that Spring when I let my horses out to graze on the freshly grown grass and clover. After a few hours I noticed that they were all foaming horribly at the mouth. I called our local country vet and she asked me if the field they were eating from had been overgrazed the year before. It was because I had taken on some extra horses in the fall and had to supplement with hay because they ate the field down so much. She told me that clover, which was the primary plant in that field, emits a chemical the year after it’s been overgrazed that causes grazing animals to foam at the mouth. It’s a defense mechanism basically that interferes with the horse’s ability to eat too much too quickly because they are excessively salivating.
When I went back to college years later I took chemistry and learned how to “balance” chemical equations, I realized this was something I already knew was true. Whatever you put on one side of the equation must appear in some form on the other side. Energy cannot be destroyed. It always has to come out somehow, somewhere, some way.
Our sacred teachings from the eons tell us the same and our ancient wisdom keepers knew it without knowing chemistry. There are many ways to know true and real things and some of them do not fall under the auspices of modern science or the rational. Keeping things sacred is keeping them away from reductionism and over-rationalization. It’s keeping them unreasonable.
Witchcraft invokes the “sacred” in the common, ordinary lives of people. Witches didn’t go live in ashrams or monasteries, unless they were hiding from the inquisitors. They lived in the natural landscape invoking the sacred in peasant and common life. Witchcraft is practical. Just because something is sacred does not mean it’s not purposeful and even simple.
Where we had the famous philosophers and mystics, all of our major world religions, modern science and psychology, new age spirituality, and other spiritual practices and traditions, our witchcraft has emerged alongside them all and, in fact, influenced them in some way or another.
The sacred systems of Western civilization that have become renowned and revered with the Renaissance and other major social movements were once very localized, community based ways of beings that were not systems at all but emergent and dynamic interactions with nature that existed when the sacred and/or divine was not a question, it was an accepted presence in the experience of reality. We will be diving more into how witchcraft is a consistent force of nature and the way it always has and always does emerge from human community and culture in subsequent chapters.
This is the first in a series of monthly (più o meno // more or less) installments where we will be exploring several witch motifs and how they are embedded in the symbolic and cultural context of people and the landscape from the caves where witches met to the practices they used to invoke the divine.
This first post is free but all future posts will be for paid subscribers only.
*The inspiration for the part about the Milky Way came from a recent talk I attended at the Onondaga Nation, presented by Oneida astronomer Samantha Doxtator about Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) astronomy.
**note that the mystics here refer to people who emerged in the Western world but that math and mysticism as well as science are practices that existed in all cultures around the world and many of those cultures influenced Western thought. I’ve mainly focused on these because they are the ones that I am ancestrally tied to and that I know the most about though it is no way intended to contribute to the erasure of other advanced systems of scientific study and thought. For example, I have learned of some of the scientific methods of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people and I suggest that anyone interested in their systems or the systems of other peoples refer to their scholars on it.
