The Witches Way

Blessings to you, your benevolent dead, and your dirt-bound bastards.

All Hallow’s Eve or Samhain as Celts call it and the Day of the Dead hold potent energies and the potential for alchemy.

Our ancestors believed these days that the dead may walk among us. They believed that leading up to this point on the calendar the veils between worlds grow thin and our ancestors and those who have passed in the previous year can walk among us, speak to us, and may be available for reparations and guidance. Beautifully, I got to facilitate such an encounter with a client and one of her ‘passed on’ people just yesterday. So serendipitous.

Modern celebrations have turned this ‘holiday’ into a bit of a spectacle. It is maybe even more commercialized than Christmas, but that is what ‘Christians’ tend to do: capitalize everything.

Whereas it can be fun to put on masks and costumes, it is the underlying traditions that speak to me more and more as I get older. Though in my youth I engaged in some pretty epic debauchery, I now find myself turning inward and ‘tapping into my own ancestral roots’ which are Celtic and Germanic with a kiss of Cherokee. I do not ‘claim’ any one of these ways, but I do believe I felt the Horned God die last night. Perhaps his great head was lopped off the moment the wail broke from deep within me just as the mushrooms ‘hit’.

He is called by many names: Cernunos, The Green Man, The Horned One… He is the god who is sacrificed to be reborn. He is ancient and his willingness to lay down his own life near autumn’s end signifies the beginning of winter. Some years I feel him felled much earlier in the season sometimes at Lughnasadh or more likely at Autumn Equinox, but He held on this year even as summer clung to fields far longer than is usual. And the fresh kiss of snow on the ground this morning reminds me of his blood—blood that feeds the land, but also the blood of senseless slaughter and loss.

Peoples who have lost touch with their ecosystemic cycles and rituals tend to enact their own abandonments and disconnections in horrific ways. We need ways to return to ourselves, to each other, and the rhythms of Life.

For some time I have had the practice of speaking to my ancestors in ritual form. I may have fallen out of it as of lately, but that is the beautiful thing about a practice or anything that is important to us: we can return to it. I call my ancestors my benevolent dead and my dirt-bound bastards because the dead can be both. They do not instantly transmute the burdens they carried in life into esoteric wisdom. It takes time. And we, the living, get to choose what gifts we carry forward and what burdens we transmute—and that, too, is work.

Last night brought me deeply into an initiatory space with my feelings and desires. I could feel the energy galloping through my nervous system waves and pockets opening and releasing. So much of what I crave personally and yearn to bring into the world revolves around motherhood. It is a path all on its own and everything I do or do not do is in service to it. Do I slip? Often and sometimes painfully, but loss is also 'medicine' and grief is its own magic.

I consumed what is sacrament: a small dose of psilocybin. It was taken spontaneously, but responsibly and so commenced my own journey into myself, but as is the case with this fungi’s intelligence, also into the roots of reality and the Underworld.

I felt the presence of my friend who died this year as well as the presence of another soul that came briefly to me a couple of years ago.

Surrendering to the fungal wisdom (they always ask me how deeply I want to go), I felt a wall within myself first crack and then the damn completely crumble.

I wailed for sisters and daughters lost, for loves who never made it home, for every woman who has lost a child and woman who has lost a friend and more. I wailed for loss of touch and connection and for my own yearning to nurture myself, those I love and the entirety of the world back into balance.

I ‘heard’ “Pray for Israel to return to Her senses.” Not Palestine—Israel. As if to embrace and redirect the lost and misbehaving child. “to return to Her senses.” May we all return to our senses and our greater sense of our connection to Life.

I felt clearly that my hurts and losses can connect me with the hurts and losses of the collective and to feel them as sacred openings into the grace that awaits us all if we but call on it.

This is the magic of womanhood: to see, to hold, to burn with it all. That is what it is for us to willingly step onto the alchemical pyre and burn—not to be consumed, but to be transformed.

This is the Witches Way.

And speaking of the Witches Way: I am hosting an online event today at 2pm MT. If you are interested but cannot attend live, the recording will come out in the following week. We will be working with containment, responsibility, spontaneity, and preparedness. These elements allow us to ‘work’ ritual easily and safely.

Link to register, if so inspired.

Lotsa love,

~Justice