weald and wold

What kind of witch are you? 

I’d say I don’t know what this question means, but that’d be being disingenuous.  I suppose what I really mean is that I don’t know how to answer it.  I noticed that the next question’s about whether you work in a particular tradition, so I’m not going to discuss that here.

I know there’s a lot of terms for different “types” of witchcraft around these days.  I’ve never been terribly involved with the majority of the witchcraft internet, but a lot of them  have been around for a while, albeit sometimes with slightly different meanings… But I don’t know that I’d lay claim to any single term.

One term that comes close might be “hedge witch”.  When I started practising, this was being used mostly as a synonym for “cottage witch” or “country witch” (largely due to Rae Beth’s book).  Though I’m now living in the big city for the first time, my heart is still a countryman’s.  And, beyond that, there’s the other, more recently popular meaning of “hedge witch”.

I wrote this several years ago, and reposted it a couple of years back: Hedgeriding.  It talks about the hedge both as a symbol and as a concrete, living reality which I grew up and lived engaged with.  (Being in a land without real hedgerows now is very strange to me).

If I was going to reach for other terms…I am a land witch.  I am an ancestral witch, a folk witch.  A witch of soil and stone, sap and root.  The things that are in my heart: a leaf; a flame; a blade.  The Dead tell me their stories.  Old gods echo in my skin, my voice.  I am a crooked witch, physically and magically: uneven, lopsided, mismatched, bent.

I’m a witch who seeks to be whole as well as broken, broken open; who seeks to see what Is and what Can Be.  A witch who seeks to do what needs to be done.

2. How long have you been a witch?

Some twenty years, dear gods. That’s…rather alarming.

31 Days of Witchcraft: Day 1

1. How did you discover your path?

I grew up in the Kent countryside, child of an animistic atheist from a Spiritualist family and a former Divine Light Mission super-premie, so it’s probably not surprising that I didn’t end up CoE or something!

Of course I grew up reading a lot of mythology and suchlike – I was reading about the Greek gods before I was introduced to Christianity at school – but the first time I read about witchcraft as a modern practice was some time around ’89-‘92, I can’t remember exactly.

It was in one of those ridiculous trashy books on ~the unexplained~ or whatever, which had a chapter on the Craft (which, looking back on it, was probably mostly Gardnerian Wicca) and I knew at once: that’s what I’m meant to do.  And I did.

I explored other Pagan paths in my early and mid teens – which wasn’t exactly easy to do in those days, as I was living in a highly conservative town and it was before the boom in popularity of Wicca etc.  But I always came back to the Craft, rooted in the land I’d grown up on.  I first met initiated &/ practising witches in person (though I had had some contact by letter and phone) when I was 18.

31 Days of Witchcraft: Day 1

1. How did you discover your path?

I grew up in the Kent countryside, child of an animistic atheist from a Spiritualist family and a former Divine Light Mission super-premie, so it’s probably not surprising that I didn’t end up CoE or something!

Of course I grew up reading a lot of mythology and suchlike – I was reading about the Greek gods before I was introduced to Christianity at school – but the first time I read about witchcraft as a modern practice was some time around ’89-‘92, I can’t remember exactly.  

It was in one of those ridiculous trashy books on ~the unexplained~ or whatever, which had a chapter on the Craft (which, looking back on it, was probably mostly Gardnerian Wicca) and I knew at once: that’s what I’m meant to do.  And I did.

I explored other Pagan paths in my early and mid teens – which wasn’t exactly easy to do in those days, as I was living in a highly conservative town and it was before the boom in popularity of Wicca etc.  But I always came back to the Craft, rooted in the land I’d grown up on.  I first met initiated witches in person (though I had had some contact by letter and phone) when I was 18.