A visitor asked some thoughtful questions regarding the blood line of the witch that I felt they deserved their own post.

“how far back do you feel it goes, where is its source”

We believe that it (the essence of the witchblood) goes back to the beginning of time as it is connected to the Great Void.
However, the witchblood as it manifested in a person, we believe goes back to when humans were gathered in communities/tribes. My family don’t talk about specific eras. I don’t believe that it is in their knowledge, but also, it isn’t in our way of thinking about our heritage.

“…has it changed since its conception.”

No, not in it’s pure form. Yes, as in culturally. But the Blood is always of and connected to the First, the Great Void, the Serpent Mother.

“Does it occur in all generations, or is it dormant at times, what makes it active”

It skips generations but is always present.
The best way I can describe it, is that it’s like the genetic trait of eye colour. A baby born to parents who both have brown eyes, can have blue eyes. This is down to the blue eye genes carried through the parents but not manifested in them. The witchblood ‘gene’ is much the same. This is a crude similarity but the best I have come up with.

I have found that even within pagan circles, that is, those that attempt for a different perspective on nature, you find that plants are still treated as medicinal substances. I think this is due to the very ingrained western allopathic perspective we’ve been raised in.

So plants are still looked upon by what they can or can’t do. For example – this plant is good for this sickness. This is the allopathic way.

In the shadow witch’s way, the plant is a living, intelligent and conscious thing. We don’t use plants as if they were just substances or tools. Instead, we form a type of relationship, just as you might do with friends. It’s more like a relationship with a work colleague though, one that you trust implicitly. Because that’s what you form, a working partnership, an alliance.

Of course plants do have inherent qualities, but they also have individual qualities. This is why sometimes a plant will work for you and other times the same type will not, or it works differently. But also, it’s not one-sided. So the person ingesting the plant or working with it magically, influences its qualities too. Just like any relationship.

If you are interested in the ways of the shadow witch, the root worker, then it’s part of how we work to form relationships with plants. Research is important (if you can’t get handed-down knowledge) but this is only after you meet and greet the plant.

If you still think of ‘X plant cures Y ailment’, then you’re stuck in an allopathic way of seeing the natural world.

The spiral witch either requests a plants help or invites the nature spirit of the plant to participate in the working.

The realm of earth is an aspect of the whole. Very similar to the concept of the soul and spirit being aspects of the whole that is ‘me’.

The human eye and conscious mind most easily perceives the earth realm. The other realms are accessible, but as we are creatures of this realm, everything here is more easily observed.

The more in tune we are with our spiritual existence, the better equipped we are to perceive and visit the other realms. The other realms afford us different opportunities, and the hedgerider and the shadow witch focus on walking to and between the realms.

The earth realm, where our bodies are most comfortable, is the realm of tide, soil, stone, root, animal, moon, blood, and weed.

The earth realm is the spiral witch’s key into all other realms. Without a a deep relationship with the plants and animals, we are not witches. A person who visits the other realms through practices such as meditation, hypnosis, trance, yoga, etc, alone, is not functioning as a witch. The allied connection with the organisms of the earth realm is inextricable with the witch ways.

The ancients didn’t meditate. They didn’t attempt to transcend. Instead, they sought to be fully in the earth realm, to the depths of the soil. They connected to the stem, the tree hollow, the stone crevice, the natural spring, and, with the spirits of nature, travelled and flew.

The witch of shadow doesn’t believe in ghosts, demons, angels, gods, or any Being that is an entity in and of itself in only a spirit realm.

We believe that certain organisms have a ‘spirit’, for want of a better term. So you and I have a spirit, rocks have spirit, the Land has a spirit; trees, weeds, animals, and flowers have a spirit. So a spirit can only exist in so much as the earth realm manifestation exists. Once the body, or earth realm form, dies, the spirit has no anchor. The spirit returns to energy of the earth or even particular organisms, like an area of land.

The witch is very much a creature of the earth realm. We don’t seek for anything ‘above’. We work with the spirits of the creatures that reside on earth.

In some ways, the leftover energy is like what some people might think of as ghosts or spirits. Let’s say for example that a person died in a house. Their spirit will not haunt the house, it will instead return to its ancestral homeland, to the earth, to the land beneath the house, or to local fauna. If the energy returns to a place very near the house, such as the soil beneath it, some of that person’s ‘spirit’, their essence or energy, will remain there. So to put it simplistically, if that person was a psychopath, there might be left in the house a malevolent feeling.

So what’s a perceived haunting?

The human decides the house is haunted due to the ‘feeling’ within it. This person merges their thought forms of fear with the local energies to form an entity.

Basically, we believe that there is nothing much stronger, in ‘magical’ terms, than the imagination, brain function, fear, desire, and will of a human being. We believe that with these things we can create anything, either on this realm or on the others.

Our desire to make sense of the wider cosmos has formed gods, while our fear of the unknown has formed demons. Our desire to be protected has formed spirit guides and angels, and our desire to never lose our loved ones has formed ghosts. This explanation is of course incredibly simplistic, but it conveys the substance of the belief, that the human creates the reality.

If enough people believe in the same entity, with lots of the same fear or desire, then that entity or Being does exist in that it is a created reality. So while neo-pagans might say phooey’ to the belief in the devil, he does exist because enough people have believed in him and still do. For them, he is totally real. And why shouldn’t he be? If the gods Pan, Diana, Isis, or the Goddess exist, then why not him as well?

If you’re interested in this line of thought (no pun) read up on Jung and his theories on the collective unconscious.

What continues to exist is not a person’s soul, but their memory, their energies, or the energies of their emotions – residual energy. The Great Void pushes all the thoughts ever had through reality.

The very esoteric and occultic of you might be asking yourselves right now – if we do this unintentionally through fear, can we do this intentionally through desire or will?

Absolutely. The witch rarely dabbles in the creation of such familiars, but for smany occultists and sorcerers it’s just their thing.

Ancestors

As memory, a type of thought form, never dies, it can always be accessed – via the collective unconscious if you like. The shadow witch simply believes that the memory from the ancestors, and thereby their teachings and wisdom, lives on and can be accessed by all future relatives.

The ancient witch has no complex concept of a collective unconscious. Instead we believe that their memories reside in the stones and rocks – the bones of the grandmother – or the ancestral Land.

Through journeying, the witch can access these memories, if the ancestor’s energies are conducive to her search.

For this reason, the displaced witch need never miss out on any teachings of her heritage. If she’s skilled, she has it all there, waiting for her.

The Shadow

A very important feature of the thought form is the personal shadow: the ‘dark’ (hidden) aspect of the person.

Many fears of demonic or malevolent spirits out to ‘get’ the person have been found, by me and those I’ve mentored or worked with, to be the person’s own thought forms.

Fear is THE most powerful emotion. It’s also the most dangerous because it is a chaotic emotion much more so than desire. When fears are too overwhelming for us, we have a tendency to project them outwards. The most perfect analogy for this is the idiom of the ‘dark cloud’ over us when we’re feeling sad or gloomy. It’s as if our depressing emotion has manifested into an external form, a dark cloud.

This is very much like our inner shadows. Our shadows, which are many and varied, are connected to but different from our Shadows (capital, key concept). There are only a handful of these shared by all humans. A little like a dark archetype, using Jung again. While the Shadow is a protective beast within us, shadows are our manifold fears, anxieties, angers, worries, etc.

If you ever see a dark figure – usually human-shaped but can be like smoke or take on any shape – without clear features, this is likely a shadow form. It’s most usually your own shadow, but it’s possible to see those of other people’s.

Most people think it is a demonic creature or some such hateful thing. Instead, we believe it is an external dark reality of the person’s inner dark reality. These shadow forms can manifest from anxiety over a betrayal, suicidal thoughts, worry over the safety of children, lack of self-confidence, and many, many reasons.

But as they belong to us, we can do something about them. They’re not demons or ghosts over which we have no power.

The spiral won’t stand on ceremony, it refuses boundaries, and it won’t offer safety and security.

The spiral is wild, chaotic, cyclic but not repeated.

It knows relationship but not cause and effect. It’s multiple and sees not polarity and duality.

The spiral witch moves with the wildness of nature, an individual, connected, dynamic, without rules or hierarchy.

The spiral and the spiral witch are untamed.

The spiral is the essence of the shadow witch.

Book Review

REALITY WITH WITCHES

By WENDY DONIGER O’FLAHERTY

DREAMTIME Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. By Hans Peter Duerr. Translated by Felicitas Goodman.

”CAN witches really fly?” This question has been posed, naively and not so naively, for centuries, but never with the erudition and sophistication with which Hans Peter Duerr addresses it in ”Dreamtime.” He asks what one means by witches, what one means by flying, what one means by reality and what one means by asking the question.

His contribution to the history of witchcraft is a detailed discussion of the documents relating not only to European witchcraft but to Australian aborigines, African werewolves, obscene Austrian cults, the South American drug yage and many more subjects. He argues that there were two distinct movements. First came the ancient cult of women who traveled by night to meet with Diana and other goddesses of the wilderness, with or without the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Then, in the late Middle Ages, in part as a result of a strong resurgence of sensuality, the ”wilderness” was moved inside the bounds of civilization and the witch was re-garded as the embodiment of this now internalized outside; the witch was ”the reality of someone else.” She had always been the creature who sat on the fence between the village and the wilderness, participating in both worlds; but suddenly, in the late Middle Ages, ”the attempt was made to shoo [her] off the fence, to chase her from the boundary of culture into the wilderness, from dusk into night.” Formerly, as demonic beings, witches could not be brought to trial; now they were considered mere humans in the service of the demonic and therefore liable to trial: ”The ‘arrogant’ woman . . . was incarcerated as a witch and her sensualism was burned out of her.”

Mr. Duerr, who has been a visiting professor of cultural history at the University of Kassel in West Germany, painstakingly marshals voluminous evidence of the role of mind-altering plants in the flights of such witches, evidence that was suppressed by the judges at their trials. The judges introduced instead another cause of the flights, the Devil (who was seldom if ever mentioned by the witches in unpressured testimony). ”It would have meant an inadmissible diminution of the power of the Demon if it had transpired that he needed bewitching herbs to confuse the senses of witches and sorcerers.” One physician neatly solved the conflict by contending that it was the Devil who incited witches to consume the plants, not the plants that conjured up the Devil. Thus, while the first set of witches believed that they flew to a goddess, the second sort were believed by others to fly to a Devil. Moreover, Christianity interpreted all experiences achieved with the help of mind-altering drugs as distorted perceptions of illusion rather than of reality. T HE question of the actual nature of the ”flying” is at first only hinted at here. We are told that the judges in the witchcraft trials presupposed the reality of the witches’ flights. Later, it was believed that witches of the ancient type merely dreamed or hallucinated that they flew, while the new witches, now under persecution by the church, actually did fly. Mr. Duerr’s own position is merely adumbrated at first in rhetorical questions: ”Did they possibly experience something that our ordinary or our scientific language was unsuited to describe? Are we forced to say in this instance, in analogy with Wittgenstein’s dictum, ‘And if a lion spoke, we could not understand him’: If a witch turned into a crow and flew, we would not be able to see it?”

He mocks the ethnographer who ”presupposed that one could only fly like a bird or like a PanAm pilot.” Then he states his view at greater length: only a small fraction of our nature is ordinarily accessible to us; but sometimes, as under the influence of certain mind-altering drugs: ”That which we include in our personality will then expand to the same extent as we, our everyday person, surrender our more or less firm boundaries. . . . The limits of our person now include matters we formerly saw as belonging to the ‘outside’ world. With lightning clarity we realize that these limits are not circumscribed by 5 ft. 11 in. and 150 lb. Our soul does not leave our body, but the limits of our person no longer coincide with the boundaries of our body that we might see on a snapshot. . . . It is not so much that we fly. What happens instead is that our ordinary ‘ego boundaries’ evaporate and so it is entirely possible that we suddenly encounter ourselves at places where our ‘everyday body,’ whose boundaries are no longer identical with our person, is not to be found.”

In order to defend this bold hypothesis, Mr. Duerr moves on to the next level of his argument, the attack on Western ideas of reality, in a chapter entitled, ”Fear of Flying.” He mocks the contention that those who cross the boundary between civilization and wilderness, reality and illusion, experience mere ”projections” or mental illness, and he goes on to ask: ”What are the criteria, and where can they be found, which would make it possible to decide whether one perceived a normally closed range of reality or was merely the victim of a delusion of the senses? What will give us the confidence to maintain that a psychiatrist such as [George] Devereux is wrong in his assertion that insanity is the only thing that lurks beyond the fence?”

The reality Mr. Duerr seeks to explore, and to defend, is not the reality of cultural relativism. Carlos Castaneda’s experience ”is not the experience of another reality, but rather the experience of another part of the reality. . . . There are not two realities, one for the witches of the Sonora desert and the other for the University of California.”

Mr. Duerr’s reality is an epistemological construct which he defends, in the fourth level of his argument, primarily in the notes (beginning to snipe at it in notes to the third page), a reality that challenges Western concepts of perception. As early as 1500, for instance, an inquisitor stated ”that to doubt the witches’ flight meant also to doubt the testimony of the senses, as for instance that at the moment he was composing a book about witches.” This self-reflexive testimony of the senses comes under heavy fire in Mr. Duerr’s footnotes.

”Dreamtime” is a paradigm of borderline academia. Up front it is full of charm and wit, in chapter headings (”The Upside-Down World, or ‘Pot in Every Chicken’ ”) and in hundreds of delightful quotations -one of my favorites is the (unattributed) reference to nightshades ”which supposedly make a person ‘as hot as a buck, as blind as a bat, as dry as a bone, as red as a beetroot and as crazy as a hen.’ ” But behind this gay and apparently careless front there lurks a mountainous scholarly apparatus – 236 pages of 827 notes, with an 86-page bibliography of some 2,400 titles, to support 133 pages of text. This apparatus also casts its shadow into the foreground, upon the text itself, which often lapses into deadening lists of facts relentlessly and self-indul-gently thrown together.

The text licks its chops when describing orgies and drug trips and nightmares, but the footnotes confront the thorniest problems of epistemology and cultural relativism – name-dropping the principal inventors of these problems rather than seriously grappling with the problems so that readers who are not already familiar with the arguments mentioned in the notes will be totally bewildered by them. The stories and field notes are deeply (and often explicitly) indebted to Mr. Castaneda, but the footnotes nervously bite Mr. Castaneda in the back.

Mr. Duerr’s heart is with the historian and philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, but his head (if not his academic portefeuille) belongs to Wittgenstein. The historical data are indebted to the historian of religions Mircea Eliade in their scope and in their themes (shamans, the world-tree, initiation through symbolic wombs in the vagina of the earth, etc.), but the interpretation of that data cold-shoulders the sacred or theological in favor of the profane or the anthropological (Mr. Duerr was, after all, trained as an anthropologist).

Mr. Duerr is attempting to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare, and his book is likely to infuriate both ordinary readers and scholars. ”Dreamtime,” translated now by Felicitas Goodman, was first published in 1978, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became the canon of a cult for intellectual former hippies; but it also inspired a serious volume of essays by respected academic supporters and opponents. Though the themes of the book – drugs, sex, anarchy, lurid religions – will probably appeal to Americans of the same coven (Mr. Duerr himself offers a special warning to readers of ”the American ‘freak’ literature” about witches’ recipes they call ” ‘tickets’ California-style,” and the original German edition contains many key phrases in English), the daunting scholarly apparatus and the heaviness of the argument may put them off. This is not an easy book to read; the arguments are there, but they hide in the footnotes and do not come all the way out of the closet until page 40, a third of the way through the book. Reading straight through this first third is rather like wandering stoned through the stacks of a very fine European library, browsing in the sections devoted to witchcraft, hallucinogens and orgiastic cults. It is good fun, but it is not for all tastes.

Serious scholars, on the other hand, will be alien-ated (to use Mr. Duerr’s term) first by their envy and mistrust of the popular success of ”Dreamtime” and then by the staleness of many of the arguments and the inaccuracy of much of the data used to support them. The basic arguments are winning enough, but no longer surprising; they may open up a brave new world to the Castaneda generation, but not to historians of science or religion. That witches represent the inversion of normal social roles, the reversal of time and the bringing of the outside into the inside, are ideas familiar to any readers of Mr. Eliade or the late anthropologist Victor Turner. To assert that our physicists have a narrowly blinkered concept of reality and our psychiatrists a culturally defined concept of sanity is to walk on a trail blazed long ago by Wittgenstein (not to mention Plato and the Zen Buddhists) and more recently heavily traveled by Thomas Kuhn, Mr. Feyerabend, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Michel Foucault and so many others. Yet it is a good trail to tread, for all that.

The errors in fact are more serious. Mr. Duerr himself is well aware of the flimsiness of the implications of many of his casual juxtapositions of unrelated facts wrenched out of context; he peppers his paragraphs with ”perhaps,” ”most likely,” ”may have been.” And he undercuts the authority of many of his dubious sources with disclaimers such as ”x is of the opinion,”

”according to y,” rather like a newspaper trying to arm itself against potential libel suits with a battery of ”allegedlys.” And indeed, his secondary sources (a necessary evil in a work that ranges so boldly through the cultures of the planet Earth) often play him false. In the course of his argument that anthropologists should have some first-hand empathetic experience of the people they write about – that they should become werewolves in order to understand werewolves and experience blindness in order to understand not only blindness but sight – he cites, and mocks, the counter-arguments of anthropologists who would excommunicate those who dare to go native.

In the course of this discussion, he tells the story of the ancient Greek seer Tiresias, who became a woman in order to know if women felt greater pleasure than men during intercourse: ”Now he knew how women experienced pleasure, but unfortunately, he had forgotten what it was like for him when he was still a man.” Mr. Duerr thanks Hermann Walter for this example. Had he instead found an occasion to thank Apollodorus or Pindar or Ovid, he would have discovered that Tiresias did remember what it was like to be a man; the whole point of the story is that Tiresias returned to manhood and triumphantly announced that women experience the greater pleasure in sex. It is ironic that this anecdote about Tiresias’ first-hand fieldwork, cited by Mr. Duerr in the course of his argument in favor of first-hand fieldwork, is wrongly cited against Mr. Duerr’s argument rather than in favor of it, all because Mr. Duerr did not do his armchair fieldwork here at all.

”Dreamtime” is a self-portrait of the anthropologist as mugwump, straddling the fence between the wilderness of drug experience and empathetic fieldwork on the one hand and the village of academic footnotes and rational analysis on the other. It is himself Mr. Duerr mourns for in his final paragraph: ”The researcher will always stay a bit ‘between the worlds.’ It is the price he has to pay for knowledge: to be forever excluded from the world of talking animals and from the world of talking anthropologists as well.” Methodologically, Mr. Duerr is attempting to wing it between his two worlds. In the end, the answer he gives to his basic question, ”Can witches fly?” is, ”I can.”

A widow had two daughters; the one was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy. She greatly favoured the ugly, lazy girl. The other one had to do all the work, and was truly a Cinderella in the house.

Once the girl went to fetch water, and when she leaned over to pull the bucket from the well, she leaned over too far and fell in.

And when she awoke and came to herself again, she was in a beautiful meadow. The sun was shining, and there were many thousands of flowers.

She walked across this meadow and came to an oven full of bread. The bread called out, “Oh, take me out. Take me out, or I’ll burn! I’ve been thoroughly baked for a long time!” So she stepped up to it and took everything out.

After that she walked further and came to a tree laden with apples. “Shake me! Shake me! We apples are all ripe!” cried the tree. So she shook the tree until the apples fell as though it were raining apples. When none were left in the tree, she continued on her way.

Finally she came to a small house. An old woman was peering out from inside. She had very large teeth, which frightened the girl, and she wanted to run away.

But the old woman called out to her, “Don’t be afraid, dear child. Stay here with me, and if you do my housework in an orderly fashion, it will go well with you. Only you must take care to make my bed well and shake it diligently until the feathers fly, then it will snow in the world.* I am Frau Holle.”

Because the old woman spoke so kindly to her, the girl agreed, and started in her service. The girl took care of everything to Frau Holle’s satisfaction and always shook her featherbed vigorously. Therefore she had a good life with her: no angry words, and boiled or roast meat every day.

Now after she had been with Frau Holle for a time, her heart saddened. Even though she was many thousands of times better off here than at home, still she had a yearning to return. Finally she said to the old woman, “I have such a longing for home, and even though I am very well off here, I cannot stay longer.”

Frau Holle said, “You are right, and because you have served me so faithfully, I will take you back myself.” With that she took her by the hand and led her to a large gate. The gate was opened, and while the girl was standing under it, an immense rain of gold fell, and all the gold stuck to her, so that she was completely covered with it.

“This is yours because you have been so industrious,” said Frau Holle.

With that the gate was closed and the girl found herself above on earth. She went home to her mother, and because she arrived all covered with gold, she was well received.

When the mother heard how she had come to the great wealth, she wanted to achieve the same fortune for the other, the ugly and lazy daughter. She made her go and jump into the well.

Like the other girl, she too awoke in a beautiful meadow, and she walked along the same path. When she came to the oven, the bread cried again, “Oh, take me out! Take me out, or else I’ll burn! I’ve been thoroughly baked for a long time!” But the lazy girl answered, “As if I would want to get all dirty,” and walked away.

Soon she came to the apple tree. It cried out, “Oh, shake me! Shake me! We apples are all ripe!” But she answered, “Oh yes, one could fall on my head,” and with that she walked on.

When she came to Frau Holle’s house, she was not afraid, because she had already heard about her large teeth, and she immediately began to work for her. On the first day she forced herself, was industrious, and obeyed Frau Holle, when she said something to her, because she was thinking about all the gold that she would give her. But on the second day she already began to be lazy, on the third day even more so, and then she didn’t even want to get up in the morning. She did not make the bed for Frau Holle, the way she was supposed to, and she did not shake it until the feathers flew.

Frau Holle soon became tired of this and dismissed her of her duties. This was just what the lazy girl wanted, for she thought that she would now get the rain of gold. Frau Holle led her too to the gate. She stood beneath it, but instead of gold, a large kettle full of pitch spilled over her.

“That is the reward for your services,” said Frau Holle, and closed the gate.

Then the lazy girl went home, entirely covered with pitch, and it would not come off as long as she lived.

*In Hessen whenever it snows they say that Frau Holle is making her bed.

Wind walker, Hedge Rider, feather walker, realm worker

I couple of month’s ago I bought two books about being a hedge witch by the author Rae Beth. I read one and barely flicked through the other. They are another new definition – ones I believe simply confuse rather than help.

I have also heard a few people call themselves hedge witches and in conversation discover they don’t ride the hedge – possibly a Rae Beth thing.

The witch that rides – the wind walker, the Mother Goose – is most commonly known by the English term (believed to be of Saxon origin) hedge rider, or hedge witch.

The ‘hedge’ is a metaphor for the boundaries of the realms. Many paths cross these boundaries, such as the shaman. And it’s with the shaman that the hedge witch has most similarities. More so than with ceremonial mages; such as Wiccans, witchcrafters, or cunning-folk.

I was told a long time ago, by a Heathen, that in a German myth or understanding of the cosmos, the earth was surrounded by a hedge. This is similar to my own heritage, albeit, not a hedge. This myth has more meaning for this way of life than simply the hedge of a village that is mentioned in many books/web articles.

It is a shamanic path only in the style of travel between realms, not in purpose, beliefs, or other techniques.

I don’t call myself a hedge witch because of my aversion to labels – being boundaries themselves – but I could be considered as such.

The hedge witch’s focus is not magic, healing, or spellcraft. The wind walker seeks to cross the boundaries. The true hedge rider does so with plants. To do so with meditation is not hedge riding, it becomes something else entirely.

It’s not simply due to difference in technique – which does create an entirely different experience – but more to do with the use of green allies. Working with plants is essential.

—

The ride is taken with nature/plant spirits.

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Hedgeriding is plant induced, but can be paired with chant or movement.

We cross the shoreline to meet with the spirits of place, of nature, on their realm. Also, to meet with the ancestors. In the journey, the threads of the web are glimpsed, and sometimes, depending on the witch, they can be worked with.

This is our focus – rather than gods or magic. Riding the hedge is not a technique, but a way of life, a purpose-driven path.

In the heritage of some, the riding is for the purpose of divination or prophecy. Seidh is one expression of this.

While the salve on the broomstick is the most well known, and infamous, method, this is merely one of many. Most methods are much less sensational or interesting: they are simply methods, nothing more. Also, mushrooms, of which I’ve seen mentioned, are the least likely to be used, this is more likely of shamans than witches. But of course, it always depends where the witch lives and what is available to her.

The easiest is burning herbs to inhale, or drinking teas. More elaborate methods are used for certain rites, or depending upon the rider’s culture. The rider might want certain rituals to induce a particular purpose, or might require the aid of an animal spirit.

If animal spirits are required, these are called, sometimes days before, and the animal is taken if it chooses to give its life. Usually it’s an animal of flight, but again, it depends upon the culture and the purpose.

Often, the heart is used, or only the blood. Sometimes the carcass is burnt in a hearth or open fire. Often along with the plants for flight. Sometimes the carcass is stuffed with the herbs, other times parts of the animal are crushed with them and sprinkled on the flames.

The riding can take place anywhere; from the witch’s home, or, as is often the case, from where places of veil-crossing are found. These can be the spirit roads or the doorways.

Wind walkers are no different than many village witches, in that they are solitaires. However, for very deep work, or extreme plant allies, hedge witches would coven (verb) to act as watchers/sitters.

Herb workers, for healing, are not hedge witches. Please respect traditions by using more useful terms.

In my family, there are only a handful of feather walkers; more are Crafters. In my experience this is the case across the globe.

In my Reading List you will notice I’ve listed books on folklore and fairy tales.

Many nursery rhymes and fairy tales have hidden within them the truths of the people of the land, the witches, the pagans, the shamans.

Frau Holt, known by many names according to culture, who we know disguised as Mother Goose, is a goddess of Europe, she leads the ancestors and the walker between realms, the shoreline flyer, the hedge rider, across the veils. She is the female leader of the hunt.

Old Mother Goose, when she wanted to wander,

Would ride through the air on a very fine gander.

The realm walker and the Dame ride, ride, ride….

I have found that even within pagan circles, that is, those that attempt for a different perspective on nature, you find that plants are still treated as medicinal substances. I think this is due to the very ingrained western allopathic perspective we’ve been raised in.

So plants are still looked upon by what they can or can’t do. For example – this plant is good for this sickness. This is the allopathic way.

In the shadow bruja’s way, the plant is a living, intelligent, conscious being. We don’t use plants as if they were just substances or tools. Instead, we form a type of relationship, just as you might do with friends. It’s more like a relationship with work colleague though, one that you trust implicitly. Because that’s what you form, a working partnership.

Of course plants do have inherent qualities, but they also have individual qualities. This is why sometimes a plant will work for you and other times the same type will not, or it works differently. But also, it’s not one-sided. So the person ingesting the plant or working with it magically, influences its qualities too. Just like any relationship.

If you are interested in the ways of the shadow witch, the root worker, then it’s part of how we work to form relationships with plants. Research is important (if you can’t get handed down knowledge) but this is only after you meet and greet the plant.

If you still think of ‘X plant cures Y ailment’, then you’re stuck in an allopathic way of seeing the natural world.