The Witch at the Forest's Edge: Thirteen Keys to Modern Traditional Witchcraft

1

WORLDVIEW AND SPIRITUALITY

The world is enchanted, filled with the whisperings of spirits. We witches are alive in a vibrant world, and we find meaning and power in our relationships with all beings. Our form of spirituality is a living relationship with spirits—the animating, dynamic, sacred essences within all things and beyond. Wonder, mystery, and sacredness co-exist with and inhabit our perception, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary aspects of our lives. As witches of the Forest’s Edge, we work unabashedly and intensely with real magic, and we are profoundly shaped by our Craft.

This chapter has a theoretical bent, while many of the others speak more directly to the day-to-day doings of witchery. The point is not to bog down practice with navel-gazing, but rather to be transparent about some of the ideas that underlie the practicalities of subsequent chapters. The themes of enchantment, interconnectedness, and liminality are currents running throughout the book. The notion of a witch’s spirituality as something that we do is reflected in my emphasis on practicality. Throughout, you will find a dynamic balance of pragmatism and deep understanding.

Many witches are of a rational, bookish, and, quite frankly, nerdy bent. We place a high value on science, critical thought, and careful discernment. Yet also, the immediacy of our experience tells us that there is more wonder than we can describe. We possess more agency than we would ever hope, and so do other beings. And as peculiar as it may seem to folks of a different worldview, our way of being can be intensely fulfilling to us, and living fully into it can be a profound homecoming.

Enchantment

As Western culture moved toward modernity, we moved away from enchantment, or seeing the sacredness everywhere. With this movement, we have enjoyed the blossoming of science and the championing of critical thought, but for the most part we have lost a world full of charm and mystery. We could treasure science, critical thinking, and secularism, and also a worldview of connection and enchantment. But here we are in a world where wonder is called childlike and dismissed as immature. How much more could the world flourish if we let the freedom and understanding of rationality breed wonder, humility, and relationship?

The truth is that we humans have never been good at being modern even in the most Westernized regions of the world. We’ve never believed with our whole hearts that only humans are conscious and that the cosmos is a spiritless machine. We’ve never really all decided that there is no way of sensing beyond the ordinary senses and that we’ve never truly existed beyond the reach of enchantment. Right now, people are talking to their cats, feeling that a certain tree is a particularly good place beneath which to rest, and wearing lucky socks.

Instead of being an antidote to this problem, too much of modern religion drains wonder from the world. When religion becomes a matter of belief in disembodied religious ideas and moral purity, then it does not matter at all if a religious person lives in the world as if they appreciate the sacredness in ordinary life. But we witches shake off religion as purity of belief. We shake off the twisting of science into a tool for domination. We embrace the sacredness, the wonder, and the magic of everyday life. We embrace enchantment.

Interconnectedness

A peculiar thing happens when we embrace enchantment. Enchantment lends itself to seeing the real, the personal, the active, and the intentional everywhere. We start to see the ways in which we have mistakenly treated ourselves as the most real beings, the center of the world, while acting as though the rest of the world is just made of things.

This self-centering does have use in magic, to help us fully appreciate our power and connectedness, but it is a metaphor for our agency—or our ability to do things. We do this self-centering in relation to other humans and also to other-than-human parts of the cosmos and not as though it applies only to us. While it may seem like a powerful superiority, this self-centeredness is not only harmful to others but also leaves us feeling isolated and powerless. So many of us mostly interact with other humans and with the creations of humans, we develop the sickness of separation from nature. It is a painful delusion to think we are separate.

We witches of the Forest’s Edge seek to find our place within the world, not on a pedestal above it. And indeed, to be fully immersed in the world is to be powerful, not because you seek to dominate, horde, and exploit, but because you are a sovereign doer among doers, working with the strength of those relationships.

It is easy to slide back into the self-centering habit of treating others as objects, tools, or mirrors of the self. As witches, we strive to engage with others as a spirit in relationship with another spirit, nature to nature, or person to person. Following from this way of seeing all beings as real, personal, and active, we draw on the ways that we are interconnected with all of these spirits. All things are interrelated, and we work with this when doing magic. This is not because of a god that connects or contains everything, but simply because the nature of nature is ecological interconnectedness.

Perhaps it is strange to use a term from science, ecology, to describe spirituality, but I don’t think it is odd for a witch. It is an apt way to conceptualize our relationships with others. Ecology has an etymology that lends itself to a poetic understanding. Eco- comes from the Greek oikos, meaning home, or, to go back even earlier to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, it means clan. Linguists have reconstrusted PIE as a common ancestor language to many modern languages, including English. Meanwhile, -logy has a richer history than just study of. It means word or speaking. From the PIE root, it means to gather. So, with ecology, we are speaking of home, we are gathering with our clan. Allow yourself to be gathered home, nestled in with your more-than-human kin, so that the world can become enchanted before your eyes. We are most fully human when we are at home as one part of nature on earth.

Accepting your place as one piece within the natural world is glorious but not easy. It requires a sacrifice of the ideals of human society that hold us up as more than nature. And as part of nature, we are part of systems that can be dangerous and bloody. But that doesn’t mean we’re victims. We are doers, and witches are dangerous, too. This sense of connection and appreciation for other-than-human beings locates the witch as a self-in-community with others, but it does not deny the specificity of any person, human or otherwise.

Liminality

Witches are threshold dwellers. We are liminal, which means that we can be present on both sides of a boundry. It means we stand in a transformative space betwixt and between. That’s what liminal means and what it means to be at the forest’s edge.

By seeking the enchanting magic of relatedness to others while we embrace literacy, logic, science, and personal freedom, we often find ourselves at the edges of contemporary society. We are both logical and pursuing experience far beyond what could be explained by society’s logic. We are also, in many ways, a tremendously normal bunch—with jobs, kids, homes, hobbies, and any number of other things that fill our lives—just like everyone else. But we can walk in both worlds and weave them together in the living of our lives. And as edge-dwellers, we stand in good company with ancestors, whose magical practices set them just a bit apart from the rest of the community, and with the ecological edges between different habitats.

Religion and Spirituality in Community

Likely it will come as little surprise that I, along with many witches, struggle with the concept of religion. If religion is primarily dogma, offering a strict list of required beliefs and crystal clear dos and do nots, then the practice of witchery set forth in this book is not about religion. Or if religion is primarily hierarchy, maintaining hard boundaries between those who are able to understand and connect directly with the sacred and those who must follow only the ones with superior knowledge, then this is not about religion.

Any conception of religion—and there are many—that creates an impenetrable barrier between this thing and that, or that draws clear, comfortable lines between those who are in or out, cannot stand within the realm of the Forest’s Edge. For we witches embrace a self-definition that places us on the boundary. We seek the immediacy of direct experience. We encourage diversity of thought and practice. We emphasize the specificity of an individual’s craft and hold all initiates as equals. That said, if religion is a collection of ideas, practices, ethics, texts, and organizational systems that seeks to help connect humankind with the sacred or the spiritual, then indeed our variety of witchery is much like religion.

On the subject of spirituality, in self-help or New Age publications, spirituality is often understood as your own relationship with your higher self or the cultivation of a purer, less ego-driven inner self. In contrast, we would say that individual self-improvement is a product of powerful spiritual engagement but not the end in itself. The witch’s spirituality is about transformative magical relationship with spirit—the animating, dynamic, sacred principles within all things and beyond. And we have found this sort of spiritual pursuit to lend richness, wonder, and meaning to our lives.

Spirituality in Motion

It is one thing to give an intellectual assent to the ideas and practices outlined in this book. But will you do the work? Witchery is a practice. But, if you are currently more of a reader than a doer, please don’t be put off. We are all constantly growing in our practice, no matter how experienced, and it is always possible for a witch to start small (or big) and cultivate a deeply meaningful practice for themselves.

In order to identify and develop perceptions of the sacred and the many influences at work in ourselves and our environment, we need both study and practice. Once a practitioner has actually experienced something that they learned or formed in study, it takes on new life and deeper meaning unique to that individual. Without study, we may not be inspired to practice with depth; without practice, we cannot fully understand our study.

As you continue on your journey of cultivating a dynamic spiritual practice, you will integrate or release aspects of previous spiritual practice depending on how effective they are at enabling you to experience your relationship with the sacred now. You are the authority on what works specifically for you. But it’s good to remember that easy is not the same as working, and difficult doesn’t always indicate a mismatch. You are responsible for your spiritual path, and that path will grow and change as you grow and