Bedrest for the angels

 

For two days I have had a nasty virus or gastric flu or pesticide poisoning from crop spray and have stayed in bed feeling sorry for myself and hoping it is just gastric flu and not some insidious carcinogenic toxic poisoning that will wipe me out when I am in my cronely prime.

 

I have had endless cups of mint tea with a squeeze of lemon juice and homemade chicken soup and glasses of orange juice and teapots full of grated ginger steeped in boiling water and I am still sick. My kitchen is overflowing with ripe organic tomatoes and my garden is scarlet with unpicked ripe organic tomatoes, and I cannot look a tomato in the eye. There are bowls of cling peaches to be peeled and processed, table grapes still a little tart because the grape season has just begun.

 

None of the spells  or potions I know are much use, and I am trusting to bedrest. At least I haven’t needed to take a course of antibiotics or some other allopathic wonder drug that will have me up and about but with fanny thrush and a metallic taste in my mouth and sadly enhanced tolerance to supa drugs. I sleep for hours and wake up and drink fluids and sleep some more and read articles from the London Review of Books to find out if my mind is still there and then I have a cool bath and sleep some more.

No meditation, no yoga, no t’ai chi, no witchy empath exercises, no half-hearted rituals, no wishful magical thinking. I just lie in bed being ordinary and sick, which is a great relief. Sometimes I skim thorough 10001 pagan etc blogs and think we try to hard as magical apprentices. There is nothing to prove. Here I am just lying in bed being a sick neo-pagan witchy woman with scant respect for labels and letting the herbal knowledge and crafty instincts slip away as I rest. There’s a kind of bare attention there, taking in the sun coming through the window and some trilling from the noisiest house sparrow and my puppies beside me snoring like ancient tractors, but otherwise not much is going on at a conscious level.

 

At the Unconscious level sickness takes the core self down into the ruined temples and dark forests and ocean canyons, but I am not going to chase after the Inanna self as she descends through unmapped regions. I am going to stay in the day with a poem from David Harsent about a garden goddess who smells ‘veryslightly of civet’ — and of course with that phrase I am right back in the mystery and amusement and Otherliness of this here, now and forever life.

Solar eclipse over the Indian Ocean

 

Another of those magical sights and glorious when seen from here, the Dark Sun loosing its power over the wilder hemishere, the oceans and tropical islands and lonely atolls.

This eclipse is called an annular eclipse as it forms a ring shape around the molten sun. The annular eclipse will be visible from a wide track that traverses the Indian Ocean and western Indonesia. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much larger path of the Moon’s shadow, which includes the southern third of Africa on the Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Australia except for Tasmania, southeast India, south-east Asia and Indonesia.

 

And I went out and did one of my more astonishing and hopeful rituals for the Dark Moon in Aquarius, then enjoyed the company of Scottish expat friends celebrating Burns’ Night — we toasted the reprobate poet with mugs of cocoa, and all the ghost stories sounded a trifle unbelievable on a balmy night at the foot of Africa. Every now and again, a wind blows inland and the smell of the green sea rushes through the valley. The wild ginger bush is flowering and a small iguana has taken refure in a Brazilian tipuana bush. Late at night, night birds were shrieking from the dense thickets at the back of the garden, along with tree frogs and the odd displaced Scottish ghostie. I sat thinking about my childhood in lonelier parts of central Africa, the moon like a tiny paper disc over those towering mountains to the north and my memories of great wild rivers ( the Pungwe, the Zambesi, the Limpopo, the Congo) tearing towards the sea and carrying villages with them across the flood plains black with silt.

 

To be attentive to mysteries of the natural world — that  roots us in belonging and yet leads us elsewhere.

Rabbie Burns and the odd wee ghostie

 

In addition to the Dark Moon, the solar eclipse and the Chineses new year ( the Year of the Ox), it is also Burns’ Night and I am profoundly grateful I shall not be forced to go out with Scottish friends and eat haggis, tatties and neeps in a frightening offal-soured gravy. Or watch beaming friends who should know better do Highland Reels or imitations of Kenneth McKellor on the slippery banks of Loch Lomond. The Scots are all very Jekyll  & Hyde when it comes to being pious and thrifty at 10am and debauched and raucous at 2am.

 

But one of my ancestors was a wife of Burns the serial polygamist and my father’s family come from Lanarkshire, from stone cottages with deep fireplaces and stone lintels and cowsheds and will o’ the wisps glimpsed in the hedgerows in the gloaming. The Tam O’ Shanter folk stories are part of my heritage and I always get a  little Celtic on Burns Night.

 

My Welsh witches of course are admiring snowdrops and slaying dragons and communing with deities who inhabit the Nile, but I go back to the wild Scottish expatriates of my childhood in Kenya and the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, great men with flaming red beards and women dancing on crossed swords and bonfires blazing up to the fiddlers’ tunes. The stories of Scotland before the First World War, the legends of kelpies and seal women and white horses riding into dark lakes and ghosts that follow youngsters home after the milking, the abductions by faeries — and the waking in a chilly dawn amidst bracken, the golden halls and dance music gone, the human child banished from the magical lands forever. Haunted by that sweet malicious laughter, silvery and echoing on the silent hillside, the doors into the Other World closed and invisible, barred to the exile.

 

Robbie Burns himself died of heart disease at the age of 37, still a young man and with the child’s innocent and gullible heart. He had the Romantic’s unerring grasp of what nature holds for the searcher after the unknown:

 

‘The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies’

Dancing on egg shells

 

 

The Dark Moon is close and I love the stillness in the garden at night. The Sabian symbol for this new moon in Aquarius is

‘A child born out of an egg shell.’

 

We give birth to ourselves in the dark, filled with intentionality and potential. The egg shell has to break open, we cannot just incubate the smooth egg, the perfect enclosed notion. There is the child within breaking free of enclosure, risking the uunknown and coming into the world trembling and vulnerable. My rituals must take on a  scary open trust and birthing process.

 

My friend Trish found a large dappled egg abandoned out on the hillside under a tall pine tree, some years ago. She brought it home and kept the egg warm in cotton wool, pillowed and sheltered from draughts. One evening when I was there, we heard the tick-tick noise of the tiny bird pecking out of the egg and within a few hours the gosling had emerged, sticky wet and spiky. The egg shell cracked open in jagged fragments. An Egyptian goose, very common in the Cape. She reared the goose and  after four months he flew away, coming back twice to visit. We called him Spike and he is immortalized on video tape, his webbed print stamped into a terracotta plate that hangs on an outside wall.

 

One of the older folk traditions of South African is hand-painted ostrich eggs, great cream-coloured and porous egg shells painted in symmetrical or picturesque designs. It is a curious and sometimes kitsch tradition I like very much and I often stand looking at coloured and panoramic ostrich eggs when I am staying in the small villages of the Karoo. I have made an omelette for 15 people from the hefty yolk of one ostrich egg alone. The shells are dense and able to withstand the heat and harsh climate of the Karoo, often buried in warm sand.

 

So the Dark Moon is  perfect time for an emergence of sorts. Letting go of defendedness and coming into the world new-born and naked and receptive, covered and shielded by the sympathetic dark. Dreaming of flight and soaring vision.

Dark moon in Aquarius

 

 

I seem to be exploring tangents and going nowhere — interesting digressions but nothing to root me into a deeper awareness.

 

The Dark Moon in Aquarius is approaching, together with a  solar eclipse. I’m planning a ritual with smoke and fire, using pentangles on the alter set out under the night sky in the garden. I hope the incense doesn’t bring the neighbours over in hope of designer drugs — just joking, my neighbours are very sedate. I am placing deep purple panicles of ‘Black Knight’ buddleia on the altar and lighting a fire with applewood, looking to burn branches of rosemary. Anointing myself with Aloe vera salve from the garden. I might bake some honey and ginger cakes to offer with the libation. And the chanting will be to do with the veiled Dark Lady. She might leave me a few cakes to munch on afterwards.

As I worked in the garden early this morninng, I thought about Jane Rebecca Yorke, the last woman in Britain to be punished as a witch. She was fined a few pounds in September 1944 for telling fortunes with the aid of her Zulu spirit guide. Since Yorke was an elderly woman, she was not sent to prison. Winston Churchill, the sometime Druid, did not attempt to  intervene as he had done with Helen Duncan, the Scottish medium sent to Holloway for nine months early in 1944 for fear she might reveal details of the D-Day landings. O Hellish Nell, we could do with more like you!

Expeditions into the psyche

 

In recent weeks I’ve been looking at certain personalities in esoteric or Craft traditions and reworking biographical profiles for my own amusement. What I am also doing is highlighting for myself aspects and dynamics that echo my own inner conflicts and attractions.

 

The long and bitter feud between Dion Fortne and Moina Mathers fascinates me. As a young woman Dion experienced relentless and frightening psychic attacks by Moina when she challenged the older woman’s authority  and horrified Moina by publishing details of hidden teachings in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

 

Years ago a friend of mine did an extraordinary painting entitled Can You Tell A Secret? In the painting, two figures are moving across a dark field, walking side by side. One of the figures has half-turned and is showing the watcher something in a half-opened hand. The other figure is oblivious to this.

 

That image spoke volumes to me about the act of disclosure and how it can violate others’ trust and felt need for absolute secrecy. Keeping secrets is very often an intolerable burden. The need to tell can become overpowering. But to whom do we in turn tell a  secret, and who can be trusted to keep that twice-told secret? The sequence of telling and betrayal may coninue and it may be imperative that in fact the secret does get told. Can you tell a secret?

 

Once there must have been love, friendship, gratitude and a sense of shared endeavour and respect for one another’s spiritual gifts between Dion Fortune and Moina Mathers, the young impressionable Welsh woman and the older Jewish artist, magicians-in-becoming. That love may account for the ferocity of the later conflict between them. They haunted and possessed one another in ways neither could quite understand. Shades too of the mother and daughter relationship, the daughter’s struggle to free herself from a dominating and vindictive mother. The psychic banishing achieved by Doion Fortune did not end the preoccupation with her former mentor and for all we know the same preoccupation was felt by Moina Mathers.

 

Another kind of quixotic relationship was evident in the spiritual partnership of Moina Mathers and Sam McGregor Mathers, in that unconsummated marriage and the tension between empowering and fulfilling work and rituals, the freedom given to Moina by her magician husband, and then the way in which Moina chose to suffer alongside him as he lost patrons and suffered ill health and hostile rejection from his colleagues, her role as uncritical helpmeet. Moina Mathers believed Sam died because the summoning of the Secret Chiefs had drained him of vital energies. Others saw Mather’s death as a result of Spanish flu ( a global plague that killed far more people than had died in WWI) attacking a system weakedned by alcoholism and poor nutrition. Alongside the support and equality Moina experienced in this marriage, there was a curiously sublimated love that might have intensified the erotic bond between the two rather than dissipating it. Lovers who never make love  together never forget one another, and that thwarted desire can become a transmuted longing and triumph over the flesh ( to use the language they might have found congenial).

 

And then there is the coupling of John Dee and his dubious protege Edward Kelley, roaming together around Poland, Hungary and Bohemia in the 1500s, through forest and lonely mountain hamlets and in the shadow of great castles, seeking hearings with monarchs and princes, telling their stories and giving demonstrations of their alchemical workings. Edward who could hear the angelic murmurings, and John Dee who could interpret them. They part in anger and disillusionment after Edward wants to have sex with John’s young wife, who will later die of plague in Manchester. The spectre of lust or angelic mischief-making has contaminated that high pure love between two spiritual and platonic men. And John’s companion in his last years is his faithful daughter Katherine, a Miranda perhaps after Shakespeare’s enchanting magician’s daughter in the Tempest, and maybe a witch in her own right.

 

Reading and unreading narratives that are ambiguous and elliptical brings me back to the stories we tell ourselves and others. In the forefront of my mind is the question of intentional community-making amongst pagani and the kinds of partnerships into which we enter; the tension between what we talk about freely in blogland  what we keep back; what others reveal about us or deduce from the posted entries. What is oppositional and what is a genuine consensus, what diversity reveals about communities that have very little in common and the bigger question of unity in the face of threat and alliances to counter abusive practices. The ways in which cultural contexts obscure very simple truths, the plethora of masks and implied rituals and competing truth claims that vy for attention in virtual communities.

 

Who is listening out there? What constitutes common ground? And how deep does that consensus go between peers and lovers and friends among the online pagani? So many different journeys and too many misunderstandings. And, nevertheless, the conversation continues, alive with unanswerables and chance wisdom.

Looking back: Moina Mathers

 

She is one of those controversial and misunderstood women in early 2oth-century mgical circles, but intriguing nonetheless and I find myself wishing she had written more or confided more in others so that we had more background on her life and thought. The only revealing work done on Moina Mathers’ life has been by tarot historian and reader Mary K Greer in her study of Women of the Golden Dawn.

 

Moina Mathers was born Mina Bergson in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1865, sister of the French writer Henri Bergson who won the Nobel Prize for literature despite being Jewish.

 

 Mina, a dark-haired art stuent with deep blue eyes who reminded friends of a Pre-Raphaelite model, met Samuel McGregor Mathers at the British Museum one year before he cofounded the famous British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, working in the Western mystery tradition. As a young initiate Moina took the motto ‘I leave no traces behind’, sometimes translated as ‘I never retrace my steps’. Secrecy and silence were important to her and she would fight to maintain that secrecy and confidentiality throughout her life. She married Mathers and they became esoteric partners: in 1899 they performed the rites of Isis together in a Paris theatre.

 

McGregor Mathers is a complex and not always convincing character. He was born in Hackney but claimed Scottish lineage and took the name McGregor. He was a vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist who studied Freemasonry and then Rosicrucian traditions. After a schism in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ( like many others, Mathers detested Crowley), Mathers formed the Alpha and Omega group. After his death from Spanish flu in 1918, Moina took on the leadership of Alpha & Omega.

The Golden Dawn was organised into Orders and women as well as men were accepted as initiates. The First Order, and here I am relying on the Golden Dawn website and Wikipedia sources only,  taught esoteric philosophy based on the Hermetic Qabalah and personal development through study and awareness of the four Classical Elements as well as what they believed were the basics of astrology, tarot, and geomancy. The Second or “Inner” Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold), taught magic proper, including scrying, astral travel, and Alchemy. The Third Order was that of the “Secret Chiefs”, who were said to be great adepts no longer in incarnate form, but who directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Chiefs of the Second Order. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn attracted poets and writers and mytics: members included the Welsh writer and mytic Arthur Machen, the Irish poet Yeats, his lover and political activist Maud Gonne, Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill, Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, Fiona McCleod who was known as William Sharp, Florence Farr and Aleister Crowley. Much controversy had to do with the authenticity of the Cipher Manuscripts produced by Mathers, provenance uncertain and with documents prone to disappearing.

 

The influence of the Golden Dawn was tremendous in British esoteric and literary circles, Four or five very gifted and unconventional women — Maud Gonne, Annie Horniman, Florence Farr and Moina Mathers worked together creating rituals and working magic in 1890s London, ignoring the restrictions and mores of Edwardian society. But there are few images of Moina Mathers available and little is known about her work as a magician. She was a strong-willed and dramatic personality who took the name Moina because fey Celtic mythology was very much in vogue at the time. She studied art at Slade and sketched Egyptian and Celtic artifacts in the British Museum. She entered into a devoted but unconsummated marriage with another adept. Sam McGregor Mathers was the ‘Master’ — but she was a high priestess of Isis. As a clairvoyant and diviner, she created not only rituals but the ritual chambers of the London temple were designed and decorated by her.

 

After the alcoholic and impoverished Mathers died in 1918 at the end of a devastating World War, his widow ran the Paris lodge for some time but then returned to England. Moina had fought from the outset with the young Dion Fortune and tried unsuccessfully to attack her through psychic means. Moina seems to have had a talent for making enemies: she accused the American occultist Paul Foster Case of practising sex magic in Alpha and Omega, perhaps jealous of his rapid advancement as an Adept. Case believed that sex magic was crucial and that the ’serpent fire’, the Great Magical Agent, worked through redirected sexual energies. It would be interesting to know if Moina was opposed to any kind of tantric ritual on principle or had spotted a sexual predator and wanted to protect the greater purpose (and women members) of the Alpha & Omega. In another scandalous controversy, Moina was accused of bringing about the mysterious death on Iona of her former student Netta Fornario. Several magicians  who knew Moina accused her of psychic murder. Moina was unable to defend herself against such accusations because she had been dead for 18 months before Netta died on Iona, There is no doubt though that right until the end Moina inspired fear and resentment amongst her circle. She herself died in 1928 at the age of 63 after self-imposed starvation in London.

 

She did not retrace her steps and left few traces. Her asexual ascetic marriage seems to have brought her great personal freedom and satisfaction. As a priestess, she was not afraid to exercise power and although the feud with Dion Fortune has cast Moina as a formidable, ruthless and malicious opponent, the latter did not shy away from conflict or from defending what she believed. In her extant writings Moina Mathers speaks of purity and self-sacrifice and her passionate idealism comes through without egotistic overtones or puritanism. Many ritual elements and practices familiar today, such as circle casting , out-of-body experinces, tarot readings and pentagram symbols owe their popularity to the Golden Dawn rituals recovered or created by women such as Moina Mathers.

Looking back: John Dee

 

He was Welsh, of course. John Dee claimed to be a descendant of the Welsh prince Rhodri the Great and the name Dee derives from the Welsh Du, meaning ‘black’. His family came to London jst after the coronation of a new king, Henry VII and John Dee was born in Tower Ward, London. He was educated at Catholic schools and later went on to St John’s College, Cambridge and was a founding member of Trinity College.

 

He travelled widely around Europe as a young man, a Europe caught between medieval and Renaissance. He was tall and slender, wore an artist’s smock-like gown with slit sleeves, and had a long beard white as milk: throughout his life he was considered very handsome. In his 50s, his second wife would be the 24-year-old Jane Fromond whom he would be forced to share with the medium Edward Kelley.

 

John Dee was also a collector – in the British Museum one rainy July morning I once spent an hour or two looking at his Speculum, an obsidian Aztec cult object, a hand mirror brought to Europe in the 1520s, glistening and highly reflective. He took comfort in divinatory stones and engraved seals and ancient maps.

 

John Dee was in many ways very much a Renaissance man: he studied mathematics and navigation, cartography, astronomy and produced stage plays that gave him the reputation of being a magician. He lectured on Euclid in Paris. But he also loved secrecy and mysteries and his attempts to cast horoscopes for English princesses led to his arrest. It was not a tolerant society, but it was a society that thrived on dreams of alchemy and transformation and perpetual motion machines. John Dee was a scientist but he was also a dreamer.

 

He was passionate about numerology. His influences were those of hermetic philosophy and the Platonic and Pythagorean thinking current in those centuries, the work of European  writers like Ficino. It seems strange to us now, but he saw no tension between his pagan beliefs and his love of the Christina faith, his longing to see Catholics and Protestants united.

 

At his country home, Mortlake, he built up a rare and wonderful library of old books and manuscripts. He planned a great empire conquered through navigation skills, enthralled by visions of the New World, drawing on the Prince Madog myth of a Welsh prince conquering America centuries before.  He thrived on the imaginative energies and bold dreams fostered by the reign of Elizabeth I.

 

In 1564 he sat down and wrote his first ‘hermetic’ work, Monas Hieroglyphica, then travelled all the way to Hungary to present a copy to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximillian II. John Dee had begun to unravel the hidden meanings of the Kabbalah through his own glyph and understood the hidden mystical unity of the universe. His codes and cryptic references have made the work largely unintelligible to later generations.

 

By the 1580s Dee was disillusioned with science and the observation of nature, and turned to the supernatural, more specifically the angels. He began attuning himself to the angelic voices through a medium or scryer. A young man named Edward Kelley channelled the angelic voices as they dictated to Dee secrets  concealed in their Enochian language, both men seated at a small table with a crystal ball or  shew stone. For some years Dee and Kelley roamed around central Europe, Poland and Bohemia, where Kelley announced to Dee that the angel Urial had ordered both men to share their wives. Disillusioned, Dee broke with Kelley and returned to England.

 

Kelley is something of an archetype, the alchemist as charlatan. He claimed to be able to prepare a ‘red tincture’ with which he could transform base metals into gold. He was lustful, devious, controlling and more intterested in profiting from alchemy than scrying. But, like many tricksters, his gifts seem to have been genuine despite his fraudulent use of them.

 

Dee found his library at Mortake in ruins. After a time in tenure as an academic, he lost favour under the new king, James I, and he lived in poverty in Mortlake, cared for by his daughter Katherine. John Dee died in his early 80s, in about 1608. Even in his age and penury he was sought out as a magician and wizard by many local people and remembered as a great magical worker in London.

 

His manuscripts recording the angelic communications were first published in 1659 and became highly influential. Shakespeare may have modelled the character of Prospero in The Tempest on Dee. John Dee has become, like Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan enigma.

 

The angelic conversations are most remarkable in that they are conversations — with charming or irritable or gnomic angels. In that century of natural philosophy and theism, the problem of magic was closely bound up with the theological difficulty of discernment of spirits, so that the medieval Solomonic magick and the Enochian discourses are obscured by a justifying and unifying ethic that obscures much that is of interest to us today.

 

At various times in recent years I have explored the work and life of John Dee, listening for what resonates through medieval scholarship with our post-modern context and ways of deciphering or deconstructing the ‘magical’. I have dreamt once or twice that I am able to travel to Mortlake at Richmond-on-Thames and wander through the galleries, look at parchment scrolls and  leaf through bound books of faded script and astronomic charts. The entire library sounds to me like a grimoire.

And there is the gowned figure of John Dee just back from finding a wedge of gold in a deep pool in Brecknockshire, raising a storm the like of which had never been seen in the county. He was an uncommon magician; John Aubrey says of him  that he was ‘a mighty good man’, a man of profound erudition and strangely gifted. He lived his magic in a less deracinated and unbelieving time, endlessly curious and amzed by the unfolding worlds within and without.

Figuring it out at kitchen tables

 

Which is of course a quotation from Elizabeth Alexander’s Praise Song for the Day and says something rich and true about how we make sense of our lives, helping one another to articulate the unsaid and think more clearly.

 

A friend in Mombasa has just sent me a lively account of the celebrations in Kogelo in Kenya, where Barack Obama’s father, an economist,  grew up. It is a small dusty African town with maize fields and dirt roads and huts with corrigated-iron roofing. We do live in extraordinary times.

The dust of Africa gets under your skin and the poverty breaks your heart and the warmth of the conversations and hugs  is like being back in the womb. It gives me hope to know that the new president of the most powerful and perhaps least accountable nation in the world has this visceral connection to the continent where I live and a place I love so deeply. But even more than I am moved by Obama’s inauguration, I am moved by that will to change on the part of the American people.

To shift from fear to hope is no small thing.

Summer peaking in shadow

 

So there I was lying back in the bath and chanting an old RuwaShona song for pounding maize or whapping errant husbands, and musing on the Queen of Pentangles and what might be happening there in that magical space bounded by the Endless Knot, when up popped an image of the Sheela-na-Gig and I was once again caught up in yoni energies and hedonism and the blazing sensuous heat of summer and that great vulva swallowing up the known world.

She can be so overpowering at times, my quixotic Celt Mother. Bringing me back to the body and the simmering energies of early menopause and the need to enjoy and indulge the sexual, grab the great sweaty bliss of the body with both hands. In my garden the figs are luscious and dripping sweetness. Just looking at a bowl of succulent purple figs brings me to orgasm.

 

The Sheela-na-Gig of Ireland and old Celtic Britain is the Divine Hag, the shameless and obscene and devouring woman with her gaping vulva stretched wide and the dark passage to the womb held open. Women in lust, women symbolising the sexual forces of renewal and vitality over against death. That primordial hungry vulva as the gateway to the source of fertility, pleasure  and life.

It is all about living through and within mystery. And there is always something to do that is not just wildly hedonistic but pragmatic, helpful and even beautiful. I am making a celebratory supper for everyone who is coming to sit in my living room in front of the television to watch a man with a wonderful open smile and a Kenyan father become the president of the United States. My kitchen is layered with row upon row of ripe tomatoes ready for bottling tomorrow so that I can make pasta with a delicious fresh tomato sauce for 35 hungry people  this weekend.  A jar of honey and some sage and mint leaves are out on the counter because I am preparing a salve for a sick neighbour who only really trusts paracetamol and is about to experience a whole new style of healing! And a pen and a large official form are set out on the kitchen table so that I can protest – in three languages with a hint of threat – to the the municipality about increases in rates and water costs in a village where most people live below the poverty datum line.

 

Another surprising definition:

 

‘The witch was the village herbalist, the midwife, the person who knew things. She would sit up with the dying, lay out the corpses, deliver the newborn. Witches tended to be needed when human beings were meeting the dangerous edges of their lives, the places where there is no map. They don’t mess around with tinkly spells; they get their hands dirty.”
‘