For a lot of us, we find ourselves in the awkward position of not knowing what to do or what to call ourselves...
I started this journey when I was little. My grandmother told me the stories that had been passed down to her from her parents and from her husbands parents. These tiny little scraps of paper with glimmers of knowledge sewn in the seams is almost all I had to go on.
My grandmother was not a witch. I can’t even say she married one because from what my grandmother has told me, grandad would have been furious at being called a witch... but he was the last fully trained weather worker in the family.
My grandparents had four children: My Aunt M who is very similar to me and wanted to learn how to manipulate weather from her father but he refused to teach her and said that only the men in the family are ever taught how; My Uncle S who, as a child was taught to whistle up winds by my grandad, but then he wanted nothing to do with it when he got into finishing school (he’s the scientist in the family); My Uncle W who my grandfather had taught ‘the basics’ but who then died when he was a teenager... and then there’s my Dad... the baby of the family.
My dad remembers scraps of things which is why he’s never surprised when I start swinging stuff around or singing/whistling ect. But after my Uncle W died, my dad stopped being interested in ‘weather stuff’ and grandad refused to teach it.
So I have a grandmother who knows bits-and-pieces from being with my grandad, an Aunt who wanted to learn but wasn’t allowed, an uncle who knew how to do one thing but didn’t care about the ‘weather stuff’, a deceased uncle who knew how, and my dad who barely remembers the ‘weather stuff’.
Then there’s me. A girl who took the scraps of what was remembered and turned it into something. Guaranteed, what I practice now is a bastardised version of what it once was... but that’s All. I. Had.
Where does this leave me? I’m not a Trad. Fam. Witch. because (as far as I know) the men on grandad’s side did not call themselves witches. Am I a trad witch at all? Most experienced trad witches would say no, I’m not. They would call me a modern witch.
This is why I clung to the label of ‘weather witch’. The entire foundation of my practice is based off of scraps of knowledge sewn together with the folktales I was read as a child. From there I researched (a lot of my early finds were either history books or Wiccan books because they saturate the market). I never found anything about weather working until I found traditional witchcraft books (which are Extremely Expensive and hard to find) or historical records (which are highly biased and heavily influenced by Christianity)...
So I can understand why trad witches call me a modern witch... I can understand why modern witches think that what I do is a sham...
My question is this: Where does that leave me?
Where do I fit?
What the hell do I call myself?
Where do I go from here because I want to learn more...
