Yay. I get to start on witchcraft in the Pacific Northwest 😃😃😃
So yeah, you won’t find anything because there isn’t anything. Just like there really isn’t much on southern witchcraftvir western witchcraft.
But when you start digging into the land, cultivating garden, pulling roots, and making tools, you start to feel a strange, but powerful pulse. It’s hidden beneath the city streets and electric lines, but it’s always there, just beneath the surface. This land was and still is a place of magic. And that’s just when you start; when you take the first few tentative steps.
But then you find yourself wanting to know more. So you start researching local flora and fauna, you start digging into the legend of the native peoples, you start to notice that certain events run hand-in-hand with the seasonal changes, and you start to realize that there is a wickedness in this land that wants to be explored. But that wickedness is not unjustified. It’s the wickedness of a land that has been violated, harmed, and dispossessed from its original people, the people who loved and cared for and knew the land.
And then the spirits speak to you. They whisper to you in dreams, the seduce you in ecstatic rituals, they crawl upon you and show you that the witchcraft you are practicing is slowly changing, slowly morphing. They show you that you no longer search for exotic plants to cast your spells. They show you that length rituals and wordy rites are not at home here, but that simply doing the work is what it takes. They show you that you can use the power to help bring the order of things, for you are a wolf that has been reintroduced to the land, they tell you all these things and more, showing that you are greater than the sum, and I anyone dares to try you, then to you they’ll succumb.
And you keep going. Your plants thrive, your practice grows, and you learn about the great titanic figures of the land: the mountains. The fire mountains that were long respected and feared by the native peoples. You learn about the spirits of the animals that have acted as guides for thousands of years. You don’t appropriate them into your practice, no. But you DO respect them. You DO give offerings. You DO acknowledge that you are working upon dispossessed land every time you hold a rite.
And then you find the mushrooms which come to you in dreams. The spotted red-cap that calls you, and challenges you with a simple task: find me, meet me, prepare me, and see the doors truly opened.
Witchcraft in the Pacific Northwest is a wicked and a wild hungry thing. It’s untapped, it’s untamed, and it’s uncontained. And it waits just beneath that pulse, just beneath that surface level, waiting to destroy you, and turn you into something new. But it’s doesn’t happened suddenly, there is no moment when you are suddenly torn to pieces and dramatically put back together. It happens slowly, patiently, piece by piece until one day you realize that you are no long practicing witchcraft, but that you have BECOME a witch, that you have been changed down to the bone, and that you will always, until the end of your days, be that wicked and wild m, hungry creature that stalks their prey at night, that poisons themselves on the moons, and who flies without wings.
Witchcraft in the Pacific Northwest is a creature unlike any I’ve ever experienced.
(Didn’t mean to hijack this post, Aaron, just wanted to give my two-cents on Pacific Northwest Witchcraft 😊)
