An Account of a Black Court Witch @trollhuldren - Tumblr Blog

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There's been a lot of talk of late spawned by John Becket's Patheos blog post from July 9th called "The Witch Stands In Opposition," in resp

#anderson faery #old feri #faery tradition #faery tradition witchcraft #traditional witchcraft #witchcraft

I’m much more active on Insta these days. Find me @sorcerously

Some say the Great Noble Spirits are sleeping, or have forgotten us.

But I tell you that a Faery comes to me nightly thus:

To share his Fire as we make love within the Starry Well,

To share my Story and unite the realms of Heaven, Here, and Hell.

My Aurifex who works the breath and waters of my soul,

and in our communion deepens the wealth of being whole.

No, do not forsake the Deep Ones hidden within the twilit Dream,

for whom we yearn and burn to vivify their shining stream.

The heart is set aflame in virid raw desire

when he approaches bearing his cunning Blue-Sun fire.

Then together we give praise unto the Holy Night;

we worship with our lips and hands and loins in sacred rite.

He teaches me the ways of praise and devotion to the Mystery,

and knots the threads that bind the Winds and sets me wandering free.

A Child, a Bride, a Hag attend unto the Moon.

Roses bloom and burn as jasmine's scent the Eve attunes.

Our flesh, one Flesh, as it weirdly writhes and gushes forth:

the Door Without a Key is opened by the Horn'd One's torch.

We consecrate ourselves with the Moon Dove's silver'd tears

and we call upon our Darksome Mother to embrace our lusts and fears.

Most Holy Harlot of the Sabbat, by the Knife and by the Cup:

Come dance the Winds around the compass as we feast and run amok.

Make our black hearts beat like a drum pounding in your frenzied Flight,

as we join the Dance on ochre'd feet to make wild our delight!

Swear now the wicked vow to unveil the Goblin Masquerade,

As lunar Scythe—your Crescent Crown—licks our fingers with its blade.

Altogether make the Covenant to fill the Cauldron to the brim—

as every drop of Red that bleeds from us is a spell upon the Wind.

Nine herbs, nine woods, nine kisses given forth into the fire

to boil up a potent brew, a nectar dripping honey-tongued Desire.

Our eyes are opened in the Sight, fill now they with Green Mist,

as quickly turn the seasons by the spirits with whom we tryst.

And Beware! Beware the Fire flashing from our Knives in fuck and fight:

Its sharpest edge cuts foe and friend alike, just as Dawn is born from Night.

And if we be so Lucky then to win the Old Ones’ boon,

as we keep our eyes well-steadied on the waters of the Moon—

look not away from there the prize, the treasure-hoard of yore,

and take the leap in waking sleep to live forevermore.

And in these acts we re-member that we are the fevered hands of Fate:

Hand-to-hand we've claimed the fire-brand in allegiance with the Fetch Mate.

The Old Ones have shaken us so that now we come awake,

and as Legion and strange Otherhood we take a stand before it's too late.

Keep the Silence as we work, masked and cowled and veiled,

but for the rest of us is clad in sky within the Wild Weald.

And we know that at the crossroads were meet the Ghostly Tracks,

the Other-Selves shall lead the Front as they emerge from hollowed backs.

Back-to-back we dance the ring against the coursing Sun,

That to There, the Furthest Shore, with our Faeries we do run.

And beyond the strand across the seas stands reaching up to Heaven

a Broken Mountain wherein burns the Sun to Midnight given.

So shines the altar-pyre darkly in the deep of this black cave,

the Sun's been swallowed by the Wolf whose jaws do form the Grave.

And like the lance that pricks the thigh to awaken our delight,

dare to climb the latticed bones to steal a spark of Might.

Behold! The Secret Queen! The Daughter who shall lead us on our way!

Our Nightly Flights shall win the fight as we battle back the day!

To and fro, between the lintel posts we strive to keep on going,

and know that stealthily we win a new Fate from this doing.

Every thread is precious, every thread we knot and bind,

Into the burning blackness labyrinthine we wind,

Tethering our cords to one another deed-by-deed,

working for the Land as it calls us to its Truest Need.

Together, in relationship, we are weaving the great Story:

And that every thread is precious, every song shall find its glory.

Silver Lightning flashes downward, a kindled kiss out of the Dark,

Great Eyes are Watching from the Outer Spaces whose gazes leave a Mark.

And as you stare into the blackness, and it reflects your Star-Self True,

know that the Story we are weaving is at the same time weaving you.

I have found great freedom in the precept, "Other people's opinions of you are none of your business." This kind of liberation is the key to peace of mind. As a person living at the crossroads of Fat, queer and nonbinary identity, disability, mental-illness, weirdness, and poverty, I have learned that I can't give any fucks about what other people think of me, that I can't be constantly chasing acceptance from others, that I can't give any fucks if I am successful or "cool". To emphasize Jack Halberstam's work, I embrace the cultural failure that I embody. This is freedom.

Our culture doesn't teach us to value wisdom, and it's not something most people seek. We're taught to seek success, acceptance, material wealth, and comfort. But wisdom is found only in following your passions; it is pursued in the transformation of your suffering into something you can endure and move through. This is where Art comes from as well.

We can invoke the friction of our suffering to make us greater than we were, reclaiming our power from those who have taken it forcibly from us or those to whom we gave it away. This very process of friction is how a pearl is created.

To be true to myself, I must embrace my wholeness. I must follow my passions, become vulnerable with those whom I share love, and transform my own suffering into compassion for myself and the world. The word compassion actually means "to suffer with." I can use my own experience of oppression and personal suffering as a tool to empathize with the suffering and oppression of others that I do not directly experience myself.

Robert Cochrane, the late former Magister of the Clan of Tubal Cain and traditional witch, said that we must be a part of this living world, not apart from it. I take this, personally, to mean that we must have our hands in this human mess.

For me, my compassion tells me that I need to do something, to fight for the Land and fight against oppression. If I call myself a witch, I must be willing to stand with all those in the past for whom that word was a brand of cultural failure. I am moved to help fight against the systems of oppression and disenfranchisement and work against the powerful wealthy elite whose corporate machinery is despoiling the Earth.

A witch cannot be idle. We only still and silence ourselves to know which way the Flow is going, then we must rejoin it. Indeed, many of us are swept up in its happenings as much as we choose to act.

To merely seek success, acceptance by those enrapt in the values of the Marketplace world (which to a degree is all of us, for we must all eat), or pure comfort is to remain idle, to be fooled by fools. My Magister Gabriel Carrillo once told me, "a witchcraft that doesn't directly challenge and subvert mainstream values and mores is no witchcraft." The powers that be want us dead if we are of no use to them, and to make workers into slaves to keep their creepy machinery going until all has been swallowed up into their greedy gullets.

So, I don't wish to be "cool" (cold!). I am not above it all. I am a witch. I cannot give a FUCK! I endeavor to burn with the Witchfire. To reveal the truth of who and what I am.

Watch it move my Hand, see it in my Eye. The time is now. It has always ever been NOW.

Rise up!

BLACK SERPENT COILS

North, the air, the wind's true home

East, the fire, the sun's bright throne

South, the earth, flesh, fur, and bone,

West, the water, where shadows roam.

Now mark the edge where Wyrd is known,

The aither coils, serpent’s black inferno;

Thout-tout-a-tout, as the myrk-riders go!

—————————————————————

It occurs to me that the witches compass is an inside-out hedge. You’re circling in the Other and circling out the ordinary daylight world. But in that encircling you are also saying the two are deeply connected and reflective of one another. There is a backwards-ness to it, an inversion like the inside of the sacred mountain or Faery hill.

In the Faery Tradition practiced by our coven, we recognize that the elemental round of the compass is a function of the Black Serpent-powers, an iteration of black fire that gives form/architecture to the substance of the Other, in spirit interaction with the waking world. The black coil of the primal elements are how the stars are bound to the Land.

#traditional witchcraft #faery tradition witchcraft #old feri #faery tradition

Thanks to reading Lee Morgan’s _Standing And Not Falling_ a few years back now, I’ve got a refreshed perspective on belief.

Belief NOT as merely the acceptance of something’s existence or truth. To the witch, to paraphrase Terry Pratchet, gods and mailmen are equally real. But that’s a passive acceptance. That’s not what is useful. It’s a noun, a possession. “Having a belief.”

Belief AS IN one’s active participation in the re-enchantment of the soul through the Storying of the world and engaging in mytho-logic in the day-to-day. It’s belief as being “all-in” to the endless possibilities of magic and sinking into the lived reality of a spirit-filled world. It’s not play-acting or only believing something true or actual when convenient. It’s a verb. A doing. A commitment to wholeness.

Sexy! This is what Andrew Chumbley means when he wrote that sorcery is the meeting place of belief, desire, and will.

#traditionalwitchcraft #traditionalwitch #faerywitch #faerytradition #faerytraditionwitchcraft #oldferi #sorcery #traditionalmagic

Traditional witchcraft, like any traditional art passed without personal intimacy--that is, with a lack of love, trust, vulnerability, and deep caring--is devoid of its Fire and merely becomes fanciful rote behavior and empty fantasies.

Witchcraft, as I understand it, abhors institutionalism. Attempting to transmit our Art outside of a container wrought of kinship and familiarity, fails to truly pass the culture of witchcraft, the context of our sorceries. You can't *really* learn witchcraft in a classroom or out of a book.

The hearth or coven are containers in which the apprentice can come undone and be remembered whole again, where they may let go and surrender to the Working of the spirits and the grinding of the Self upon the mill of magic.

Institutions are made from the forces and ideologies of capitalism and colonial-imperialism that have destroyed and sickened our precious world. Witchcraft stands in strict opposition to this. We must unspell our minds from the broken enculturation of our civilization and remember the ways of wholeness and shared integrity emergent from the Otherworld.

Buyer beware.

“Resistance to the War on Our Existence!”🤘🏼

Cooper's Do-nuts, Compton's Cafeteria, Stonewall Inn... many of us have never forgotten the uprisings/riots at these historical sanctuaries by LGBTQ+ patrons against the state-sponsored violence against us. And yet the silenced horror of the HIV/AIDS pandemic over the 80s and 90s still took from us a generation of elders after the hard-won liberation of being openly allowed in the daylight. We still had our parades and eventually legislated the rights to marriage and wider "acceptance," but these liberal victories have not made us significantly more free; we still fear for our livelihoods, our families, and our safety.

For in recent days we must now remember and add to the names of our dead from the atrocities at PULSE Nightclub in Orlando and Club Q in Colorado Springs.

We are still wanted, outlaws, a threat to those who would continue to silence us. Open violence is still being perpetrated against us in our sanctuaries, "behind closed doors," where we revel in the pleasures of being ourselves. And at the state legislative level, open attacks are being made to disappear our trans and queer youth, and demonize us as "groomers." We remain an unspeakable horror to many; plainly, they want us dead and gone.

We are in a war - a culture war, but no less deadly, for the body count grows.

As those who would call ourselves witches, we must stand with and as the oppressed, the dispossessed, and the marginalized. And we must fight. We do not have the privilege of remaining both silent/apathetic and alive. If we wish to be truly free, we must continue to fight this war, take up active resistance, and win!

In Witchcraft & the Queer Counterculture II: By Blood, Tooth, and Nail, we will revisit our modern history of resistance by remembering such groups as Queer Nation, ACT UP, and the Pynk Panthers and Street Patrol. I will present charms, spells, and workings for magical resistance, a toolbox for war-wizards (for we must be warriors and not worriers!). And we will discuss the need and how-to for both the creation of the Oasis and in revivifying our deviant gazes that we may include, celebrate, and revel in the depth and breadth of our queer wholeness.

There will be three scholarship spots reserved for community leaders without ability to pay. Email [email protected] to ask for one of those.

For tickets visit: https://www.horseandhattock.com/event-details/witchcraft-the-queer-counterculture-ii-by-blood-tooth-and-nail

#anderson faery #old feri #faery tradition #faery tradition witchcraft #witchcraft #traditional witchcraft #queer witchcraft

What's the reason for these rites

we mark on holy days and nights?

What could man come up with now,

for what wouldst he forsake his vow?

It is our nature, of Wytchankind,

to tell our stories at certain times.

To weave our myths from darksome lore

in deep woods or behind locked doors,

where dare not ordinary eyes to peak

when the secret shining words we speak.

So per our nature we steep our souls

like snakes and rabbits in their holes,

within the sensuousness of the Land

to work our charms by the Master's hand.

And in Her cycles we participate,

As we are freed by the bind of Fate.

What some modern practitioners now call the Fetch Mate has always been a part of traditional witchcraft and spirit-led magic. The Familiar or Faery-spouse is an integral part of historical sorcerous ways.

This relationship demonstrates that nothing in the cosmos is accomplished alone, that we live in a relational and co-reliant world.

The Fetch Mate is our personal “divine twin,” containing powerful similarities and differences to our own numinous natures which stimulates our magic. This being may occupy a position within the White, Black, or Glas spirit-courts, or a combination thereof.

They are a spirit who has often been with us since the first lifetime in which we became a witch, our primary initiator. We are mutually devoted to one another’s mastery, in perfect love and perfect trust; in our journeys toward realizing our divine wholeness. Sometimes this spirit and the witch “trade places” through different lifetimes, one taking residence inside the Hedge and the other without. The two cannot safely live inside the Hedge at the same time without disastrously fateful happenings occurring.

In my witch lineage both Victor Anderson and Gabriel Carrillo acknowledged their Fetch Mates explicitly, sharing their Names with their descendants, though this exact term was not in use at the time.

trollhuldren

The first page of my essay published in the Queer Magic anthology by Mystic Productions.

In my estimation, in witchcraft, what makes someone a part of one tradition or another isn't necessarily that they have been passed certain lore or secrets, have become a guardian and receiver of information; I have ascertained in my studies that many different initiatory Houses of traditional witchcraft share the same Mysteries (with bioregional textures). None of our secrets are so unique.

What makes someone part of one tradition or another is with whom they throw in their lot—with whom they are clan, with whom they make covenants and vows. And this includes witches and spirits both living and dead.

The Craft as I know it is a familiar endeavor. In our traditions, we get up in each other's business. We hold one another dear and support each other in tangible ways, not just sentiments. We can get messy, and we work it out when we do. We *love* each other. We are a sorcerous family.

And it is as it should be—I wouldn't want to be a part of a tradition that was individualistic and whose initiates numbered many who were distant and cold and not interested in true familial bonds and responsibility. In fact, that's a big part of why I supported the split of Old Faery from public Feri.

Where the lore piece comes in, for me, is that our corpus of lore is the collection of stories we share with one another. All families have stories. Ours are about our clan and our relationships with the spirits we adore and are devoted to, and our relatives living and dead. That's why they are private, intimate, and sometimes secret. They're our "family recipes" for witching, for doing the work of a witch. Witchcraft is bound in Story, and the Cosmos is relational. To witch is to participate in the sharing and telling and furthering of Story—to participate in the weaving of reality, the Game of Fate.

And when someone comes along, and we recognize that spark of kinship, that we have shared lifetimes together before, we adopt them in. It's a process that takes time and effort; the building of trust and intimacy, just as you would when joining any family.

I choose co-reliance, cooperation, interconnection, interdependence, and true family. Love is a verb, y'all.

Witchcraft isn't about "feeling energy" or "positive thinking" or the image of a beneficent Mother Goddess who acts on our behalf in Nature to make us happy, like some universal auntie in her white sundress, hat and gloves, sipping iced tea at a garden party.

No. Witchcraft—as I understand it—is about communication (speaking/seeing/hearing/feeling/transmission or prophecy) with the spiritworld, with beings strange and eerie. It is about the soul’s flight from the body, the awakening to and "gaining" allyship with the Familiar spirit from whom deeper and greater power and wisdom may be achieved and without whom sorcery is nearly impossible. It is about the sensuality of both the Land and the body, and the identification of the two together, embracing the darkly erotic, sexual nature of creation and the environment. It is about Fate, being an agent and servant to the Old Mystery, and the knowledge that Death/Fate and Eros are intertwined like the serpents on Mercury's wand.

Witchcraft is a calling from birth, yet its phenomenalization (as for many sorcerous callings around the globe) requires an experience of Initiation--either by the spirits directly or by the spirits at the intervention of human hands, or both--to be "activated". It is not an identity per se, it is a vocation, a way of life, a PRACTICE, an engagement with the living, breathing cosmos. It requires DOING--much doing--not merely being.

Witchcraft comes from the tutelage of the Witch-Gods:

The mercurial and cunning, turnskin Master of Magic, our Witchfather, who bears Light between his horns, teacher of all artifice and sorcery whom we seek to emulate and become like, especially as he is embodied within us as our innermost Daimonic-self.

The Eld God, who is the Dark Huntsman and King of the Underworld, Twin-Faced Lord of the Wild Hunt.

The merciless Supreme Goddess who weaves Fate from the Uttermost Depths, who is the All and the Veiled face of Great Mystery.

The Rose Queen, Dame Venus, who is the loving hand of sensuality and pleasure, and the Tri-form Goddess of the Moon and its enchantments, Queen of Faery.

To be a Witch is to die before you die, to seek to know yourself and therefore know the world, to commune with spirits, to merge with Fate and its flow. We adore our gods, often as lovers, but we do not grovel, we are not unworthy. We seek to become as gods, to be deathless.

The cosmos is a dark place, a great dark space full of both terror and ecstasy. Most of it is Unseen and unknown. But our gods have given us Fire—Love—and with it we may warm ourselves in rings of Art or by the hearths of our homes and our strange communities...

Sharing one's initiatory tradition of witchcraft with another, entering into the dynamic and deep relationship of apprenticeship, requires a radical intimacy that has been typified by the familiar phrase "Perfect Love and Perfect Trust." Another way one might evoke this state is calling upon "perfect vulnerability". This is essential when knotting the Red Thread.

A container apart from the world of the marketplace—where all is for sale, trade, or theft (to paraphrase the amazing Lee Morgan)—is essential. It is a place to wash away that world and embrace our wild wholeness, the economy of Gift, to be fully and radically nurtured and embraced by our beloveds. Lee and the Anderean Coven call this the Oasis.

This kind of radical intimacy is woven of Love in the sense that bell hooks uses it, not mere affection. It requires that we know and accept both the beauty marks and the warts of those with whom we enter into such a relationship, co-creating a fierce closeness and sharing as well as a celebration of similarities and differences whose power is both healing and rending. We entrust our well-being to one another. It nurtures and tends to ancient wounds. It does not coddle, yet it embraces frailties. This Love and Trust requires of us a lot of courage—it is both beautiful and terrifying, a relationship of which there is no analog in the marketplace world. And it is the most powerful kind of relating I've ever encountered.

Such apprenticeship is the hammer forging the blade Truth. Oh how the hammer kisses the blade! The Fire of Witchery itself the countless hands of a legion of spirits heating the metal, keenly giving it permission to be shaped.

We must come naked and laid bare, our hearts held before us in offering for the Pyre that burns at the heart of the Eternal Sabbat. We have poured every last drop of Blood into the Cauldron and we have made of our living flesh the Altar of Witchcraft. With only our hearts left, torn out, we thrust them into the Pyre to burn Pitch Black. We must be completely accessible, destroyers of emotional distance, warriors of perfect vulnerability and compassion with those within our covens.

Oh yes, we suffer for Wisdom. Here are the Forbidden Mysteries guarded well by the Great Hag, who flays our skin that we may dance as shining skeletons in the revels of the dark inverted mountain, the Faery Hill. All masks of flesh foregiven, our dance makes of us a wild writhing scaffold that holds up the Myrk-Sun, a serpentine lattice of bone criss-crossing the unending Void, silver-white threads of the great web woven by Fate! Our spells are the very Breath of God Herself, words and deeds sung by Truth, the place where Love and Wisdom meet.

Evohe!

The major Houses of traditional witchcraft represent living bodies of power and knowledge. In much the same way that the grimoires are power-centers and containers of knowledge, and present a primary ritual through which all further magical operations can be extrapolated, likewise The Origin Story, The Ordeals and Oaths, The Revelation of the Mysteries, the exposition of the cosmology of the sorcerous world -- these are the spells that make up the oral and phenomenal gramarye embodied in the witch-covenant. The foundation of which is the Initiatory Rite whose extrapolation spirals into infinity.

Hail the cunning puckeril,

dearest friend of the Night,

are you filled with my own Breath,

or perhaps the Daimon's Light?

Are you shod with cloven hooves,

Or are you cloaked in wings?

Perhaps your limbs now end in claws

or more terrorizing things?

Out from the Deep, the Elrich Well

come you leaping forth in motion.

By adder's tongue and smoke of Hell

shall I drink the horrid potion.

In my Vision you shed the shadow

that I have draped you in;

And in this caress I find release

for the longing in my skin.

Your kiss, your bite, the sip of blood

like a nectar for you, Dear.

Pull off the cloak, draw back the hood

and now shall I shed a tear?

For if I weep when you are far

Will it draw you near in stead?

I'll light the lamp and catch a star

As we share red wine and bread.

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