Witch(lore)craft

Quotes and notes on the Craft and lore. Follows from beamagical. website | goodreads | patreon

[witch-lore-craft]

“In midwinter, the traditional season of the dead, the feast of crossroads (compitalia) was celebrated in honor of Hecate or the genies of these locations (lares compitales), which gave the ceremony the name of Laralia. At these crossroads, the pater familias hung from the trees woolen dolls (maniae) or bark masks (oscilla) representing family members, and he asked the spirits of darkness to accept these substitutes for the people they represented. This ritual did not vanish with the fall of ancient Rome, and there is strong evidence of its continued existence during the Middle Ages because humans have always lent a supernatural character to crossroads (bivium, trivium, compitalis). They belong to the dead first, then to witches.”

- Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind (2009)

Image Credit: Trenten Kelley, “Santa Doll in Woods” 

[witch-lore-craft]

“It has long been thought, especially in all the shore regions, that those who died at sea continued to wander amid the waves and near the reefs for want of receiving a burial.”

-Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind (2009)

Image Credit: Ivan Aivazovsky, “Ship «Empress Maria» in storm”

[witch-lore-craft]

Image: August Heinrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon

“In parts of Yorkshire it was believed to be prudent to give shoes to the poor, because every man after his death would have to pass along stony country. Those who had donated shoes in their lifetime would be met by an old man who would return to them the identical pair they had once given away for charity.”

-Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)

[witch-lore-craft]

“[Bran’s] companions took [his] head and buried it in London under the White Mount as they had been previously instructed by Bran, as an amulet to protect Britain.  This they do, making the head of Bran one of the ‘Three Happy Concealments.’  Subsequently it was dug up and thrown into the Thames by King Arthur, who declared that he was the only defender the British Isles needed.  This was one of the ‘Three Unhappy Disclosures.’”

-David Rankine, The Isles of the Many Gods: An A-Z of the Pagan Gods & Goddesses of Ancient Britain Worshipped During the First Millenium Through to the Middle Ages

Image: “The Death of King Arthur” by John Garrick

[witch-lore-craft]

“The magical quest is – in one of its deepest senses – a philosophical quest for the truth, and yet the story of magic is one of endless fantasies, fibs and fictions.“

- Philip Carr-Gomm, The Book of English Magic (2010)

Image Credit:  Ivan Tsarevich, The Flying Carpet, a depiction of the hero of Russian folklore (1880)

[witch-lore-craft]

“The real magic of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.“

-Marcel Proust (Qt. Philip Carr-Gomm, The Book of English Magic (2010))

[witch-lore-craft]

“In a cave you are as if in a womb, safe in the darkness of the earth’s belly. And it was almost certainly in caves that the very first magical rites were conducted, with initiates emerging into the light of dawn or beneath the panoply of stars, having undergone various ordeals and preparations for their next phase of life.”

-Philip Carr-Gomm, The Book of English Magic (2010)

Image: Mariano, Hands at the Cuevas de las Manos upon Río Pinturas, near the town of Perito Moreno in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina.

[witch-lore-craft]

“Magic begins in darkness – the darkness of the earth, the sky and the body – and an awareness of it is born with light. Seeing green shoots appearing out of the dark soil, the sun, moon and stars rising and setting in the sky, babies emerging from the womb, fire leaping up in the midst of a cold night, were all primal experiences that awakened that sense of awe and wonder that lies at the heart of the magical experience.”

-Philip Carr-Gomm, The Book of English Magic (2010)

[witch-lore-craft]

“It’s important to understand that, outside the bounds of modern Neo-Paganism, witchcraft is not about the Goddess or a Goddess. It is not about the God or a God. It is not about seasonal celebrations commemorating the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. It is not about procuring a good harvest, literally or metaphorically. It is not about reliving the past or dancing in a cloak while drinking wine or wearing flowers in your hair. It’s not even necessarily about being Pagan. Witchcraft is about sovereignty.”

-Christopher Orapello and Tara Love-Maguire, Besom, Stang & Sword (2018)

Image: Duncan Price, “Jack in the Green Festival Hastings”

[witch-lore-craft]

“Instead of basing our magickal practice on the past in an attempt to achieve authenticity, why not also look to the present? Or to our immediate surroundings? Why not contact the local land spirits? If witchcraft ever existed in the world, then it exists just as much in the here and now as it ever did in the past.”

-Christopher Orapello and Tara-Love Maquire, Besom, Stang & Sword (2018)

Image: John Bauer - Illustration of Walter Stenström's The boy and the trolls or The Adventure in childrens' anthology Among pixies and trolls, a collection of childrens' stories, 1915.

[witch-lore-craft]

“As he spoke, he paused before a great mound grown over with trees, and around it silver clear in the moonlight were immense stones piled, the remains of an original circle, and there was a dark, low, narrow entrance leading therein. ‘This was my palace. In days past many a one plucked ere the purple flower of magic and the fruit of the tree of life...I am Aengus, men call me the Young. I am the sunlight in the heart, the moonlight in the mind; I am the light at the end of every dream, the voice for ever calling to come away; I am desire beyond joy or tears. Come with me, come with me: I will make you immortal; for my palace opens into the Gardens of the Sun, and there are the fire-fountains which quench the heart’s desire in rapture.”

-A.E. (Qt. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911))

Image: Uncredited, Pixabay

[witch-lore-craft]

Witch and Troll by John Bauer (1909)

“It was believed that when an incantation had been pronounced in the proper way at Newlyn Tolcarne, that the Troll who inhabited it could embody the person who called him up in any state in which the person had existed during a former age. You had only to name the age or period, and you could live your past life therein over again.”

-W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) 

[witch-lore-craft]

“In ancient Greece it was a common opinion that Zeus was reincarnated from age to age in the great national heroes. Alexander the Great was regarded not merely as the son of Zeus, but as Zeus himself.”

-W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)

[witch-lore-craft]

“Gwydion secured the Head of Hades’ Cauldron of Regeneration or Re-birth; and when the corpses of slain warriors are thrown into it they arise next day as excellent as ever, except that they are unable to speak; which circumstance may be equal to saying that the ordinary uninitiated man when reborn is unable to speak of his previous incarnations because he has no memory of it.”

-W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)

[witch-lore-craft]

“Not only was Mongan an Irish King, he was also a god, the son of the Tuatha De Danann Manannan Mac Lir...And so it is that long after their conquest the People of the Goddess Dana ruled their conquerers, for they took upon themselves human bodies, being born as the children of the kings of Mil’s sons.”

-W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)

Image: A 1909 illustration of kings in a dark forest

[witch-lore-craft]

“To enter the Otherworld before the appointed hour marked by death, a passport was often necessary, and this was usually a silver branch of the sacred apple-tree bearing blossoms or fruit, which the queen of the Land of the Ever-Living and the Ever-Young gives to those mortals when she wishes them as companions.”

-W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)

[witch-lore-craft]

“But this western Otherworld, if it is what we believe it to be--a poetical picture of the great subjective world--cannot be the realm of any one race of invisible beings to the exclusion of another. In it all alike--gods, Tuatha De Danann, fairies demons, shades, and every sort of disembodied spirits--find their appropriate abode; for though it seems to surround and interpenetrate this planet even as the X-rays interpenetrate matter, it can have no other limits than those of the Universe itself.”

-W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)