How long can the moment stretch before climax? The vertiginous brink of consummation. Locks in the complex of concentric gates. Cryptographic tumblers meshed wet with the attar of roses. Exhortations spent. A hesitation held in the face of inexorable conquest. An intake of breath that must, finally, overcome, resisting, to the end, exhale. Transformed, the raw plasma of storm pours from the dragon’s mouth. The shockwave pulses out with the geometric driven precision of the heart, beat after beat after beat. It has begun. This atomic force, this raw force is Babalon. The storm breaks like a dropped glass whose shivering bell glimmers into infinity. The note remains ever distilling the same pitch. In the Sabbat it resounds becoming a quiver of cymbals as strike bears down incessantly met by rising counterstrike. This is the sound the dancer makes when she moves. The bells at wrists, ankles, hips, earrings, shaking. The noise of battle reverberates through the armour in the deep secret cavities of our bodies. Here amongst the threshing limbs, the slaughter, she walks.
This is the emblem of the unfolding of the rose amongst the flames. A million orgasms intersecting their petals through all space and time. A message comes through to those who would be present at such a sabbat: get rid of yourself.
But this endless moment, this bacchanal, can lead us away from the most salient fact of witchcraft. Though as Jack Parsons says, witchcraft is the oldest religion, that it lifts us out of ourselves and switches our bristling skin, the fact is that witchcraft arises from the world. It comes from the land, the people, the plants, the animals, the whole web of life. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Witchcraft is here in present time.
When I say apocalyptic witchcraft it is deliberately antagonistic because I see witchcraft being used as an excuse for solipsistic escapism when it is the exact opposite. I situate witchcraft in the world as it is. As radical changes cascade through the living systems of the biosphere, tradition must by necessity change. This fluid transformation is the beauty and strength that marks true craft. As such it will upset those who cling to form. So be it. There is not simply tradition, there is innovation, there is becoming and there is revolution. This is a woman’s truth, this is the goddess who has spun through history to be with us now.
Witchcraft has a history of remembering its radical heritage whether through Michelet, Jack Parsons or feminism, and also of inventing itself anew. Montague Summers writes: ‘Witches, satanists and the whole unhallowed crew were meddling with and mixing in politics from the first, and as their liege lord, the Devil, rebelled against God in heaven, so do they rebel against any ordered and legitimate form of government on earth.’ I say that it is on the cusp of doing so again, and with good reason. Though the sabbat itself arguably only dates from 1650, it connects to a far older tradition of nocturnal gatherings on the high places born from both celebration, and in response to attacks on the people, as well as a demonisation of such assemblies both to protect them from prying eyes and to criminalise the participants. It is in this renewal, and not the faux old or the endless inquisition into what is traditional, where witchcraft is to be found.
The bald heath has witnessed the dance of the atom turn volte-face. The splitting of the light in an apocalypsis that we have wrought. World’s end is not a threat from the pulpit, we have assembled it with dextrous and sinistrous fingers, bunkered our oblivion for the days of the final division of plunder now at hand. We will not follow the smoke to the stars until we are burned on the pyre of the earth. Love is the war to end all wars, and the war is upon us.
While our culture laments, what have we done wrong? Has no concept of sin, but only consumption. It still knows that something is going dreadfully awry. Infantilised it helplessly repeats, what, what have we done wrong? It is simple: Mankind has broken the covenant with nature.
Dee and the alchemists knew this, and sought to coax from their alembics a gentler reconciliation, an harmonious counterchange of the elements cross-matched. That window has closed. There is no gold that will buy us freedom from our fate, we are more fearsomely tasked. As our vaunted technological sophistication hits built-in obsolescence it is the deceptively simple acts and tools of witchcraft that will endure. I would trust my black-handled knife longer than my laptop. If more high magicians had, like Paracelsus, listened to the folk practitioners rather than their vanity we would perhaps not be at this point. Yet we are.
We must recognise that we are the horsemen that sheet upon the winds. We the angels pouring poison vials. We the seal breakers. We the elders of days revolving around an empty throne. We the daughters of Jerusalem, the Kings of Edom, the Cains and Liliths, the scorpion men. Before we turn our deserving ire on the class of the super-rich and their marauding corporations we must recognise that we too are the consumers. Our actions have added to the weight of disenchantment. We have let this happen.
The rape of the earth is about to enter a horrifying final phase where the last wildernesses are despoiled for the last resources. Should we weep? The words of Medea, daughter of the Sun and priestess of the witch-goddess Hekate, can be considered here, as an inspiration from the sharp pen of Seneca. Whilst her Nurse pleads caution, Medea responds as sorceress:
Medea: Light is the grief which can take counsel and hide itself; great ills lie not in hiding. ’Tis pleasing to face the foe.
Nurse: Stay this frenzied outburst my child; even silent calm can scarce defend thee.
Medea: Fortune fears the brave, the cowardly overwhelms.
Nurse: No hope points out a way for our broken fortunes.
Medea: Whoso has naught to hope, let him despair of naught.
Nurse: The Colchians are no longer on thy side, thy husband’s vows have failed, and there is nothing left of all thy wealth.
Medea: Medea is left – in her thou beholdest sea and land, and sword and fire and gods and thunderbolts.
Such is our state. Such is the goddess of witchcraft and the figure of the witch in the line of Medea. There is no escape. Witchcraft is already dead as a hag, as barren as the moon, as contaminated as the tar sands. Yet witchcraft is born again in this sacred despoiled landscape, and will be despised as an abomination by those who cannot navigate by the candlelight of guttering stars. Those who seek to escape the fates and furies will learn that they are inexorable. We celebrate this, wreathed in the afterglow with a half-life of a million million years. We the murderers, the poisoners, the tightening noose of curse, the fire on the mountain.
We have a reply to this savaged world, a confession that need not be racked out of us: It is we who have drunk from the cup. We who are drunk on the blood of sacrifice. We who flower from our wounds. We who celebrate Love and War. We who know mystery. We are the Witchcraft.
Witchcraft does not wait for deliverance. It kisses and kills with the same flushed bloody mouth. We cannot bridle her utterance, the whore speaks. We are not separate from the fate of the world. We are used to being unwelcome, hunted, blamed, raped, tortured, dispossessed, disappeared. Now we are an irrelevance, a harmless eccentricity, a fairy ball sporting stick on ears and dressing up box deviance, a social joke. Yet as witchcraft is filled with the spirit of the age we will become dangerous again, because witchcraft will have rooted meaning.
Apocalypse is not escapism as some suggest. It is being held in the jaws at the threshold of life and death. It is sacred confrontation and revelation. It is utopia and dystopia in eternal exchange. It sees through. In Christianity apocalypse is used by the world haters who argue for war, in the New Age as a panacea for those who long for ascension; I use it to awaken us from dream.
There is no other way to talk about apocalypse. I do not choke the inspiration in my throat. I will not simply watch the last dance or describe the dancers without losing myself amongst them. We must be brought to an awareness of the moment.
We have the power to destroy the world and we are doing so. Witchcraft must respond, as it always has, to the events which unfold around us with the gifts we have been given and those which we have won on the heath. Having entered into the moment, we can go back, but not a moment sooner. So we ask the looking glass our question, what is witchcraft?
In the search for origins we ask who we are. Not a miasma of deception to drape over the shewstone, rather a blood thread that spins into a mantle, a living web of connection.
What is witchcraft?
The answer is simple: Witchcraft is the work of the enemy. Witchcraft is the sex that other people have, witchcraft the drug that other people take, witchcraft is the rite that other people perform. Witchcraft is the magic that other people do. Witchcraft is the clothes that other people wear. Witchcraft is the words that other people speak. Witchcraft the goddess they venerate.
It is impossible to reach any other conclusion. For the whole of recorded history witchcraft has been malefica, venefica, incest and murder. The next village, the next town, the next country, the old woman, the young woman, the Jew, the leper, the Cathar, the Templar, the Ophite, the Bogomil. They do it. Not us you understand, them. You will find the witch at the end of a pointed finger.
To argue otherwise is a fatal mistake that opens us to divide and conquer. To prettify witchcraft is as ill-judged as to disfigure it. You cannot deny the goddess in any form of cast lantern light or play of shadows. You cannot say white witchcraft or black witchcraft without doing violence to Her complete being. It is time that we heal this wound. Consider the words of the Thunder Perfect Mind: I am the whore and the holy one.
So let us explore our definition with the aid of a book that means so much to us. The Malleus Maleficarum in defining witchcraft identifies three vital components: The witch, the devil, and the will of God. The witch as we have seen is the other, the foreigner and, more often than not, the woman. The devil is the double, whose worship is nocturnal, orgiastic and child-killing. The will of God is simply the power of the church and state to oppress, to accuse, and to enact the auto-da-fé.
As such an apocalyptic witchcraft will contain these self-same elements: The Witch, as foreign woman, exemplified by Inanna-Ishtar and demonised in the Bible as Babalon. As populations are displaced by war, flood, fire and famine, we will see many more strangers in a strange land. To the witch, they are kindred.
The Devil as the mask of wild nature and the Goddess, giving us the choice to control our bodies, minds and destiny. We have already seen Baphomet as a cipher for Mohammed, and Islam will not be the only bedevilled enemy. Ecologists, feminists, psychonauts, shamans, will continue to be decried in these terms. We can choose to embrace the Devil that they deny.
The will of God is a clear understanding of and opposition to the designs of our enemy. This is not simply destroying the mythic structure of the Christian Church which gave man nature to despoil, just as it cut down the cedars of Lebanon, but the final ugly phase of Yahweh: corporatist fascism. We are the final line of resistance.
But what of modern pagan witchcraft? Why has it not risen to these challenges? The difficulty with modern pagan witchcraft is that it began with compromise. Gardner had one eye on the recent repeal of the witchcraft laws. And it harm none was rather more expedient than the hair-raising pronouncements of Cecil Williamson or the misanthropy of Spare. Yet it is foolish to simply attack Gardner or Sanders or Cochrane or Graves. They were responding to the spirit of their age. It seemed for an impossible heady moment that witchcraft was going to become the new religion of England. That project is in disarray.
Now Ronald Hutton says not simply harm none, but be harmless. Having seen the Nigerian witch killers and the Satanic Panic of the eighties, he argues that we are better off to live in a disenchanted world and escape on the weekends to our imaginal worlds of whimsical delight.
I say, fear us. I say that the power of the witch is in having every option open. Witchcraft will not lie beneath, will not be disarmed. Women know this. We do not want to be inside, having interfaith meetings with the hand-wringing monotheists whose holy books sanction our stoning, murder and rape. Witchcraft, and by that I mean malefica, is the strong face we show to this world. This is the merciless path.
An example of this is the solonaceæ, the family which includes mandrake and datura. Solonaceæ comes from the root solari, to soothe. Indeed, these daughters of comfort both cure and kill. They enable us to fight poison with poison. There is no way to separate the powers and no way we should be cleaved from our rights to exercise either.
So is there an alternative narrative to that of Gardner? One approach is that of traditional craft. Paul Huson neatly explains the difference when he writes:
Traditional witchcraft is what Margaret Murray – a British historian who during the twenties advanced the notion that Witchcraft was originally a clandestine pagan religion that had continued to exist alongside Christianity – referred to as “Operative Witchcraft,” to distinguish it from what she called “Ritual Witchcraft.” Operative Witchcraft, to use her words, encompassed all charms and spells, whether used by a professed witch or by a professed Christian, whether intended for good or for evil, for killing or for curing. Ritual Witchcraft on the other hand, embraced the religious beliefs and ritual of those who practiced what Murray referred to as the Dianic Cult, the worship of a deity that was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal, traces of which she believed were to be found in Italy, in Southern France, and in the English Midlands. The god was named Janus or Dianus, the goddess Diana. “Wicca” or “Wica” was arguably G.B. Gardner’s own personal take on the Dianic cult.
Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft is a key text of traditional craft, but Huson clearly states that he drew on the same material as Gardner from the folklore library at University College London. Plainly stated, they both cut it from the same cloth. It is fair to say that traditional craft, though containing earlier and folkloric elements, is as invented as Gardnerian Wicca, and by that I mean no disrespect to either.
Yet now we see the manufacturing of a schism between a supposed traditional craft and initiated Wicca. It is an attempt to separate the inseparable and rewrite a history of shared protagonists, as the example of The Regency demonstrates, and on an island of widely diverse practice that cannot be neatly embroidered into one gypsy myth. The new strands of ‘old’ witchcraft show where Wicca was remiss, namely plant lore, low magic and folklore. But to define oneself in opposition to your closest allies in a battle of authenticity seems fatally flawed, especially when most of our history is chronicled by our enemies and further spans the shifting landscapes of literature, poetry, vision and dream.
Furthermore, how is a Cain-Lilith myth any different or more valid than a Diana-Lucifer one? Who exactly enforces that Wiccans do no operative magic, or ensures traditional crafters have no religious or mythic underpinning? In fact, what we see now is a supposedly traditional craft enthusiastically fashioning exactly the kind of ritual witchcraft that they have decried the Gardnerians for. The reason is that they are part of a divided whole which is not only true of witchcraft, but our entire culture’s schism and denial of the complete goddess, whom we dare to know incarnate as Babalon.
This horizontal hostility between people who should share the same interests is exactly the tactic employed by cointelpro. It splinters, it dissipates, it prevents us engaging with the real enemy. There are more pressing issues than whether we work naked or robed. Enough. I say, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. When I say apocalyptic witchcraft I also mean the destruction of the false differences between the traditions.
Gerald Gardner’s witchcraft was not ultimately about the form, it was about the force. A culture crawling out of the bombed cellars of London into the new world of pill and possibility. The witchcraft of Jack Parsons was not about the form, it was about the liberating force of the bohemian sexual revolution and entheogenic drugs. Traditional witchcraft is not about the form, it is about the harrowing loss of folklore, rural life and, crucially, meaning in a postmodern world.
Apocalyptic witchcraft is about a world at war with the last remnants of wild nature, the last remnants of humanity, and so I am here concentrating on conjuring that force rather than entering into the trap of circumscribing it. Those who have read The Red Goddess will know that I am adamantly opposed to the imposition of orthodoxy. So when I say apocalyptic witchcraft I am describing a set of ideas that can be embodied in any witchcraft approach. We should celebrate every form of emergent heresy. Our emails are, after all, read by the same intelligence agencies. Our ritual sites photographed by the same military satellites. Our wells poisoned by the same fertilisers, fracking chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
We must never forget our enemy. However peaceable we believe we are, they define us with violence. Witchcraft was born in the torture chambers of the inquisition. Unclothed, bound, broken, taught to fly in strappado. In the 1200s the enemy was the Cathars who threatened the Catholic Church by espousing poverty. In the 1300s the enemy was heresy, exemplified in the destruction of the Templars. In the 1400s it became the figure of the witch that subsequently blossomed into an international satanic conspiracy. Why did this happen? Why did the sabbat obtain such prominence? Why did the witch become so reviled? Without understanding the enemy there is no answer that can be given.
The creation of a purely malefic figure of the witch was an attack on women, though men too were burned. Woman was attacked in this way to enable the state to enclose the common land. Woman was attacked to remove her control over her womb. Woman was attacked to divide the sexes and rend the social fabric. Woman was attacked to destroy the sense of the sacred in nature. Woman was memory of ancestor and clan.
We do not need to follow Marx, we need simply to follow the money. The process has continued because the enemy has inexhaustible greed and diminishing returns. It is not simply the commons that are enclosed, everything is being sold into the hands of the few. This means war, and the war is upon us.
The sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of church and state, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of the authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionised the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the sabbat form. I do not simply refer here to the inspiring fantasies of Jules Michelet, but the important modern work of Silvia Federici.
We see the same attacks on freedom of assembly in the destruction of the free festivals, rave culture and the occupy movement. These have been met by the masked Anonymous, the faceless black bloc anarchists, the direct actions of the ELF. These are expressions of popular witchcraft and have been persecuted by the same inquisition that came for us. I do not say that these are examples of operative witchcraft, I say that we, the people who are the witchcraft, have a sacred duty to join this war. We need to celebrate sabbats again, infuse them with our witchblood, our cunning.
Here is my prophecy. Witchcraft is going to get both aroused and angrier. Nature will rise. We are not only coming for your children, we are your children and all those who will inherit the ruins of the world. Welcome to the apocalypse. This is the moment when we realise that the climate is broken. It’s all blood and roses from here on in. As witches we should prepare to fly on the wings of the storm.
This essay was originally published in Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Scarlet Imprint.