Images of (Traditional) Witchcraft

Notes made while reading “A Deed Without a Name” by Lee Morgan.

Choosing the path of witchcraft because drawn to imagery like spirit flights, hedge crossing, bubbling cauldrons, wild dances in wild places, death and ghosts, shape-shifting, sorcery.

Imagery created by witch trials, interrogators, inquisitors, diabolicists? Or eternal archetype?

Darkness as Mother, intellectiual illumination as guide to understanding/embracing primal darkness. Kindling the flame in the dark; “the lantern of the seeking mind and the rich, fecund darkness from which that mind draws life.”

Scholarly works of Carlos Ginzburg, Eva Pocs, Claude Lecouteux and Emma Wilby used as source material.

Witches as neutral agents of Fate; see benandanti vs malandanti, Bessie Dunlop vs Isobel Gowdie, healing vs cursing etc.

Spiritual experiences labelled as ‘Other’ = witchcraft.

Diversity of symbolism shows depth and range of craft practice.

Household objects imbued with Other powers, a hidden practice, seen vs unseen.

The crooked path is the serpent lines that twine around the straight track, or the earth energies that that wind back and forth across ley lines, connecting sacred well and standing stone and ancient pagan holy site. The obscured path requires acceptance of intuition as a guide. It’s a meditative path, labyrinthine. Morgan describes the scholarly component of witchcraft lore as the straight track and experiential gnosis as the crooked road.

Trad Craft as folkloric & shamanic vs. Wicca as Western Occult & natural magic.

Marked as Other:

• the witch mark can give power and/or be symbol of oaths & associations
• mark on the left hand/shoulder
• born with a caul
• born with teeth
• seventh son of a seventh son
• red hair
• sixth finger
• asymmetries of any kind
• lameness in one foot (Devil’s split foot, one foot in the Otherworld)
• one blind eye (ike Odin, one eye trained on unseen world)
• strangeness: intelligence, quietness, imaginary friends, sickliness, extreme robustness etc
• “fey” = visionary, touched, fated to die