It's Time to Call Back the Magic

So. We felt it before we had a word for it. You and I.

The witches and the druids, the mystics, the ones who talk to Trees and are not joking about it. The animists who never needed the term to know the Land was awake and paying attention to us all the time, even when we forget. People with dirt under their nails (I personally just can’t really get it out) or a candle lit on the kitchen windowsill for a reason we couldn’t quite explain to our mother, though she’s asked and might have roll her eyes.

Truth is, it’s time. It’s Time to Call Back the Magic.

We’ve known it a while. Maybe it was the summer the river went quiet and nobody with any power seemed to mind, or they minded and reached for another piece of technology. Maybe it was the machine, the way it began talking back in what seems like intelligence, patient and sweet and never once tired, and we watched decent people start to half-pray to it and make it a God. Or the body. Somehow it always comes back to the body, this Ancient Earth that carries us, a body that keeps a count the mind too often refuses to listen to, to trust and to follow.

But wait. I am going ahead of myself here, let me walk back and start with one word that fascinate me since I read the old witch tales; Spell.

Spell used to mean story. To tell, to recount, to lay a thing out in some order. And then, somewhere in the 1500s, it took on the other meaning too, the incantation, the words with something alive and intelligent packed inside them, a secret divine order of sort. The same word for both, because nobody used to split them. A story told well was a spell. To spell was to enchant.

Now there are a few other words I want to lay down here before we dive deeply in. Charm, Enchant, and Glamour (yes, Glamour).

Charm is carmen, Latin for song. Enchant is incantare, to sing over a thing (you probably my wife Rose The Wollf Den Enchant her Runes). And glamour, this word we’ve handed to the glossy magazines and the red carpets, the word for people who look expensive and on top of it all, glamour is just a Scots slurring of grammar. Yes grammar. Yes slurring, you can’t escape the old meanings even on a red carpet, especially on a red carpet.

Grammar, in its older sense, meant the hidden art of letters, the knowing of how a few marks could move the world, quite glamorous right? Grammar and glamour, one root.

The craft of the alphabet and the casting of spells were the same craft (we all been enchanted by poetry, myth, and beautifully written story). Someone said a while back that “the most magical books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.”

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So this was right up until Empire took that word glamour, which used to mean a spell you throw to change how a thing is seen, and handed it to the advertising men and the magazines with women on the cover. Because they never took the magic off the word nor us. They kept it, moved it behind the counter and onto a screen, put a price on it. Every ad today is an incantation built to make us feel one exact way on demand. Every feed is a grimoire, but we are not the ones reading it, we’re the ones it reads to, spelled hour on hour from the second our thumb hits the glass. I have seen way too many people around me taken by that spell and it’s heartbreaking to say the least.

So, I want to say, Fuck that. In fact I am saying it, FUCK THAT.

Let’s take the word back. Let’s Call Back the Magic.

Because the spell is still being cast, quite loudly, right now. I wrote a version of this on Substack Notes a few days ago, and Marianne Williamson answered it. As you know, she courageously ran for president in the USA, she has seen the ugly machine from the inside, and she said the chant that used to be “witch, witch, witch” has only swapped a single consonant. Bitch. The same word, thrown the same way, to make a woman’s power read as a sickness, a dysfunction, or a crime.

Everyone is obsessed with the “witch burning” that happened centuries ago, but the burnings never stopped; they only stopped needing the wood. I will come back on that. She also talked about the way out (We break a spell by seeing that it is one).

There’s a poem up in the North, the Völuspá, the seeress speaking it, and a woman walks into the middle of it. Gullveig. She comes into the hall of the gods working seiðr, the trance-magic, the seeing, and they don’t like what moves in her, so they run her through with spears and throw her on the fire. She burns. They haul her out and burn her again, and again, three times over, and three times she stands up out of the embers and walks off whole, and takes a bright new name, Heiðr, and goes straight back to her magic like it was nothing at all.

Her burning is what starts the first war in the world.

I think about her a lot. And about that fact. It says so much about where we are as a collective right now. Burning a woman, three times over, starts the first war in the world. As we burn the Mother (Earth), and belittle & harm the Mothers, is it not surprising we are still at war?

Now there is another woman, in our own century, Silvia Federici, who spent years down in the complex paperwork of the witch trials, and what she found there is not the story any of us got handed in school or read about, the one where the fires are the last ugly spasm of a dark age burning itself out. What she found is that the fires were a foundation, that this whole measured and priced and optimised world we move around in now got poured while the wood was still smoking, and that the thing being burned, town square after town square, with clerks keeping careful record the whole time, was a single idea, the idea that the world was alive, that the water listened, that the Trees were kin and the dead stayed close and a woman who knew her plants and her own will could lean on what was coming and talk it into something else.

You cannot raise factories and extraction systems on a world like that. A world that awake won’t hold still to be counted or fenced or sold; it keeps insisting it is someone and not something, so it had to be hushed, turned into matter, made cheap, and the fastest way anyone has ever found to do that is fire. They called the fire progress, wrote it into the ledgers of Empire and the sermons that way.

And if you think that’s safely in the past, I have some news from my own life.

My wife and I built a healing center. A sweat lodge, gathering nights, a fire we kept till morning, people arriving to grieve and to pray and to get their hands back down in the dirt. For that, we got called a cult. Me, the cult leader, at the head of a cult that does not exist, has never existed, and that frankly I do not have the temperament to run. We got called dangerous. That one I’ll keep, actually.

Dangerous to the machine, yes, gladly.

Never once to a single soul who came through our gate. Our lodge and our gathering nights got written up by someone official as a “camp for transient people,” whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.

Her family hired a private detective to follow me. Her ex called the town down on us. And some more ugly details I won’t share here. All of it the slow cold machinery of people who have decided our way of living is a threat, and who set about getting it flagged and filed and shut.

Our own witch hunt. No spears this time, just lawyers and a rumor and the phone number for the authorities.

So when I tell you that Gullveig burned three times and stood up three times and walked off to her magic anyway, know that I’m not reaching back for a nice old story. I have lived inside it.

It took me years to understand the shape of it, that they never actually come at us saying we threaten the system, they say we’re dangerous, full stop, dangerous to them, because they have dissolved so completely into the machine that they can no longer feel where it stops and they start, so that a threat to it lands in their body as a threat to their own life, which means they aren’t even lying when they say it. They feel it.

Yet, what they burned is what’s coming back in through the land and the tired bodies now.

Through you. That pull toward the green and the wild and the unprofitable that you can’t justify on any spreadsheet you own. Not a hobby. Gullveig, up on her feet again, knocking the ash off her shoulders.

It’s time, and there are more of us than they know how to count.

I could leave it there and it would be enough, a gift for a Saturday. But the part I actually want to put in your hands is the part nobody gives away, which is what to do with any of this once the feeling passes. A call with no practice underneath it is just that, a feeling, and feelings lift by Tuesday.

So past this line, for whoever’s pulling their chair in closer. What’s down there is the rest of it.

• Where real magic actually comes from and the price it asks, the part the weekend workshops skip because the price doesn’t sell.

• My own telling of it too, the whole fall, how I lost the magic completely and walked into the machine, made the good money, and met a dead man in the mirror at the top of the ladder, and what it took to hear the call back.

• The two realities we’re choosing between every single morning without noticing, and how to start choosing the living one on purpose.

• And then the spell itself, one you can do tonight in your own kitchen, no shop and nothing to buy, the small exact thing they lit the fires to stop.

And as a gift, because this one sits deeper in my heart than anyone will ever know, there's a whole little book waiting down there for you too.

The Book of Small Spells.

• Nine of them, and a small magic for each of the eight turns of the year.

• How to greet the world awake in the morning.

• How to read the feathers and the tracks again, the way you could as a child.

• How to mend your own threshold

• How to ask for something without begging for it

• How to sit with grief when it floods you

• And what to do on the nights the old fear comes and you have to work the magic scared anyway.

• PLUS the seasonal Wheel of Magic

Things kept simple enough to do at the end of a wrung-out day. Yours to keep by the stove and grow a season around.

Come closer.