Being a Witch Can Be Frightening.

This is the first letter in a series of letters you’ll receive on the second Sunday of every month. It is a more informal way for me to let you get to know me better, and to share more experiences, more witchcraft and more practice in an intimate space. It will also be a moment dedicated to questions and exchange. And it will always be free.

Enjoy the read

I grew up with a woman who wasn’t my mother. One of the strongest, fiercest personalities I have ever known in my entire life. She never called herself a witch, nor did she ever call herself a practitioner. But she did things, seemingly normal things. She never explained anything to me. She would do things, and I would watch her. And if I tried to ask, I was never given an answer. Despite having an extremely generous, welcoming, and warm personality, she also had a grotesque side, one that was almost terrifying to me. Sometimes she would look at you with a mocking, sibylline, almost insinuating gaze. As I grew older, I began to sense there was something about her I should look closer into, but her religion, her total devotion, and her conscious choice to offer no explanations held me back. So I stopped asking questions, simply accepting what I saw as a certainty. The strangest thing was that, at times, it was almost as if she were mocking what she was doing. I know it might be hard to imagine, but that was exactly the feeling I got. For an instant, it was as if she took on something mephistophelean, as if the energy around her shifted, becoming almost distorted.

This woman was my grandmother, and she had been by my side from the very moment I was born. She was an extremely religious person, seemingly worlds away from anything we define today as practice, magic, witchcraft, or occultism in general. This was what everyone saw, including me. Until she was left alone. And in those moments, something changed.

But one of the most frightening things that my grandmother truly taught me was how to feel the arrival of the wind. From the wind, you can perceive so many things. The wind that scares me the most is the autumn wind. I believe it is called Föhn, and it is a very warm wind that comes from the north-west during the first days of autumn. I remember one episode very well. I was around 16 years old and at the time I lived in a house in the countryside. It was surely the beginning of autumn and it was late afternoon. I was outside, in the garden. The sky was clear, I remember the moon and a very cold light, almost violet. You know, when you feel the wind, you perceive it before its arrival. And it is like an omen. Something that makes you lift your head and lose your gaze into the emptiness for a few seconds. Then the wind arrives. That warm air breaking the first chill right on skin. I feel that sensation deep inside my bones, and it is truly powerful. And you feel it. You breathe it. And in that moment, in that exact moment, you perceive something. Something that is about to arrive.

You don’t have to look for it, you don’t have to make an effort to find it, you don’t even have to learn it, you just have to feel it. What I feel is like a fracture between time and space, a thousandth of a second in which your awareness somehow expands. And if I can stay in that moment with a clear mind, ahhh, what you might perceive is incredible. If you read my articles, well, you’ve probably noticed that I always try to give an explanation for almost everything, but there are some things I simply can’t explain. And this is one of them. I remember my grandmother, busy with her chores, suddenly turning her head. Even indoors, inside the house. It was as if she had heard a sound, as if something had startled her. As if she were about to scrutinize something. Then, all of a sudden, she would look at me and say “The wind is coming. The wind of madness”. And then nothing happened. I would just stand there, completely puzzled. I wanted to understand what she really meant, until I started to perceive it too.

At times, even my mother has tried to explain to me the feeling of this opening of awareness. It’s hard to explain, because I truly don’t know how else to describe it. It is really an infinitesimal fraction of a second in which you feel like you have total knowledge. You perceive this world and the other one. You feel what has passed, and you feel what is about to arrive. You feel the pain, but you also feel life. And all of this happens within the fraction of a blink. If it has happened to you too, you already know what I am about to say. There is nothing in all of this that you will be able to hold on to. The amount of sensations, visions, words, and intuitions is so immense that, at the very moment you perceive them, they have already vanished. Everything slips away, like the air.

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The Föhn arrives every year, and as long as the Alps and the air currents exist, the Föhn will continue to arrive. But these episodes do not happen all the time, and they do not always happen in the same way. Sometimes I experience it in its entirety, other times I have experienced it as a true omen. It has happened, very often, that precisely with the arrival of this wind, terrible things would happen. Physically, I can feel it days before. I become very nervous, with more mood swings than usual, and I also suffer from strong headaches. My emotions seem to become amplified, everything seems more violent and faster. It is as if, for days, I remain in a constant state of alert. The warm autumn wind cleans the sky, yes, but why does it have to shake us so much on Earth in order to do so? It is as if I can perceive the aggression and tension that are accumulating somewhere, in some form of the collective unconscious. My first memories of these episodes are with my grandmother. Usually, when there was wind, she didn’t go outside much. She didn’t have an easy temperament, but when the wind came, she became truly impossible to handle. The stronger the wind became, the more nervous she grew. But when the autumn wind arrived, it was different. She never told me anything, but I have the absolute certainty that she was perceiving something. Every time. The same thing happens with my mother, but she perceives it in a different way. No form of amplified emotions. It was as if both of them knew something. Some form of claircognizance, perhaps. Who knows.

Maybe some of you have experienced clairolfaction. I have. And the first time it happened was easily one of the most frightening things that have ever happened to me. Not because of the ability itself, because it is simply about smelling things. More than anything, it was the way it happened. The first time it happened, I was so overwhelmed by panic that I had to go to the hospital. I truly thought there was something wrong with my body. In reality, I was perfectly healthy. I was just smelling things that no one else could smell. Most of the time, it is a beautiful thing. I smell very pleasant scents that I have learned to recognize as signals. Others are a little less pleasant, but unfortunately, I have learned to recognize those as signals too.

Clairolfaction is not something you can really control, because it is quite invasive. I can’t just turn off my sense of smell. I would still smell it anyway. My sense of smell is definitely very developed, but despite this, I can perfectly distinguish a real scent from a “less real” one. Pleasant scents are often full of memories. Sometimes I smell scents that I immediately connect to my childhood, or to someone I love. Then there are the scents that I perceive when I practice, and in this case they can be useful to orient myself. They give me pretty precise indications about my energy, about the process, and about the result. Other times, though, I perceive a unique scent, always the same, which I have learned to associate with only one thing. It is a sharp, pungent, cold, and heavy scent, almost clinical. It is very strong, very invasive, and it truly lasts for a very long time. It happens to me in crowded places, like supermarkets or on the subway. It is as if I could smell danger. It is a horrible, horrible experience.

Another rather frightening thing I have experienced, for as long as I can remember, is hearing voices. Okay, said like that it sounds bizarre, but this is exactly what happens. To be honest it happens much less now, probably because I have learned to filter certain types of information in a different way. But when I was a child, it was definitely not something enjoyable. It happened exactly at the moment when I was about to fall asleep. The sensation is like being inside a huge market where you can hear a lot of voices all at the same time. I couldn’t distinguish them. I still can’t understand, even today when it happens, which voice is trying to tell me what. Often, it felt like very loud screams, almost angry ones. And they were so intense, so chaotic, that they completely robbed me of sleep. And it would go on for hours, until they slowly faded away. An explanation? I don’t have one. Today I believe I am able to focus my sensitivity in a different way. I believe I have learned to channel it differently.

I want to end this piece by telling you about an episode that I remember particularly well. Perhaps one of the episodes that touched me most deeply. We are at my great-aunt’s house. Probably one of the places with the highest concentration of energy I have ever been to. When you crossed the threshold of that house, it was as if the density of the air changed. It was truly heavy. There was a strong smell of burnt wood ash. It was always very dark, letting in very little light. There were dark velvet curtains on the living room window, through which the same ray of light always entered, illuminating the entire fireplace. She was very old and spent most of her time sitting, in front of the fire. She spoke very little and very softly. The last time I ever spoke to her was during the wake for the funeral of my aunt, one of their sisters. The house was very large, so they decided to keep the body there, at home. It was a spring afternoon and I arrived together with my grandmother and other aunts. They left me at the entrance, so I entered the house alone. The door was open and, strangely, the house was illuminated. I remember perfectly the vivid colors of the paintings on the walls, and the intense green color of the sofas. I entered directly into the living room, quickly looked around to understand where she was, and then I saw the door of a room in front of me, slightly ajar. At that point, I approached the door from which I could glimpse my aunt, who was standing beside the body of her deceased sister.

For a moment, I thought about stepping back, leaving and letting her be alone with her in those final moments. But then, as soon as I turned toward the exit door, I heard her speaking. At that point I stopped. I tried to look through the small opening of the half-open door. She was reciting something, probably a prayer. Then she began making gestures in the air, right above the body. It was as if she were knotting something in the air, and she was doing it starting from the area above the feet all the way to the area above the head. Without ever touching the body, repeatedly. When I decided to enter, she stopped everything. She took my hand and accompanied me to the kitchen. Her hand was freezing cold, cold like a piece of ice.

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Everything you have read is obviously not part of any witchcraft practice. It is simply part of my life. Being a witch is something you choose. It can happen of course, but then you still have to choose it. It happened to me, and even though sometimes it’s incredibly frightening and uncontrollable, I believe I will continue to choose it, forever, and in every life.

Marta