Confessions of a Hunted Witch: Revisioning Jezebel
No More, for the Hunt Has Ended: Spit Song of the Crone
Envisioning a New and Wild Truth: To the Next Generation of Wisdom Keepers
When She Comes Home: A Bedtime Story
For Once, She Is Sure: To Build a Heathen Temple
An Incantation for the Vibrant Dead: To the Ghosts Who Haunt
On the Edges of Joy and Meaning: A Ritual for the Sovereign Prophetess
Binding Sight to Spirit: A Ritual of Embodied Divinity
Feminine Power Lost, Feminine Power Regained: A Ritual Drama between Sisters
The Five Actions of the She-Gods: Ritual Vows for the Heathen Spiral
A Witch’s Weather: A Simple Ritual for the Humble Priestess
Psalm of the Warrior Crone: Ritual Poetry for the Wanderer
Beginning a Conversation with the Others: Developing a Practice of Pathworking
Meeting the One Who Waits: Simple Pathworking for the Wakeful Dreamer
Shielding the Psychic Warrior: Practical Magick for the Empath
Crowning the Feminine Face of God: A Spell to Claim Our Heathen Birthright
Crone Spells: Handcrafted Magick for the Solitary Witch
The Right to Rest: Comfort Magick for the Modern Witch
Hear Me, Heathen: Magick Words for the Untamed Woman
Ether Reflection and Final Prayer: The Spirit Wakes Wild
At Home in All the Spaces Between
Appendix: Further Study for Women’s Groups, Covens, and Other Wild Circles
The picture our teachers, pastors, parents, and media painted for us young West African kids was that our past was without controversy — bright and sunny — from the moment when the Christian Bible touched our borderlands and changed us forever. Before that singular moment, everything was dark and beastly and sore, our lands reeking with the fumes of unholy alchemy and superstition, the damned genius of the Witch and the Pagan gods and demons that knew her in her filth. Today, this glorious day, we could celebrate their eternal incarceration, they told me. Those of us who had power from above could stand on the heads of snakes, the writhing Lilithian figures that hid in the shadows, and drink their poison without fear of harm.
Growing up in the heavily Christianized Protestant south of Nigeria meant that I was part of a megachurch of charismatic evangelicals and got to witness many “casting out” sessions where the Man of God would sprinkle holy oil or water on a wild, screaming girl who had just confessed to being a Witch. The images of thrashing limbs, carnal confessions of nefarious nightly deeds, and tearful surrender are indelibly seared on my mind. I did not doubt that the tales were true; and that if one were to dream of flying on a broomstick, or to eat a sumptuous meal at ungodly hours, or to comb one’s hair in the dream, one was being initiated into the cult of Wild Ones. Threaded through the everyday was therefore a watchfulness, an impulse to flee the carnality of the body, to assert the lasting dominance of the masculine, to weaponize the borders of the city — the legacy of colonial struggles to push back the wilderness, to suppress the sinful urges of nature (the wild woman’s domain), and escape into midair, hoisted above mere ground, heir to the heavens.
Jezebel dethroned, Lilith vanquished, Asherah covered up and rushed out of the holy place, the masculine distorted, I stepped into a world of work, economy, and research that mirrored this quest for escape, for flight, for passive holiness. Mine was a search for the sacred, the disembedded, and the lofty.
And then one I day, I met her. She glided into the rational order that was my life and pulled the pillars apart with a mere wink. The woman I would later call my “thunderbolt,” my “ground,” the bonfire whose fierce circumference I longed to be incinerated in, the mother whose veined arms and long neck would in time cradle our children: “Lali.”
When Danielle Dulsky writes about love in “the Lost Verses of the Holy Feminine,” a love “so impassioned that it ripples back through the cosmic web and stirs the hearts of the ancients,” it resonates with me. I have known this love for myself: this love that turns the Sons of God mad and drives them to seek the embrace of the shadows that their swords were once sharpened to kill; this love that upturns time and history, shakes it loose from its phallic moorings and pristine foundations, and gives power to the excluded and occluded. When Dulsky speaks of the way Lilith “loves the untamed wilds, like a Witch loves the moon,” she recalibrates haunting pasts and remembers what is now becoming a stunning realization: here, right here, in the mangle of the material, in the queer stirrings of telluric critters, in the murky depths of silent waters, in the wintry spirituality of the desolate, in the graceful appearing of moon, is the sacred.
For me, the touch of a wild woman, Lali, was my undoing. I am not alone. A grand undoing is afoot in biology, in psychology, in quantum field theory, in archaeology, in feminist scholarship, in our appraisals of the vital contributions the world makes in worlding itself. In not so many words, we are coming down to earth, enacting a second Fall of sorts, composting our hard surfaces and realizing the agentic world around us is more than resource, reacquainting ourselves with the historically maligned figure of the Witch, resituating ourselves in a sensuous web of life. With new materialisms, concerned with the emancipation of mater, of mother, of the vitality of “nature” — once territorialized under regimes of Enlightenment as mere resource — we “remember the Holy Wild.”
It is not true that our past is without controversy. Instead it is simmering with subtle absences that haunt our claims to goodness, to rationality. To progress. The wilds have always been part of the city, but we learned not to look — to suppress what longed for expression. Modern history — replete with the burning of heretical women, the colonial blotting out of earth-based
