Witches? Why, Thank You.

I don’t speak on Halloween. I don't write. I honour my ancestors. It’s an exercise in liminality. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. Last night, a group of female friends and I decided to dress up all in white, paint our faces white, and pass candy out to kids. All this, while seated in a semicircle, silent. See, the town that my sisters and I evacuated to during the fires happens to be THE BEST town for halloween. Over a thousand trick or treater’s passed by the house where we held our silent counsel. ⠀

When you don’t speak on halloween, people like to guess what you are. It’s become half the fun for me. ⠀

We got a lot of good guesses: zombies, ghosts, ghost-brides, but what most people called us? Witches. Oracles. “Are you going to tell me my future?” “Are you the Oracle of Delphi.” “Look at the witches!”⠀

We weren’t wearing pointy hats. We didn’t have broomsticks. For goodness sake, we were trying to be creepy. Yet deep in the human psyche there is a recognition of feminine power. How could there not be? Women were spiritual leaders, shamans, priestesses and prophetesses for much longer than the genocidal claws of Christianisation. When every aspect of our spiritual and religious authority was stripped from us, we still found a way to hide it in our weaving, our cooking, our storytelling, our songs. ⠀

Witches you say? Yes. We’ll take it. Witches. Wyrd Women. Fates. Spinners. Pythonissa. Incantrix. Fee. Hag. All the different ways to say world-weaver, healer, woman who walks the edge places. Hedge-woman. Truth-speaker. Poet-prophet. Way-finder. Midwife. Night-Farer. Shapeshifter. Banfáith. Fate-seeress. Divina. Mystery-singer. Strega. Pharmakis. Blesser. Bruja. Heathen.⠀

Five women, clad in white, holding silence on the eve of the ancient heathen new year? Witches, you decide, as you gather candy from a basket. This is because something in you, no matter how deeply buried says “This. I recognise this. I know this. She is power. She is prophecy. She is not forgotten.”⠀