HECATE

FERAL: REWILDING LANGUAGE

 “I was given the casket on the condition I disposed of it in the deepest, most secure underland site that I reached – a place from which it could never return. The second of the objects was an owl cut from a slice of whalebone. It is a talisman and what it connotes is magic. The minke whale from which the owl was taken had washed up dead on the shoreline of a Hebridean island.” Robert Macfarlane, UNDERLAND (p. 19)

INTRODUCTION

Disclaimer: the names and situation associated with the woman called Hecate are fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. The scenario, however, is based on a factual, similar event.

“I’m a witch,” said Hecate, smiling that smile I’ve seen countless times before. “I’ve read your book. It really helped me center myself after my divorce.”
“Which book?” I suck on my coffee, a bit blissed at the autumn sun on the back of my neck, despite the intuitive hackles.
She’s confused, as though I’d just devoured a baby in front of her. “Witchcraft Theory and Practice. Um…”
“You didn’t know I’ve written more?”
“Ah, no. It’s great, by the way!”
I’ve got a workshop called FERAL, on the rewilding of language, beginning again over the coming weekend. I don’t want strangers hanging about my house. Have I had death threats in the past? Yes. I’m still alive though. Obviously. I prefer to meet those I don’t already know in a café downtown. Suss ‘em out, inoffensively, obviously.
“No, it’s not,” I respond, kindly. “I signed the contracts with the publisher, for that book, in 1998.”
“Classic!”
We’re getting on nicely, so far. Am I about to fuck that up? Of course. “So, you’re Greek?”

She’s forty nine. I remember being forty nine. All my kids grown and gone their own ways. Me thinking I knew everything. Silly stuff like that. Her hair is dyed a precocious and eye wateringly fluorescent pink, and a really lovely septum piercing dangles above her top lip. She keeps fiddling with it. She’s as wildly Bohemian as any goth on the streets of Melbourne and I’m mightily respectful, if not a bit wary. She wears a rustic, heavily tarnished silver pentagram, and her fingernails, while fake, are killer-black and as close to talons as a nail parlor can get ‘em. “Hecate…” I continue. “Myth and legend and all that. You don’t look Greek.”
“I’m not. I’m Australian. Hecate is my witch name.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry about that book, then.”

PART 1 – WHAT’S IN A NAME?

NAMING IS TREACHEROUS

It’s time we had this conversation. And Hecate, the woman sitting with me, is a powerful case in point. She is not who she thinks she is, and I am about to become involved in her true-life mystery, and a magic that is both real and tactile. But first you and I have some talking to do.

Witchcraft, as an action. Witchcraft is something one does. Witchcraft is often equated with wicca, and wicca is referred to with an upper-case W, to indicate its importance as an entity in the modern vernacular, in the illusionary, non-place, called the West (west of what, I am unsure. It’s a rather silly construct) and is, currently considered a valid religion.

WICCA

But wicca, the religion, is not witchcraft, and does not, of itself, practice witchcraft. It is a ritualized, quite new, devotional practice that I was involved with for many decades but that, ultimately, being a savage and a pedant and an anarchist, I came to understand as a magnificent, utterly well-intentioned form of religion where dualisms and invocations take the place of hopes and prayers.

Douglas Ezzy’s book [1] confirms Hume’s hopes for the future. His volume, published six years later, is essentially a collection of testimonies: fifteen chapters in which sixteen practicing pagans (including Ezzy himself) speak of how the practice of paganism has affected their lives. The tone is warm and conversational, and the pagans emerge as charming and interesting people, ranging from youth to late middle-age. Common themes include the feeling that the Christianity of their upbringing did not fit their view of the world; the electric experience of working ritual alone and in a group; a concern with both feminism and the environment; and the celebration of human life, from birth to sex to death. Source.

I relish ceremony: candles, the cough-inducing interference of commercial incense, the need for an altar, upraised hands, robes, talismanic jewelry and charms, pentacles and salt or chalk circles, or else those drawn with a stick, a staff, a wand, a gesture (or a dagger… we’ll get to that) in sand or soil; on the lounge room carpet or cellar dust. The list is long, and many are the commercial outlets that will provide us what we seem to need to enable us to be well-prepared to function within the ideal parameters of this chosen way. To sell us stuff that, according to the books, is appropriate for witches. To authorise meaning. Because, Hecate forbid, to work a ritual in jeans, socks and a woolly jumper is just plain, well, plain.

SPELLS PART 1

People often write to me asking for a spell for this-or-that. Some claim to be cursed. Some ask for the cure for fear, or as a way to get rid of someone, or to find love. To attract a job or cause world peace. Do they work? See SPELLS PART 2, as I’m about to get distracted by the other side and its use of word magic (or, in the case of the Synod of Whitby, “a hostile sword” quote is from Bede) to utterly change the course of human thought.

Thus…

“What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all.”  JAMES JOYCE, on hell:  Source.

NEVER BOAST, NEVER THREATEN

I guess witchcraft has its perks because at least there’s no threat involved. To anyone or anything. Despite the bad rap. But hell? It took Zarathustra to invent that and, a millennia or so later, zealots of the cult of the dead god to use it to threaten small children, sensual women, anyone with an alt-sexuality that’s anything not bogun, Trump oppositionists, child-sellers &/or dying soldiers.

This is not it. Where is the wisdom in any of it? And if there is none—almost a need to coerce and prove oneself alternatively worthy—why is the practice (or the idea) still adhered to, even after a hundred years of failed propaganda and, also, failed claims of authenticity? Like christianity, even buddhism, that offers the adherent an afterlife of vague cloud-and-right-hand-of-godness, terror—that mountain-pecking-birdiness, that is hell—or some flight into the body of a newborn someone or something.

But what has this got to do with witchcraft? And when did the word become a being thing instead of a doing thing? Have I been down the road of claiming? Yes. Did I know I’d bought into a cult, like any of the above? No. Did it gain me notoriety? Yes, but mainly in the minds of people who’ve never met me. Who are looking for a mirror within in which to see themselves. I understand that. Because there is a ‘ness’. A ‘something’, that implies that witchcraft is witchcraft.

But “a witch?” Houston, we have a problem (and yes, I know that’s a meme) or, in this case, Hecate we have a problem. Love and kisses xoxoxox.

SECTARIANISM, FEAR AND SPLINTER CONFORMITY

BACKSTORY

The early era of when a spotlight was actually claimed by an individual, rather than media, or theocratically-imposed rhetoric was in the latter part of the 1960s. Prior to its romp towards acceptability, in the form of Wicca, witchcraft was not even considered a something, outside of the mind of men, religion, the church, particularly peeved women, pulp fiction and B-Grade movies.

Witchcraft has about it, in populist consciousness, a dirty little bitter woman-face of dumbness and hysterical, disease inducing scandal. The foul and uneducated scowls of old women, with crooked backs and single eyes, living deep in forests, eating children who have become lost, or else, if in positions of prominence, within a highly christianised and suspect society, the secret queen of the castle dungeons, holding center stage, naked or slightly-so, albeit grandly draped, in a position of power, endowed by the attending acolytes and adherents, who wantonly lust after her alter-prone flesh-and-blood body whose spread legs temporarily encase whichever man is considered sufficiently well-represented within the court of kings, the crimson choir cassock of a papal cardinal, or the top hatted, mustached and monocle’d among the monied 1%, the aristocratic, the nobled or merchant-membered of a popular East India Trading Company equivalent (in the twenty first century) like BHP, Goldman Sachs or the Epsteinian uberclass.

These images, and fetish ideologues, were food for the press and the McDonalds-minded. Or else, particularly in the new diadem of defamation, Disney.

TACITUS, BOOK XIV, states – 30: On the beach stood the adverse array, a serried mass of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement. Then, reassured by their general, and inciting each other never to flinch before a band of females and fanatics, they charged behind the standards, cut down all who met them, and enveloped the enemy in his own flames. The next step was to install a garrison among the conquered population, and to demolish the groves consecrated to their savage cults: for they considered it a duty to consult their deities by means of human entrails. — While he was thus occupied, the sudden revolt of the province was announced to Suetonius.

It was from the voices and pens, of the supposedly, recently vindicated, that a hypothetical modern witchcraft spat I am here, and I will claim a tax break.

Without going too deeply into the repeals, by the British Commonwealth, of a law passed in 1735 and called The Witchcraft Act, that changed (slightly) its veil of godliness in 1951 to become the Fraudulent Mediums Act, these mothballed condemnations allowed for the emergence, into a public domain, of Gerald Gardner, a bloke sprung from the cabals of nineteenth century elitism—well-traveled to places considered the antithesis of an entrenched and self-certain christianity, such as Ceylon, Malaya and Cypress—and a family made rich by the timber trade, to become a member of a Rosicrucian order (circa 1930), practicing—or so I spae—out of Christchurch (in Dartmoor, not the New Zealand one), the territory of the invader/colonizer Saxons, who referred to the place as Tweoxneam, and that was stolen or misappropriated from an hypothesized indigenous Celtic tribal affiliation known as the Dumnonii [2], Deep Valley Dwellers, in a land of mists and mystery, once covered in oak forests.

The following legends show a progression from giants to witches to pixies and, of course, the Evil One also makes an appearance. Naturally there are also ghost stories. Source.

EMPIRE

Was Gardner’s fascination with the folklore and indigenous practices of other cultures his reason for consorting with the figure of the rich English woman he coined as “Old Dorothy” Clutterbuck, and whom he claimed initiated him into a coven in the New Forest, England? He certainly had his days of notoriety: claiming a philosophy degree from a suspect American consortium[3]

In 1910 he was initiated as an apprentice freemason into the Sphinx Lodge No. 107 in the British occupied Colombo (then Ceylon), affiliated with the Irish Grand Lodge (the leader of which was a member of what is known as the hellfire club). Gardner placed great importance on this new activity… Source

STOP NOW

That’s enough of that. Gardner, Valiente, Crowley, Leadbetter, Blavatsky, Budapest, Simos and, eventually, (at the small-scale end of this) me. We have all perpetuated (and in some instances, still do, extant) our own brand of misappropriation and, even now, in the era of social media, we can add the coagulant diatribe of multiple religious, anthropological (indigenous and/or conspiratorial) constructs to the mix.

So, to unravel. To finally stop. Because the sectarianist mine-is-realer-than-yours-ideological inventiveness, and fiction, has reached an inevitable dead end. Why? All are based on figment, guesswork, desire, theatre and, at the core, deceit, on both sides of a suspect righteousness and equality debate. Wicca is a fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me [4] snub of orthodox behavioral demands by people with intentionally thin lips. So far, so great, but wait…

The indescribable lostness of a usurper people-animal, has condemned the softer voices of near-extinct environments, cultures and species to derogatorily-penned fauna, non-European indigenous languages to brute-speak that we, as an Arctically-pale-skinned human multi-product supermarket aisle of societies, unable to justify our own inadequacies, are determined not to care about.

Until late in the twentieth century (and probably even now—I’m such a fucking optimist) our fore-parents were, and are, hoping they can pretend to ignore the voices of terror and the crash/boom of calving ice that is now ominously and inevitably raising sea levels, to the degree of drowning small, inhabited Pacific islands, while also (unfortunately continuously) raping and plundering, bombing and poisoning, as companies, corporations and governments have done throughout recorded history, all that does not conform to our netted, gilded desire for more of N… (insert something).

The above practices are now, in politikspeak, called Free Trade. Is this in the vain hope that the word “free” will act as a blue pill for all this plastic, and all these oil and chemical spills, deforestation and destruction of biodiversity and habitable non-structures, unparalleled, aberrant soil degradation and river-killing? All the smiley-faced conspiracy theorists, lower down on the hierarchical pyramidal diagram, many of whom remain utterly caged in the zoo, who suggest the wealthy drink the blood of human babies in ritualized debauchery, to… to what? To enable the accumulation of more? To grant eternal life? To appease the deity that abrahamic theocrats have conveniently termed satanic because no, they don’t drink the blood of a man who died, mercilessly, sort of like anybody the master race deems problematic, every Sunday, sometimes even daily, because he/they held/hold the keys to the previously alluded-to cage?

All while awaiting all the dead to rise up, as was once upon a time promised (because that tortured, murdered man didn’t really die, he just ascended. To where, some of us are yet to imagine, because, as the late, great John Lennon once sang “Above us only sky…”) in all their flapping, grey skinned, eyeless and lipless, forested world of proteobacteria, pseudomonas, firmicutes, peptoniphilus and clostridium [6], like something H. R. Giger will only ever dream of.

Are we, as a society historically drenched in the blood of collusion, in genocide and slavery, replete with a colonialist, destructive and overtly fundamentalist ideological attitude, going to continue to claim a radicality that is, if honest, the binary offshoot of monotheism?

Are we, as supposed anarchist, heretical radicals who refuse to kneel before the symbol of torture, in an ostentatious building owned by the governments of a deeply flawed patriarchal, misappropriated spin, actually perpetuating the same pomposity, but with a twist that sticks its tongue out at daddy, in a gesture that says fuck you, that is mere posturing because we have nothing better, wiser or unfettered to leap onto and claim?

Well…

SPELLS, PART 2

50/50 – great odds

That’s your chance of having a spell work. No matter how many candles are carved and shaved with some form of boline or other, no matter how many letters from the tetragrammaton one writes with the blood of your pinkie, whether in sigils-in-clay, carved onto dubious Hebrew-tinged Rosicrucian amulets, hung about the bed of a newborn, to repel Lilith, or onto a rune-like, or ogham-like birch, hazel or rowan branch (perhaps an oak one—although that’s just a radical and uneducated guess at specificity; oh, lambs-to-the-slaughter, I sound like I’m serious) stripped of bark and tied at each end with red thread, sealed with black sealing wax bought for this explicit purpose and, once passed through the smoke of incense, is buried in the back yard with a so mote it be as the spade is put away. Whether one entombs a cat behind the chimney bricks, buries a boot under the paving stone of the family home or fills a jar with urine, bent nails and hair from an enemy’s shower stall plug hole that is, once chanted over, consigned to a cemetery plot or a building site where the concrete is due to be poured in a week because one has done one’s research about this.

I have been part of the running-away-from-home movement, loosely called paganism (a word I emphatically dismiss because I am not Italian… although I do seem to have a thin green line of ancestral DNA along the fault line of the Tiber) for several decades. On the downhill slide away from same, for several more.

If spells worked, every beauty in the Miss Universe pageant, asking for a wish to come true, would have made world peace happen. So would christmas, with its peace on earth, good will towards all men chauvinism. But they don’t. And, by dungeons and chains, why would any sane person summon love from an individual who doesn’t? Why would one lay healing hands on a person whose destiny it is to die today?

ARE ALL SPELLS SELFISH?

What about the woman who comes to me asking me to work a spell to stop her daughter being raped by her own uncle, because the police can’t do shit when the child says nothing, and medical examinations are inconclusive? Well, I am certainly going to piss in a vegemite jar for that. Because the alternative would land me—&/or the mother—in jail for first degree murder, despite the abused child’s silence for fear of consequence.

SO, WHAT IS WITCHCRAFT THEN?

Truth is, there is NOTHING definable about it. The being, knowing practitioner of a something that could be classed as witchcraft is not going to say. If they do, they are boasting and, while I have no problem with boasting per se, I do have a problem with The Complete Book of Spells, Ceremonies and Magic, and every other book on a similar trajectory (my wall) that I gave up exploring thirty years ago.

The equivalent word—almost the anathema of the word witchcraft—is miracle. A seemingly supernatural outcome to a threatening or doleful experience that cannot be considered ‘normal’ or ‘predictable’. Being found alive, in the rubble of a bombed out neighborhood, in Syria, eleven days after the buildings were turned to ash and debris, stunned and confused but otherwise unscathed. How is that possible? It isn’t, apparently, and therefore it is a miracle. A “wondrous work of God” [7]. No thanks to the audacious will to live that many, many species continue to display, despite all the vain and economically-sanctioned cruelty we, as a human animal, can inflict, just because we think we’re better. And made in the image of some supreme, omnipotent deity.

PART 2 ANIMISM OR BIAS?

What—not who—is Hecate?

Or CALLING OUT the RELENTLESS ASSUMPTION because, while thusly named, the woman sitting with me, with pink hair, a septum ring and a seriously impressive tattoo sleeve, is not it. Could Hecate, then, be a species, or a landscape? Or an ancestral, tribal name? Or a collective noun for a pack of stag hounds?

Dogs were closely associated with Hecate in the Classical world. “In art and in literature Hecate is constantly represented as dog-shaped or as accompanied by a dog….[8]

I have to stop here. I want to raise a supposition with you. The concept of both sovereignty and lineage. That all the ideas promoted by academics over the past few centuries encased in the righteousness of the written word, are wrong. They are biased. The bigotry of grave robbers and Mengele-style categorisation of non-Europeans by way of skull measurements.

Whether promoted through tomb meddling, or the guesswork surrounding deserted metropolises, villages, buildings, menhirs or painted underground archives (archaeology), or whether through the finding, and subsequent classification, of human-like statuary, from the small figurines given the titles of Venus of Willendorf, the Minoan Snake Goddess, a figurine unearthed at the mythical Aratta, the guesswork, after the brain-frying indoctrination of almost two millennium of purposeful ambiguity, needs, from my perspective, to be challenged. This male female, human/god divisiveness… time’s up..

GOLD IN THE COALMINE

It would have been a Sunday because in 1982 we didn’t have the internet and I never bought a newspaper on any other day. The Herald. An article that caught me. That stopped me. That challenged everything I thought I knew. And these were the days of Erich von Däniken so that’s saying something.

An image on page 4, of a small gold object on a clear plastic plinth. It was now on show in the London museum. It was impossible to tell what the object was from the first photograph except that it was definitely, I reiterate, made of gold. The second image, however, had been photographed under a microscope. I was looking at a detailed carving of an F-111 aircraft with its landing gear down. That’s not the oddness, though. What boggles the mind is that it was discovered during the drilling of a new shaft—through a deep vein of coal—intended for an additional metro train tunnel. SOLID-FUCKING-GOLD! Hand-crafted: “Coal formation began during the Carboniferous Period – known as the first coal age – which spanned 360 million to 290 million years ago. The build-up of silt and other sediments, together with movements in the earth’s crust – known as tectonic movements – buried swamps and peat bogs, often to great depths. With burial, the plant material was subjected to high temperatures and pressures. This caused physical and chemical changes in the vegetation, transforming it into peat and then into coal. Source

So, who made it? And when? And what—by the love of earth—why and how is it there? And what of the consensus that promotes the concept that we’ve ‘progressed’ up some evolutionary ladder to be the elite species we are now when, it is just as plausible, EVERYTHING postulated as a straight-line-time-construct is utterly wrong and that we, as a species are under the thrall of some Cargo Cult sleeping beauty spell and that all our technological advancements are because we’ve done this shit before.

CARGO CULT: The term is now broadly used to describe behavior where people mistakenly think they can summon some benefit by going through empty or unimportant motions. They don’t understand the real consequences or causes, but they try and get a result anyway. You can see this is science, in programming, and in agile software development. In fact, it is quite common indeed. Source.

I could be called a liar because, in 2003, when I traveled overseas on my first world tour, I asked about it at the museum while I stopped over in London on my way to Mme. Tussauds and, hopefully, Camden Town. I was smiled upon by the woman at the information counter. I was informed there was no such item. So much for truthful journalism and fake images, eh? Back then, even! Before Trump! And what has manipulated our thinking? And could all these academically clever bastards be absolutely guessing, based on (and to justify/sanction/federally fund) their crimes?

CRIME AGAINST THE PEOPLE

We are in the internet age (I know, I know, fish are wet). That is sometimes wonderful and at others, confusing. When the original story of the many-beasted, tattooed woman, entombed in the permafrost of the Altai Mountains, beneath the mummified remains of four horses, was first presented, again in a newspaper, back in the 90s, it was proposed that she was a shaman. Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom, was written byOlga Kharitidi, exploring the effects of such a powerful figure on all who came into contact with her. Now every search engine titles this mummified individual as “a princess”.

What are we? Idiots?

JUNG AND HIS ARCHETYPES

No. Just no.

It is unfortunately plausible that these stiff-collared gentlemen are as much the problem of hierarchy as the rest of the so-called free West. The years of Jung’s life were the height of The White Massa, a Europe, Britain and now America deep in the throes of misappropriating lands, resources and species, in a worldwide blanket theft. Most religious, governmental, corporate and academic institutions were also seduced (as were the Grimms Brothers, amongst a plethora of others) by their own arrogant stance of conquerage and misappropriation. As accomplished in the brutality of others, by acquiescence, as King Leopold II, Hitler, Pol Pot, the entirety of the so-called British Empire’s elite and military prowess, up to, and including, its stance on nuclear experimentation at Maralinga and the American War, called the American War by the Vietnamese, and including the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent trials of such weapons of mass destruction on the peoples of the Marshall Islands.

What are we to believe? That men like Jung were valid exponents of wisdom? His treatment of a collective unconscious based on his own, and his poor mad mother’s, sad spack-outs? Was laudanum, thought a cure for a woman’s hysteria, her only escape when, perhaps, all she needed was be heard? Europe’s elite boys basked in the educational institutions that were glorying in a golden aged renaissance, particularly in England, during the brutal poverty and disease the rabble needed to experience for them to remember their place (a jolly cool way to prevent a revolution, eh what)? An historic moment—the height of empires—when pulling teeth was thought to cure insanity in the brain, and heroin was the cure, du jour, for a cocaine addiction?

The late nineteenth century was an era steeped in the mysterious and the suspect-occult. Séances and spiritualism, masonic and grail lodges and African/Graeco/Egyptian orders, the secrets that explorers thought they had discovered: black magic, voodoo, pointing the bone, the skulls of massacred Zulus, the severed hands of Congolese, the remaining drums of murdered Saami. Perhaps exuding some mystical power that a pale European with a gun and a private army could claim and wield against satanic corruption.

The pale-skinned man’s pith-helmeted condescension, entering the approximate 70,000 year territory of the Arrernte people and thinking to understand a culture utterly unremembered as having once been his own? Him walking amongst what remain of the survivors of the Trail of Tears and asking whether they will now accept jesus into their hearts while handing out smallpox-riddled blankets and 80% proof rum while, for god’s sake, put some fucking proper clothes on! Hanging out with the Inuit and trying to understand a language of clicks and throat singing, gagging at the thought of seal blubber as a staple food source whilst, simultaneously introducing them to the sugar so brutally harvested by slaves in the Caribbean? Spending days, stoned on coca leaves, or intoxicated on whisky and their own sense of imperialist Gauguin-ness, in New Zealand and Tahiti, while being fucked by native girls and misinterpreting ancient lore into something like a dictionaried language?

Agreeing to a straitjacket and a metal-framed cot, including wrists straps, in Bedlam? Criminalizing the remembered ancestral knowledge of Africans now enslaved by the Portuguese in Brazil, maybe? Or, as in the Congo, with the severing of hands that Little kingly Leo (the second one, not the first) figured was a great idea if the people who had actually always lived there didn’t meet his concept of a rubber quota?

PART 3 QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

TERRA NULLIUS AND SHEEP

AUSTRALIA. The Killing of Ecosystem (oh, and people): “For most farmers, land is their most important asset. Agricultural land is also an integral part of the Australian ecosystem and has a significant environmental value, of which farmers are responsible for managing approximately 385 million hectares (or 58 percent of Australia).” Source

AFRICA. The Killing of Dignity (oh, and people): “Those who survived the desert were herded into concentration camps and were forced to dig up Herero graves to retrieve the skulls of their dead relatives. Women were forces to skin and boil the skulls, which were used in German experiments to prove Aryan superiority and African inferiority. Of the more than 80,000 Herero population, only 15,000 survived.” Source

IRELAND. The Killing of Self-Determination (oh, and people):“British viewers were truly shocked to discover the brutality of the Great Hunger Many of them had not previously known of the death of at least one million and emigration of a further million of their closest neighbours in what must be regarded as the darkest and most horrifying seven years in Irish history.” Source.

SCOTLAND. The Killing of Heritage (yep, people): “In the first place, the Highland Clearances transformed the cultural landscape of the Highlands of Scotland, probably forever. In the space of less than half a century, the Highlands became one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe. And, it should be remembered, the Highlands and Islands comprise an area bigger than some industrialized ‘first world’ nations such as Belgium or Holland. But it was not only the people who disappeared. The settlement pattern, the homes of the people for a thousand years or more, has virtually vanished, becoming no more than an archaeological feature for those who stumble across the remnants.” Source.

SKYE. The Killing of Their Own: “It is hard to read any historical account of The Clearances without a deep sense of injustice and a bewildering disbelief at how one of the most civilized and generally prosperous nations of its time could inflict such wanton brutality on its own people – and adopt widespread indifference to their plight. By the early 19th century Rubh’ an Dùnain had, some archaeologists suggest, endured perhaps 6000 or 7000 years of continuous habitation; there is tangible evidence of Neolithic, bronze and iron age activity and of early and late medieval settlement. Climate change over the millennia had a direct impact on the enduring patterns of life, society and culture; piracy, pillage and clan warfare were survived. But ultimately human greed and pitiless cruelty proved to be the more effective purgatives driving every last simple, hard-working person from the peninsula. Source

WALES. The Killing of Language: “Welsh must be one of the only languages in the world that is hated simply because it exists. Simply because it defies Anglo-Saxon and Norman history. Simply because its existence seems to be such an embarrassment to some of the English. The angry blog posts written by monolingual students are almost embarrassing enough to not warrant a response. Because it is only a monoglot who cannot understand the importance of language, because they have never made the effort to learn another.” Source.

Of course, the above references are a pittance. And just about now—before I head into the wind of misappropriation by those wishing to claim an ancestry neither honest nor theirs—there’s this:

Two years later, in 49, Ostorius confiscated land in and around Camulodunum to set up a colonia. This was a town for retired Legionaries, in which each veteran was granted a homestead. The town gave the veterans a secure retirement and concentrated an experienced reserve force in the new province, on which Rome could call in case of emergency. In theory, it was supposed to provide a model of Roman civilization to which the natives might aspire. Unfortunately, the colonia at Camulodunum caused more problems than it solved. As it grew over the next decade, more and more Britons were driven off their land, some enslaved by the veterans, others executed and their heads exhibited on stakes. Source

THE POINT

Who are we? You, me, the people four suburbs away, the farmer on misappropriated (that means stolen), beaten, poisoned and degraded soil? The person giving a talk at the gathering? What is pagan if not an Italian word, and why would I perpetuate its use as a designation for animism when I am not Italian? What can I call myself to belong? Is that why we do it? We are, perhaps, clannish by our very nature. A pack animal. Are our tribes prone to violence and hooliganism, at a football match, because of a pent-up frustration at not being an honest species with a clear understanding at whose side we’re on? Is that why the so-called British are such boozers? Alcoholics? During the COVID-19 pandemics the libraries and bookshops closed but the bottle shops didn’t. Do governments know what would happen—en masse—if they closed the licensed poisoner joints? What? Even more dead wives?

And we have been taught to name everything. To objectify everything. Despite a thing being a public assembly or a gathering for whatever reason, and not an object with no previously-identifying division from any other thing. If I was Irish, I would say a ting, or ignore the existence of the ð altogether (Tuatha is pronounced too-ah) while, if a Cockney or a Maori I would pronounce a thing as a fing. Let’s face it, on the whole, generalizing as I am not usually prone to do, we’re fucking lost.

We’re wingin’ it. We’re still relying on antiquated texts and innuendo that are written by an elitist, classist, religious and sectarian anti-linguist with a permanently hunched back from bowing so very lowly, because to do otherwise ensures a whipping, a fifteen year stint in a Siberian gulag or a trip to colonial Australia where, like Angus McMillian, born in 1810, and whose family was subject to the savagery, of those aforementioned Highland Clearances, blokes in the English (NOT British, mind) queen’s blue, and, as such, blessed by god and gun, authorized to just slaughter every rightful descendant, of a minimum 70,000 year inhabitation, because they were here first and that just won’t do! Not when what happened, to your own family in your lifetime, actually and really happened. Despite it being three months away, by ship, and the colonizers not knowing one fucking word of the First Nation elders, especially not the word NO.

After all, you behaved, din’t ye laddie, and got the fuck out, like a braw wee man had to do? They gave ya a gun, didn’t they? The lairds who took your land and sent you to this abysmal blue-skied anomaly?

Wheat and sheep and coal and all that hardwood! While we continue to be the problem of head-in-the-sand bigotry towards anyone unlike us, we’re busy seeking to legitimise ourselves in costume and device.

I’m not being mean. Why would anyone think that?

GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM

I’m first generation born within the sprawl of Sydney; a mere six years after America bombed the living fuck out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, heralding the onset of a nuclear proliferation version of don’t touch my toys that has not, yet, ceased. And that certain nations continue spruiking is the road to the final, holy grail of acceptance: one obtained by the gilded front teeth of a bully-state and a ministry of nuns with whips and scissors and lye soap. Oh and starch.

And all the while there’s this new thing. Is nationalism, the invention of a cultural identity, a copout? When racism is dividing humanity? Well, it has done all my life, so it can hardly be called new. Segregating us along skin-color lines or by the construct of worthiness-by-wealth-or-title, is about as rational as cutting down a forest to plant a lawn.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon…Source.

There was a version of this, circulating when I was fourteen years old, that went: I love a bombswept country, a land of sterile plains, of battered fallout shelters and radioactive rains. Dorothea MacKellar [9] who, while enjoying the sights of Sydney harbor from her very, very wealthy and acceptably ‘Mother England’ heritage, was still Dundee. Because how can a body be rid of lore? Of deep belonging? Of a few Ice Ages of drinking from that burn or eating from the body of that boar?

DUNDEE (Dùn Dèagh) A Neolithic cursus [10], with associated barrows has been identified at the north-western end of the city and nearby lies the Balgarthno stone circle. The circle has been subject to vandalism in the past and has recently been fenced off to protect it. Bronze Age finds are fairly abundant in Dundee and the surrounding area, particularly in the form of short ‘cist’ burials. Source

I neither justify nor overly-examine my tendency to ramble. I could walk through a forest following a straight track with signs, written in English with some form of subtitling just to be sure I don’t get lost, or I can learn what I’ve been at for decades, which is to recognize landmarks, and leave accounts of them, rather than the signage, as, hopefully, the forest will outlive the signage. And when you and I both comprehend the marks carved in dolmens for precisely this purpose, both of us, and our children’s children’s children will be able to discover an ancestral home that legend continues to say is hidden in this vast and ominous green.

Your and my recent ancestors have subsumed and consumed other people’s lands and ‘resources’. Countries have been claimed (despite who was here beforehand: those indigenous ancestors’ skulls and jawbones that rage-in-amber from the dusty cellars of museums half a world away) and pitched, claimed and uniformed, through enforcement and subsequent acquiescence, to the point of a Cronulla Riot or a #blacklivesmatter campaign, or even more perversely a Go Back Where you Came From slogan: For a white person — and it’s almost always a white person — to say “go back” to a Native American, whose ancestors were here long before European settlers colonized this continent, betrays the real, white supremacist meaning of the phrase: We don’t want you anywhere at all … Source

… and you want to call yourself A witch?

MISAPPROPRIATION

Splinter groups of thus-called witches have evolved, somewhat like clusters of bindweed or cinderblock towers, that claim a lineage, a credentialed but quirky righteousness or, again, a fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me mindset, are no different to those who drape themselves in the Australian version of the Bucher’s Apron (that includes the centaurus-pointing crux—the five stars that make up the Southern Cross of alpha, beta, delta, gamma and epsilon crucis) and think of it as some authorized national identity (despite Australia remaining a colony) who can beat the living fuck out of anyone with skin that’s darker than a second generation girl from Blackpool with a so-called (but deadly) ‘healthy tan’.

What’s the point? Are we that lost? Yes. Why?

I am a Celt. Are you, really? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. Okay. Aren’t you going to ask me what that means? I know what it means. What? I dunno, a white woman? A descendent of Finn McCool or Vercingetorix? Do you know how to pronounce Vercingetorix? Yes. Say it, then. Fuck me, you’re pushy: Ver-sin-get-or-iks. Um… What? There’s no s in the word, and get is pronounced like jet. Fuck you, bitch, I know what I know. Oh, sorry, not sorry… was Vercingetorix a bloke or a woman? A bloke, of course. Why are you so sure? Men are always warriors. What about Budega? Well, she was different. Why? I dunno, because she raised an army? Is that what defines history and a culture? Sure, it is, all those academics can’t be wrong… and she was magical except the hare got away and she was defeated. So you know the story? Yep. She must have been a fuckwit, though, for misinterpreting the way the hare went. Wow, is that like Trump is a good guy because he wants to make America great again? What are you implying?

Language is, or can be, like photography. People can talk and talk and talk and say nothing. We can write and write and write and just be repeating what has been said before, like a many-balled butt plug on its way out of its temporary anal incarceration. But then there’s this:

And sometimes one word is enough. Horror. Evil. Beauty.

So much is written in such as way as to roll off consciousness as a set of self-described facts. We can all do it. It’s acceptable.

It’s nothing.

These facts will last five minutes, or for the extent of an argument, perhaps even to delineate an identity but none of them can match that photograph.

Then take this:

Or this monstrosity:

That then becomes this:

And here we are again. We have been caricatures for so long now that no one takes anything we say as valid or even real. It’s all recreationist, or re-enactment movements or more troubling and offensive, an excuse for far-right political extremism. A kind of still-white-bitches mindset.

Celticity is “an attractive set of symbols and identities that come replete with popular recognition and a supposedly ancient past that can be invoked by people for many purposes, from ‘new age’ religion to popular ‘world music.’” Historically, however, that “ancient past” is hard to pin down. Hague et al. explain: The very flexibility and the vagaries of archaeological evidence regarding the original Celts enable multiple political and cultural meanings to be invested in the form, whilst retaining the symbolic value and historical authority accrued by the reference to a supposedly ancient Celtic culture. “The Celts” can and have been envisioned in all sorts of ways: as a warrior class; a pan-European people; as the epitome of whiteness; “whatever version of the past seemed nationally expedient.” It’s a cultural identity that has come into vogue in recent decades. Source

BREAK AWAY, BRIGHT EYES

I come to the point of all this. Genealogy. It seems that for a narrow window of us-as-human-data-retention we can do this. I know aristocracy, royalty, several extant indigenous kinship recall systems, and horse-breeders all keep lineage records. But until the twenty first century people have been too busy recovering from 1848 and gender disparity to concentrate much on their family trees. Why?

Because they haven’t meant much. Your grandma on your mother’s side comes from Belfast and her mum was married to someone named Richard Dawson Bates, and so… Who? Doesn’t matter, does it? And my great grandpa, on dad’s side was born in Prague… but he never said anything about anything, so he was pretty useless, wasn’t he? He’s dead now, anyway. We didn’t visit him much and I don’t know when he emigrated here, but I think it was around 1945. What was his name? I think it was Tom Kubish, something like that. Nothing to talk about here, folks, I suppose. He was old when I was a kid and didn’t really speak much English. He was a heavy drinker and angry all the time. He changed his last name to Cubby to make out he was one of us, I think.

And? So what?

There must be some kind of way outta here Said the joker to the thief…

From All Along the Watchtower, Original lyrics, Bob Dylan, 1967 Re-recorded by Jimmi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, 1968

In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan writes: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”

STORYTELLER

What we are experiencing, in the above quote, is how a story evolves, depending on the storyteller. Genealogy was first realized as important when the names and the years of life and death coincided with either local, national &/or world events.

How could my made-up buddy John Cubby know that his poor, now-dead grandfather was Tomáš Kubish, possibly the brother, or cousin, to the famous Jan Kubiš? How did he come to emigrate here? Why does his steamship travel document mention him as being from England when the notation on the family tree clearly states he was Czech? NOW are we are getting somewhere? Now does our bland, bitter, invented John represent a mystery to be researched? Does it matter? DOES IT MATTER? Do John’s unborn children matter? Well?

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I won’t say lineage is a pure thing. The hand that documented all that information was so often pissed drunk that my friend (and the person who extracted my own family tree from the occult archives of a careless bureaucracy) who is a genealogist of at least forty years, will sometimes spend several hours in front of a twelfth century document that, looking over his shoulder is—to a peasant like me—indecipherable gibberish.

They wrote between the lines when they remembered they’d done a baptism, he says. That s is an f. the y is th and looks like a d. Ye Olde Bookshop is actually THE Olde Bookshop. Fuckwits. He snorts derisively, tucking one hand to within the folds of his long sleeved dark wool robe, pouring and downing a shot of Jamesons, his best thinking done when he is out of it on something, as many geniuses are apt to be.

Shall I try to read the page? No. Do I give a shit when he traces my matrilineal ancestors through the sap of winter silence? No. They seem boring. I relate to the names just like John did his Tomáš. And all the while my OCD compulsion draws me to Thetford Forest, Inish Mȏn, Culloden; to Cú Chulain, Scáthach, that bastard Suetonius Paulinus, yes Vercingetorix. And Julius Caesar’s penchant for torturing the native captives of Albion. Why?

I was there.

I’ll repeat that.

I was there.

Or, if I am a proper storyteller, I am there (and ‘there’ is me).

That’s the realization, when my huffy, Bill Nighy-type friend eventually prances into the room where I am sprawled, watching Botched with unconscionable fascination, and lays down the throwaway line I found you someone who wasn’t English. Oh, yes? I say, hardly pulling my eyes from the image, of the deviated septum, on the telly. Yes, he’s Welsh. I turn towards my old friend, more out of politeness than interest, and he says the long-dead relative is Caradoc ap Silures. Only he pronounces it as sy-loooo-rez when, to be proper, the tribal word is pronounced shileresh. SILURES? CARADOC? How far, the fuck, down that root have you gone?

Turns out, as far back as taxes.

And the Roman Empire taxed, or extracted goods, slaves and tithes, from everyone. Records were kept. Census taken. If a body owned land, cattle or other people that were negotiable, their names were recorded. Through war, invasion, conquest, religious persecution. We’re there. Somewhere.

You’re also related to Charlemagne, he adds before leaving the room. But so is everybody, the randy old bastard. But I’m still in shock. I know this man. This Caradoc, who is not an ap Silures, but who fought with them. The Silures is a tribe. In what is nowadays called Wales. Good Sisters of the Night, I am found!

The question is, did I know? Is that the fascination many of us encounter with the ‘ness’ of certain peoples of the world? Is this some phylogenetic, common ancestor memory? Of course it is. Of course it is. And it doesn’t matter if we travel the coastline from Unst to Nunavut, in coracles of willow, covered in seal hide, and waterproofed with pitch, for many thousands of years.

Until the ocean becomes too vast for such trading options, with the dramatic recession of the permanent ice, so that we only get to go as row as Kaffeklubben until, of course, someone rigs a knörr and brings the fucking sheep.

WHAT IS THIS?

The above image is a page in Luna Baily’s book A Modern Witch’s Guide to Happiness, and the blurb on the Booktopia site states (as, apparently, a promotional tag):

“It’s time to give your inner witch a voice. Unlock the magick of modern witchcraft and infuse your every day with happiness.

This is your essential spiritual guide to happiness. Including everything you need to know to become a modern witch, from working with tarot cards and healing crystals, to taking direction from the stars, this book will teach you how to harness the power of the natural world, dispel toxic energy and develop your own psychic ability to find happiness.”

I wasn’t looking for an article on this book but I stumbled across it anyway and figured this was the exact article in which to mention it. Buy it and do what thou wilt, I say. Good luck to you, Luna. I think it’s fitting, before I complete this article, to give you an idea of what is out there, and how witchcraft is now perceived. This and the glossy PR website of specific Sydney “modern” witches (in difference to what? An old fashioned kind?) who make a killing (excuse the pun) selling courses on how to do this stuff and charging a few months wages to take your pale, talisman-endowed, light, white summer frocked, Anglo-European self to “places where Goddesses still live and where they inspire us to let go of the burden of the everyday”.

JUST VISITING, CAN’T STAY

I watched a hastily-shot video of a friend giving a talk at an eclectic gathering of diverse Anglo-European pagans in Western Australia. She talked about authenticity. Her ancestors are both Albanach and Norse so she chose to discuss two ideas, relative to Norse mythology: the concepts of Wyrd and Orlog—examples of which are blogged about here or, Mother Time forgive me, and here. My friend is as authentic as that indigenous Pictish Druid (fuck me, I mentioned him somewhere) who met me at Rock n Roll Café; as authentic as I think I am.

I just wonder about the summoning of language and meaning, from an archival burial ground, to indicate that we, too, have something of a story to tell. To justify our right to be here. An ancestral heritage that can endow relevance onto a reconstituted, pre-industrial, pre-decimated elder lore that is almost as extinct as records of us.

We KNOW we are lonely. We, of the pale faces and the hot showers. We, the secret consumers and money makers, from off the backs and cultures of stolen, dawn-of-time spiritualties. We, the homeless, living in houses built on the backs of the extinct and the driven out. We the segregationists with the thin veneer of #blacklivesmatter solidarity; the Brother, we march-beside-you. We do! We do, until the rubber bullets and the baton-bashings that won’t affect us because our skin is that of an obviously fog-and-ice hue, and we’re wearing Gucci–or Target–so get off my fucking neck you dickweed, fucking, copper! We are. We. Are Fucking. LONELY!

Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists. Source.

I attend a talk by Dr. Lynne Kelly on mnemonics, from her book The Memory Code. I listen to her discuss her precision understanding, of the vastness of knowledge, carried in the memories of non-literate people, and I am lonely.

I listen to Bruce Pascoe speak, in A Sky Full of Secrets, Professor Marcia Langton on Q and A and Marjorie Tahbone, an Inupiaq tattooist and activist… I literally tremble as Meyne Wyatt delivers his monologue on racism. And, like Takaya, the last sea wolf, I am LONELY. Meyne Wyatt, monologue, Q and A, 2020

SITE, AFTER SITE

Of the King Penguins, Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica: Nearly 900,000 of the regal, meter-high, black, white, and orange birds had disappeared without a trace. “It was really incredible, completely unexpected,” recalls Weimerskirch, who works at the French national research agency CNRS. Source

All these people seeking to present us with themselves. Asking that we (I use the word loosely, apologies) see them, because corporations and institutions are still steamrolling cultural and land practices, slaughtering wolves and whales, poisoning waterways and fracking a limited future at the expense of uniqueness and places that we (any of us) have no business going near, without permission and grace, and the other people-animals of earth and sky and sea are TRYING to get us to FUCKING-WELL BEHAVE.

PART 4 – SEISMIC SHIFT

CAUGHT IN A LANDSLIDE

LOST

The stories we perhaps tell now, around huge fires before the onset of an indefinite winter, nights reminiscent of long, ectoplasmic mists of another age, often summon a longing so overwhelming it is an ache. One that has me holding my ribs and turning away from the crowd; of an age before mobile phones, before social media, school, job applications, dentists, ties and high heels, before ooshies. Because these stories are tedious. They serve as no navigational education whatsoever. They do not advise me of how to make an awl. They are twee. Memoraphobic (is that a word? It is now) and meaningless with 16th Century monkish babble, considered, quizzically, as valid… somehow.

Time: you twisted motherf#*^er.

We don’t know, at all, when this is. When we are. When anything. This era might not happen for another thousand years. Until after another Ice Age. It might not have happened in the era we call time because that word—time—does not exist in the languages of certain cultures. And yet most of our stories, the ones mummy reads us before we can do so for ourselves, begin with Once Upon a Time. And the problem we face here, in the regurgitatedly abstract West.

“For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us,” he says. “We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.” Professor Chris Sinha, Language and Cognition, Source

Preservation of stories such as those related to Lebor Gabála, the Iliad, the Eddas  (poetic or prose), all things Bible, are useless, garbled, misunderstood and meaningless. I won’t justify this to make it easier. So, also, are the stories presented to us, as a human animal, as history. That last one is a doozy.

Western history is written as an abstract. If not consisting of bloodshed, conquerage, hierarchy, political upheaval, conquerage, discoveries of people, objects, a Rosetta Stone or a Nag Hammadi codex (that oops, already existed—you can’t find what isn’t there), conquerage, war of any kind, economic or religious, um… conquerage, it’s not, well, history. You don’t exist. I don’t exist.

But we do. So how is history an honest record of human being, when we, as human animals, are peaceful? When we are non-literate?

In the words of Tacitus, Christians showed “hatred of the human race” (odium generis humani). Among the more credulous, Christians were thought to use black magic in pursuit of revolutionary aims, and to practice incest and cannibalism. Source

From what I remember Tacitus said the same about us Celts, oh, and the Gaulish. Anybody not Roman. Most, if not all of the stories, presented to and by anthropologists relate to people of non-Anglo-Europeanness and ‘interesting’. Or ‘unique’. Or ‘primitive.’ And, until recently, as ‘uneducated’ and therefore subject to the rules of a taker/consumerist/stockholder mentality: dispensable.

The same applies to language. To the practices of hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that do not concede ownership of the person the Aymaran and Quechua languages call Pachamama, that my own Brigantach and Catuvellaun ancestors called……….

Who are we without language? What have we become and who are we to believe?

“Not only did William the Conqueror have the nerve to, well, conquer, he also nicked our woods. England had always been a paradise for trees, covered from the end of the last ice age in increasingly dense forests of oak, hazel and birch, with some pine. When early islanders began farming, the tree cover slowly began to give way to pasture and cultivated land, but under Anglo-Saxon kings, the forests still belonged to the landowners and their subjects. William, however, introduced “Forest Law”, which claimed the woodlands as the hunting grounds of kings. Anyone stealing or killing a deer or boar would be in a whole heap of trouble: by the end of Richard the Lionheart’s reign in 1198, that punishment was mutilation, including the removal of your eyes and other unmentionable parts. Source

After all is said and done, the situation is like being trapped in a funfair’s Hall of Mirrors. Deceptive. Inescapable. Quite possibly the cause of a lifetime of physical dysmorphia, and also, quite probably, untrue. One can get lost in images of oneself or others that are warped and slanted to appear the way some sniggering malcontent decides they will.

Until what is know as the 17^th Century common land was forest, river and fen, shared by everyone within the vicinity. Then the fences went up. Then the starvations got worse. Then the transports. Once the travesty of enslavement of mainly Africans, for free labour on the colonialist rubber, potato and tobacco plantations, now focused on England, Ireland and Scotland, calling poverty or activism a crime, and if not executed, this desperate or angry population of beaten people, dismissed as pointless flesh, was condemned—individual, family, or entire tuath or clan, to penal servitude for however long the lairds, clergy, sheriff—or the Old Baily—decreed should be the penalty for standing up to the destruction of ancestral land or the theft of a sausage to feed the kiddies.

WHO ARE WE NOW?

Australia is not our country. Australia isn’t even a country. Not in any real sense. “The name Australia derives from Latin australis meaning southern, and dates back to 2nd century legends of an “unknown southern land” (that is terra australis incognita). The explorer Matthew Flinders named the land Terra Australis, which was later abbreviated to the current form.” Source.

I’m not trying to be argumentative, just getting to the point. This… this theft is still being perpetrated, exploited and overridden by an attitude that says, just shut up, believe you live in a democracy, that you are not part of the problems associated with environmental vandalism, human trafficking, classism or the chasm of extinction that threatens EVERYONE. Burn some incense, hang a dream catcher in the window, perform a ritual to save Ronnie from heroin, and his mum from eviction because he stole her monthly rent, or cast a circle, deasil, to celebrate midsummer three days before you go to your nan’s for christmas dinner.

About now, as I’ve mentioned somewhere before, I bend the knee to the Wurundjeri and the Boon Wurrung, the traditional custodians of the land where this house has been built, without their permission, without consideration and without negotiation. I offer respect to their Elders and, in unquestioning sincerity, without saying “past’” and “present”, rather preferring the truism “always”.

BACK TO HECATE

She’s forty nine. I remember being forty nine. All my kids raised. Me thinking I knew everything. Stuff like that. Her hair is dyed a precocious and eye wateringly fluorescent pink, and a really lovely septum piercing dangles above her top lip…

“Here’s an idea, Hecate. Why don’t you tell me the name your mother labelled you when you were born?”
“No, that’s just not—it doesn’t reflect what I believe.”
“What was it?”
“Simona. Davidson is my last name. It is my married name so I’m killing it eventually.”
“Why did she name you Simona?”
“I don’t know. It’s Polish or Czech, I think. It reminds me of that old seventies Knack song My Shirona. My mother used to sing to it when she played the cassette, but she’d change the words to My Simona. Which is why I hate it.”
“Your mother is Polish?”
“Was. She’s just an old woman now. No accent or anything.”
“Were you born here or in Europe?”
“Here. My great-grandparents came here to escape the war. To Sydney. From somewhere near a place called Dziedzinka.”
“How’s it said?”
“What? Why?”
“There’s more to this story of you than you’re telling me.”
“You know that how? Oh, sorry. You’re psychic… I wish I was psychic.”
“I’m just REALLY nosey, is what. And I love a good mystery.”
“Jijenah. She called it Jijenah.”

We sit a while in silence. She’s all of a sudden become very withdrawn. Then she seems to shake it off and, when the waitperson comes our way, she orders the vegetarian special off the board, and another coffee.
“Whatcha thinking?” I ask.

Observing her is like watching a storm roll in off the sea. It’s almost ominous, and I say a silent thank you to the land that I have met her here, and not at my house. Just in case, like.

“Mum wasn’t their only grandchild. They had other kids—my great aunties and uncles—but they acquired Mum, daughter of their disappeared own daughter. At least, that’s what I remember. Mum doesn’t mention anything if she can help it, and as far as I know everyone she’s related to is dead.”

I search her face, examining, so obviously un-English. “Come again?”

“It’s like my great-grandfather. He had a glass eye, but I was always so used to it I forget to mention it. I don’t know if they were real family or not. Nothing is clear. Once, when I was little, our Babcia–that’s Mum’s great-grandmother–said getting Mum took a day’s paperwork to fill out.”
“She was adopted?”
“Sort of. Yes. No… She was taken in. The family name was Kossak. I remember, years later, thinking that was what Russian dancers were called. What has any of this got to do with witchcraft and the workshop?”
“Everything. I agreed to meet you to find out who you are, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then, who are you?”
“I think I probably should have a talk with Mum.” She fiddles in her handbag for her phone. It’s vibrating. She switches it off and dumps it back into the gloom. “But we don’t get along. She shits me. She’s moody and angry all the time. Silent. It gets hard to be around.”
“You got siblings?”
“Nah,” she smiles. “I don’t think she liked sex. I asked her about it once. I had to clean the bathroom for a month.”
“Simona, will you find out? Will you phone me when you know her story? Yours, really. Anytime, eh? I’m up for it whenever you can. But yes, I’ll see you at my house next week for the workshop.”

We eat in silence. The mynahs are relentless. As each table empties they swoop. Taking whatever is left over from the plates, siphoning the sugar from the cannisters. They are so brave; so fearless. I wonder, for the thousandth time, about size and how we presume that because a critter-cousin is smaller than us that they see us as bigger. Or is that some mental construct? A duck attacked my car one time, because I drove too close to where his mate and their children walked, in single file, towards the creek out back of my old house. That duck didn’t care. My big black Toyota fourby was a threat. He would have killed it if I hadn’t kept going.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

I’m putting my few things in my bag. I’ve had enough of company for one day.

“Her other relatives were killed or taken; disappeared.” The intensity on her face is like when the kindling finally catches the flame from the match. I feel something in my gut. “I think that’s why she was in the orphanage. How the family found her. I have no idea, really, but I’m sure they knew how to find her. Knew of her. They were allowed to take her. Nobody says anything to anyone in my family.”
“How much do you know?”
“Snatches. Bits and pieces. I don’t know if she’ll tell me because I’m pretty short tempered towards her.”
“How old is she now?”
“I’m lousy at math. She’ll probably be dead soon, though. I think she was born in maybe 1942? I know she was four when her grandparents found her. The war was still devouring the world. I don’t think any of them were Jews though, so I’m not sure why it all went septic.”
“Hang on. What?”
“She was in Kraków. Or was it Warsaw? She once said she was surprised they’d come. Like it was magic. Even though they never found my grandmother…”
“Records were very explicit, even then,” I add, remembering.
She’s weepy, and has to blow her nose on a tissue. Then she doesn’t know what to do with it so she shoves it deep into that abyss of a handbag. She is rattled by our conversation. By what she’s remembering. “They were actual blood family. The only ones left alive, it turns out. They paid to find her. If they knew what happened to Magdalena–their daughter, my grandmother–they never, ever said. Is this confusing?”
“No. Was she dead?”
“Oh, god—”
She doesn’t understand, yet, that I’m usually unforgiving towards throwaway, unconsidered religious terms like that, but now’s not the moment to be pedantic.
“I have no idea. Mum told me she remembered her as young and very pretty. That she was taken away after she gave birth.”
“Taken where? Who was your father, then?”
“She only talked about it once. Just after Nicholas was born. In case–you know–he got sick or something. She said there were papers… Stuff I’ve never seen; never wanted to see.”

She looks at me like she’s drowning. We do that, don’t we? Dismiss the stories of our parents, or their parents, because we have a mark to make upon the world. A reason for being here that we have been inculcated into presuming is just about us, when it isn’t? When, in reality, we are the product of so many other people who have, literally, made us… well, us.

By taking herself a “witch name”, she is trying to free herself from being invisible and neglected, but owned, by a husband who has nothing to do with her heritage or her deep cultural roots–offspring that don’t contact her more than a couple of times a year. So much so that she has almost closed the door to a great, brutal, terrible and ultimately liberating ‘ness’ and witchery that she could never, until months later, comprehend.

Within a narrow, shabby St Kilda apartment, on nights of lamplit, cigarette-smoking, vodka drinking, onion-unfolding experience of enlightenment, Simona listens to her mother intently, knowing that she needs, for once, to shut up and not criticize the older woman’s unstable use of English.

Mandy—Amanda Katarzyna Wysmułek-Kossak, whose married name became a respectably Anglo Amanda Burnley—explains what she remembers (which is all snow and grey, cold, metal-framed beds, and shouting, fattish women in uniform) of her childhood. Some deep recollection of bullets. Of the terror of letting go of a loved hand. Of feeling nothing. On purpose, feeling nothing.

Of the day her new, old matka and tata came and took her with them in that big car. To the warmth of a coal fire. In an actual house. In the little village she came to know was Białowieża, not far from Białystokw where her own disappeared mama had, she learned, studied veterinary science and had fallen in love with a Communist man whose name no one knew, only that he got sent to a gulag, called Karlag, that was somewhere way up near Kazakhstan, 3,000 km east of Moscow, for the crime of having had an opinion. Forced onto the back of a truck with another thirty young men, dragged unwillingly from his love, leaving her, a slightly pregnant Magdalena, to face the consequences of her sin, in a hospice for disgraced women, and who then vanished.

Then, finally, the ship, and the sensation she will never forget, of arriving in Sydney and experiencing summer for the first time.
“I found out that I still could have relatives in the area,” she informs me after the first day of the workshop. “Mama and I, we didn’t stop crying when she told me. I had no idea. Sorry, I’m such a ditz.”
“That place. What’s it called?” I pull out my phone and pass it to her. She types in Białowieża and the search engine brings up a listing for a world-heritage landscape: one of the last and largest remaining segments of the immense primordial forests that once stretched across the European Plain.

To the story of another Simona, not a Davidson or a Burnley, not a Wysmułek, came to light over the coming weeks. A Kossak.

“She spent more than 30 years in a wooden hut in the Białowieża Forest, without electricity or access to running water. A lynx slept in her bed, and a tamed boar lived under the same roof with her. She was a scientist, ecologist and the author of award-winning films, as well as radio broadcasts. She was also an activist who fought for the protection of Europe’s oldest forest. Simona believed that one ought to live simply, and close to nature. Among animals she found that which she never found with humans.” The article enchants us to read further with this heading— Simona Kossak: They called her a witch, because she chatted with animals and owned a terrorist crow… Source.

My new friend would disagree, now, with the terms tamed, owned and belief, because we are already into the third week of the FERAL workshops, on rewilding language, but her life has just taken a turn into a hidden peculiarity that many discover, when the pretence, and the hurriedly-woven shawl, that hides the escape map, begins to unravel. Her grandmother’s disappearance is unresolved. Passage to Poland is already booked, in hope of answers to both her parents and her grandparents. The airline is holding her ticket until the COVID-19 scare passes.

Simona is only beginning the search of her identity. But consistencies with fact can sometimes be unusually compelling. They could lead nowhere, or they could expose who she really is. Her middle son, Frank, suffered night terrors until he was twenty. From as young as aged fourteen he has had a fascination with Poland, and especially with Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp. He now lives in Warsaw and is studying. He learned the language almost as though he had no choice, and is working towards a doctorate in environmental science. Simona has asked if it would be okay for her to stay for a while.

CONCLUSION

I am not audacious, arrogant, or stupid enough to suggest the legends, lore and mythology—the folktales—of any of many indigenous lands and people are better forgotten, because, at some moment in the course of being born and dying and being born the warnings, or history-couched-in-metaphor just might—in retrospect—be understood. Some unexplored Newgrange may yield a Rosetta Stone-style lexicon for translating the urgent need for remembering. And awe at the true meaning of Scáthach, and her mythological ‘sisters’, will come to light.

But to learn of them, and to create a caricature of identity around them to indicate you or I belong, is not an answer. These do not yield clan. Nor wisdom. Nor witchery. They do not mean you are their current familial representative of ancient and ancestral lore. Because to lose the hyperbole, inflicted onto us and demanded of us, as a christianized people (whether we realize it or otherwise), is to seem to leave us rudderless on an endless, compassionless and seemingly-inhospitable, all-powerful sea.

In Robert Macfarlane’s book UNDERLAND, he writes of his exploration of the caves of the Slovenian Highlands—

“Nailed to the trunk of a beech tree near the lip of the sinkhole is a metal sheet, two feet or so high, and blotched with algae. Written on it in black ink is a long poem in Slovenian, entitled ‘Razčlovečenje’. At the bottom of the poem is scrawled the word ‘PAX’…and later, on the same page, I feel a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate… What happened here? The mouth of the chasm says nothing. The trees say nothing. Leaning over the edge of the sinkhole, I can see only darkness beneath me.” [11]

So, instead, tell the children the wisdom songs of your youth. Give them folk, and punk, and Stairway to Heaven and The Wall. Tell them of Martin Luther King and Eddie Mabo. Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine Greer. Yes, you can tell them about Adam Goodes and Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa. Tell them about Budega and… tell them of my ancient father. Have fun with old sex manuals and invisible hemming. They won’t know about any of it. These are new/old stories. Culture stories for the moment, easily lost. How to grow mushrooms and which ones will kill you. Which one’s will open their eyes. Let them know you know.

Tell them that the people laughed at Thomas Edison, as the building lit up on the eve of 1900; and they all said the electric light was just a fad.

Tell the tales of striving for freedoms unimaginable a hundred years before. They are not about conquerage.

…

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