Feature Image: Hollow Bones by Katrina Haffner

As I’m down on all fours, balanced on one hand and one knee with my opposite leg suspended in the air behind, I hear the instructor intone, “How we begin is not how we end.” He means that our physical state is always changing, that we walk out of the barre studio a little stronger, a little more flexible than we were when we came in.

The year is preparing to turn as I write this, and as it does, millions of people will resolve to begin the New Year by acting, speaking, eating, working, relating to others, and simply being in a way that is different from and hopefully better than whatever they did before. A lot of coaches like to focus on how quickly many resolutions are forgotten or broken, but I think it’s remarkable that we always resolve to change, and how deep down we know that how we begin is not—and doesn’t have to be—how we end.

I like to take my prayers outside. Next to the swing and the backyard fountain is a patch of dirt that wasn’t always there. When we first moved into the house there was a tough, gnarled tree stump in its place. I don’t know what happened to the tree, but I do know that our local mushroom population loved that stump. I watched as a variety of fungi worked on the wood, slowly breaking it down until it disappeared completely. Although it didn’t, not really. It just changed.

I’ve always loved mushrooms. Forever associating them with magic and the line that they straddle—nourishment and healing on one side, death on the other—I find their folklore and their varieties endlessly fascinating. In school we learned to call them decomposers, a special class of plant and fungi that feeds on organisms already dead, thus transforming death into something that can support life once more.

Death is not an end but a new beginning may sound like a cliché, but the fact is that everything in and around us is constantly dying, transforming, and becoming something else. Fungi are the allies that remind us that such a cliché also happens to be absolute truth.

Interestingly, advanced medical research into fungi reveals similar functions on a less physical or literal plane. Many people ingest reishi and lion’s mane to bring life back to overtaxed immune systems. Some scientists are experimenting with various species of psilocybin, exploring their use not just for a good time but also to help people trapped in psychological death states, which might include emotional paralysis, deep depression, and trauma that leave them feeling frozen and isolated.

In his wonderful book on all things fungal, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake points out that the treatment of bacterial infections with antibiotics is being challenged in a deep way by fungal infections, which are poised to become more frequent and deadly. This danger has spurred medical researchers to find new and better treatment protocols and has served as a reminder to all of us that an overreliance on antibiotics leaves everyone vulnerable.

I spread truffle-infused honey on a slice of hot buttered bread for my oldest son. He’s been through so much: loss of vision in one eye, the possibility of losing vision in the other eye, the relief when the medical procedure worked and preserved that second eye’s sight. Through it all—the trauma, the surgeries, the fear—he has been so brave … and he’s grown so tall that he now towers above me. He’s grown too in talent, in his ability as a cellist, pianist, and composer, and most of all in wisdom. I think about the changes he’s been through, and then my gaze falls on an orange and blue ceramic piece made by my youngest son. It’s a mushroom. I keep it on my desk to remind me that how we begin is not how we end. Living life leaves a mark.

I am back in class, this time doing forward and reverse lunges at the barre. I breathe into the motion. I reflect on how the greatest quality of fungus is not that it decomposes or that it can open doors of perception, but that it connects. Tiny white hyphae reach for each other, fungal filaments that we now know are required for life, because connection is required for life.

Connection of tree to tree and tree to forest and forest to forest; connection of soil to soil, of each web of life to all others.

My hair is damp with sweat; my thoughts turn to spring and that patch of dirt in my backyard where there used to be a stump of wood. What shall I plant there this season? What new life has death made way for? What is ready to grow? I’m not sure yet, but I’m ready to find out.

Warm sunlight is pouring into my tiny office and a steaming cup of coffee sits on my desk. I’ve just finished anointing my hands with the ritual oil combination that I prefer before performing a tarot reading, and I’m waiting for my client to call. At this point in my career, most of my clients are people I’ve worked with year after year; I often know their stories and can guess their situations long before they start to speak. But today I have a new client, referred to me by one of her family members. As we connect and say hello and I ask her what’s going on and why she sought out a reading, I hear a familiar tale. She feels like she’s at a crossroads. She’s not sure what her next move will be. It all feels hopeless. I smile and ask her if she knows that one of the greatest literary works of all time begins in exactly that way:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

These are the beginning lines of the Inferno, Book One of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, completed around 1321.

She’s in excellent company, I say, and it strikes me that so many of us the world over have felt the way Dante did as he began his journey. The world feels especially fraught and fragile in this moment now, with conflicts and wars emerging in various places, institutional trust at all-time low, and polarization at an all-time high. It is a moment quite similar to the one in which the tarot first emerged in Florence over five hundred years ago, in the early 1400s—the early days of the Renaissance.

Maybe there is something here for us. When scholars speak of the Renaissance, they often focus on the changes in art, philosophy, science, and civic culture that define this historical period. They tend to forget that while Renaissance philosophers were returning to the dialogues of Plato and the works of Aristotle, and while Renaissance politicians were taking their cues from ancient Greece and Rome, the humble yet popular card game tarrochi, which was played in well-appointed noble households as well as in local bars, was also reaching its fingers back into the great oracular traditions of the ancient world.

When we learn about the Renaissance period in school, most of us are taught that it was a time when art, music, and culture flourished compared with the medieval period that preceded it. But that’s only a narrow slice of the story. Remember that the Renaissance began in the shadow of the Black Plague, which had ended only fifty years earlier. Wars between nations, political factions, and even cities were the norm, not the exception. A general sense of geopolitical instability and the looming fear of another lethal onset of disease were major ingredients that cooked up the period we today recognize as one of Europe’s richest and most forward- thinking. Not so different from this moment.

And the tarot tells this story. It tells the story of innocence entering the world, then facing unavoidable adversity and taking in the education that such adversity demands. It tells us the story of what it takes to triumph. In a very real way, the story of the Renaissance, like the story of our moment in time, is the story of the tarot.

We don’t know precisely when tarot cards made their initial appearance, but we know that it was during the early Renaissance, that it happened in Florence, and that their popularity spread quickly. We know that tarot cards came to Europe via Asia, as the concept of any paper card did, and we know that tarot cards were used in games of chance before or alongside their use as a divination tool. It is not surprising that a small, highly portable pack of cards that could be used for gambling or forecasting would become popular, spreading to the point where now I have them laid out on the baize before me. It’s not surprising that the needed medicine they carried five centuries ago has deep application for right here and right now.

I turn my attention back to my client, humbled anew that this practice is over half a millennium old, knowing that I’m privileged to participate in it today. I begin to shuffle and cut the cards, turn them over, and reveal their images, stories, and calls to action. As we progress with the reading, I can tell that my client is feeling a little less lost in the forest dark, that some rays of hope and possibility are shining through. She knows, she sees, that she can do this. She can prevail.

Dante’s opening lines were not just speaking of his own internal state. He was doing what any good man would do at the time: reflecting on how his own sense of loss, numbness, and confusion was showing up in the world around him. He was seeking out a deeper and righter relationship between himself and his world. This is perhaps why some refer to Dante as a Christian shaman—he was going on a soul journey and just happened to take much of the world with him in his quest.

The tarot does something quite similar: It calls on the spirit of the Renaissance to help meet adversity, loudly proclaiming that there are depths to the human mind and heart that have scarcely been noted; that we are all, each of us, capable of so much more than we’re doing; that despite plagues and wars and fractious politics, we are still here. These seventy-eight cards are a constant reminder that out of the times, places, and people that feel most broken, true blessings and deep beauty emerge.

It was true for the Renaissance, and it is true for us today as well.

Winter is a lesson in magic because it is a season of paradox. It is the time of hustle, bustle, and busyness. It’s the season of gathering and giving, of seeing family members that we rarely see and taking time to connect with friends whom we miss throughout the year. It’s the season of school concerts and office parties and frenetic baking in the kitchen and grabbing last-minute gifts.

And at the same time, winter is a season of quiet. It’s curling up by the fire with a book, watching the movements of the heavens in cold clear night air, lighting candles in the deep night hours.

And herein lie the paradoxes: Winter means returning to loved ones, but it’s also statistically the loneliest time of the year for many. Amid all the joy and merrymaking, the Yuletide holidays are known for boasting the highest suicide rate in the U.S.

For some people, depression arrives because winter is a closing—of the seasons, of the year, of another 365-day journey around the sun. But winter is also an opening: It rings in the New Year, the new journey, the new seasonal cycle. It is in winter that crass commercialism and thoughtless consumerism seem to win the day, but it is also in winter that the Wild Hunt rides through the wood, when the midnight dark is peopled with ghosts and spooks, fae and familiars. The veils may thin during those last days of October and the first days of November, but the veils seem to drop completely in the winter so that the mundane and the amazing are in constant communication.

The character of Coyote has always helped me understand the winter best—Coyote as he is known, loved, feared, and laughed at by the First Nation Tribes in the Southwest. Coyote is a trickster and troublemaker par excellence, changing his story, his mood, and the weather on a dime. Winter is Coyote season. Coyote stories are told only in winter because his fundamental nature is a liminal one, dancing along the threshold of what divides the sacred from the profane, the mundane from the magical. So too with winter.

I am about to begin teaching a yearlong class on magic with an emphasis on folk magic traditions. There are two fundamental understandings—not beliefs but understandings—that I want my students to grasp.

The first is that we live in an inspirited world. This is an old idea, one that our ancestors knew: that you and I and a rock, a tree, and a bird all possess spirit, all possess soul.

The second understanding is that the beginning of magic relies on our relationship to an inspirited creation. Relationships are hard. They can be gloriously messy. They are often paradoxical just like magic, just like winter. I think perhaps magic’s greatest teaching is an idea that the season of winter seems to curl around and re-center again and again: It is the teaching that miracles are found in the most unexpected places.

This is illustrated in many winter traditions through the emphasis on light and life emerging from the darkness. For winter is a time of long and dark days; it is the time of the great dying back, and yet it is also the season when we collectively remember the light—the light of the returning sun, of candles lit in a dark window, of tiny babies being born, taking their first lusty gulps of breath and uttering their first cries for joy against all apparent possibility, for how can life thrive in a time of death? But it can, and it does, all the time.

It seems to me that winter is a reminder that the world needs right now, a reminder that in the darkest, coldest, numbest of times and places, hope is ever present, under the surface, waiting to emerge once more. I look at the celebrations of light and life that weave through these months and I want to say even more: Hope is easiest to find in these long winter months when we should rationally least expect to see it.

What greater magic is there than hope?

Keep it close to your heart over the next cold months and share it with your loved ones, for here is another paradox: Hope, like story, increases and is strengthened in the sharing. Coyote knows this. It’s why he is standing by the pinyon fire right now, beckoning you closer, inviting you to sit down as he does a funny old-man shuffle dance … and begins to tell a tale.

Feature Image: Barred Owl (2022), by Vasilisa Romanenko vasilisaart.com

It is deep autumn in South Central Texas when I encounter the owl. The skies are stony and gray, and the branches of the old pecan trees in our backyard are bare and stretching toward each other like the boniest of witches’ fingers. Wind gusts and stirs the few leaves that are left to flutter.

It is ancestor time, November 1, the first day of Día de los Muertos, and the candles on our main family altar are flickering. Copal smoke scents the air, and I nibble on sweet pan de muerto and sip on coffee sweetened with cajeta while the boys get bundled up and ready for school. They are hyper on the events and the sugar rush that always follow in the wake of Halloween, ready to meet up with friends and share battle stories of the night’s adventures. A bit later I’m sitting at my desk in the nook off the kitchen, talking to a group of students about the practices of honoring ancestors, when I catch sight of it.

Heart-shaped face, gorgeous plumage that moves in shade from Spanish oak brown to creamy white, luminous eyes that are looking, piercingly, right at me. I know we have owls in these parts, especially this kind of owl, a barred owl or, as my grandparents always referred to them, hoot owl. I’ve lost count of how many early mornings I have walked these paths with hot coffee and hard prayers under starlight and heard the great birds with their low, deep calls. But I have never had one show up so boldly, staring at me so frankly.

I know why the owl is here: Because of Samhain and Día de los Muertos, the holy days of the dead when the veils between the worlds are so very thin. It is the season of the witch and ghost bird, ancestor time.

An ancient belief tells that owls are actually angels in disguise—watching, protecting, observing. My grandfather was taught by his mother, though, that owls are actually ghost birds able to move from the land of the living to the land of the dead, able to carry messages back and forth too.

Watching the great bird watch me, I’m convinced. It feels like a messenger here to watch and learn. It feels like the ancestors have decided to take leave of their altars and show up in a more concrete manner. I first see the owl around nine in the morning, but it stays put all day, watching, peering into my window. So when the boys get home from school, I take them outside, one at a time. I’m showing them the owl, but I am also showing them to the owl. As the sugar skulls decorated with bright strips of foil glitter on the ancestor altar, I decide to have a heart-to-heart with this gorgeous creature high in the branches.

tell it that my children are happy, healthy, and good in so many ways. I tell it that my babies are as safe as they can be. I know that this last part is deeply important to my ancestors and in my lineage, because those who came before me often were not safe because of the color of their skin and how they spoke and how they looked. These little things, so easy to take for granted, matter to my beloved dead.

It seems only fair. Later this evening we will have a bonfire. More copal will be offered, along with some chocolate and tequila. Marshmallows will be toasted. And then late into the night I will sit with my cards and ask my questions of the ancestors, for they are the ones who have gone before us, they are the ones who know. At that point they will be the ones to tell me. The owl stays put through the three days of Día de los Muertos. On the fourth day it flies off, and though I hear it, I do not see it frequently. It’s fine, though, appropriate in its way, and much like the ancestors themselves … rarely visible but always watching.

Autumn is often considered the season of the witch. I think if it is, then it’s because autumn is a season full of the wonders and magic found in the natural world at every turn—wonders and magic that require our attention and right response. And that really is what witchery is all about: knowing what is worth your time and attention, knowing how to respond correctly. Knowing that ancestors do not always show up at perfectly constructed altars, and that more often than not you may find them watching through the eyes of an owl.

Summer is close. It is not quite here yet on this spring evening when I am penning these words, but I can feel it. More to the point, I can smell it. It’s a Sunday evening about a month and a week before school will be out for the summer, and we’ve decided to have an impromptu cookout. The boys are delighted, as are we. And I can smell the arrival of summer on the waves of its smoke billowing over our back courtyard: fragrant pinion smoke emerging from the crackling fire in our star-studded fire pit. While I encourage my students to open themselves to the seasonal and elemental affinities that naturally arise (for many magical traditions water is most associated with summer), I must say that for me, summer magic is fire magic, and fire magic fills up our summers. I find this to be true summer after summer in at least three different ways.

The first is found in the humble act of barbecuing. Firing up the grill, smoke pit, or open cook fire is a cue all across America that summer has begun. Usually we kick things off on Memorial Day—an honoring of the dead during a season so full of the living—and in my home state of Texas, barbecuing is akin to religion. We are more right than we know.

Having a cookout may seem like the pinnacle of bourgeois American life, but in actuality it is one of the oldest devotional rites we have. It has been passed down in relatively unbroken form through the millennia. Start with Homer, whose stories were themselves based on much older ones: Some of the greatest scenes in The Iliad really boil down to beach barbecues, where offerings of ox fat wrapped around thigh bones were grilled over open flames while libations of wine, barley, and sacred herbs were thrown into the fires, all in an effort to persuade the fickle Olympian gods to grant victory to the warriors.

Then, go back further: Evidence found in Neolithic sites like Göbekli Tepe indicate that our earliest religious experiences occurred not in stationary, permanent temples but were rather more like festivals, with people converging at a single point from many different directions (and cultures) to sing, dance, pray, and, yes, barbecue.

From a practical point of view, the barbecue is an ideal occasion for dovetailing the sacred and the profane. We come together in a spirit of revelry and joy, we cook together, and then we fill the air with sweet aromas as smoke rises up to the sky. Sacrifice, congregation, incense: Some of the key components in ritual and ceremony around the world are the fundamental building blocks of every good cookout. Add prayer and magic, and you have the capacity to be in deep ceremony—just like your ancestors.

The second place that fire magic and summer magic show up is in the grandmother of the humble cook fire, the bonfire. Bonfires appear throughout the year at different seasonal junctures, but in the summer, after a day of swimming in the cool green waters of a limestone spring or as night falls over the desert and a cool wind picks up, there is something about having a large fire beside which we can warm our toes, toast marshmallows, and tell stories together that makes for a certain kind of magic.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the celebrations to commemorate summer solstice or Saint John’s Eve. The span from solstice (usually around June 21) to Saint John’s Eve (June 23) is regarded as some of the most magical nights of the year. Ostensibly celebrating the year’s longest day and the birth of Saint John the Baptist respectively, these days are marked by feasting, festivals, celebrations, fortune-telling—and bonfires. The fires are large and usually close to the top of mountains, places traditionally believed to be gathering places for witches to cast their evil enchantments. The fires of Saint John’s Eve were seen primarily as protective, shielding against malevolent forms of magic.

Meanwhile, magic of a more healing sort would also be made, as this was traditionally a time when women and girls would harvest medicinal plants for use throughout the year, including fennel, rue, rosemary, lemon verbena, mallows (like marshmallow, hibiscus, hollyhock, globe mallow, and okra flowers, laburnum, elderflowers, foxglove, and, of course, Saint John’s wort). These all have magical as well as medicinal properties. Gardeners and herbalists often do a great deal of their harvesting around this time of year, as it is believed that the plants are more vital in these heady days of midsummer. In the light of the bonfires, gifts would be exchanged and left for fairies, and all kinds of magic—especially love and sex spells—were highly sought out. Although the fires’ long shadows over the mountainsides were supposedly to keep the witches away, it seems that something else was happening: In fact, everyone gathered around a bonfire finds a bit of a witch in themselves. It is almost as if the flow of the flames draws it out of us. The third place I find fire magic in the summer is in the dark. Specifically, under inky black skies and fleecy blankets as I look up at the stars shining with their own fire, lighting up the heavens.

The Perseid meteor shower, which usually begins in July and culminates in late September, is something most of us can catch if we try. Star gazing, learning constellations, and perhaps most important, telling stories about the stars we see in the sky are some of the oldest magics we have. Any would-be witch would know at least a bit about the stars, their patterns and seasons, and the way that they can describe events down below from their vantage point above.

Soon it will be summer. At sunset, I’ll place crystal jars full of spring-fed water alongside the leafy green herbs in my garden, letting the waters be kissed by starlight and moonshine, working with those potions just as I will with all the herbs we harvest on solstice. I’ll hold the hands of my sons as we dip our toes into cool pools, and I’ll teach them to make wishes on the backs of the silverfish that live in those green depths. We will wander mountainsides finding interesting rocks and butterflies, and we will settle down on baked earth to talk and gaze into ever-changing flames. The question is not where you can find magic in summer but rather where you can’t. Catch the scent of smoke, feel the warmth on your face, utter the words “once upon a time,” and weave your spell, for around the fire we are all witches.

Briana Saussy is an author, storyteller, teacher, spiritual counselor, and founder of the Sacred Arts Academy, where she teaches magic, divination, ceremony and other sacred arts for everyday life. She is the author of Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary, and Star Child: Joyful Parenting Through Astrology. See more at brianasaussy.com.

IMAGE:
Photographer/Creative Director: Natasha Wilson @natashawilson.co
Models: Seema Hari @seemahari, Maia Saavedra
@maiasaavedra_photo, Four @4likefour, Mack @mackandgold, Jetta Juriansz @shmetta
Gowns: Michelle Hebért @michellehebertofficial

Feature Image:
Photography by MARTIN PODT @martinpodt

Spring does not need to be summoned.
It will come in its own time and its own way to grace the land around us. It always does. For me, in my area, I know spring is well and truly on the way in early March, when the mesquite trees are heavy with their delicate yellow blooms and the wildflowers begin showing off all over the place. The first to arrive is pink primrose, and that is followed by bluebonnet, Mexican hats, and paintbrush, and last are the wild white poppies with a shock of hot pink at their center. This is how spring settles itself into the land where I live.

But sometimes spring and the energy it carries with it do need to be invited to grace our inner landscapes and the situations we hold in our hearts and minds.

Sometimes what a relationship needs is the enchantment of pulsing, verdant life.

Sometimes what a cold heart longs for is the spell of sunlight and warm breezes running across your face.

Sometimes we need to dance and pray and make love to the sound of birdsong and the sight of bare tree limbs budding out with promise.

Sometimes our inner lands, our soul soil, have been encased in the winter—of heartbreak, of mourning, of grief, of anxiety, of fear—for too long, and it is time for something else, a new kind of magic, time to invite in spring in.

And so, I give you, a spell to do exactly that:

Hold in your heart and mind the places that feel barren and cold.
Touch with your hands, your breath, hallowed dreams that once were bold.
Feel your beating heart of muscle, oxygen, and light.
Draw its energy into your palms until you feel them shining bright.

Go out into wood, into field, into street. Gather up paperwhite, rose, crocus, and new oak leaf.
Gather seeds, a pot, a cup of water, some good black earth.
Take your goods, go home, spread them out, prepare your work.
Place paperwhite in the north, rose in the south, circle with bloom and leaf. Crocus kisses the west, while little oak leaf calls in the warmth of east.

Light your candles, pray your prayers, let sacred smoke fill the air.
Fill your pot with half the earth, enfolding within your seeds with care.
Place the pot in the center so it is the eye of the circlet of leaf and flower.
Root your feet down onto the earth, into the earth, calling on spring’s power. To fill your body from toe to tip, to unfurl its green vines in hair and in hip.

Know that each balmy breath summons into your life spring sweet.
And feel it warm your bones, those frozen places, with its new gentle heat. Calling back to life all that you feared was frozen, gone, or dead.
Shaking and swaying you gently until that old, winter skin is shed.
Now, pulsing as you are with light, life, warmth, and all that is new,
fill the pot with earth until it is full, then water it so that it is sweet with dew.

Say then these words over earth and seed:
Spring, sweet spring, it is your time to lead.
Make yourself a nest in my heart, belly, and head.
Call back to life what had been foresworn as dead.
As these seeds push through earth seeking the light, restore energy, vitality, verdancy, and bloom to my life.
As these seeds unfurl, preparing to flower and fruit,
cover me with your warm breezes from crown to root.
Spring, sweet spring, wash your wild wonder over me.
As I ask, so it is, has been, and shall now be.

Thank your allies in the north, the east, west, and south.
With prayers, blown kisses, or sweet thank-yous from your mouth.
Blow your candles’ good work forward, gather up leaf and bloom.
Set your pot of seeds and life where it’s kissed by the sun, graced by moon. Offer up rose and crocus, oak leaf, and paperwhite,
under the dark velvet sky of a new moon night.
Snuggle down, under blanket, under downy bird wing.
Your spell has been spoken, now await the arrival of spring.

Feature Image: Major Andre’s Tree, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928), by Arthur Rackham

A confession is required before we begin. Although I spent the earliest years of my life creating colorful syllabi on construction paper describing all the magic lessons I would be teaching my rapt audience of stuffed animals, and although I spent many an hour with my (endlessly patient) calico cat encouraging her to balance on the end of a broomstick, I did not have more than a passing familiarity with the stereotypical image of a witch.

I do have a picture of myself dressed up as a witch. It was taken in my maternal grandparents’ living room, the heavy, straight-out-of-the-seventies goldenrod polyester curtains providing a suitably mystical background, at least in the mind of my seven-year-old self. In the picture I’m wearing a bright yellow Mexican dress, lushly embroidered with flowers and flowing green vines, the kind of dress I had in every color and wore (along with much of the seven-year-old girl population of San Antonio) throughout the summer. You cannot see my feet in the photo, but I’m willing to lay down serious money that I was wearing one of my beloved pairs of jelly sandals. A fake gold chain encircles my head, and my expression is suitably serious and pensive. This, to my mind, was the epitome of a witch. No warts, no crooked backs or pointing fingers, and not a scrap of black cloth in sight. Thirty-five years later, not that much has changed.

The word witch was never a slur to me but nor was it an unqualified compliment. A witch, a bruja, was someone, something, more ambiguous than simply good or bad. A witch was someone who might use their knowledge for good or ill, who might cure … but also curse. Most of all, a witch was someone who had a nuanced, frank, and honest relationship with power. Contrast this to another magical figure in my young life, a curandera. These people were (and are) holy. They dealt in the language of curing and healing only. They worked not for personal gain but for the collective good. Curanderas also had deep relationships with their power, and that power was always in service to the good.

As I grew up, learned more, made magically minded friends, and started taking on clients for myself, I discovered that the divisions were not quite so stark—even and especially in the community—as I had first thought, but they were (and are) still there.

If witch was ambiguous to my young self, magic was not. Magic was everywhere and in everything. Magic was my paternal grandmother lovingly patting her Saint Christopher medallion and talking to him before she revved up her Lincoln … even to drive five miles to the grocery store or movie theater. It was my maternal grandfather watering his plants while standing barefoot on the earth, talking to barn owls—ghost birds, as his culture thought of them—and showing me where the horny toad had made a little den for itself in an old rock pile. Magic was my great aunt who always smelled like gardenias and cheese biscuits and a tiny nip of tequila pressing a wishbone into my tiny hand, teaching me how to pull until the crisp snap was heard while we stood in her fragrant log-cabin kitchen. It was my paternal grandfather telling me old Scottish stories like “Tam Lin” and my maternal grandmother making sure I knew by heart all the best Bible verses, beginning with a full memorization of the twenty-third Psalm. Magic is and was my mother teaching me the names of plants as she shamelessly filches seeds and cuttings from front yards and graveyards alike or picks up dead and broken animals from the middle of the highway to give them a proper burial. It is my father telling me to find work that makes me happy and only after that, makes money. This was the magic I was taught and lived next to day in and day out, and so my brain made the logical connection that the sources of this magic—grandparents, aunties, and parents—were the witches I knew best.

My witches were as far as you could get from the short, twisted, squat, hairy, squawking, cackling, wart-nosed, black-clothed, and finger-pointing varieties with their chicken-footed houses, fang-filled mouths, and endless hunger for children. Or were they?

I first encountered the character of the more stereotypical witch in stories, the fairy tales and myths that were both read and told by heart to me. Later I discovered the image of these types of witches in books and film. While this witch did not feel anything like the witches I was accustomed to, I was fascinated by her … and it was almost always a her … nonetheless. In my growing years I came to understand that the stereotypical witch was not descended from a single image but rather a chimera of images cobbled together through literature and fear, in large part as an effort to explain why magic and power, especially in the hands of women, were not to be trusted.

The witch’s bent and twisted shape and wild cackle bring to mind her shape-shifting abilities and underscore her relationship to animals and the natural world. Yet her penchant for devouring children marks her as unnatural, un-feminine; it runs counter to the idea and ideal of women as bearing and nurturing children. Her appetite, often alluded to in terms of sexual desire, reaffirms the norm that power not be made available to women, or those of a lower class, those who look, speak, smell, or think differently, because they wouldn’t know how to wield it correctly. Even the witch’s pointed finger brings to mind the untactful bluntness of someone who has not been raised to have nice manners, someone raised out of civilization—the rudeness of pointing being one of the first things we teach young children even to this day.

This image of the witch moved me, spoke to me, because I could see her in my witches. She was the witch behind the witches in my life. Not her physical form. My witches wore embroidered blouses and silver jewelry and spectacles and pearls. They carried briefcases that matched their boots and black church purses full of everything you might need during a long, boring service: tissues, Vicks vapor rub, and Sucrets. My witches drove pickup trucks and old brown Chevrolets and had heavy turquoise and silver rings on their earth-loving fingers … which they did, and sometimes still do, point.

So, no, I did not see her form, but I felt her force. I felt her speak through the women and the men in my life who whispered their own spells over my head: Be safe, be brave, find your own way, know your power inside and out, own it, speak with it, write with it … do this for yourself and your babies and for all of us who could not … because we didn’t look right or sound right or speak right or smell right. Do it for us too. And so I do, and so I have, and so I shall. May it be so for all of us.

Briana Saussy is an author, storyteller, teacher, spiritual counselor, and founder of the Sacred Arts Academy, where she teaches magic, divination, ceremony and other sacred arts for everyday life. She is the author of Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary, and Star Child: Joyful Parenting Through Astrology. See more at brianasaussy.com.

Early morning. Sea mist still hovers over the water, and the bracken-covered dunes that furl out beneath my feet like a green carpet are alive with activity. Under the surface are cool, sandy-walled tunnels and dens filled with breath, scale, and rattle—dunes in south central Texas are known to be preferred dens for rattlesnakes. On the surface amid the succulents stands a blue heron—awkward, gawky, royal. Skittering across those dunes are translucent sand crabs that would fit in the palm of my hand. One produces a rapid series of annoyed castanet clicks, not with its claws but with its jaws, when we fish it out of the chlorine-saturated pool and return it to its sandy home.

We have come to the ocean—really the Gulf of Mexico—my family of four, on what has become a yearly pilgrimage of sorts. Our extended family makes its way here each Easter. We are a motley assortment of Catholics, Baptists, witches, and wanderers gathering at the edge of the land, the edge of our place, to behold resurrection, life returned once again. While here we rub up against each other, swapping stories and scent, trading silences and tears. We note the ones that choose to show up, honor the ones who cannot, and bless the ones that won’t. We return to lineage and family pattern here, return to pack, re-establish our North Star.

But this year I am not alone. I’m carrying prayers with me from my other family, the whole and hearty community of soulful seekers that I have been charged and privileged with stewarding over the past ten years. These are specific prayers being made. Prayers for healing, restoration, and resurrection. I take the prayers down to the gray water’s edge and sing them over the waves and into the sea. I rock back and forth in time with the waves lapping against the shore, sending out the sacred smoke. I steal away to fill glass jars with ocean water, shells, handmade oils, and petitions for deeper-than-deep healing, recovery, releasing of addictions, petitions, and prayers for returning to life. More sacred smoke for blessing and consecration, sealing the jars with breath, fire, and melted wax, and then it is time to gather them up, tuck them between the towels and sunscreen, and carry them home. The prayers remain here at the ocean’s edge, carried by the endless, rocking waves.

Back up on the balcony in the wee hours of the morning, I watch Venus, a luminous teardrop, hanging over the wide blue breast of the sea. The moon is full but Venus’s light is bright enough to rival Luna’s. The dunes and the strip of beach have changed even in my lifetime, growing narrower, smaller, closer to being taken over completely by the foamy hem of deep blue dress. More sea, less sand. More depth, less space. I know the causes; I understand the flux, the moment of change we are in and we are. I know that in the lifetimes of my bright, beautiful boys, it will change even more. And I know it is not the first time.

South central Texas going all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico looks today like a series of rocky hills, flat farmland, vast ranches, and limestone creeks and rivers fed by deep underground springs. But 260 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs and even before the Pleiades, Texas existed under a vast and ancient ocean. It’s why it is relatively easy to go for a walk in the part of the state where I live and find ancient fossilized clamshells, fishbones, and coral. These ancient seas receded; landmasses changed. You would never know that the whole state had once been the bottom of an ocean floor. Now it is beginning to happen again; as tides rise, bits of land are covered in the foamy brine.

The ocean or sea is one of the most oft-invoked images to describe change. The tides, current, and even color of the ocean change not just from day to day but from moment to moment. I sit on the deck of the beach house we’re staying in, sipping my coffee and watching the show. Gray skies are met by slate gray waters. But then a shaft of sunlight pours down and illuminates the depths, summoning a clear cobalt to come out and play.

It is still one moment, calm enough for my three-year-old to wade out bravely into the shallows, watching the little angel-wing clams tuck themselves into the wet sand, and then powerful enough in the next moment to knock him down. The undertow of the Gulf of Mexico is particularly notorious for this. Things look calm and swimmable on the surface, but those deep and unseen currents have lifted more than a few souls up and off their feet, carrying them too far from shore to swim back, too far to be saved.

We are taught as little children that should you venture too far out in the water and the invisible hands of the undertow grab onto your ankles and carry you off, you must not ever swim against the current or tide. This will exhaust you and exhaustion leads to death. Instead, we are taught to grow still, catch a breath, find the current, and then swim with it, swim parallel to the shore; this will help you find purchase once again. It is perhaps due to invisible forces like undertows that ocean and sea are also often metaphors for a different kind of power, a unique type of force. The North Star, by contrast, not to mention a number of constellations, provide something certain, definite. They are solid, gleaming marks by which you can set your sights and chart a course. They are the constants against the backdrop of the ever-changing sea. On the other end of things are the iron anchors. Drop them and they kick up silt on the ocean floor, dragged along until they grip onto something. Locked into place, they hold a ship fast, keep it still and safe.

It might seem then that prayers sent out over ocean, songs and stories and petitions carried off by waves, have nothing fixed about them. They are adrift. But prayers and songs and stories have been prayed and sang and told not just of the ocean but to the ocean for millennia, as long as there have been creatures to pray, sing, or tell a tale. Early in the morning, on just the other side of a full moon, I look out to the sea. Vast white wings suddenly cut through the air along with a throaty call. An owl is hunting over the night dark dunes, flying parallel to the ocean’s edge. The waves come in and out, lapping at the land, caressing it with their glassine hands.

I think of every holy figure I know of who is associated with the sea. Tiamat, Aphrodite, Venus, Sedna, Y’maya, Namakaokahai, Chalchiuhtlicue, Stella Maris, Morgan le Fay … the list goes on. Each with their own stories and tales and dramas but also sharing in something vast and deep and ever flowing. Perhaps not such a bad place for prayers, after all. I look out over the ocean, remembering that once, not so very long ago, it covered the land where the beams of the porch I’m standing on right now are sunk deep. I understand why the sea is the image we reach for when we need to describe shifts and change. But listening to the waves as they keep perfect time, I feel that perhaps it is the most eternal thing of all. No wonder we carry prayers to it, call out wishes over it, still.

Feature Image:
British Library / Alamy Stock Photo
Rumpelstiltskin (1913), by Warwick Goble

 

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It is night. Darkness has closed in around us as I lie in my three-year-old’s tiny bed and finish casting my words into the cool black so that my ten-year-old in the top bunk can also hear them.

The miller’s daughter has found a way to keep her babe. The frog has turned into a prince. Sleeping Beauty has awakened once more. They do not all end happily, and I do not edit out the gore. Cinderella’s sisters dance in red-hot iron shoes until they fall down dead, the young wife holds Bluebeard’s decapitated head aloft by the hairs of his chiny chin chin, and the boy who lied about the wolves is nowhere to be seen in a sheep-dotted pasture, but there is blood everywhere.

Sometimes the endings are ambiguous: On some nights Little Red Riding Hood’s granny makes it, but on other nights she doesn’t. And both of my boys know that characters like the Baba Yaga or Morgana le Fay are too complicated and layered to be called simply good or bad.

So, stories now all told, it is time for my words to fade, their spell of sleep and protection woven over both children like the holiest of blankets. And I know tomorrow in the brightness of morning, the questions will begin: Why does Rumpelstiltskin want the child in the first place? Why does Sleeping Beauty seek out the spindle? Why would the boy lie a second and then a third time? Why is Bluebeard’s beard blue? And most of all … is it real? Is any of it?

Children like to get down to business. They like play, but out on top of the table, clear play. They sniff out confusion in their elders and will keep at it until it has been fully unearthed and revealed as the interesting bone that it is. So they want to know about the stories—of course they do, they want to know if they are real. To which the only possible and honest response is, What do you mean by real?

I look at what we surround ourselves with today: opinions masquerading as news; metaverse worlds where virtual real estate is bought and sold for astronomical sums; food that looks, smells, and tastes like something it is not; and entire lifestyles predicated on the illusion that everything is limitless. These are a few of the elements that make up reality, the things our little ones are taught to call real. What happens to our accounting of the real when we stack stories—especially fairy tales—against it?

Fairy tales, according to some, started out as diversions from reality. Stories about dragons hoarding treasure, cauldrons that never stop overflowing with food, and magic beans that rise up into the realm of giants were told to make hours of hard labor go by faster or shared as novelties among bored housewives who lacked other outlets for their creative energy. Some of our favorite fairy tales give us storylines of escapism. We find ourselves journeying to the Snow Queen’s Palace, Thumbelina’s flower, or Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed hut. These scenes and locales exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Then there are the stories that play with real locations that were known to both teller and audience: Miles Cross from Tamlin, Sherwood Forest, the mountains in Rip Van Winkle—places where, if the moon is just right and the wind just so, we have the opportunity to fall into something … else. Something uncanny and spooky, something liminal.

We move from the familiar, the known, and the real into the unknown, uncharted, and unreal, right? After all, we all know that those are fairy stories, make-believe, pretend. Except J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t think so. Why, he asks in his essay “Of Monsters and Critics,” do we assume that escapism means turning to something less real? Why can’t escapism be a turning to what is most real? Why is an airplane more real than the Crane Wife’s wings outspread in the snow and under the stars? Why would we ever assume such a thing and give over our understanding in such a way?

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” —Albert Einstein

 

If I tell my children there are no dragons and then we find ourselves staring at an open-mouthed Nile Crocodile basking happily in the afternoon sun, what are they to make of it? Moreover, while there may not be fire-breathing beasts hoarding treasure under great mountains, is there a force of greed in the world so potent that it has the ability to singe the hairs on your arms? I think we know the answer.

There are monsters in stories. Are monsters real? We know the answer to that as well.

Does perpetual lying and deception lead us to be devoured by something at the end of the day? Are looks sometimes deceiving? Can normal, everyday objects hold great power?

What about pluck, courage, kindness, and generosity in the face of overwhelming odds? Are we not learning that forests are enchanted in a way and possess their own intelligence, or that animals have ways of talking, if only we were able to hear them, to listen?

The beloved storyteller Martin Shaw says that parents who tell stories to their children are on the front lines of storytelling. And as anyone who has served on any front line will tell you, that is where the rubber hits the road, where we become very aware of how abstract ideas do or do not inform actual practice. It is here we get clear on what is real and what is not.

It may be helpful for us to recall that the old meaning of “faerie” referred not only to a people but also to a place, a realm of magic and enchantment with which this world, the “real world,” had regular commerce and relationship. When that commerce is interrupted, when the relationship is severed, the effects are seen in this world—in the form of plants and animals dying, in the form of people arguing more and listening less, and in the form of life as a whole becoming harder. At this point the witch, the shaman, the griot, the conjurewoman, the magician, and the storytellers are called on to remake the bridge between the two worlds, to weave them together so that real life can be restored once more. So it is that the roots of our world are sunk into the soil of what some call Faerie.

Much of what these stories show is the most real stuff you will ever encounter. Our kids know it. That’s why they ask for the stories. Tell me what is real, they whisper to us. Tell me a story, they say. And so, we do.

Illustration by Guinevere Von Sneeden

 

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In the crazy-making noise of the world today, it is easy to feel pushed, pulled, and called to follow a million different directions. Energy-wise, this leaves us feeling scattered, unrooted, and unclear. In my work with clients through this year I’ve heard about these feelings again and again and have witnessed firsthand how they lead to other problems: feeling unable to use our full voices, feeling unheard and unseen, and, most of all, feeling overwhelmed. Fortunately there’s an easy remedy to the sensation of being scattered and rootless: the ritual of Rooting Down and Rising Up. This simple ritual works with our energetic body to root us down into the deep earth and rise us up into the stars. From a sacred-arts and magical perspective, it also allows us to connect with the wisdom and love of our ancestors as well as the vision for what is possible and needed for the future held by our descendants—the ones who come after us when we become ancestors. The ritual also contains instructions for creating an “anchor,” or a physical gesture that you can do anytime and anywhere to immediately put you back into the sensation created by the ritual. The natural world is full of magic; this is the first step in truly allowing ourselves to connect to that truth.

Time: 5 to 10 minutes

Materials: A place (ideally outside for your first time) where you will not be disturbed. Options: The experience of this ritual is heightened if you are barefoot and perform the rite during your favorite time of day. (Mine, for instance, would be at dawn or
dusk.)

Process: Sit, stand, or lie down in a comfortable position, allowing your feet to touch the earth if possible. Take in a full and deep breath and, as you do, see, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel the land underneath you. See, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel your own body extending out and down, down into the top soil, down into the bedrock, and the tangled roots of trees, down through the delicate webs of fungi, the layers of geologic time, down through root and stone and bone. Down through the graves of your ancestors, your beloved dead who hold such love and wisdom for you. Root yourself down until you see, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel the presence of the earth’s core, pulsing out its life-giving energy and vitality. Affirm and acknowledge that you participate in this energy, that it blesses you and that you, in turn, bless it. Bring your awareness back to your breathing. On your next exhalation, bless, in gratitude, the earth and specifically the lands where you live and the creatures, seen and unseen, who form it.

Take a moment to see, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel this experience of rooting down into the deepest earth. Allow that feeling to fill you and surround you and then, as you feel called, create a physical gesture that, whenever performed, will immediately root you back into this feeling. This might be your hands at prayer position by your heart, one hand on heart and one hand on belly, using your finger to inscribe a small spiral or star on your palm, a hip wiggle or a shoulder stretch—it is totally up to you. This gesture is your physical anchor and will anchor you back into your experience of this ritual. As you are ready, on your next exhalation, see, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel that you are now fully rooted in the deep earth and at the same time extending your upper body up and out toward the heavens. Your body’s energetic presence rises up, up through the tree branches, up through the clouds, up by the mountains, up through the  atmosphere, up through the whispers of your descendants—all people who come after us and who hold a vision of what is possible and what is needed, up into vast space itself where you are surrounded by the very stuff you are made of: stars.

See, sense, touch, know, hear, and feel these stars surrounding you, pouring their light over and through you so that anything that needs to be soothed, healed, or mended is taken care of at this time. Exhale a blessing on your future and the future you are dreaming into existence. Again, at this point, anchor yourself in the feeling of rooting down and rising up by making the physical gesture you have decided on.

And now that you have rooted down and risen up, go forward with your day, confident in the knowledge that you walk in the deepest earth with your head surrounded by stars.