by Sally Walker
- Twisted Beech – Why We Write
- When the Winds Change (MoonScape Spring 2024)
- The Need to Feel Special (Cygnus Spring 2024)
- Reclaim the Witching Hour (The New Feminist. Oct 2024)
- Where Do We Fit In? (Myddle Earth Spring 2024)
What is that particular niggle, infuriatingly nibbling away at our peace, wearing us down until we just have to meet it in the shadowlands where it’s long set up camp, and write about it? For some writers it’s a love of the mystical, a compulsion to shout against injustice, a delight in the absurd, a fascination with lives so different from anything we can imagine, the fiery pull of the spirit – or maybe a little of all of these. For me, it started with a wound. Well two to be exact, one collective, one personal.
The witch trials. In a long inhuman history of atrocities, why that one? Why does this crime against mainly women (many old and in poverty) eat away at us, infesting the collective unconscious with an unresolved unease?
It might be in part personal to me, linked to childhood family clashes over religious beliefs, or maybe even a past life. I’ve never forgotten a life-changing dream of a sixteenth century teenage girl, confused and terrified, imprisoned for her healing abilities, who had inadvertently got caught up in community politics and the mass hysteria of the era. A girl who I recognised (not by appearance) as myself.
Or is it because it was the most defenceless members of a gender already devalued and controlled who were so vulnerable to being demonised with the word ‘witch’? Gaslighting has a long history it seems.
And then, embarrassingly, there’re my own little sore spots at play. Most women, at least on a bad hair day, and especially in today’s selfie-posting, self-promoting culture celebrating celebrity and glamour, secretly worry that they don’t quite measure up. For many of us, with time, the romantic dreams we once drank like nectar at the fairytale feast, seep away beneath illusory moonshine, leaving empty cups with little cracks. Sooner or later, we all have to face brothers Grimm reality.
Never getting to be the Disney Princess seems pretty trivial in the scheme of things, but even petty slights and mere twinges when persistent enough may bore into your peace of mind, eating away at our sense of self. Being mega average myself, I’m easily overlooked. Additionally, as the Cosmos dearly likes a joke, I always end up with beautiful friends – who stand tall and simply shine in public, as opposed to my tongue-tied virtual squat…
So there I am, in my thirties, back home after some unsatisfactory party or other, sitting despondently on the carpet in the small hours of the night, wailing that same old childish complaint common to all of us from five years up, “But it’s not fair!”
No surprise then, that my (anti-) heroine is passed over, put upon and poorly endowered in personal attributes. Of course, limitations come in assorted flavours – economic, geographic, demographic to name a few. And you can bet your bottom dollar that whichever society you’re born into is going to have a lot to say concerning your gender, race, sexual preferences, beliefs and whether you were schooled at Roedean or the comp down my road. (I got the comp with bottle green gym knickers.)
“It’s not fair!” gets answered by “Well, life isn’t” – not this one at any rate, or at least not from our limited roadside viewing spot. Gaining a bit of maturity, Moira gives away The Dress to someone who looks less daft in it, and I too eventually cottoned on that the real life-task (of real life) is to find happiness within (or despite for the feisty) our limits.
Because we’re shaped by these, they slowly twist our growth over the years. And once we get that this is only part of who we really are, we can then start smoothing out our ruffled feathers and tightly coiled trunk. Writing a whole life storybook of someone whose struggles you can resonate with is a great way to unravel both core collective brutal wounds and piddly but painful personal pinpricks alike.
When the Winds Change
(first published in MoonScape Spring 2024)
Picture this:
You’re just your average bod living in late Tudor England (ah yes, sorry, that makes you one of the down-trodden peasant majority). Let’s say it’s the end of a wet summer in 1597 and the country’s been suffering famine for three years now. Even in better times it was pretty tough going to scrape a meagre living, enough to keep you and yours in a modicum of health. After all, life has always been a precarious affair for the likes of you poor wretched rustics – subsisting below the poverty line, paying crippling rents, taxes and church tithes, losing grazing rights due to ongoing enclosure, bedbugs, unsanitary conditions, every day awaiting accident, bubonic plague, the pox or syphilis to strike you down before the sun sets! But now, what with yet another crap harvest and this infernal never-ending rain, starvation is hammering on the door of your wattle and daub hovel. Some of you, desperate to ease the gnawing hunger pains, even resort to eating acorns off the forest floor (subsequent bowel eruptions are going to make you regret that later).
Predictably – as ill done by as ever, malnourished and worrying your breeches off about the coming winter scarcity – you get sick. What can you do about it? Professional physicians are way too costly for your paltry purse, just buying a loaf of bread at the current extortionate food prices is outstripping the pathetic wage they pay you (kept pathetic by state legislation enforcing a low maximum wage for your sweat-and-tears physical labour). (At this tyrannical time in history, the mere mention of a minimum wage will get you laughed out the tavern!)
So where does this leave you in your present extremis? Thankfully, not without a cunning plan up your sleeve. For hanging out almost on the doorstep, there are (and for time immemorial have been) the Cunning Folk. Offering an impressive range of services inclusive of herbal remedies, protective and curative spells, divination, midwifery, expelling witches’ curses, finding mislaid items and so forth, plus a bonus give-away of some sage advice thrown in for good measure, all available at bargain price or even just a bit of barter! Admittedly, although they dutifully adhere to the prescribed Christian worship, these practitioners in handy magic are frowned at by a disapproving Church, but the general peasant population simply adore them! They’re the sixteenth century caring profession catering for the impoverished common masses. No self-respecting parish would be without its very own Wise Woman or Cunning Man!
True, some of their more peculiar ideas might seem a bit cranky and, as always, you’ll spot the odd charlatan making a fast buck, but there may be something to these old country remedies and this tired-and-tested knowledge passed down the generations, whereas natural magic has long been esteemed and preserved in grimoires. The odd folk medicine recipe will even make it into pharmaceutical medication in time, e.g., Digitalis or foxglove for treating heart conditions is attributed to one such traditional healer. And compared to the (tortuous) primitive practices of the Elizabethan medical men, with their over fondness of leeches and single-minded diagnosing according to the four humours (considering your present bleak prospects, you’ll fall under the melancholic category for sure), well quite frankly, you’re be better off with the old Wise Woman down the lane…
Moving on a few hundred years, here we are with all the marvels of modern medicine, not a leech in sight, and medical treatment available for all and sundry, albeit with long NHS waiting lists. But something at grassroots level has been chipping away at the longstanding centralised and homogonous health care monopoly. For quite a few decades now (astrologers like to harp on about the comet Chiron, discovered in 1977, as the harbinger), we’ve seen the rise of complementary / alternative therapies. Largely provided by small scale independent workers advertising their reflexology, homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbalism, hot rocks – you name it – skills on a card in the window of the local health-food shop.
And simultaneously, there’s been another change creeping in, quietly infiltrating the standard paradigm which has held such a strangle-hold on our view of the material universe. For truth be told, a lot of us have become a smidge disillusioned with this all-wrapped up, no-enchantment-allowed, transparent Clingfilm Era of consumables and top-down information drip. And even the denizen of science has turned traitor on its respectable Age of Reason’s forebears. The classical you-know-where-you-are-with-Newton has been usurped by the raving mystics of Quantum Physics. Oh woe for the rational man! The universe is not what he thought. At its most fundamental spooky level it’s neither predictable nor ordered, the observer affects the observed and some of the quaint convictions of the Cunning Folk don’t seem so far off the mark after all!
Reality just isn’t what it was. We’ve been plonked back in the Wonderland of mind stuff. The physical 3-D realism of the Enlightenment was just a big Sorcerer’s trick played on us. We’ve looped another full circle of the Spiral and we’re entering a Renaissance of the Magical (especially on Netflix), revisiting our ancestors’ supernatural mindset in a New Age of unrestricted sub-atomic particles in all their whacky, chaotic kookiness! And as ageless mystical practices such as divination, whether tarot or scrying, become more and more a part of popular culture, and as increasing numbers take to such modern trends as mindful manifesting, whether by neurolinguistic programming or an employment of spells, it’s pretty clear by now that the sociocultural wind has changed direction. Because it’s no longer just we pagans who welcome a return to magical thinking, slowly but surely blowing back to us on an old Tudor breeze.
The Need to Feel Special
Painting by Coral Dodsworth
(first published in Cygnus Review Spring 2024)
We feed our daughters the sugar-rush Disney diet, gifting Princesses’ dresses for birthdays and fairytale boxsets for Christmas. So what? Let’s not get over-woke about it, like a gate-crashing Maleficent trying to shut down the delightful Kingdom of Childhood Enchantment! After all, even kindergarten kids recognise this charming realm isn’t the reality they must live in.
But maybe we are smudging the line a little between fantasy and delusion, distorting realistic expectations for girls, slipping in some insidious feminine goals alongside the laudable? Blurring their vision slightly, as they merrily trip into adolescence upon their glass footwear, until they’re just a smidge more prone to falter on everyday bog-standard mundane life? Perhaps, as we offer our excited little maidens invitations to the innocent-looking fairy feast, they may already be ingesting the poisoned apple, soaking up a grandiose lie, digesting the seeds of their future mental ill-health.
Princess re-makes are less limiting than once upon a time, but they still convey the same underlying aspiration – the wish to be special. And is it really surprising that girls secretly yearn for a world where Snow White and Belle are the fairest of them all (and therefore the best and don’t we deserve the best!), where Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty wait only for a Princely rescue to be restored to their rightful place at the palace – i.e. upon the palace balcony being cheered by an adoring fan-base below… And can we really blame them for their delusions of grandeur? Truth be told, we all wanted to be the Princess.
And there lies the problem with the prevalent Princess precept: you cannot share out the crown amongst the populace, by definition royalty enthrones a favoured few. In other words, as we dangle the Princess role, the fairy story version of womanhood, in front of them we’re setting up the majority of (ordinary) girls for failure.
We cannot block the cut-throat peer pressure of social networking, or break the glamourous spell the media casts over impressionable, insecure teenagers as they struggle to position themselves in our self-doting, selfie-posting, celebrity culture. Narcissistic values are endorsed in order to make it in life. Most won’t; they’re as unlikely to feel the heady heights of being deemed special by society as they are to feel the pea beneath the mattrasses piled up against them.
The novel A Westerly Wind brings Witches, highlights how not being the fashionable It Girl can impact a young woman’s emotional wellbeing – and what she can do about it. The hapless Mogs of is not only one of the unnoticed, nondescript nobodies with whom the world abounds, but she is alas as far, far away from Princess status as Quasimodo. Trailing behind the other small fry, her only Princess dress sadly shabby (everyone agrees it would never get her into a Royal Ball), Moira plays alone, eats sweets, collects stamps and grievances. Adulthood doesn’t bring the ugly-duckling-to-swan makeover, just a greater desire to escape into illusion.
However, eventually we do have to grow up – dropping the dream to face brothers Grim Reality. With the fearsome forty looming, Mogs enrols in a (somewhat cantankerous) Cornish coven. Sweeping out the gunk from under society’s rug with her metaphorical witch’s broom, she flies through time, to the witch persecutions of Elizabethan England and the Black Death of a medieval London, for our lives may not be as little as we think – like a Russian doll set we’ve forgotten can open up. Multiple selves unfurl in layers – a cosmic onion growing on the Multiversal level playing field of magical possibilities! The Royal Road from rags to riches turns out to be of the inner variety.
Because the real Quest, one which promises self-determination and emotionally healthy outcomes, isn’t a competitive one. The true magic wand to a happy selfhood is individual not comparative, celebrating our sole endeavour on the journey to personal sovereignty. By encouraging our daughters to value their own and each other’s special unique worth, all little girls can grow up confidently, holding hands with their fellow playmates, Princesses every one.
Reclaim the Witching Hour
(published in The New Feminist 3rd Oct 2024)
From penis envy coined by 20th century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to penis theft sited by the Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 (a treatise used to convict witches), women have been accused of some pretty weird stuff over the years! Such bizarre finger pointing can even extend to scapegoating us for all of society’s ills. Hell’s teeth! We can go right back to the beginning for that, when the very first woman was judged guilty for the entire Downfall of Mankind by consorting with Satan. And not for the last time – apparently women and the devil have been conspiring together forever, whether in serpent form, offering Eve the odd apple, or as the Great Black Dog of the Burning Times. Either way, it’s all her fault!
Time and again, history has shown to what devious depths society can sink in its blaming and shaming. When the going gets tough for the populace it’s so often laid at the 
door of the downtrodden, the defenceless or outsiders, as if their pitiable lot wasn’t bad enough before. And women, deemed inferior throughout the ages, scorned and frowned upon, made handy fodder for sacrifice.
Take the witch mania scenario of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for instance. A long spell (not of the witchy sort) (not that they don’t get the blame) of bad weather is causing repeated harvest failure and famine, and suddenly everyone’s getting hysterical and accusing neighbours of wicked capers! By far the majority of those tried for witchcraft were women, mainly the more elderly (by Tudor standards) and probably many widows and spinsters without male support and vulnerable to destitution. Poverty-stricken old women made a rather convenient scapegoat. Frequently forced to beg for survival, they were a nuisance to their village at a time when purses were already pinched and there’s a run-on parish charitable alms.
And yet how to be denied? This was a strict religious era in Europe, with Christian scriptures demanding: If thou in any way afflict widows and they at all cry out unto me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath shall wax hot against thee. (Exodus Ch. 22).
So people turned the matter inside out – they made the victim the culprit. “She is a witch,” they cried. “We will hold no neighbourly bond with such a one, we shall shun and spurn (and haply burn) her for the safety of the godly!” And thus the righteous folk of the village were left in peace of conscience and in peace at home, free from troubling scruples and troublesome widows.
The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum) is hot on insatiable female sexual debauchery leading men astray, whilst the male-controlled Church and State had quite a few of their own belittling gender snubs. The claim that women are more susceptible to mental instability and frenzied behaviour well preceded Freud and the rise of psychology; the long-suffering church goers (and that’s practically everyone) of Elizabethan England were subject to this annual prescribed sermon on marriage:
Woman is a weak creature, not endowed with strength and constancy of mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they may be more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be. (Anglican Library). And etc.
Court indictments concerning a witch’s demonic arts were totally bonkers – levitating cleaning equipment, genital teats for paranormal suckling, wantonly causing male impotence, alongside your bog-standard fornication with (of course) the horny devil.
As Suranne Jones’ two-part series Investigating Witch Trials (a) on Channel Four discusses, women are still being blamed today, specifically for male sexual violence.
– Violence which now constitutes a “national emergency” according to the recent policing statement by the NPCC, reporting a massive 37% rise in violence (including sexual) against girls and women between 2019 and 2024. A staggering 1 in 12 women are victims each year, an alarming escalation “fuelled by online influencers” according to the police statement (b).
A massive internet following for Andrew Tate, who accuses women rape victims of responsibility for the assault, is just the tip of the iceberg. Women have regularly been held complicit in their own sexual abuse, due to their ‘provocative clothing’ or because they’re out on the town past women’s curfew hour, or they were ‘asking for it’ due to alcohol use, and so forth. And now we have the internet Incels (involuntary celibate men), a few of the most vocal of whom blatantly blame women for not providing them with sex, and obnoxiously threaten obscene violence against them. In the West Country where I live, five people were shot not long ago in Plymouth by a man who lapped up such online blusterings. Past and present, the ways of the world can be sickening – but we need to move on.
Maybe we can help empower young women against absorbing such ubiquitous allegations by reclaiming the label witch into mainstream culture and media (and not just as a Netflix sexy fantasy figure…), just as the derogatory term ‘queer’ was positively reinstated by the gay community. The constructive witch archetype, coming up from the grass roots today, is that of wild women who uphold their own authority and refuse to conform to society’s expectations of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. No longer accepting blame or derision because they choose to live outside the norms.
My own personal experiences as a Cornish witch, combined with some deep delving into historical crimes against women, slowly grew into a novel, A Westerly Wind brings Witches, published earlier this year. Set both in Tudor England of the 1500s and in the contemporary world of modern witchcraft, I wanted to explore why women were accused of witchery and to tell my own story of what it means to be a witch today. Also to recall the lost but once widespread role of the traditional Wise Woman at a time when women were banned from official positions of public influence – how did that one slip under the patriarchal net!
The up-and-coming religion of Wicca is distinct in that it doesn’t favour men by venerating an exclusive male deity, as has been so prevalent across the board. And isn’t it time we offer little girls a Divine Feminine to relate to? Squeezing the Goddess onto the holy throne between a wholly reluctant God the Father and God the Son!
The witching hour was once depicted as a shadowy midnight when witch and devil dance. It epitomised society’s fears of the bogeyman, and so there may be some value in shining the spotlight there. Peering back into the darkest era for women, re-airing the stains in our history’s misogynistic dirty linen, can help focus our attention on the scapegoating going on under our noses in the modern world. It seems we still need to be vigilant for whoever’s being demonized and take a good hard look at who’s pointing the finger. Because we know to where it can lead.
And as for the old witch herself, she has been getting a more user-friendly makeover for the twenty-first century. But if you’re going to be that fiercely independent, defiantly non-conformist woman, with a bit of a wild side, then you may well encounter some heavy-handed, even scary, attempts to falsely accuse, control and silence you. Devilish indeed, just not the devil we were warned of…
Footnotes
- a) Investigating Witch Trials, 24 June 2024, Channel Four,
- b) ‘Violence Against Women and Girls National Statement’ July 2024, by the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) for England and Wales.
Where Do We Fit In?
(first published in Myddle Earth, Pagan Federation, Midwest and Wales)
Pinging an alert with our premiere infant appearance in the family pics, clanging fearfully as we embark on our first day at school, college or work place, trying to fit in preoccupies our thoughts and emotions throughout life. Feeling we belong is like getting into the third little piggy’s house of bricks, but with deep pile carpet and a Fendi Casa sofa. After all, who doesn’t secretly want to be liked, valued and seen (preferably twinkling in the spotlight) within their community? But it’s a dicey endeavour – it depends on how our community rates and wants us (ouch!).
And so, hoping this is how to best fit in, we do our damnedest to conform to the (possibly impossible) standards of whichever social milieu we’re keen to gate-crash. Once in with the in-crowd, we’re then faced with slippery hierarchies to clamber up if we can, and pernicious pecking orders kicking us back down when we can’t. (From which position they can gleefully trample us into the muddy ground …) In this cat and dog society (though mainly catty) what resources can you call upon in order to thrive? Support, wealth, talent and – maybe not least for hopeful little girls and insecure grown women – an appealing appearance could certainly up the odds in your favour.
The dumpy grumpy Moira Box of A Westerly Wind brings Witches has been dealt a dud deal on all these fronts. For poor Mogs, perpetually put down and put upon, it’s more about doggedly surviving than thriving. Tagging behind the neighbourhood small fry, denigrated as unfit to fit in by a cut-throat girls’ gang, she spends a prickly childhood watching other children’s friends through gaps in the hedge. Adolescence is extra plus-sized in the agonising angst department, with a backside resembling one of the larger gas giants she can’t even lift herself off a chair without the class chorusing “Jupiter ascending!”.
Having flopped dismally at her life goals of camouflage clothing and ducking, and aware that her shrivelled self-esteem has shrank down to a can of worms and is about to crawl away completely into the woodwork, Moira does a moonlit flit, fleeing her dreary lot with a last-ditch bolt to the other side of the country, as far west as she can go without toppling off a Cornish cliff. Here, in a land of mist and moor, stone circle and ancient megalith, she adopts a new approach to our very human need to fit in, swopping her like-bodied but not very helpful former friends for a cantankerous coven of local witches. (Dress code: comfy baggy ethnic cottons, pentacle motif optional. Group slogan: “Be careful what you wish for as we’ll going to make it happen drekly”.)
As you may have already found out (commiserations), The Great Cosmic Joker delights in shaking us hardest when we’re most stuck-in-the-mud, catapulting us out of our rut with all the forced fun of a Jack-in-the-box. Not by changing our set social spot (at the bottom in Moira’s case) but by stretching the setting into which we struggle to fit so widely that the bottom falls out. Because, if we extend the boundaries of belief far beyond the world as we think we know it, suddenly we don’t anymore. We’re swept up into a weird and wonderful widdershins-turning tornado to enchanted Oz! Now we’re not sure we even believe in Kansas anymore, let alone want to go back there.
A course of regression sessions uncovers past lives both in Tudor England, when witch hangings were the must-see Netflix of the day, and in a rat, flea and Black Death infested medieval London; revealing to the dumbfounded witchy novice the hidden role of soul inheritance in determining who we are and where we really belong. For the riddles of our lives may be unfolding over a longer time frame than our current little life allows, unfurling oh so slowly over a whole series of reincarnations, in an impeccably staged, purely personal, dramatically tragic-comic, magnificent journey of the soul!
Additionally, an antidote for feeling a failure and a cure for stomach cramps is to stop bending over backwards in order to fit into society’s dictates. Instead of straining to live life from outside in, try opting for a multi-story life lived from inside out. Flitting between her many selves of other times and bodies, as between the flavours of a Battenberg cake, Mogs shapeshifts into a happier sense of self, despite what other people are always telling her. For past the pegged perimeters which define our restricted reality is a bigger canvas than Kansas; while the social judgements with which we berate each other look pretty petty when viewed from the galactic edge of the Milky Way! Wriggling out of society’s constrictive corset may even help free us from whatever stinky trash bin we’ve been dumped in.
Because it’s not just a matter of how you fit in but also where. Perhaps, it’s only in an infinite universe of magical possibility that you, as your Eternal Self, can find your perfect place and shine bright as you truly are. And why not go there, it’s much more fun to play outside the box!