The Witches’ Devil: Myth and Lore for Modern Cunning

From the Introduction:

Now do we step into the dark. The lantern light flickers, its dim glow faltering at the same time as you clutch it in your left hand tightly, the trail before us barely visible among the vines and weeds. The blackness of the woods at night surrounds us like a cloak. Crickets sound their trill. The cool air conjures clouds from our breath like a spell.

Somewhere in the distance, a voice enunciates some ancient speech we cannot quite make out, its echoes trailing high over the hills, its timbre wet-thick like the falling of branches after a storm. Perhaps it is not a voice at all. Perhaps it is merely the settling of the woods, a wind among the vines, some creature moving through the snarls of leaves and twigs.

Still, you cannot help but think it, and I cannot help but ask out loud: Is it him? Is he here?

Come with me, then. Let us walk, the two of us, and let us try to find him if we will be able to. He is old now, older than he was when he taught the first witches at their fires, training them in arts so ancient the stones of the earth can’t fathom. The ages of the world have changed him. Time has left him worn and thin and scattered, emerging in the old lore here and there as a whisper or a clue, hidden at the back of such a lot of black doors we hesitate to open, mortal as we are.

But still, he lives. We witches feel his gaze when we are alone in the dead of night, our lips busied with the work of incantation. We hear him when the breeze whistles through an old oak tree. We feel his hands upon ours as we knot the cord, as we burn the herbs, as we place the pins of our age-old craft.

And for those who feel the call, we know that by some means, despite all of his flaws and all of his danger, he is ours—feared like us and maligned like us, alone like us, rebellious like us, hungry for knowledge like us, drawn to the dark like us, obedient to no lord like us, wild and longing to be free like us, ceaselessly an outsider and other, just like us. By some extraordinary and ancient curse, the things we fear in him are most like us, imperfect and flawed, something godlike but unlike a god, a kindred and beloved whom we cannot touch to rescue, a mirror through which we cannot reach.

Let us go, then, on the lookout for him. For fear of him, and for love of him.

Let us reach for the blackberry tucked just there, among the thorns, trusting that the sweetness we find will be worth the pricking of our thumbs…