Preface
Introduction: Broth from the Cauldron
Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
—Polly Berends
After my grandmother died, my mother found a small notebook in which Arbie had written down all my cute “sayings” when I was a child first learning how to talk. The first sentence it recorded was: “I want to be a Witch someday. Not Tuesday.”
Being a twenty-eight-year-old Witch whose coven meetings were held on Tuesdays, I burst into laughter. I read through the little notebook and saw—to my amazement—that every other sentence was about Witches. How does a child between the ages of one and three, growing up with no television, develop such a fascination? How does a Republican girl raised in an agnostic, scientific household become a Witch?
My mother had the answer.
“You see,” she said after I finished perusing the notebook, “you were always like this. Witches, magic, what the birds were saying out in the garden. This is all you ever wanted to talk about. We never encouraged you in the slightest.”
I patted her arm comfortingly. “It’s true, Mom. You never encouraged me.”
“The only explanation is reincarnation!” she asserted. “You were always like this, from the very first.”
I nodded sympathetically. “It’s not your fault.”
Do people choose a path, or does it choose them?
Wicca, or Witchcraft, comes from the root willow. The willow tree is flexible, bending with the wind and not breaking; magic, too, is flexible, responding to and moving with the flow of energy. While in math, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, in the world of matter—and spirit—this is not so. Witchcraft is known as “the twisted path,” not because it is perverse, but because—like lightning moving through the sky, or a river carving out its course—energy follows the path of least resistance.
Hence the structure of this book, which is not the classic chronological memoir. Sometimes the truest way to tell a story is the twisted path, the journey through the labyrinth, the path that doubles back on itself, full of odd turns, improbable coincidences, and strange miracles. The key is the thread of meaning that we carry as we journey to the center and return again.
I have been a Wiccan priestess teaching shamanic classes since 1976. I have been teaching year-long apprenticeship programs—which I call “Hogwarts for Grown-ups”—since 1992.
Initially, people often enter Wicca, Witchcraft, seeking control. Not usually the control of others, but wanting to control their own lives.
Magic has sometimes been called “the art of coincidence control.”
But somewhere along the line, most of those who come hankering for power find their concept of power has widened and deepened to a flow far vaster than anything their egos could possibly generate or fathom.
They exchange the illusion of mastery for mystery.
Or as I often joke in my apprenticeship program: “They came for the magic. They stayed for the food.” They discover that magic is the art of changing consciousness at will. Or, sometimes, accepting the changes which have been forced upon you, and forging them into something powerful.
Some of the most sacred and remarkable revelations of my life have occurred while I was engaged in ritual. Most of them have occurred when I was engaged in living my ordinary, amazing life.
Since Shakespeare wrote the lines, “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,” in his play Macbeth, our culture has shied away from the image of Witches cackling over a seething cauldron as an icon of unspeakable evil and horror.
But a cauldron is only a big soup pot, something every family in old Europe cherished since the beginning of the Bronze Age. Often it was their most valuable possession. Because of it, whatever they gathered or raised could be thrown together with a little water, and a nourishing soup or stew would emerge.
The cauldron has been a symbol for magic because it is an earthy metaphor for transformation—throw a bunch of disparate elements together and they somehow become more than the sum of their parts.
When used for medicine, the cauldron could combine herbs into a potent, healing tea or salve.
So the cauldron became known as a magical implement, the cauldron of changes. But its powers are for good, not harm. The Cauldron of Cerridwen holds the inspiration from which all artists and poets must drink to be inspired; it also carries the promise of transformation that transcends death: the mystery of rebirth.
Stories simmer in our minds, often for years. They can be nourishing and delicious as soup; they can be as potent as medicine. The Witch is one who stands outside of the culture, in a little house in the woods, with her herbs, her observations, her stories, and her wisdom. She brews soups and spells, potions and cures. These are some of the teaching and healing stories that have emerged from my journey. They are serious and silly, simple and profound, and they are all true. So scoot your seats a little closer, hold out your bowls. I’ve been brewing this hotchpotch for forty years and it’s ready now.
Have a little broth from the cauldron.
