I had decided to put my priesthood back into the centre of my life when I returned to everyday life after coming out of hospital, but this was easier thought than done. My imagination would roll over helpless with laughter if I thought of knocking on the door of Westminster Cathedral to ask the Cardinal to let me back in. He would have wondered if I were kidding or mentally subnormal. No way they would have a vacancy for a priestess! I did not think it any use reminding them they taught that once ordained, if you said Mass, it would be a real Mass. No one could take this from you.

I had been to the services of Anglicans and charismatic Christians who had women priests but I was not at home with them. I had to be true to my instincts, inspiration and reason. I was not seeking to return to the priesthood because I needed a job - I was instead seeking to fulfil a prophetic mission. I now think I did not fully trust my inner bond with my Lover-God when I looked at these alternatives. I thought I needed some human props of appointment and community acceptance before I gave myself full-time to my vocation.

Instinctually I knew there had to be another way. What if I simply forgot about my preconceptions, forgot my guilt at not following a priestly vocation, forgot my conceits about being called to be in a priestly job - and simply looked at what my instincts told me?

When I did try asking my instincts a different path appeared. If I tried to visualise the path that most attracted me, the picture that came was not that of me presiding at an altar in a large building, but that of a track up a hill side through heather and small trees above a wild coastline. I would see myself as happily walking up this path carrying a small rucksack and trusting in providence to look after me. When I stopped to camp, a boulder beside my camp became naturally my altar as I simply thanked my Creatrix for wine and bread and for her presence. If I were meant to share such small rituals, as I thought I was, then others would appear.

I knew where these images came from. I was seeing in my mind's eye my ancestral lands on the western coasts of the British Isles. The life I was envisioning for myself was that of the Celtic women and men who really leave everything to give their lives to God - or to the Goddess in pre-Christian days. They set up their hermitages in the wildest coves or caves. They saw the face of divinity in nature. Their path had long inspired me - but for years I had put aside the thought of following them as a mere day-dream thinking I should be based in the cities where I could more effectively fight against social injustice. I thought it would be escapist for me to go to live in the wild.

For the next few years, London seemed meant to be my home. Much of my research for my investigative articles or films now involved using the internet, major libraries or interviewing. I also discovered on the 'net that there were email groups that were solely for transsexuals. I joined one got to know many others who had walked between the gender worlds for the first time since I transitioned over twenty years earlier. I was most intrigued when I found some were rediscovering the ancient place of transsexuals in the priesthood.

This resulted in my being invited to the United States to meet some I knew through email. After a fifty mile canoe trip with one couple in a Canadian wilderness I visited a group in Arizona who were reclaiming a sacred role for transsexuals inspired by the Gallae transgendered priestesses who were honouring the Goddess Cybelle at the time that Christianity was founded.

It was an intensive experience - partly because I had the most wonderful sexual encounter with one of the later group. Our love-making was ecstatic and gave me the strangest of feelings that it was beyond gender. It seemed to me to be an utterly exciting and transporting meeting of two people who had an enormous amount in common. I loved her hands, hips, and life sense. It was as if we could fertilise our souls. Over the next days I learnt much from her. She was the first transgendered priestess that I had met.

I wanted it not to be just a holiday romance although she was deeply committed to her life in Arizona and the other members of this group. The attraction between us was clearly mutual and so I set out to woe her. When we spoke together on the veranda a rainbow appeared. I laughingly pointed it out and said, "look, there is a good omen! We are meant to be together." She still resisted. Then came a humming bird, which hovered, between the branches of a tree. "Look, at that", I said, "surely that is another omen?" When she still resisted, I asked her what other signs did she need? "Would some lightning do?" The sky was then clear blue. There was no wind - but within 20 minutes a sudden storm broke with thunder and lightning. I could not but laugh. But our relationship was still not to continue. It was her decision. She was too much part of that place. I still remember her with love. She taught me there are so many ways of loving and that we all have extraordinary gifts to give to each other.

One night in Arizona we decided to have a Circle. I had learnt this is what they and members of the "Craft" called holding a ritual in a circular space created for that occasion. Circles had long been used for outdoor rituals. Aborigines in Australia used a "ringplace" or Boro Ring and in the UK there are of course "stone circles."

Before the Circle we singly went for a bath to purify and prepare ourselves. One of the group called out as I went, "Talk to your Lover". I am not quite sure what was meant - but alone in the bath, I called on my divine Lover and the thought came to mind of what I was to do in this circle.

We started by invoking the elements and asking them to help and protect us. The circle was then set up by drawing its perimeter. We then called to us and into us both the female and male aspects of Deity, uniting ourselves with every aspect of the Deity. We were then asked if we had anything specific that we wanted to work for. I responded by utterly and completely rededicating myself to my priesthood, as a priestess of the God and Goddess, as a lover who had a divine lover, as a person who was called from infanthood to the priesthood. This was a transfiguring moment in my life. This was no pre-set ritual but grew out of a moment of inspiration. Suddenly the priesthood was becoming very real again for me. I had not thought it would happen like this. It was utterly unexpected.

Shortly after this I visited some transsexual witches on the West Coast of the US. They took me into the redwoods and we celebrated together in ritual circles amid these vast warm and soft barked trees - and it was then that I learnt to add the aspect of warrior to the more widely used 3 aspects of Crone, Maid and Mother. Women in the Iron Age had realised they needed warrior Goddesses to protect themselves and thus dreamt the Morrigan. We too need that energy. I found that modern Witches called their sacred work "work" while Aborigines call it their "business". Both meant by this that they were working alongside the ancestors, spirits or deities to achieve an end, not "praying" for someone else to do it.

One hot and steamy Arizonian day I walked alone through the sequira cactus trees and prickly pear into a rocky valley where a stream danced over golden sands - and here I found the pawprints of a mountain lion or puma making this for me a place of absolute wonder and some fear. Where was she now I wondered as I picked my way downstream? This near meeting also felt most special and a blessing. The lioness, as a strong female animal that hunts with other females, speaks with power and is an archetype of power. I sometimes identified with her (as in my 'Cowardly Lioness story above). For those who honour Cybelle, it is a symbol of the power of female nature. Her chariot was depicted as pulled by lionesses. I felt one of these, one that was rebuilding her pride.

When I had to leave, my Arizonian lover gave me one last present. It was an ankle, an Egyptian sacred symbol like to a cross with a loop above it. And this small thing turned out to be unexpectedly useful. When I went to a bisexual woman's meeting back in London, a woman present noted that I was wearing this - and afterwards pulled out her own similar symbol and introduced herself. She told me she was part of a magical circle that met in Catbird, not far from where my boat was moored - and she warmly invited me to come along to meet the others to see if we could work together.

I thought these contacts with people who were calling themselves witches was strangely appropriate.. When I was a youthful follower of Christ I had learnt that one has to look for God among the poor and outcastes. I was now seemingly finding the Deity among the people who named themselves after the outcastes of Christianity. I knew that witchcraft had been thoroughly demonised by the Churches and even by pagan Rome - but I was willing to be open and find what there was for me to learn.

When I met with the Catford group it turned out to be a delight. After the many years I had spent working with Aborigines, it was wonderful to discover some among my own race with whom I shared so much. The group included young people that seemed extraordinarily dedicated, dancing with the energy of the earth and immersing themselves in our ancient mystical and magical traditions. I was happy to learn from them. I felt, tasted, it fitted the great pattern and so I decided that this was good and appropriate for me. It felt like a coming home, - as many others have told me when they found the Craft.

I found this reshaped modern Craft encouraged all to learn the arts of ritual making and to have the confidence to share these rites with one another. Their rites were composed within a tradition that drew from many ancient sources and did not require the approval of congresses of high priests and priestesses. With them ritual writing had become a sacred tool accessible to all and everyone in the circle was in the priesthood. Strangely, I had found a spiritual home where I may have never thought of looking,

As for the rumours that witchcraft was a form of devil worship, no one I met in the Craft believed in the devil. Our rituals were centred around honouring Nature and the Creating Deities under varying names. We learnt that if magic were used to harm others, this would be certain to rebound on us and hurt us far more than it hurt others.

Our rituals were happy, focused and often intense. The central focus was the raising of collective energy drawing from our bond with the Earth and the Deities. This energy was directed for a healing or some other similar purpose. In principle we were a circle of equals. The more experienced did not put on airs but taught the others by example and by answering questions. The aim was that we would all learn to work as part of a sacred priesthood - much as did the Gnostics. We had no mediators, no pretension. Our group used no titles. When I first joined, I marvelled at the focused attention with which the members harnessed their will and focused it to create a truly magical safe space. (. For those who have not experienced such rituals, there are some suggestions in the appendix to this book. Try these out, change them as needed, make them your own.)

When I had worked with Aborigines, my own path had been a private song sung in another's space. I felt myself to be their guest - although I was sure I was welcomed by the Ancestors as a child of our shared earth. In Australia as a guest who knew her birth place I had talked with the spirits, dreamt my own dreams - while giving my heart, my passion, to helping protect the and sacred earth that gave birth to the Aboriginal nations and that is slowly giving birth to a new nation as immigrants also began to learn from that same earth.

It was a thrill to discover after working with Aborigines that a similar pagan spirituality was not dead in Europe. It had found new life after many rumours among academics that it had died out centuries earlier. Margaret Murray a noted Egyptologist, in the 1930s wrote a book entitled "The God of the Witches" that depicted a male dominated Craft that she said had died out under persecution in the sixteenth century. Over 100 years earlier Jacobs Grimm in Deutsche Mythologie (Gottingen 1835) had argued that witch beliefs were lingering relics of a systematic pre-Christian Teutonic religion. Then in 1991 Ron Hutton wrote "The Pagan Religions of the British Isles" in which he maintained that Pagan religions died out still earlier back in the 1100s.

He did however throw in a caveat. Although he maintained pagan religions had died out, he said that practices that were "trivialities such as [at] the occasional [sacred] well or tree" had survived to modern times as folk or magical practices and rituals. Having made this distinction he declined to define 'religion', saying this was a work for theologians and philosophers. The Oxford Dictionary definition of "religion" is "a system of belief and worship". It gives no requirement that a religion includes a hierarchy or authority structure. Those practices that he dismissed as trivialities could be signs that a nature religion continued even if some of its adherents also followed a form of Christianity. His attack on Margaret Murray did not prove that a individualistic nature religion had not survived - all it showed was that there was little or no documentary evidence for a surviving coven based religion.

Later, in 1999, Ron Hutton wrote a further work, "The Triumph of the Moon: A history of Pagan Modern Witchcraft"", to answer, he said, some of the questions he had left open in the above work. In this he finally attempted to define the word "religion", by adopting the definition proposed by a relatively obscure writer, Sir Edward Taylor whom in 1871 defined "religion" as having essentially two elements; the belief in the existence of spiritual beings and the need of humans to form relationships with them p3.

Hutton then moved on to define the word "pagan". He first cast doubt on whether its modern meaning of a religion of nature had a firm foundation in antiquity by citing a couple of "authorities". The first had it mean a civilian outside the Christian army - a meaning that it could only have had in a Christian period. Hutton then said he would rather go with a later writer who had it mean "the rooted or old religion" of a "pagus" or locality. I have no great dispute with the latter. If one combined Hutton's adopted definitions, "pagan religion" could be said to be the rooted or old belief in local spiritual beings with whom humans attempted to form relationships. But this definition remained poor. Pagans have also developed relationships with universal spiritual beings or deities. Aborigines might call these in translation as 'All Father" or "All Mother". Paganism for me honours local spirits but is essentially a religion centred on the sacredness of nature. The sacred is not confined to another heavenly realm, or to consecrated localities but is a property of the whole of nature.

Why did Hutton, despite making the above definitions and despite his research findings that local beliefs in sacred places and nature spirits survived in Europe a into modern times, still maintain that a pagan religion did not survive in Western Europe beyond the 12th Century?

Perhaps his difficulty lay in a felt need to separate "Christian" from "Pagan" practices? If a vicar in a Derbyshire parish blesses a sacred well, keeping up a very ancient custom of honouring such places, is he being pagan or Christian? Perhaps the answer is that he is being both - that his system of belief is not strictly what came from Israel but now incorporates local Pagan elements ? If we look at the evidence of what happened when Christianity arrived in different cultures, it seems that religious veils of different shades can be put over pagan belief systems that arise from reverence for Nature and from instincts. Certainly the Protestant reformers of the Reformation thought this was so. They accused the Catholic Church of having incorporated too many pagan aspects. Likewise shamanism, while it has its most intense forms in certain ancient pagan societies, can coexist, according to Eliade, with other forms of magic and religion. p5

If no pagan religion or religious practices survived in Britain or Ireland for so many centuries, this would mean for me that in the British Isles nature ceased being venerated, that the old wells and paths died, that the inhabitants of these islands ceased to know their land, that this race ceased to do the work for which it had been created - and all my instincts shout and protest that this could never have been so. My instinct is that some among my ancestors never ceased to venerate this land and put their love and energy back into her. I feel this is what the land itself tells me.

For me it suffices that local healers, farmers, mystics, dreamers, spell-workers and others believed in the sacredness of nature and honoured her. My own research indicates that such a practice has never died - and by definition this comprised a religion. My own instincts would put this even stronger, that this is a religion that is innate in us as humans, that it is part of the very reason for our existence.

Dorleen Valiente, who died in 1999, maintained that the Craft originated from ancient shamanism. She was a noted writer on witchcraft and a practitioner who worked in the 1950s with Gerald Gardner in developing the rituals of the modern Craft or Wicca. In her works she gives many examples of how witches worked with animals as familiars - perhaps a practice not that far distant from the use of "power animals" and totems among other ancient indigenous societies? She believed that the stories of witches "flying" are closely paralleled by the Sami accounts of Shamans "flying" to the spirit realm. In both cases this could be an experience produced by mediation practices or even by the use of drugs such as the significantly named "magic mushroom."

Margaret Murray/s 1921 work entitled 'The Witch Cult in Western Europe" quoted witch-trial evidence to support her thesis that a horned God coven centred cult survived in Europe until the 17th Century. Her work has been much criticised by Ronald Hutton. He said she while she "ignored or misquoted evidence which indicated that the actions attributed to alleged witches were physically impossible. Or she rationalised it by suggesting, for example, that an illusion of flying was created by drugs". He maintained this "cast doubt on the truth of anything else claimed in these confessions." Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick in "A history of Pagan Europe" said she omitted from accounts of witch-trial testimony such "fantastic details such as shape shifting, flying through the air, making rideable horses out of straw and so on," Hutton further took to task other leading Pagan authors, such as Dorleen Valiente and Vivienne Crowley, for not investigating these criticisms of Murray in their works - while he himself did little more than baldly allege that other writers had demolished the Murray thesis.

I do not know if Murray distorted her account of a horned God cult. I have not read the witch-trial evidence that she quoted. But the basis of the above attack on her, which has much damaged her reputation, is not that she ignored contrary evidence but that the phrases she omitted from her quoted testimony were so fantastic that it would have discredited her witnesses if she had included it. These attacks on her relied principally on research by Norman Cohen whom went back to the original testimony and quoted it in a fuller form in his book: "Europe's Inner Demons".

The following are phrases he said she omitted:

"they (went) through at a little hole like bees and took the substance of the ale". These words could have inspired by authentic old European pagan beliefs. Cohen quoted elsewhere in the same book an ancient pagan belief that the followers of the Goddess sometimes flew through the air with her to bless the earth and would enter houses through cracks and keyholes and bless good families. He pointed out as a possible modern derivative of this the modern myth of Father Christmas coming down chimneys to bless good children.

Cohen also mentioned the following: "The Devil was with them in the shape of a great horse and they decided on the sinking of a shipÉ The devil would be like a heifer, a bull, a deer , a roe or a dogÉ and he would hold up his tail while we kissed his arse". Such elements are very common in witch-trial testimonies. They seem to relate to a surviving animism in which powerful spirits were seen as inhabiting the bodies of different creatures - and to the magistrate's belief in the power of the devil. It is hard to imagine that "kissing his arse" was not a response made with a very wry humour to a question about worshipping the devil.

He also quoted; "All the coven did fly like cats, jackdaws, hares and rooks É rode on a horse that we would make of a straw or a beanstalk. " - one that one of the witches turned herself into a horse to carry members of the group. Again this can relate to an authentic and Europe- wide folk-belief in the possibility of flying - both to do evil magic and to do good magic. This may be based on experiences when in trance or using drugs. Likewise shape-shifting into various animal or bird forms has a long and illustrious history in Celtic folklore.

He also quoted one quite terrible testimony. It was that one of the accused dug up the corpse of a baby to eat some of its flesh. This was done, it was said, to make it certain that the group would have to keep its existence secret. None could betray the others, for all were equally guilty. This testimony is feasible - although it should be remembered that accusations of cannibalism have been falsely levelled at many persecuted groups including the early Christians and the Jews.

Finally, he quoted the following as omitted by Murray. "I was in the Downie-hills and got meat from the Queen of Fairie, more than I could eat. The Queen of Fairie is bravely clothed in white linen." This again is a well established and very old folk belief. "Downie Hills" or "fairy mounds" were said to be the homes of the "Little Folk". They were lead by Queens or Goddesses. At least one Goddess was said to be clad in White - Bride or Bridget. In her memory "Brides" wear white to this day.

Another critic of Margaret Murray was Keith Thomas in "Religion and the Decline of Magic." He quoted Murray as saying: "the only explanation of the numbers of witches who were legally tried and put to death in Western Europe is that we are dealing with a religion which was spread over the whole continent." He dismissed this by saying: "the absence of any organisation, co-operation, continuity or common ritual among witches makes it impossible to speak with Margaret Murray of a "witchcraft" let alone of the "old religion." (p515-525). However, he demanded here a higher degree of organisation than is necessary for a religion. He also focussed on the evidence for a continuing Coven centred religion rather than for a continuing nature religion. He also maintained; "accused witches had no demonstrable links with a pagan past."

However Thomas' world view was very different from that held at the time of the witch-trials. I quote here Normal Cohen. "the early church already regarded all magical practices as manifestions of paganism É" Thus for the Church authorities it did not matter if the magic were beneficial. The Ancya Synod as long ago as 314CE imposed a penalty for curing sickness by occult means. Such decisions became part of western canon law.

It perhaps is a shame that Margaret Murray did not quote more in full. It need not have weakened the case for the survival of pagan beliefs. But she was no expert in the old Shamanic practices nor on all relevant folk traditions. However Carlo Ginsburg, in "Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath", (A historian Hutton described as "brilliant"), has since linked the stories of witches' sabbat or gatherings back to ancient shamanic traditions.

Further light is cast by a recent study of a medieval Grimore in "Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the 15th Century" (Richard Kieckhefer Pen, State Univ. 1999). This book contains directions for creating such illusions as "flying horses" - perhaps like the flying straw horses mentioned above. Kieckhefer commented that these illusion spells done for entertainment sadly "become sources of Boschian nightmares of the witch-trials."

This grimoire is typical of many others that have survived from this period. The other kinds of spells mentioned in the grimoire are psychological - intended to have an impact on the thoughts or imaginations of others - and divinatory using a mirror, crystal or a polished finger-nail! Spirits were asked for information but they were not commanded to do any task. It detailed several ways to set up magical circles to protect and to focus energy. Exorcisms were also of interest - as they were to the church at that time.

Perhaps the material Murray is said to have omitted was further evidence for the survival of a nature centred religion? In some cases it might point to a link between the Craft and old shamanic practices. Dorleen Valiente, a noted writer on witchcraft and a practitioner since at least the 1950s when she co-authored many of today's witchcraft rituals with Gerald Gardner, stated at the 1998 Pagan Federation conference in London that she believed the modern Craft was spiritually based on the continuing shamanic tradition of the British Isles. She extensively quoted sources telling of how witches worked with animals as familiars - perhaps a practice not that far distant from the use of "power animals" and totems among ancient indigenous societies. She believed that the "flying" is closely paralleled by the Sami accounts of Shamans "flying" to the spirit realm. She said this could be an experience produced by mediation practices or even by the use of certain drugs such as the significantly named "magic mushroom."

The practices that survived in the countryside influenced the "spellcraft" of the modern Craft, for people such as Dorleen Valiente and Gerald Gardner were assiduous students of "natural magic" practices and wrote much about them - as have other modern witches such as Raymond Buckland with his books on "Gypsy Magic". For them it was an essential study for a Craft that both venerated and worked with nature. This is not to say that Christians did not also study spellcraft. The Churches' official recognition of miracles, holy objects and of "prayer-power" was also in effect a recognition of the spiritual energy that partly inspired pagan magic - and of course there were and are many Christians who continued to honour nature.

There are many records of a surviving pagan religiosity in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. As mentioned, Hans Kung held that the witchtrials gave witness to surviving pagan beliefs. In 1589 the effigy of a pagan god with its priest was brought to London from Wales where many pilgrims had honoured it. Both were burnt at the stake. On hundred years later, in 1677, the French Catholic Church found it had to forbid the honouring of pagan gods and the holding of lunar festivals - a ritual particularly associated with women and with witchcraft. (p103-4) The church authorities condemned: "those believing that because women worship the moon, they can draw the hearts of men towards the Pagans." In "Capitularia Regum Francorum, published in Paris in 1677 listed woodland huts serving as pagan sanctuaries and water springs serving as "sites of sacrifice." (Q in. p 102) In Brittany in the 17th century shrines were kept by senior women who taught "the rites of Venus" to young women. This included instruction in shamanistic practices.

In Scotland some pagan religious practices survived at least until recent times. In 1656 the Dingwall Presbytery denounced the local "heathenish" practice of sacrificing bulls to Mourie. (P105) and of pouring milk on certain hills. In 1860 Sir A. Mitchell reported that people were still spoke of the god Mourie. Nearby, on the island of Maelrubha in Lock Maree, a sacred oak, festooned with gifts of ribbons and buckles stood was next to a healing well that was seemingly under the care of a pagan priesthood when, in 1774, Thomas Pennant witnessed its rites. Some ceremonies have continued until today - such as pouring milk as a libation in a holy hollowed stone known as the Leac na Gruagach - Gruagach being a Goddess symbolising anciently the sacred cow that looks after humans - and cows.

Despite the theories of academics that all pagan religions died out in the UK, there are also recent accounts of a surviving pagan religiosity or religion in parts of the British countryside. The beliefs of some in the Pennine valleys are recorded in Twilight of the Celtic Gods -David Clarke with Andy Roberts, It quoted a local, Blandford, as claiming: 'I come from a very old tradition if the learning passed down through the families is to be believed, my maternal grandmother was responsible for passing on the teachings ...I was slowly eased into the fundamental belief of our tradition, that the land is sacred. And to that end we thought of ourselves as stewards, guardians of the areas where our family dwelt., Many ordinary countryfolk knew of our knowledge of plants and animals and certain members of our family would help them... this just seemed to be accepted and expected' "... we revere, and stand in awe of, the powers that create and sustain us and the world ...To us being alive and part of the body of the mother was worship for us.. The powers that we held in awe were locked inside the landscape, inherent in the power of the weather and manifest in the changing of the seasons and in the end they in turn ran through us. It was nothing complicated, nothing supernatural, and to me at least, the way people are supposed to live... The fells were seen as places of the goddess and the high moors, rocky scars and peaks such as the Beacon were the places of the male power. The core of the old faith was the constant coming together of these two, whether it be in the creation of human or animal life"

Blandford did not call himself a witch. He thought the word meant something quite different to his own practice. He wrote: "I've never met a witch and from what I've heard about them I am not sure I want to. I know some old books on the Dales refer to some local characters as being witches... but they were not witches; if anything the label 'wise woman' or 'wise man' was more strictly true." But members of the Craft that I have come to know and love could have written what he described above. Names such as witch, wise woman and saint may describe the same person seen through the eyes of different people.

Ronald Hutton documented in his 1999 work "The Triumph of the Moon" various kinds of magical practitioners found in the British Isle from the 1700s up until modern times. He plays particular attention to those called "cunning folk" in Wales, Southern England and the Midlands. (p85) By his account of them, their magic was directly descended the "high magic" of the Middle Ages described above (Thurs. p). This Christian inspired magic was centred on gaining power over demons and expelling them in the name of the Holy Trinity from people, animals or places. This work was probably reflected in their Welsh and Cornish names. Folklorists believed their Welsh name "dyn hysbys" or Cornish equilivalent "peller" meant "expeller" of demons.(p85). The dominance of High Magic was reflected in this period by the definition of magic made by Sir James Taylor - "practices designed to bring spiritual or supernatural forces under the control of human agents" (H. p67)

I have mentioned how in the Middle Ages High Magic was an pursuit of the literate elite who based their work around magical text books called grimoires Hutton cites many examples of British "cunning folk" living in isolated villages but with similar grimoires. Some used the very same books as were used in the Middle Ages such as the Lesser Key of Solomon. These books were often seen as vested with quite frightening powers.

To this High Magic many practitioners joined elements of the traditional "low magic" of the countryside. They used herbs, made love- charms, lifted or imposed curses and told fortunes. They were also sometimes known as "wise woman" or "wise man". They would however deny that they were "witches". For them a "witch" was the cartoon creature of the persecutions. Cunning Folk, who were mostly men, often saw witches as evil woman who practised black magic, often in alliance with a demon. They were very careful to keep themselves removed from this target of persecution. They would offer spells to protect their customers against witches. James "Cunning" Murray would proudly say he was 'the Devil's master" as he specialised in countering the demonic spells of "witches".87

In Northern Wales, on the island of Mons (Anglesey), secretive "circles" existed for much of the 20th Century, as verified by the otherwise sceptical historian, Ronald Hutton, but which he admits are possibly much older. (RH303-4) The members of these circles called themselves part of the "Old Religion". They met at ancient megaliths and sacred lakes, casting into the latter sacred leaves and offerings. In their rites they used carved stone heads as symbols of the Gods. These rites were presided over by elected women leaders whom some locals considered to be "witches".

Wales, like much of Britain, is still rich with sacred wells. For example there the "Virtuous Well" at Trellick, south of Monmouth and west of the river Wye in Wales. It is signposted, in sight of a well used road and immediately surrounded by a small paved walled court with niches for offerings. The thorn trees overhanging it were festooned with ribbons, lace and rags, some old, some new, when I visited.

`The BBC Chronicle team in 1977 leaned that, in certain Pennine valleys, Beltaine fires were lit on farms and flowers put on springs and stone heads carved and buried. They reported a strong belief in a mother goddess and a male horned god, leader of the wild hunt. P45 Dorleen Valiente, who practised witchcraft from the early 1950s, told of how a man took on the role within some covens that symbolised this God. She knew him as The Man in Black (this seems to me like a dramatic re-naming of clergy - whom I remember as a child as always being men in black.). This role may be related to The Man in Black that Margaret Murray said she learnt of through studying the records of 17th century witch-trials that claimed that he was the "devil". Valiente described him as having the political role of making sure one or more covens were safe - and said that he was sometimes safeguarded by having powerful friends in the Secret Societies (see page X in Thurs.) and at Court. Certainly he was rarely arrested. Nowadays she said this role is symbolically taken, not by a man, but by a stang, a staff crowned with horns, placed in the ground by the entrance to a magical circle. As we are here dealing with oral traditions, it is difficult to verify any account.

The 20th Century establishment of "Wiccan" or "witchcraft" practice had by the end of the century many tens of thousands of followers. This was based on a combination of factors. It was a creative act initially by small numbers of people who wove together some of the ritual craft of the secret societies with a very fresh emphasis on the sacredness of nature and on the female aspect of the Divine. It was gnostic in that it believed in inner wisdom and did not rely on any external inspiration or revelation.

The image of the village witch is now set in our folklore - but the lineage of modern Craft and Wiccan practices is far wider. While the "spellcraft" of the modern Craft is directly linked to the traditional magic of the countryside, its 'ritualcraft" owes much to a wealth of ritual knowledge that has been processed, decayed, been reborn and refined over centuries, that may well have been originally inspired by shamanic practices but which more immediately came as well from Renaissance, Greek, Egyptian and Celtic practices. (See Thurs.)

Inspiration can come from many sources in a religious and magical path that does not believe in an authoritarian approach and does not believe it possess the whole of the truth. Thus the wisefolk of the countryside and towns were accustomed to studying the Craft partly by looking at how others did their magic. Hutton noted that many a famous British practitioner of magic in the 18th and 19th Century was constantly ordering books! This is still the case today.

Gerald Gardner in the mid-Twentieth Century developed his ideas on ritual magic while working with a resourceful group associated with the Rosicrucian Theatre in the New Forest and with friends in Freemasonry, Co-Masonry and in modern Druidry, while also studying the traditional magic of the countryside. He drew material from the Renaissance grimoires known as "The Keys of Solomon" (such as his blessings for salt and water), from the Alchemic knowledge of magical societies such as Golden Dawn, perhaps also from tantric sex knowledge he had from his years in the East, as well as from matter passed on from the Freemasons (such as the use of a rope tow and a pointed weapon before entrance to First Degree initiation - a compass pointed at the chest for the Freemasons, a sword or dagger for Gardner.) His British sources had in their turn learnt from the secret magical orders of the Renaissance whom in their turn drew from more ancient sources such as gnostic, neo-platonic, Alchemic and Greek initiatory mysteries. One chant used supposedly came from the Troubadour movement that had inspired the Beguines. The modern Wicca movement drew much on Gardner as well as on such gifted poets and ritualists as Dorleen Valiente - and through them thus crafted rituals from a wealth of sources.

The modern Craft thus weaves together in an ever renewed way elements that have been part of the gnostic tradition, the ancient mystery initiatory traditions and which in their turn may well have drawn from still older shamanic tribal wisdom. By the 21st Century Druid, Wiccan, Old Religion and witch rituals shared many sources of inspiration, There was no bible, no defined Creed, no Book of Shadows that set up a pattern that could not be broken. Each circle span what worked for it together, constantly learning from each other. There was much pooling of inspiration. They shared a religion where the creativity of the human spirit was celebrated. I think it is helping to create and inspire the new rituals needed for our age.

All of these traditions had in common a belief that nature was holy. Together they make up much of the western mystical tradition

To speak of my own experience of this ritual Craft. - in our rituals we often call the God or Goddess into a member of our circle, so this person becomes for us the symbol of the real divine presence among us. The priest or priestess will sometimes then speak in the name of divinity. This can be spontaneous but sometimes we used the "Charge of the Goddess" written by Dorleen Valiente.

In part this reads:

"I who am the beauty of the green Earth and the white Moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters and the desire of the heart of man, call unto thy soul, arise and come unto me, for I am the Soul of Nature who giveth life to the universe. From me all things proceed and unto me all things must return and before my face, beloved of gods and men, thine innermost divine self shall be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite. Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices, for behold all acts of love and pleasures are my rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And thou who thinkest to seek for me, know thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not, unless thou knowest the mystery that if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee, for behold, I have been with thee from the beginning and I am that which is attained at the end of desire."

In our circle sometimes a male would invoke the Goddess within him or a female the God within her. All of us have both polarities within us. I found that when I called the other energy, the male, the God, then there was an excitement and a creative force within me that did not come when I simply invoked the Goddess, who did not complement me but was me.

Sometimes there might come laughter and some chaos into our rituals. This particularly happened when we invited some members of a group called "The Temple of the Midnight Bimboes" to join with us in ritual. They were a seriously magical group that thoroughly enjoyed ritual play. Another time was when, instead of invoking the "Archangel of the South" to protect our circle, I said by mistake the "Archbishop of the South!" I had an immediate vision of a furious archbishop in full regalia, apoloxic with rage at being summoned to protect a pagan circle - and we all collapsed with laughter.

I had now learnt at last that I did not need the approval of a bishop or pope in order to practice openly as a priestess. Fundamentally my priesthood rested on the commitment I had made to my Deity. I now had at last found people with whom I could be the priestess - for in the modern Craft all who are initiated are in the priesthood. The Craft thus re-empowered me by giving me a clearer understanding of my inner power, the gift we all have from our Creatrix.

My feeling of coming home was reinforced when I discovered that the mystic marriage was central to the initiations given within the Craft. I learnt that these initiations were not necessary for the practice of the Craft, that many witches do not use them - especially those who work by themselves or who are in the older family traditions - but that they are excellent teaching tools and are now a part of the practice of the Wiccan coven tradition.

I learnt the First Initiation had at its core a commitment between the Initiate and the Goddess and God like to that of a handfasting, or a couple's engagement. The Third Initiation is a celebration of the marriage or the complete and utter bonding between the initiate and deity. These two initiations are in the ancient mystic marriage tradition, kept alive by mystics and, in an asexual way, in the monastic tradition but now celebrated again in these modern covens in perhaps something of the same exultant spirit as infused the ancient Eleusian Mysteries of Greece.

I was told that the Second initiation is different in character from the other two. It is given when a person is starting to teach the craft or run another coven and needs the support of the Deities. It's ritual is based on another part of the Grecian and Middle Eastern initiatory Mysteries in which the initiates descended into the underworld, died to this world and were reborn. - 380.. 381 picturesquely described.

The group I joined suited me particularly for it encompassed members of many different sexual or gender paths. We had straight heterosexual, gay and lesbian and bisexual members - and myself of many labels. We saw all forms of sexuality as sacred and divine. We called ourselves the Rainbow Tree circle or coven in honour of our many coloured ways, of the Tree of Celtic Wisdom and the Tree of the Qabbalah,

Initially some pagan beliefs made me stop and reconsider my own beliefs. One was that there could be (but need not be) more than one god or goddess. I had grown up to take for granted that there could only be one god and one creator. At first I thought perhaps the many pagan names for deities were simply names for aspects of the one ineffable Godhead. But then I thought of the wealth of spirits with which I had grown up. My parents called them angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim - using the ancient Hebraic classification. Perhaps some of them were also able to create? If they were able, would that make them much the same as the Grecian lesser gods? Why should the only intelligent creative beings be either humans or members of a Trinity? Many among the gnostic Christians held in common with Plato and the pagan Greeks that creating spirits they called lesser gods and goddesses emanated from one ineffable supreme Godhead. In the first centuries of this era angels were said to have bodies. Around 800 CE they were said to be able to shape shift. But by the time of Thomas Aquinas they had been refined to be creatures of pure will and pure intellect

In my pathworking and meditations I experience one Creating Energy whom I know as my Lover, Creator and Sustainer. For this I used to say "he", I now prefer to say "she" as this energy is a birthing power, but ultimately I know he and she are both one. Perhaps they are one in themselves, perhaps as part of Kether, the ultimate ineffable energy. I gender-shift in my imagery as I call on either of the two interlocked gender energies, thus the confusion of pronouns in the book! I do not yet know if my Lover is part of a galaxy of loving and united Deities who share the work of Creation, if she shares the common divine energy of the One - or if she is the one person who created all. Such distinctions may be ultimately meaningless for me - for She is all I need to complete me, but I like to think of her as part of a family. I call this Energy either God and Goddess in this book - but for me she is Hermaphrodite - for she is me and I am her and she is both inside and outside me - and she has for me as many guises as has a flake of snow.

An Aboriginal friend and writer, Kevin Gilbert, who had a wry sense of humour and much wisdom, explained that his people believed that in the beginning; "the great Creative Essence of Life, the Creator, had filled the land with creative spirits and in a transmorphosis these spirits took on physical shapes and became the progenitors of the modern animals or earthworms we see today." These creative spirits the people knew as their Ancestors.

The Jewish and early Christian Gnostics had to deal with the problem of a Jehovah who was said to have authorised racial pogroms and genocidal wars. Their answer was that this Old Testament God was clearly a lesser God who had come from the higher God, a demiurge, who was not perfect but suffered from jealousy, male chauvinism and made mistakes in creating. It was he, they said, who invented the Garden of Eden myth to justify the subjection of women to men, the pain of childbirth and who turned a blessed garden into a vale of tears. But I thought there was an easier answer; that much of the Old Testament was written by Hebrew priests who were attempting to justify their people's misdeeds by claiming that they were but obeying God.

For me, the wonderful balance and symmetry of creation demands a Creator or Creatrix, one or more, that also live in a wonderful balance and symmetry. There may one or a trinity or even a galaxy of divine persons. They could be emanating from one divine Godhead or be of equal status. Just as we are individuals who can love, I feel the creating energy is full of a similar personal energy. My own experience is of a divine person who is big enough to be part of the making of a universe and small enough to want to relate to me.

There is an alternative view that behind the history of our universe is the story of unconsciousness becoming conscious and self-aware. In this myth, we are the brain-cells that help make the universe self conscious. Carl Jung in his later writings spoke of his life as a process of an unconsciousness that we have accumulated during over a million years of our evolution becoming conscious in each one of us through dreams and visions. I know I too am enriched by such an internal process, but I think the hand of the architect so visible in our world is not that of an awakening giant who only now is becoming self-aware - nor that of an architect living apart from the world.

For me the dynamism of our universe, within and without us, is directed at more than achieving consciousness. Beyond this it is centred on achieving a relationship of love. We are a creation that needs love for its completion. We humans can find our completion in knowing our creator as our lover. We are a creation that is becoming united in love with its creator.

We celebrated this in the coven. A vital part of every weekly ritual for the group I joined was a quiet "path-working" period when we mediated after completing the more active part of the ritual. This provided a space where the Gods or Goddesses could talk to us and work with us. Most covens have this practice.

Each pathworking commenced with one of us telling a short story, taking the group from the circle, through a gate, and then perhaps a forest, to a place where the God or Goddess in some form was waiting for us. Then about 20-30 minutes of silence we would be returned to the circle. We would then bless cakes and wine and while sharing this would also share what each had experienced in the pathworking. One of the first things I learnt was how when we had a particularly wonderful ritual, we all would see in our minds eye much the same. It was as if our minds swam in a common pool.

We often used in pathworking a tool developed by Jewish mystics called the Tree of Life or Qabbalah which depicts divine energy as flowing through spheres from the highest ineffable place to the earth and back again. This has long been used in magical circles. We would be taken by the person leading the pathworking through the same imaginary gate and forest but we would finish up in a place infused with the energy of a particular sphere - or aspect of the spiritual path.

I had long practised meditation. But this was different in that it trusted the imagination and actively encouraged its use. We did not fear imagination as a source of distraction. Rather for us it was a divine faculty that we could use to travel into other realms, with which we could be creative, with which we could dream stories that came from deep within. I now cannot imagine not trusting my imagination. It is the ship that has been given to me to take me to the secret worlds. Imagination is when the heart and mind see together.

On of the greatest of modern Christian mystics, the monk Thomas Merton blamed the Christian religious institutions for abandoning imagination, symbolism, enchantment and the sacred. He wrote a poem about this called "The Lion":

William Butler Yeats expressed a similar sentiment.

But I thought that there was no need to be so sad. The world of imagination and magic was still alive even if not within the establishment. Arcady lived. The horses raced the sky. As we created with our imagination, we shared in the divine creation. Creating this world was not something that simply happened at the beginning. It is something that is constant. Creation is the sustaining energy of our earth. When we create a painting, a book, a poem, a machine, a building, then we are putting our own energy into the divine creation. That is why it is so important that all acts of creation are in tune with the magic of our universe.

For we can also create badly, poorly, with ill will or hatred, and when we do, then our universe suffers. We can create demons that haunt us. But how can we complain? We do not want to lose our creativity for without it we are not really human. Being human carries a truly terrible responsibility.

I do not think our world is doomed because of our mistakes - I see Nature as very capable. I think she will create the children she needs and give them the understanding needed. I see this happening. I also think that the Creatrix sometimes gives us parts to play in previously devised myths that helps to shape our lives and history - but more about this later.

Imagination is for me a wonderful transforming, fun, delightful faculty. In my own people's history, it gave many tools to our early bards, poets, mystics and shamans. One of these was shape shifting. The great Gaelic visionary bards and poets talked of shifting from experiencing life as a human to experiencing it as salmon, hawk and stag. (So too do some Australian Aborigines) These experiences came from their sense of being one with nature. Bonded with nature, thus one with the Deity or Deities of Nature, we too are one with all that is, was and will be - and we know ourselves as sitting in a cobweb in which all life is woven together.

This oneness with nature was used for protection. The Scots did this through a chant called a "fith-fath" (pronounced "fee fawh") l in which the subject take on another guise for protection, drawing from the energy of many creatures. A Scots Gaelic example is:

The Celtic bard, druid or witch may also ask other creatures for help such as a hawk for insight or for sharp eyes to find the missing. They might then in thanksgiving, sing a song celebrating the Divine Creation, or Gaia, returning to Her the sustaining gifts of energy and of song. I wrote the following after an ecstatic experience of oneness with my Lover Creatrix.

Aboriginal clans have a similar relationship with totemic animals or birds. In Central Australia an Aboriginal camping ground might look as if the various family camps are pitched at random. But if you looked down at it from above with an eagle's eyes, you would see that they have set out their various camps on the pattern of the footprint of their totem - thus if their totem is the emu, there would be one camp on each claw. In Alice Springs an Aboriginal housing estate has its houses sited on this same principle (after much opposition from the town council.).

When the police came into one Aboriginal camp to shoot its dogs - saying that this camp had too many dogs; they were astonished to be told by elders that their shooting had made some children very ill. They learnt this clan had as its totem the dog - and thus could not kill a dog without damaging its health. The elders invited a leading police officer to spend time with them learning of the "dog dreaming". After this the police stopped threatening to kill the dogs and instead provided veterinary services.

I believe that animal kind evolved along with us. If we cannot speak to them, listen to them, then how will we ever cope with aliens from other planets! One modern theory of evolution has modern humans co-evolving with their dogs. The dogs helped shape us - making us develop talents they needed while we dropped talents that we no longer needed since dogs provided them for us such as a keen nose and protective claws and teeth. When my dog licks me in the morning, enjoying the salt on my skin, even my bare skin seems to assist in this dog-human bonding.

All ancient cultures honoured what they saw as an essential link between humans and the rest of creation. The ancient cultures of the British Isles and Eire did so - just as do the Aboriginal. If our bodies remembered when we were embryos that we were once fish some millions of years ago by briefly growing gills, if our bodies similarly remember in the womb when we were animals with tails, briefly growing tails then losing them, then the old Celtic wisdom that we have memories of being these creatures is not so very strange. (I use Celtic here to describe the ancient culture of our islands as it was when written records began - influenced by other Celtic cultures in Europe but not dominated by them.)

Our practice of invoking the elements is not unique to modern paganism. It is part of a common pagan and Christian heritage. One of the rediscovered 1,800 year old gnostic Christian texts, "The Gospel according to Philip", wrote of the four elements of earth, water, air and light:

"Farming in the world requires the co-operation of four essential

elements. A harvest is gathered into the barn only as a result of the

natural action of water, earth, wind and light. God's farming likewise

has four elements - faith, hope, love, and knowledge. Faith is our

earth, that in which we take root. And hope is the water through which

we are nourished. Love is the wind through which we grow. Knowledge,

then, is the light through which we ripen...

 

"It is from water and fire that the soul and the spirit came into being.

It is from water and fire and light that the son of the bridal chamber

(came into being). The fire is the chrism; the light is the fire. I am

not referring to that fire which has no form, but to the other fire whose

form is white, which is bright and beautiful, and which gives beauty."

Most Craft circles invoke fire instead of light - but both are aspects of the sun. The text also shows the mystical "bridal chamber" is as part of the gnostic teachings of Christ as it is of the Hebrew Wisdom literature and the Mysteries initiatory tradition of Greece. It is a reference to the Mystic Marriage.

Just as not all Church teachings honour Nature, neither do all magical teachings. There is another tradition of Magic that did not attract me for it seeks power over spirits, to command nature including spirits. It is a form of what some call "High Magic" distinguishing it from paths that work "low" magic with nature. For me, I must be Nature. I wrote a verse to express this.

The Craft uses as tools objects that can serve as a focus for our energy and rituals. This is especially important for those in the Wiccan path. There sometimes include ceremonial tools such as White Handled Knives, Black Handled knives called Athames, brooms and even jewelled swords. These are not in the least bit essential but can serve as an expression of our love for our Craft by embodying our own or the community's very best skills in metal working or woodcraft.

But in one pathworking, I found myself lead by the stag, Herne, deep into a wood until we came across an open and somewhat muddy area. Here Herne nosed at a stick lying upon the ground and I was given to understand that this was my appropriate wand. Through this I would join myself to the power of the wood. He then indicated a pool of water lying in a basin in a forked tree trunk. There was my water for blessing and scrying. Finally he pawed at the muddy earth. This was to be my Pentacle, my Earth, and the source of my magic. Since then, when working a ritual in a forest, I will seek the piece of wood that will link me best with the energy of that forest - I take great care in this search. Likewise, when I invoke earth, I will knee, kiss the earth and if possible pick up a handful of earth or a particular rock to honour this within the circle. Sometimes we pass the earth from one another welcoming it with kisses.

Likewise the witch's broomstick has important significance. It is an ordinary part of any household - and it is for me an instrument of female power - not a phallic symbol, as some would have it. The wise woman uses it to keep her space clear, to keep out dirt and bad magic. It is a symbol for her power over the dirt of life. It is symbolically used in rituals both to cleanse the space to be used for a sacred circle and also as a symbolic "fairy" gate into a new life and household. Thus handfasted couples sometimes jump over a broomstick.

Some covens call themselves Gardnarian or Alexandrian. One of the two founders of our group had trained and initiated in all the degrees of the Gardnarian tradition of the Craft - but then went his own way when he encountered a Craft group that was not so tolerant sexually. I was thus a little apprehensive when I was invited to meetings of other covens - but to my delight I did not meet with anything but acceptance - and found many a coven with which I shared a common magic. It seemed that in the forest that is the Craft, many covens had been growing in similar ways.

Gardnarian Craft is named after one of the first to describe publicly the workings of a coven after the repeal in the 1950s of the final remnants of the anti-witchcraft laws. This was a retired civil servant, a Gerald Gardner. He did so first through the means of a novel -and, when this went well, he published books that openly taught a form of witchcraft. - much to the dismay of people who preferred the safety of keeping all such things private. His published versions of rituals wove many elements together from different sources - and inspired many to explore the Craft.

It was a timely initiative. People were looking for ways to rediscover the old European nature religion. Soon this grew into an open Craft practice. At first this was still overlain by aspects of the patriarchal society that surrounded it. Thus this version of the Craft became named after two of its leading male practitioners, Gardner himself and a man called Alexander. It was not called after the women of the Craft, such as Dorleen Valiente who composed many much loved invocations, despite it being a religious path that honoured womankind. It was also later called Wicca - a word ironically meaning "male witch"; "wicce" being the word for female witch.

I found that the flexibility of the coven I first joined was not shared by all. Some were more like the Churches or perhaps Freemasonry in that they had frozen their rituals composed around the 1950s and 1960s into one format that essentially never changed. They would repeat their loved words and rituals, putting their energy into the same forms, charging these with their magic. This was a change from the original intention and practice of the founders of Wicca, Gerald Gardner and Dorleen Valiente, who had hoped the rituals they helped create, would inspire others to do as they did. Some of their followers instead treated these rituals, not just as beautiful and to be treasured, but as sacrosanct and never to be changed. This was reinforced when books were subsequently published with titles such as "The Witches Bible".

I had quit a Christian priesthood tradition with a lineage going back the greater part of two millennia - so I was not too impressed when I heard of witches who boasted on a "lineage" going back 30 years to Gardner. I could understand and appreciate why they might wish to honour their teachers, but I could not see how such boasting would benefit the craft. I thought Gardner would have been horrified at this practice. The proudest lineage any witch can have is from Mother Earth.

Des, a witch who trades gypsy ponies, in 1999 told me when I visited them in County Cork how Gardner initiated him into the Craft when he was but a teenager. He had an out-of-body experience when helping Gardner at the Museum of Witchcraft in the Isle of Man. When he came to, he found Gardner was there for him, supporting and looking after him. Afterwards Gardner suggested that this experience might mean that he needed what the Craft could give him. Gardner then took him by the hands and led him through a simple rite of dedication as his First Degree initiation. This rite had none of the trappings of binding, blindfolding or of swords (as depicted in Hollywood movies and done in many Wiccan covens). Des then went through the other initiations with a priestess who worked with Gardner - but he has never called himself a Gardnarian witch but simply a muddy seated witch. He emphatically told me that Gardner did not want anyone to copy him - he just wanted to share with others and to help empower them

Another aspect of the emerging modern Craft was the teaching of the "threefold law." This is that if one does harmful magic, the harm will be returned to you threefold. This is sometimes taught in a way that motivates solely through fear of punishment - an ethic I had rejected as a child. Dorleen Valiente, with whom Gardner once worked magic, has stated that this was not an old law but was written in her time. It may however be good 'headology". It can deter efforts to do harm. But a sounder basis for Craft ethics lies in the witch and mystic belief that we are one with all around us - thus, if we hurt others (including the plants and animals) then we are hurting someone bonded to us, part of our own family - and thus hurting ourselves.

Another "in-between" aspect of the emerging Craft was the idea of some that the Third Degree celebration of the Mystic Marriage is best done between a priest and priestess, as it was a celebration of fertility. But fertility in nature is not limited to heterosexual means! All forms of this ritual, whether done alone or with a partner of either gender, symbolise the essence of this ritual, which for me is a celebration and realisation of the union between the human and deity. This is the source of our spiritual fertility. It can be equally expressed by gay or straight love. Most covens are today very open to all aspects of love.

This stress on the heterosexual goes back far. According to hostile Christian sources, the Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated for millennia in Greece had at its heart a ritual coupling of the high priest and priestess. Bishop Asterius of Amaseia just before the Eleusian Mystery temples were destroyed by Christians at the end of the 5th Century, alleged that during 'the descent into darkness", what happened was '"the venerated congress of the Heirophant and the Priestess, of him alone with her alone" and that the initiates regarded what was done "by the two in the darkness is their salvation." (Ref. 382 Myths). A sacred celebration of human sexuality was obviously revolting to him.

What did happen was sealed in oaths of secrecy, but the few published pagan comments talk of symbolic acts such as eating and drinking the sacred food, of a sacred drama enacted in near darkness to recall the Goddess of spring from the underworld of winter and a final calling on the rain to fertilise the earth. Through this rite the initiates experienced symbolically the death of winter darkness, their own rebirth and their oneness through the sacred food with the divine. The rite concluded with the rebirth of the divine son, seen symbolically as a head of wheat.

The bishop of course may have been right in his description of part of this rite. Even if so, it is good to celebrate human sexuality. In earlier centuries even St Paul saw the bonding of humans as a sacred symbol of God's union with the community. Nowadays in the Craft a sexual union is sometimes privately ritually celebrated by a regular couple as a way of celebrating the union of divinity with humanity - thus adding another deeper celebration to that which they did on their marriage day. In this celebration the woman is again the Bride - but now explicitly representing the Goddess or the Sacred Earth. On this day the man is the male God in his joining with the sacred female Earth. For me obviously such a rite can be done whenever both desire it and a suitable occasion comes.

In the Renaissance period, the members of the magical orders, forced to be secret because of the Church's opposition, included alchemists who celebrated this same union between genders as a process that was likely to produce the "gold" of alchemic transformation by for a moment lifting the couple to a knowledge of a divine ecstasy. At their climax, male and female for a moment knew what it was to be bonded into one being, to be beyond male and female, to be the Deity beyond gender, to know what it was to be, as some put it, the sacred Hermaphrodite. (Ref. poem on p.)

Hildergard of Bingen, the forerunner of the Beguine of the 11th Century, wrote: "It is the power of eternity itself that has created physical union and decreed that two human beings should become physically one." The Alchemic text called "The Crowne of Nature" has the alchemic couple: "wrapped in each other's arms in the bliss of connubial union merge and dissolve as they come to the goal of perfection. They that are two are made one, as though of one body." (Q in Johannes Fabricius's Alchemy.) An early alchemic school, founded by "Maria the Jewess" wrote: "see the fulfilment of the art in the joining together of the bride and the bridegroom and in their becoming one." (203Trev). Such old Western Alchemic knowledge was passed on from the Renaissance secret societies to such groups that revived magical practices in the 19th century as the Order of Templars of the Orient (OTO) and Golden Dawn - and thus to Gerald Gardner and the modern Craft - rather than from the similar Indian Tantric practices.

I will not speak here of how others do these rites today in our private circles For us they are "copyright" - private to those who compose the rituals and perform them. Our circles are safe spaces where we support each other, places for intimacy and trust. What I can share is what I myself have created in circle.

Initiation is essentially something that happens between the individual and the God and Goddess. The others in the Circle, including priest and priestess, are best man, best woman, magical aides, givers and protectors of magical energy, facilitators, witnesses and .friends - but not the chief players in this ritual.

My own experience of this Mystic Marriage Initiation or "Great Rite" was utterly transforming, something I will never forget. It was a rite in which I as a woman became one with the Goddess to celebrate my bonding to the male God. I did this without a sexual human partner simply because I had none at the time and needed none.

Although I had experienced what it was to live as an hermaphrodite, I still had need for this ritual, for I do not identify with both genders. I knew myself as a woman who needed the male for completion. To me my self identity was beyond explanation. I had come to accept it was as much part of me as was the colour of my eyes. I believed my spirit had been born single gendered despite being in a body that had features of both, perhaps because that was how my brain was shaped, perhaps because that was my fate.

The ritual preparation started for me at the Winter Solstice when I volunteered during a semi-public ritual in London to be one of those calling down the sun-child so the Sun could be reborn. To my surprise something most unusual seemed to happen to me. I became aware that there was within me a room filled with white light. Then, into this room came a spiralling light formed in the shape of a figure of eight. I did not understand this vision for several days but I remained aware of this presence within me. It was not me. It felt if it were alien, apart from me. Suddenly I realised that this was another life. It was as if I were pregnant of this light form. Then I recognised the light form. It was in the ancient shape of an infinity symbol, it was God himself. For the next few months I continued to be awed by this presence within me. It became very much part of my preparations for my Third Degree initiation that we had planned for Imbulc.

I had picked Imbulc, February 2nd, as it was the feast of the Mother Goddess Bride, a much loved name for the female Deity in Ireland and Britain at the time when Christianity first arrived and the name used by my ancestors for Her. Her festival was one of the four great Celtic festivals of the year. Imbolc meant the arrival of the Ewe's milk, the first sign of spring. It also celebrated the snake's awakening from hibernation. The snake was thus a symbol of everlasting life, It was also the day when She was invoked so her sacred fire would warm the spring. Her ancient fire festival has become translated into Christianity as Candlemas. As long as records go back, a ceremonial fire was continuously kept burning in Her honour tended by women in Kildare until the agents of King Henry VIII extinguished it. It was happily relit a few years ago and is now tended by nuns who call her "St Bridget.".

I was wisely told by my coven that I should re-write my initiation ritual so that it celebrated my own gender path. I then took the old forms of the ritual, reworked them, and then had them agreed to by those who were at the heart of our Circle. (Some modern Witches call such people High Priests and High Priestesses but we did not use such titles.)

So my ritual included a formal thanking of the God for sharing with me male mysteries and then a thanking of the Goddess for bringing me home to live among my sisters as a woman and priestess. I was closing this circle, acknowledging that both anima and animus had played a powerful role in me, celebrating the gift I had received of experiencing life among both genders.

I had also to celebrate my bisexuality. I did this by honouring first the bonding of woman to woman by pouring wine from one chalice into another. I then dipped a hunting arrow into one of these chalices as a symbolic celebrating of the joining of male with female. The celebration then moved on to the exchange of wedding vows between me and the God. Here is a part, just part, of my ritual:

After the purifying and setting up of the circle.

Over the Cup.

As water is poured into the Cup.

Brighid on this your Day...

We consecrate this Cup

So it may hold the Water of Life

And be a symbol of the Mother's womb.

May this Cup serve to keep Jani

in the company of the Mother.

So may it be.

Over the Bow and Arrow. (Used instead of an Athame or sacred knife)

The Arrow and Athames are laid on top of the Chalice (not dipped into it) and then held up vertically.

Brighid, on this your day,

We consecrate these instruments of power.

We imbrue them with all our passion and our strength

We bind to them all the powers of Fire.

We bind to them all the powers of Love.

May they serve to keep us in the presence of the Sun God and Goddess.

So may it be.

After the calling of the God and Goddess into her, Jani then says...

I who am the beauty of the Green Earth and the silver moon among the stars and the mystery of waters and the desire of the heart of all, call upon you. Arise, come unto me.

For I am the soul of nature, who gives life to the universe. From me all things proceed and all things must return. Before me let thine innermost divine self be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite. Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth; for behold all acts of love and of joy are my rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you. For behold, I am with you, within you. You need not look elsewhere.

Tonight we celebrate the feast of the waxing light, The Child Sun grow stronger as the days grow longer. It is the time of initiation, when the seeds stir in their dark sleep.

(All then spiral dance for Brighid..... chanting.. weaving and kissing...

Chant.

Fire of the heart, Chorus with each line.....She shines for all...she burns for all...

Fire of the mind,..

Fire of the Art,

Fire beyond time...

after nine spirals we stop.

The Initiation Ritual.

Jani standing in front of the Altar takes up the Cup and the Arrow.

She turns to all the members of the Circle.

I thank you for being with me this day, I thank you for your energy and love, May you all be ever one with the Goddess and God. And in thanks ----

She takes up her cord.

I give myself to the service of the Goddess and the God and bind me. Let all the powers assist me in being their true lover.

Jani places a ring on her wedding finger saying...

With this ring, I wed myself to the God and Goddess. I are they and they are me.

Jani sits on the edge of the Altar, arrow and rod crossed over her breasts.

She is given the cup part filled with wine and a second part filled cup of wine. Jani takes them and pours the wine from one into the other.

As wine is to the cup, so too is love of woman to a woman. When joined they bring the deep mystery of maidenhood, blessed ecstasy and wisdom.

Jani lowers the point of the arrow into the cup and says.

As the blade is to the male, so is the cup to the female. When joined they bring a completion, blessed fire and fertility.

Jani points the arrow up wards and says....

I who was born a woman able to experience life in both genders.

Thank the Goddess and God for their gift...

I, a woman, knew the plough, the phallus and the heat of the giving of the seed...

I who thus was enabled to live within the world of the patriarchy

I who encompass in one person the female and male

Give thanks for the great gift of living within and knowing the God.

I honour the God that shared with me his way of loving.

I give thanks to the God that made me his priest so I might know his magic.

I thank too the Goddess who in due time came to reclaim me, to slip me back into a female body, brought me home after my sojourn in the male world to be her priestess.

Jani takes the cup...

I chose the cup, the womb of life. I bring my female spirit to its true home.

Jani exchanges the cup for the knife...

I chose also the arrow that never more will I be closed to the seeds of loving life.

She holds the arrow to her.

I thank the Goddess and God from bringing me to this your sacred priesthood to be the sacred sacrifice, I offer you myself, whole, in heart, body and spirit. "

After further ritual celebration, in the pathworking that followed, I had an extra-ordinary experience. I was wearing on one wrist a snake shaped bracelet - as I had for some twenty years. The snake for me symbolised the never ending cycle of life as it did for Aborigines, Egyptians and many of the ancients.

Suddenly the snake on my wrist seemed to wriggle, grow, turn into a great python, and plunge its head into my astonished mouth. The sexual implication was obvious. My reaction was to be somewhat amused. I muttered to myself "but I am not into oral sex!!" But the snake did not stay in my mouth, it plunged on, deep inside me, getting to know my stomach, heart - all my organs.

It seemed now to me that it was as if it was taking possession of me. I though wryly of how some Christians would interpret this. They might think the snake was the devil coming to take possession of me! But I knew this was wrong. The Serpent symbolised other things to me. It symbolised the power of God come into me.

I then found myself walking alongside with it as it went down into a deep dark cavern. I wondered where it was taking me - and then we came out in what seemed like a sacred building. At the far end on a dais stood two beings -and I realised that the snake had taken me down to meet with the God and Goddess.

I stood before them and simply said "I am here now. What is my work to be?"

Then suddenly I was in the birthing cave at Uluru, attended by Aboriginal women elders, and giving birth to a son. My final vision was of myself sitting like to the Virgin Mary with a manchild in my lap, presenting him to the world. I was very surprised, intrigued, perplexed. The vision seemed to be an answer to my query about my role but I scarcely understood it. A similar statue of Mary and Jesus was over the altar in the seminary where I trained to be a priest.

I puzzled over it. Why such a Marian image? Such a Christian icon? I had not thought of her as my model. Was there something here deeper than I had thought? How could my work be to show the world the divine child? Why was it a boy child? But if I put the question to instincts and inner voices, the answer came that if I lived true, I must be a Mother who shows to all the teacher-child that she has birthed, the promise of new life, a new life that was a God, a God that would grow up and then die for the people - for the ancients a cycle that would be repeated again and again while the Mother sustained and kept the continuity of the people and the world. I had to live very ancient myths. I have never been one for consciously re-living myths. Perhaps I did not have a choice. It had all seemed to happen spontaneously and very independently of me.

Researching later I found the Goddess bearing a young son was one of the earliest images of the male God. Anne Baring and Juleps Cashford in "the Myth of the Goddess" reported that the androgynous Deity - depicted as a woman with horns - was the Neolithic Cretan image of the Deity. Then, in the Cretan Minoan period, the images started to change to showing the God as born from the Goddess and still dependent on her so as a boy. Myth p 131 Likewise as women we must still create and honour the male aspect - a lesson especially true for myself as someone who had seemingly rejected this aspect of herself.

When the members of our coven shared what we had experienced during this pathworking, we found that we had all seen snakes even though snakes had not been mentioned beforehand. One saw me as Medusa with my hair all snakes. We finally completed the ritual with a fun grounding exercise. We got out body paints and everyone painted me. I was covered in trees and serpents and flowers to the accompaniment of much laughter. The painting grounded me. It is always important when working magically that one grounds oneself afterwards - perhaps simply by placing one's hands on the ground and wiggling fingers into the grass. Otherwise the energy can stay up and be uncontrolled and chaotic once we have stopped consciously directing it. Grounding is also said by Aboriginal elders to be a very important conclusion to any ritual.

The linking of serpents with the devil in Christian mythology was originally based on an Jewish attack on the magical and spiritual symbolism of Egypt. Moses said: "He made the devil a serpent <for> those whom he has in his generation." Snake symbols were everywhere in Egypt. They symbolised with skin shedding the renewal of the earth and of humans. There were two hieroglyphics for Goddess in Egyptian. One was an egg, the other was a cobra. The Gnostic Christians pointed out the ambiguity of this condemnation of serpents, quoting; "It is written thus: "... the rod which was in the hand of Moses became a serpent, (and) it swallowed the serpents of the magicians." And "He made a serpent of bronze (and) hung it upon a pole ... for the one who will gaze upon this bronze serpent, none will destroy him, and the one who will believe in this bronze serpent will be saved." (Num. 21:9), Testimony of Truth . The symbol of medicine of a snake wound around a staff was that of Asclepius, Greek God of healing. Seven thousand years ago in Thessaly, the goddess was depicted enthroned holding her child with spiralling snakes around her ( page 5 myth) an image close to that which I had seen at my initiation.

For me all creatures are holy - and thus I honoured the serpent. To demonise any creature is for me an act of the greatest ignorance and can lead to much cruelty. I also honoured its ancient symbolism among the Egyptians - and among the Aborigines. Somewhere deep in the human psyche, there seems to be an archetype of a primitive snake. It is the Kundalini (p 60myth) power that in Eastern practices rises from our loins through our body to eventually breath fire from the top of our skull. It is the dragon energy of the earth known to races whose lands lie as far apart as the Chinese and the Welsh.

Our coven was influenced by Egyptian magic, I frequently saw myself in path-working as a raven flying from the chambers of pyramids built by people who wove into their clothes the symbol of the serpent and lived a life of magic to those of Uluru in the centre of Australia where lies the pool of water that serves as a home for the Rainbow Serpent and where the people also traditionally did much magic. After I had been at Uluru I sometimes found myself lying on the desert earth, merging with the earth, becoming the earth and giving birth to many creatures.

As for the wonder of my initiation experience of seeing myself as pregnant with the Divine Child and of giving birth to Him, I do not see being pregnant with God as the unique privilege of Mary, nor was being the Child of God the unique privilege of Jesus - it was not even a privilege of being human, it was and is the divine right of every particle of creation, of the universe and the universes beyond this. Every part of creation is pregnant with God and every particle is a child of God.

Every tree, every insect, every being, is giving birth to part of the divine plan. And we are all part of the outcome. We are all the Child born of the divine plan, We are both the child of Divinity and pregnant with Divinity. We are part of a symphony of beauty and ecstasy.

The ancient Greeks celebrated this in the Eleusinian rite which had at its centre the birth of the divine child, seen as an ear of wheat. This birth represented the renewed fertility of our sacred Earth and was linked to the Sacred Marriage. It was an initiation into a vision. Towards the end of the ritual, sacred objects were revealed, there was an explosion of light and it was said that "the great goddess has borne a sacred child", Then " a single ear of corn is held up." After a sacrifice of a bull, water was poured upon the earth while all present cried out to the heavens "Rain ", then to the earth "Conceive."

Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist born around 525 BC had Aphrodite say: "The pure Sky longs passionately to pierce the earth and in passion seizes the Earth to win her in marriage. The Earth is made pregnant by the rain falling from the Bridegroom Sky. The earth gives birth for mortals to pastures of flocks and corn, Demeter's gift. The fruitfulness of trees is brought to completion by the dew of their marriage. Of these things am I part cause." Note 45, page 222 of "The Way of the Earth."

The experience of being pregnant with God runs through a mystical tradition that is thousands of years old and world wide. Porete spoke in 12th Century France of being pregnant with God. She wrote: "He is fullness, and by this am I impregnated. This is the divine seed and Loyal Love." This was so female an understanding, that the Church could not stomach it. This vision was given as a reason for burning her at the stake in 1310.

Julian of Norwich, as I have mentioned, nearly got into trouble into trouble for much the same vision. She wrote how she saw herself and the Virgin as pregnant with God's Word. This alarmed her protector, Cardinal Easton. He had this image removed from her papers in order to protect her from Porete's fate. But when Easton died, the 70 years old Julian put her pregnant imagery back in her book. For her "God" had both genders - as had the Virgin Goddess of old. She wrote of the motherhood of God (quoted in Wed.) in a manuscript dating from about 1400, now held at Westminster Abbey.

In the visions that accompanied my own Initiation, I found myself giving birth without the need for another parent. Again this is a concept from deep within. The primal creating energy gives birth of itself without the need of a partner - thus the Goddess Inanna over 5000 years ago was called the "Virgin Mother of Earth and Heaven". According to the wisdom of ancient times, the Virgin Mother was a title only possessed by divinity.

The Apocalypse of Adam is one of the most ancient and beautiful of the Gnostic texts, It is prophetic and is suspected to be pre-Christian in origin. It recited many accounts of the origin of the One who is to come, saying that he would be born of a Virgin, All of them have this boy person growing up in the wilderness. This text can be seen as a metaphor for our individual spiritual growth as the children of God - or for the coming of divine power into our world. The water may represent a baptismal form of initiation or transfiguration. Baptism was a rite known to the Egyptians before it became Christian - indeed the Jews in their sacred book The Tabnud, accused Jesus of practising Egyptian magic. (378 TRev.)

"Now the first kingdom says of him that he came from [...]. A spirit [...] to heaven. He was nourished in the heavens. He received the glory of that one and the power. He came to the bosom of his mother. And thus he came to the water.

And the second kingdom says about him that he came from a great prophet. And a bird came, took the child who was born, and brought him onto a high mountain. And he was nourished by the bird of heaven. An angel came forth there. He said to him "Arise! God has given glory to you." He received glory and strength. And thus he came to the water.

The third kingdom says of him that he came from a virgin womb. He was cast out of his city, he and his mother. He was brought to a desert place. He was nourished there. He came and received glory and strength. And thus he came to the water.

The fourth kingdom says of him that he came from a virgin. [...] Solomon sought her, he and Phersalo and Saul and his armies, which had been sent out. Solomon himself sent his army of demons to seek out the virgin. And they did not find the one whom they sought, but the virgin who was given them. It was she whom they fetched. Solomon took her. The virgin became pregnant and gave birth to the child there. She nourished him on a border of the desert. When he had been nourished, he received glory and power from the seed from which he was begotten. And thus he came to the water.

And the fifth kingdom says of him that he came from a drop from heaven. He was thrown into the sea. The abyss received him, gave birth to him, and brought him to heaven. He received glory and power. And thus he came to the water.

And the sixth kingdom says that [the Virgin went...] down to the aeon which is below, in order to gather flowers. She became pregnant from the desire of the flowers. She gave birth to him in that place. The angels of the flower garden nourished him. He received glory there, and power. And thus he came to the water.

And the seventh kingdom says of him that he is a drop. It came from heaven to earth. Dragons brought him down to caves. He became a child. A spirit came upon him and brought him on high to the place where the drop had come forth. He received glory and power there. And thus he came to the water.

And the eighth kingdom says of him that a cloud came upon the earth and enveloped a rock. He came from it. The angels who were above the cloud nourished him. He received glory and power there. And thus he came to the water.

And the ninth kingdom says of him that from the nine Muses one separated away. She came to a high mountain and spent (some) time seated there, so that she desired herself alone in order to become androgynous. She fulfilled her desire and became pregnant from her desire. He was born. The angels who were over the desire nourished him. And he received glory there, and power. And thus he came to the water.

Although many ancient religions celebrated their sexuality and enjoyed it, they also sometimes sought a perfection they called "virginity". This was the very opposite of being non-creative. It did not involve the giving up of sex. They taught we must all become creative of ourselves like the Mother Goddess who did not need a partner. We do it by uniting the two sides that we all have, the anima and animus, the female and the male, and becoming one - as in the final verse of the above poem. This was for them the virginal path of perfection.

The Catholic Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths, whom I met in India in 1970 when he was exploring the common mystical understandings shared by the religions of the East and West, after he had experienced Hindu shrines in which were carved female and male genital images, wrote that Christians could well learn from a religion where sexuality was seen as essentially divine(P111?). For me it was a shame that he had to go to the East to discover this when it was there to be rediscovered in our own ancient European sacred inheritance (especially in our Sheila-na-gigs).

The psychiatrist Karl Jung, who gained much from studying ancient alchemic texts, wrote that the alchemic path to human perfection entailed us becoming the child of the divine mother (check quote Myths p 651) but for me it is deeper. It is also to become the Deity Himself or Herself, one'd in the ecstasy of union, human and God.

The Christian mystic Meister Ekhardt recognised this when he wrote:

Oh wonder of wonders!

When I think of the union of the soul with God!

The divine love-spring surges over the soul, sweeping her out of herself

into the unnamed being of her original source...

In this exalted state she has lost her proper self and is flowing full-flood into the unity of the divine nature.

Henceforth I shall not speak about the soul, for she has lost her name in the oneness the divine essence.

There she is no more called soul : she is called infinite being.-Tractate 11.

The spiritual path is one of ecstasy. There is a constant ecstasy lying behind all happenings, all realities. It is linked to the very being of creation. We were all created to sing together with delight as we recognise and come to know the intelligence and love that lies at the heart of creation. Mysticism is at the root of creation. Einstein, an acknowledged genius of the 20th Century, acknowledged this when he wrote:

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger.. is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge =, this feeling, is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men." Quoted by M Laski in Ecstasy p 201

He also wrote: "The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive." He thus disagrees with the many who think "being scientific" means abandoning their trust in their instincts, including in their innate religious feelings. They are disempowered by this lose of confidence in their own inner self.

I myself have a saying I use when teaching:

"The fish in the water are thirsty say the untrusting."

Ecstasy is at the heart of the shamanic practices of the nations that still live very close to nature. Elliade subtitles his classic work "Shamanism" as "The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy." It is part of many religious paths. We can give it many names. During my own life I have experienced ecstasy in paths that have been called at different times the Mystical, the Christian and the Craft. But despite the change of names, I have known I was on one path, experiencing the same ecstasy.

Some modern witches are anti-church perhaps because they have had bad experiences of churches or because they have learnt about how witches were killed and tortured by church people. Others, including those in the family traditions, are not at all anti-Christian -as neither was Blandford. He wrote: 'Let me assure you that we were not in any way anti-Church.. we have always frequently attended services and even helped with their festivals... If truth be known, there have been more than one or two members of the clergy in our area who were as comfortable out on the wild moors as they were in the pulpit if you see what I mean. If there have been any problems with the Church , it has been only recently with the coming of the more evangelical clergy, those people who want everyone to bend to their beliefs and their beliefs only."

What he described is for me a human experience open to everyone, not meant to be "occult".. We inherit it not because it is part of a secretive family tradition but by the very fact that we are human. It is in-born in us. He concluded by saying much the same: 'I don't think I am giving away any secrets for the simple reason that there are none. Mystery, yes, but secrets, no. It is an open book if you are prepared to read it correctly.... you have to experience, know and ultimately understand - in that order - these things, and I think the time has come when we have to understand them quickly, before it really is too late.'

As for his path not being anti-Christian, that too is important for me. I think people cannot be judged by labels but must be honoured for having their own insights and inspirations. What is not acceptable is intolerance of the religious views of others and using religion to gain power.

It has been good to see signs of change in Christianity in recent years. One example of this is the large "We Are Church" movement that grew in the 1990s in the European and American Roman Catholic Church. One of its leaflets stated: "We believe in a church which affirms the goodness of sexuality, the human rights of all persons regardless of sexual orientation, the primacy of conscience in deciding issues of sexual morality, for example birth control...We believe in a church where the people of God participate in the process of selecting their bishops and pastors...We believe in a church with equal rights for women, where women are full participants in all official decision-making and are welcomed in all ministries, including the diaconate and the ministerial priesthood... where priests may choose either a celibate or non-celibate way of life... We believe in a church which embraces and welcomes those who are divorced and remarried, married priests, theologians and others who exercise freedom of speech..."

At their conferences they have discussed: "Creating Feminist Liturgies"... "Family Prayer: Opening Children to Feminine Images of God"; "In the Beginning Is Relationship: Human Sexuality as Energy for Love and Service"; "Remaking a Servant Church from the Bottom Up"; "The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos", "New Millennium: Women Breaking through a Patriarchal Church." Unfortunately the Vatican has done its best to obstruct this movement.

My involvement in the Craft happened while I was again immersed in my investigative journalism. I have mentioned in the last chapter how I went to South Africa to investigate its diamond mines. I will never forget the defiant dances the miners put on for me in the mining compounds. Nor will I forget addressing and answering questions in a meeting of 700 diamond miners that lasted over three hours inside one diamond mine. Nor will I forget that many diamonds sat in thick asbestos dust within the mines leaving the unprotected miners of this romantic stone very susceptible to a crippling and even deadly disease.

When I went to Northern Canada to speak about my diamond film - I was grateful to De Beers for trying to stop the showing of my film there. It gave me the chance to speak to crowded meetings about the hazards of the diamond industry, to hear the music of the ice crystals clashing when ice floes drifted, to see the midnight painting with showers of colour the milliard stars of the northern skies, to experience an Indian dog sleigh ride over sparkling ice and to eat a few of the many berries exposed when the snow melts that feed the awakening bears, the migrating birds.

I have also mentioned briefly the new call that came in its typical fashion for me to use my investigative skills on a medical issue. In this case my brother Tony asked me if I could possibly help a neighbour whose son had become brain damaged within days of having a Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccination. I knew nothing much on this subject but my brother still asked if I could come up and meet her.

Thus I came to meet Jackie Fletcher, her husband John and their son Robert. Jackie told me of how their healthy son had gone for his MMR - and then started fitting and showed signs of brain damage. When she took him to the hospital, they told her that the relationship between the vaccination and the onset of illness could only be co-incidental. A little later she spoke to the other parent in the waiting room - to find to her astonishment she had been told exactly the same. Jackie then organised a public meeting through a local health centre - and 150 people turned up. She soon met very many parents whose children had "co-incidentally" falling gravely ill immediately after vaccination..

I researched her stories and found many similar cases. I phoned Professor Michael Stewart, the vaccination expert at London University's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and told him of the reports of these parents. His response was totally unexpected. He said. "What else do you expect? You are injecting a living virus. Why do you think I head up a team of immunologists. We are trying to make the vaccines safer because we know of the current dangers."

I was left wondering about the possible relationship between adjusting our immune systems through vaccination with living viruses and the great increase in auto-immune diseases in children and adults. Most childhood diseases are caused by viruses that have co-existed with humans for generations just as other dangerous creatures have co-existed with us for millennia in the wild. We do not exterminate the snakes in the jungle because they occasionally do damage. They are part of the balance of the wild. Many viruses that cause illnesses are also of benefit to us. For example, we now know that adults who had measles as a child have a far better immune system as adults - as well as lifetime immunity to measles, something no vaccine can give us as yet..

I was soon writing front page stories on the risks of vaccination for the British newspapers, The Independent and the Independent on Sunday. A year later I was co-producing a new investigative television documentary, a Dispatches for Channel 4, on cancers linked to monkey viruses that had entered humans through a contaminated polio vaccine. I was again really back in the saddle - this time not for Aborigines but for those affected by careless medicine. Also there was another major change. I did not hide neither my gender path nor my work in the Craft from the rest of the film crew. It felt very good to have conquered the fear I had earlier that being open would affect my career. But maybe it was society that had changed, Maybe it really was now safer for me?

Our film looked at the consequences of using wild caught monkeys in the manufacturing of the polio vaccine. The World Heath Organisation approved of three ways of growing the polio virus needed for the vaccine. One was in cloned human tissue, another in cloned monkey tissue - and the third in the kidneys taken from killed wild monkeys. This last method it said was the most hazardous because it is extremely difficult to screen out all monkey viruses.

We found that the manufacturers of polio vaccine who used wild monkeys because they costed it as slightly cheaper had been careless. Monkey viruses had contaminated hundreds of millions of polio doses and, despite Parliamentary assurances that this contaminant was safe for humans, these same viruses were now turning up in very many human cancers. One third of all human bone cancers were estimated to be so contaminated.

Channel 4 flew myself and my co-producer, Rosie Thomas, to an American government workshop that brought together scientists from around the world who were discovering that a monkey virus that contaminated the polio vaccine , SV40, was turning off the switch in our genes that stops the multiplication of cells - thus presumably leaving us more open to cancers that are essential the uncontrolled multiplication of cells.

Nearly all the tests on human cancers reported at this conference and in scientific literature had been done outside the UK - so Channel 4 insisted that we persuade doctors and patients to allow us to test UK biopsy samples in overseas labs. After about twenty tests we found the monkey virus - in a mesothelioma lung lining cancer victim and in a bone cancer victim. This SV40 virus is now being screened out of the vaccine - but it has now made a home among humans. It is being passed on from mother to child and husband to wife.

Since we made this film, further research has found another viruses from the African Green Monkey in the brains of ME sufferers. This is the species used for today's polio vaccines - and the species that recently was reported to have successfully reared a 'wild human child" in Africa. It seems it is a "stealth virus" that does not cause the usual tell-tale inflammation. This virus is not being screened out of the vaccine as I write. According to one Harvard professor, there are thousands of scientifically undescribed viruses in monkeys - and none of these can be screened for. We do not know if they cause us harm. They may not - or may. By choosing to use the bodies of wild monkeys, our companies are taking a gamble with us.

Questioning the government doctors over their vaccination programs was very much like investigating a church. They seemed to regard my questioning as a heresy. They said I should not do it - for it might put parents off vaccination - and would spoil their plans to exterminate certain viruses. But the answers to questions asked in the UK Parliament showed that a 1990s national measles and rubella vaccination campaign they organised was reported by doctors as a suspected cause of over 500 cases of serious illness requiring hospitalisation - while averting approximately 150 cases of normal measles.

Vaccination had it seemed almost become a holy practice. Parents who do not vaccinate were often accused of neglect and come under great social pressure to conform. My research put me in touch with several parent led organisations that work to empower parents by supplying them with detailed information that was not available normally from doctors.

One woman that carried out this work became a particularly close friend. One day I decided to also tell her that I was involved in the Craft. When I did, I was disconcerted to have her immediately break out into peals of laughter.

When she stopped, she gasped, 'Why Jani, did you never notice my broom stick next to the fireplace?" True, there was one there but stupidly I had never thought of its symbolism. She then told me that she had worked as a witch for many years. For her the Craft was the way of the wise male or female healer. She was a solitary, working without need of a coven on human health issues. I was reminded of the women healers who were damned as witches in the Middle Ages. She was in the finest of traditions and we had from this time on the finest of friendships.. She is the wise'un who became my advisor as well as friend.

It has been a surprise to me to find how many people are in the Craft. One day I noted with amusement a poster in the nearby town of Greenwich put up by members of a local church . It warned that two covens were planning to infiltrate Greenwich by the Millennium. I knew that more that existed there already.

While making the film for Channel 4, I found to my surprise that I was more damaged than I thought from the assault of 4 years previous. I became painfully light sensitive and started to see three moons in the sky at night even when entirely sober. My doctors hazarded that the beating had cracked the lens of my good eye (the other is "lazy"). Cataract damage then had accumulated around these cracks. The surgeon took out this lens while I was looking through it - and put in another. The colours I saw in my eye during this was amazing and scary. I was desperate not to move a muscle lest the surgeon slip. And while I was recovering from this operation, - there came another call.

This time it came through an email message rom a Kentish witch who called herself Motherwort. She told me of a local forest that was threatened with destruction. A company wanted to turn what had been a community asset for over a thousand years into a private holiday park with a thousand houses and a car park for 2,700 cars curving around a 4000 year old burial mound, with hotels, artificial lakes and golf course. It was publicly owed land but the Thatcher government had decided to sell in order to create jobs and revenue. The woods they wanted to sell were part of Lyminge Forest, officially an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that attracted over 140,000 visitors a year. This was happening near Folkestone where I grew up. I used to go to Lyminge as a child. I had to go down to see what was happening.

What I found were camps of young people, styled by the press as "eco-warriors", living under beech, birch, oak and pine, without electricity, who had to carry water for over half a mile to their camps, all present because they were determined not to let the government destroy this forest on top of the North Downs, on an ancient track that is lined with sacred wells and tombs.

Newspapers had written with admiration of these protests, of the deep tricky tunnels and the scary tree houses built to make the development too costly to be carried out - but they did not describe the magic that was afoot. To find this I found I had to go and join the protesters, live with them, humbly listening, sharing, laughing.

I found it a delight being with them and they soon made me one of their family. I found it easy to be open about being in the Craft - and made more than welcome at Kyros, at Bastards, at Gone to Pot, at Fortress and the other camps. It seems they want the Crones, the witches, the priestesses who do not represent a patriarchal religion or any power pretence. This was not the English society that I remembered - but I was at home.

It was a delight being in a forest that I first saw as a child. This was my land, my ancient people. As we sat around the fire at night and at dawn, fetching water, putting on the billy, it felt strangely alike to the Aboriginal camps I had known. I seemed to sense a nod of approval from over my shoulder from the Aboriginal elders with whom I had worked. This was what they hoped Europeans would do: learn of the Mother earth who gave them birth, learn to protect their Mother; learn to listen to our own ancestral dreaming; learn we are sister races. And thus another circle in my life began to close. I had gone from Folkestone to Australia where I had worked to save forests and sacred places. It seemed I had now returned to do the same work on my own familiar land.

What I found was that these camps were a seed bed for magic, a place where young people remembered, where the Craft grew as it always had, deep among the trees, in the heather, in the moonlight. This was not seedbed of the town, of the urban coven or grove, where sacred traditions were treasured amid suburbia. It was the seedbed of the protest camp, of those who leave the cities and their houses because they felt they were called to protect the wild.

As we shared and chanted around the fires, talked and did magic, I felt that this was how traditionally the Craft had always grown. I feel that I was meeting some of the new cunning men, wise women, who were forging their magic in poverty and sharing, learning their herbs and toadstools, coming one with the spirits of our island. Their firepits with their tarpaulin or wooden shelters were now in many places around this land, They are the children whose instincts have been awaken by the mother, who know where they need to go to heal. They know what they are about.

We stand for the land

for the right to protect the land

for the right to dream the land

for the right to know her

and to teach the children about her.

For me the world is vibrant, alive and ready to teach those with open ears. This understanding has always been very important for Aboriginal people too. We too are woven into the patterns of the earth like the threads of a tapestry. If we see just the individual threads, we can never learn the whole pattern.

And when we fight for the Mother, seek to protect her, then we in turn will be looked after and taught. I remember well the night around a camp fire in Lyminge forest when a young woman said to me softly: "Jani, you will understand. When I am digging a tunnel I can hear the rocks singing to me."

There are in nature what some call faery gates. These are places that seem to be able to take us magically through into regions where other domains of existence become evident. When we pass through such gates, we start to see another world around us with trees that sing, rocks that sing, of imps and elves and faery folk. We slip into a world where our imagination becomes free to teach us not just with words but with images and music, smells and touches. Living close to nature, to the nature that gave us birth and sustains us, we are close to the womb of life. Here we can find the ecstasy that is our birth right, not a tablet purchased with mammon, but a gift that comes from deep within.

And into this world of instinctive knowledge, we must inter-weave our history. There is much to be learnt. Not for nothing did the Druids of old study for some twenty years before they were ready to serve the people. There are treasure houses around us to be explored. But before we can truly learn, we must put down the foundation. We need to stand bare foot upon earth before we start. It is a sound old saying that the wise person keeps "well-earthed".

When I arrived in Lyminge Forest, the local community had spent years trying to find a way to protect their forest. One old man told me that he had done his romancing in the forest and so had his parents. Now his children were walking their children through the forest. He could not understand how this publicly owned land could now be sold. Locals had only invited in the eco-warriors when all other means of protecting the land had failed.

The tactics used by these warriors come out of a long learning of non-violent ways to achieve change. They knew that the people who wanted to take over the forest were only doing so in the expectation of profit. So, if they could make it too expensive for them to gain control of the forest, then they could save the forest from developers.

Thus we dug tunnels in the sandy clay that coloured us bronze and below them we built giant badger havens, with rounded egg shaped chambers protected by steel doors. These were sunk in different parts of the forest and were well concealed. Others had fortress towers erected over them so the warriors could sleep above the shafts away from the reach of bailiffs that might seek to surprise them.

Concrete bunkers went down too, with pipes set into their walls into which arms could be padlocked to make our removal even more expensive. Similar pipes were concreted in and concealed around firepits in case we were ambushed by bailiffs while eating our evening meal.

Those with a head for heights put up tree houses high in the beech, pine and oak, woven together with a cobweb of walkways some 100 feet above the ground. One young man constructed a drum filled with concrete and flints and hoisted it up to his platform. If anyone tried to evict him, he would padlock his arm into this drum. Many other similar devices were built. One was a crucifix suspended high over the main entrance to the wood. If there were an eviction, a daring protester would chain himself to this as a symbol of the sacrifice being made of the woods and of our spirits.

The curse of our forest is that it is the nearest to the channel tunnel and thus is coveted by men who want to fence it and charge tourists for "the English Countryside Experience." I believed it should not become private. It was our forest. It supported our ancestors. It has rare remains of Celtic, Roman and early medieval woodland settlements covering a period of over 4000 years. They left behind pottery, tools, sunken ways and charcoal pits - and their dead.. When I found some Neolithic tools and located burial mounds already listed as ancient monuments, some protesters said softly "We knew it. We could sense them. We know they are here."

These ancient places are not the only thing precious in this forest. One night I saw a nightjar hurtle itself over a Bronze Age burial mound. Nightjars, a "red book" endangered species, are heard every summer night at every camp along with owls and nightingales.

The forest included many different kinds of woodland, shady beech with bluebells, patches of Douglas firs. Some areas have been coppiced for centuries. There were sweet chestnut groves, lily of the valley, heath and areas of baby Corsican pines - the latter the ill thought gift of the Forestry Commission after a hurricane. Fast growing indigenous silver birch - and other indigenous species now surrounded these pines. Four times more species grow in a broadleaf forest than under pines. The forestry commission told us that when we go, they will kill the broadleaves so that their pines might flourish. One forestry spokesperson protested that this wood was only a tree-farm.

We used every means that we could dream up to protect this forest . On our camp, we dug tunnels and did magic, raising energy, joining with the energy of the wild wood, putting our wills entirely into the effort of shaping a future in which this forest would be safe. When it had grown too dark to dig, when the nightingale sung in counterpoint to the mechanical sound of the nightjar and the hoot of the great owls, then we began to chant, joining hands, weaving, travelling deep within ourselves to use our inner energy, drawing more energy up from the ground.

Motherwort had composed her own song to the small trees around our camp. She wrote: "Grow strong little trees, live long, outlive us, shelter the birds and our children's children..." She also noted: "at night we went deeper and wilder. Jani is telling us about the dragon energy that she has woven through the wood , singing and dancing, invoking the primal power of the earth goddess, wakening her. We are humming, the night is with us, the trees surround us, the energy is high because we are so close to the wind and fire and stars. No need to imagine a magical space! This is one.

"We begin to hum, whispering "Come dragon, come dragon, come, come come, we your daughters, we your sons", a deep drumming refrain, a tune springs up from nowhere and we are singing. The pulsing energy of Lyminge is thick with dragon energy, now the low pines are filled with circling mist.

"As we reach a crescendo we were shaking with the red energy of the earth, the dragon was present. We felt we would turn them back, we are too strong for them. John cried out "Look there is a dragon in the clouds!" we whooped and yelled. The clouds, lit by the moon, formed a dragon's head with a serpentine tail. We held each other, looking at the sky, someone started high-kicking, we were doing the can-can! laughing and singing.

She concluded: "It was two in the morning, ordinary folk were in bed! but we were in love with Lyminge, dancing in the moonlight. The earth is strong! We are strong! We will win."

For me it was a marvellous night - and its magic went afield. I used the chant when I left the woods for a week in August to attend a witchcraft conference. Before the opening ritual I asked if I might ask for energy to help protect Lyminge. There were about 120 witches in the great circle. I had expected to be asked to just say a few words from the side but to my surprise, half way through the ritual, the high priestess turned to me and said: "Jani, would you now go to the centre of the circle and raise energy for Lyminge." Gulp! I had never done anything like this before with so many. They were mostly strangers to me. They probably knew a great deal more than I. They were mostly Gardnarian witches with many years more experience of Gardnarian Craft and perhaps would think me ignorant of the "proper" way of doing this.

Gripping the staff I had found in the surrounding woods, I nervously went to the centre of the circle and began after a few introductory words the same chant as we used in our forest camp, "Come dragon, come dragon, come, come, come, we your daughters, we your sons", Nothing happened. I crouched, gripping my staff, and with closed eyes concentrated on finding the energy. I felt my voice grew stronger, urgent, summoning . It took time to catch but then like a forest fire the chant whirled up around the circle. I was now standing but still I had my eyes shut. Soon the energy was taking me over. It was like surfing a great wave. I soared with it but had to keep control, for I had the responsibility of turning this energy into effective magic. I had to reach above this whirlwind of a chant to give a signal so that everyone would simultaneously release and send the energy. I managed it while on tip toe. After the sending, we knelt and grounded ourselves. Only then did I open my eyes to find myself surrounded by panting drained people. One mother and child told me afterwards they had seen fire in the cracks in the earth when they grounded themselves. Energy had been sent. This too was part of the protecting of Lyminge.

This happened the same week as the eviction was supposed to happen in the forest, when bailiffs were sworn in and the police had their leave cancelled. The forest at that time was full of people digging tunnels, putting up walk ways -and being scared. Many of the young, and old, had never confronted authority before. It was very stressful.

Motherwort wrote of what it was like while I was away at the witchcamp. "The local sheriff has been sworn in and the police are all on overtime, they're really coming. All the protesters are working through the night in preparation for the eviction. Within 3 days I learn how to make a lock-on, fortify a tunnel and get a bail address. As I work I sing and pray. I call on my hero's, the tribal peoples who lost their homeland and on the strength of the rocks beneath me, I feel her (the earth) and I feel us (my forest family), I know that we are strong. The trees feel scared, yet they are with us, they know somehow that we are on their side, and in small ways they help us. We can always find the path even in the dark, the woods open up for you."

But when I returned after the witchcamp, there was no longer much sign of police or bailiffs. We continued to put up defences but later learnt that the orders requiring the police and bailiffs to evict us were cancelled that week. We now had more time.

Our camp had the slogan "Possessions own you" on the fridge we used as a cupboard (no power lines there). Wiccan slogans decorated the shelter's roof. Some nights a senior Druid protester came to visit We cooked communally, shared books, shared lives. We treasured water as we had to carry it nearly half a mile every morning. Our tunnel became deep with different chambers, concrete lock-ons to which we planned to secure ourselves if the bailiffs came. A local woman in her seventies planned to "lock-on" with us.

Nearly every camp had tree-houses and at least one tunnel. The Fortress was surrounded with palistrades that leant outwards and were hung with tapestries painted with large scary spirit faces. The Underground Elephant camp had an elegant lacework of net sleeping platforms and tree houses. Scary Pine treehouse was nearly impenetrable even to the protesters. With no television to possess us, at night we told stories, sung and pathworked..

On one pathworking the slow worm I met took me around the forest in a very slow weaving and then down a hole into the burial mound next to which I found it - to show me myself buried within. It did not surprise me. I grew up on the hills that surround these woods. I was at home here. It was a good place to meet ancestors and to learn. When one winter Solstice I pathworked here with a small group, I learned from a shadowy figure that it was not so much the beginning of the return of the sun that was to be celebrated by me, but that this longest night was a time to celebrate the dark night, the dark but good energy that moves within the earth and between the stars.

On the darkest nights the protesters and I learnt to let our feet find paths by their different feel. We also found that the energy of people that had walked these paths seemed to make them glow on such nights. Perhaps the compaction made them able to reflect star light? One day I stopped on a path thinking I could see the lights of cigarettes nearby. It was not cigarettes. I stood entranced while it seemed to me fairy lights danced to soft music. If it were my imagination as it could bave been, well then I still enjoyed it!

The danger had not passed yet. Mothewort wrote: "The witches on site were working overtime, we had to stop the developers coming in. We joined hands round the firepit and circled the energy. We had never worked together before, but we were closer than many covens. Facing your fears together means that you show each other who you really are very quickly, there's no time for bullshit. One night as I sat by the fire, the spirit of the land spoke to me. There were three of us, focusing on the communication between the land and the forestry commission. We figured that if we could get them to talk to each other, it must be good. I will leave you with what she said....

Big men, little land. Big men, little land.

The men are tall,

BUT THE TREES ARE TALLER"

Once the fear of immediate eviction started waning, when the police and bailiffs still did not come - we found we had to continue to guard the forest for years to come as the company had started to play a waiting game. It had several more years before it must commence the development. It tried to out-wait us.

In order to get more people involved, part of Motherwort and my work in this forest became organising Summer "witchcamps" to which we invited all who saw nature as special or holy and wanted to learn how best to protect her. These camps were 5 days long - and were so designed that no one was excluded for reasons of poverty. A cauldron of vegetarian food was provided every evening and other food as income provided. In the event, no one went hungry. We asked for donations of say 15 pounds from those who could afford. Others could come free. It was a chance for people to meet practising witches, to share magic and rituals with them and to get to know about eco-protest. The principal instructor was always the wood itself.

The first year we did this, we invited Starhawk and her partner David to participate. Starhawk had written many books on magic and self-empowerment - and we had found her work inspiring against nuclear powerstations and to protect US forests . It was from her books that I first learnt of modern militant witches fighting for our planet. Her work had given us the idea that we should hold a witchcamp - for she organised such camps annually. It was a delight and inspiration having her with us in the forest,

She then invited Motherwort and I to attend her first British witchcamp held two weeks after our own at a centre near Glastonbury. We could not have afforded to attend if she had not invited us waiving her own fees. This week long camp costs over 300 pounds, with half of this going to pay for accommodation and food. The result of this was that the many local witches who knew the spirits of that land could not afford to come. When Starhawk took people from her camp to the Glastonbury Tor telling them to take note of the energy left by the many who did magic on the Tor, I could see the rooftops of the local witches. It was a pity they could not come. I felt they could have enriched it - teaching what the local Craft was all about, introducing the local spirits that empower this place.

But then it would have been a different kind of witchcamp. Her camp schedules were carefully constructed, controlled and aimed at self-healing. For the first half week the participants did not have any input into planning the rituals. These were run by the American co-teachers she had trained. When the tutors allowed the participants to be creative in the rituals, there was a sudden and delightful flowering as were unleashed the talents of some of the experienced European witches present - especially the Dutch.

With our very different backgrounds, it was not surprising that there were differences in how we did magic. I particularly missed the close working with the spirits of the local place and perhaps the lack of invoking the God's male energy. When I could participate, I drew Herne from the floor of the Circle into our midst, pawing at the ground as if I were the Mare.

When the participants were sent out to work with the spirits of plants into the tended gardens, I found myself looking wistfully at the wild woods guarding the slopes of the many neighbouring hills. They seemed to be calling me - and when I found a spare moment, I went to meet them.

Deep in one of these woods, I found a stream issuing from a little cave. When I turned around, I found I was standing on the edge of a wide clearing shaded by two giant horse-chestnut trees with rope swings. I ran to one of the springs - and, turning on the rope, I found a powerful face carved into a scar at head height on one of these trees. For me it was the face of an old wise one, a God or Goddess perhaps, but certainly a guardian for this place. I had no idea how old this place was - but it was certainly being used for rituals - or so I felt.

After some time spent enjoying this place, casting circles by swinging round, laughing, me and thanking its guardian, I carried on over some witch hazel roots up to the top of the hill to find near its summit a standing stone next to a burial mound. - and to find myself in another ritual space with a fire pit. I felt that this was how Glastonbury used to be before it became a bustling town. I introduced to these woods some of those who came to Starhawk's camp who did not mind doing rituals in the rain. This became my special contribution to Starhawk's camp.

What is needed is a web woven between witches and magical people linked by love and craft and not by cash, a web of increasing strength. I have always thought of witchcraft as a skill and religious practice that belonged of all of us by its very nature, that could and should be available in all its fullness without consideration of income. Starhawk told me she does not charge for coven work - but makes a distinction between this and her witchcamps. Everyone needs to find ways of supporting themselves. These camps are part of her way. I accept this. It was good for me to go to her camp. It helped me think out my own way more clearly.

Magic differs from prayer. When people pray for help or forgiveness, they beg for the intercession of a superior supernatural being, or a saint existing in a supernatural world. They see themselves as sinners and as ultimately weak and unable to save themselves. But with magic, we attempt to use our natural powers with, perhaps, the help of other natural entities, to affect a change.

Our power comes from our union with nature and the divine creating energy. Our knowledge of natural powers is experiential and includes such as yet ill-understood phenomenon as telepathy and prophecy, When we observe inexplicable happenings, we know these are achieved by natural causes that we do not yet understand. The divine energy is part of nature, not of a supernatural world. In working magic we join our energy with others - as happens in coven magic. We also may ask other creatures, spiritual beings or energies to join with us - - including the spiritual beings and deities of Nature.

Someone, I wish I could remember who, said "Magic is what happens when one takes off the blindfold, Magic is what the world does with us... not what we do to the world." It is very instinctual. All children instinctively try to do magic.

Children have sometimes asked: "Jani, are you a white witch or a black witch?" My usual answer is: "Neither. I am a green witch. " Magic is for me ultimately green, for it comes from nature and is dependent on nature. It is thus a good energy, a divine energy, a blessed energy. It is for me allied to the divine energy that underpins our world. It is of itself good - but it can be distorted. If we use it for evil, we are trying to turn the power of the earth against itself to hurt the balance of creation. I rarely come across the harmful use of magic - but this may be for the same reason that I rarely come across pornography on the Internet, I have not been out looking for it.

But I have read Egyptian and Coptic "love-spells" dating back to the early centuries of Christianity which I thoroughly dislike. These called on Deities or Angels to bind another person to force them to love the person casting the spell. The person casting the spell was frequently a Christian male. These were sometimes inscribed on tablets of lead or on pottery bowls and thus survived. Sometimes they were corner-spells, meant to protect the client against all curses. They were sometimes attempts to harness the forces of nature to bind another person or to harm them. The targeted person was often identified to the spirit by the presentation of something like a sample of a victim's hair.

Recipe - books of such spells, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, were found in the Cairo Genizah (the used-paper store-room of the medieval synagogue in Cairo, Egypt), The researchers examining these at the University of Michigan have testified that "numerous medieval manuscripts -- in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and many other languages -- attest to the vitality of such recipe-books throughout the Middle Ages." (ref. Magical section of their website.)

An example from such a book:

Take bran of first quality and sandalwood and vinegar of the sharpest

sort and mould cakes. And write his name upon them, and so hide them,

saying into the light the name of Hekate, and "Take away his sleep from

so-and-so," and he will be sleepless and worried.

If these had efficacy, then it came from the focus these objects gave to the human will - and the focus such objects would give to the fears of their intended victims if they got to know of their existence. But the existence of such harmful acts of magic no more means that magic itself is wrong than we could say that intercourse is wrong because sometimes it turns to rape

For me, a modern witch, as we use the term today, should be a person who knows how to shape reality by using her own inner energy, a person who centres her or his life on learning from nature, who knows how to work with nature and its spiritual energies to heal and to maintain the balance that underlies the energies of creation.

The Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle in Cornwall, founded by Cecil Wilkenson, with whom Gerald Gardner worked in its early days, contains a wealth of West Country folk magic dolls, paintings and carvings. Some of these were found in house chimneys or in attics where they were originally placed in order to protect a house. Some were used to help focus either healing or cursing magic. They were all tools used to assist the human will to achieve an end by serving as a focus. I felt somewhat uncomfortable here because for me there was too much of the cursing magic and not enough of the green or healing magic - and very little about the gnostic, mystic marriage or ecstatic shamanic journeying skills or even the centuries of persecution. There was also none of the sense that Aborigines have in working magic that they are helping to maintain the balance and energy of creation. It seems we have lost much.

On one occasion when invited by a local coven to a maypole dancing at Beltaine (May 1st), I wondered what to take as my gift. As they were meeting in town, I decided to bring may blossom from one of my favourite places, Oxley Woods near Blackheath in London. It is an ancient woodland which protesters were successful in protecting from being carved up by a major road.

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I also went to this wood intending to work magic to help myself achieve some things I then wanted in my life. But when I got into the trees, I knew the answer. There was absolutely no need for me to work for myself. My job was to join with the trees in creating the spring. I felt the energy of the sap rising around me, up the trunks into the fresh canopy of leaves. I joined with them, danced with them, celebrated their reborn vitality. As a human I celebrated being part of nature, not separate from her, but a person created to play her own part in the great dance of life and love. As I danced through the trees, singing to them, caressing them, being the wild woman I love to be and should be, but am only shyly, when no one else is around, I instinctively trusted that there was no need to do magic for myself. When I later left the forest all the other things that I had wanted to resolve were wonderfully resolved.

Another tiny example. One time the weather looked very dubious the day before some Craft Initiations were to take place in a hilltop wood. So I walked out onto the pontoon on which my boat and home was moored and, uniting myself to the strength of my sister elements, I imagined myself so tall that my head was among the clouds. I then chatted to the forces shaping the clouds, told them what we had planned to do next day and asked them, if it did not disrupt their plans too much, would they mind keeping rain from the clearing where we would be carrying out our ritual? Now it may well have been chance, but next day we spent some 12 hours in our wood and, although it poured all around us, it was dry there until half an hour after we left. Weather magic I now regard as something quite ordinary.

When we were working magically to protect Lyminge Forest, we had to think up spells that would do little harm to others. One of the better ways to do this, is to join our minds with each others and with the energies of the forest in order to attempt to send a delusion by a kind of telepathy. We sent to the police the delusion that there were more protesters in the forest than there were. We sent to the accountants of the company that wanted to take over our forest, a delusion that would make it harder for them to focus on the profits that would come from the development because these figures were being obscured by the images of leaves. We used what energy we could raise to send these delusions. We have no idea whether they were received. Whatever did happen, the forest has been preserved.

In so working instinctively, we were in a very old tradition. Here is an example found in a very old Irish legend. "The children of Calilidin gathered shaggy sharp downy thistles and light-topped puff-balls and fluttering withered leaves of the wood, and made many armoured warriors of them; so that there was not a peak nor a hill around the valley which was not filled with hosts and battalions and troops, so that the hideous quick wild cries that the Children of Cailidin raised around it were heard even to the clouds of heaven and the walls of the firmament; so that the entire land was full of woundings and raids, of burnings and swift lamentations and of the bleating of trumpets and horses, through these magic arts of the Children of Calidin." (P46 mis) All this was simply a delusion sent to fool a foe.

This alliance between us and the other realms of nature is only as it should be. I am not suggesting that we can reshape nature. Only that sometimes, at least in small ways, we can affect how things happen. This is the more true the more our spirit is at one with the spirit of Nature, or, to put in another way, is married to the Earth and Creating Deity or Deities.

This union is based on love and self knowledge. When we are living such a divine union, relishing it, held in ecstasy at its beauty, then we are both nothing and extremely powerful. We are nothing in the sense that we have nothing that is purely our own. We are powerful in that as we forget ourselves, we are transported by love beyond all restraints to be united with the great strength of the Creatrix and Creator.

But things are often not so ecstatic. Sometimes we might have need to protect ourselves. This also has happened to me. One day I was very upset when a woman banned me from an email list on which I had many friends because she wrongly thought I had written an unsigned email that criticised the list-owner. When I wrote to her asking for a copy of this email that I was supposed to have written, she refused to send it me. I then wrote for support to a woman who helped run the email list , a woman who proudly boasted she was of an initiation lineage going back to Gardner but, instead of helping, she joined with her friend in denouncing me for send this same mysterious email that I knew I had not sent. I was not sure how to deal with this. Losing contact with so many other friends at once was painful. I wanted to teach a lesson but did not believe in harmful magic.

So I sent her a visualisation in which I saw a house with ruined walls burning as if in the Bosnian war. It was a house in which they and I lived. The damage represented all the harm that had been done by their lies. I pictured myself standing outside this house, holding in my hands thunder-bolts of anger. Then I told how I let my anger fall from me, dropping the thunder-bolts unused. I instead used the air to blow away the smoke, water to cleanse the house and put out the fires, earth to rebuild it and fire to purify it. I then called the two women into the circle and bound them to be 'truth-seekers'. This was the end to my ritual. I knew that this could not hurt them unless their pride was dominating them. This working was effective but ultimately sad. Two years later one of the women wrote to me, telling me angrily how she was hurting since: "you cursed me to be a truth-seeker".

But there were prices I had to pay for this. I found myself not allowed to talk to a group whose help I wanted for an environmental cause because one of its members, a friend of one of the woman I had bound, told the others that I did "curses." It thus hurt a cause dear to me. I also received a copy of a ritual organised by them in which they called me a "warlock" and "she who shall not be named" and tried to lock me away in an oak tree. This shocked me and amazed me. I wove around my boat a protection barrier of energy to reassure myelf, imagined a wolf neatly curled around her, and subsequently felt safe. But I realised that this silly affaire had turned into quite a stupid "night war". I learnt from it not to take such things so seriously - and something more about the power of visualisations. This was the one and only time that I involved myself in any such thing. However I believe that people who work with magic need to learn how to defend themselves.

I always try to provide in the rituals I help shape, room both for both ancestral wisdom and for inspiration - and time to listen to the inner voice. The role of the priestess in charge of a ritual is like that of a conductor of an orchestra. She must not only carry the rite forward, she must sense the energy coming from each member of the group, and weave it all together so that the song or spell that results is as powerful and enriching as possible.

I mentioned above (ref.) how I also worked to raise energy to save our forest at a witchcraft gathering. Later at this same gathering I found myself for the first time discussing at a large meeting the magical implications of being born transgendered and how important it was for the Craft to be open to all varieties of gender gifts. I had a wonderful reception. This took away all my fears of working with "Gardnarians".

One day during this gathering, I was sitting reading a book behind a village witch who was doing a healing on another's damaged neck. I decided to join my own energy since I knew the woman who needed healing. I took pains to make sure this was not at all obvious. When the healing finished, I was surprised when the healer turned round to thank me for helping. I knew that my own contribution had been minor so was surprised to be detected. It was a great pleasure to be with people who were so at home with healing energy. There was much I could learn from them.

I leant about healing partly from a woman whom I went to see when I dislocated my knee canoeing in Canada. I had loved this canoeing so much that I had ignored the pain. On my return, I went first to my local hospital. After several weeks of seeing a physiotherapist, my knees seemed to be getting worse so she wanted to send me for a scan. She told me she could not simply send me into the next room - she had to get my doctor to refer me again to the consultant who would then have to authorise the scan. At this point I asked a friend in the Craft for some help and she recommended a certain cranial osteopath.

When I went to see the osteopath, she spent over two hours getting to know myself and the history of my knee. Eventually she told me I was not earthing myself correctly through it. She then manipulated the knee shaking with energy. At one point she asked me to see if I could adjust my muscle where it joined my knee. So I visualised travelling down through my leg, visualised the injured part and moved it. She then stood back - and asked why she had experienced that there were now two of me present in the room! There was the me lying on the couch -and the me that was standing beside her working with her!

Be this as it may, she cured me in one visit. When I next went to the hospital physiotherapist, I strode in and told her that I was now better. The physiotherapist then told me that I could not both go to both the osteopath and herself. When I asked why, she said that they would not know whom had cured me! I did not go back to the hospital. Since then I have frequently used the lessons I learnt from this healer.

I have been blessed with the chance to share the company of elders of the Craft. I have sometimes said to them that I would love the chance to sit back and take a back seat so I could better learn. But their response has been that my place is out there, that teachers will be sent to me as I needed, that I was in the meantime to trust my instincts for they would truly teach me.

I was also fortunate to be part of the saving of the Rollright Stone Circle on the Cotswold Hills. When the farmer who cared for them decided to sell them, people had visions of a major company buying them for advertising purposes - so a number formed a fund-raising committee to purchase them so that they would still be available for quiet rituals and for the public to enjoy. This committee was religiously neutral - so it appointed both a Christian and a Pagan spokesperson with me asked to be the latter. When the Stones were purchased, I was then thrilled and honoured to be asked if I would be the priestess for the first Samhain semi-public ritual. In circle that evening there was approximately one person for everyone of the seventy odd stones - and many of these were Catholic Christians that had opted to stay on after the end of the official entertainment.

I will never forget the great fire dish blazing in the centre, reflecting its light on the stones, on the low clouds above and on the participants - nor their rapt faces when they put their hands through the holed stone to be bonded "One with the Stone, One with the Circle, One with the Earth."

I had agreed beforehand to join my own energy with a woman being ordained that day into the priesthood of a Celtic Christian church in the US and with Bobcat, a Druid priestess, working in ancient stones elsewhere. The Samhain festival is said to be a time when our ancestors are particularly present with us in our rituals. It is an ancient Celtic festival that the church christianised or honoured (depending on your view-point) as the Feasts of All Souls and of All Saints. For me it was good to join energy, to spin a web that joined people of different religious paths. The Christian Ordinand wrote to me afterwards to say how she had felt our presence in her Ordination and how thrilled she had been. She had deliberately picked this festival because she said "I wanted all my ancestors to be present."

I often attend an annual inter-faith camp organised by a dedicated and open-minded Christian, Michael de Warde, called "Meeting in the Presence". The aim is to provide an opportunity for Christians and Pagans to share their insights and differing views. I believe that apart from all the authority centred rigmarole of the churches we share much in common. The Benedictine monk Bede Griffith, whom I met in India in 1970, also came to believe this. He said that underneath there is one mystery that we all share. Michael has noted that Roman Catholics find it easier to share with pagans in ritual than do members of the Protestant denominations.

One day Michael invited me to the launch of a new book to be held in the presence of the Archbishop of Southwark at the Anglican Southwark Cathedral. It was written by an Anglican priest, its first part was about the immanence of God in all of us. It concluded that God saved all of us no matter what our religious affiliation. Although I accepted the good motives, I was somewhat uncomfortable for it seemed to be saying that the Anglican God would save us all.

When audience responses were asked for, I said: "I was very happy to hear you talk about the immanence of the divine presence around us. This is what I also teach in my coven." I then hesitated, appalled that the word "coven" had so slipped out. It seemed to ring around the arches and everyone including the archbishop turned to stare at me.

Michael de Warde broke the ensuing silence by asking the speaker if what he wrote was relevant to pagans. Much to my surprise the author responded by saying that he had no problems with most major religions - but he had with pagans for "I cannot see how their view that nature is sacred leaves room for the redemption of nature."

It was my turn to be surprised. How could nature be tainted with sin? Astonished I said: "Do you mean that the wind, the tides, the moon, all need to be redeemed?" The priest acknowledged that this was so - and at this point the Archbishop closed the brief debate. Afterwards many clergy came up to me to thank me for being present but this brief event again brought home to me that the critical divide between religions and religious people was between those who see nature as holy and those who see her as at least partially corrupted.

With the Lyminge Forest of my childhood countryside hopefully saved, I was now free to respond to that nagging voice that kept on saying to me: "When are you coming to learn from your ancestors' lands on the wild west coasts?" I was now more willing to listen to that voice which said leave all and follow me that I spoke of at the beginning of this chapter..

I had been brought up to acknowledge my Irish ancestors. Later I had learnt that the lands in which they dreamed and worked included the west coast of Scotland, Argyle and part of the west of Wales. The latter land had always been of easier access to me, and it felt like home. My younger daughter had her birth rite in one of its mountain streams. The wildest places where hermits once lived seemed to call me. Part of my given name, Roberts, was at home among these hills as well as in Scotland and among English smugglers. The other part of my name, Farrell, came from Ulster - from my mother's father. I was also related to the McBrearties and the McArthurs who were the Scottish clans of my mother's mother.

Since the spirits of Wales refused to be ignored any longer, I fitted out my Lada station wagon so it could run my computer and packed into it a tent. I had no sooner decided to do this, then the Goddess made it easier for me. A friend had a large ex military Land Rover which he had not used for two years. It had been converted for the use of senior army staff and had under-floor gas heating, a toilet, fridge and cooker - and a table that could seat six as well as a roof that lifted to give more storage on its bunks.

If I were to travel like this, a dog would be a welcome companion and a protector - so I was also thrilled when Sarah, a woman I had spent much time with in Lyminge Forest, offered me one of her two dogs. Thus Storm, a black border sheepdog bitch with a white breast and tail tip came to live with me. She and I instantly bonded. We knew each other from the forest camps. All now was ready and we soon set out. I had everything I could possibly need in the Land Rover - including my laptop computer, everything but a bath.

I decided to head for the Prescilli mountains of South West Wales thinking that, if our ancestors thought them so special that they had brought from there the blue stones for Stonehenge, then they must have qualities that would make them well worth visiting.

Just after entering Wales, I stopped near the River Wye at an ancient sacred well I have mentioned above, with thorn trees by it festooned with new and old ribbons, each one symbolising a prayer or spell. Nearby stood three great standing stones. In the same village a massive outdoor stone altar of great age stands in what is now a churchyard.

I then followed the Wye into the mountains along its wide and beautiful valley. Near its head, at the monument to the death of the last prince of the Welsh to fight for his country's freedom, Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffuff, I washed my face with water from the same well where his severed head was washed. His Bard, Bleddyn Fardd, sung of him around 1280: "Man was killed for us, who ruled over all, Man who ruled Wales, boldly I'll name him, Manly Llywelyn, bravest of Walesmen, man not enamoured of too easy a way." P165 wv That night I slept not far from this in a wild dark valley full of the noise of a rushing torrent. I woke up by rocky pool overhung by small Welsh oaks with twisted trunks, dressed in bluish green lichens and mosses. The new leaves had not quite come and the branches were still decorated with the last of Autumn's russet leaves. Around me daffodils brightly spoke of Spring.

I had picked from the map a cove near the mountains as my destination. When I saw its wild headlands lit by a sun setting over the Irish Sea, I found myself grinning with recognition. It was a perfect place. It was if we knew each other. Next day after I and dog had explored the bay and I was back at work on this book, a woman started chanting on the beach. When she climbed back up, I introduced myself, and she immediately said: "Well sometimes you must need a bath. My back door is always open. Please feel free to come any time whether I am at home or not." I grinned and thanked my God and Goddess for looking after me so well.

This cove is called Caebwr. It is watched by the earthworks of an ancient small fort and from a field half a mile back by a three legged cromlech., a massive boulder supported on three others - the remains of a burial mound,. It was heavy, solid, reliable, a reminder that our ancestors have long loved this land.

I used this cove as my base over the next few weeks. The Welsh made me feel welcome. I had many a discussion about the land. Some of the many whose first language was Welsh told me the ancient stories. The woman who had made her bath available told me her favourite place was an ancient oak wood in the mountains. She spent much time there and felt she had found there the place that was the heart of its magic. I wondered if I should go there but decided I should first explore this wild coast and then the still wilder mountains from which the Stonehenge stones had come.

I had not travelled like this in these islands before - and I felt somewhat apprehensive that I might suffer from the stigma that travellers were often accorded in the media. I understood that local people who loved their wild places, did not want to see them invaded and possessed by vehicles parked over a long period. Thus I never stayed in one place for very long. This was no great hardship. I am an intensely curious creature and always have liked to see what was around the next corner. Only once did anyone who spoke to me at Caebwr make me feel at all unwelcome. This was when a man gave a courteous warning that local authorities would be sure to come and evict me. No one ever did - but I never stopped for long.

He made me feel nonetheless uneasy. On reflection I thought that this was ridiculous when so many others had made me welcome. I clearly had a fear that I still needed conquering so I started a song about being a coward. I then picked up a stone, attached to it my fears and threw it away into the flowing water. As I threw it I was reminded that I was oned with the Goddess, a priestess loved by her and therefore a person who belonged in her wild places.

One of the first places I wanted to visit was the large bay nearby named after the pagan Goddesses varyingly called Bridget, Bree and Bride, to whom the first Christians gave the title of a Saint rather than try to demonise her. I arrived at her bay on a wild evening, deep mist coming off the sea, great waves breaking below. I felt I had arrived home and sung out a greeting to the Bay of Bridget:

Then I scrambled down to discover a well dedicated to another Saint called Non. A plaque by the well told the story of how this well was said to have been miraculously formed when she gave birth at this spot to St David, the patron saint of Wales.. Visitors had thrown money into its water as a gift and prayer. A statue of the Mother of God, Mary, looked over the well - a confirmation of the traditional female status of sacred wells.

Near to the well stood a ruined ancient building dedicated to Non and containing a simple old Celtic Cross. This is a symbol that goes back to pagan times. It unites a sacred circle, the wheel of life, a symbol of both the sun and of women, with a cross representing the four quarters, the four elements and the four festivals as well as for Christians the cross on which Jesus died.

I meditated on this ancient sign and felt that it would be appropriate to use it in ritual instead of that other symbol of the elements, the five pointed star of the pentragram (spirit being added to the ancient four of earth, fire, air and water.) The Celtic Cross is everywhere in the land I love. For me it symbolises the sacred beliefs of both my pagan and Christian ancestors.

Non's ruined chapel was guarded by standing stones on all four sides, suggesting to me that it had been a holy place from long before Christian times. One stone had on it what are said to be the finger marks left by her when she pushed against it while giving birth to David. If this story is so ancient that it is honoured with standing stones, then perhaps this myth about St David has a more ancient form. Could it be that the ancient myth underlying the Christian myth is that here on these cliffs the Goddess Non gave birth to Dyfed, the name of this part of Wales, that in legend it was here that Dyfed had its birth place? Was Non was the Mother giving birth to the king or high priest of the land. Was the spring was her breast milk?

So I found myself chanting to the horse that grazed around Non's Sanctuary;

When I walked east along the cliff tops from this chapel, I found carved into a great rock on the cliff top another Celtic cross. This one had in its centre the sun, with its flames radiating out between the quarter marks. It was simply a cross - for one arm was not extended beyond the circle as it is when Christians draw it. (Although that form too has an ancient pre-Christian symbolism - it is found celebrated in the great Celtic Cross stone circle of Callendish in the Hebrides (a name meaning Islands of Bride.) This cross seemed most appropriate for cliffs above a bay dedicated to Bride - for the Sun was one of her symbols. Her name Bridget comes from the Celtic bree-saigit meaning "the bright arrow" - the sun shot across the sky. Another of her symbols was the white horse that runs the sky.

A woman who had Welsh as her first language took pleasure in explaining to me other ancient myths about this land. She pointed past Non's Well and the Chanter's Headland to an island and said that is where the ancients slept when enchanted for over 20 years. She pointed also to where the giant boar ran ashore in the epic of the Mabinogian leaving a great cleft in the cliffs that now hosts a harbour. It was a marvel to me that the Welsh language had preserved such stories. It reminded me of the stories of creating Ancestors in the Aboriginal dreaming sagas.

The following poem about Bride is from a book of Druidry. It tells of the lighting of 19 candles in her honour. I will only here give some of its lines - and a reference to the rest.

The Goddess Bride is still celebrated by us when we marry - although most do not know this! The words we use are ancient. (See Wed) In ancient times the King of the land would symbolically marry the mare, her totem, signifying by doing this his mystic marriage with her as the Goddess of Sovereignty.

The ancient Celtic song below reveals to us how the Celtic Christians melded their love for Bride with their new faith. They called her the midwife or "aid-woman" who helped Mary give birth to Christ but it was her help that they often sought in these songs. This song was recorded by Christian monks. The following is an example. (From the CARMINA GADELICA Ortha nan Gaidheal - a collection somewhat edited in translation.)

BRIDE THE AID-WOMAN

Over the next few weeks I roamed the Priscilli mountains in blizzard, high winds, rain and sun. I found by their highest crag, overlooking a rocky outcrop that provided at least one stone for Stonehenge, that standing stones had been erected in the outline of an upside down boat, with the side stones leaning inwards and a flat stone for the transom. I had not seen any ancient site like this before and I wondered if the stones had been set up to help empower and bless the boats that transported the stones across a hundred miles of open sea towards Stonehenge.

I found that many a field was blessed with standing stones -and that the custom of erecting these stones was still alive. I asked one farmer, whose property was called in Welsh the Druid's Spring, about the tall stone standing next to the farmhouse. He told me he had erected it because it seemed the right thing to do! I found stone circles on headlands that were not marked on Ordinance Survey Maps and ancient Ogham markings on proud stones that stood alone on cliff tops.

The old ways seemed very alive in Wales. When walkers asked me what I was doing and I told them I was writing about the old religion, they would ask if I were writing about the Druids. They were keenly interested. I did not detect any sense that they deplored this as a pagan practice. It seemed that this ancient priesthood was still honoured in Wales - indeed it seemed to me to be regaining its strength since the Eistedfords had been established. Many a town had a new stone circle to host bardic events. I was surprised to find one in the ruins of the castle in Aberystwyth and another in the heart of the university town of Lampeter.

I also heard many stories about the ancient healing magic practised in the hills. When a cow fell ill, it was not always the vet that was called. Sometimes they called someone from an old family that knew the old ways and could use perhaps dance, chants and herbs.

The survival of their language clearly has preserved the old Welsh culture more than political independence by itself could ever do. One family took me deep into the woods to a moss covered cliffed ravine containing a waterfall and told me that behind this waterfall was an entrance to the underworld celebrated in the Mabinogion. To get to the waterfall one had to pass through deep water. We removed a dangerously fallen trunk - and a few seconds later a child fell from a rope to where the trunk had lain. It was a gift that we moved it in time. A passer-by then told us that this was thought to be a place where magic was still done. It seemed to me it was a wonderful place for a rebirth initiation into any faith that held that the divinity resided in nature.

I also sought out and found the burial mound named after the great bard and druid Taliesin above the great mud and sand banks of Barmouth? Estuary. Although several local villages are named after him, his traditional grave site was without a signpost or a marker. The local farmer told me where to find it up beyond his tractor on a nearby rise. The grave mound had a stone lined cleft across its top, for all the world like a vulva with an egg rock lying within. This was the grave the Druid reborn when he tasted the three drops of inspiration from the cauldron of regeneration and wisdom and was forced to escape through an epic of shape shifting, according to the Mabinogion. I found shelter here in the valley below in a mossy wood graced by a waterfall

The very last place I explored in the Priscillis was the oak wood that the chantress had mentioned to me when I first arrived at Caebwr. My vehicle had a problem with its lights and I had a day to wait until the spare part arrived. My garage mechanic, a Welsh speaker, a dowser and magical man, told me that these same woods were his favourite place. He suggested I parked by them while I was waiting for the part.. I now had no excuse - and so I went to the woods known as Hagis-y-Coed?.

I stopped above them on a high dirt track by a bracken covered hill crowned with four great wild rocky crags rich in mosses and lichens and embraced by the roots of twisted trees,. and walked down to the woods in the valley below. Immediately I came to an old twisted grove of small weathered oaks richly carpeted in bright green moss covering boulders trunks and branches..

It seemed a rich and friendly place and so I lightly skipped into the grove and happily greeted the trees. I feel rooted amid them, welcomed as an old one I feel through my feet the powerful torrents of life flowing through the earth.

Here cradled under oaken branches, embedded in soft mosses, I felt to my surprise the oaks speak. It was a gentle welcome and enquiry. They seemed to ask me, had I come to be initiated by them into druidry? With surprise I listened. I had long wondered at whether I had a place in the Druid path. I had been put off by the bloody sacrifices of the past, of the male chauvinism in certain branches of Druidry, of feeling that they once were the established religion. I had felt that perhaps I was meant to be outside Druidry, the loner, the chantress, a dreaming daughter of earth.

Now I realised that it was not a Druid Order that would make me a Druid, initiate me. That was not the way of this oak wood. Druids were its people and they were chosen by the Oak. The very word Druid meant "of the oak". No matter what happens to others, no matter what the Orders do, it is the privilege of the Oaks to sometimes chose Druids. It is they who can chose their dreamers, their priestesses, their priests. For them a druid was simply their person. I accepted their gift with joy. When I left it was as a Druid, as well as a Witch and priestess. I was laughing with pleasure when I thanked them for their great gift.

Later I learnt that the ancient Irish Druidry (which we know better as we have indigenous written sources - the British written sources are from the Romans or Greeks) had druidesses known as a ban-drui (a "woman druid") According to one ancient document, the Dinnsenchus, the Goddess Bridget was a ban-drui and a ban-fili (poetess). They were also called pythonesses by St Patrick (I happily remembered that a witch called me by that title after I encountered a great snake at my Initiation.) It seems that the druidesses were indistinguishable from witches called ban-tuatha or ban-saithe (fairy women) (p53). The word for magic in Irish is druidecht - which simply means "druidism".

Leaving this glade, waving it goodbye, I went deeper into the ancient wild mossy rocky woods. It felt so very rich, full of old knowledge. I went deeper and deeper, enchanted by them, until it felt time to return. But something, a nagging curiosity perhaps, made me keep going until I saw below me a small valley within the woods. It held a clear pool fed by a spring and beyond it to my surprise a tall standing stone. Next to the pool was set a flat rock. Immediately the idea came that this was a dousing pool, something I had never met before. I sat on the flat rock in front of the standing stone and looked into the sparkling water . The oak opposite formed with its reflection a complete circle of branches, as above, so below. As the ripples moved so it seemed one could look into the past and future. This was truly an ageless place.

A couple of days later I spoke about this wood to a local woman who was deeply involved in the old religion and especially devoted to the Goddess Bride. She told me this wood was known locally as the former home for a training school for Druids! Later I was also to describe my experience in these woods to an elder of Druidry. He immediately said I had been called by the Old Ones and I should come to see him and swear the Druid oath. This I did at the first opportunity.

I do not see what happened to me as that special. I feel no inclination to boast of being a Druid. It surely is open to all whose religion is centred around the love of nature, of creation. It was me learning as does a child, with imagination and the love of wild creatures. As for talking with trees, for me trees are every bit as alive as are animals. They are part of a sentient and intelligent creation. They are woven from the same energies that created me. Christians recognise angels as God's messengers. Trees are for me this and more. They are part of the divine imagination, part of divinity.

The old wisdom of Druidry is partly recorded in a text called "The Triads of Britain." It spoke about the duties of a Bard, an order of Druidry

I went to the Priscilli mountains intending to camp among them for three weeks. In the event, I stayed there for over three and a half months. It was only my obligation as a host for a witchcamp in Lyminge Forest that brought me back to England.

I learnt many things while there - and longed to go back as soon as I can to continue my lessons. One was the use of chant to listen to the voice of the earth, to my unconsciousness and to my inheritance of memories. This way has come to me partly out of my childhood experiences and partly out of my time with Aborigines - but it is something I have not directly learnt from anyone. It is for me part of my own way of working, my own destiny perhaps.

I experience Nature as Divine - and naturally want to sing to her my thanks and my joy. My song or chant is for me a way of putting back some energy into the earth, giving something back in gratitude. In doing this, I feel I am fulfilling my destiny, doing a work for which Nature dreamed me. Australian Aborigines believe that they must put energy into their holy place to keep them alive and well. They thus repaint their ancient paintings, dance in the sacred places and travel the dreaming tracks singing the songs that recount the stories of creation. My fancy is that my own songs are helping to keep my own hills and bays sacred - and that my descendants will feel in these places something of the love that I and others have put into them while we walked this land.

The chants I sing are often spontaneous. I do not consciously chose the words. These come from deep within. I have no control over them. As I sing, I learn from the words I sing. To give one example; I heard myself chanting one day when I felt very much part of the magic of nature:

This was I thought a gift of Wisdom - and I sung it all the way back lest I forget it.. Yes, at the root of my life, I am now being true to the ecstatic love that I have long known. The flowing of ecstasy is deep. It is a dark river, strong and pure, flowing with pleasure through the ravines within me. This river is Bride, is Sophia, is the great magic of Creation and when I say "I support the great magic" I am affirming that I have made the conscious decision to be part of the flow of energy that sustains everything. Since then I found that Dorleen Valiente said something very similar, that, at their core, all magical traditions are one in "the great work."

She had been writing about the more erudite western traditions of magic including the Qabbalah and commented; "However it may well be asked what this has to do with the simple pagan and rural traditions of the old religion of witchcraft? We have already seen that countryside witches were often quite illiterate, like most of the common people of olden days. This is quite true; but, nevertheless, the old religion of witchcraft has its roots deep in the same soil as the rest of the western magical tradition. Indeed in basic ideas, the magical traditions of the whole world are interrelated at their deepest levels. Moreover, at the deepest levels magic and religion are also closely entwined about each other and are concerned with the same great theme; the marriage of heaven and earth, the union of macrocosm and microcosm, the Great Work." P112 of W for T.

Of all the words describing people of magic, that of chantress now seemed to fit me more than any other. I felt myself to be a chantress, a weaver of gentle but strong spells, perhaps an enchantress and priestess. Sometimes I prefered these titles to that of "witch" which has been tainted by those who fear the Craft - and to that of "wise woman" - which I feel would be conceited to adopt - or even to "shaman" when that title is seen as trendy and New Age.

My final trip on the west coast of Wales was to the north, to one of my favourite great Welsh peaks. I wanted to visit what is for me the Great Circle of the Old Ones, to ask them for strength and to be simply with them in awe and wonder. This great circle is the cwm at the heart of Calder Idris.

I started climbing up at dawn. It seemed not long before I was passing the great white quartz boulder that guards this valley. Soon I was in sight of the deep blue lake with which the valley ends. When I stood on its grassy shore, it reflected as perfectly as a mirror the mountain peaks around it..

The elements were set around me. I had climbed up from the east - that side alone was open to any breeze. The sun was rising into the south. The lake was the water in the west. The highest of all the peaks, Calder Idris, was the earth in the north. I acknowledged the presence of the Elders and Elements. There was no need to cast a circle. It was cast aeons ago by glaciers.

I asked to be allowed to listen to them. I bared my feet, exposed my skin to the mountain underneath and its energy. I had come to remind myself of the strength of the powers with whom I am bonded; To remind myself that their strength is mine. To learn not to fear. To learn to trust. I spent much time meditating by the lake and thanking the Goddess for the blessings I had received in Wales..

But before I left Wales there was also another lesson for me. A woman took me to an ancient Celtic Christian sanctuary in a bay called Mwnt. She said she wanted to introduce me to its guardian spirit. When we were in the church she called its guardian. I opened my senses, became as aware as I could of what was around me and seemed to feel the presence of a strong old male spirit. My companion told me that he had noted the anointed cross on the back of my hands, the mark of a person ordained among Christians, and said that I was most welcome. As we walked out of the gate of the round church yard enclosure, we both simultaneously noted with surprise a strong smell of honey although we could find no signs of bees - nor of honeysuckle. I could have imagined possibly the old spirit - but not this scent.

Later I was to return alone to sing to this spirit. I had learnt that in the old days many hermits travelled from this bay to the sacred islands. Mwnt had thus been a sacred space long before the Christianity arrived - but the names people gave their religion did not matter. If it recognised the sacredness of the land, the guardian spirits would have no quarrel with it.. Again I became aware of a presence. In my imagination I saw on the back wall of the church a large image of an ancient sailing ship - with me standing on the shore as if I were a light house. Again going through the gate in the circular wall around the church, I smelt the honey - a smell that I had noted was absent when I arrived.

A similar experience awaited me when I stayed overnight on my way out of Wales with the mother of a child I knew. She woke me early saying she had received a message that she had to take me to a certain place. She then drove me to the head of a wild valley in the heart of Wales near Llangynog where there was a shrine to a 7th Century holy woman, St Melangell, who had lived in the local woods. The story went that when hunters chased a hare, it hid itself under her skirts. When the hunters urged their hounds on, the hounds refused. The hunters thenceforth regarded that valley as belonging to Melangell and a community grew up around her. The shepherds in that valley call hares "Melangell's Lambs" - and many see the valley as still a refuge for wild creatures.

When we arrived at this old chapel we found in it several miniature landscapes created for the feast of St Melangel out of moss, wood and stones, depicting this story of a hare. Sculptures of hares decorated the chapel's walls. There was an ark like structure behind the altar containing her remains - and behind this, a plain white chapel over her tomb stone.

The vicar told us afterwards that her husband, an Anglican priest, had become a mendicant to beg the money to rebuild this 12th century shrine which stood, she said, on the site of a much older shrine. Her husband was now buried in its graveyard. She took us to see a standing stone in the graveyard saying this showed this had been a holy place from before Christian times - as did the over 2000 year old yews growing nearby.

She also told us the graves of the followers of Melangell contained white quartz crystals that had been placed upon their bodies. She also explained that as the chapel was dedicated to wild creatures, she was not removing the cobwebs while the baby spiders were hatching - and told of her delight when she saw a stoat in its winter coat that morning at 4 am in the churchyard. Just outside was her centre for people with cancer - she said she could at least try to cure them of their fear. She was for me a real priestess. I felt able to tell her of my own experiences in the oak wood and she then clasped my hands and greeted me as another on a sacred path.

When I spent time alone in this sanctuary, suddenly again came the honey smell as at Mwnt - and this time it did not have the same male feel, but felt as if associated with the presence of a female guardian. Some may wonder if I were imagining this? All I can say is that is how I perceived it. I am now used to trying to keep my senses open, to trying to keep myself aware of things that only faintly come to me. As for Melangell, among today's eco-warriors. I too had met spiritual women who lived in poverty in the woods in order to protect the woods and all the wild creatures that dwell in them. One of these, a young woman called Sarah, had presented me with my dog.

What I had learnt in these ancient Welsh Christian sanctuaries was that, if people of any faith honoured these ancient places, the creatures that lived there and the ancestors who had worked here, then the ancient guardian spirits that cared for hills and rivers would be perfectly accepting. Many of the early Celtic Christians shared much with the Druidry from which they came. Many kept their love for their lands and sacred places. Pagan, Christian, it did not matter as much as the ability to sense the divine presence in Creation. One wise man who stopped by my wagon in Caebwr, told me not to forget how much members of the early Celtic Christian church had loved this land.

The original sharing between many a Druid and Christian is sadly not recognised in many Welsh parishes. I found old churches with leaflets acknowledging that they were built in ancient sacred circles that are twice as old as Christianity. Some still had standing stones around them. But their leaflets suggested that Christians were the first truly spiritual people to arrive and thus did not acknowledge the blessings that our earlier ancestors brought that had helped make these places sacred. Missionaries are today doing much the same in Australia on Aboriginal sacred lands. I was thus delighted to meet here a Christian minister who was so aware that the ground was already holy before the church was built.

There are still traces of ancient sacred places in London. On the first full moon of 1999, a month before Imbolc, I went with a friend to search out some of the ancient places in London that were once dedicated to the Goddess Bride. We went first to Brideswell in Wapping in the East End , by the former London docks. This was a well that once supplied water seen as a gift of the Goddess Bride to seamen but today the sacred spring can only be detected by its gurgles under a manhole cover.

We then went into the centre of London, to an Anglican Church dedicated to St Bride, the patron "saint" of journalists - and the same Goddess whose bay I had visited in Wales.. Its board noted that the church was underpinned by a Roman building and by an ancient holy well - which would have been dedicated to the Goddess Bride before the Romans arrived. Springs were seen as the breasts of the goddess. Under the full moon my friend and I thanked the spirits of the place, asked for blessings for London and remembered our ancestors on this most ancient burial mound.

Bride was both the Mother Goddess and the threefold Goddess of poets, of metal workers and healers - a fine inheritance for journalists. The church board celebrated this place being Christian for 1,500 years. It did not honour the sacred gift of water in its well - nor our pagan ancestors whose energy and devotion had make this a sacred place long before a church was built here. The well and church are on a low hill top beside the river Fleet, a tributary to the Thames. From Bride's Church we could see across this now hidden river to where St Paul's Cathedral stood on the opposite height. The cathedral was also built on top of an ancient shrine, said to have been dedicated in Roman times to the Goddess of witches, Diana.

Should we accept such biased histories? When I was a child, my Catholic mother made sure I knew that the Anglican pre-Reformation churches were "stolen" from us by the greedy King Henry 8th. I have since always felt utterly at home in the marvels of the great Gothic Cathedrals with naves of great stone trees sometimes held together by keystone images of the Green Man. All of us have ancestors who were pagans who bequeathed to us much that they held sacred. The Church of England does not "own" the sacred spaces on which stand its most ancient churches. These are sacred also to Catholics and to the members of the pagan religions of these islands. I hope that soon we all will be able to celebrate in our varying ways in all of our sacred places.

We need something new, millennial, an "even" balance between pagan and Christian that allows both to work together. The different expressions of our innate religion, woven by different cultures with rich insights, should be honoured and shared.

I acknowledge that I inherited knowledge of the mystical tradition from the Churches - and thus owe them a debt. I owe also to the religions of other continents. They too were part of the Mediterranean mixing pot at the time when Christianity was born. When Gnostic Christianity flourished (AD 80-200); Buddhist missionaries had been in Alexandria for generations. The Brahmins of India were also well known there.

Behind all religions lies the innate human religion of our children. Our deepest wisdom lies in understanding the gifts we inherited as children. The truth is there from the beginning, within us - as is beauty, energy and spirit - and divinity. We humans are not born at random, not created purely for survival by Darwin's natural selection, but as part of a great work of music, of creation, of art and of love. Poets and scientists instinctively know that something is true if it fits into the great pattern of beauty around us. For me all nature is infused with divine spirit. All matter is also energy and spirit.

This is alike to the vision of the Jesuit mystic and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin although he saw this fusion of spirit and matter as coming about through evolution rather than being always in existence. He wrote: "All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is *spirit-matter*. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule."

He continued: "Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call "matter" turns about, furls in on itself, *interiorises* the operation, covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious. It is a cosmic *change of state.*. This irrefutably explains the links and also the contradictions between spirit and matter." Ref. "The Phenomenon of Spirituality":

For me the Creating Energy of the world, the universe, dreamt us. It loves us. It gave birth to us as to all other creatures because we have a role to lay in the great music of this universe, in what Plato called the great chorus of the spheres. It gives to each one of us a destiny.`

Part of this destiny is to realise that just as we share in the nature of the universe, we also share in the nature of God. The living creative sustaining intelligent energy that underpins our world, the energy that we know as divine, as Gaia, as the Father, as the Mother, the energy that imagines us, makes and sustains us and every particle of this universe, the energy that is small and personal enough to love each of us and large enough to sustain all that is, this energy is within us. This is the "Force" that is really with us. Our bodies could not exist without the presence of this Creating Energy. This Energy is the Person who dreamt us and formed us in Her, His, own likeness. It is present in all creatures. It is thus both within and without us.

The ''Gospel according to Luke" reported Jesus as saying: "the kingdom of God is within you" - not in some separate City of God but here, in what the some see only as a vale of tears. The rediscovered 'Gospel according to Thomas' reported Jesus as saying: '"If those who lead you say to you 'look the Kingdom is in the sky, then the birds will arrive there before you. If they say It is in the sea, then the fish will arrive before you... Rather the Kingdom is inside you and it is outside you." "When Jesus was accused of committing blasphemy because he had said he was the son of God, his response was that the scriptures said we are all gods! (luke?)

Jesus then spelt out the consequence of this:

When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known and you will realise that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty." 128

If the Gospel accounts are accurate, Jesus really laboured to get across to people that they already shared the divine nature, that they were naturally children of God. It is therefore most ironic and misleading that many who later claimed to teach in his name insisted that Jesus alone was a son of God, that only Jesus shared in the divine nature, that we ourselves are guilty miserable sinners who become children of God through the Father's generosity, not through our nature, not as a birth right.

The Gospel of Thomas related that Jesus said, "I am not your master... He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him." This to my mind is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge which Eve reached for - and which the Jealous God, Jehovah, did not want her to have. This is the knowledge which in being denied to Christians, leaving many who should have been empowered instead struggling with guilt and fig leafs.

Rather should we be singing:

I honour and learnt from the Christ that the priests killed and whose words they distorted. I am the daughter of God, I am she that is born of the Father, walking strong, warrior, mother, father, beyond time and gender, she who is being given birth to, she who gives birth.

 

I am also the Pagan, the spirit of nature, child of the Goddess, the one that was burnt and hung and tortured for centuries, born of the Mother of All.

We span the worlds, one with the mystics of all religions, one with the children of all races. We must realise and reflect the beauty that we possess so that our external behaviour is a truthful match to our inner reality. It is our way to make the world more beautiful.

When we accept who we really are, then we are rid of the divisions that fragment us. We accept with love the aspects of ourselves that we had rejected or not recognised. We become complete. We unite inside ourselves both the male and female aspects of our characters. We become strong, able to self-fertilise, able to create.

This too was among the saying of Jesus kept by the Gnostics.

Jesus said to them; "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same...then you will enter [the kingdom]" Gos acc to Thomas.

I remember well the day when I conquered my fears enough to find my oneness. At that time I was wearing an ankh, the magical pagan Egyptian symbol also used by Coptic Christians like a cross with a loop as its upper arm. When I first started wearing it, I had told friends that I felt I was travelling the circle on top of the Ankh back towards the centre of the cross. I realised I had completed this journey on the day when I realised I had managed at last to embrace both the male and female sides of myself without feeling that my self-identity as a woman was hereby threatened. I was now at the centre from which the arms radiate out. I felt this meant the time had come for me to start teaching!

Another balance I needed, but took time coming, was the empowering realisation that I did not have to chose religions, that I could value and retain aspects of both my Christian and Pagan inheritances without feeling that I was being disloyal to a belief system, without fearing the rejection of my fellow believers. I had learnt that Jesus included in his teachings aspects of both Egyptian and Jewish traditions. I knew I was not abandoning what I have learnt and inherited but seeking a new synthesis We carry our own truth within us. We do not need to be the label. I found myself singing:

My ancestors in these isles well knew of this balance. That is why the Mother Goddess of Ulster, Macha, was said in the Tain to be the "daughter of the Strange One of Ocean." The "strange one" was the area between the high and low tides, the area that is both sea and land. This is also why many ancient cultures frequently made their hermaphrodites into their shamans - for they knew life between genders. That is why many of the ancient Goddesses were depicted as hermaphrodite. The image revealed that they did not need others to create.

Everyone of us is a priestess or priest for we need no mediator needed between us and our Lover-God or Goddess. Some of us are also called to manifest this role publicly as a teacher and as a representative in ritual of the sacred people and of the Deity among us. The work of the priesthood is more than serving the people by empowering them, by healing , and by keeping the balance. We are to live as the Goddess present in nature, to serve the earth, serve the animals - and serve rocks for the God is in them too. We must put our energy into our holy places, we must do our part in our sacred world.

My own path includes being an investigative journalist - fighting against greed and the other false Gods that people worship and to protect the earth. We all have our own paths. There are many ways she needs to be served - thus she makes many of us!

My work also includes being an enchantress, in that I have to use chant to sing the earth, to express my own feelings of worship and to put back into the earth something of the energy she has given me. In doing this I am serving my Dreaming, keeping it alive.

When I am working as a priestess, I often experience a sense of timelessness. When I walk up the Avenue of Stones at Avebury, I feel I am the priestess who did this before, who has done it many times, and will do it many times. I am very far from being alone in having this experience. Many other women have told me that they had this experience when walking this Avenue. This comes from the nature of our sacred work. We are all One in this work.

When we work magically, when we walk the Avebury Avenue, when we meditate, we can experience being beyond time. For me if one person can sense future events, then the future is in some way present now. For me the past, the present and the future are but different dimensions of the now. The gnostic scriptures record Jesus as teaching much the same, "Blessed is he who is before he came into being. For he who is, has been and shall be." Philip gospel ref.? (There is also is an interesting current mathematical theory that explains part of the Chaos Theory by positing that we cannot know the precise position of a particular electron because it is being influenced by the future. It seems science and witchcraft are again bedfellows - which is as it should be!)

As I wrote the above paragraphs I was in the midst of Bodmin Moor in a rainstorm, sheltered in a Land Rover. I had come there to finish writing this book for I needed wilderness to feed me and to sustain me for what I feel is a sacred task that is definitely in the present. Two days earlier I had watched the full eclipse of the sun from near the Hurlers Stone Circle and saw the sun copy the moon in waning and waxing, creating the wondrous darkness that woke a bat near me.

I nearly did not come to these moors. I intended to go north to a friend's funeral rites but the car had broken down and now it was too late. I then considered going to the eclipse of 99. There were reports that vast crowds would flood into Cornwall to watch it. I hate crowds but I wondered if perhaps I could find a wild place? I thought of the heights of Bodmin - surely that will be alone - and of visiting the nearby Witchcraft museum in Boscastle but I still was not sure. I decided first to go to the nearby sacred Red and White Springs in Glastonbury to get my water supplies and then meditate on the Tor and seek an answer. And when I reached the Springs, a man sitting by them gave me the answer! He told me he was going to exactly the places I was considering. He planned to stay in Boscastle and intended to watch the eclipse from Bodmin Moor. He had all the detailed maps I wished to see. He pointed out the location of two stone circles upon the moor and also told me of the sacred places he knew near Boscastle.. One of them was guarded, he told me, by an angel that cured him. He called himself both a Christian and a Pagan So here was the sign that I thought I would find on the Tor, the man waiting for me. So that is why I came to Bodmin and was happy. I felt I was on my path and in the right place.

I spent a night on the road to Bodmin up on top of the Quantocks in an open grassy clearing grazed by ponies amid the heather. I stopped my "battle wagon" by two old thorn bushes, ancient ones of the heights, I felt their welcome. Tears of misty dew lay on the curved breasts of turf beneath them, There was a strong fragrance of heather - and a fine crop of bilberries nearby. I sung a welcome song and left my love and energy here as a secret dreaming, a gift to children who would roam here. This place was unmarked by stones but it felt as if gently surrounded by elf energy. I wondered how they would see me. Perhaps as somewhat transparent?

I feel instinctively that the work that I am now doing as a priestess, as a guardian of the wild, will essentially continue to be my work after my death. It is not simply that this work is timeless in the sense I experienced at Avebury. It is rather that I will be going home as a conscious human being to be with my Lover, not to go to sleep or to get blissed out - but to work with my Lover in sustaining this wonderful world.

When the rainstorm on Bodmin Moor finished, I took a break from writing this to climb up to burial mounds upon a summit to talk with my ancestors and to honour them. On the way down, following no path, I found a stream that issued from a dark cleft. I climbed into this to discover that it flowed from the mouth of a cave. Within the cave was a clear pool with a waterfall coming down into it. The cave entrance was encircled with many flowers, foxgloves, heather and gorse. It seemed to me a truly holy hidden place. I left in the flow of its natural blessings a wish that all who found her, would find healing. My feet unconsciously took me here to do this. It is part of this priestess's work. The waters issuing from this cave nourishes many creatures. Perhaps some day a creature may come here needing healing? My own energy is now joined with what was already there.

We can learn much from the patterns that appear in our lives when we follow our instincts. They can reveal to us the dreams that underlay our creation and helped shape us - and something of the Divine Energy that sustains us. If we do have a Creating Parent, it seems that She may also "dream" a destiny for us.

I learnt of this possibility when I discovered to my surprise that some of the most important events of my life were seemingly woven into a pattern that related to the ancestral myths of my people. This gave my life a structure and meaning that I did not intend.

Was it by chance that the two key events in my gender transition happened on two of the four major ancient feasts of my ancestors - and in each case, happened on very appropriate feastdays, revealing a deeper meaning in what was happening to me?

By seeming chance, not then knowing the significance of the date, I took my first female hormone pill on August 1st, the feast of Llamas, a harvest festival when we celebrate the death of the corn king, a death needed that we might live. This was the day I too killed the willing male so that I, Jani, the daughter of God, might live. The pill contained hormones taken from a pregnant mare. In a way, she thus gave birth to me. A white mare in ancient times signified the goddess.

Next a hospital assigned me a date for the operation that would enable me to make love as a woman. They picked seemingly at random May 1st, the great feast of Beltaine, when is celebrated the new life of Spring, a time traditionally for much love-making. It was then too that I later first made love with a man.

Then I was gravely assaulted at midnight on the great feast of Samhain or Halloween. Was it by chance that this attack, the only such attack in my life, happened at a time when traditionally the veil between the worlds of the dead and living is said to be at its thinnest? It took me to the borderlands of death to listen to the God and Goddess. Through this assault I came to put my anciently chosen sacred role at the centre of my life.

Finally, was it chance that my final initiation in the Craft was on the remaining feast? I celebrated what is called the Great Rite, the mystic marriage, on the Celtic feast of Imbulc, the feast when ewes begin to have milk, serpents emerge from hibernation, when light is overcoming the winter's dark and when is celebrated the feast of the ancient Goddess. True I chose this day - but then I was unaware of the greater pattern in my life.

This pattern suggested to me that some spirit, ancestor or deity, with knowledge of the ancient myths of my ancestral lands, had helped to weave my story for me. This spirit had dreamt me a life that gained meaning from these ancient myths. Perhaps these myths too had their origins in ancient dreamings. This would not have surprised Aboriginal Elders. They were used to the spirits of their lands shaping for them their own lives.

There are so many signs, so many myths, within which I find myself dancing. My very travelling way of life now is so much that of the Gallae, the priestesses of Cybelle, but I did not chose this way to mimic them. It came naturally. The Gallae apparently believed, as Jackie and I did when our children were young, that owning property was an obstacle to spiritual progress. Ref. 108b of b. They travelled in caravans and took from one place to another a small shrine of the Goddess. If a Gallae had a true home, it would be the mountain forests considered sacred to Cybele. Such places are my home. They ate meat believing, as I do, that all food was alive and died that we might live, therefore that all food is sacred. They preferred food gathered directly from nature.

According to the ancients, a person who became a Gallae, a transgendered priestess or shaman, was fulfilling a destiny ordained before birth and revealed by dreams or by the stars, a destiny controlled by the Goddess. Ref. B of B, p 111. Such was the belief of many an ancient people. In this world, we all have a destiny. We are free yet each one of us was brought into being for a specific purpose. This purpose is set in the dreaming that began the process aeons ago that resulted in us now materialising in this life as a human of this planet.

The psychologist Karl Jung wrote of myth in developing his psychology. He said he found myths and dreams excellent tools for gaining some knowledge of the contents of our unconsciousness. Rather like the palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin who saw matter itself as naturally evolving from unconsciousness to consciousness. Jung saw each of us as containing an ocean of unconscious knowledge which we are in the process of turning into conscious knowledge.

He said a myth can better express the inner personal meaning of truth than can an objective scientific "fact" - for personal truth cannot be defined, limited or be purely rational. Carl Jung - rather like the Beguine Porete, held that the more our critical reason dominates our lives, the more impoverished our lives become. He wrote that our lives become richer the more we make conscious our myths and our unconsciousness. 302 He held that each of us possess "the almighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years". This he called the "collective unconsciousness", (P105) seeing it as combined 'the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death" p41ft. Myth. For me it is the precious resource that we have at our disposal - and yes, it does cross gender lines as Jung suggested. Ultimately we need to find a unity beyond gender.

He said when in his eighties: "My life is the story of the self-realisation of the unconscious.. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestations and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious state and to experience itself as a whole... what we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my 83rd year to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only "tell stories". Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth." P3

In these thoughts of Jung, myth plays a different role to that it played in my own life. It seemed to me, the myth I lived was not made by me, but I was made for it. The myth seemed to come into my life through the active agency of another rather than from my unconscious world.

Yet although Jung defined: "Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition," in his later years he also described myths did not fit this definition but which were bridges between our conscious thoughts and another imperishable world that lay outside us and beyond the laws of time and space. This was closer to my own experience. He said his dreams and visions gave him knowledge of this world and concluded:

"In the end the only events in my life worth telling are when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences among which I include my dreams and visions. They for the basis of my scientific work."p4. "Myths are the earliest forms of science. When I speak of things after death, I am speaking out of inner promptings and can go no farther than to tell you dreams and myths." 304

It seems that myths can enter our lives from this other world. Perhaps I came aware of them because I had wedded this imperishable world? Perhaps the wedding of our personal will to the Creating Spirit of these inner myths, as an act of love, of self-giving, helps free the eyes and heart to see with imagination, helps frees the spirit to live the myth that lives in the divine imaginings about us? Perhaps myths are in our lives because we were not formed in a vacuum but in a world of myths that have much to teach us?

Jung believed that myths arrived in his life from this other world. The night before his mother died he had a dream in which a wolf tore past him as if on a hunt. He immediately recognised this beast as being part of the Wild Hunt that seeks the souls of the dying, an ancient myth of his German people. When he later learnt of his mother's death, he saw this dream was a pre-cognition of her death. At first this the savagery of this vision dismayed him. But on reflection he saw an inner meaning that pleased him. She was being taken..."beyond Christian morality , taken into that wholeness of spirit and of nature in which conflicts are resolved" Later on he wondered why he was not beset with grief when he thought of her death, but then realised that whenever he thought of her: "I continually heard gay dance music, laughter and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated." It was perhaps as if his mother was celebrating her mystic marriage. p311, 313-4

Jung looked to life after death to give a purpose to our lifetime work of making conscious what we possess in our unconsciousness. He theorised that the more we make conscious, the more we can take with us into the next world. "The maximum awareness which has been attained forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of death that is so important. Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together , can the general level of consciousness be raised." Jung 311.

I am not so sure that this is right. Why should our unconsciousness not come with us into this other world? Why should we not be able to continue to explore its contents? What happens if we are reincarnated, as many believe? (I am dubious about reincarnation being my own next step. I believe after death I will work with of my Lover God in the work of sustaining this earth.)

In the very early days of Christianity, some pagans came to believe in the message of Jesus because they found incarnated in his life many of their greatest and most precious myths. In particular he seemed to have lived some of the mysteries that they had celebrated for hundreds of years in the temples of Greece and Egypt. The rituals of these temples celebrated a divine person who died so that we might live, who then descended into the underworld and later rose back into life again. In Egypt they celebrated the death of the God Osiris who died on a Friday to rise up again three days later. In Mesopotamia, they had far older story of the Goddess Inanna, going back some 5,000 years, who descended into the underworld, spent three days there and then reappeared in splendour. These myths honoured the death of plants that gave their lives that we might live, celebrated the rebirth of spring as well as that of the moon- and finally, and most importantly, used these symbolisms in rites designed to celebrate the rebirth of an individual to spiritual life. None of these myths were thought of as real historical events, no one went hunting for relics of Osiris or pieces of his coffin. They were all seen as embodying a far more abstract wisdom.

The later Christian account was that an historical person had uniquely lived this mysteries, embodied the God and charged his followers with a message of a one true religion for all of humanity. Some suspect that the Christian church embellished Christ's life with mythological elements or that he is himself a myth. But there are many elements of his story that lend weight to the conclusion that he was a real historical figure, such the writings of pagans about him and his great friendliness to women, an aspect scarcely likely to be invented by a patriarchal Church..

I think it rather that the myths came into his life and shaped it, that he could not escape from living them. Perhaps this happens to many others besides? He apparently lived and spoke as a person who was one'd with God, living a life dominated by sacred realities, so to me it is no wonder that dreams and myths came to him, taught him, possessed him.

I see these sacred myths as the foundation lessons of human kind, part of our inherited wisdom, a divine gift to us. These myths then became stories that were woven into the sacred rituals of a thousand different nations. Some myths are so fundamental that they never really die, even when religious or scientific authorities deny their reality, but keep on resurfacing.

Thus the many stories about Mary, the Virgin Mother, that are woven deep with old pre-Christian myths and symbols. Male authorities may say she is not a Goddess, but she has been experienced as such since the honouring of the "Goddesses" was officially abolished in the Roman Empire. Her title "Stella Maris", Star of the Sea, was inherited from Isis. Her very name Mary means "Of the Sea", the primordial female ocean, the womb of life - from which Macha, the Goddess of Ulster, was also born. I now see Mary as a Goddess, who makes manifest the female aspect of the Divine, and as such She refuses to be suppressed, refuses to die, refuses not to be part of her people's lives..

These ancient myths even come to inhabit our fairy stories - stories originally not of fancy but of "faeries" or nature spirits. The ancient tale of Cinderella has the heroine watched over by the "Godmother", who can symbolise the Divine Mother, our Protector and Source of Wisdom and Enlightenment, for she teaches Cinderella what to do to reach happiness. Cinderella also has to spend the ritual lunar three days in darkness before she attains union with her Beloved in the Sacred Marriage.

A modern example of a myth coming to life, possessing someone, surely happened in the life and death of Princess Diana. I was brought up as a Northern Irish Republican. I had not obtained an Australian passport because I did not wish to swear allegiance to the Queen. But something happened when I woke up one day in the very early hours of the morning and put on the television because I could not sleep. The surprise was not so much the news that Diana was dying following a car crash. It was what happened when she died.

At that moment I found myself, to my astonishment, sitting bolt upright in bed and exclaiming "But you are good!" It felt as if we had touched and I had felt her goodness. Over the next few days it seemed that many others experienced something similar. I wondered if this was because so many were engrossed in her life and so helped to create a great surge of emotional energy around her death? This does not mean that she did not touch us. The collective energy added strength to her appearance in our lives. However it happened, I cannot forget how real her touch felt.

Over the next week, I studied the accounts of her work for sick children and for land mine amputees, to see if my intimidation were correct. I found she had really worked hard to fulfil the myth she felt she had been given, that she was meant to be the Queen of Hearts. She went frequently to hospitals unannounced, without the press, taking great pains with sick children. I was particularly impressed by the account of a parent who told how her sick daughter wrote to Diana and received from her a hand-written reply. Some weeks later at a public event, this parent called out to Diana, thanking her for the reply. Diana immediately stopped, came back and asked about her daughter. The reply came that she was at a children's hospital and gravely ill. A day later, quite privately in the middle of the night, Diana turned up at this hospital to see this child.

And thus I was thrilled when her brother took on the role of completing her myth, championing her in the Abbey at her funeral, saying she was named for the pagan Goddess, Diana, and burying her on an island where she will be remembered as a sleeping beauty. I loved it all and hoped the people hold fast to this new working of an ancient myth. Why it should be given to us now, why Diana, that I do not know - but her death was extraordinarily experienced by many. Tens of thousands left her flowers in a national outpouring of quite incredible grief. Maybe she was too earthy, too sexual, too honest ever be officially made a saint - but she would be if we still made saints by acclamation. Instead she will probably remain the goddess that she is - that all women can be.

One lesson I learnt from this was that the divine way is not always to work through the poor and outcastes - but may work through popular myths, even through a princess of the royal family. The divine way is of the people, not of an esoteric occult few.

We can make our own myths. Sometimes we do this by building on deep true instincts. But othertimes myths have been framed purely to help achieve a political end. A created myth with terrible consequences was that of Adam and Eve. It changed for Augustine and for many our inherited and instinctive delight in nature by teaching that this world is a vale of tears given to us as a punishment for our first parents' sins.

But looking at it more closely, it turns out to be a very muddled myth, bearing all the hall marks of being cobbled together out of different ancient stories. Surely a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was created to impart this knowledge? Why were women and snakes so singled out for punishment? Were they being punished because they had sacred knowledge learnt of trees, a knowledge considered dangerous by the priestly author of this version of Genesis? (Biblical scholars say that the biblical stories went through a priestly rewriting about 300-400 years before Christ.) Why were snakes particularly evil? Was it because they were the emblem of rival religions such as the Egyptian?

I have spent decades of my life helping people to deal with such evils as corporate greed, bad medicine, human rights violations, pollution - but all that I could achieve by doing this was to prevent a few evils. I often felt I was simply plugging a few holes in a fragile dyke.

I now realise that there are other ways of tackling these problems that can be more effective. The myths that underlay and justify corporate or personal irresponsibility need to be changed. The myth that humanity was given this world by God so we can "conquer" it serves as an justification for carving up of our common heritage for private profit - and serves to make those who do so feel more comfortable at night. The myth that women were created to serve men justifies male chauvinism. The myth that we are weak sinful creatures helps to justify a milliard guilt complexes and our need for a priestly caste.

So, perhaps one of the most important things to us to do is to re-dream the myth of our Creation to make it reflect our deepest, most personal and sacred instincts. If we love the World, then our myths about our creation will reflect that love and will be beautiful. But if we fear nature, if we fear women, if we want to deny to others the knowledge of good and evil, then we will again find ourselves with a creation account like to the one in Genesis.

Let me start. Afterwards we all should embellish it, alter it, improve it, and make it more personal.

The Genesis Story, the Birthing Story

In a cave under the world lives the Mother who could make children by herself for she contained both male and female magic. She is in love with creating and is always refashioning herself, making children of every kind out of her own body. In four days she had made a galaxy out of one of her legs, a nova out of a breast and a spider out of the other breast. Her nose she had used to shape a cow, her eyes the planet Venus and the Sun. She is a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting colours, lights and shapes.

And everything she creates is so full of her energy that it dreams and creates as well. She is so alive, so much enjoying the detail of creation, that she is present everywhere, watching, seeing how it is going. For her everything she has created is her family. She lives in them, sustaining them with an endless sparkling stream of love and energy. She creates and supports a never ending cycle of birth and death to allow creation to continue to evolve in a balanced elegant way. She heals the wounds, cares for the dying. Nothing in her world is static. She is in the caves with the bats. For them she is a bat Goddess. She is on the moors with the wild ponies. For them she is a Horse Goddess. She is in the heavens -and for the stars she is the Goddess Mother of Galaxies. She is down the holes with the worms and they too know her as their Mother Goddess. All sing to her, all love her in their own way.

Creation matured and became more and more conscious. On the fifth day of creation the trees, the rocks, the earth dreamt of themselves and learnt that they were beautiful. The Goddess was delighted that they were becoming more aware. Every mother likes it when her children resemble her more. The dreams of the trees, of the rocks, of the earth, became full of her divine energy, and they too created out of their bodies other species that expressed other aspects of divinity. On the 6th day they dreamt a species that could express self awareness and so out of the earth, out of the plants, out of the animals and the snakes, out of their dreams, came the first humans.

The Goddess clapped her hands with delight. Her worlds were producing creatures like her that could express themselves creatively. So she decided to give them a gift. Their instincts she would more deeply bury so they did not dominate their lives. She will also give them the power of creating their own myths and of re-shaping the earth. She thus gave them the ability to wreck creation - but she had to trust they would grow up true.

Among the species that had helped make humans were the trees and herbs. These also promised to help, teach, house, feed and heal humans when needed. But She also gave the humans the special gift of most sacred tree that would teach them of the dangers of creating false myths. This magical tree was the Tree that knew both Good and Evil. She told them eat of this tree and live wisely.

And so that humans would not get the illusion that they were a species apart from the rest of her creation, she reminded them of the great cycle of life, of death and life, by giving them also a special guardian, the snake, to remind them of this cycle everytime it shed its skin. The serpent also promised her it would teach them the magic of life, for, living close to the earth it was full of earth energy.

The first humans were to be the parents of young gods and goddesses in whom the power of the Goddess would be incarnate. They would be both divine and born of the earth although like all creatures they would live on earth as part of the wheel of life. They would have awesome power to do good or evil to their family, the family of the Goddess - yet she knew that if they succeeded in fulfilling the dreams she shared with them, then they would be her Lovers and she would not be alone. It as a risk she took - for she knew in her instincts and her knowledge of the future that this was the way it had to be.

And she made them male and female so they would mix their genes, have fun in doing this and form between themselves a union that shared the love that she had for all. She created also gays and bisexuals so there would be many ways of making love and marrying. Then she said the time had come to rest and make love for her Garden of Eden was complete. It was now the day of love, the seventh day that is unending. This is the story of the Original Blessing and of how all things came about.

End.

At the end of the book comes will come a section of rituals and poems including...

Whom Am I?

On lowliness

On being feared

As a priestess of the Earth, I am not of one path, but of all paths. I stand between them all, accepting what each gives that I can weave into my tapestry. I weave knowing that what I weave is but one square in a cosmic patchwork quilt. Others weave the other squares. We are of the humancraft, of the inherited Old Wisdom. We weave the net that protects those who fall, we weave the thread that joins us to each other, we weave the quilt that will keep the child and elderly warm. We weave the beauty that inspires, we weave the magic of imagination, we weave the tapestry of life.

 

END

Epilogue

WiseCraft - On Encountering Death.

About taking a friend through dying, conquering anger and fear -and taking him through the gatesÉ on being for him the dark goddess and Crone.

Rites and Pathworkings to follow.

All or a selection of the following

A Child Welcome

For a Girl reaching Puberty

For a Boy reaching Puberty

Engagement or Handfasting for Year and a Day

Handfasting or Marriage for Life (Heterosexual, Bisexual and Homosexual

For the Ending of a Marriage

For a Person who is changing their Gender.

Self Initiation into the Craft.

A complete Dedication to the God and/or Goddess.

Protection Rituals

A preparation for Death

To Celebrate and Mourn a Death