At twenty-three, she was still looking. That was when a friend made an offhand comment about Wicca, and gave Christina a copy of Drawing Down the Moon, a study of neopaganism written by Margot Adler, journalist, Wiccan High Priestess and granddaughter of the celebrated psychiatrist Alfred Adler.
The book inspired Christina: finally, she could put a name to what she wanted. She decided to look for real witches. Her journeys took her to Europe, where Wicca originated. She hitchhiked in Scotland, ended up on a tiny Orkney island, made contact via letter with a bona fide English Wiccan and finally, after a serious bout of illness that convinced her to leave the small Orcadian cottage where she was living and studying, she arrived in London, where she found ‘it’. A coven of witches. She started her training, she was initiated, and went on to become High Priestess of her own coven. Amidst all this, she studied for and was awarded her doctorate, as well as starting her own business, which is now a thriving bookshop a stone’s throw from the Fitzroy Tavern.
A ‘coven’ is a group of up to thirteen witches. Each coven is independent, with no central authority to answer to, even though most covens are informally in touch with each other. In the majority of cases a coven is led by a High Priestess and a High Priest, but the High Priestess comes unambiguously first. She is, however, primus inter pares, first among equals: she is the centre of the group, but this does not give her any moral authority over the others. As one of the very first High Priestesses put it, if she exceeded her role, people would ‘vote with their feet’ and leave.
A coven is basically a group of friends – though one that practises rituals in a rigorous way, within the guidelines of a specific tradition. Gaining access to a coven can be a rather laborious affair, and even then, you won’t necessarily like its members and they won’t necessarily like you, as can happen when any individual encounters a long-established group of friends. No reputable coven will take in a new person before an adjustment period, which lasts never less than ‘a year and a day’ and often more. Wicca does not require any exchange of money or favours, but it does require time.
In sum: there is a discreet international network of people, from all walks of life, organized in small groups, handing down an oral tradition based on a modern interpretation of ancient pagan religion, in which women have been leading the show since the Fifties. If I couldn’t find any wonder there, I was doomed.
My opening question to Christina was pretty basic: what on earth is a ‘High Priestess’?
She took her time before answering, sipping her sparkling water and nibbling at her vegetarian curry. ‘I’m going to answer circuitously,’ she said, ‘because if you get into definitions, the world starts ending.’ She patted Rambo’s head and went on. ‘I became an initiated witch at the age of twenty-six. I felt I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the whole of my life. That was twenty-eight years ago. Over time I went from being in a coven, where I did my apprenticeship, to having a coven of my own, and passing on the tradition. And when somebody is the head of a coven, High Priestess is the term given to them. It is a very grand term, but the grandness, at its best, applies to our aspirations. It is an archetype, an ideal. It means that I pass on the tradition that was passed to me, that I practise in a coven, and that I do the Work.’
‘Which is…?’
‘The Work is to be a friend of the mystery,’ she said. On seeing my expression, she laughed, and tried to explain. ‘Becoming a witch was my way of marrying the mystery. It was me saying, I will be faithful to the unknown, I will not let that fall by the wayside. I will never walk away from the unknown, the mysterious, that thing that makes me tremble and allures me in equal measure. The Work is to be faithful to that. The Work is also to bring that into the world.’ She laughed again, at her own words this time. ‘It sounds very noble, and strange. But yes, the Work is to bring that into the world. That which is unseen, that which is…’ she paused, searching for the words, ‘…maybe on the other side, and remains largely unknowable. I made this promise, that I wouldn’t shut in myself the door on the mysterious. The door on the sacred that is found in the darkness behind candlelight; or in the cave.’ She paused once more. ‘I kind of see myself as somebody who has their foot in the door to keep it from slamming shut.’
Christina loved what she did, she was aware of how odd it sounded and she was entirely unapologetic about both oddness and love. She didn’t try to justify or explain or cajole – she simply stated what she thought. Or, better, what she felt.
That thing that makes me tremble and allures me in equal measure.
I was on the right track.
*
Rudolf Otto was a Christian theologian with an interest in other religions. In 1917 he published a book called Das Heilige, The Idea of the Holy. The book tried to answer the question: what exactly do we mean when we say that something is ‘holy’? What is a ‘sacred’ thing? And why is it sacred? This is a useful question for us wonder-seekers to ask, and we do not need to subscribe to any supernatural belief to understand why.
Say that you are walking in the woods, on your own, on a Sunday morning. Nothing strenuous, just an easy circuit you found in a book of local walks. It is one of those early warm days in May that make you feel young again, and the scent of blooming wild flowers lulls you into a contented mood. Right now, your life is not complicated or troublesome or messy. Right now, all is good.
You sit on the soft moss growing on the serpentine root of an oak tree. You take from your pack a cereal bar and your water bottle. You drink the water, you eat the bar, you put the wrapper in a pocket and decide to move on. You rest your hand on the root to push yourself up on your feet – and you touch a spot with no moss, and you notice the pleasant roughness of the wood. You don’t stand up immediately. You keep your hand on the root.
You look at the oak. It must have been alive and growing on this spot for two hundred years and more. Your hand is still connected to the root, and now your hand tingles, as if an echo of all that energy, all that life, is running through you, from wood to flesh. You know it is not possible, you know it must be only suggestion and that there is a perfectly viable physiological explanation for that tingle, but that is beside the point. Your hand still tingles. This oak was here before the Second World War and even before the First, it was here before W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley were waging their magical war. Decade after decade the oak stood, and all those years, all those decades and centuries, all those days and hours and minutes in which so much happened, are here, under your palm, physically present with you.