‘So you do believe in a goddess.’
‘And a god as well, but these are just… words we use,’ Christina said. ‘My tradition has always refused to define them. We use words, movements, rituals: we are not a text-based religion. We don’t have our Tertullian, our Augustine.6 I could say the goddess is the female force of nature, and also a being.’
‘You mean, an actual being?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Somebody could say, the goddess is a principle, somebody else could say, it is female essentialism, and somebody else could say, she is an actual spirit who actually has a personality and I know what colours she likes. Wicca itself doesn’t do that. It is centred on practice. It just gives you a set of experiences, from which you draw your own conclusions.’
I didn’t have the impression that Christina was avoiding the answer. I had the impression she was saying exactly what she meant to say. I tried to corner her, asking, ‘Have you ever seen anything bizarre in a ritual?’
‘My entire life is bizarre, when looked at from the outside. I transform my kitchen into an incense-making workshop, with piles of frankincense, and essential oils in jars, and smoke billowing and setting off the smoke detector, and two friends trying to disable the smoke detector before the neighbour knocks at the door. My partner coming in, and saying, why are there twenty-eight jars in the kitchen, and what is this pile of herbs that looks like bad marijuana? And I love that that is my life, I love that that is happening in central London.’
‘I get your point.’
‘But it doesn’t answer your question.’
‘Not exactly, no.’
She sighed, resigned. It dawned on me that she must be asked to answer this question pretty much every day of her life. We like to believe we are intellectually subtle and sophisticated, but when everything is said and done, we all wish for a touch of Hogwarts.
‘Sometimes I see things, you know. Not anything that would blow anybody’s socks off. I have experiences that are hugely amazing to me, but if I described them to you now, they would feel like a bit of a waking dream. For example, the person who taught me Wicca came to me shortly after she died. I felt her presence in a ritual, very strongly, at the edge of our circle. It was not in my imagination, but I wouldn’t want to die on the hill of defending that to an atheist. It is a conversation I don’t want to have. All I would say is, in witchcraft rituals I feel profoundly transported and profoundly moved. Things happen there which are real, on a mythic level. I have a mythic parallel life, and that gives meaning to my whole life, and never ceases to amaze me, and nourish me.’ She paused again, looking me straight in the eye. ‘Look,’ she said, before delivering some of the strangest lines I have ever heard, ‘I have seen a chicken sacrificed at six, I trekked in the desert when I was thirteen, I have seen monks levitate in Burma. My mum studied with them, and I saw her levitate too. Not much,’ she added, as if that made the whole affair a bit humdrum, ‘just a couple of inches or so. When I say that I have experiences in my rituals in London, experiences that transport me and make me want to do this for the rest of my life, that is the landscape I am comparing them to.’
I have been listening to the recording of our conversation quite a lot, and I have been taking plenty of notes. This is the part that struck a chord with me. The exotic and the mundane, travel and self-exploration, the spectacularly strange and the gently meaningfuclass="underline" Christina was telling me that she got to a point where those different ‘landscapes’ are one and the same for her. She can be as amazed in her kitchen as she was when, as a girl, she journeyed to a Buddhist temple to see levitating monks. It is a crucial point – a crossroads we need to reach ourselves.
You may find the idea of flying monks appealing or you may find it absurd. Either way, I’d like you to forget about it. I appreciate this may be difficult, because the image is hard to dislodge from your mind. But our journey is not about the paranormal; our journey is about the normal, redefined. In Christina’s story there is a nugget far more precious than the possible levitation itself.
It is the way she told it. When Christina related the levitation episode, she dropped it in casually, with no fuss, showing little or no interest in it. Make no mistake, she believes the levitation was genuine (she trusts her mother). But she actually doesn’t care about gravity-defying monks and mums. Witnessing human levitation is to her not inherently more prodigious than making incense in her kitchen. This is an astonishing quality she has: she can – quite literally – find the magic in the everyday. A magic so powerful, so intense, as to overshadow miraculous feats in faraway temples.
We want that.
Flying monks, like theatrical magicians, offer us a visual miracle, a precious gift of wonder, regardless of how it is achieved. Learning the world view of a High Priestess may help us to find wonder not just in things that are obviously extraordinary but also in things that are quietly so. Thus can apparently mundane aspects of our daily lives take on a magical light. An enchanted world is not a place where we don’t see different things, but we see things differently.
Our sense of wonder sharpens when we stop chasing the spectacularly strange to focus on the gently meaningful. Think how much more intense and pleasurable your life will be when you stumble upon a numinous experience in your own home. Whatever we think of the thorny relationship between monks and gravity, we all have kitchens, and it is those we need to enchant.
By using – yes – magic.
*
Witches cultivate to an impressive extent what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’: the skill of not asking questions. True artists, such as Shakespeare, he said, should know how to accept ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.7 This goes against the grain of everything we were taught: when you want to understand something better, you ask a question; when you want to show interest, you ask a question; when you want to gain a deeper level of self-knowledge, even then, you ask a question. The principle that asking questions should be our default mode is rarely itself under question. The only alternative, after all, is bleak ignorance.
Questions are the spotlights our mind uses to dispel the shadows. As such, they are immensely useful – and yet a human being cannot live in perpetual light. In order to flourish we need to sleep, and dream, and you can’t do that in a neon-lit office. Keeping the spotlights on 24/7 cripples our sense of wonder and does serious harm to our well-being: it is in the darkness that our subconscious stirs, it is in the shadows that our best ideas grow. We need to make space for that darkness in our life.
There are times when asking questions is the right thing to do (the journey we are taking in this book, is, after all, based on questions asked), while at other times it is better to embark on a different form of exploration. Witches ask questions – Christina is adamant that most of them love science, and it is certainly true of those I have met (when they have a cold, they swallow paracetamol). But they also know how to change gear. They can turn off the light and enter into a state of mind that makes the numinous more likely to happen – that lets them appreciate the strangeness of life. We have been taught that the light of reason is all there is; witches, without renouncing that very precious light, teach us also to embrace the shadows, the flickering daydreams, the things half-seen and half-imagined.