“Everybody knows that witches don't have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the leader that the witches didn't have.”

(Terry Pratchett)

I'm fortunate in having friends who aren't afraid to ask the Big Questions, so let me ask you one such that my friend and colleague Frebur posed to me recently: What is the Great Work of the Witch?

To answer this question, we first must ask another: What is the witch's most important tool?

(If you said “athame,” think again.)

Having established means, let us next establish ends: What is the Witch's Work?

Well, that's easy: the Work of the Witch is Transformation.

We transform What Is into What Is Not.

We transform Winter into Spring, and Summer into Fall.

We transform a Line into a Circle, and a Circle into a Line.

We transform What Is Not into What Is.

What, then, is the Great Work of the Witch? Is it not, as Frebur wrote, “to live every aspect and moment of one’s life as a witch?”

Is not, after all, the Greatest Transformation ultimately the Transformation of Self?

Some are content to be who they are. Well, there's no shame in that.

But that's not the Way of the Witch. The witch will never be content with being who she is.

The witch wants to be who she can become. This is the deep witchery.

Well, there are witches and witches. You know the ones that I mean: the ones that witches themselves look at and say, Now there's a witch!

Now there's a witch, they say, shaking their heads: half in admiration, half in disbelief.

Look to the Earth, herself the Witch of Witches: restless, never content. Look to the Moon her daughter, Mother of Witches, ever-changing.

Become, become, she says.

The alchemy of Self-Transmutation: Is that not, I ask you, the Greatest Work of all?