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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in hedge

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
In the hedgerow...any hedgerow

In the hedgerow...any hedgerow

We associate hedgerows with long winding country lanes but actually a lot of cities and towns have hedgerows even if it is just the one outside the front of your garden or alongside the local school. 

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Where There's a Hedge, There's a Witch

Hedges mark boundaries. Hedges divide this from that.

That's why where there's a hedge, there's a witch.

Wherever there's a distinction, there's a hedge. The world is filled with hedges: the hedge between in and out, the hedge between living and dead, the hedge between day and night.

The mind is filled with hedges: the hedge between black and white, the hedge between here and there, the hedge between us and them.

That's why we need our witches, those unholy straddlers with one foot on either side: participating in both, but wholly belonging to neither.

In a polarized world, people hunker immovably behind their mental hedges.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Astraddle

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

 (Glinda the Good, The Wizard of Oz) 

Well, they call her Glinda the Good.

 

But she can't even tell the difference between a dog and a witch dog.

So obviously (I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a muddle, she says) she isn't, not very.

When it comes to witching, the difference between good and bad isn't the difference between help or harm.

No: when Tiffany Aching says of Mrs. Lettice Earwig (author of To Ride a Golden Broomstick) that she's “not really, when you get down to it, a very good witch” (Pratchett 99), it has nothing to do with helpful or harmful. Nothing at all.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Crooked Art

In English, the adjective "crooked" generally means "bent, twisted, out-of-true." In senses both literal and figurative, it contrasts with "straight," and this contrast is true in Indo-European languages generally (West 413-4).

But Old Craft sees it differently.

In the Indo-European world at large, the gods are the *déiwôs, the "celestials." But the witch's gods are first and foremost the earthly gods, the powers of Here. Even in pagan days, we were (of necessity) Other; every culture needs its other. We were (and are) the institutionalized Other, necessary source of disquiet and critique from Within. Yes: even then, we straddled the Hedge.

The elder witcheries are sometimes known as the "Crooked Way" or the "Crooked Path": witchery as the Way of Indirection. Results indirectly achieved are nonetheless results. Witches rarely go in for frontal assault. We're far more likely to go around. Or under. Or over.

Small wonder, when He Himself is known (among other things) as the Crooked Serpent, Who is our teacher in the art of indirection, the Great Horned Snake whose Serpent Path we tread.

 A while back, I found myself humming an old Mother Goose rhyme. I hadn't thought of it in years.

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
The Turning Of The Wheel - Year One

I was taken by surprise when I realized that this blog is already a year old! A YEAR!!! The wheel has completed an entire turning and this burgeoning hedge has covered some ground!

Time has flown because school had me so preoccupied. I have loved the way time has slowed this summer, and I'm feeling like a floating blossom in the slower time-stream, rather than a twig bobbing madly in the faster one I had been in!

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