What do you say when a witch dies?
Not My condolences.
Not Rest in Peace.
Not (vacuity of vacuities) I'm sorry for your loss.
Reborn to the People.
In his ground-breaking 1954 book Witchcraft Today, Gerald Gardner presents himself—rather disingenuously, be it admitted—as an anthropologist investigating, and eventually being initiated into, an archaic tribe that, counter to any rational expectation, has somehow or other managed to survive, hidden in plain sight, in contemporary Britain.
Gardner's witches believe in reincarnation. When they die, they hope to be reborn among their own.
It's a compelling vision, and one that reads utterly authentically. This is not the “stop the train, I want to get off” reincarnation of Hinduism or Buddhism, or the “every day, in every way, I just get better and better” reincarnation of Theosophy, but a tribal reincarnation in which the highest concern is not Me, but Us.
No wonder so many of us were drawn to this vision. Who wouldn't want to belong to a tribe?
Besides: who could possibly want to be reborn as a cowan?
Reborn to the People.
In Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin's Masters of Solitude novels, a post-apocalypse America has broken down into its component parts. The East Coast, now one sprawling mega-megalopolis, has literally walled itself off from the rest of the continent, and left the rest of us to stew in our own juices.
Meanwhile, out in the howling wilderness, the witches live, broken down into regional tribes: the Shando, the Wengen, the Karli.
Like witches everywhere, they believe, if not in reincarnation per se, then in rebirth, and when they die, they hope—who wouldn't?—to be reborn to their own.
Reborn to the Karli.
Reborn to the Wengen.
Reborn to the Shando.
Witches these days may or may not believe in reincarnation, but we do believe in rebirth. You can't look at the natural world and not see that things go round and round.