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I didn't work for almost a year after I got back from the UK, so money was tight. When Yule rolled around, I had to get creative.

(In retrospect, I have to say that that was one of the happiest years of my life, though I lived pretty much exclusively on beans and rice, and vegetables from the garden.)

Fortunately, my friend Robin—who has (among other things) the distinction of having been the very first Robin in a community of many Robins—was (and is) a big-time Terry Pratchett fan.

Now, those of you who know Pratchett's work will know that Hogswatch is the Discworld equivalent of...well, Yule. So on the Eve of Hogswatch, during the day while she was off at work, I recorded the first of my Hogswatch gifts that year on her phone machine.

Hogswatch is coming, the goose is getting fat...

The next day, I recorded the second.

We wish you a happy Hogswatch...

The next day, the third.

I'm dreaming of a white Hogswatch...

Every day for thirteen days she got another Hogswatch carol. Some, of course, were better than others.

Up on the rooftop, piggy trotters:

out jumps the jolly old Haw-awgfather...

(Personally, I think that this one counts as an improvement on the original. Reindeer don't have paws....)

On the thirteenth and last day of Hogswatch, of course, she got that old classic:

On the Last Day of Hogswatch, my true love gave to me...

Needless to say, I only sang the last verse.

 The Perils of Mirror-Magic

“Never get between two mirrors.”

In his 1991 novel Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett warns of the dangers of getting trapped between mirrors.

The danger he writes of is real, especially for witch-kind.

Let me tell you a story.

Stepping out of the hotel-room shower, I catch an unexpected glimpse of myself from behind in the mirror on the wall in front of me, vertiginously reflecting back from the mirror on the bathroom door behind me. It's disorienting, seeing your own back, right there in front of you: an out-of-body experience, almost.

Like many gay guys, I'm probably over-engaged with graceful aging. As always, the territory manages to look simultaneously familiar, and alluringly mysterious.

“Damn, boy,” I think approvingly, “Looking pretty good.”

As it happens, I'm prepping for an event later this summer at which I need to look my lean and rangy best, so it's reassuring to know that the regimen is paying off.

A day or two later, back at home, I find myself—uncharacteristically—checking out the rear view again with the aid of a hand mirror.

Next day, I'm at it again. Now, I've got as much gay narcissism as the next guy (f*ck you, Sigmund Freud), but—as the saying goes—third time makes the charm.

“No,” I think firmly, and lay down the mirror.

Forewarned is forearmed. Thank you, Terry Pratchett.

Our own hinder regions being something that we don't much see, they readily become for us a liminal territory: us/not-us; familiar/mysterious.

The Self as Other: one of the Horned's deeper mysteries.

Hey, everyone has a stuffed Himalayan mountain goat's head hanging over the fireplace.

Don't they?

“So,” says the plumber, “all these symbols...are you into the occult or something?”

Goat's heads, Green Men, clay Goddesses. You don't have to be in my house for very long, or have much in the way of a flame between the horns, to realize that there's some pretty High Strangeness going on here. Still, when the kitchen drain became intractably plugged, this wasn't exactly the conversation that I had expected to be having.

“Not really,” I say, which is no more than truth. There's nothing arcane, or particularly esoteric, about the Craft. It's all completely natural.

“Oh, I thought you might be Wiccan or something,” he says.

“Now that I could tell you something about,” I say.

“Isn't that occult?” he asks.

“For me, it's largely a matter of tribal identity,” I say.

He looks thoughtful, and starts to tell me about about the novel, clearly a favorite, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, which for some reason—Terry Pratchett “gets” witches better than just about any other contemporary writer, including many who call themselves Wiccan—I've never read.

“...so she publishes this book of prophecies, which doesn't sell very well, but really she just wants the free author's copy,” he tells me.

“Sounds right,” I say.

Clearly, he's been thinking. Several hours later, he asks in passing:

It was past midnight when the boy knocked on Granny Weatherwax's door.

“Come quick,” said the boy. “The cow kicked Mrs. Brown, and she's gone into labor early.”

“What about the midwife?” asked Granny.

“It's the midwife that sent me,” said the boy.

Granny was on her broom so fast that she didn't even stop to close the door behind her.

She found the midwife in the barn beside Mrs. Brown. The straw was bloody. “Where's Mr. Brown?” Granny asked.

“In the house, boiling water,” said the midwife.

“Good,” said Granny, and crouched down to take a look.

Her face was hard when she looked up some time later. “You thinkin' what I thinkin'?” she asked.

“That we can save one, but not the other,” said the midwife.

Granny nodded, then frowned.

“Where you goin'?”

“To ask Mr. Brown what we should do,” said the midwife. When she saw Granny's look, she took a step backward.

When Granny spoke, her whisper was loud as thunder.

“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.

Zombies shamble. Werewolves howl. Witches cackle.

I'm not sure just when witches first began to cackle. Personally, I suspect the cackling witch to be a fairly recent development, perhaps even as late as the “Twentieth” Century. It may even be that we owe our cackling—as with so much else—to the Great Green-Faced Mother of Us All, the immortal St. Margaret Hamilton.

Still, whenever it is that we first began to cackle, we've made the sound our own. You hear “cackle” and you think “witch.” It's pretty delightful to have a verb of one's own.

It was not always thus. “Cackle” is an old word—all the Germanic languages have some version of it—denoting (probably imitatively) the sound made by a hen when she lays an egg.

The ancestors were astute observers of the world around them. If you've ever actually heard a hen cackle, you know what a distinctive sound it is: shrill, brittle, with a note of triumph to it.

The underlying metaphor here, then, is witch : hen. This actually makes a good deal of mythological sense. The sacred bird of the God of Witches is the—well, let me be coy here and say “rooster.” A cock's head figures on the coinage of the Dobunni, the Keltic tribe ancestral to the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches. Witches, so they say, are hens to the Devil's cock, cows to the Devil's bull.

Oh, those earthy ancestors.

The voice was unmistakably that of Discworld's Nanny Ogg, in full Impart mode to a junior colleague.

Of all things, she was talking about the show Bewitched.

“Terrible programme, full of inaccuracies,” she said. “That's why we had to have it canceled.”

So it was the witches themselves that got Bewitched canceled?

“Of course it was,” says Nanny. “Not that I had anything against it myself, mind you.”

She takes a pull from her hip flask.

“As a matter of fact, it even confirmed several of my favorite biases,” she says proudly.