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Once we dwelt in the fertile plains. Beef was our food, the milk of cows our drink.

Then we were driven out.

Into the rocky, unfertile hills we fled, which cannot sustain a cow.

We became a people of the goat, for whom the Horned wears caprine horns and hide.

Like goats, we witches are survivors.

That's why it can't help but seem to me something of a moral failing that I don't like goat's milk.

Oh, I've tried. “This chèvre has a nice, lemony tang to it,” I say hopefully.

But in my heart, I understand that it's really myself that I'm trying to talk around.

Maybe it's just a matter of what I'm used to.

Maybe I'm secretly longing for those fat days of our onetime freedom.

 “Second, Mother of Third”

This is a drabsha.

Unrelated to the Christian cross (but is it?), the drabsha is an important symbol of the Mandaeans, called the Last Gnostics, an ethno-religious minority originally from the southeastern Middle East, now dispersed throughout the world.

A wooden cross draped with a white silk cloth and decked with branches of laurel, it symbolizes the light of the supreme god Hayyi Rabbi, “the Great Life,” covering the four quarters of the world.

This is a stang.

One of humanity's oldest gods, the Horned is still worshiped around the world.

We do him no wrong if we think of him as the collective body of animal life on planet Earth.

Through the Hidden Centuries, the witches of the West kept faith with him and his ancient ways, as they still do.

In our day, once again, he raises up a people to himself.

Tell now of the Horned, His Bestiary.

Soon told.

For is this not his Book of Beasts, and him the All-Beast? in which is told the likeness of each beast, and kind, and singularity: its life and loves and ways, and life within his life?

For are they not in him, and he in them?

Is his life not in them, and theirs in him?

And does he not delight in them, as they in him?

His the life-in-great, and theirs in-small?

And every birth of them an increase to his being, and every death, diminishment?

And, being beasts ourselves, does not our love go out to them, and so to him?

To him the All-Beast, one-in-many, manyness in one?

Witch Money

The little silver coin, 2000 years old, is tiny, barely the size of my little fingernail.

It is a coin of the Dobunni: the original (so say some) Tribe of Witches.

The People of the Two Bands

At the beginning of the first millennium, the Dobunni—the People of the Two Bands—lived in the Cotswolds and Severn Basin of what is now southwestern England.

Like the other Celtic-speaking peoples of southern Britain, they Romanized early; even before the Roman conquest of Britain, they were minting their own coinage. We can gain some sense of the extent of their tribal territory from the distribution of these coins.

600 years later, this same territory was inhabited by an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people called the Hwicce (HWITCH-eh). Archaeological and genetic finds make clear the area's cultural and demographic continuity from the Celtic to the Saxon periods.

Interestingly, the same territory is also characterized by a distinctive kind of Neolithic burial mound. In the tribal hunting-runs of the Hwicce, it would seem, roots both cultural and genetic run deep.

What if Gardner was right after all?

What if the Craft really does reach back into the Stone Age?

Heads and Tails

I hold the coin, a miniature Moon in black and silver, on the pad of my index finger.

On one side, barely legible through centuries of wear, a lunar profile looks to the left. On the other, a three-tailed stallion rushes to the right.

Face and horse: who these may have been to the Dobunni, the Elder Witchery, we cannot know.

I read the two sides of the coin together: she looks toward him, he rushes to her.

Who they may be to the Younger Witchery, though: well, now, that would be very clear indeed.

They say that the Horned, god of witches, has a cloak of invisibility.

Dernmantle, they call it—a dern is a secret—for which reason Dernmantle is counted among his many by-names. Remind me to tell you some time the tale of how he came by it.

(Some, though, call it a cap or helm: the Dernhelm.)

In this way, he walks among us, unknown, unseen. Lord of Beasts, where animals are, he is: nor do we always see him.

Down the long years, he has walked unseen. Through the hidden centuries, he walked among us still.

We, his people, are like to him. We, too, have the power to walk unseen.