A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

In Tune with the Land
The Wiccan Path
Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft

Wicca is a natural religion, in every sense. Witches know that, as men and women, they are part of the central nervous system of Gaia, the Earth-organism, and that this involvement extends to all the levels. They know that the more they can put themselves in tune with the environment in which they live and work — physically, etherically, astrally, mentally and spiritually — the more meaningful will their religion become, the more effective will their psychic working be, the greater will their contribution to Gaia’s health and well-being be, and the more fulfilled and integrated will they be themselves, as human beings.

Many of the things which this implies we have already pointed out: putting yourself in tune with Nature as locally manifested, even if you live in the middle of a city; celebrating the eight Festivals for a living awareness of the annual rhythms; taking an active and informed interest in environmental issues; respecting and understanding the true nature and needs of other species, and of the plant kingdom, and constantly enriching your relationship to them; and so on.

But legend, mythology and cultural tradition are also a vital part of the spirit of the land. They are the roots along which flow the sap of our relationship to the particular part of Gaia in which we happen to live. So wise witches draw heavily on these local roots — in their ritual forms, in the Goddess- and God-names they use, in their astral experiments and even in the places they make a point of familiarizing themselves with.

This is one of the advantages of the flexibility of Wicca. No Wiccan ritual form is Holy Writ. Here we can learn from the mistakes of Christian missionaries, who have taken a symbolic system born in the Middle East and ossified over centuries of European feudalism and capitalism, and imposed it chapter and verse on alien environments which have their own rich roots. (To be fair, some missionaries are wiser than this, but not many — and certainly very few in past centuries.)

Wicca has, or should have, no such inhibitions. It should be attuned, and adapted, to the spirit of its actual environment.

To take one concrete example: Australia. We are in touch with several Australian witches, both directly and through Catherine and Kent Forrest’s lively magazine The Australian Wiccan (PO Box 80, Lane Cove, NSW 2066). Most of them are of European background, and many of them practise a Gardnerian system or one akin to it. It is interesting to see how they cope with the fact that the Sun in their land travels anti-clockwise and that Midsummer is in December. They seem to use a variety of methods, both in the direction of casting the Circle and in the placing of the elements, and also in their arrangement of the Sabbats.

In the Northern Hemisphere, where both the Western occult tradition and Wicca as we know it took shape, the pattern of a witches’ Circle is as shown in Figure 15(a). It would seem to us that in the Southern Hemisphere the pattern should be as in Figure 15(b) — so that in both cases the Sun rises in the Air element, reaches its zenith in the Fire element, sinks in the Water element and at night hides behind the Earth element, where the altar stands; and the Circle is cast in the same direction as the Sun moves. Similarly, in the Southern Hemisphere the eight Festival Sabbats should each be moved six months away from the European and US pattern. The Lesser Sabbats of solstices and equinoxes look after themselves in that they would be appropriately named locally in any case — the rebirth of the Sun would be greeted around 21 or 22 June, and so on. But the Greater Sabbats of Imbolg, Bealtaine, Lughnasadh and Samhain could perhaps be more flexibly moved; a strict six-month shift, for example, would bring Imbolg to 2 August, but perhaps the ’first stirrings in the womb of Mother Earth’ should be more realistically celebrated earlier or later, in tune with the reality of Gaia’s local activity. Again, there may be local folk festivals to which the witches’ Sabbats may fittingly be equated; just as when we lived in Co. Mayo we celebrated our Midsummer Sabbat on 23 June because that — St John’s Eve — was the night when other Midsummer fires could be seen from horizon to horizon, with all their frankly pagan overtones, and why should the witches be the odd ones out just because the Book of Shadows says 22 June?

Figure 15(a) Northern Hemisphere

Figure (15 b) Southern Hemisphere

Australians who are genuinely in touch with Aborigine lore, which has been attuned to Gaia Australis since time immemorial, doubtless integrate elements from that lore into their own ritual forms and into their awareness of the environment.

From twelve thousand miles away, these comments may sound presumptuous; but we are not trying to teach our Australian brothers and sisters to suck eggs — just pointing out, to provoke thought among European witches, the kind of approach that witches have to take this problem of fitting their practice and their thinking to their actual surroundings. It may well be that Australian witches will come up with different answers from the ones we have suggested, because of local factors which we know nothing about. That is their business — as long as these answers are based not on some Holy Writ imported from a different environment but on their true relationship to Gaia, as she is where they are.

The Northern origin of most of the existing literature creates a problem, as our friend Robyn Moon of Modbury in South Australia points out. She tells us that the Australian covens she knows of place Earth and the altar in the South, and Fire in the North, and cast the Circle widdershins. But she finds that ’it feels wrong to us to work anti-clockwise when for so long all our books and references have stressed deosil. What to do?’ Refuse to be intimidated by the laws of another hemisphere, of course!

As an example of the kind of attempt Australian witches are making to devise a ritual pattern which stems naturally from their own environment, Robyn sent us this cycle-of-the-year diagram which appeared in the now-defunct occult magazine Whazoo Weakly and which she understands was drawn up by Nick Howard of Adelaide. In the accompanying text, he maintained that in the temperate zone of Australia there are not four seasons but either three (as in Egypt) or six, according to the locality; three in the areas approaching the desert, and six in the coastal areas. He cited both desert (Pitjanjara) and coastal (Western Australian) Aborigine seasonal concepts in support of this.

Fig. 16

We leave it to our Australian friends to judge the validity of his calendar. But his attitude is certainly right: Mother Earth as she is where we are, and never mind what the existing literature says.

(Talking of existing literature: Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett’s handsomely produced book Other Temples Other Gods is a fascinating review of the occult scene in Australia.)

Even the placing of the elements on the simple Solar pattern we have described may differ in some countries. For example, if we lived in Egypt, we might well adopt the ancient Egyptian placings, because they are firmly rooted in the ’feel’ of the Nile valley — and even have their own Lords of the Watchtowers, the Four Sons of Horus. The placings are as follows. East, where the blazing Sun of Egypt rises — Fire, under the patronage of Duamutef. South, from whence the life-giving Nile flows — Water, presided over by Imset. West, under the vast skies of the desert — Air, presided over by Qebehsenuf. North, towards which the southern waters bring their blessing — Earth, presided over by Hapy. Anyone who has been to Egypt knows that these are as they should be. (Egypt’s three seasons were: Inundation 19 July to 15 November, Winter 16 November to 15 March, and Summer 16 March to 18 July.)

Witches in the United States have their own special problems, similar to but perhaps more complex than those in Australia. Apart from the American Indians (whose pagan roots are as deeply indigenous as those of the Australian Aborigines), they come from a wide spectrum of foreign ancestral backgrounds — Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, Jewish, Slav, African and so on — and many of them live in communities where those traditions are still very much alive, even if they have been subtly altered by importation into the New World and by interaction with each other. So American witches may be torn between basing themselves wholeheartedly on (say) the Celtic ritual and mythological inheritance of their mothers’ milk, and rejecting it equally wholesale because the soil on which they stand is not that in which those roots grew. We know some personally who are fortunate enough to have a real contact and understanding with American Indian neighbours in a natural environment, and are enriching their own practice thereby. But for others the problem is a very real one; Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon gives pointers to how some of them are tackling it. European witches, often perhaps only half-aware of their own good fortune in having little conflict between tradition and environment, are often unfairly critical of American witches for being too experimental. We should be sympathetic rather, because it is a problem which only they can solve, on their own ground — and maybe they can teach us not to take our own ground so easily for granted.

The British Craft — certainly in its Gardnerian stream — is strongly Celtic-orientated; so when we came to Ireland we had a flying start, apart from being predominantly Celtic ourselves. But we, too, have made our adaptations, because the land simply invites them. For example, we usually replace the ’Great God Cernunnos’ invocation (see Appendix B) with this, which we composed ourselves:

Great God of Erin, Lugh of many arts,

Enter our Circle and inspire our hearts!

Open our eyes — uncover to our sight

The Tuatha’s Treasures: Sword and Spear and Light,

The Dagda’s Cauldron, and the Stone of Fál.

Great Mother’s consort, Father of us all,

Hear this my invocation, grant our wish —

A Lugh Lámhfhada, bi anseo anois!’

Lugh is the brightest of the Irish Gods; he is sometimes referred to as a Sun God, but this cannot be right — grian (Sun) is a feminine noun in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, just as Sonne is in German; to Celts and Teutons the Sun was a Goddess, whereas to Egyptians, Greeks and Romans he was a God. Lugh should rather be called a God of light and fire, a pre-Christian St Michael. Two of his titles were Samhioldánach (’equally skilled in all the arts’) and Lámhfhada (’of the long arm or hand’). The last line in our invocation means ’O Lugh Long-Hand, be here now!’ (Our own Co. Louth is named after Lugh.)

The Tuatha Dé Danann (Peoples of the Goddess Dana) in Irish legend, and probably with some factual basis, were the last inhabitants of Ireland before the Celts (the Gaels or Sons of Mil) came here. They were regarded as a magical people, and Lugh was one of their leaders. After the Sons of Mil defeated them in battle, the Tuatha retired by agreement into the hollow hills or sidh-mounds of Ireland, where they became the aristocracy of the sidhe or fairy folk. As such, in the tolerant atmosphere of Celtic Christianity, they became the acceptable form of the old pagan Gods and Goddesses — and so they have remained. In the tales and beliefs of ordinary country folk (and certainly of witches) the Tuatha Dé Danann are still very much alive and well and living in Ireland.

Their Four Treasures, which are clearly elemental ones,¹ play an important part in Irish mythology. One of them, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, which cried aloud when the true High King of Ireland mounted it (the Earth acknowledging him?), may probably still be seen: many archaeologists maintain that the upright stone on Tara Hill in Co. Meath (see Plate 9) is the true Lia Fáil, though a rival claimant is the Coronation Stone in Westminster Abbey.

Like many covens, we save a little of the consecrated wine and cakes of each Circle as an offering — but in accordance with Irish tradition, we place it on a Westward-facing windowsill for the sidhe. We accompany this gift with the invocation: ’A Shidhe; a Thuatha Dé Danann: beannacht Bhandé Danann libh agus linn’ (’O Sidhe; O Tuatha Dé Danann; the blessing of the Goddess Dana on you and on us’).

The list of Goddess-names at the beginning of the Charge (see Appendix B) already includes two Irish ones, Dana and Bride (Brid or Brigid); but we like to add a local one. When we lived in Co. Wexford we added Carman, the Wexford Goddess. Now that we live in Co. Louth at the mouth of the River Boyne, we add Boann, the Goddess of that river, whose local mythology is particularly rich.

In the Charge itself, we sometimes change ’the Land of Youth’, to ’Tír na nÓg’, which means literally the same thing but has much more significance in Irish legend; and we make the same change in the Autumn Equinox declamation.

Every land has its magical places, its ancient and continuing focal concentrations of power. English witches, and many non-witches also, rightly recognize Glastonbury as such. Stonehenge and Avebury are power foci too (for ourselves, we are more drawn to Avebury, finding it more alive and less psychically overlaid than Stonehenge). Local witches all over the British Isles could add to the list.

Ireland is especially rich in such places; for us Newgrange, ten miles up the Boyne from our home, is the Glastonbury of Ireland. Lovingly and accurately restored by the brilliant archaeological team of Professor M.J. O’Kelly since 1962, it now once again receives the winter solstice sunrise along its seventy-nine-foot passage as it did five thousand years ago, to its central chamber under the oldest roof in Ireland. The great mound of Newgrange, Brugh na Bóinne or ’the palace of the Boyne’, with its nearby sister mounds of Dowth and Knowth (the latter at present under excavation), was the spiritual and cultural centre of a remarkable neolithic community long before Stonehenge was begun, and it is linked in folk-memory with the great names of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It is officially known as ’passage grave’, but its significance was obviously much greater than that — just as a cathedral means much more than the tombs it happens to contain. The power of the place has to be felt to be appreciated.

To be in tune with the land, witches should pay special attention to such places as Glastonbury and Newgrange or their equivalents in their own countries, both in the sense of acquiring archaeological and other academic knowledge about them, and in the sense of using their psychic awareness on them. The power of these places is there to be experienced and tapped.

We keep a personal dossier on Newgrange and add to it regularly. It includes academic information, photographs, recorded dreams, a note of every visit, and the shared experiences of ourselves and of visiting witches from other lands. We find the exercise very rewarding, and we recommend it to other witches for trying with their own places.

Every witch must relate to his or her own environment on all the levels. How he or she does it is a personal and local matter; the first step is to realize that it is important to try — and we hope this Section has given food for thought.