About

 
Once upon a time, there was a little girl…

She was a very good little girl, really, she was. Just a bit different is all. She hated going to Mass. She balked and argued, whined and bawled, and threw a frightful fit, but always lost in the end. She spent her childhood talking to animals, communing with trees, developing telepathic relationships with the oddest things– like her Halloween pumpkin, a spider in the attic window, and a very spooky life-size doll– a disturbing haunted doll, it was, but that’s another story.

She became quiet and compliant, and grew and grew and grew.

Until one day, as a teen-ager, there was a really, really bad boy who had to go away. Hmmmm, she thought, how will she make this bad, bad boy go away?

And then, the idea came to her– a wild idea, an incredible idea.

Feverishly, she began gathering articles from around the house– a red candle, a red ink pen, a photograph of the Really Really Bad Boy, matches, and other odds and ends. With pounding heart, arms full of ‘stuff”, she descended the stairs to the dark dank cellar of her grandmother’s house.

Amid quivering shadows cast by the flame of a red candle, she shouted and raved at the image, marking a large red ‘x’ across his mid-section; then, with a final stab of the pen, she spit on the image and held it to the bouncing flame– up it went, blackening, shriveling,

shrinking…away…away…away…away.

And in that first most magickal moment, as the energy began to build and swirl about her feet and race up her legs in a magickal rush, she knew.

A witch was born.

Amythyst Raine, photo by Anne Turrell

I am a highly eclectic witch. I practice with abandon old-fashioned and quaint kitchen witchery, but I’ve also performed rituals within a cast circle amongst all the pomp and ceremony of High Magick. I have steeped myself in dark and mysterious hoodoo practices, and I have followed the herbal path of the green witch. I worship the Mother Goddess, and I relegate the God to His rightful place as Her consort. I am many things. My spiritual practices and beliefs are widely varied and uniquely personal.

I have successfully combined all of the magickal practices listed above on my Personal Spiritual Path, which I’ve dubbed: “Gray Magerium”

Below is an overview of the three main magickal practices that make up my very special version of Witchcraft– Hoodoo, Wicca, & Green Witchcraft:
Hoodoo, Wicca, Green Witchcraft:

• Voodoo (*Hoodoo) consists of a large body of African folkloric practices and beliefs with a considerable admixture of American Indian botanical knowledge and European folklore. Although most of its adherents are black, contrary to popular opinion, it has always been practiced by both whites and blacks in America. Other regionally popular names for voodoo in the black community include “conjuration”, “conjure”, “witchcraft”, “rootwork”, and “tricking”. The first three are simply English words; the fourth is a recognition of the pre-eminence that dried roots play in the making of charms and the casting of spells, and the fifth is a special meaning for a common English word...  *Hoodo is Voodoo without the religious aspects– pure magick.

• Wicca is a neo-pagan religion based on the pre-Christian traditions of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Its origins can be traced even further back to Paleolithic peoples who worshipped a Hunter God and a Fertility Goddess. Cave paintings found in France (and dated at 30,000 years old) depict a man with the head of a stag, and a woman with a swollen, pregnant belly. They stand in a circle with eleven mortals. These archetypes of the divine are worshipped by Wiccans to this very day. By these standards, the religion that is now called Wicca, is perhaps the oldest religion in the world. (The type of Wicca I incorporate into my practice is called “Dianic Wicca”, it is decidedly feminist, and it focuses on the Goddess and the worship of matriarchal divinity.)

In 1951, the laws against Witchcraft were repealed in England. A man named Gerald Gardner was the first to come into the public eye with a description of what modern witches were practicing. His information came from the traditions of a coven called the New Forest Witches, and from Ceremonial Magick and the Cabballah. He began what is now called the Gardnerian Tradition of Wicca. From Gardnerian came Alexandrian Tradition, and a host of other offshoots that today number in the hundreds.

• Green Witchcraft is a personalized practice, differing from person to person, incorporating the use of herbs in magick, use of everyday items in magick, and possibly a religious belief system as well, which also will differ from practitioner to practitioner. There is no one, established tradition of green witchcraft.

“A Green Witch is a woman of power, whose religion is her life, whose life is her art, and whose art is the wise use of the green.”