Blåkulla

Bricolage of Tradition and Innovation by Chaise Levy

In Ramsey Dukes’ ( aka Lionel Snell) first rate essay on magic The Charlatan and the Magus he plays with the idea of trickery. Instead of casting it as we might in “serious” magical circles as an inauthentic or evil sinister side of the current magical world, Dukes does something quite different. He asks us to practice a kind of maybe logic, allowing for the possibility that trickery is not a bug in the system but instead an inherent part of how magic works. That it might indeed be possible that illusion can open us up to wonder, and true magic in ways that would not be possible without it.

I am going to practice some bricolage here, a French word that means bringing together disparate things, and hopefully find some deeper resonances by doing so. This might seem like a random bag of tricks, but there is a constellating force I swear.

As someone who grew up around punk rock and metal culture, images of witchcraft and the “satanic” have been a near constant around my life. Band logos, song lyrics, skateboard graphics, you name it. My contention is that for many these are aesthetic affectations, Baphomet performing a ritual on the bottom of a skate deck does not in fact mean that my skateboard is magical. But as Dukes points out in the Charlatan and the Magus that trick, or affectation may in fact be just another doorway into the possible. After all, the illusion may just be a doorway into the “real.”

Working the Weather

There are many etymologies that float around the internet for the word witch, abundant tributaries to follow back to the word's origin. Today we will look at Hagazussa, from the Old High German, which means “fence-sitter,” or “fence-rider.” The image conjurers straddling the limin between two places or states, poised and ready to take action.

The word opens wider when we start to understand some more of the folk traditions that words such as hagazussa come woven into. In the folk traditions of Sweden the fence post is a site of many magical operations. It is a place for binding, for blessing, and for curse as well. These magical workings constellate around the fence posts natural ability to raise things into “the weather and the wind.” With its base firmly buried into the soil of the earth, the fence post raises up into the wind, buffeted by the weather and is to a practitioner a perfect site for moving things up and away. This connection, among many, links the witch up with a whole complex of symbols connected with the air, and especially the weather and wind.

Around this time of year, especially at Easter and Walpurgisnacht, images of witches riding their brooms abound. The folklore goes that these are the nights of the witches' ride to the Sabbath on the windy top of Blåkulla. There you may find all manner of dance, frolic, and ritual which in trolldom are aimed at the raising of the jardarmegin In the depictions of witches, as above and below, we find images of older women flying their brooms often carrying a coffee pot in tow.