The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft

by Diana Helmuth

Some of us need something unimpeachably scholastic to bait us into the stygian depths of the “woo-woo.”

I wonder how long it takes for blood to forget where it comes from, and what it becomes after that.

guilt is pointless—unless it is fuel.

I open my eyes and I see what I can only describe as God. God is beaming, pushing, glowing between the individual needles of the pine tree across the creek. God is the symmetrical ray of light, illuminating the granite wall that towers over the right side of our camp. God is the visible aura surrounding every single rock and plant and tree in my field of vision. God is the air. God is everything, glowing, pouring, floating, waiting. I see him because I want to see him. I see him because he is there.

We strip the supernatural of its undefinable power—and allure—by implying it’s the same thing as folding the laundry. I don’t want to pretend the mundane is divine. I want the divine to be divine.

Nothing restrains a rushed call to altruism like bureaucracy.

“The history will never be perfect, and we’ll never know what really happened or how people really used to practice magic. No one will ever agree on these things. So I’m trying not to see Witchcraft as a path home to the past. Not anymore. I think it might actually be a path to the future.”