Witch: Unleashed. Untamed. Unapologetic.

by Lisa Lister

if we are to evolve as a species now, it will be the women who lead us in it, ideally with the support and help of the men, but certainly no longer in deference to them.’ BAREFOOT DOCTOR, AUTHOR OF BAREFOOT DOCTOR’S HANDBOOK FOR THE URBAN WARRIOR

For many, hearing The Call will feel like a remembrance – maybe of a past life, maybe of a whisper from an ancestor, maybe of a feeling deep in your bones. Either way, it’s a remembrance of who you were before you forgot.

The witch represents the part of each of us that has been censored, ignored, punished and demonized. And it’s a part that wants – no, needs – to be accessed and fully expressed.

The witch is a woman fully in her power. She’s in touch with the dark. She knows how to be the witness, how to let things go and how to follow her own counsel. Most importantly though, she questions EVERYTHING.

She knows that in any given moment, she can be a hot mess, a woman of grace and beauty, angry and grief-struck, loved and pleasure-sated, tired and soft or raw and vulnerable. She also knows that in some moments, she can be all of these at once.

She’s whole. And a woman who’s whole? Well, she’s a really bloody scary threat to anyone who’s not in full integrity – not fully aligned with the truth of who they are and what they stand for.

It’s time to re-member that to be a witch is to be a powerful woman in a world where women have, for thousands of years until now, felt really bloody powerless.

Reclaiming the word and identifying as a witch will call your power back, because being a witch runs bone-deep.

Instead, it’s about being a woman who can recognize, navigate, claim, trust and use her Goddess-given powers of creativity and manifestation, her vision, her intuition and foresight, her rhythms and cyclic nature and her ability to experience FULLY the dark to serve the light. And she does it to heal not only herself, but her family, her community and ultimately, the world.

This book is a response to the fact that for centuries, women have been persecuted for their power. The fact that women like my nanna were forced to speak in hushed tones about the magic that they made. The fact that women like my mum turned their back on their power and gave it away completely for fear of shame and judgement.

I don’t write books to tell you how you ‘should’ do things, I write them to spark a fire of recognition and remembrance in your body. It’s what you decide to do with what you remember that makes the real magic happen.

To play our part in dismantling the Patriarchy – the construct that wants to keep us separate and disconnected from ourselves and each other – we need to remember the Goddess-given tools and power we were born with.

I’m a hereditary witch, meaning I was born into a family who practised their own form of magic. I turned my back on it for a few years to do the ‘important work’ – ahem – of following boy bands, kissing and being a teenager who wasn’t laughed at for being the ‘traveller kid’. But then, when my nanna died, she spoke to me often through the dreamtime; and she kept encouraging me to come back to my magic. So, as with most things I do, I got geeky about it.

In this book, I’ll introduce you to some of the many traditions of witchcraft and their practices. You’ll find spells to try, and pages from my own Book of Shadows… but just to be super clear: none of it is actually necessary.

They’re just prompts to remind you to trust yourself, to go back to the root of the craft – the craft of the wise, the craft of the wise woman – where witches were female shamans who worked with dreamtime, visions, herbs and incantations.

You don’t need an intermediary to connect with source and your inner wisdom.

I want it to feel like you’re surrounded by a coven of like-minded wise women, healers and medicine keepers – witches – and as though behind you are all the women that have gone before you, right back to the beginning of time.

Mumma Earth, Father Sky, Grandmumma Moon, Grandfather Sun, Star Nations and the mysteries that lie in between – be with us, support us and guide us in our circle. Ancestors, witches and wise women who have gone before us, please join us, sit with us and guide us in the circle. SHE, divine feminine, lady of all that is, I ask for your presence and your blessing. Please clear the space of any heavy energy; and fill it with love, healing and truth.

Women have been doing this for thousands of years, gathering together, holding space – keeping and holding mysteries and secrets beyond time and space, because this is what witches do. Courageous and wild witch – that’s you, BTW – thank you for showing up, for being here and above all, for being you.

And me? I get called out for being ‘too much’.

‘I call back my power. NOW.’

Being a witch is remembering. It’s the GREAT remembering. It’s the remembering of who you were before you forgot. And then it’s the lifelong job/journey/quest/adventure of reconnecting – over and over again – to your forgotten knowing.

A witch is an unapologetic woman. She alchemizes experiences and emotions.

She is self-sourced.

It’s being someone who trusts her inner authority, and doesn’t look outside herself for validation and/or approval. It’s being someone who uses her own personal magic to navigate and negotiate the environment she currently finds herself in.

Let me make this super-clear: you don’t need to be a Wiccan or a Pagan to be a witch. In fact, you don’t even need to know what either of these terms mean. All you need is a deep sense of knowing who you are underneath all the noise, labels and societal messaging. That’s why your roots, and the practices and traditions that accompany them, are the best place to start waking the witch within you.

My mumma lived in fear of almost everything. She feared the dark, flying, driving, spiders and people with power. She feared life itself on most days; and her life became small and unfulfilled because of it.

Our way of being as women has been persecuted for millennia. The word ‘witch’ has been vilified and slung around as an insult. So it’s no wonder that we, as women, hold back our power, hush our voices and stay small because we’ve been told that being powerful is unsafe. Our work, the work of the witch, is to make it safe to be powerful again.

How do we dare to express our fullness? We must bring it ALL. Rage AND laughter. Beauty AND strength. Fierceness AND grace. Vulnerability AND force. Compassion AND passion. And guess what? You don’t need to be less of anything. In fact, I invite you to be more of everything.

So many of us have an innate need to be liked and approved of. It’s human nature, but it also means we’ve been conditioned (really bloody well) into making a thousand subtle compromises. It means we’ve become women who don’t dare to live out our fullness. We make sure we’re not ‘too quiet’, and make sure we’re not ‘too loud’. I see it in myself. I see it in the women I work with.

We never fully allow ourselves to go ALL THE WAY. We hold back, rein it in and tame our true nature in any given moment, just in case we get judged/shamed/accused b...

You can never claim back your power by being less of yourself, or by squeezing yourself tight enough to fit inside the narrow box marked ‘100% approved.’ Power can’t come from being ‘less than’. It just can’t. It can only come from expanding and growing and expressing yourself FULLY. From daring to take up space. Becoming more of everything.

So… what if there was a definition of power that felt good? One that didn’t feel dirty, selfish or sleazy? To get to that definition, you’d have to: … Learn that ideas like selfishness, manipulation and greed are what corrupts, NOT power. … Trust your own, feminine inner authority to nurture you and those around you. … Realize that your positive intentions grow stronger when you’re more powerful, not weaker.

You can’t wait until you feel strong enough or brave enough before you take a stand or take a risk. Why? Because while you’re in your cage, you stay tame.

You find and claim your power when you interact daily with a world that’s in need. When you practise being the most powerful being you can be. It might feel that there’s so much work to do; but actually, it’s the only work there is to do.

Just so you know, to do this work, you need to get comfy with a lot more discomfort than most people are willing to put up with. You have to be willing to: Feel. Everything. Joy, pain, fear, anger, distress. You have to be willing to feel it all. To feel the whole freakin’ world. Disappoint people in order to be your true self. Know that you are chained to nothing and no one. Breathe. Deeply. Right down deep into your womb. Find fierceness and healing and peace in those places of yourself that seem hard and closed off. Let the feminine parts of yourself lead the masculine. Don’t get rid of the masculine (you’ll need it!), but let the wild nature and chaos and softness of the feminine inform the harder edges. Love yourself. Even the most wild and crazy parts.

‘A witch is a wise woman aligned with the Earth, a healer. It’s a word that demands destigmatization at this crucial time in the planet’s history when we desperately need the medicine of the feminine to rise and rebalance humanity and the Earth.’ – SARAH DURHAM WILSON

‘Bruja’ is the Spanish word for ‘witch’; and ‘Curandera’ means ‘healer’ in Spanish.

Eclectic witches don’t follow any particular religion or tradition. Instead, they study and learn from many different systems, and use what works best for them. They build a tailor-made religion or tradition for themselves from the ground up, rather than following an established tradition.

There is very little written down about where ‘officially’ the travellers and Roma originated from. Some say it was India, others say the Middle East, but what is known is that despite experiencing what the Roma people called ‘The Devouring’ (a holocaust of travelling people), the shuvihani – the Romani word for ‘wise woman’ – still holds the skills of divination, herb lore and spell casting.

Hoodoo is a nature-based healing tradition that consists of a large body of African folkloric practices and beliefs, mixed together with Native American botanical knowledge and European folklore. It should not be confused with Voodoo, which is a religion.

Regardless: many people (including me) credit high priestess Doreen Valiente for the emphasis that Wicca puts on the Goddess. For me, Valiente was one of the most important figures in Wicca. She wrote down much of its ritual and worship; and she played an integral part in lifting the legal ban on witchcraft on 29 July 1951, which had been in place for over two centuries at that point.

Every woman is a witch, regardless of whether she knows it or not. Why? Because she’s cyclic, she’s powerful and she can embrace nature to heal herself AND her community. In other words: she IS magic.

Being a witch isn’t about what you do. It’s not spells, rituals and ceremony: it’s the stance you take in life. It’s who you are at your source.

I’m a witch who trusts the wisdom of her fierce and feminine soul.

I’m a witch who works with roots and from her roots.

Your soul loves the truth, so take time to begin to understand what your truth is. (And know that you can only do this in stillness!)

Your body will tell you your truth. If you start talking to someone and you get a headache, it could be dehydration. OR it could be your body telling you this person isn’t okay, or that this conversation is whack and it isn’t working for you. This is how you start to trust yourself and your intuition – by telling yourself the truth. Tune in at every moment. Pick up a crystal, or an item of jewellery or clothing. Does your energy go up, or does it go down? Start to practise this with people, places and items. Tune in to each thing, and then tell yourself the truth. The more you lie to yourself, the harder it is to step into your power as a witch.

Be kind (but take no shit) Be kind to yourself and others. If you spend valuable energy judging yourself and forcing yourself to spend time with people who demean you and make you feel bad about yourself, you’ll strip yourself of your power.

The truly powerful people in the world are kind, but they’re not self-sacrificing. They see what’s beautiful and wondrous, both within themselves and within others.