Fuck You It's Magic
Or why Friday the 13th's confected scarytale is just one more obscuration that defines these burning times
It is no surprise to anyone that I love Friday the 13th, but to have it arrive the day before my annual Valentine’s Day rant? Chef’s kiss. We are certainly floating in a sea of confected stories here at the end of the world as we know it.
As you can well imagine I have been writing about this one in particular forever-ever. Because Friday the 13th is our day, witches and wannabes*. Always has been, which is why it has come to be associated with the implied darkness of all things occult. A magical word that simply means hidden. Sacred knowledge protected from mass destruction and the dilution that accompanies the modern rabid consumption of mystery and magic. Long before AI decimated our wisdom fields with its deliberate nonsense, there were monsters and they hunted witches.
Every single Friday the 13th I recall the scarytale of the burning times, because those who refuse to remember their past are condemned to repeat it. Not on my watch nor in my words. Now more than ever we must remain vigilant against malevolent control of women, witches and our magics. Perhaps by an accident of birth or circumstance you are fortunate enough to have avoided being hunted (and happy Friday the 13th to everyone except our apex predators). Who sprang to mind? Even if you have not heard it before, or inexplicably missed the direct causal link between femicide and patriarchy before now, here is one of its origin tales for you again from my blog back in 2016…
Once upon a time in Germany in 1487 there lived a violent misogynist named Heinrich Kramer. Under the red cloak of the Catholic Church in their paranoid attempts to wipe out paganism (which they had renamed heresy) Heiny was given sanctioned power to interrogate, torture and kill. In God’s name.
The very first doms were an army of roving priests of the Dominican order, whose aim was conversion and whose means was murder. And their chief enemy and targets were women. Herbalists and midwives connected to seasons and cycles, the earth and its deities, whom they labelled witches and placed in league with a devil they more closely resembled.
Heiny documented the spurious findings of his inquisitions in a book he called Malleus Maleficarum in which he described witchcraft and endorsed detailed and brutal processes for the extermination of witches. A tome of torture and still an horrific testament. Heiny demonised the 13 cycles of the moon and the 13 cycles of a woman’s body and covens comprised of 13 worshipping women. He set about systematically destroying female freedom and power. All in God’s name and it stuck.
Horror is associated with Friday 13th and well should it be while too many of us still live with the terror of misogyny. Superstitions, much like curses, draw their power from fear. If you do not believe them, they have no hold over you. In much the same way so many women are reclaiming their wyse ways and wyrd, tis time for us to reclaim 13 as the sacred number it is to us. The Heinys and Doms of the world can choke on their fearful venom but no longer can they claim 13 in the name of terror. It is ours, once and always. This is a day to honour the cycles that live within you and to bear witness to how much we have still to claw back.
Witchcraft is a kind of umbrella term most commonly utilised over the centuries to describe the radicalisation of women. Etymology speaks its deepest truth but who cares what words really mean, right? Only those who cast spells. All its associated derivatives are considered spurious and dangerous, which will delight me forever. Witch was notoriously used as a front page perjorative for a sitting Australian primeminister by another not all that long ago here. The only female in the job (so far) is still famed for her cracker misogyny speech made to his smug face in parliament. So being called a witch hardly dents the duco. It polishes it with warning and speaks to embodied, rather than borrowed, power. The kind that bites back.
Witchcraft is built on codes and secret keys found now in common places. Power held in the remarkable sum of its parts and a formidable wisdom tradition. Numbers are one of our many sacred languages and thirteen is a power, its enchanted impact creeping through the cultivated crap to be well weaved in. There are 13 moon cycles in a year. Covens traditionally comprise 13 witches as a perfect circle of power. This same field of force thrums in the bodies that can do what you do bleeding as they menstruate 13 times a year. This blood too is a power that can create life and take it away, carried not wielded in our wombs.
Back to the maths so you may be intrigued mid-revolution by the symmetry of this coding. 13 is technically a happy number and yes there are sad numbers too, but not this one. 13 is the smallest emirp - which is way of chirping prime backwards - described as the atoms of the natural number system. 13 is a rippling base from which so much can be derived and contained. All the many mathematical distinctions prove that the world is built of codes and secret power is embedded in specific numbers, combinations and the frequencies they generate.
This is as true in cultural influence as it is in witch nerd heaven. 13 is when you become a teenager, a tipping point in our growing. In many cultures and faiths 13 years old is a mark of maturity and a rite of passage through childhood, operating like a bridge. In Italy 13 is considered a lucky number. In Hindi the word for 13 is terah which means yours. There are 13 notes in a full chromatic musical octave and in a deck of playing cards there are four suits, each of 13 ranks. 13 is a Fibonacci number, a divine sequence, a spell that repeats like a chime through our world.
When I banged my staff on the internet in 2019 and flung open the doors to my Coven like Angelica Houston in The Witches, I was looking to create connections to the likeminded and similarly inclined. At the time the whole of Australia was on fire and we were screaming towards the Saturn Pluto conjunction that would manifest as the virus that shook the foundations of the old world order. Cracking its ancient towers irrevocably and all of us as well. I was already in self imposed lockdown having barely escaped from my own terrorist event and the #notallmen circus that still tends to surround them now. Unable to get justice from its clown cars and trapeze I left town, moved near a lighthouse and realised what I really needed was more witches in my life. So I hatched a tale about a gardening witch that grew into a real life business and started a Coven, or as my son used to like to describe it as a witty wayward teenager, a cult of my own.
Witchcraft often starts from a bad attitude, one I love to cultivate in anyone. That power is elastic and it builds resilience as well as reverence. In younglings this teaches a connection to nature and a delight in it, the kind that leads to care and stewardship for a lifetime. For girls getting periods while running the dangerous gauntlet of modern childhood, witchcraft whispers secret power and neutralises shame coding for its opposite. For the traumatised, witchcraft can help reclaim boundaries and autonomy crafting a new sense of self. For the ostracised it offers a home on the margins. Witchcraft offers prescient tools for the recent revolutionary. In modern burning times where all the wizards curtains have been ripped back, the emperor’s clothes are dripping in blood and the awful truth is horrific? Let’s just say the primal rage at injustice in me sees the witch in you. If you would also like to be radicalised into a soft lattice of revelatory gnosis, I have great news.
Crafting your life gives you a way which is why witchcraft is sometimes referred to as the crooked path. A roadmap rooted in cycles and observations, lore and wisdom that makes sense because it is how everyone used to live before we apparently got smarter, and simultaneously poorer for it. It provides structure and steady foundation which is important when some days and news cycles it feels like that is slipping away. So many of its beautiful tenets are now blithely grouped together as nervous system regulation. I prefer the term ritual and practice it as such.
One of the very first ravens I sent out to my Coven was A Witch By Any Other Name generated after one of our Coven expressed her legitimate concerns about the dire intersection of her Catholic faith with her latest foray. For the first time in writing I was tracing my own path and it was like tracing its sigil on my heart.
I write a great deal about how nature is my church. As a pagan and a card carrying witch who lives her personal faith out loud, this is hardly surprising. When I practice its rituals and observations, I feel connected to all that is. I watch the goddess wax and wane and the sun god move across the horizon. I feel their cycles in my body. I observe daily the perpetual rhythm of life, death and rebirth in the seasons and in my garden. I tend my contribution to nature fervently and know that all of it, including my connection to my own spirit, will wither if I don’t. My faith brings me great joy and comfort. It has room for transcendent states and a personal felt sense of an all encompassing power, vast and innate and inherently unknowable. It cultivates mystery and magic. It is my bedrock. A feeling shared by devotees of any faith that satiates the soul’s hunger for states of grace.
A community of witches was a long held dream of this solitary. Our Coven Electric is that yearning made manifest and the Coven Devotional is the sacred container in which you can build your own practice or return to it. Today on this magical day sacred to witches and mystics, I have unlocked a whole host of ravens in the Coven so you can get a feel for my favourite place on the internet together with a retro Mood for Magic playlist for witches to dance as we have for centuries, wildly and with abandon.
Go mad, darklings. The world needs your magic now more than ever.
Kerrie xo
* and you thought the link was an ad. Oh no, that is a standing invitation to dance with us that I sneak in somewhere every Friday the 13th.