Neighbourhood witch

'Few people nowadays are witches; or, if they are, they are not often ready to admit it. This is a pity, not only because there are many occasions in modern life when a witch might be useful...' (Elliot Rose: A Razor for a Goat. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1962, p. 3)

I have been reminded recently that while ones standing as a witch may be for the most part unacknowledged by other people, they'll still come when they need a witch.

There is a house in my street which, while privately owned, is let out by the council on short term lets. The most recent tenants have managed to make as many enemies as they could in an incredibly short period of time: the details will of necessity not be published here, & are anyway not really the point. Suffice to say that both a witch friend & I have done things to get rid of these people. Unbeknown to me some of the neighbours also went round to the owner of the house to remind him of his responsibility in this matter.

I only found this out when I told another of the neighbours that the unwanted tenants were as good as gone, & to stop worrying because (when she asked me if I thought so) I *knew* so. It was at this point she looked at me strangely & told me that they had been taken to court for non-payment of rent, & had their tenancy terminated. I asked her why she was therefore fretting about it since she already knew their days were numbered - conceited, of course I was chuffed that I knew it already without the information she'd heard.

She obviously picked up that I 'gnew' on some level that she didn't because I came home today to find she'd put a note through my letterbox to say when their tenancy is ending (they've gone, I was hoping for the whole bailiffs drama, which is what would have happened with my magic, so I'm inclined to attribute it to my friend. 'Oh, I'm gooood at those', she said). This aside, non-witches recognise witchcraft when they see it, they also recognise witches when they see them, even if they can't put a name to it. We witches get used to the ecstasy of the Goddess, we can forget that the things that regularly happen in our lives are 'impossible', & we forget how these things hit a member of the public when they first meet them. In this case, of course, there is also a comeback for the landlord, who plainly isn't bothered who lives in his houses, in unpaid rent & the state they've left the house in.

It is this role of being both scary oracle, & the person people go to when there really is nowhere else to turn to, that really delineates the witch from the priest, the social worker, the lawyer, the health professional, & the councillor, yet constitutes a role that somehow includes elements of all of those things. The sheer multi-facetedness & ambiguity of this role will also tend to ensure that people will both recognise a witch & be unable to admit to themselves what they are really seeing. Elliot Rose again:

'The word [witch] is not my property or my invention, & I can hardly venture to define it; but undefined, it rides its traditional, sub-literary, pantomime broomstick over the wide compass of the heavens, & in hell also the weird sisters cackle & gibber.' (Ibid, p. 4)

Incidentally I have been watching Margery Allingham's Campion. Personally I prefer the later, darker, more developed novels, to the earlier ones that were dramatised into the TV series, but in Look to the Lady, not only does Campion tell a fortune with playing cards, but also does a spell by the addition of another card. The cards are the illustration to this post: he saw a woman (queen) surrounded by knaves (knaves), pursuing a pot of gold (ace of diamonds). Then Campion produces a joker from nowhere & inserts it between the queen & the ace of diamonds, & says that he sees this pursuit being prevented by a pale young man. Witches really do come in all shapes & appear in some very strange places!

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