Witches know

Something I keep banging on about is the Hedge, which is the environment in which the witch finds herself, on all levels. The hedge of course refers to boundaries & the ability to see ones environment on lots of different levels at once. It is in the hedge that we find the challenges that need to be faced, & which cumulatively constitute an initiatory experience for the witch.

I have recently come across a challenge in my hedge, which I'm not sure what to do about yet, but I'll use it here as an example of witches knowing & the ways we know. It also partly illustrates what happens when a witch makes her way into the hedge: it gathers itself around her & interacts with her.

There is a street in the city centre which at certain times I find unbearably uncomfortable. For reasons that will become apparent I will not be naming it - I don't want certain people searching the name of the street & coming to this post - nor any details of what I think is presently happening there. Suffice to say that it is a street to the south of Birmingham's present city centre. It has existed for centuries, & was among the streets of teeming slums around there in the eighteenth century that became turned over to industry in the nineteenth century.

I first became aware of something wrong in that area on one of my tramps through the city. The feeling I get to either side of that street is the comfortable, welcoming, busy Birmingham one, but on one particular evening the street made me intensely uncomfortable. I'm not easily weirded out but I had a distinct sense of being watched, in a very hostile way. I literally could not wait to get away from that street. I have been back twice since, once in the day & yesterday in the evening & it seems that the place has somehow closed to me. I got absolutely nothing there on either visit: it felt completely closed, & giving away absolutely nothing to me. I feel this may be significant.

Of course I have done investigations. After the first visit I asked a friend to do a divination. She does not know the street, does not even live in this country, but got the sense of unrelenting violence, dangers, murk murk murk, & murdered children & prostitutes. Her advice was very clearly not to go there at all. She also felt that a certain illegal activity was going on there now. Thus far my differential diagnosis was the centuries of desperate human existence had created a spirit of place which was predisposed & invited illicit, dangerous activities.

My next step was to go to the library & see whether any of this had made the history books. The sort of things I was looking for were murders, brothels, gangs, etc, in that street & surprisingly the written history of that street is completely pedestrian & normal. I was amazed. On the other hand, the kind of thing that I was looking for are the kind of crimes that people are usually keen to keep hidden. In fact, now I put it like that, I feel that I'm being directed more clearly to another aspect of spirit of place: this street keeps its secrets hidden. It's not often I can't get to the bottom of something psychically or through history. So my diagnosis remains that there may or may not be a spot there that attracts this kind of thing, that also attracts cover ups. What remains unexplained in any way is why it is just that street: it seems bizarre that that kind of energy would be confined to the man-made unit of a street, I would normally expect it to be spread further. I would also expect the surrounding streets to have the same energy but they don't at all.

I have been mulling this over for a while now. Then yesterday evening the whole situation leapt into relief for me. I was in a pub with a witch friend (that is the pretext for the picture, illustrating me at the bar), talking about this & he brought out the tarot cards. Even I was amazed at the clarity with which a cesspit of abuse & corruption, all carefully guarded & covered up, appeared in the cards. This thing, kids, is huge, & it's powerful people, the apparently great & good, running the show. The good thing that appeared was that this situation is on the turn & can't continue indefinitely.

Then we went from one pub to another by a route that crossed this road at one point. Once again I sensed absolutely nothing - the spirit of place was completely closed to me, & I normally can't contact individual entities unless I'm on my own. My friend got a sense of a strangled prostitute & was quite distressed by the experience. He also got the same feeling of the roads either side feeling completely different.

Then a lovely thing happened - we went to another pub & both made contact at once with an ex-landlady from the 1960s - her bleached blond hair in a beehive gave her away, also the chain smoking which gave her the lung cancer that killed her. She thought we were a couple - everyone thinks that, as it happens we're not each other's type, but she really liked us. She'd seen some wheeling & dealing in her time, but nothing like as dodgy as the road I've been writing about. It was a pub that has not long re-opened after being derelict for many years - the present landlord could do with cranking up the friendliness a bit, but who needs that when you can chat with the landlady from 50 years ago?

As for the street I've been writing about, I'm trying to discern whether this is something that has turned up for me in my hedge. My personal hedge is changing, as I noted in my last post, so it is to be expected that the next thing for me to do is going to be different. By now I'm assured enough that I also know the resources will be available for the task when the time is right to do it. This is the responsibility of the witch's knowing - because we know things in a way that others don't, we end up knowing about things that we have to do something about. Plus I feel this one may be so big it will be in the papers when it is undone...watch this space!

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