My Lent Book

When we witches borrow practices from the Christians it tends to be at best tongue in cheek. Lent is the season in which the Christians memorialise the time Jesus spent in the desert - I've talked before about the significance of desert & related it to what we would call the Hedge. I'm incredibly late with this since the actual season is drawing rapidly to a close but one of the things they do as an ascesis is give something up. Like murder. Or rape. Or paedophilia. No, seriously, often the things they give up are slightly ridiculous & no great loss. Last year a witch friend borrowed an ascesis from them & gave up alcohol for Lent. *How* we took the piss - 'Another bitter lemon, dear?' This year he's given up chocolate. In reality I think this is a real ascesis because these are seriously addictive substances & living without them would actually be a real loss. In the desert (read Hedge) you do experience real loss & the necessities of life are often missing or in very short supply.

My repeated opinion & experience is that the resources, tasks, & experiences become available to the witch when the time is right. When the witch is ready, the need appears, & when a need arises, a witch appears to meet it. My personal hedge has recently moved - partly volitionally, but also because I'm willing to transplant myself I've put out the psychic feelers to my desired destination, & in turn the spirit of place has reached out to welcome me. The other evening I stood in the old graveyard in Park Street & felt at home (not that I'm a goth). That area in a triangle from Holloway Head up to Millenium Point has actually been my stamping ground since I was a very young faggot cruising for we-know-what round there, so I feel the relationship I'm making with the spirit of place is a development of something that already exists. The majority of that area was, from the industrial revolution, up to living memory almost, either industry or teeming slums. The Park Street area was the Whitechapel of Birmingham at the end of the nineteenth century, dominated by gangs & virtually unpoliceable. If you have psychic ability & should go to that part of the city, be prepared for a shock: the sheer chaos & badness of much of what lies under the surface can be overwhelming. Since the magical hypothesis is that what we see on this plane is the manifestation of other layers of existence, as witches we interact with our hedge on deeper levels than just what you see. I have already made some friends there & helped some problems to their natural end.

My Hedge actually produced me a book to read today : it was actually from a certain shop which I'm not going to name because I don't like the owner. Our mutual hatred has nothing to do with the way I used to go in & look at the jazz mags when the shop was in Hurst Street! - actually I suppose I did buy quite a bit as well.

Anyway the book that leapt to my attention is Clarence Rook's The Hooligan Nights, about a nineteenth-century hooligan in London who recounted his exploits to Rook. This is exactly the same milieu as the Park Street area of the past, so in a sense is from my Hedge & an invitation to go further into my Hedge.

No matter to me that the veracity of the tales in the book has been questioned - the whole point of the Hedge is to divide, cross, or traverse the barrier between the real & the unreal. The majority of our sources for the modern witchcraft movement, or even the witch figure are either this mixture or at best shoddy history. I note that Rook may have had a more colourful life than you would think, since for over twenty years he had a symptom of tertiary syphillis (http://oxfordsociology.blogspot.com/2013/10/clarence-rooks-hooligan-nights.html?m=1).

I'm calling it a Lent book to borrow another Lent discipline of the Christians - I mean if it's good enough for the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suppose I can slum it. I've written before about the tensions I see in witches' relationships with the written text - we don't have scriptures but end up creating them or 'canonising' texts ('That's not in Doreen Valiente!'). Christianity has several approaches to reading as 'spiritual' exercises, & this taking a book for Lent is one of them. The older way of reading is called lectio divina, a ruminatory, repetitive way of reading aimed at the contemplation of God, also characteristic of the monastic tradition. I remember when I was a Benedictine novice the prior giving out the Lent books in the chapter house. There was an old lay brother whose book remained firmly unopened in his place all through Lent - I remember noticing a book called 'All About Pigs' in his room, but no 'spiritual' reading.

So my taking this book as a Lent book is a very real witchification of the Christian practice, in the inversion of normality vein so characteristic of the witch figure. I'm going to leave it by the loo - it's a man thing - & look forward to seeing how my Hedge speaks to me in the desert.

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