Category Archives: Advent Calendar of Witches

Happy Yule, everybody! Thanks for following along with my Advent Calendar of Witches. In the spirit of light and gratitude for the abundances of even this hard year, I want to offer a list of witch and witch-adjacent writers and artists.

My formula for understanding witchcraft has been witch = accusation + fire, but no one ever burned Marie Laveau for anything. The whole city of New Orleans, they say, came to her for help or advice at some time or another. And yet she was never hauled before a court. This contradicts everything I have learned about witchcraft, about the cruelty in people afraid their power is slipping, and about the operations of 19th century slaveholding societies. Nevertheless, the story the archives tell about the charmed work accomplished by Marie Laveau is clear. Her subterfuge in the service of social justice took the form of uncorrupted generosity.

This is a hard year to be approaching the longest night. So I offer as a balm the story of the fairy queen Rhiannon.

The devil, it is said, keeps a book of names where you sign in your own blood or some other potioned ink like a liquid iron gall. There is no erasing it, there is no smearing it.

If your name appears in the devil’s book, to hear the Puritans tell it, he is now your master. If they let themselves think very much about it, the Puritans must have been terrified that what they had done to other people might in turn be done to them.

Agnes Naismith laid a dying woman’s curse on the town of Paisley and who can blame her, given how she was scapegoated, along with six other people, after that spoiled brat of a laird’s daughter, Christian Shaw, fell into fits. Or at least that’s one way to tell the story.

Behind door number 18 is Maria Sibylla Merian, the great botanist and first ecologist, who discovered and documented insect metamorphosis in the 1600s. She had to be very careful about her reputation, because there were many who still believed in witches and their power to take the form of butterflies and spoil the milk. She kept her laboratory of silkworms and caterpillars very secret.

Yesterday my friend Bob sent me a picture of the railroad tracks that ran along the edge of the defunct dairy farm outside Glouster, Ohio where I used to live. I walked over or under that bridge with my dog every morning. And yesterday another friend, Darcy Higgins, shared her beautiful graduate thesis on conservation education in that county. So today on my Advent Calendar of Witches I want to talk about Mountain Mary, Appalachian magic, hex signs, acid mine drainage, and a little stretch along the banks of Sunday Creek where I keep a piece of my heart.

Maria Gonçalves Cajada, the accused sorceress from colonial Brazil, once said, “If the bishop has a mitre, I have a mitre, and if the bishop preaches from the pulpit, I preach from the cadeira.”