Friendly Neighborhood Witches

"From The Times
July 8, 2008
My friendly neighbourhood witches
Ken Russell

In a heavily wooded hollow in the heart of the New Forest lies the village of Burley. Its tea rooms provide cream teas for tourists, while half a dozen shops cater to the needs of witches living in the woods near by. Books of spells for good and ill, stacks of magic wands, shelves of tarot cards vie for space. Pentagrams, lucky charms, crystal balls, mystic bibles, “books of shadows”, astrological mugs and twig brooms are piled high. Witches and fairies of all kinds hang from the ceiling in mid-flight or decorate bracelets, china, paintings and pretty clocks. Everything is for sale, and for every sale to a serious witch or warlock, there must be a thousand to the visiting tourist.

Yes, Burley is well and truly steeped in witchcraft. And, except for that 16th and 17th-century lapse in tolerance in which tens of thousands were burnt across Europe (mostly women), witches have been thriving, ever since Burley's own Sybil Leek came out of the broom closet in the 20th century and invented witch pride.

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Like most people brought up on Shakespeare, Rackham's drawings, the Brothers Grimm and The Wizard of Oz, I've always assumed that witches were good when they were bad. Double bubble, poison apples, magic mirrors, warts and wands. Pointed hats, black cats, prodding fingers, cackling laughs. But in Burley I was privileged to drag my Hammer-Horror fantasies into the secret lair of a real witch and warlock for correctional instruction.

Our modern magicians, Vandervalk and Freya, hold multiple university degrees in medicine, animal husbandry, ecology and psychology. They're grounded professionals whose dedication to public service (teaching prisoners to care for creatures such as wild owls as a route to learning respect) makes it a risk to reveal their night jobs as high priest and priestess of the craft. And they've had it up to here with toad jokes. This is 2008, after all, and the wise arts have been tested and refined for centuries. The results are in for this pair, who have been practising a combined total of 30 years, 12 of them in partnership.

Witchcraft is based on the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. It involves fine-tuning oneself to receive a vivid experience of the connectedness of things. As Vandervalk puts it: “Witchcraft is like electricity. I'm the plug that goes into the mains. I don't keep the force for myself, or claim mastery over it. I'm a conduit, to bring ease and positive outcomes to other people's lives.”

He continues: “In Western civilisation, all of us are five days away from anarchy. All it would take would be for our usual power systems to fail and we'd be plunged into darkness. At that moment it would be extremely useful to know a shaman like myself who is an adept in woodcraft and plant medicine.”
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“Power animals are my speciality,” he adds. “I'm grafting myself to their purity. Survival is their whole purpose. It's the life-linkage I'm cultivating. A witch connected to woodland ways is able to remove the plastic wrapper from life. That's why it's easier to conduct our work in nature. The forest, the time of year and the Moon are our church.”

“It's a path for attaining self-knowledge in conjunction with the cycle of life, birth, death: the mysteries."

“If someone wants to get revenge or a husband to return, we don't help them to cast spells; we redirect them,” Freya says. “Any black magic rebounds on the sender seven-fold. Nor do we perform ‘skyclad' - in the nude,” she adds, a little too pointedly in my direction and with a hint of psychic powers.

“We're not obsessive about it. The point is to integrate the mundane with the evolutionary thrust, not to favour one at the expense of the other,” Vandervalk says. “And,” he jokes, “to turn annoying people into mushrooms.”
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