Rewilding Witchcraft

Rewilding Witchcraft, Scarlet Imprint

we begin with wolves. ... The apex predator was shown to be the vital element in biodiversity. Man is the only exception to this rule.

I once reasoned that, in a long slow decline of living standards, witchcraft as a low tech, local response could perhaps survive the coming storm and that hand in hand with rewilding habitats as re-enchanted sacred spaces it offered the potential for a post-industrial recovery of bio-diversity.

Now everything has changed.

Rewilding is alas the final position of an ecological movement facing catastrophic losses. ... Yet the essential failure of rewilding is this: we cannot simply introduce new predators, or species such as bison or beavers, into small isolated environments whilst industrial culture is destroying the entire matrix of life on the planet. ... I am not suggesting quitting. ... These small victories will make a difference as we approach the choke point and particularly for those who have or choose, in spite of the facts, to have children.

with climate change animals and insects are being born out of sync with their food sources. As I have said before, the wheel of the year has been broken. 

For witchcraft to be anything other than the empty escapism of the socially dysfunctional or nostalgia for bygone ages, it needs to feel the shape of its skull, venerate the dead and the sacred art of living and dying with meaning.

Orientation, Presence, Imperative. We are not simply losing it all, it is being stripped from us as surely as those accused of being witches were by their inquisitors in the torture cell. ... The witch has been created by the land to speak and act for it.

However, I predict the next generation are going to be angrier and their witchcraft more radical than you or I could dream. They will realise that there is nothing to lose, rather than this generation which seems concerned only about the size of their pension pots – not the fact that they have cost us all the earth.

These technological and scientific responses do not account for the wider environment which we do not control, but which now seeks to redress the killing balance and is doing so with storm surge and wildfire and tornado and flood and drought regardless of what is playing on your headphones or how high the gates are to your compound. I welcome this storm.

a shift to the local and a disengagement from power structures are necessary steps. Find the others has become an imperative.