witches

Most people think that witches are a Christian invention. But the idea of the witch who flies in the night and draws power from dark cosmic forces to work her ill will on others pre-dates Christianity, probably by many centuries.  

In Homer’s Odyssey (c.800 BC), Circe – who turns men into animals – is described as a witch, and Plutarch refers to witchcraft in his treatise On Superstition (c.AD 100). Illicit magic features heavily in Roman law statutes, some of which are passed down to the Christian world. However, many of those early laws were really laws against sorcery, which unlike witchcraft can be beneficial, and which requires special skills, tools and words. 

Archaeologists have found hundreds of ancient Greek curse tablets, which the Greeks called katares, ‘curses that bind tight’, and they appear to have invented them, with a great number focused on sporting competitions or legal contests. The inscribed tablets were left in graves, wells or fountains, where the dead could better work their magic. 

Diane Purkiss – A journey into witchcraft beliefs 

Masturbation

Masturbation is the ongoing love affair that each of us has with ourselves throughout our lifetime. 
 Betty Dodson – Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving 

real-life lesbian Cinderella story

When I returned, Hannah was lying fully naked, touching herself. I knelt between her open legs and pressed my toy to my clit, firing off my pleasure sensors like crazy, and started kissing her neck. Moaning as I made my way down her toned body, I landed my face in the crease where her thigh met her hip and licked along it, teasing her for a moment. I mouthed her mound with soft lips, then dove in at last, sucking her clit to mirror the sensation my toy was giving me, totally losing myself in her perfect pussy. She was so easy to take in, so supple and flowy compared to Brian’s seriously giant cock. 

“That’s it,” she whined, putting her trust in my tongue. “Keep going. I’m right there….” 

Eager to obey, I kept going, sucking just a little harder and turning my vibrator up to match. You’ve treated me so well. Let me help you feel good now, I telepathically told her pussy. I was getting off on thanking her in this way—my money kink at its finest. 

“I’m so close!” she cried out between pleasurable gasps for air. 

So was I. We were tethered, my toy on me mimicking my mouth on her like we temporarily shared a pulse. And as our pulse quickened to the point of no return, I gloriously lost control, letting out a screaming orgasm straight into her pussy. 

My sound waves were the last push she needed, blasting her off to join me in the second half of my climax. She grabbed my head, weaving her fingers into my hair and tilting her pelvis so she could melt even further into my mouth. I felt her surge with warmth and wetness and we stayed right there, reverberating together while time froze just for us. 

GG Sauvage – My real-life lesbian Cinderella story 

Whipped, chained, exposed and humiliated…

[The illustrated story of O – Doris Kloster]

Dominique Aury, writing as “Pauline Reage” wrote the classic “Story of O” in 1954….Bestseller hardly covers it. “Story of O” has sold millions of copies, and hasn’t been out of print in more than 40 years. It has influenced numerous erotic fictions, been made into two (wretched) films and given shape to countless fantasy lives. 

But it’s a difficult book to think about right now, its structure and assumptions somehow out of tune with our times. O, a young fashion photographer, goes with her lover to a mysterious chateau, where she’s whipped, chained, exposed and humiliated, all in the supplest, most finely poised sentences imaginable. Elegantly choreographed and costumed, “Story of O” seems a bit of a period piece now — like 1950s haute couture in a world of latex and piercings. 

But it’s the novel’s pre-feminism that makes it seem so foreign to us. The chateau is run entirely by and for the pleasure of men: No male submissives or female dominants need apply (though in the character of Anne-Marie, there’s a suggestion that some of the middle management is female). Sexual power and privilege in “Story of O” are rigid, systematic, almost metaphysically encoded — O is like a supplicant joining a religious order. But what seems most out of sync with our time is “Story of O’s” utter lack of that therapeutic quality that pervades so much contemporary porn: that remarkable insistence that this stuff is good for you, bringing with it self-knowledge, autonomy and the ability to love. 

O doesn’t have to learn to love – if she learns anything, it’s her utter need to be dominated by love. And she certainly doesn’t have to learn to live, since the novel ends with her death or abandonment by her lover, convincing us that the two eventualities are equivalent. Time away from a lover – a master – is dead time for O. In popular contemporary pornographies, on the other hand, time away from the lover is almost a convention, an opportunity for healthy soul-searching before the books’ happy –  even wholesome – endings. Beauty and her prince cuddle in the saddle in Anne Rice’s “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy. Pat Califia’s lesbian biker girls ride off clean and sober at the end of “Doc and Fluff.” Even John Preston’s eponymous leatherman, Mr. Benson, goes a little sappy on us. 

It’s easy to smile at these simplified happy endings – supermarket romance laced with the banalities of consciousness raising. But they also represent an achievement: a faith that it’s possible to integrate daily life and supportive relationships with the extreme demands of the sexual imagination. And even if the stories get a little preachy at times, there’s still a cheerful community spirit to them, as well as a nice dose of irreverence and a willingness to laugh at oneself. Contemporary sex radicalism’s public conversation is in some way reminiscent of an earlier, equally pornographic era, the recklessly public and talky Enlightenment. Think of the Marquis de Sade’s whacked out speeches on sex, power and “nature;” think of his dramatic dialogue “Philosophy in the Bedroom” as the proceedings of a group self-help session, perhaps with a hot tub nearby. 

But is it possible to assimilate “Story of O’s” lonely, pristine quest toward self-negation into this clamorous, self-actualizing, “sex positive” culture? 

The answer to this question lies in the mysterious facts of the novel’s genesis, first described by Jean de St. Jorris in a 1994 New Yorker article. As the obituary said, Aury did write the book in order to keep her lover, the critic and literateur Jean Paulhan. She’d become his mistress during the Nazi occupation, when both of them, unknown to each other, worked for the same underground resistance journal. Their love affair, which spanned three decades, continued to follow wartime rules of silence and clandestineness — the secret meetings, the meticulous planning. Though Paulhan never considered leaving his wife, who had Parkinson’s disease, he expected her to accommodate to the affair, just as he expected Aury to fill in the lonely Sundays and vacation times. I think of the famous photograph of François Mitterrand’s funeral, wife and mistress both in attendance, and what a fearsome investment of female tact and anxiety such an arrangement must entail. 

For Aury, the anxiety came to a head in the early 1950s. She was in her middle 40s, and she began to fear that Paulhan might leave her for a younger woman. “I wasn’t young, I wasn’t pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons,” she said. (“And he was fuckin’ 70 at the time,” my husband marvelled, not quite managing to conceal his admiration.) 

“I could also write the kind of stories you like,” she told him one day. Paulhan admired the work of de Sade; he’d written the introduction to an important edition of his work. When he had voiced his doubt that a woman could write compelling S/M, Aury said she knew that she could. The fantasy lay buried in the half-forgotten depths of her dreams, conceived before she had ever met Paulhan, before she had ever known sex or love. “Story of O” is in no way a humble entreaty by a woman terrified of abandonment. It was clearly meant to overwhelm. Revealing a fierce, complete and unsparing sexual imagination, it was every bit as much a dare as a love offering. 

And it’s in this way that the novel transcends the circumstances of its creation – the history, the manners. Foreign to our own manners and circumstances, it’s as much a dare to us as it was to Paulhan – an invitation to rediscover a dimly remembered place in the imagination. In an essay called “A Girl in Love,” Aury remembers “those oft repeated reveries, those slow musings just before falling asleep, always the same ones, which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint.” 

At the bottom of Aury’s elegant and urbane pornography lies the fantasy life of an impressionable child – the sort who listens carefully to the overheated perorations of an overzealous religious school teacher, who pores endlessly over the lurid imagery of a comic book or an illustrated saint’s life. Because pornography’s power doesn’t reside in the extremity of its images and motifs, but in their naivety and redundancy – in the pornographer’s need to employ the symbols of constraint, and to spell out the abstractions of power and passion in the most primitive terms possible. 

Pornography is not only shocking – it’s embarrassing, a return to a time when we hadn’t yet learned to defend ourselves against the outrages of our imaginations. But Aury wasn’t embarrassed. She almost, I think, saw the humour of the thing (“Return to the Chateau,” “Story of O’s” muddled and largely unsuccessful sequel, contains a few wildly self-parodic passages). But she didn’t seem to see the need (as I do, for example, in my porn) to use irony to bridge the gap between the outer and inner lives. Vastly literate, circumspect, living a life of quietly constrained passion, she was as unshaken by the same raging desire within her as Emily Brontë. 

And so this is my tribute, recognition, thanks, to Aury for showing me, and others, the way into the chateau. Or the ways – in the first pages of the novel O enters the chateau twice, once blindfolded, once not – take your pick, it doesn’t matter. Just as it doesn’t matter how we stumble in, stupidly, haphazardly, purposefully, sex-positively – the door will open to disclose our own half-forgotten, naively imagined visions waiting there for us. Just as Aury’s imagination waited for her to write this most serendipitous of masterpieces, this most inevitable of visions. 

Molly Weatherfield –   When Dominique Aury died an unflinching notion of sexuality went with her 

Characters you want to save…

The books I love best I remember two ways: what happened in the world of the book, and what I was doing myself at the time: where I sat, what my daily habits were then. In 1988, when I first read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, I was twenty-two and in graduate school, in the first apartment of my adult life. I’d just begun to believe that I could be a writer, so I read differently, trying to figure out how the author did it. Clearly, any writer had strengths and weaknesses: if only I paid diligent attention, I could see them, and then divine the gears behind the story. 

It took me three or four sentences in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to give up on that theory. That is, I saw, just as I’d planned, what Carson McCullers was good at: She was going to break my heart again and again. I sat in the orange armchair that had come with my apartment; I clutched my paperback, with its pulpy gray pages and ugly cover illustration. Reading, I could not see any gears at all, because the characters —these actual, living people she wrote about — obscured them. I could no more see how she did it than I could fall in love with someone and see how that person absorbed vitamin D from the sun. 

Partway through the book, I had an experience I’d never had before, and have never had since. At one point, twelve-year-old Mick Kelly and her younger brother Bubber are sitting outside when Baby Wilson, a four-year-old girl whose mother is grooming her for Hollywood, walks by, dressed in pink, swinging a pink pocketbook. Bubber loves Baby, and pleads with her to let him touch her pretty outfit. He is shouldering a borrowed rifle. Baby walks on and Bubber aims his gun at her and you know he doesn’t mean to shoot her but — 

I sat up in my chair. At the bottom of the right hand page, Bubber was aiming the gun at Baby. I knew what was going to happen on the other side, but the scene and characters were so real to me I somehow believed if I didn’t turn the page I could prevent it. I could save Bubber and Baby and Mick. I desperately wanted to do it. 

Eventually, of course, I turned the page, and everything happened. 

That’s one of the miracles of Carson McCullers: she writes characters you want to save. They are naïve and blind in love; they are passionate about lost causes; they make mistake after mistake, but somehow you love them so much you want to rescue them. There are many moments in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that still make me gasp with worry and regret for the characters: I don’t want life to treat them so badly, because they deserve so much. 

Elizabeth McCracken – Hunting the Lonely Heart 

copulated with the Devil

Congress with the Devil became a popular part of sabbat mythology, but testimonies like the vivid one of Isobel Gowdie suggest that we cannot write this off as merely the exaggeration of the interrogators. There are simply too many details here that an interrogator would never think to enquire about, Isobel has provided more than a simple answer to a question: ‘yes I copulated with the Devil’, she provides us with a rich narrative of the experience. 

Lee Morgan –  A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft 

The Dark Man guides the witch…

He appears often unexpectedly by tradition, at the moment of inception between the witch’s leaving of the path of ordinary life, to cross the threshold unto the crooked path of the Wise. It is the ‘Dark Man’ or the ‘Man in Black’ who guides the witch across this threshold upon the path of Return, which is the path away from the established order of ‘the world of men’, back via the way of the wild and the ‘Other’ unto reunion with the company of the spirit, power and the primal source of ‘All’. 

Gemma Gary – The Devil’s Dozen 

animistic beliefs and rituals

The early modern ‘fairy faith,’ if we can call it that was an amalgamation of many of the animistic beliefs and rituals surrounding nature spirits, deities, ghosts and so on which had not been completely homogenized into catholic hagiography and the cult of the dead. 

Emma Wilby – Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits 

true nature of existence

The universe is but a thought in Consciousness. In Reality it is nothing. One who sees the true nature of existence and non-existence never ceases to exist. The Self – which is absolute, effortless, timeless, immaculate – is without limits and at no distance from you. You are forever It    –    Ashtavakra Gita 

At the moment of orgasm

Many of you intuitively know the link between spirituality and sexuality through direct experience. One woman, I’ll call Carrie, related the following; “At the moment of orgasm I knew that I was in a great, golden light and I experienced myself as transparent, luminous energy. I saw seven star-like, golden, swirling points that lined up in my body. I did not know about the chakras at the time but later I discovered that that’s what I saw. My energy centres looked like radiant golden lights in my body.” What she had visualized was the life force freely flowing through all seven energy centres that were illuminated and energized by her orgasm. Many people who become interested in spiritual sex have had initial spontaneous ecstatic experiences such as Carrie’s. 

Linda E. Savage – Spiritual Sex