Witchy Days Throughout the Year
Celebrating the Life of a Witch
BLESSED BE
My heartfelt thanks go to:
My special friend Liam Cyfrin. I couldn’t have written this book without his advice and Witchy insights.
The brilliant girls, Tracey Shaw and Lauren O’Keefe, who not only do a magnificent job of running my website (www.fionahorne.com) but are also good friends!
All the wonderful Witches who shared their stories with me.
All the generous people who took the time to write in to my website and who sent me letters offering their comments and support.
My gorgeous friends and family who supported me during the writing of this book.
My awesome management team in London – Terry Blamey and Alli Macgregor, and in Australia – Melissa LeGear, Justin McNeany and Rochelle Nolan.
And, last but not least, the spunky team at Thorsons, especially Louise, Joanna, Jo, Jessica, Karen, Paul and Meg.
The journey of this book began 20 years ago in Australia – the world was different then. Witches were still cloaked in fear, suspicion and myth. Now, in these ‘woke’ times, who doesn’t know a proud, self-professed Witch?
I’m grateful that this book has stood the test of time, being re-released in this 20th Anniversary Edition. I hope it is useful to you, whether you are new to the Craft of the Wise, or a devout practitioner looking to refine and deepen your skills.
Witchcraft is a spiritual path – it welcomes all seekers.
Enjoy your journey.
Blessed Be,
Fiona Horne
May 2017
www.fionahorne.com
Some say that you have to be born a Witch – a Witch cannot be ‘made’. I disagree. In our society, where the majority of alternative spirituality is hushed or treated with derision and scepticism, it can be hard to hear your inner calling.
I spent most of my teenage years as a practising Catholic, going to Mass every Sunday with my parents and attending a Catholic girls-only high school. At times I found comfort in the rituals that many people of all faiths reduce their religion to. It was pleasant to think that all I had to do was be good and I would go to heaven, and that the only spiritual responsibility I had in my life was to obey the Ten Commandments.
When I was thirteen I had a favourite nun, Sister Geraldine, who taught at my high school – she was tough and cool and didn’t take crap from the school heavies. She told me one lunchtime that she’d never had a boyfriend in her life, that she’s always loved God and He’d always loved her back, and she always felt happy and good about herself. I was in High School Hell at the time, no girlfriends, no boyfriend, constant fighting at home, and in her words I saw freedom from the depressing nightmare my life had become. So, I decided to become a nun.
I started to read the Bible and educational books about the Catholic faith but I found so many contradictions and disempowering female stereotypes, that instead of my usual attitude of blind acceptance – of having faith – I started to question everything spiritual I’d been brought up to believe. The deeper I delved into the religion the stranger it seemed to me, being made mostly of legends and unexplained laws, yet demanding absolute faith in these stories and rigid adherence to the rules. I listened to the sermons preached from the pulpit and became more and more convinced that the Catholic faith was not for me.
I started to look for alternatives. The most obvious one to an angry, rebellious thirteen-year-old who didn’t want to be Catholic any more was Satanism. So I went to the library and discovered the tacky fiction writer, Dennis Wheatley. All his books featured demons and evil witches, Satanic sabbats, sex and death. This all seemed quite thrilling at the time and I happily lit black candles in my bedroom, said the Lord’s Prayer backwards and read the Malleus Maleficarum under my sheets at night by the light of a torch. However, rather than becoming seduced by black magic, I became depressed with its banal, cruel and perverse obsessions and my interest waned. About the same time my attractiveness to boys increased and not long after discovering Satanism I discovered boys, and they were to occupy my every waking thought for the next few years of high school.
Later in my teens, having established my independence by leaving home and getting a job, I started thinking about my spirituality again. It was now the 1980s and the New Age movement was exploding. Lots of books on alternative spirituality started to appear and I got swept up by the ‘positive thinking’ brigade. I bought books on affirmations and personal healing by Louise Hay and books on manifesting pleasing things in my life – like Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualisation. If anything bad happened in my life I would focus on the positive and attempt to think only happy and constructive thoughts. Consequently I felt frustrated and let down when I wasn’t always able to avoid unpleasant experiences and it became quite a struggle to stay positive all the time. My wholesome interest in the New Age mutated into scepticism.
Some of the New Age books I read over my late teens mentioned the word ‘paganism’ and I strongly identified with its concept of living close to the land, being environmentally responsible and finding divinity in Nature. So I became a vegan, avoiding all animal products in my life, including leather and honey, and recycling everything that I could. As I read more books I started feeling drawn to those that had that mysterious and exotic word ‘witchcraft’ in them. At first I thought I was going to be inundated with Satanic scare stories again, but instead I was excited to find a documented nature-worshipping religion that placed great emphasis on the sacredness of the individual and the land.
For a while I browsed through these books finding all the terminology and rigmarole a bit off-putting – but then one day I saw Ly Warren-Clarke’s The Way of the Goddess (now published as Witchcraft – in Theory and Practice) and my life changed. Here was a book about Witchcraft, or more specifically, Wicca, that was both easy and thrilling to read, and I realized that all along I had been a Witch, even since those early naïve days of Satanism. Here was a religion that made sense: it was dynamic and logical, loving