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The picture our teachers, pastors, parents, and media painted for us young West African kids was that our past was without controversy — bright and sunny — from the moment when the Christian Bible touched our borderlands and changed us forever. Before that singular moment, everything was dark and beastly and sore, our lands reeking with the fumes of unholy alchemy and superstition, the damned genius of the Witch and the Pagan gods and demons that knew her in her filth. Today, this glorious day, we could celebrate their eternal incarceration, they told me. Those of us who had power from above could stand on the heads of snakes, the writhing Lilithian figures that hid in the shadows, and drink their poison without fear of harm.
Growing up in the heavily Christianized Protestant south of Nigeria meant that I was part of a megachurch of charismatic evangelicals and got to witness many “casting out” sessions where the Man of God would sprinkle holy oil or water on a wild, screaming girl who had just confessed to being a Witch. The images of thrashing limbs, carnal confessions of nefarious nightly deeds, and tearful surrender are indelibly seared on my mind. I did not doubt that the tales were true; and that if one were to dream of flying on a broomstick, or to eat a sumptuous meal at ungodly hours, or to comb one’s hair in the dream, one was being initiated into the cult of Wild Ones. Threaded through the everyday was therefore a watchfulness, an impulse to flee the carnality of the body, to assert the lasting dominance of the masculine, to weaponize the borders of the city — the legacy of colonial struggles to push back the wilderness, to suppress the sinful urges of nature (the wild woman’s domain), and escape into midair, hoisted above mere ground, heir to the heavens.
Jezebel dethroned, Lilith vanquished, Asherah covered up and rushed out of the holy place, the masculine distorted, I stepped into a world of work, economy, and research that mirrored this quest for escape, for flight, for passive holiness. Mine was a search for the sacred, the disembedded, and the lofty.
And then one I day, I met her. She glided into the rational order that was my life and pulled the pillars apart with a mere wink. The woman I would later call my “thunderbolt,” my “ground,” the bonfire whose fierce circumference I longed to be incinerated in, the mother whose veined arms and long neck would in time cradle our children: “Lali.”
When Danielle Dulsky writes about love in “the Lost Verses of the Holy Feminine,” a love “so impassioned that it ripples back through the cosmic web and stirs the hearts of the ancients,” it resonates with me. I have known this love for myself: this love that turns the Sons of God mad and drives them to seek the embrace of the shadows that their swords were once sharpened to kill; this love that upturns time and history, shakes it loose from its phallic moorings and pristine foundations, and gives power to the excluded and occluded. When Dulsky speaks of the way Lilith “loves the untamed wilds, like a Witch loves the moon,” she recalibrates haunting pasts and remembers what is now becoming a stunning realization: here, right here, in the mangle of the material, in the queer stirrings of telluric critters, in the murky depths of silent waters, in the wintry spirituality of the desolate, in the graceful appearing of moon, is the sacred.
For me, the touch of a wild woman, Lali, was my undoing. I am not alone. A grand undoing is afoot in biology, in psychology, in quantum field theory, in archaeology, in feminist scholarship, in our appraisals of the vital contributions the world makes in worlding itself. In not so many words, we are coming down to earth, enacting a second Fall of sorts, composting our hard surfaces and realizing the agentic world around us is more than resource, reacquainting ourselves with the historically maligned figure of the Witch, resituating ourselves in a sensuous web of life. With new materialisms, concerned with the emancipation of mater, of mother, of the vitality of “nature” — once territorialized under regimes of Enlightenment as mere resource — we “remember the Holy Wild.”
It is not true that our past is without controversy. Instead it is simmering with subtle absences that haunt our claims to goodness, to rationality. To progress. The wilds have always been part of the city, but we learned not to look — to suppress what longed for expression. Modern history — replete with the burning of heretical women, the colonial blotting out of earth-based traditions of the sacred — may be read as a history of aversion to mater. Dulsky writes that “the extent to which feminine power, in its myriad forms, has been condemned as evil is nothing less than ancient and global. . . . The Goddess has been demonized in our culture, increasingly cast not into a hellish underworld but into a pink and glittery fairyland where she is harmless but also useless.” Now the Goddess is incarcerated no more, and a fierce reckoning is happening. This coming to the Holy Wilds is our deepest hope if we are to linger as an earth community.
In my work researching neomaterialist reconfigurations of racial identity, and specifically how ancestral DNA testing queers the idea of indigeneity, I met Danielle Dulsky. She introduced herself as a Witch. She smiled and told me her story, of her teenage longings for belonging, of being drawn to Ireland since before she knew what was calling her, even when she believed she was Polish. She spoke of her grandmother, her irresistible attraction to the figure of the feminine, and her call to become a Witch.
In this book, Dulsky’s libratory words, quivering sensuously with a search that has never terminated, open us up to the fathomless beauty of the wilds beyond our fences, ritualizing our approach to the Goddess our forebears once banished. This book is holy. This book is a prayer, a cartographical introduction to earth, to water, to fire, to air, and to ether. It is a spell to undo the trance that holds us in the grip of modern separability, devaluing the woman, distorting the masculine, and quelling the queer.
I invite you to read it. Read it knowing you will not arrive. Knowing you will be met quite suddenly by something greater than yourself, something hiding under the veil of the ordinary. Knowing that She breathes again, and desperately seeks you.
— Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
In the beginning, there was She.
She was nature’s primordial pulse, the pan-elemental alchemy of birth; the fertile void of death; and the mysterious, enduring, and numinous cosmic infinite. All was She, and She was all. Her power pervaded the totality of existence and veiled all potential worlds in the name of holy manifestation. Her steady, purposeful rhythm pounded on, in, and through the stellar fusions, the planet building, and the great galactic swell. The universal dawn was a quantum prayer to Her, and She was dancing for us long before humanity’s blessed inception, long before the glow of the primal feminine was eclipsed by modernity.
While the rhythm of Her hallowed drum has slowed and quieted to a barely audible, near-whisper beat, while humanity’s spiritual landscape has been overbuilt and hums with man-made hymns, She can never be silenced. She is our elemental nature, the stuff of our souls, and we are She embodied. Every one of us could hear Her if we only listened, for She has sought safe harbor in our very marrow. She lives in us, and with Her genesis came our mandate to wholly and emphatically embody Her in the wake of the feminine’s historical denigration. If we only put our ears to the ground, we would hear the promised pulse of Her return not as She descends from a gold-and-diamond heaven but as She claws Her way up so ceremoniously through rock and stone, destined to erupt from beneath the very structures built to keep Her contained.
Our language is insufficient when describing the shape-shifting majesty that is She, but