Practical Witchery! - John Stormm (best novels to read for beginners TXT) 📗

of the very worst of those ancient clans, and they use our craft to murder, rape and ravage the diverse peoples of our planet for their personal profiteering, I cannot argue the previous point. 

 

        They have a saying among themselves:  "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king!"  It has become a symbol to them of their power over the world today.  And the mystics of their ilk, rule over the masses by mystifying and obscuring the truth from all of the people they abuse at their whim.  They have hobbled the populace for centuries out of hand, with false histories, traditions, dogmas and doctrines of devils, in order that they may be masters over you all.  But the truth of this history remains, that there are yet the remnants of another 187 ancient wyrding clans, of some power and craft, of which I am related to one or more of them, as are many of YOU!  This gene pool has dispersed widely in the last several thousands of years.  Power has corrupted absolutely, as was always known that it would.  I would take that away, and put it back into the proper hands of the people of this earth, where we can ALL rise and thrive and live good lives, and raise our families to a future of bright promise and not one of subjection and slavery.

         In every race and culture on this earth are the wise, the magi, sages, mages, wizards, witches, shamans and true nobility of the Old Blood, which each of them claims, to have descended from the stars of the heavens.  As the descendants of such, even yourselves, it is not seemly that you be subject to petty tyrants in this way!  I recognize that there are many clans, covens, ancient lineages and cultures.  Because of this, I will keep my treatise here, couched in the most general terms that I can, so that you may apply what I say to what you already may know of your own, and adapt that knowledge as you see fit.  I am a Danaan witch of the blood, and no novice in my ways and craft.  But I am not here to become anyone's master or ruler by any means.  I am here to awaken and teach men and women to recognize what has happened to them.  To shuck off the chains that hold you all in thrall of the evil powers that move this present world into its murder and madness, or you will not survive what it undoubtedly will bring you all to.  I am here to share with you the story of how we came to this point and retained our own power and how using much the same, you may find your own power and wield it to the benefit of your people.

          You will hear it said many times in the course of this essay that, knowledge is power.  It's high time that you all learned to apply that as more than simply an ancient wise or clever saying, and wield it as a life changing tool.   As by what the Wiccans know as the Threefold Law:  Anything we do, be it bad or good, comes back upon our own heads threefold.  If you abuse your power, it will destroy you and yours as surely as these 13 Illuminist wyrding clans will ultimately destroy their own from the face of this planet.  Take what I give you here, in the spirit in which it is given and do well and responsibly with it, and you will bless your own clans for many, many generations to come by your wisdom and deeds.  This, and only this, is my agenda as a witch of the blood.  I withstand the darkness to break its chains upon my ancient siblings in order that light and peace may one day prevail.

                                   

"A Long Memory."

 

          I just want to live a "nice normal life".  Being a hereditary witch, perhaps a "nice paranormal life" would be a bit truer to form.  But no matter what kind of family one is born into, each will have it's own definition of "normalcy".  In our own family, we lived and worked within our own boundaries  for many centuries.  So in our own minds, we have a very well established sense of what is "normal".  Within the past three generations or so, some marked changes have occurred in the natural order of things.  This is probably where the divergence begins, but I suppose a bit of our own biased version of history should come first.  Truth told; we've been watching the world change around us for many millennia.  One age ends and yet another begins, and then many of the rules change.  Old concepts are cast off as unprofitable, and new ideas embraced as though they've been proven by time.  The Celtic wheel ever turning.

  The Ancient Goddess Danu/Mother Nature

          Of the Tuatha Danaan, and then the Witches and Druids, we saw the Roman Empire born after our old trading partners, the Etruscans were killed off, died out or were assimilated into the ascending Roman culture.  Our warriors once honed their skills bullying the Roman legions.  Eventually they grew strong and organized enough to repel our assaults, and then our choices were to be driven out of central Europe or submit to Roman rule.  As a people, we either rode the Silk Road eastward to our oldest Mongol allies, or we fled to the western isles and kept the worst of Rome at arms length.  There we remained Celts.  The Roman Empire fell and the "Holy" Roman Empire sent it's own envoys to capture Celtic hearts and lands.  For the most part, Celts resisted well until over the years the Church of Rome had "sainted" those parts of our culture that it agreed with, and "demonized" everything else that didn't follow Roman thought.  These were dangerous times and forfeiture was your very life.  Again we saw ourselves withdrawing into the shadows of history, and out of the attention of a xenophobic mob of Roman sycophants.  We cloaked ourselves well in these shadows that came with their darkness. 

          The Anglo-Saxons became the English empire and the Celts were the first "annexation" of that empire.  English landed gentry needed more land for the newest generation and the Scots, Welsh and Irish occupied that land.  We spoke our own language, honored our own chieftains, practiced our own faith, played our own music, and raised our sons and daughters after our own time honored traditions.  This was very un-English and therefore: unpopular and costly.  Costly for those who insisted upon their right to be themselves.  It seemed that the English had a vision to make the world over into their English image, whether it fit us or not.  We ultimately lost everything, and seen it handed over to someone with no regard for our lives.  Celts are a stubborn race.  We live, love, dance and war most fiercely and passionately.  We are not English, and most of us will only be Celts from our first breath to our last.  Nothing more, and certainly nothing less will do at all.

           The English had it's "anglish" language, a conglomeration of all the peoples and cultures it had absorbed.  Being peoples of the far ends of the Roman Empire, they had no great love or devotion for Rome.  But many embraced the Christian God, if not the Roman Pope.  So, in keeping with it's "take what I like and cast off the rest" policy, England practiced it's English form of Christianity to spite Rome.  Among the Celtic populace who had just begun to get comfortable with the Roman adaption to Celtic lore, now had to endure a move to become even more non-Celt by casting off the Roman, and adopting the Anglican ways.  Again, many paid dearly for their slowness to change, and with the "witch hunts" we pulled back even  farther from popular eyes, cloaked ourselves in shadow and inhabited those places where civilized men feared to tread.  Without missing a beat, they moved into our vacuum and helped themselves to all they pleased and cast off the rest.  

          When history started to settle in for us, we found that our language, our faith, and even our music and dance had been outlawed.  It would become the template for establishing their English empire everywhere they set foot in the world.  We could blend in with the forest and the moors easily enough.  Now we would have to assimilate the language and customs, enough to obscure our true selves from more than casual observation.  To acquire more Celtic land for it's nobility, the English adopted yet more policies designed to starve the remnant out.  The famine began and those with the means, fled west yet again to find the liberty to be their own persons.  Amongst all those poor Roman Irish, our wyrding clan arrived in America.

           We were cautious about who and what we were, though still many people found the old ways of some comfort when they required healing that they could afford nowhere else.  The Shamblins sent their young men into Lincoln's war, to buy our citizenship into this new land and the survivors settled eventually in the Virginias.  We may talk more about them later.

          The Andersons also paid Lincoln's blood debt of liberty, and settled in northwest Pennsylvania, with their plethora of fair daughters with strange ways.  This is where the divergence is first felt before it has begun.  Talented in many arts of healing and mysteries; they found in this land, husbands who would love them for themselves and allow them to be.  Well... most of them, anyway... but I digress.  A good midwife in the family was a precious thing to have.  This was back before the days when mothers wanted doctors in the family.   So, the Old Religion hid itself amongst this recent wave of immigrants, and nurtured itself in secret.  We lived and raised our children among you, but we were never truly one of you. 

        Citizenship for war heroes did nothing to raise us in ranks for being anything other than cannon fodder in some tyrant's idea of political correctness.  After all, it was a common enough saying in those days that:" An Irishman is only a “nigger” turned inside out."  After paying so dearly to free all those slaves, we could see that "freedom" was not yet truly won for either of our people.  Except for the color of our skins, we really had more in common with the black folk here.  We remembered that the Romans liked to watch their slaves fight to the death in their arenas.   It really wasn't our world, so complaints were sort of a moot point.  What could not kill us outright, served only to make us wiser and stronger... especially for those of us who remembered who and what we were, and what we've already been through.  The changes from an Atlantean culture to Bronze Age Europe was a hell of an adjustment, Roman, and then English domination, and now life in America.  I imagine we could live and thrive on the moon if we were forced into it.

 "Of Adepts and Matriarchs."

           It has been said that some 6th or 7th Century pagan Irish King had sired only three daughters and no male heir.  As it turned out; one of these fair ladies is married to a "foreign prince" who is only half-human, and the other half of yet another world.  It then appears that a peculiar "matriarchal" tradition is started with these daughters and with one of them, every third