Manifesto

The Wildwood tradition of witchcraft is an ecstatic, sorcerous, and mystical path through the heartland of witches, the spirit landscape of primeval forest. Within this forest are standing stones, labyrinths, Gods and Old Ones. Within this forest, there is mystery. This landscape is the covenant that binds us together. The Wildwood belongs to all witches, and some witches belong to the Wildwood.

We are a witch house, working with spirit flight and the oracular arts, with possession and aspecting, with rhythm and movement, with the holy risk of intimacy to reach gnosis and ecstasy. Through these disciplines we explore ever deeper into the wild, into the mystery, and into our own shadows and light.

Our witchcraft is centred on relationship with spirits, named and unnamed, known and unknown.

Wildwood witchcraft as a cultus is centred around the Witches’ Gods, or the Sacred Four. We revere, work with, conjure, and are initiated by them: Grandmother Weaver, Grandfather Green Man, the Crescent-Crowned Rose Queen, and the Horned-Cloaked God, Master of the Art. Many Wildwood witches also cultivate fecund relationships with our Guardian Beasts, Ara the First Witch, the Serpents, Faerie Maidens, the Watchers, and other strange spirits.

And Wildwood witchcraft is also an organic thing, a creature that takes on the characteristics of the soil it roots in. And so our witchcraft is politically and ecologically bioregional animism. We work with our ancestry, honouring our myriad histories and ethnicities, and we are engaged with and influenced by the spirits of the lands that we live with.

As we fall in love and into relationship with these spirits we remember that we too are Gods in process. We are each of us sovereign, the ever-wandering centre of the limitless cosmos. We are each our own authority, anchored to our intrinsic belonging, informed and provoked by our relationships within the web. As such we are free to act or not act as our own deep wisdom and ethos guides us, held and challenged by one another and by the virtues of love, truth and wisdom. We aspire to practise radical responsibility for the results of our actions.

Our world is divine, sacred. We experience this Earth, the Cosmos, and anything and everything we may encounter, as the living body of the Gods. In our ecstasy we discover that all life is connected, interdependent, and an extension of our own living flesh. We work to be in right relationship with this green, blue, and precious world; to protect and celebrate the sanctity of the wild, to help to restore wholeness.

The fire of our ignited awareness asks that we work for justice and regeneration—political, social, ecological. What that looks like will be different in each of us: priestessing or making art, writing or speaking out, teaching and learning, protecting the wild and the vulnerable with our bodies and our spells, bending time and resources to finding new ways, restorative ways. And we are all, in our fertile differences, working with the same green fire in our bellies.

Our bodies are holy—we are divine human animals, the living flesh of the Weaver’s dreaming. We tend and adore ourselves as living vessels of divinity, as vaults of living memory, our bodies as sacred landscape.

We embrace sexuality and sensuality as just some of the many expressions of our divine human animal bodies. We also remember that each witch is their own authority, and so we engage or don’t engage with sexuality in accord with radical, enthusiastic consent.

Our bodies are varied as they are holy. Mystery takes infinite forms, and so do we. We are women, men, genderqueer, non-binary, genderless of various histories; we are brown, mixed, white, settlers, and indigenous; we are queer, heterosexual, pansexual, bisexual, gay, asexual; we are of all socio-economic backgrounds; we have mixed ability and welcome neurodiversity. Diversity is essential for a healthy and vital ecosystem. We recognise that these differences create intersections of oppression and power, and our witchcraft reflects this and is consciously engaged with it.

We are a feminist tradition, and a queer tradition. We embrace the strange, the fae, the wild, the flourishing wyrd, the radical, the fags and queens, and all beings whose existence causes discomfort in a patriarchal, heteronormative, colonised, capitalist and imperialist society.

Wildwood witchcraft is a practice. Our craft is ignited, engaged, an ongoing initiation that ever deepens. We are in process, growing and changing as we do the work. We seek to foster growth in ourselves and each other, and sometimes that looks like calling each other in, processing our bullshit into fertile manure together. We are always aspiring, dedicating and initiating ourselves as students of the witches’ craft.

Reflecting this truth, the Wildwood ever deepens, is organic. We are open to new-old lore, new-old stories, new-old techniques of magic and sorcery, emerging from the white thread of spirit gnosis and the red thread of human-to-human connection. These threads braid together, remember each other, inspiring our practices as we move deeper into mystery, into the wild.

We experience the Wildwood as an Otherworldy landscape found in the everywhere, a touchstone that lies within. And we experience the Wildwood as a way of being in the worlds, an attitude of radical integrity and fierce love that we can bring from our circles and groves, and pour out like an offering over everything that we do: our art and poetry, our song and dancing, our teaching and priestessing, our parenting and showing up to community, our engagement with the worlds.

We enshrine and experience, work with, and embody the Greening: the egregore of green fire that is the ever-renewing potency of nature, of change. The green fire of the wild returning, ever returning, to our hearts and minds and bellies, and to the worlds.

In love, truth, and wisdom—may it be so.

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