The Green Hedge Witch by Rae Beth

Author:Rae Beth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719826450
Publisher: Crowood

Chapter 6

Broomsticks and Staffs

A hedge witch’s role might be defined as ‘go–between’. You go between the human community and spirit realms for magical purposes. Sometimes, however, you go to give magical help, such as a blessing for trees or creatures, within the Otherworld. That is, you may walk right into faerie, physically, and do some magical work there. Much more often, you give blessings within the ‘dreamscape’, the psychic dimension, the place where human imagination and elven activity intersect. After all, that is the hedge witch’s real territory.

To work for trees in the Otherworld or the realm between worlds affects our own trees as well as those in faerie forests. That is because the land-elves and all elves live in subtle dimensions of this same Earth which we inhabit. I am not saying here that there are no elves on other planets or in other universes. For all that I know, there are many of them. But for all practical purposes, elves that we meet are here on this Earth with us. And all their realms are subtle dimensions of the same universe in which we live.

Sometimes, we go ‘between the worlds’ to gain information about what the elves may require of us to maintain our friendship with them or to divine what is needed to cast any particular spell. Or we may simply go exploring or go to develop magical skills.

To go ‘between the worlds’ is to travel in spirit, in most instances. Your body does not normally leave Middle Earth. But there have been cases, such as the famous one of Thomas the Rhymer, a thirteenth-century Scot, in which a physical journey was undertaken right into the faerie dimension of Earth, the Otherworld. Sometimes, faeries have come to live here, in the everyday human reality. The tale of the ‘green children’ who wandered into a medieval Suffolk village is thought to be one such case and folklore recounts many, many others. You can walk physically into an area of the Otherworld but it is rare and not without risk to do that. You may find the portal back to your own time and place has closed behind you. Or you may get back quite easily, only to find that weeks, months, years, even hundreds of years have passed in the human world since you were gone. That is because time runs differently there.

As hedge witches, we practise spirit travelling when we go between the worlds to another realm. Our bodies stay safely in this human world while, in a state like a dream in which we are fully conscious, our spirits ‘ride the broomstick’ to other places. We are hedge riders as well as hedge sitters, flying in spirit by means of plants. We ride the hedge by bestriding a staff or broom. This seems to be an ancient technique.

In tribal cultures throughout Europe and on other continents the wooden staff has always been seen as a magical tool and connected with travelling. All practitioners of magic, whether

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