Prunings from the Hedge
Keeping Silence
Witches avoid careless talking for several reasons. During the Burning Times, secrecy was necessary for survival. Whatever was said in circle had to stay in circle. Though we are no longer burnt (the last witch burning on record took place in Mexico in the 1940’s), indiscretion of this sort can lead to people losing jobs, child custody battles, and various forms of social persecution, especially in ‘the Bible Belt’.
Secondly, although knowledge is air, and like air should be shared freely, esoteric knowledge taught to initiates and candidates for initiation needs to be kept confined within the teacher-student relationship. It was a rule in the groups being taught by the Caucasian mystic Gurdjieff that students refrain from sharing the ideas under discussion with those outside the group. The reason was that outsiders would usually say that the ideas sound like other ideas they had already heard, and this would lead to dilution and distortion of the teaching. After several months of grounding in the system he was teaching, Gurdjieff relaxed this prohibition somewhat, for his students by then had acquired restraint of speech as well as the proper context of the ideas they had learned.
Thirdly, careless talking, like compulsive movements, simply wastes energy that the student needs to save, for most of our energy is already habitually deployed and we have very little to spare. The temptation to appear knowledgeable and interesting to people must be resisted, and if your friends complain that you are becoming dull, you may rest assured you are making progress in restraint of careless talk. They may wonder what is happening to you in your life, now that you are no longer one of the stars of the daily bull session? Let them wonder.
Fourthly, in the circle the witch enters into a world that lies between the everyday world of Middle-earth and the Otherworld of Faerie, which includes the Summerlands. Although it is a separate miniature cosmos, it partakes of the laws of both of the worlds flanking it. Consequently, the witch must observe the laws pertaining to both realms when in circle, and when out of it, he or she will practice observing the laws of both realms so as to be practiced in them when the circle is cast.
As fairy tales make eminently clear, words in the Otherworld have power. They used to have power in Middle-earth as well, but this has been drastically curtailed by the withdrawal of common human consciousness from the borders with Faerie. When W.Y. Evans-Wentz researched the fairy faith in Celtic countries (publishing a book with that title) around 1911, he found the instances of second sight, whereby the energy and sometimes the denizens of the Otherworld become visible, dying out in all but the most remote areas of Ireland and the Shetlands, with a few survivals still to be found elsewhere, such as in Brittany and the Isle of Man. Thus, in order to recover the power of words in circle, witches must do what they can to recover and increase their sensitivity to the Otherworld.
This is pursued, first of all, by treating words here in Middle-earth as if they still had power.
Words having power entails, first of all, that they be true. While there are sensible reasons for telling white lies from time to time, such as leading fox hunts astray, these reasons pertain to the average person who knows nothing of other worlds under different laws, and would have no intention to enter them in any case. If we tell a lie, the lie remains in our awareness to contradict the true things we say on related subjects. If we regularly lie or even just fib, the habit of saying one thing and thinking another will interrupt and interfere with our utterances when we cast a spell. When a witch finds him- or herself in a situation where telling the truth will cause harm, he or she simply remains silent. This act builds power for our words when we do speak.
The standards of Otherworld honesty are more stringent than this, however. If we speak of something as if we knew it when we do not, that counts as a lie. If we promise to do something, or even simply agree without qualification, and then, because of circumstances perhaps, do not perform it, that renders our words lies retroactively. We must be careful to say ‘maybe’ or ‘if I can’ (or ‘no’) when asked to do something if there is the slightest chance we may not be able to do it.
The reason for this is dramatically presented in fairy tales. In the Otherworld, and for denizens of that realm caught in Middle-earth, a promise lasts forever. It is the same as a vow or geas, which will pursue the swearer till death and even beyond. Fairy tales are full of cases of mortals who either became entrapped through broken promises, or did not take the promises of fairies seriously.
When the witch realizes the laws governing speech in the Otherworld, he or she will naturally tend to become taciturn. That is why this article is called ‘Keeping Silence.’ Even politics presents some parallels here: President Calvin Coolidge, known as ‘Silent Cal,’ once explained his laconic speech by pointing out that what you don’t say you can’t be held to. But of course, there is a positive reason as well for witches: When we declare a thing to be so in circle, it will become so, because we have practiced restrain of speech and our words have acquired power, partly from practice and partly from being between the worlds and thereby partaking of the laws of the Otherworld as well as those of Middle-earth.