Unknown Artist

Night is not less wonderful than the day . . . it is lit by the splendor of the stars and it reveals things to us that the day does not know. Night is closer than day to the mystery of all beginning. The abyss is open only by night: day spreads a veil over it.

Nicolas Berdyaev, "The Middle Ages"

As locations for spiritual interaction, churches are quite naturally 'places betwixt' where the 'Otherworld' and its presences may be particularly palpable. The churchyard, as a burial ground, is a particularly potent 'place betwixt' and thus highly useful to the witch; the graves being employable within traditional charms and rites of 'get rid of' magic, healing, protection and turning. Their dust or earth have their old uses within curative charms, acts of blessing and of cursing. As the centre of a web of 'corpse roads' and 'spirit paths', converging from across the landscape, the churchyard is a place of spirit contact, the sight, and gaining useful information of the past, present and the future. It is to the churchyard the traditionally minded may travel to enter into rites of witch-initiation.

Gemma Gary, The Devil's Dozen: Thirteen Craft Rites of the Old One

Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves The bloody chamber, and other stories

Carl Gustav Jung, Man and his Symbols First published 1964

“I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. February 1934

Tableau de la Croix || 1651

armor composed of 1.074 plates / Polish, 16th century

From Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1611).

With the right combination of elements, it was theorized, any substance on earth might be formed. 

The Holy Mountain