“I Emerge Monstrous From The Monster, My Skin The Dragon-flesh Of Nightmares.”

“There is something waiting for us at the edge of the woods, and it is our fate to meet it.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

Chapelle de l'abbaye de Beaulieu located in Haute-Marne, in France

Gustave Doré (1823-1883) ~ The Raven, 1883 

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

Grotesques of the Amiens Cathedral, Picardy region of France

French vintage postcard

The Holy Mountain

Polaris, The North Star

Devises Heroïqves (1557) Claude Paradin

Haupt der Medusa by Franz von Stuck (1892)