Today’s offering comes to us from Diana Helmuth, whose new book, The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling through Modern Witchcraft, released earlier this month. She is a nonfiction author, freelance writer, Silicon Valley startup veteran, hiker, producer and cupcake baker. You can find her at her website and on Instagram as definitely_not_lost.
“Why do you want to do this right now?”
In 2021, this was the question hanging between me and a rather large sum of money.
In 2023, it remains a question I get asked by a lot of people, and it’s the one I have the hardest trouble answering.
I recently published a book chronicling a journey about trying to become a Witch for a year, called The Witching Year. The elevator pitch was a version of AJ Jacobs’s bestselling memoir, The Year of Living Biblically, but for Witchcraft. I wanted to transform myself into a confident, powerful, real life Witch by absorbing all the modern material I could find and trying to put it to work in my life. It was an experiment; a journey that would yield unknown results.
Witches have existed for centuries, of course. When people ask “why do you want to become one right now?”, I hesitate on answering. There are technically two truths to that answer. One is not sexy. The other is embarrassing.
The truth is that some friends gave me the initial idea: Meg Elison and Lauren Parker, to be precise, two tenured Witches of different crooked paths. I was in an argument with Lauren one day about astrology, and how I thought it was counter to the very ideals it sold (“how can it be self-discovery if it’s telling you who you are based on nothing more than time of birth?”).
After several minutes of this, Lauren finally said, “you should try living astrologically for a year and write about it – that would be hilarious.”
Meg chimed in. “No, you should try and be a Witch for a year. That would be hilarious.”
The cover of Diana Helmuth’s new book, “The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling through Modern Witchcraft” [Simon and Schuster]
I considered myself agnostic. I had dabbled in Witchcraft before, almost by accident. I grew up in Northern California – people hand out crystals as often as joints around there. It was the site of Starhawk’s first Spiral Dance and the Zell-Ravenhearts’ research compound. In high school, I knew as many practicing Witches as I did practicing Jews. By the time I was 16, I had played with tarot and chanted “Isis, Astarte, Hecate, Inanna” in someone’s mom’s living room. But these events were more about experimentation and curiosity, rather than following a spiritual call.
Despite the fact that NorCal was (and is) extremely fertile soil for Neopagan revolutions, most people I knew growing up weren’t spiritual at all. Pointedly so. Christopher Hichins and Bill Maher seemed to have successfully disseminated their agenda to West Coast liberals. Nobody talked about it out loud, but I grew up with a very firm, unspoken assumption that anyone who was spiritual was a bit stupid, and anyone who was smart hated people and read a lot of Sartre and was an atheist. I didn’t even realize how unconsciously I had absorbed this idea until I was in my mid-30s, on the precipice of trying to write a book about Witchcraft, and wondering why I was having such a hard time sinking my teeth into the very quest I had fought so hard to get a book deal for.
I thought I was going to write a book about how funny it is to try and source all of Aleister Crowley’s arcane tools to summon a demon, or how awkward it is when you cast a circle and then immediately realize you have to pee. Instead it ended up being a 300 page battle over why I’m so scared to admit I want to be spiritual. I felt like a jock in a 90s high school rom-com who had been dared to go out with the ugliest girl in school. It didn’t take long before she took off her glasses and I realized what a fool I’d been, that I had everything wrong, and I was actually madly in love.
The breakthrough moment occurred around day 100 of my year and a day commitment.
At that point, I had spent three months mostly feeling like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to determine what voices in the Witchcraft community I should listen to. Initially, I simply picked the top ten bestselling books about Wicca and Witchcraft – in a folk religion, what other methodology could I use than popularity?
But my goal was to deeply explore the trend of modern Witchcraft, which meant keeping a keen eye on social media, up and coming opinions, and new works. The world became very noisy. I was having trouble determining who I should listen to, as people seemed to be constantly contradicting each other, and at the same time telling me to simply “listen to myself.” I wanted a clean path that would yield a clean story, and it became very clear this didn’t exist and wasn’t going to happen.
I felt like I wasn’t sure what I was even doing anymore. I was panicking about how to finish this book. I was afraid I was about to make a complete ass of myself.
Stacks of old books [EliFrancis, Pixabay]
Then, one night in December (the night before the solstice, to be exact), I got up after a long day of work, stretched my aching back, and got into my car to go for a little walk. There was a bike path near an old jobsite I knew of, a place where I could look out over marshlands and see where the lights of civilization kiss the sky.
By the time I got out of my car, it was already fully night. Wind messed with my hair, and pylon tower lights flashed red in the darkness, miles in the distance, like titans playing with strings of artificial stars. I was totally alone. As I walked out towards the black, brackish water, thoughts started to burble up from the back of my mind.
I realized why most Witchcraft ceremonies still made me uncomfortable, despite my efforts. It’s not that I felt like a grown-up playing make-believe. I was ready to buy in. I believed in the power of the mind, the power of prayer and spellwork to focus the mind to bring about a goal, even if that goal can only affect oneself.
It was the awkwardness—no, the arrogance—of summoning the elements and deities of the universe that I couldn’t get over. Semantics matter. In many of the Witchcraft primers I was reading, you are asked to command things like the very element of earth, with words like “come to us, come to us, be here now.” This never ceased to feel extraordinarily presumptuous. The elements, the gods, are here all the time. They were here before us, they will be here after us — how can we summon them? They are here all the time.
I stopped walking.
They are here all the time.
I glanced down both sides of the trail. I was on a dirt road that stretched between two wide planes of marsh water. I saw no one, and even if there was someone there, they probably wouldn’t have seen me. I’d had some experiences trying to talk to the elements in the past, but with very limited (dare I say, no) success. I hadn’t tried it since September. But here, in the safe dark of the marsh, I felt inspired to be patient with myself, and try again.
I thought about the four elements. I thought about drawing them near, summoning them to me. It still didn’t feel right. I felt like I was picking up a phone and hearing dead air on the other end.
They are here all the time. This thought radiated in my mind.
I can’t summon something that’s always already here.
A marsh at sunset [Alain Audet, Pixabay]
I look out into the opaque gray expanse of the marshland, feeling like I was on an alien planet. I thought about the sci-fi concept of terraforming, about the electricity that powers the lights twinkling in the office complex miles away, that was flowing through the electricity towers ahead in the distance. They blinked like low-hanging stars. I thought about connection and interdependence.
It occurred to me that the energy in my body is the same as the energy in the red power lights, just a different current. What’s inside the office lights is inside me. It’s also what’s in the stars a million miles away. The water in my blood is the same stuff rushing in the creek next to me. The wind that is outside of me is also inside of me. I pull it in and push it out; it is the same breath being used by the frogs, the birds, the people breaking into cars downtown, pumping through the HVAC systems of the condos down the road. I picked up my hand and stared at it, thick, heavy, cold.
I am earth. This is earth. I am the dirt I am walking on. I am conscious earth.
They are here all the time.
I think it’s fascinating to learn what phrases and mantras people use to get out of their thinking mind and into what Starhawk calls “The Younger Self.” For some reason, this one did it for me.
Something, finally, clicked.
Bliss flooded me, like a drug, like a wave. I took a great, heaving breath. I felt like all the atoms in my body remembered what it was like to be inside the core of a star right before it went supernova. Before I knew it, I was staring at my hand, crying. I was crying because my hand is a miracle. It’s like I had never seen it before. My hand is all five elements made flesh.
I am a miracle. Everything was suddenly a fucking miracle. It was urgent, overwhelming.
(I briefly wondered if this is what a good acid trip feels like).
I know this isn’t news for many people, especially people who read The Wild Hunt. Even if you’re not a Neopagan, you take one high school physics class where you learn we are all made up of the same protons and electrons and neutrons, and that matter is never really created or destroyed, just constantly recycling into different forms. I learned it.
But I had never felt it.
I understood, in that moment, without having to ask anyone, that this is the flow of the universe that Witches plug into, work with, manipulate. I walked back to the car, giddy, high. On the drive home, my eyelids flooded every time I reached a stoplight.
After that, my doubt did not evaporate. And even after my year ended, my doubt has not evaporated. But to feel one moment where I felt completely confident that I had touched something divine, and that that divinity was in myself, and knowing deeply that no one could ever take that away from me, was perhaps worth spending a year to try and do what Carl Jung called the most terrifying act of all: to accept oneself completely.
My book is not prescriptive; it is a memoir, not a how-to. But my hope is it allows some people to feel safe exploring their spiritual sides. Even if it doesn’t feel like it’s working.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.