Woman Most Wild. Danielle Dulsky

muddy bare feet and use those three keys you hold in your left hand. You may fear condemnation. You may want so much to be in control when you have a bone-deep knowing that your most authentic self is limitless, untamed, and ancient. In these pages I will show you how to open the door that keeps your spirituality so neatly and apologetically contained. Unlock this closet carved with the claw marks of your inner Witch, and liberate Her soul, and I will call you out as a Woman Most Wild. Hear me when I tell you there is nothing to fear, and take these words to heart: Opening that door will bring you to the sweetest homecoming you have ever known.

      Remember the innocence with which you used to welcome the first warm morning in spring. You became a medium for the sheer electricity of new life. You were fed by the rising gush of Gaia’s green juices as they groundswelled under your grass-stained knees. Sister, you, so raw and awake, knew in your blood what it meant to be a wild Witch long before you were a grown woman. In the heat of summer, your Maiden’s intuition told you to lie in the grass and be infused with sensual solar power, and you listened. When the leaves began to drop so ceremoniously from their branches in autumn, you relished the death ritual with all that you were, knowing you would soon rest in your fire-lit nest as the first winter’s snow coated the outside world. You were Witch as a young girl, my love, and you are Witch still.

      Pause now. Close your eyes. Sink into the softness of your perfect body. Sift through your memories, recollections of a time that may seem too far-gone to be real, and affirm who you are: I am a Witch. In this moment, you are on the edge of reclaiming your wild woman’s soul as part of your identity. I, as your sister, hold that you are harboring an untamed, unseen creatrix who, when unleashed, will offer you the truest, most sacred, most needed nourishment to those raw parts of yourself that are so thirsty for greater meaning and deeper authenticity.

       MY PROMISE TO YOU

      You need not be fully comfortable with naming yourself Witch. It only makes sense, after thousands of years of society’s sharp blade stabbing deep into women’s divine integrity, for the word Witch to provoke an automatic belly tightening. It was not so long ago when any number of practices aligning your feminine soul with the natural world would have led to legal, if not fatal, ramifications. You know this, and such a deep knowing is as inherent to your blood as iron. Our soul-wound still bleeds, and it runs bright red for the loss of feminine spirituality. While I wholeheartedly believe that many religious paths need not be incompatible with the ways of the Witch, there are those who will tell you differently. I make a promise to you now, my Sister, and tell you that the way of the Witch is entirely your own.

      I promise that I will not argue for you to relinquish any part of your belief system you hold as true. I vow to continually affirm your spiritual autonomy. You are who you say you are, and there is no Priestess so enlightened she has the right to rob you of the names you have given yourself. Harvesting your Witch’s soul means making good and personally relevant use of what I call the three keys to the broom closet. These are your own physical, emotional, and spiritual rhythms as they intimately converse with those of the natural world; your personal practices of magick and ritual; and, most important, your sacred circle of other wild women. In these pages I will offer you spicy tastes and vibrant visions of Witchcraft as a way of life. I will ask you to listen, and listen closely, for heart-whispers and guttural howls from deep within your feminine psyche. Listen as your Witch consciousness awakens and speaks in Her own voice, and know that the call of the wild never sounds the same to any two sets of ears.

      I call you out as a Witch but offer you no religion. Instead, what I offer you in these pages are glimpses of how your soft and perfect being may be infused with the marrow of ritual, magick, and circle-craft. My purpose is not to gift you with an entirely new way of living but to offer clarity on an alternative way of being in this world. You have the bright eyes of a Woman Most Wild, my Sister, and I will show you how to use those soul-windows to see the majestic beauty in all things but especially in your holy self. In these pages I will invite you to insert those three keys into their magickal locks and set your Witch’s soul irrevocably free.

      Know the Witch as a wise presence that is fiercely feminine. Know the Witch as a wild woman who has embraced nature’s spiral dance. Know her as a keen-eared, sharp-sighted healer who has her own way of conversing with the world. Now, know yourself as Her. To be a Witch is to be a woman of the Earth. To be a Witch is to see the mystical in the mundane, bright beauty in the fertile darkness, and, most salient, the sheer merit of being unapologetically and fearlessly you. You are poised to experience the liberation of unbridled spirituality, and I am honored, just for a time, to walk with you on your path.

      The very foundation of my sacred work is a hearty formidable bridge between the traditional women’s circle and the Witches’ coven. You, my Sister-Witch, crave both the warm womb-space of a women’s circle and the electric magick of coven work. Coven is a very broad term for a group of men and women who practice many variations of paganism, both religious and nonreligious. Traditional covens have nourished the spiritual thirst of many men and women throughout the global community, as has Wicca, the diverse religion firmly grounded in the Craft. Alternatively, Witchcraft is a flexible, liberating, and nonreligious practice that serves as the undiluted, fully adaptable essence of feminine spirituality.

      Witchcraft is an inclusive practice that demands nothing of you, and there is no test you must pass before you can call yourself a Witch. Know this, my love: Any spiritual path that renders you choiceless is not truly a feminist path, and the spiritual poverty affecting many women comes largely from our long-standing exclusion from positions of power in patriarchal religion. The very nature of spirituality is connection and union, with the divisive dogmas of many religions not only precluding access for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community but also misaligning with the very necessary role of spirituality in a human life.

      Deeply rooted and malicious weeds strangle many seemingly feminist traditions, and rigidly organized Witchcraft is no exception to this unfortunate, often unnoticed reality; hierarchy, greed, control, and ego-born power will compromise the best-intended and most compassionate spiritual paths. The remedy to the pervasive exclusion of authentic equality within spiritual communities is to infuse all facets of the organization with the freedom of choice, inclusion, and nonhierarchal structures. Women have been uniquely robbed of their spiritual power, and the reclamation of wild spirituality, that is, practices and understandings that acknowledge the untamed, holy, and spiraling qualities of the natural world as living within all beings, is paramount to pan-gender equality.

       FOR THE WILD GOOD OF WOMEN, FOR THE WILD GOOD OF ALL

      I wrote these pages for the woman who has sensed her inner Wild One poking at her ribs but has kept her contained, unsure of how to negotiate her liberation. My words are also for the seasoned Witch seeking some literary nourishment, the Witch’s friend hoping to understand her Soul-Sister better, and anyone who has sensed a spiritual void born from the loss of the divine feminine. While this book is primarily for those who identify as women, your wild spirituality does not require a physical womb; it only asks you to honor the fusion of your body and psyche to your feminine spirit. Though ritual is a vital and load-bearing pillar in the Witch’s house, this book is much more of a three-part ode to your inborn wild wisdom than a how-to manual for conducting rituals and crafting spells. A wealth of books is available to those seeking such resources, and I would urge you to begin by considering the foundations I offer here. We are both Priestesses on our own paths, but in these pages, my bare feet will step in time with yours.

      Just as salient, let me say that while I believe the reclamation of Witchcraft is an act of women’s liberation, an affirmation of our feminine birthright in a world where we have been historically subjugated, it is much more a cultivation of feminine spirituality that is positively and fiercely pan-gender. The global community has been collectively orphaned by the loss of the sacred feminine, and wild woman spirituality is, and indeed will be, instrumental in reviving Her. All human beings, independent of a dominant gender orientation, embody qualities of the masculine and feminine, and the whole of humanity has suffered from the aggressions of the immature and nongenerative masculine. I have titled this book Woman Most Wild not to isolate anyone who does not identify as a woman but to empower toward freedom the wild woman archetype within the global