Europe was conquered over a thousand years ago by a faith which was not its own, that did not spring naturally out of its forests and hills, its mountains, rivers, and valleys. For the Gods of old Europe were the Gods who belonged there, who were native to the land and the people that they served. They were and they remain the Gods who best speak to the spirits of those with European ancestry and Who still reside in our very blood. We belong to Them and They belong to us, and that has always been the relationship between God and Witch.

And so we ache and long for a rebirth from the ashes of the restless dead. We hope and pray for the Old Religion to return to us and be renewed in the coming Age. We reclaim and rewrite our rituals time and again, finger through book after book and search the internet, hoping to stumble across the way back to what was taken from us. We seek after the heart and breath and bone of our own selves and of the faith of our ancestors, for the two are intimately intertwined. But, perhaps, the problem is that we are looking in all the wrong places.

The religion of the witches, the religion known as Wicca, is not Christian in any way. Its roots have nothing to do with Christianity, for like all native religions, its symbols, rites, stories, and traditions spring from the land from whence it came. It speaks to those who yet live in Europe and Britain and to those whose heritage is of that place, for it is our overriding archetypal spirit. And so, to truly understand Wicca, one must come to understand that inborn heritage. We must find within us that which speaks to us, what stirs our blood and moves our souls.

Those of us who are reborn as Witches, we seek the powers which once resounded through those ancient rites, and they are here to be called upon. The connection only lies in wait to be renewed. The key is in finding the doorway within ourselves, the road back to what was once thought lost. If we come to know our true selves, what lies below the surface of what is laid upon us by the culture and dogma of centuries of Christian faith, then we shall come to know again the Old Gods, the Old Ways, and the fourfold powers shall rise. For these powers lie within us, as much as without.

No religion can truly satisfy that intense longing for meaning, unless it is one that makes sense not only to the mind, but to the body, heart, and spirit. Just as the powers of the Four Quarters of earth, air, fire, and water come together to make the circle, so our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits need to be in accord. If they are not in accord, then it is all the more difficult to make the leap to that which lies beyond them, the spirit that moves within the religion itself. The living faith of the living Witch.

We have dreams, visions, desires, and this longing, this feeling that something is just there, just over the horizon, and if we could but find the words for it, we could summon it into being. If we could only find the way to reconnect to that source, to the spiritual beginning place of the Old Religion, then we would know where and how to begin again for ourselves. We would know what building blocks need to be set in place for the world to be made anew, the world we all long to live in.

But it is not a simple or an easy task to shake off the beliefs of the non-Wiccan religions that many of us were raised in, let alone the constraints and of a cultural mindset heavily invested and built up by those same beliefs. It can be a slow and even painful process to shed the skin and be reborn as what we were truly meant to be. The process is made even more frightening by the fact that we are not even entirely sure what we desire to replace it with.

The clues to this new-old world are as buried treasures in what has come down to us from the past. Despite the fact that some today, even those use the name of Wiccan or Witch to describe themselves, now deny or doubt that anything has survived. It must be said, though, that all must make their own choices on this matter and if they so wish to believe that nothing has survived from that ancient heritage, then, for them, nothing shall.

But as we all have been born from the past, as we all have lived many lives, it does live on. It lives on in us. It lives on because we are those self-same witches from centuries ago, though we are now born to different bodies. It lives on because their blood did not die, but spread itself down through the many generations who have come since. And so the ways of the Old Religion have not been truly lost, nor ever can be, for they can only be forgotten.

We are the children of the past and the progenitors of the future, and it is an unbroken chain. What makes a Witch is remembering this, remembering who and what we are and all that being a Witch means. No book can teach you that if you cannot touch what lies inside you already, if you are not ready and willing to look for that spark and incorporate it into your life.

For as we are the descendants of those who once danced within the forests and upon the sacred mountaintops, who lifted up the flame of their own bodies and hearts to work magick for the good of the land and the prosperity of the people, as we are their descendants and we are them, no one can take that from us. Only if we deny who we are, if we turn away from what stirs in our blood, will we have no past. And those who have no past, have no future, for time goes not a straight line, but a circle.

We are all “hereditary” Witches if we but wake to what was given to us by virtue of our birth. It lies dormant within us, occasionally turning over in its sleep and throwing off dreams of what was and what can be again. To wake fully as Witches is to reclaim our birthright, our heritage, our powers and our place.

It is not a light matter to state that those of today’s religions that base themselves upon the struggle of duality, of light versus dark, good versus evil, have finally had their day, but that they have. They have run their course and now too must face a choice—to change or to fade and die. That is the way of things. Some might like to deny it, to deny the transformation of the Piscean paradigm to that of the Aquarian, but the slow grind of the wheel of the sky, the wheel of the Ages, is inexorable. All the prayer in the world cannot stop it. Though, no doubt, a few would like to try.

We have lived in the shadow of those who wanted us to be as they would have us and not as we desire to become. But now the light of the rising dawn will serve to reopen the doors to what was and what may be, and we stand in the middle, as always. We as the world’s Witches can sense it as other worlds draw close, as magicks and the Old Gods converge upon that inner door. As the secrets stir within us, the secrets that many in Christianity had hoped we would forget. Secrets about who we are and where we come from and what we may do. Secrets of the world and secrets of the stars and secrets of our own nature.

We have only to walk through that door to know again our heritage. We have only to give ourselves over to the living faith of our past to find again ourselves, our Gods, and our purpose. All the rest will come in time, once we have laid the foundation for it.

Veronica Cummer © 2009