The Coven Invisible

We are the coven of the invisible, magic and alone

Edge walkers, hedge riders

Our rooms dark and bare

But for our spells

We invite in the Old Ones to our blood rites, pact on pact to get us through dark nights, the dark days, the length of our imprisoning.

A thousand years ago they burned us. That burning lives within, a pattern in our cells, these many hells brought into form as environmental illness, as auto-immune, our bodies battling themselves in a context of edges and margins.

We are simultaneous, living and not living. We are potent in our transformation and disregarded in our in-valid state. We are the embodied reckoning of the witch wound, the deep alteration in psyche that spread on waves, that eater of life systems, culture ways, ancient truths.

We are the garden, the listeners, the root. We are the truth tellers, our bodies revealing system and solace that cannot yet be seen in the vast spread of general population.

You hold us in distain, in disregard, because you cannot see our pain and choose to disbelieve our reality. You are the keeper of conventional morality, the upholder of ingrained degradation, systems so entrenched they become impossible to navigate: medical, disability, legal, professional. You exclude the Invisible because we scare you.

Boo. We are death, alive.

Boo. You are also. This is terrifying, simultaneous, true.

Hey. Our ancestors have something to say to you…

But first, a ritual.

We the Coven of the Invisible, your partners, parents, children, elders, we invoke the goddess Gullveig in her transformational fire. Thrice burned by ignorance and greed, thrice annealed in the war of the gods, she emerges magical, potent, shining, her name then Hei∂, shining, night sky, star. She wanders the world teaching magic to the sick.

Sick, we are.

We sick ones call to the spirits of this sacred earth, spirits of blood and bone, ash and stone, spirits of plant and tree and animal.

We invoke our Dísir, Nornir, Fylgia, Haminga, the sacred grandmothers of our many lineages from a time before.

We invoke the visions of the ancients and renew our relationship to the earth and each other.

We remember our healing gifts, we comprehend our sacred vows.

In this circle we call forth the cleansing of the witch wound, the initiatory power of sickness and isolation. We call forth the dream of death transition, which is our rite of passage, which is the ceremonial alignment of this descent.

We call forth the Dark Goddess, who wears the threads of tear and truth, who holds us in her liminal embrace and says

Welcome to the underworld.

Something must die here, a sacrifice must be made.

For you who are brave enough to accept this journey, to travel to the lands of outcasts and thieves, to follow the web of lies to the gate of Hel, her half-corpse form awaits, she stretches out her bone hand.

Will you take it?

In the ritual circle the coven moans and dances, singing lunar-solar rhythm, the matrices of wyrd, pattern of stars, of universe macro-micro. We whirl apart, together, as paradox.

We are the Coven Invisible.

Flesh on flesh, bone on bone, we sing a soul story of impossible beauty.

Solitary, but not alone.