A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck

Review by Cath Barton

‘Magic is patience. Magic is waiting, and seeing, and trying.’

What magic is not, as Alice Tarbuck makes very clear, is an escape from reality. It is, rather, about exploring our connections with other energies in our world. Over the centuries witches have developed and practised ways to help us use our personal power to do so. In the past their efforts have often been misunderstood and repressed by those who wield political power. And while this can never be condoned, witchcraft has, at times, attracted the weirdness of the likes of the early 20th century English occultist Aleister Crowley, making many people suspicious of its motives.

Using the cycle of the year as a template, Tarbuck has written an accessible and fascinating source book and primer on the history, ethics and responsible practice of witchcraft. As an academic, she weaves together the strands of her study with engaging clarity. As a poet, she leavens the mix with a light hand. Each chapter covers a month and a theme, and within this she tells of how, in past centuries, communities persecuted those who were seen as different, deviant or simply outspoken, making them scapegoats for disastrous and otherwise inexplicable occurrences. One such is damage wrought by the weather, and in her January chapter, Tarbuck tells graphically of the Scottish witch trials of the sixteenth century. In North Berwick Agnes Sampson was one of several people accused of raising the storms that almost drowned King James VI of Scotland and his bride Anne of Denmark. Under torture, Sampson ‘confessed’ to satanic rituals, implicated others and was subsequently executed by garrotting and burning. It happened to her, as Tarbuck says, because ‘she was simply in the wrong place, under the wrong bit of sky’.

Tarbuck subtitles this January chapter ‘Smelling the Weather,’ ranging through observations about the magical etymology of the post-drought smell petrichor and the allure of the Greek God Pan in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, to the invention of the barometer by Evangelista Torricelli at the height of the European witch trials and how the new was historically perceived as (dubious) witchcraft before being embraced as (acceptable) science. It’s a whirlwind of information, but sewn together with skill so as to be never indigestible, and with abundant references to further reading for those interested in pursuing any strand in more detail.

In other chapters, Tarbuck explores themes as diverse as foraging, attracting money, witches becoming animals, magic in the land, fortune telling and the shaky ground of sex magic. She discusses festivals familiar to all in western culture, and to which many of us ascribe magical qualities, if we think about it. At the end of October comes Hallowe’en, which for Christians is incorporated into the liturgical year but links back to Samhain, the Celtic celebration of the end of harvest and the point of transition to winter. It is a time when the veil between the living and the dead is perceived by witches to be thin, spirits are close, and, in folk magic, there are rituals for keeping supernatural forces at bay. Tarbuck says that her experience of guising – performing songs and rhymes door-to-door, now appropriated by the American trick or treating – is where her interest in the occult began: ‘It felt like a summoning, some sort of joyous pact with another realm’.

While contemporary witches are (hopefully) not persecuted, they may still come up against old stereotypes of who they are and what they do. In June, the month of midsummer enchantment and mischief, Tarbuck goes to a wedding in the grounds of a stately home, where the bride asks her if she will ‘frolic naked on the lawn’. Instead, with two women friends, she sneaks off to the adjacent medieval churchyard where they find a wishing tree emblazoned with ribbons. They tell one another confidences; this, she says, is ‘magic of the highest kind’.

Magic, though, cannot be willed into being. Tarbuck sits in a remote and damp Scottish forest on a darkening February afternoon waiting for fairies, on the brink of giving up. She is, in practice, as likely to find connections to the wider network of beings in the world in far less pristine and apparently wild places and this, she makes clear, is essential if witchcraft is to do its job of working for the good. So when she collects herbs, for example, she does not eschew those growing on pavements in cities, just makes sure she washes them well. It is a refreshingly pragmatic approach.

A Spell in the Wild is a journey through a year, a spell of time. The books does also contain some magic spells, though Tarbuck stresses that it is not a grimoire – a spell book per se – because spells are essentially personal. What her book provides is a clear map of territory with which many of us are at best only partly familiar; it is one it may well be helpful to consult regularly, especially in these strange times when our usual signposts no longer serve us well.

A Spell in the Wild is published by Two Roads, 1st October 2020