Magic Loves the Hungry
stories of liberation from the belly of the beast
He drew out the spear and cast it at Rúadán, it flew through him and he died of it in front of his father in the assembly of Fomorians. Brighid came and keened her son. She screamed loudly and finally wept. This was the first time that weeping and loud screaming were heard in Ireland. And she was thus the Brighid that had devised a whistling to signal by night.
- Cath Maige Tuired, translated by Morgan Daimler
Like most survivors, I have been in an underworld of grief this week— simultaneously horrified by the latest round of Epstein files while also sitting with that quiet knowing in my belly that women are familiar with; that alert and instinctive knowing when monsters walk among us.
The cave is a sacred underworld for women. The personification of the womb and the tomb. The liminal space of the Life/Death/Life cycle. A dark corner of the world where the Cailleach resides, carrying the world in her cloak. The site of creation, where earth and water meet to form worlds. The place of qarrtsiluni… the Inuit word for sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen. The darkness from which all of creation bursts forth.
Patriarchy perverts the cave— it strips women of our power, chaining us to stones and forcing us to watch shadows on the walls. Patriarchy’s cave strips us of our intuition and deadens our emotional expression. It replaced healers, midwives, and witches with the profession of the doctor— pathologizing us, diagnosing us, experimenting on us, and raping us. Labels such as hysteria and personality disorders veil systemic abuse, using our bodies as the hiding place for their secrets, keeping us chained and subservient, and always directing violence inwards.
Patriarchy created a world of monsters— predators with an unsatiable appetite for depravity, swallowing the world and leaving us chained in the belly of the beast. Generations of women have been chained this way— severing us from our ancestors, each other, our bodies, and from our instinctive knowing that these shadows on the wall are not the truth— they’re just illusions. And illusions are stories that can be reimagined.
Brighid’s feast day is Imbolg, a word meaning in the belly. This Imbolg I am thinking about the power of storytelling in the belly of the beast.
Storytelling feeds us. At its heart, storytelling is an emotional expression that grows us into something bigger than ourselves. In grief work, we say that there are four modalities of community healing: singing, dancing, silence, and storytelling. Storytelling is powerful because it teaches us how to take action. Although not explicitly stated in the story of Cath Maige Tuired, I like to believe that Brighid’s keening for her son on the battlefield temporarily halted the war. I imagine the men pausing their fight, lowering their weapons to hear the haunting wail of a grieving mother— a grief that stretches her large— bigger than the wars that men wage… bigger than the belly of the beast.
There are violations of humanity that should make the world stop…make us drop to our knees and wail for what we have done, and what we have allowed to happen. But in our grief-phobic culture, we are so afraid to let ourselves step near the edge of that cliff. Will we fly or will we fall? Will we be lost forever, or return with medicine from our wounds? And do these diverging paths depend on the stories we tell ourselves about grief and emotional expression?
Empire is the architect of our inner deadening. We have become numb to the horrors, which is the most terrifying thing of all. As Joanna Macy writes, “…of all the dangers we face…none is so great as the deadening of our response.” Colonial rituals of consumption— shopping, scrolling, super bowls, award shows and other addictions— pacify us— draining us of our life source and dampening our emotional energy.
In our political response to this inner deadening, we don’t tell stories. We regurgitate facts, statistics, and history, trying to endlessly debate empire and talk people into revolution. We activate our minds but not our bodies, heart, or soul. In a world of technofascism, AI and fake news are rapidly becoming more real than reality and further impede us in the quest for truth and justice.
What we learn from storytelling is that our emotional expression is the raw energy source for our actions. When we allow them to be fully expressed, they create spaciousness, pause, and allow for something new to follow. The story of Brighid grieving her son on the battlefield shows us the path for breaking our chains. Brighid’s wailing not only pauses the war, but refuels the energy needed for liberation. When we follow the full emotional arc of our grief, we align ourselves with the Life/Death/Life cycle; we don’t pick one part of the cycle and stay stuck there. We allow ourselves to flow through the cycle, knowing each piece is just as important as the next. When we reject the inner deadening that is nurtured by patriarchy, grief energy moves naturally through us, allowing our body minds and spirit to metabolize grief and create nutrients for new life by returning us to truth, deeper purpose, gratitude, and love as forces of creation.
Magic loves the hungry, and as any witch will tell you, magic finds us in our deepest moments of need— when we’re barefoot in the woods, escaping violence, weeping wildly with the earth, mourning our dead, and fighting like hell for the living. Irish nationalist Maud Gonne said when writing about her own stories of fight and liberation, “I was returning from Mayo triumphant. I had stopped a famine and saved many lives by making the people share my own belief that courage and will are unconquerable, and where allied to the mysterious forces of the land, can accomplish anything.” In grief spaces we say that rituals are not created through the mind, but rather, are dreamed through us from our connection with the holy and alive earth. Our stories of liberation won’t come from a single book, a single leader, or a single idea. Liberation is a story we tell, and that story is created by our alliance with the land and plant and animal worlds. These are the stories that will grow us bigger than the monsters whose bellies we have been chained to…until now.
CANDLE SHOP UPDATE: I have some new candles in the shop for Imbolg and springtime rituals! Check them out here!
I am so deep in grief, this is the only thing all day that has felt like medicine. Thank you.
Thank you for this