Birth Ritual of the Winter Hag: Welcoming the Spirit of 2021
from ‘Ways of the Witch Storyteller’ by Danielle Dulsky
The just-full moon of the longest night is singing songs of ice and storm, and I, a weary witch without a dream, am taking to my cottage of stone. Here, may I meet those unseen Others who know me best, and may they drum the old year to death in a rhythm my deeper soul remembers. May they circle ‘round my haunted birthing bed and bid me breathe with the force of 10,000 northern winds as this new year crowns slowly from between my blood-wet thighs. May they bring me gifts of snakeskin, antler, and wolf bone and tell me tales of holy stars and midnight wandering. May they tend the fire while I labor long into the night, and may they bear witness to this, my initiation as myth-dweller.
Birth wants a song.
My bones are weak, and my back is aching with the weight of a year gone awry. Frozen, I am, in this void where all is possible and impossible at once, but my blood still runs in warm rivers beneath my iced-over skin. The enchanted snow has sealed my lids closed, but my eyes are wide open behind that thin lip of flesh. I see all. I see the wide-winged raptor birds waiting in the pines. I see my death, and my resurrection. I see my grandmothers’ poverty and my children’s privilege. I see empty streets, tidal waves, and wildfires. I see the old crone of winter, and she is me.
A song wants a story.
An icicle-crown, I wear. A trail left in the snow from my long-dragging robe woven from wool and driftwood marks the memory of my slow-walking madness, and I am a hag of wonder. I am born of this ground. Some say the gods left these lands long ago, but I say the land is god. I, the Cailleach, say we are still here.
Sing for us. A story wants a scar. Sing for me.
My wintertide house has a soul, even now, and I’ve arrived just in time for the clove-and-cinnamon brew’s inaugural bubbling. The Others are here, and my ceremonial thaw begins with my wildest ancestors thrumming their scythes on the ground and humming a hymn of battle and bone. I strip myself bare. The veins of frost running through my hair melt into milk, and I am a silver-haired and
saggy-skinned she-god of the storm. I am strong bones draped in liquid-blue flesh, and my cobwebbed womb is swelling with anticipation.
A scar wants a shrine.
The grandmothers whose names were stolen join me now with graveyard moonlight behind their knowing eyes, and I grow fatter with every secret they hiss into the void. They speak of a certain wildness their epitaph’s left unnamed, and I know them to be me. They spark the hearth-fire to life with a somber hymn of plague and famine, and they pull their own shriveled-to-leather hearts from behind their ribs and place them on the mantle in memoriam.
A shrine wants a memory.
I get on all-fours at the hearthside and howl. I am full with an unpolished ferocity known only to the mothering beasts who bleed on the snow, who feast on their own afterbirth while their innocents suckle from the last vital stores. I am no longer human. I carry no name. I am the ache within the ache within the ache. I am primal scream. I am the hallowed void between death and birth. I am the wild children singing their truths in the streets, and I am the dying parent. I am the griever and the grieved. I am the death-wail of a year falling to dust, and I am the lonely mother weeping on the bathroom floor. I am the abandoned child and the babe strapped to the breast. I am the lost father and the forgotten god. I am the last tumultuous quakes of a deadly labor, and I am a timely eruption.
A memory wants hope.
The elementals pull me to my feet and help me to my birthing bed with their hearty limbs of twig and bone. They dance slow, these older-than-ancient spirits who know how to move in and out of time like undiscovered cosmic particles born from the seeds of black holes. Their medicinal rhythm soothes my pain, and I am pushing the world through the boney gates of my body. I am singular in purpose. I am awake to all. I am shaped as the Sheela-Na-Gig, and my mouth is wide.
Hope wants a dawn.
The bone-women come close and catch the spirit of this newborn year in their fleshless hands. For a fleeting moment gone too soon, I glimpse the promising face of the future. I smell the Beltane dew and hear the cackles of a coven. I am ripe to the moment, and I am ready.
But a dawn wants the dark.
The last I remember of these moments is the sound of my shredded soul restitching itself, and I sink into the shadows of a dreamless sleep with the mewling spirit of a new time curled in the fleshy folds of my postpartum skin. I am the long sleep before the sunrise.
The dark wants a song.