Archive for the ‘The Gods’ Category

Next in out series of interviews is the very prolific author, Judika Illes! In today’s interview, Judika talks about her love of magic, her many books and her diverse background.

Bernadette:
We would love to hear a little bit about your background Judika!  Many of your books deal with magic from many different backgrounds and cultures, so I’d love to hear about your background and influences!

Judika:
Well, I’m from Queens, one of New York City’s outer boroughs, which partially explains my comfort and familiarity with different cultures. Queens is reputedly the most ethnically-diverse place on Earth. I come from a fairly international family—I have relatives all over the place. I was the first person in my family to be born in the United States. I grew up with people from lots of different backgrounds, cultures, religions, and spiritual traditions, so I was raised to be tolerant and not make assumptions about people.
I think that personally I am a fairly good example of an urban magical practitioner. Magical practitioners from major urban centers like New York are constantly learning from each other, trading and sharing information, and evolving new traditions. The traditions I learned at home were mainly Central and Eastern European, but I was also heavily influenced by people who taught me African-American, Latin-American, Caribbean, North African, and East Asian traditions. Other influences on me include the great occult stores that flourished in New York City during my youth, before rising rents drove them out of business—great stores like Samuel Weiser’s Books and Magickal Childe, and all the botanicas and wonderful herb stores like Aphrodisia, which just closed recently. Growing up, there was also an unofficial but strong and distinct local New York style of magic, mainly an amalgamation of Western occultism and Puerto Rican traditions, especially Espiritismo—I’m very much a product of my background.

Bernadette:

Tell us about what inspires you to write Judika.  Your books are great sources of information for anyone interested in metaphysics.  How do you go about compiling and researching all information that needed to complete the books that you write?

Judika:

What inspires me to write is my love for my topics. I am so blessed and privileged to be able to write about subjects I love, like spells and witchcraft, saints and spirits. I enjoy the researching process- that part is fun and I would do it for myself, whether I was published or not.
Writing itself is difficult, but I feel an obligation to my material, to preserve it and also to present it in the clearest possible way, so that readers can share in my passions. I love divination, for instance, and I want other people to love it, too. My motivations aren’t entirely unselfish—I think that there’s greater safety for my community of magical practitioners and fortune-tellers if the greater public really understands what it is that we do. Historically, it has been dangerous to practice these arts, as it still is in some places today. I hope that my writing helps dispel fear and misinformation.
My research derives from a combination of personal exploration, learning from books and learning from other people. By nature, I’m a fairly shy person, but I’m a fearless researcher. I contact perfect strangers, if I perceive that they have information needed for one of my books or if I need someone to teach me something or explain something to me—I’ve made some wonderful friends this way.

Bernadette:

Do you have “other” interests or hobbies?

Judika:

Oh, yeah, lots—although whether I have time to devote to them depends on my writing schedule. I love beading and cooking. I read a lot just for my own pleasure: history, mysteries, comic books, art books. I love music. I like to watch movies. I tend to accumulate stuff- I’m an avid collector, especially of witchcraft-themed items like postcards and dolls. I love traveling. Given the opportunity, I’d do all my own field research, if I could.

Bernadette:

What’s in the future for Judika?  What projects do you have coming up?

Judika:

My next book, The Encyclopedia of Mystics, Saint, and Sages will be published in November 2011. It’s another thousand-page encyclopedia, this one exploring saints, holy people, and miracle-workers from many spiritual traditions. It’s a practical work, similar to my Encyclopedia of Spirits, containing information regarding how to venerate and communicate with a wide variety of saints, as well as information on how to determine which saints are most compatible with you and helpful for your own particular problems and issues. I’m also in the process of updating my website and, hopefully, doing some more teaching. Having spent much of the last ten years alone in a room writing, I really appreciate opportunities for personal contact. I have some new classes in the works that I’m very excited about.

Bernadette:

Is there a book that you would like to write, but haven’t done so yet?

Judika:

I would actually like to write some fiction someday—I have a few novels turning around in my head that haven’t made it onto paper yet. I also have several half-completed books. The Encyclopedia of Spirits was initially going to incorporate saints and angels alongside Pagan spirits but the manuscript grew too big. The easiest way to trim it was to delete these categories with the hope that someday they would have their own books. The Encyclopedia of Mystics, Saints, and Sages will be published in November and hopefully the angels will one day have their own encyclopedia, too.
I began my writing career with a large work on fertility that remains unpublished. That manuscript contains a chapter of magic spells. A publisher rejected the book, but liked that chapter, which evolved into my first published work, Pure Magic: A Complete Course in Spellcasting. I would very much like to eventually publish my fertility book.

Bernadette:

I wanted to let people know about your musical background..can you tell us a little about that?

Judika:

I know that’s something we share, Bernadette! My first true loves were music, magic spells, and divination and they remain so today. Some of my earliest memories involve listening to music on the radio and eventually I became a disc jockey. I started off hosting a blues show, but also did standard rock programs and would sometimes fill in for the country and jazz hosts. My taste is eclectic. As with the magical arts, I love and appreciate many styles of music. I was the first female music director of WRSU-FM, the radio station affiliated with Rutgers University. In terms of the craft of writing, the writers who have influenced me the most are the music journalists of the ‘70s, who wrote with clarity and humor and were not afraid to wear their passions on their respective sleeves. When I was eighteen, my career plans involved these musically-oriented paths, but free-form radio was in its death-throes, as was that sort of music journalism, so I ended up on different paths, although, who knows? Radio has evolved and I may return to it someday. The urge to share music with other people spills out of me on facebook, where I’m constantly posting music news and sharing youtube videos.

Bernadette:

How do you feel about the pagan community today?

Judika:

I try to approach people as individuals, regardless of their background. I think that we are blessed to live in a spiritual renaissance and that we should be ever-vigilant to preserve hard-won liberties. I think that it’s crucial that we cultivate tolerance for each other.

Bernadette:

Any advice for aspiring pagan writers?
Judika:

People are constantly writing to me, telling me what book they think I should write next—sometimes describing these books in great detail. And what I always tell them is that if you can “see” a book that doesn’t yet exist, then maybe you’re meant to be the one that writes it. That’s how I began my career—I perceived a need for a book and I could “see” the book that would fulfill that need. If you can see it, then you can write it. This is a good time for spiritual publishing, so don’t wait. If you have a book in your head, put it down on paper. Just write it— it’s easier to fix or embellish something that already exists, rather than agonize over words in your head. My other word of advice is to consider the format in which you would like to present your work. If you hope to actually publish something in book form—whether in a traditional book or an e-book—then don’t post too much of the actual work on the internet: save it for the book itself.

This interview was such a pleasure to do!  Judika’s books have become the”mainstay” of anyone who is interested in the study of spells and magic.  I refer to her books on a daily basis!

Here are just some of her many books:

http://www.judikaIlles.com

We now continue with our series of interviews with noted author Christopher Penczak!

Bernadette:

Many of the celebrations of the Wheel of the Year were originally created and celebrated by a culture that were no longer a hunter-gatherer society but were an agricultural society.
Many of us today are not following an agricultural lifestyle, though we receive the benefits of such.

Does this cultural change of today’s times warrant today’s pagans to reassess our magical celebrations?

Christopher:

While we’re not involved in an agricultural lifestyle, one could argue in terms of food, we still an agricultural society. Even when you don’t live on a farm, the markers of the season are important touchstones to the cycle of life in the course of a single year. The outer signs, such as the first flowers, the changing of the leaves or the rise and fall in sunlight indicate tides of life force that flow in our world, and its important as magickal people to be in touch with those tides. They influence our health, mood and magick. I think they are particularly important for those of us who are not living on a farm, to keep in touch with the lifetides that feed and support us.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is with great pleasure that I post this interview today! Raymond Buckland has always been a huge influence on me, and is someone who has helped to shape our Wiccan community today.

Bernadette:

What inspired you to write The Chronicles of Kernow?

Raymond:

I think it was Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, though I have always loved fantasy and have played around with the idea of writing one for many years. I actually started on “Kernow” around 1980 but had to keep shelving it as other books became more necessary.

Bernadette:

Tell us more about the characters in your latest book The Torque of Kernow. Are Shyre, Sannungor, Keyran, Ozal, Yost, Lemal and Tage based on specific people? What is the basis of the story?

Read the rest of this entry »

You may have made your New Year’s resolutions and started to pack away your Christmas tree; but the holidays aren’t quite over yet! There’s still Epiphany on January 6th, and more intriguingly Epiphany Eve, tonight on January 5th: a night of celebration and offering to an ancient goddess of magick in disguise.

Epiphany, seemingly a very Christian holiday, is generally celebrated as the anniversary of the night the Three Wise Men, a.k.a. the Magi, reached the end of their long journey following the Christmas star and arrived to meet the baby Jesus; infamous presents in hand. In and of itself, the holiday has more ancient precedents. For the story of the Magi did not originally belong to Christianity, but is a re-telling of a far older Persian myth regarding the birth of the god Mithras. Epiphany is therefore essentially a pagan holiday. But the Italians have made it even more magickal, adding on their own little witchy twist: Befana.

Befana is to January 5th what Santa Claus is to Christmas Eve: a well-wishing elemental spirit who delivers goodies and blessings to children and households who put out small offerings to her. But where Santa Claus likes his milk and cookies; Befana has more grown up tastes. She prefers a midnight snack of a little cup of wine and perhaps some appetizers: though I’m sure cookies would do in a pinch. She’s considered quite a wild figure and is meant to have a rather wicked sense of humor, so I’m sure she’d be happy to go with the flow. In return, Befana traditionally gifts her celebrants with candy, figs, dates, honey, and sometimes small gifts; often hiding them away in your socks rather like the Dutch Father Christmas. She also might give your house a quick sweep in her role as a sort of archetypal grandmother to all. Read the rest of this entry »

Prayer and song are elements of religious culture which anthropologists assume were some of the key early features of the world’s first religions thousands of years ago. The spoken or sung verbalization of a wish, a cry for help, a thank you and other types of prayer formalizes the supplicant’s desire ~ pushing it out from them and into the wider cosmos. It is a beautiful expression which bridges the gap between human and divine.

With the advent of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, these prayers began to be written down ~ their power deriving now as much from the vocalization of the desire as from the act of being written. Early writing was considered sacred. The knowledge of being able to read and write was a powerful skill; one which was possessed by the rare few; in fact, initially only priests, royal administrators, their scribes, and occasionally the royals themselves were capable of writing and reading. It was used as much for organizing the newly expanding Empires of the world as it was for magickal purposes. Over time, it would filter down to the merchants and beyond, sifting down through the ages until the invention of the printing press in China in the sixth century AD and the later, more prominent Western discovery of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, and the wider spread of literacy that ensued because of these discoveries. But in ancient Mesopotamia, the power of the written prayer was myriad, and was used to call upon the gods for a vast array of purposes.

The following prayer, or hymn, to the goddess Ishtar is from approximately 1600 BCE, during the first Dynasty of Babylon. It was written in cuneiform on behalf of the King Ammiditana, and survived the ages, to be deciphered by the archaeologists of the early twentieth century and ultimately read by you, dear reader, at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the known witches of the past, the figure of Medea is most representative of some of the oldest, darkest pagan arts still known to man. As such, it is fitting that she be the first in what I intend on being a series of articles for the Mists exploring the individual tales of the witches of the ancient world from archaeological, historic, and literary perspectives (entertaining rather than erudite ones, I promise!). So sit back, relax, and imagine yourself round a primeval campfire listening attentively to the ancient tale of Medea: princess, priestess, scorned wife, and witch.

The Romance & Plight of Medea

Once upon a time, long long ago, in Colchis on the far eastern end of the Black Sea, there was a princess called Medea. And one day, a band of travelers came to Colchis, in search of the Golden Fleece which belonged to King Aeëtes, Medea’s father. The travelers, known to posterity as the Argonauts after their ship, The Argo; were led by Prince Jason of Iolcus; who had been challenged by his throne usurping Uncle Pelias, to capture the fleece and bring it back in return for the crown. King Aeëtes received Jason’s delegation amicably and decreed that if Jason could complete three epic challenges, Jason could sail away with the Fleece. Medea, present for their meeting and seeing Jason, either of her own volition or cursed by Aphrodite and Eros, the gods of l’amour, fell instantly in love with Jason. And unbeknownst to her father, agreed to help him in return for his hand in marriage and his making an offering to her goddess Hekate. At each of the challenges, Medea used her magick and herb-craft to keep Jason safe and bring him triumph: Medea gave him an herbal charm to protect him from the fiery breath of the Khalkotauroi (bronze oxen); advised him as to the best way to defeat a magickal group of soldiers sprung from dragon’s teeth; and gave him a sleeping potion to use on the fearsome dragon that guarded the Fleece.

With the challenges complete and the Fleece won, Jason whisked Medea away from her homeland with her protesting father and brother giving chase. In the resulting skirmish, Medea’s brother, Apsyrtus, is killed, thus angering the gods. Now cursed, Jason and Medea head to sea and back into the odyssey-like vignettes that characterized the Argonaut’s initial voyage to Colchis; except this , they have Medea and her magick to aid them. Initially, at the ship’s request (that’s right, The Argo could talk), they stop at the island home of Medea’s aunt, the sorceress Circe of Homeric fame, to have the ship magickally cleansed for the crime against Apsyrtus. Continuing on, post-purification, the Argonauts run into the sirens; before travelling on to Crete, which was guarded by a robot-like bronze guardian called Talos. Medea be-spelled Talos long enough to wound him fatally ~ using her apparent knowledge of metallurgical magickal arts to know the golem’s weak point.

Next they sailed to Jason’s home of Iolchus, at which point in the story, it is often assumed that Medea and Jason have been officially married; but alas, even with a foreign wife of noble blood and the Golden Fleece in tow, Pelias would not give up his brother’s crown to Jason, its rightful heir. It thus falls to Medea to get the kingship back for her husband. And so Medea tricks Pelias’ three daughters into believing that she can return the aged Pelias back to youth. Having given Jason’s father Aeson back some of his youth, she is rumored to have power over life and death. So she shows them a ritual similar to the one she performed for Aeson, whereby an elderly ram is chopped up, brewed in a cauldron of magickal herbs, and comes back out as a lamb; and then instructs the daughters to do the same for their father. They merrily (and gruesomely) chop him up, but Medea withholds the correct magickal formula for the herbs, and Pelias remains old, and dead. Unfortunately, Medea’s ploy to win the crown for her handsome hubby backfires: the people of Iolcus, led by Jason’s cousin and Pelia’s son, Acastus, run Jason and Medea out of town for her trickery.

Jason and Medea then flee to Corinth and set up shop. And they have two children, usually said to be sons. But in the Greek culture of the historic classic period, when the tales of Jason and Medea were finally written down; a foreign wife, like Medea, did not have citizenship: leaving the family status and Jason’s prestige in the lurch. Yearning for more power, Jason claims his family at home is not legitimate given Medea’s dubious legal status; and he ends up betrothed to the local Princess Glauce (sometimes called Creusa). Medea, furious, vows revenge, and sends a poisoned wedding dress to the lucky princess. Glauce and her father, King Creon, both die by the dress; leaving Jason once again without a throne to look forward to. And in some versions of the tale, Jason accosts Medea, only to learn that she has also murdered their two children, fearing both Jason’s wrath and the wrath of the citizen’s upon them for her regicide (Although in one version it is the crowd which kills the children; after Euripides’ play featuring the above storyline, few have deviated from the more dramatic element of Medea killing them herself).

Medea is swept away from Corinth by her grandfather, the sun god Helios and continues to travel around Greece. She first takes refuge in Thebes with her friend and former Argonaut, now the King, Herakles (Hercules,) before again being cast out when word of her wicked reputation reaches the Thebans. Next she takes refuge in Athens, where she meets and married King Aegeus, father of the hero Theseus and namesake of the Aegean Sea around Greece. Medea, now a skilled political schemer, arranges for her new son (some say by Jason, others by Aegeus), Medus, to become the heir apparent for the Athenian crown; and all goes well until Theseus appears and claims his birthright. Attempting to win the crown for her son, Medea attempts to kill Theseus and is caught in the act by Aegeus who promptly kicks her and Medus out of Athens. They run back home to Colchis, where Medea dethrones an evil uncle and puts one of her other brothers on the throne. And then, according to Herodotus at least, Medea and Medus move farther east into Iran where they become the namesakes of the Medes, an early incarnation of the cultural group that will eventually become the ancient Persians.

Jason, meanwhile, regains his throne in Iolcus, but lives out his life scorned by the gods for reneging on his promises to Medea. Ultimately, aged and ruined, he takes up residence under the remains of his once glorious ship, the Argo; only to be killed when the rotting wood of the hull fell apart on his head.

How do we know Medea’s Story?

Medea’s story is a tale of a woman scorned; the tale of the Hester Prynne & Scarlet Letter of the Ancient World. Her story is both the simple, heart-rending quest of a woman looking for love a la the Lifetime Channel; and a complex wander through the realms of ancient Greek myth. Even the basic tale of Medea is a sprawling epic of many names, multiple places, and considerable socio-political and fairy tale elements. It would have been told orally for possibly a millennia before it was ever written down, with elements added, subtracted, and altered to reflect the understanding of the audiences it was being told to. For instance, take the dubious legal loophole through which Jason divorces Medea. This is an element of the political and legal system of classical Athens circa the 5th century BCE, but in the story it is applied to the period of the tale, which is typically dated to have occurred (if it did indeed occur in any way, shape, or form) sometime around the 12th century BCE at the beginning of the Greek Dark Ages. But not everything is reworked and old elements slip in, staying because they are fragments of society still in use or those recognized as ancient: for instance the use of bronze when by now the Greeks had discovered harder metals; or the idea of their being a King of Athens and Corinth, when by the classic period, only Sparta had kings, most other city-states had adopted other more democratic forms of government.

The tale above is one I have amalgamated for you, as a timeline of Medea, taken from the primary historic literary versions of her tale. Each of those stories varies in its details and some only tell part of her tale, relying on the pop culture knowledge of its contemporary audience, much of which we are no longer aware of, to fill in the blanks. Although Hesiod, Pindar, and Herodotus both mention her, the earliest full source is Euripides classic play Medea , a tragedy which was written and performed first in ancient Athens in 431 BCE century and onwards and which focuses only on Medea’s time in that same city, though it mentions earlier events and foreshadows later ones within its script. It is considered the classic version of the story, as well as one of the most venerated plays in all of theatric history. Next comes Apollonius of Rhodes’ Alexandrine epic The Argonautika from the third century BCE. This text is unique in its romantic and epic language, and its use of extensive research to fill in the earlier portions of the story in particular. For Apollonius was a scholar at the library of Alexandria and in writing his tale, he preserved for us snippets of earlier texts, poems, and oral lore which recounted the melancholy tale of Medea. A smattering of others reference her in between classical Greece and Imperial Rome until finally there is Seneca’s Medea and Ovid’s 1st century AD versions of her in his Metamorphoses and The Heroides (which translates to The Heroines), which Ovid based on the classical mythology and clues from the decorative artwork of Greece that had been handed down to the culture of Rome. Ovid was much enamored of the story of Medea, and indeed wrote a third, full length text telling her tale which has sadly been lost to mankind by the ravages of time. However, his Metamorphoses provides ample anthropological details on the magickal rites of Medea and therefore what was considered pop culture magick or ancient ritual by his time period, and his Heroides delivers a poignant “letter” of Medea’s story, telling the tale as if from the point of view of the witch herself.

The Anthropological Background of Medea

Medea, an eastern figure, enters what we now know as Greek myth at an important time in proto-history; as the eastern European tribes of the Asian steppes migrated into the Balkan Peninsula, mixing with the so-called Pelagasian population that was already living in what is now modern day Greece. The mixture of populations as thus would have resulted first in a period of cultural conflict as the two societies’ belief systems and sacred stories fought for supremacy before ultimately settling into an amalgamated version which reflected the dominance of one and the submission of the other. In other words, the two sets of stories got shoved together and the powerful witch/goddess of Eastern legend becomes subject to and wife of the more western hero Jason; with the role of Medea and her dark arts possibly considerably toned down from what they may have once been and twisted to cast her as the villain. The culture that resulted from the mix of the Eastern nomads and the “Pelagasians” becomes the Mycenaean society of Dark Age Greece, circa 1200-800 BCE. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, contemporaries of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, are likewise born from this same mish-mashing of East meets West, and indeed all three stories cross-reference each other considerably, both in the use of the same characters and the use of certain linguistic phrases to describe people, places, actions, and cultural facets.

Medea’s story, in particular, is an ethical quagmire of the ancient world. Undeniably a villain for much of her tale, she starts off as the bright, innocent heroine, eager to help her hero succeed. Through circumstance and experience she is shaped into the nasty piece of work the society of her tale needed her to be in order to understand her place within their contemporary mythology. Medea, as a woman, was too powerful for them to begin with. Her magick afforded her a weapon against society, which put her on equal stance with men and allowed her loopholes around the burgeoning legal rules which ancient Greek society was starting to view as necessary and unbreakable. Her role as an outsider, a member of a barbarian nation to the East who has migrated into the “civilized” world of the Greek city-states, adds to the fear surrounding Medea. She becomes the misogynist’s boogeyman, terrifying three millennia’s’ worth of men with the tales of her magickal destruction and her symbolic role as the ultimate woman scorned. Even when sympathetic versions of her are introduced, like Ovid’s letter from Medea to Jason in the Heroides: she cannot even excuse herself for the evil acts she has and is about to commit. Modern opinions of Medea are perhaps more lax, in that expanded women’s rights and increased general psychological knowledge give us a deeper insight into the mind of Medea, who’s actions, though still not excusable, can be arguably seen as having a motive.

The later sections of Medea’s journey are also of anthropological note as not only does Medea travel from her native Colchis, she moves from Greek city-state to city state: Colchis to Iolcus to Corinth to Thebes to Athens, back to Colchis, and then potentially to the Iranian plateau. This could speculatively be associated with the cult of Medea or an ancient sorceress/goddess figure quite like her, moving across the prehistoric landscape and being variously adopted and then neglected just before or during the so-called Greek Dark ages (1200 to 800 BCE). But even with this cult gone, a vague memory of it lingered into the historic period to be included as one of the tourist stops along Medea’s life voyage.

The sometime finale to the story of Medea killing her children could also be explained as a regional variation of this religious following. In Athens, there is indeed evidence of an early mother goddess cult, often associated with Hera and Medea alike, which involved either the ritual death of children or else was in honor of the early death of children and the mourning mothers (let’s hope the latter). In Corinth there are indications of a cult specifically focusing on Medea and Jason’s two deceased children themselves. Temple excavations at several archaic Greek sites associated with this early mother goddess group contain the burials of children within or around the foundations of the building. Although macabre to modern tastes, this focus on death, especially the death of young people, is common throughout world cultures, both ancient and modern; especially in the developing stage between a nomadic existence and settling down in towns and cities. In the ancient Near East, it was quite common for the bodies of younger members of societal groups to be relegated to distinct burial areas separate from the living spaces and the adult burial grounds; either in commemoration, or in fear that those who had not had a chance to live would retaliate on the still-living or their remains.

Another possible cult detail hidden within Medea’s tale regards the use of Pelias’ three daughters. In almost all versions of the story, they are basically seen as faux-initiates of Medea who are meant to learn magickal workings from her but are ultimately, for political/vengeful reasons, not allowed into the full secrets of Medea’s magickal craft. This is potentially indicative of some element of the cult whereby magickal knowledge was transferred from teacher to student until ultimately, with the cult’s downfall, the power of the magick faded and initiates were left in the dark, literally.

Exploring the Witchcraft of Medea

The sheer antiquity of the character of Medea is also attested to in the types of magick Medea practices within what remains of her tale. Medea’s magick is not the ritual temple magick, secret devotion, or cosmopolitan charlatanism that came to dominate the classical Greek period: it is a darker breed altogether. Medea acts more as a tribal shaman cum medicine woman of the older hunter-gatherer days. Her ways are less the ways of the city-states she visits and more those of the countryside and the mysterious “other” of foreign lands outside the realm of “civilized” society. She is a darker, chthonic goddess of life and death, power and destruction. She builds kingdoms and watches them fall, only to help them rebuild again. Her magicks, like her, are representative of the older ways on the outskirts of the Greek culture that built the city and the myth around her.

Medea is first and foremost, a devotee of the goddess Hekate. But whereby the acts and devotions of priestesses of her ilk had become privatized by the classical Greek period when her story was written down, Medea, wild-child that she is perceived to be, practices her prayers in public and private alike. She has no qualms about involving others in her rituals and at multiple points in her story invites others to witness her magick, pushing them away only at the peak of ritual thus preserving only a small element of secrecy. Apollonius has Medea and Jason perform an offering prior to his trials together, where in she instructs him on how to invoke magick herself. And in most versions, Pelias’ daughters as well as a possible royal retinue witness the midnight youth ritual both the times she conducts it properly and the time she purposefully does not, again, only being kicked out for a brief portion of the ritual. Despite these witnesses, Medea’s magick is not the communal magick of a temple, it is a personal relationship with a goddess. It is an individual chanting alone in a sacred grove rather than a throng singing together as a priest makes a sacrifice.

Medea’s affinity for Hekate runs in the family. Her mother Idyia, her aunt Circe, and potentially her sister, are likewise devotees of the goddess and of her student the goddess Artemis/Diana. Intriguingly, most versions of Medea’s story indicate that a grove or shrine sacred to the goddess existed near the “palace” of King Aeëtes in Colchis. Colchis, or Kolkhis, is not so much a city as a region in modern day Georgia (the country, not the state mind you ~ you have no idea how often that confuses people). King Aeëtes would have not been so much the ruler of a city and its people as the leader of one large or several nomadic groups along the edge of the Black Sea, with a potentially movable “capital” and immovable sacred sites. Ovid’s Heroides insists that not only is there a grove, but that in it, is a golden statue of Diana, “wrought by barbarian hands” ~ an anthropological detail backed by archaeological and historical evidence of the religious practices of the Balkan and Caucasus regions around the Black Sea: sacred groves with central features, often a statue, which has been embedded with precious metals. Notably there is the later sanctuary at Sarmizegetuza in modern day Romania, which was built over a pre-existing sacred site quite similar to the sacred grove in Colchis under discussion. However, for all that there are sacred sites which Medea works her magick in, she and her magick are not tied to the site alone. She does not have to be working within the confines of the goddesses’ sacred space, be it a grove or a temple, in order to call upon the goddess. She uses her powers this just as easily from the bow of The Argo, in a field outside Iolcus, and in the streets of Athens as she does at the beginning of her story in the grove of her goddess.

Medea’s magickal litany consists of several practices which are still highly regarded within witchcraft today; namely: the arts of invocation, purification, herb-lore, and rituals combing these elements. It is her herb craft which distinguishes her more as a witch and less a simple pagan priestess. She uses her herbal skills multiple times throughout her life: twice to help win the Golden Fleece, in the youth ritual for the ram and Pelias, and as a poison against Glauce, her father, and later Theseus. She also uses her herbs to heal, in what are often side notes to the primary tale which are typically disregarded or made little of because they cast the wicked witch in a more positive role. Even I have left some of these side-notes out of my narrative above because they are often just that, side notes to the primary tale. Medea heals several of the Argonauts while on board ship, most notably the highly controversial and only female Argonaut, Atalanta. She heals and makes younger Jason’s father, Aeson. And she also cures Hercules when she visits him later in Thebes. Ironically, Hercules would eventually succumb to the same kind of “poisoned-outfit death” Medea had previously sentenced Glauce to just before she visited Hercules.

The biggest magickal feat she performs, however, is arguably the youth ritual at Iolcus. And it is this which I would like to leave you with as the pinnacle of Medea’s magick. [Please note, do not try this ritual at home ~ even if you can find a dragon to take you round to collect all the ingredients: don’t even think about repeating it!] Ovid’s rendition of this magickal feat is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch, albeit the one that takes the most mythological license.

“Three nights remained before the moon’s bright horns
Would meet and form her orb; when she shone
In fullest radiance and with form complete
Gazed down upon the sleeping lands below.
Medea, barefoot, her long robe unfastened,
Her hair upon her shoulders falling loose,
Went forth alone upon her roaming way,
In the deep stillness of the midnight hour.
Now men and birds and beasts in peace profound
Are lapped; no sound comes from the hedge; the leaves
Hang mute and still and all the dewy air
Is silent; nothing stirs; only the stars
Shimmer. Then to the stars she stretched her arms,
And thrice she turned about and thrice bedewed
Her locks with water, thrice a wailing cry
She gave, then kneeling on the stony ground,

‘O night’ , she prayed, ‘Mother of mysteries,
And all ye golden stars who with the moon
Succeed the fires of day, and thou, divine
Three-formed Hecate, who knowest all
My enterprises and dost fortify
The arts of magic, and thou, kindly earth,
Who dost for magick herbs provide;
Ye winds and airs, ye mountains, lakes, and streams,
And all ye forest gods and gods of night,
Be with me now! By your enabling power,
At my behest, broad rivers to their source
Flow back, their banks aghast; my magick song
Rouses the quiet, calms the angry seas;
I bring the clouds and make the clouds withdraw,
I call the winds and quell them; by my art
I sunder the serpents’ throats; the living rocks
And mighty oaks from out their soil I tear;
I move the forests, bid the mountains quake,
The deep earth groan and ghosts rise from their tombs.
Thee too, bright Moon, I banish, though thy throes
The clanging bronze assuage; under my spells
Even my grandsire’s chariot grows pale
And the dawn pales before my poisons’ power.
You at my prayer tempered the flaming breath
Of the dread bulls, you placed their necks,
Necks never yoked before, the curving plough;
You turned the warriors, serpent-born, to war
Against themselves; you lulled at last to sleep
The guardian that knew not sleep, and sent
Safe to the homes of Greece the golden prize.
Now I have need of essences whose power
Will make age new, bring back the bloom of youth,
The prime years win again. These you will give.
For not in vain the shimmering stars have shown,
Nor stands in vain, by winged dragons drawn,
My chariot here.’ And there the chariot stood,
Send down from heaven her purpose to fulfill.

She mounted, stroked and harnessed dragon’s necks,
Shook the light reins and soared into the sky,
And gazing down beheld, far far below,
Thessalian Tempe; then the serpent’s course
She set of regions that she knew of old.
The herbs that Pelion and Ossa bore,
Othyrs and Pindus and that loftiest peak,
Olympus, she surveyed those that pleased
Some by the roots she culled, some with the curve
Of her bronze blade she cut; many she chose
Beside Apidanus’ green banks and many
Beside Amphrysus; now was swift Enipeus
Exempt; Peneus too and the bright stream
Of broad Spercheus and the reedy shores
Of boeb gave their share, and from Anthedon
She plucked the grass of life, not yet renowned
For that sea-change the Euboean merman found.

And now nine days had seen her and nine nights
Roaming the world, driving her dragon team.
Then she returned; the dragons, though untouched
Save by the wafting odor of the those herbs,
Yet sloughed their aged skins of many years.
Before the doors she stopped nor crossed the threshold;
Only the heavens covered her; she shunned
Jason’s embrace; then two turf altars built,
The right to Hecate, the left to youth,
Wreathed with the forest’s mystic foliage,
And dug two trenches in the ground beside
And then performed her rites. Plunging a knife
Into a black sheep’s throat she drenched the wide
Ditches with blood; next from the chalice poured
A stream of wine and from a second chalice
Warm frothing milk, chanting magick words,
Summoned the deities of the earth and prayed
The sad shades’ monarch and his stolen bride
That, of their mercy, from old Aeson’s frame
They will not haste to steal the breath of life.

And when in long low-murmured supplications
The deities were appeased, she bade bring out
The old exhausted king, and with a spell
Charmed him to deepest sleep and laid his body,
Lifeless it seemed, stretched on a bed of herbs.
Away! She ordered Jason and Away!
The ministrants and warned that eyes profane
See not her secrets; then with streaming hair,
Ecstatic round the flaming altars moved,
And in the troughs of blood dipped cloven stakes
And lit them dripping at the flames, and thrice
With water, thrice with sulfur, thrice with fire
Purged the pale sleeping body of the king.

Meanwhile with the deep bronze cauldron, white
With bubbling froth, the rich elixir boils.
Roots from the vales of Thessaly and seeds
And flowers from the farthest Orient
And sand that Ocean’s ebbing waters wash,
And hoar-frost gathered when the moon shines full,
And wings and flesh of owls and the warm guts
Or wolves that change at will to human form.
To them she adds the slender scaly skins
Of Libyan water-snakes and then the livers
Of long-living gazelles and eggs and heads
Of ancient crows, nine generations old.
With these and a thousand other nameless things
Her more than mortal purpose she prepared.

Then with a seasoned stick of olive wood
She mixed the whole and stirred it. And behold!
The old dry stick that stirred the bubbling brew
Grew green and suddenly burst into leaf,
And all at once was laden with fat olives;
And where the froth flowed from the pot
And the hot drops spattered the ground beneath,
Fair springtime bloomed again, and everywhere
Flowers of the meadow sprang and pasture sweet.
And seeing this Medea drew her blade
And slit the old king’s throat and let the blood
Run out and filled his veins and arteries
With her elixir; and when Aeson drank,
Through wound and lips, at once his lips and beard,
White for long years, regained their raven hue;
His wizened pallor, vanquished, fled away
And firm new flesh his sunken wrinkles filled,
And all his limbs were sleek and proud and strong.
Then Aeson woke and marveled as he saw
His prime restored forty years before.”

Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Cleasby, H.L., 1907. The Medea of Seneca. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 18, pp. 39-71.
Clauss, J.J., and Johnston, S.I. (eds.), 1997. Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cockburn, G. 2005. Lecture series on Medea: Analysis & Interpretation. Durham University

Further Sources:
Medea and Witchcraft in Classical Greek Art
The Medea Tradition presented by Wesleyan College
(For classical, primary sources, please see links embedded in the text)