The God(ess) Beneath the Ground

I am often asked how I became a pagan and what that means, so I decided to make a post about it so I can just refer people here.

I was raised very vaguely Christian. My mother was an ex Catholic, and I attended a convent school from the ages of about seven to ten. But I realised at secondary school that any attachment I felt for Christianity was almost entirely due to liking the music. This was proper grand, rolling music, you understand, not frantically jolly happy-clappy stuff that sets your teeth on edge.

14% of the girls at my secondary school were Jewish, The philosophy of Judaism appealed to me and I began to seriously consider converting – although it would be more than forty years before I learned than my late father had been adopted, and had been born Jewish.

At Edinburgh University, I was a member of the Union of Jewish Students (there were actually quite a lot of non-Jewish members). I would regularly go away with them to pan-Scottish or pan-UK “weekend schools”, long weekends which combined lectures, political debate and boozy parties. Some of the strangest and most interesting memories from my youth were at UJS weekend schools, but that’s a story or ten for another day.

Backtracking a bit, when I was quite a young child, seven to ten-ish, my mother was live-in housekeeper to the live-in stable girls at a riding stable in Brookshill Drive, north of Harrow Weald. We lived, appropriately enough, in a place called Bridle Cottages. From there on at least one occasion we travelled a few miles east to vist an old soldier and horse-trainer called Captain Younghusband, who lived in one of the old houses by Wood Lane Pond in Wood Lane, Stanmore.

By this point I was going to a Church of England primary school in Stanmore. For a while we stayed with my mother’s sister in Elstree, and to get from the school to Elstree we would walk through Wood Lane. After various travels we ended up living in Harrow which was in the other direction from the school, but I still didn’t lose touch with Wood Lane, because at Christmas, we children went from the school to sing carols to the residents at an old people’s home in Wood Lane: a very grand, square white building a few hundred yards along the road from Captain Younghusband’s old house at Wood Lane Pond.

Later, we moved out to Rayners Lane but I still went to a single-sex secondary school in the same Stanmore area. This was Heriot’s Wood Grammar School, which was later converted to a Comprehensive School called Bentley Priory. That too is worth a whole other story, as it was an extremely eccentric school. This is the place where 14% of the girls were Jewish (and many of the rest were Hindu or Greek Orthodox): it was a mile or so west of Stanmore which at that time was home to one of the biggest Jewish communities in the UK.

Bentley Priory Open Space and the Bentley Priory Museum were just behind the school, and I have scrambled along the terrace at the front of the grand building which was once the wartime headquarters of Fighter Command, along with a slightly older Jewish schoolfriend called Caroline who had been expelled from Roedean (ultra-posh private girls’ school) for dealing cannabis. She had a dreamy, vague air which my mother attributed to perpetual post-coital daze, but I realise with hindsight that she was stoned.

So, imagine my surprise at university when one of UJS’s weekend schools turned out to be being held at a place called the Yakar Centre in Stanmore, and the Yakar Centre turned out to be the very building which had once been the old people’s home in Wood Lane where I had gone to sing carols. At this point, it was a centre for Jewish studies. It’s been several other things since, and is currently the Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Muslim Community (KSIMC) of London Husseini Shia Islamic Centre.

This was the weekend when the Chief Rabbi, the Very Reverend Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, came to address us. Bearing in mind that this was before the days of automatic spell-checking, and that there was a rumour that The Jewish Chronicle employed a proof-reader whose sole duty was to check every copy to make sure they hadn’t mistyped “rabbi” as “rabbit”, and that “Jacko” as he was known in the Jewish community did bear a remarkable resemblance to a white rabbit, I had to fight a terrible urge to offer him a lettuce leaf.

It was also the weekend when I accidentally interrupted a small group which included a very Orthodox and very eccentric girl called Frieda, who was then convalescing from Hodgkin’s Disease. Looking back on it, I am no longer sure of my dates, but I think that although I was still thinking of becoming Jewish I had already embarked on my career as a witch, by doing a blood sacrifice (my own blood, by sticking a craft knife into the heel of my hand) as part of a ritual for Frieda’s recovery and health. It might have been after that summer weekend in Stanmore, but I think it was before it. I stood in the window of a friend’s flat in the Grassmarket at midnight, looking up at the castle, and I thought that if necessary I was willing to die if Frieda would live. And I felt as if some force had risen and was going to take me, and I thought “Yes, OK, go on then”, and obviously it didn’t, but I felt that the fact that I had been genuinely willing was sufficient.

I didn’t tell Frieda about that, although I don’t think it would have surprised her all that much, as one of her hobbies was staring at the backs of people’s heads on the bus and then implanting commands such as “Scratch your ear now” into their brains.

Frieda was the one who I told about how I had picked greenfly off an indoor plant and she glared at me and snapped “What did you do with the greenflies?” I said “Er, I accidentally squashed a couple but I picked most of them off with insect forceps, put them in a jar and took them outside and put them on the bushes” and she relaxed and said “That’s all right then”.

Anyway, on this occasion it was about 3am, and I accidentally interrupted this little group and Frieda said “We were just discussing the thingy thingness of things”. I meant to say “And did you reach any interesting conclusions?”, but because it was 3am it came out as “And did you reach any interesting confusions?” which was actually far more likely, especially with Frieda involved.

The following day was the Sabbath, so we did no work. We couldn’t have if we’d wanted to, as the weather was blindingly hot. A small crowd of us sat around on a sort of patio cum terrace at the back of the house: I remember there was a slightly unpleasant young man who was talking about how he had persuaded a child to do that “Fall back and I’ll catch you” thing and then had let them fall all the way to teach them not to trust anyone, and a very small ginger rabbi who had tried and signally failed to grow a beard, and was a massive Arsenal fan.

Even nowadays, Stanmore Hill has hardly been built on at all – there are skeins of houses along the roads, but beyond them is all green space, farms and woods and nature reserves and sports grounds. Wood Lane ran north of the Yakar Centre, and south of it there was a long field which was markedly convex, with the centre to the north of it and woods on the other three sides. I was bored with the conversation, and hot, and restless, so I decided to go for a walk down the length of the field. The grass was quite long and quite dry, and filled with tiny white flowers like the froth on a mug of beer. They may have been cuckoo flowers, Cardamine pratensis. I’m not sure – just that they were tiny, and there were masses of them. The shape of the hillside meant that the house stayed in clear sight for a long time, and then fairly suddenly disappeared behind the convex bulge of the ground.

This is what I wrote about it a few months later:

Name of Light (Sabbath afternoon, Yakar Centre, summer ’79)
It was summer, it was summer, the Sabbath
Drowsed in the drying grass.
The hillside was covered, was dappled sweet
With brown and green and gold and purple fur.
I plunged like a seal into the drowning world of it;
The field curved over the hillside,
It dropped down forever, ever, never
Seemed to pass from sight of the white house
In which the peace of Sabbath walked cool corridors.
The hill deceived the eye; viewed from the terrace
It so swiftly curved from sight yet though I waded
Calf-deep in white flowers, moving in a dream
Across and down the flank of Stanmore Hill
All afternoon, it seemed,
Not till I reached the farther edge did I lose sight
Of house, of terrace, gardens, rabbi, friends.
And then with a heady strangeness buzzing in my brain
I felt the living earth, and power
And dizzy strength, an ebb and flow
Between myself and Earth, and England.
Had I known then the words to speak
The thing I sought was there; I knew them not,
And drunk with summer waded back
Through fields of flowers
To the cool Sabbath of the echoing house.

It felt as though the animus loci, the land-soul of England herself, rose up and filled me like water forcing upwards from root to leaf of a tree, and I knew that the land itself was alive, and I couldn’t really square that with being Jewish and so I had to be a pagan: albeit one who still had distinct Jewish leanings.

My relationship with my gods is much more on the Jewish than the Christian model – bearing in mind that Eli Wiesel memorably wrote that “Israel” means “He who wrestles with God and wins“. I see my gods as more like superior officers who assign me tasks than forces I actually worship, as such, and if I call on a god it’s usually because I think they’ll enjoy what I’m doing, rather than because I need their help. It’s not the pagan way to treat the gods like a supermarket checkout – put prayer in, get gifts out – although I did once see a friend who was aligned with Thor shake her fist at the sky and yell “Oi, you! You’re supposed to be a mate of mine!”, and the rain blew away almost instantly.

I usually feel most attachment to the Trickster and to more or less Celtic gods: to the Dagda, whom I knew as Honey Mead before I ever knew his name because his essence feels slow and golden, and who is associated with agriculture, fertility, male strength, wisdom, magic, music, poetry and partying; and to whatever the people 3,000 years ago associated with the White Horse of Uffington, that I know as The Changer. But I also have a soft spot for Ganesh – him and his rat.

For a while I became mildly obsessed with imagery of the hare, who is associated in some cultures with the Trickster – enough to max out my bank account in the late ’80s buying a limited edition Suzie Marsh ceramic hare, who remains probably the most valuable thing I own.

As for being a witch, that’s a separate issue. Despite what some Wiccans might want you to believe, “witch” is a working method, not a religious position (and it’s gender-neutral). I’ve met Christian, Jewish and even Muslim witches. It means using psychic ability if you have any, nerve, traditional lore (especially herbology) and psychology to manipulate people and events – for their own good if you’re a so-called “white” witch, and for yours if you’re a “black” witch.

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