Witchy Magic Circle by Marina Zrnic

Foto de Aphiwat chuangchoem: https://www.pexels.com/es-es/foto/palillo-de-cigarrillo-en-monton-de-monedas-405082/ Human race, as a society, is not collectively accustomed to talk about death. We rarely mention it and we avoid talking about our dearest ones who have died. Death is something lingering far beyond, on the horizon of our lives, inevitable, yet far away. Some of us perceive death more than others, some are capable of communicating with it, and yet some are barely aware of it, until the very end. Death is the deepest secret, a well of our existence. We reflect our faces in the bottom of it, in dark mouldy water, but we are not capable of diving into it without dying. Many cultures avoid dealing with duality of the universe and our existence, underlying solemnly the light without being aware that without dark, there would not be any light and that without death, surely there would not be life. Traditional witchcraft recognises the duality of the universe and goes even further...

Foto de Filipe Delgado: https://www.pexels.com/es-es/foto/worms-eyeview-of-well-1601495/ "Verum usque in præsentem diem multa garriunt inter se Canonici de abscondito quodam istius Abbatis Thomæ thesauro, quern sæpe, quanquam adhuc incassum, quæsiverunt Steinfeldenses. Ipsum enim Thomam adhuc florida in ætate existentem ingentem auri massam circa monasterium defodisse perhibent; de quo multoties interrogatus ubi esset, cum risu respondere solitus erat: 'Job, Johannes, et Zacharias vel vobis vel posteris indicabunt'; idemque aliquando adiicere se inventuris minime invisurum. Inter alia huius Abbatis opera, hoc memoria præcipue dignum iudico quod fenestram magnam in orientali parte alæ australis in ecclesia sua imaginibus optime in vitro depictis impleverit: id quod et ipsius effigies et insignia ibidem posita demonstrant. Domum quoque Abbatialem fere totam restauravit: puteo in atrio ipsius effosso et lapidibus marmoreis pulchre cælatis exornato. Decessit autem, morte aliqu...

Look out! Look out, boys! Clear the track! The witches are here! They’ve all come back! They hanged them high, — No use! No use! What cares a witch for a hangman’s noose? They buried them deep, but they wouldn’t lie still, For cats and witches are hard to kill; They swore they shouldn’t and wouldn’t die, — Books said they did, but they lie! they lie! — A couple of hundred years, or so, They had knocked about in the world below, When an Essex Deacon dropped in to call, And a homesick feeling seized them all; For he came from a place they knew full well, And many a tale he had to tell. They long to visit the haunts of men, To see the old dwellings they knew again, And ride on their broomsticks all around Their wide domain of unhallowed ground. In Essex county there’s many a roof Well known to him of the cloven hoof; The small square windows are full in view Which the midnight hags went sailing through, On their well-trained broomsticks mounted high, Seen like shadows against the sky; Cro...

  Foto de Mikael Kristenson en Unsplash PROLOGUE Martin Hesselius, the German Physician Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place. In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term "easy circumstances." He was an old man when ...