How we relate to our mothers is deeply intertwined with how we relate to the landsea that births us. It is no coincidence that our Settler heritage—a shared and violent heritage of patriarchy, colonial-capitalism, chattel slavery, and racial ordering of the world—-also engenders within us, individually and collectively, oppressive ways of relating to the landsea… in the ostensibly settled forms of anthropocentric speciesism, resource or property. In other words, the well-documented Murder of Nature. The historic exploitation (civilisation) of the landsea continues its haunts under modern regimes of Imperial Science and Capitalism.
Entangled with this, our Settler heritage also generates and maintains historic and continuing violence against people across the spectrum of gender in varying ways. Think witch-hunts yesterday, misogyny and transphobia today. In this configuration, our relationship to mothers, our mothers, and to being a mother is also settled into a pre-determined characterisation into which our experiences are expected to fit. The evocation of “Mother Nature” in relation to environmental actions lays bare our internalised Settler problematics of the Mother: Which Mother relations do we evoke and reproduce with the landsea? How can we and why should we evoke magick of ancestral evocations and family when our ancestral heritage is shaped by the solidification of tyranny, exploitation, and violence across spacetimes?
As we witness a renewed turn to witchcrafts in our Northern-OldWorld Settler societies, we must reckon with these histories and presents of our Settler heritage(s). This is necessary if we are to contest and create alternatives to the assimilation of magick and witchcrafts to a fearful and neocolonial white supremacist heternormative Settler imaginary. The time has come to open portals for The Long Unsettling: The unsettling of our beings cultivated so far within Settler heritage, the unsettling of our magicks and desires, the unsettling of our witchy Crafts.
We are called here, to the Bidston Observatory, to begin! Begin the chipping away of settlements. Confront! Given its own Settler heritage in helping create settler relations with the landseas, the Bidston Observatory, now reclaimed as BOARC offers a remarkable spacetime to begin such Unsettling. Who knows what we might stumble upon in this process? But how we decide to relate to what we meet shall be key. Key to the Long Unsettling!
Through 8 Renewal Rituals this Summer, we seek to begin long-withheld conversations with our mothers and the Wirral landsea. We seek to create shared care-full timespaces where the Unsettling of our magickal selves, communities, and collectives may begin. We seek to unsettle us by re-laying, re-orienting and re-newing our relations with our mothers and this landsea and vice-versa. We seek to use language but we shall not be limited by it. We are blessed by the Water Nymph Calypso and the Water Spirits in this task. We are blessed also by Goddess Frejya and guided by the memories of this landsea here on the Wirral in the shapes, sounds, and rhythms of the Ancient Nordic Runes.
If you too feel called as we do, come join us. Refract. Destroy. Grieve. Rejoice. And create. Unsettling Rituals that resonate for you. Find unsettling magickal ways to relate to land, sea, and mothers. Embody this triadic wholeness. But none of it without confronting present and ancestral settled powers, politics. For witchcraft is political.
BUT…ARE THESE RENEWAL RITUALS FOR THE LONG UNSETTLING RIGHT FOR ME?
We invite you to participate in these Renewal Rituals if:
You come through a Settler heritage (i.e. a white or not-white heritage of patriarchy, colonial-capitalism, chattel slavery, and racial-caste ordering of the world that relates to the landseas as resource or property),
You resonate with the call to unsettle yourself and your Settler communities,
You are interested in practising magick/witchcrafts rooted in Earth rhythms of spiritual-material guidance,
You are interested in examining your relationship to your mother and specific landseas in community with others similarly aligned,
You seek to contribute to an honest, non-judgmental, and caring space of vulnerability,
You are not a cis man (nothing against cis men: Rather, we acknowledge that (un)Settler cis-men share different relations with mothers and the landseas, and specific problems in their relation to witchcrafts as a result of it, and it is necessary to open up timespaces for all this. These 8 Renewal Rituals are just not the appropriate ones.)
If you’re interested in participating and fulfill these requirements, please register here.