Not necessarily, but I am. I label myself as both a psychic medium and a witch.
Many people are fascinated, and want to know how I got to be these things. I don’t think it was a matter of choice — though I did try very hard not to be them, for a big slice of my life.
‘Are they the same thing?’ someone recently asked. No, they are not. It is perfectly possible, and I think quite common, to be either one and not the other. However, there are also plenty of people who are both. Or, I should say, all three.
Definitions
Psychics / mediums / psychic mediums
A psychic is someone who apprehends a reality beyond the physical world we all experience. Perhaps they receive communications from plants and animals, beyond what we normally get in our interactions with our pets and our gardens. They might well be able to sense other people’s energy and be affected by it. We’re all more or less intuitive. A psychic is intuitive to a heightened degree. They can also get intimations of things that haven't happened yet. They may have premonitions, or precognisant dreams, or tap into some other method of knowing in advance, such as clairvoyance.
A medium is able to communicate with people in the spirit world, those who have died. Perhaps they can also get messages from such beings as angels and nature spirits. It’s a particular form of being psychic.
A psychic medium (like me) can do both. (I haven’t encountered many others. Those I have met seemed to be more focused on the mediumship.) Lots of people — more than you might think — receive communications from friends and family members who have passed on into the spirit world; a medium is one who can relay such messages for those who don’t get any and would like to. We can communicate with those in spirit even when we have no personal connection. A professional psychic medium (which I am) does this as a service to the public, and receives a fee.
(Is it proper to ask a fee for this kind of work? Some people think not. I’ll tell you a story, a little later on, about how that applies to me.)
Please note, we all have different ways of going about this. Just because one person does it a particular way, doesn't mean that everyone will. For instance, I have known some remarkable clairvoyants (clairvoyant = clear seeing, i.e. beyond physical sight) but I personally am not very clairvoyant, only a little bit. I am rather more clairaudient (clear hearing), but my greatest gifts are clairsentience (using touch to receive my messages, e.g. holding the client's hand) and claircognisance (an inner knowing).
I usually use Tarot cards, and a large crystal ball, when I do a psychic reading for someone. They are tools which can facilitate the work; however, I can also do it without them.
We find whatever way works best for us. It's very individual.
Witches
Witches follow ‘the craft of the wise.’
As there are various Christian denominations, so there are different forms of witchcraft, but they do of course have some major things in common.
They have great reverence and care for Nature. I tend to think this is the most important aspect, and I believe many would agree with me. However it's not as if it was all written down in a book of rules and regulations. We rather disparagingly refer to other major religions as 'the book religions'. For ourselves, we prefer to learn from the world of nature, and through wisdom passed on from one witch to others.
We do sometimes write what we have learned into a personal book (called a 'book of shadows' or a 'grimoire'). This is not so much a set of regulations which must be obeyed, as guidelines to what has worked for the person writing it and might therefore be helpful to others.
Witches also work with energy, in ways that those unfamiliar with them might see as magic. And most people think magic isn’t real; that those who practise it are either deluded or fraudulent!
Personally, I think magic is just science for which we haven’t yet found the scientific explanation. In my lifetime, scientists have discovered many things to be factual which were once considered impossible – for instance that plants communicate. We ‘spooky’ types get quite used to sudden announcements of things we knew to be true all along, from our personal experience of them. We just smile when science finally catches up.
I’ve been a psychic medium all my life, although I did try to suppress it for a number of years. It’s innate, and refused to stay buried forever. Witchcraft, on the other hand, is something I’ve been practising consciously and purposefully since the early 1990s. By now both these things feel perfectly normal to me, even ordinary. So it surprises me when I notice how many people still have mistaken ideas about these matters — particularly about witchcraft.
Misconceptions
Don’t believe too much of what you see onscreen, or read in novels! For one thing, most of us don’t bother to try and look the part. We can wear flowing robes and exotic jewellery, and some of us like to, or like to on particular occasions; however, we don’t actually need to.
There are more witches in the community than you are likely to know. In their everyday lives, most of them look just like anyone else, no distinguishing marks. No extra fingers or nipples — don’t laugh; in olden times that was believed — and no special way of dressing, either. Like everyone else, we tend to dress for our jobs — whether we are mothers, couriers, office workers, labourers… Witches who wear the traditional pentacle (a five-pointed star, or pentagram, enclosed in a circle) — and I think a lot of us do — will usually have it around their neck, tucked under their clothing, hidden.
I remember going to a concert by Wendy Rule, a wonderful singer -songwriter who is public about being a witch. As the audience arrived, the friend I was sitting with, a psychic and healer with a New Age and Christian background, said to me,
‘There’s an energy here … I can’t quite place it …’
I looked around, and said immediately,
‘Oh, it’s all the local witches.’
I didn’t know any of them, and few of them were dressed in anything magical-looking. It was a cold night; most of us — women, men, and some schoolchildren — were rugged up in coats and scarves.
Well of course it was no surprise that Wendy’s audience would consist largely of witches! Only to be expected, really. And my companion was right: there was a collective energy, one which I hadn’t particularly noticed until then, perhaps because it was natural to me. My friend, a light worker and not a witch, was unaccustomed to it. (I’m a light worker too, in that I consciously and purposefully join with others sending out light for personal and planetary healing. It’s just that I happen to be a witch as well.)
‘Witches are very earthy,’ I said later, trying to explain this incident, and the difference in the energy, to a couple of other friends who aren’t witches but were familiar with light worker energy.
It’s true. We like to stay close to the earth, both in our lives and our spiritual practices.
(‘My church is the forest or beach or river or garden,’ said a facebook friend recently, and I thought, ‘Aha, I had a feeling about you. Now I know!’)
We work with the elements; our sacred objects may include twigs and stones and shells; when possible we like to hold our rituals of worship outdoors.
We tend to feel that, as in nature, there must be a balance of opposing forces; therefore we acknowledge darkness as well as light. Not the darkness of evil, but that which exists in nature: night- time, lit by the mysterious moon rather than the radiant sun; our so-called ‘negative’ emotions such as sorrow, anger and fear, which we need to express in healthy ways rather than try to suppress; the great void from which we all came …
Are witches evil?
It irritates me when, in novels or TV shows, any local magical or Pagan group turns out to have some dark and sinister agenda: at the very least, preying on the gullible; at worst committing murders. You can pretty much count on it! Tarot readers, too, and mediums, are usually revealed as fraudulent, and sometimes as possessed by evil!
(In the days when I was teaching Tarot reading, I even had one student who expected me to teach her how to fake it! She just couldn’t get it that this was not what I was about; she seemed to think I was holding out on her. She fairly soon dropped out of the course — and, in doing so, stealing one of my favourite Tarot decks, which I had lent her to practise with for homework.
All these decades later, I find I’m still upset about that. It was the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is common enough and easy to replace — in fact I have several different editions of it now — but that one had a lovely soft pink backing on the cards, which to me gave the whole pack a very loving, gentle energy. I’ve never come across another the same.)
The truth is that witches, of all people, are very unlikely to be going around doing evil. As I explained in the first, 'What 's This?' post here, we have only one rule that we are required to obey: ‘Do as you will, an it harm none.’ (This ‘an’ is an archaic version of ‘if’ or ‘so long as’.) I think this is the strictest moral code there is, because you have to think about everything you do! It’s also extremely hard to live up to, because we usually can’t see very far ahead to all the possible consequences of our actions.
In practice, we at least have to stop and think about the effects of any magical work we contemplate, and do the best we can to ensure it won’t be harmful. This is made easier to abide by because we subscribe to ‘the law of three.’ That’s not a law in the sense of a rule we must obey; rather, we regard it as a natural law, something which will naturally happen if the conditions are met: a law of cause and effect. It means that whatever we send out, be it good or ill, it will come back to us multiplied. It’s often called ‘the law of threefold return,’ promising that whatever you send out once will return three times over.
I personally don’t think it must be threefold exactly, just that it will be even more than what you put out — and yet, I have known at least one case where there were three specific repercussions (close together in time) for a particular piece of active ill-wishing.
