Lee Morgan

 “To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.” 

― Novalis

A Covenstead is traditionally a place where a coven works, but here I would like to use this poetry of thinking to discuss where any witch works. The three mile radius is the size usually ascribed to such a place, and here I think this seems like a good way to start with deepening your connection to the giant you live inside. Even if you live in the middle of a city it is to the souls of the green realm that our soul first begins to sing.

What makes the traditional covenstead three-mile radius meaningful as a rule of thumb? I think at a practical level we can consider that three miles was a walkable distance, particularly for people from eras before cars who were accustomed to far more walking. Even here in Hobart a jaunt to the top of kunanyi/Mt Wellington was a perfectly normal Sunday recreation for a whole family, including women in corsets. In the past you’d have been able to collect water, wildcraft a lot of foods and medicines, engaging in some hunting and growing a lot of your own food in a radius of this size, and certainly that would be relevant to this old piece of witch lore. But what else inside your three-mile radius infects your magic?

Stories. 

Certainly no one who knows my work, or me, is particularly surprised by this answer. Your bioregion also has a storyverse that is held together by a variety of tales, some may be indigenous dreaming stories, folk stories, historically based recent stories, urban legends, interesting natural features, and ghost tales, all layered over one another. If you are lucky there might even be tales about witches, magic, faeries, or spectral hunts associated with your area. If you haven’t yet researched these sorts of things now is the time. Even if you have those who have lived in the same place all their lives often benefit from a second look, as it’s easy to become over-familiar with a place and not see the things of great impact that a visitor sees. 

Here are some things to begin to meditate on.

-Significant old trees particularly those with stories attached. If you are Australian are there trees connected with Aboriginal culture such as birthing trees in your area? It is a good idea to talk to a custodian about how these trees are traditionally treated. There may be some things where giving a respectful distance is preferred to interaction. Are there old oaks planted by early settlers that have stories attached to them? Sometimes there are even stories about where the acorn or the apple hailed from in the old country before it came here. Focus on ones with stories or lore in them to begin with. Is there a tree people write their names with their sweetheart on? Perhaps the person who planted it was particularly associated with law and order or someone died there? These are all relevant facts that could relate to what sort of sorcery can be performed there or in alliance with that tree.

-Burial grounds. Just as with the trees the old ones tend to pack the most punch but all are relevant especially your local cemetery if it falls inside your three mile radius. Be prepared to be responsive to dowsing and other spirit led avenues, as there are bones and layers of the past everywhere even when they are not marked out. 

-Old Churches and places of worship. A place where spiritual experiences are had regularly, whether an indigenous sacred site, a Buddhist temple or a Christian Church should be noted as spiritual hot spots. If that belief system sees witches as enemies it should be noted out accordingly on your covenstead map. For instance some evangelicals specifically pray against witches and the ‘evil angels’ we consort with, and it may pay to know where hubs of such activity are.

-Trees of age and significance.

-Anywhere paths or roads cross is significant, but some will be more magically potent or useful than others. For instance, old dirt road paths that no longer get as much traffic and are quite lonely at night are very handy. Of course famous crossroads where people have traditionally sold their soul to the devil, or old scaffold sites are of great importance too. It is good to start thinking now, if you haven’t already made friends with a crossroads on first name basis, if you can find a private crossroads for future work. Or failing this, dirt from such a site slightly outside your Covensead that you can take home with you. If you do this always leave three silver coins for the spirit of the place in return.

-Cross waters. Places where rivers or streams cross either in three ways or four. If there isn’t immediately obvious (remembered) lore about your local waterways perhaps consider the names, especially the oldest names of the rivers and what they might mean. Did anyone drown in them that you know of, giving birth to a famous ghost story? In the town where I did part of my growing up with had Fisher’s Ghost whose body was thrown into a particular river.

-Wells and springs and significant ghost roads where spirits travel in straight lines.

-High points, such as mountains and significant hills and the sky roads that are created between those points if one was to move between them as the crow flies.

-Storied Places. Sites with a story attached that is old enough to be integrated into the landscape in some way, such as dreaming sites that have a tale telling of how that rock formation came to be shaped that way. But less ancient stories can still be relevant and should be noted, particularly if there is some supernatural element involved.

-Old Buildings, paths, stairways etc with ghost stories.

-Once you start to get a list of such things you can plot them out on a map of your three-mile radius. When I have moved to a new place I like to make some kind of colour code to indicate certain influences. Often when you do this on a map you begin to notice connections between places, even straight lines forming between places of power.

In some ways positive or negative are relative to a homo sapiens point of view. A human massacre site for instance is definitely sensed as negative by a human, possibly irrelevant in significance to other creatures. Whilst there can be situations where land pacts between trees, animals and humans are so profound that one does indeed sense that the land is angry it probably pays to consider whether human tragedy is experienced the same way by all life forms. However, as we are not ravens who might experience positive responses to battles and bloodshed leading them to food we are still subject to the feeling and awareness of this partiality towards our own species. Places of this ilk are experienced differently to a sorcerer, whereas they might not be to a pademelon. There are places where terrible things have happened that I have sensed something wrong so strongly it’s almost like I can still smell death there. Sorcerers and other sensitive folk can often sense a kind of fracture often in these places of mass crossing over where many deaths have occurred. The disturbance caused by so many souls passing through and the shock of violent death gives the air a certain charge, the veil a certain permeability. This is one reason why witches are famous for working at places such as gallows sites, graves of the unhallowed death and places that people consider ‘spooky’ or even cursed. The other reason I would imagine is that few people like to go to places like that after dark and one is less likely to be interrupted. 

Here are some examples of places that possess more unstable power. You need to have them on your Covenstead map even if you don’t choose to work with them at this point, or ever. A lot of what we call Virtue accumulates at places where many births or deaths have happened and this can be used to empower magical workings. However, one should seriously consider how you feel before and during going to places like this. If what you’re doing feels dangerous or unhealthy in a way you don’t feel you can process or you feel disrespectful using the site then you should definitely not do so. 

-Desecrated graves. Due to the taboos in many cultures about tampering with graves uneasy dead are believed to dwell in such places.

-Massacre and battle sites.

-Old gallows, execution sites or popular suicide locations.

-Sites known for an unusual density of accidents.

When you have this material, or at least a start to it you can begin to look at your Covenstead area in terms of these locations. You can meditate on the map and see if any patterns appear, such as lines between peaks and other power places along which ghost roads may flow, allowing spirits to move between one place and the other at different times of year. Some spirits and may not be able to cross running water so it is worth having a key on the map that represents flowing water because this will place a magical boundary around you. When we get to Skimming the Cream, for what might be our Robin Hood act, we will return to this idea all over again. Spirits of the more chthonic type, such as hellhounds, werewolves and some lake dwelling entities are also well-known for their inability to cross a flowing river. 

Find out where your drinking water comes from. Even if it’s outside your covenstead you could draw lines where it enters your covenstead. Is the rainwater in your watershed drinkable? Is there are way you could start capturing it to drink? Even if it’s only a symbolic amount you take in before certain workings? Can you return that water to the land by urinating outside sometimes, or pouring some upon the earth? It sounds terribly simple, but knowing where the water comes from that you drink, trying to get that to be the water from your Covenstead and returning your water is surprisingly tangible and powerful, especially if acknowledged by you with a prayer of thanks to your local watershed for how you literally exist inside its body. 

When we look at our region we are also seeing what is brought in from elsewhere and how permeable it is. Permeable to introduced water, introduced food (which then becomes introduced waste assuming your waste is returning to your bioregion which perhaps it is not) we see a rich system of interaction. Some of this permeability will appear to be toxic, some of it definitely is toxic, some of it has repercussions too complex to be immediately appreciated, some of it is positive. It is important to remember we don’t live inside a bubble. Whether your region is lush and untouched or an urban human habitat it is never going to be all one thing. With food in particular it would be complex beyond the needs of this course to try to map where all of that is coming from. It is useful to have some idea about though, because the more we know the more we know what land we rely on. It is of course really positive if you are able, due to the type of environment you live in and financial means to eat from your region and immediately surrounding regions as much as possible. If this is not possible small changes can be introduced, such as growing a planter of salad greens based on local soil and compost you’ve made yourself. Each small step of this sort is significant and worthy.

Even in my case where I belong to a straightforward water system and am privileged to have access to a lot of local produce, including our own, it is clear that a bioregion is still shaped more like a spider than a three mile Covenstead circle. 

A modern witch’s bioregional practice might involve sending skimmed virtue to far off farmlands suffering drought because your bread  derives from there even if you don’t. But there are layers and layers of this reality if you take it from different perspectives. For instance, the human perspective is the spider-shaped bioregion, but the pademelon perspective (pictured for those who can’t immediate visualise this furry person of the forest who is very abundant on this mountain) has changed but little, except for the occasional imported apple from the Huon Valley just behind the mountain that he might be lucky enough to acquire from a soft hearted person or two. The possums sometimes eat elm and birch that would have not been on their original menu, but beyond these impacts our presence here have a bioregion still exists from their perspective. It is defined primarily via water sources, as their bodies are made up of the mountains rainfall and spring water just like ours are. 

Long before humans created spider-shaped bioregions birds were already moving seeds around to other places. Sometimes they were even seeding fires in the case of raptors, who carry burning brands to locations to start a fire, with the purposes of flushing out game. Indigenous people also shaped the land around them using fire and engaged in trade of items over long distances. So it is sensible to think about our Covenstead as: 

Permeable to influences from outside the three mile radius line, such as the movement of waters in rivers and wind currents, as well as things moved by humans and birds.

Based around the exchange of waste water going into the ground and then brought up from air/earth into bodies, and back into the ground again.

As being human habitats when they are built on by people, rather than us being something somehow separate from nature.

As containing numerous human and non-human magical and religious layers of influences. Some of them are malignant and impacted by human activity, some of them are just malignant from a human perspective, others are upholders of something closer to a fairy godmother perspective.

They are playing host to entities of many sorts who may not view human history or human concerns from the same angle as us. It’s important right from the beginning of this work that we decentralise ourselves as Sapiens from the story. Bad things happening to Sapiens is disturbing to use because we are Sapiens, it doesn’t always mean that every tree, animal and stone is crying out for us. Or if it is, in some cases it is crying out because it’s hungry. To explore the way that good actions and good intentions can both be a danger and a support network for someone living with the spirits of water ways and the wights therein, I would like to direct you towards the story of Crooker and Derwent River. There are rivers with an appetite, but there are also vixens and hares and elderly women in green gowns along your pathways.