To do what we like to call hedge-partnering with someone is to become a pathway through which their True Desire manifests in this world. Witches can have more than one hedge-partner, in well developed covens they often do. Not all hedge-partners are sexual relationships. To be in such a partnership with another witch is the most benevolent magical arrangement possible. It ought to emerge from a deep commitment to each other’s Wholeness and general human wellbeing. For a better grip on what that sort of beneficent regard might look like we need only think upon the nature of the fetch mate relationship. What would that look like if we tried to filter some of that regard into our human life?
The fetch mate is the ultimate relationship of the Bower, the innermost sanctum of sacred connection. If you found a way to profane that connection it would be a grave thing indeed.
It is hard to conjure up a hedge partner if one hasn’t yet had the love of a fetch mate modelled for us. Many of us in the English speaking world don’t know what such a commitment to another person would even look like. The fetch mate bond is a magical improving relationship, one that plays a part in showing us how to do things that our upbringing likely didn’t teach us. We don’t talk much these days about the so called improving-friendship which was much discussed in the Victorian Age, the kind where both parties experience a strong motivation to grow, that was set off by contact with the other, but we need to revive this term. Without this element of rigour in friendship, this expectation of an alchemic process involving the pair of you, it is hard to explain, or recognise the primary characteristics of the love between fetch mates, and therefore between hedge partners.
This kind of love sees our hidden underbelly and our daily human foibles, but also keeps in mind to honour the divinity that we are becoming, which is another part of the true face of our Desire, ebbing and flowing in and out of that person through a day and a night. A hedge partner is also the person least afraid to tell us when we are selling ourselves short or are off our path.
There is a great deal of necessary mystery about this bond and some of the lore around it is usually kept private in initiatory traditions, as it hits close to the roots and the guts of all things witch. But outside of lore, what my people observe based on collective notes taken over decades, is that fetch mates, and therefore hedge partners, exhibit a kind of harmony of sameness and difference. They hold things in common with each other that almost no one else ever has, making us feel seen and recognised, whilst at the same time they have productively opposite features that are ‘growth areas’ for the other partner. They comfort us that we are not alone, whilst challenging us to join them when our weak muscles are their strength area. We also challenging them where our muscles are strongest, and they are the one standing at their own growing edge.
The key to learning how to successfully hedge partner is a hedge riding experience in itself. You are inviting or being invited into an Oasis with this person, but there will still be aspects of the Marketplace needing to be transmuted through sexual play and other ritual methods that allow for playful confrontation with opposing energies. Learning to pretend together is a great step at bringing the energies of the childhood to the fore, the time where most of us originally got hurt in our body image and sexual selves.
You must try to offer them something inspired by the purity of a fetch mate’s intention, but with the knowledge that they won’t act like your fetch mate. The hedge-partner, like the fetch mate, is chosen because they have enough things in common that deep magical understanding is possible between you, yet it will be almost certain that the things at variance will be more pronounced than with your fetch mate. This is because we meet them in a world that is The Binder’s world, things of too greater harmony, and not enough push and pull, are in danger in this world. So you are meeting a person with associated scale armour.
It is said in witchcraft folklore that I have received that fetch mates can never live together in this world in two human bodies, lest one of the other of them is destroyed.
Ultimately however, the aim of the working partnership is to eventually manifest the closest thing living humans can to a state of equilibrium between harmony and creative difference. Think of it like if difference were DNA the fetch mates are like a siblings – carrying both similar and different coding. The right kind of hedge wife/husband/partner for you would be more like a magical cousin, someone who shares even less in common with you again but is still kin. Over time you’ll realise that both connections are their own form of necessity. The ways in which your hedge-partner sometimes put sand inside your oyster shell is vitally important to creating the pearl of your Wholeness.
If one wishes to manifest the Bower state, something like the Rose Queen’s vision of Paradise, something knitted together by greatness-in-relationship, one must learn how to protect it, make a viable space for it, be brave in extending yourself towards it, all of this long before the time is on hand, because such things will not go unopposed in this world. Really though, this opposition isn’t a mistake, it is part of the point, and you will fare better if you set out not resisting this friction from the start.
I have decided to give this disparate collection of ideas for working partnerships and adjustments for other circumstances all together here in a kind of sacred grab-bag of things from lived experience:
-If you are in a sexual connection where it’s appropriate you could try not only playing with submission and domination, but playing with perspective as well. Invite the bottom partner to experiment with seeing this act as a cosmic surrender and service of the other, and then later to change their view of it to that they themselves are being served by the top, even whilst performing the same act. When ready swap to the other role and repeat the process. This is very powerful and should be done not just with sex but other activities as well. The over-culture tends to see the person serving food to company – for instance- as performing a menial role that places them beneath the other, whereas in my culture it is seen as a sign of possessing the means and the power to cultivate a community. Swapping how you see an act from dominant to submissive and back again, without any greater or lesser value being given to these two qualities, is a great strengthener of your ability to change and grow and not get stuck.
-You can do the mirror magic practice where you invite the fetch mate to enter your reflection and try to see yourself through their eyes with a working partner. They do not have to be a sexual partner, but be prepared for the fact that if it works it could deepen the feelings in that friendship, especially if regularly repeated. Such things can pave the way for vesseling in possession.
-Circulate Witch Fire between your bodies, passing it from forehead to forehead and then settling on sharing the bounty. This fire that results is more than the sum of its parts.
-If you are working with a fetch mate rather than a living partner, think about ways you can build bridges to make them more reddened, physically present, and yourself more tangible in their world. Vessels need to be created on both sides for this to happen. You will need to build a meeting place on the edges of your world and theirs. Creating physical expressions of them in this world is also powerful but remember they will need to do the same with you. A dedicated phallus belonging to that entity, or a suitable vessel with an opening allows you to create a liminal organ of theirs over time that build up a lot of power because they are regularly feed with sexual power. These things have been known to take on a life of their own, rolling and moving inexplicably, or appearing to grip or thrust. Treat this vessel as just as sacred as their spirit urn. You can even give offerings to it, though the most important offering is your sexual adoration.
-If you would like to prepare a space in your life for a hedge partner, or two, to one day settle into here are some approaches. To begin with do the work on yourself to create the qualities at home first. I think it’s best to be open to either a healthy senior or junior role, or one of both if you’re into that. Consider your motivations in wanting a working partner during this and start with what you have to give.
The best partners to be with are people who are already experiencing a strong relationship with their fetch mate, but remember, patience is often rewarded. The reason why this connection to the fetch mate matters is that the immaculate quality required for a Bower relationship has been modelled for them. Modern relationship parlance teaches us to look for the qualities we want a person to have, when instead we would be best placed magically to think about what sort of feelings and experiences we would like to have in that relationship, and remain as open as possible about what ‘type’ of person could provide them.
Another important thing the standard dating scene doesn’t seem to exactly encourage is thinking about what you’d like to bring to this relationshiop.
The essence of the hedge partnership is reciprocity, so I’m not suggesting some state of selflessness, one where you’re likely to get taken advantage of by a narcissist, just a blurring of the edges around ‘type’. This allows for your wish, when you start casting your magical net for this outome, to be easier to grant. Feelings are nebulous enough to congeal into fleshly experiences a lot more easily than forms… We could wait our whole lives bitterly bemoaning the absense of the FORM we wanted for a working partner, when the FEELING we hoped to experience could have been available, hidden in plain sight, before our eyes the whole time.
Ecstatic vesseling experiences can happen very easily with hedge-partners. This may also happen with certain big spirits like The Rose Queen, a possibility that opens up many therapeutic options. As we become more sensitive to sensing all the different shades of a person, the red and black serpents, matters of heat and cold, active and receptive, and most importantly which ones are active growing edges, we will often sense what sort of opposing/balancing power our working partner needs to come up against. Sometimes we cannot deliver that ourselves, we might even be in too similar a predicament ourselves. Luckily at such moments we can put out a call to certain spirits or gods we work with to work through us.