Lee Morgan

 Taste the Forbidden History… Have you ever wondered why the stereotypical witch looks a lot like a Neanderthal? And why everybody accused witches of procuring baby fat for their work and even eating it? This book explores the truly taboo aspects of witchcraft and draws on a long history of heresies, accusations, and mob mentality. There are two forms of history when it comes to something like witchcraft - an identity sprung from an accusation- the logical one, and the mythic one. Whether traditions of witchcraft reach back into pre-Christian times is one question, but there is also another type of history, the one that lurks in images, forbidden practices, repulsions, biases, and bigotry. The one we don’t even know might exist inside ourselves as well. The history of witchcraft contains both of these things, it is its history, but it is also its mythos - the history of the stories told about us.

If you are among her number then witchcraft owned your skin before you ever knew you did. You slipped into it down the drain-pipe of a birth cord, and it had you sewn into the flesh-purse of your baby hide. Many tales have come down to us over the past few hundred years, stories of outsiders reflected in a mirror darkly. The People of the Outside is part of that history, it is among some of the deepest buried sediment to be found in caves and sifted for traces of the past. It is a history of dust. It pulls apart binaries and invites us to use our hybrid brains - every tool, from science to intuition - to untangle the elf-locks that endure as a clever-cord, an elongated witch’s ball, one that reaches all the way back to our own almost extinct ancestors. Welcome to the witchcraft of the dispossessed, from the almost until recently forgotten forebears, to eating people, and an unflinching examination of what it means to be a person of the outside.

Collective Ink Books kindly agreed to bring this little shocker of a book to the public and you can pre-order it now.

“Later he woke in a warm, dry, soft nest. He thought of it as a nest filled with furs because it most resembles one, rather than what Jaincot’s people would have called a bed. The one who carried him was there, Jaincot knew him in the half-light for what he is, not so much with his eyes though. He knew him by his smell before he could even see through his concussed vision. Or should he have said that he knew him by his salt?

He was not human.

Jaincot could not say why it mattered to him like it did. Why his veins were threaded through with electricity at the thought. There was something saline about this man’s skin, like the way skin smells when lightly coated with salt after swimming in the sea. His sweat had something tangier to it, quite unlike male sweat from among his own people. Jaincot was not able to stay conscious for long. It did not occur to him to wonder whether he was being saved or perhaps eaten. As a man who lived in his curiosity, even when it came to danger he felt the same kind of interested excitement either way. The strange man’s movements were very deliberate, almost mindful seeming, he was not in any hurry in the world. He radiated from his skin a great sense of depth and calm, as if the ancientness of his kind were his own.

He offered Jaincot a horse’s hoof modelled into a cup; it was holding a fragrant marrow broth which tastes of herbs and mushrooms and he drunk it down hungrily. Whilst he did the man held his head up as if he was not only his kindred but a most beloved brother. There was an immediate trauma-familiarity between them. Jaincot didn’t know if it was the way the light was hitting the other man’s prominent cheekbones or the shadows that gathered in his deep-set eyes that struck him with his difference the most. His colouring was not brown, it was different to anyone he’d ever seen before. His hair was of a paler copper shade that has faded to ashy, whilst his beard still possessed stronger auburn tones. His eyes were somewhere between a true grey and a very pale icy blue. They were eerily reminiscent of some wolves Jaincot had been gazed upon by, whose eyes were so grey they were almost white.”

-The Ceremony of Innocence, Lee Morgan