The Devil's Dozen: Thirteen Craft Rites of the Old One
The Devil's Dozen: Thirteen Craft Rites of the Old One
Paperback – Jan. 1 2015
by Gemma Gary (Author, Illustrator), Jane Cox (Photographer)
We present Gemma Gary’s The Devil’s Dozen as a new edition, expanded and complimented with an attentive exploration of the witch’s relationship with the Old One as initiator, empowerer and liberator in history and lore, alongside additional line imagery and photography.
The operations of magic and witchcraft deal with the hidden worlds of spirit and the powers innate within the natural world; within plant, stone and magical loci. The ‘Old One’, who in folk tradition is often named ‘The Devil’ embodies both the ‘rend in the veil’ and the spanning bridge between the worlds of the material and spiritual, the revealed and the hidden. It is through union with this entity that witches and folk magicians gained access to the powers that reside both within the hidden realms and the natural world, and could awaken the potent fire within.
In traditional folk belief, the Devil existed also as an embodiment of the chaotic forces of nature; a belief quite distinct and separate from that of the Church with its ‘Satan’ figure. To the witch, he might also represent the ‘darker’ aspects of the divine; the keeper and the revealer of the divine light, the psychopomp guide of souls, and sentinel of the threshold unto the mysteries of death and the Otherworld.
Something, it would seem, of the ‘elder divinity’ and the old ‘spirit of the wild’ has lingered through to the present; permeating regional faery lore, the calendar of ritualistic seasonal folk-customs, and traditions attached to ancient landscape features. The themes of untamed, wild nature – its freedom, its spirits, its power and its magic, so repugnant and threatening to the Church, were grafted onto the diabolical, affording yet greater preservation of the Old One for those who sought to stray from the path of limitation and conformity, and tread instead the hidden ways of the witch and magician.
About the Author
Gemma Gary is a British artist, author, and practitioner of traditional witchcraft, folk magic, and the "cunning craft". She is a co-founder of Troy Books, a trustee of the Museum of Witchcraft & Magic, and the founder of the Craft Order Kord Bucca. She is best known for her books, including Traditional Witchcraft: A Cornish Book of Ways and The Black Toad, which focus on the magical traditions of Cornwall and the West Country.
