"And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say." Welcome.

Welcome, idle reader or new subscriber. My name is Fey Hart, which is to say it's one of my names. Like many people who call themselves witches or magicians, or like the poet once said of cats, I have approximately three names. The other two are respectively the name I have on paperwork and the name that is my true name, entrusted to only one person besides myself. Fey is somewhere between a kink alias and what some ritualists call a craft name, but in levels of intimacy it's closer to my true name than my paperwork name. In starting this newsletter, I'm inviting you to read thoughts of mine that are highly personally expressive, often vulnerable, sometimes iconoclastic, and more authentically me than the version of myself you might unwittingly encounter on other parts of the internet.

In any case, thank you for joining me. Having reached age 35 a few months ago, what I'm preparing to write here in the coming months is a culmination or at least a byproduct of 17 years intermittently or regularly practicing kink, 21 years of spiritual questing that include the last 5 years as a sworn satanic witch, and a lifetime of mental health challenges and existential terrors. These experiences, combined with a painfully philosophical attitude, a heavily textual communication pattern, and an appreciation for the natural world's therapeutic gifts, have carried me to a point where I often have a lot I can say about what I think is wrong with the world and what I should be doing in the world — and the roles that in my opinion kink, animist ritualism, and radical compassion have to play in addressing these issues.

Lately I've found that a steady number of friends (and mere acquaintances, somehow) are inclined to solicit my thoughts about all of the above, whether in a direct form or by seeking input about all the things those topics touch, from art to sociology to economics to meat and potatoes questions like how to grow a healthy community. I love responding to each of these people individually how I can, but sometimes I have thoughts that really use a lot of words, and sometimes they arise without even being asked. As I'd like to avoid falling into damaging social media traps, and likewise to avoid using a 100% free blog where I spend hours posting material that could just as well be submitted to magazines or news columns, I'm trying the newsletter model for now. Based on discussions and crude polls, this seems like the most efficient way to broadcast my musings while still retaining an often-lost human element.

Now, despite all of the above, I need to offer some disclaimers before I get into a real overview of what's going to get posted here.

• As I've also written on the About page: I am not a professor, doctor, therapist, scientist, or lawyer, and my writings are merely positioned as non-fiction reflections, not as academic papers or deliberate professional advice. My expertise is in prose, philosophy, linguistics, art, personal religious practice and experience, and lifestyle kink. However, most evidence-requiring assertions have been researched to the best of my ability; and this publication will never engage in influencer-style partnerships, sell tie-in merchandise, or advertise psychic/healer services.
• Another way of saying all that: unlike some other people who publish regularly about anything I'm going to cover here (and who are in some cases fine, i.e. this isn't a targeted complaint), I consider myself a student much more than a teacher. I intend to actively structure and phrase my posts in ways that avoid giving "lessons" or "strap in for a wild ride" content.
• Just to really, really stress the important parts: this is not a self help guide, this is not a doctrine for kink or witchcraft, I'm selling nothing besides words, I'm not (yet) an established homesteader or traditional artisan or similar.
• This is also not a politically oriented publication insofar as I suspect I won't usually feature language or topics that transparently discuss a specific political subject or whatever current event is dominating the 24 hour news cycle.
• However, to be entirely clear from the very beginning, I do consider most of the things I talk about here to have crucial political implications, and I won't remotely hide the fact that my interpretation of the Left Hand Path in rite is wedded to leftist politics. It's difficult to hang a single all-encompassing label on my flavor of leftism, but after many evolutions and experimentations it's probably a nexus of anarchocommunism/communalism, syndicalism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-globalization, anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism, anti-industrialism, support for indigenous sovereignty and re-indigenization, queer liberationism, post-gender theory, and a mindset I've personally dubbed "deep dark ecology."

If all of this sounds acceptable, then here's my true introduction to Salt for the Eclipse.

Witchcraft

This newsletter is partly about meditations I have as a satanic witch — a phrase meant to describe the fact that I perform various activities associated with historical or contemporary concepts of witchcraft, and that unlike some witches, I don't repudiate the notion of the Devil as my patron deity, but rather embrace it. I embrace it (or, as the Devil is expressed for me, him) specifically for anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment significance. I'm not in the Church of Satan, Satanic Temple, or any other organization like that. I have no interest in joining.

Besides the satanic aspect and a lot of ceremonial magic principles that derive (for better or worse) from the Western esoteric tradition, my rites also carry heavy Celtic reconstructionist and Germanic heathen influences. These cultural aspects are due to personal heritage and ancestor reclamation, not due to any belief in those groups' superiority; rather, I believe in compassionately but vocally resisting colonialist trends in paganism and occultism, and I sharply reject the kind of fascist ideology that sometimes rears its head therein — most visibly in heathenry, but not exclusively.

All of my rites are self-designed, and they're initiatory in the sense that I won't share certain information about them. My owner (more about that word in a moment) and I are the only practitioners, and he has played his own role in shaping what rites are like. We have no interest in getting anyone else to join in. But for introductory purposes, it's worth knowing we have a special cosmology, our practices include elements of sex magic and sacred BDSM, and we are constantly figuring out new ways of committing further to what we do.

In my personal case, I find my calling as a witch has led me to magic through art (writing especially but also theatre, music, and traditional visual media), divination (chiefly through astrology and tarot, in iconoclastic ways), hedgecraft (through gardening, learning plant lore overall, cooking, and hopefully foraging one day), and solar/lunar/astral veneration. I also think that death work is in my future; I'd like to do more to help people prepare for death, whether their own or others'. And above all, my witchcraft is apocalyptic, which is a concept I'll be discussing here extensively in the future.

Kink

To touch briefly on my kink life as suggested earlier, it's worth knowing as we begin this journey together that I'm rebellious, primal, but ultimately submissive to a sadistic, sensual, equally primal, dominant owner, and we're married. I'm his lifelong pet, though his ownership comes with substantial freedoms, flexibility, and firm mutual limits. I summarize my kink ethics as ECRA (Empathic, Consensual, Risk-Aware) and "your kink is not 'okay' and neither is mine" (meaning a kink itself is neither good nor bad, its moral value being only conferred by how well its practitioners follow ECRA).

I also think ethical kink necessarily requires far-left politics and vice versa, including but not limited to a foundation in queer sexuality. Kink communities would not exist without queers; queers cannot deny that kink is part of our lifeblood. And it's vital to create healthy models of binary woman/man relationships, because those are possible and necessary; but it's just as vital to dismantle the notions of "heterosexuality" or "straightness" as ideological reference points.

Lastly regarding kink, I am including material about it in this newsletter because it's a foundational tenet of mine that an understanding of kink is vital to ritual practice and to improving our society. As to why this is the case, you'll have to read future posts.

Where I live

The topic of land must be addressed as follows: I am first and foremost the descendent of settlers on occupied land, and thus a settler myself. To preserve some privacy, it's probably wisest for me to not name exactly which tribe it is whose unceded land I inhabit, but I do know which tribe, and it's at least worth being clear that I live on a fairly far-eastern stretch of Turtle Island, under United States government control, with my house in a rural community sitting at relatively easy driving distance from both the Atlantic seacoast and the foothills of the northern Appalachians. I've benefited from generational wealth in being able to buy a house, even though beyond this we only barely have the income to take care of it or tend the small surrounding plot. I also feel extreme gratitude for not only escaping the renter's cycle but for never becoming unhoused — while simultaneously I find myself in the second-plus-generation settler's paradox of not really owning the land where I live and not having grown up on the land which is my real ancestral birthright.

Landlessness is a supreme example of traumatic violation. This violation is worst and most important to address among the people whose land has been most recently stolen; in other words, I would never pretend that my paradox holds a candle to the repugnant experiences that living indigenous people and their ancestors have regularly endured. The form of colonization that's affected my own psychology is a potent but much older wound that's had far more time to turn its victims into violators themselves. However, at some point I internalized the principle that in order to aid decolonization efforts both locally and worldwide, it's important to do work that heals the old wound in my ancestral background. This old wound is the ideological and economic divorce from commonly held land and from an animist awareness of that land.

As long as current financial factors demand that I live where I do, I therefore consider it both an obligation and a balm to connect with my immediate natural surroundings for the threefold goal of self-healing, learning areas in which local indigenous populations need direct support, and advocating for environmental protections even when indigenous voices aren't present to do so. To accomplish that connection, as mentioned earlier I'm an inexpert but stubborn student of gardening, foraging, botany in general, and everything you can do with the plants in question. My owner and I would also like to hunt and fish, but besides his existing fishing knowledge we haven't yet progressed beyond acquiring firearms licenses.

Why salt, and for what eclipse?

I'm writing here not just for healing but for fortification, and sometimes conversely for destruction. Salt is a vital nutrient and in various traditions it's associated with protection. At the same time, in earth where salt is laid, nothing grows. We need salt to live, and yet it sterilizes. I think salt is beautiful, delicious, and fascinating, but it carries the mystery of how many things which humanity has harnessed for great goodness and prosperity are also things that can be our undoing. The dose makes the poison, as they say. And sometimes even poison isn't a taboo evil, but a necessity.

Writing here, I mean to contribute toward the healing of not only my ancient generational trauma but many of my personal mental health woes. I also mean to destroy and purge things which are no longer useful to me. It's especially important for me to do this in a newsletter instead of on the landscape of (perhaps collapsing) social media, which at this point I've decided is an entertaining parasocial diversion on good days but has often been a source of damaging misdirection not only for communities but for myself. Performative politics, performative kink (see: the worst excesses of FetLife), performative rite (see: instatumblr-style consumerist witchery). I'm not quitting all social media, because there are very specific contexts where it's useful, but my most significant thoughts and discussions belong here, not there.

That's all the salt. As for the eclipse, the eclipse is many things. Here are just a few.

• The eclipse is the ultimate sacred mystery, the wedding of sun and moon.
• The eclipse is the most liminal of liminal states, a space wherein magic is most profound, a mindset toward which all ritual should strive.
• The eclipse is the most primeval expression of human fear, as everything we understand about our conscious awareness comes apart at the seams.
• The eclipse is the Sol Niger or Black Sun, a critical but harrowing alchemical process.
• The eclipse is the eating of the sun. Ragnarök. Apocalypse. The end of it all.

I believe that to endure my own personal eclipses, and to endure the ongoing great eclipse — which has gradually threatened to destroy us all since the capitalist-industrial age began, and whose outcome will be violently transformative even if many of us survive it — we're going to need a great deal of salt. I would like this writing to be some of that salt.

All told, I want this newsletter to feel as much as possible like the devotional, primordial spaces my mind increasingly occupies for close to half of any given day. I think it's the same kind of feeling that people are often trying to approximate with something like Catholic cottagecore blogs, only for better or worse I'm hoping to decolonize and decommodify such material. If nuns are brides of Christ, then let me find and write about all the tasks and revelations that befit the Devil's bride. Noting, of course, that the Devil's gender is whatever you need it to be, and so is the bride's.

Planning ahead

Given just how many things I can expect to cover here, I'm going to try publishing once a week, every Friday morning or however much later than that it takes me to finish something. Topics are going to rotate between a very loose set of categories I have in mind. Some posts will be narrow in scope, sharing a tidbit that I think is interesting, or a brief but specific realization. Others will be very broad, either touching on a lot of different things at once or dealing in mystic abstractions.

Despite the fact that some people encouraging me to start this newsletter have exhorted me to make walls of text as much as I like, I'm also going to try and make most posts shorter than this first one. Until I have enough paid subscribers to not only break even on site costs but to get effectively paid a respectable rate per hour spent, I can't afford to write something this long every week. However, I'm certain it will still be short only by what a few individuals would call "Fey standards."

Speaking of paid subscribers, here is the part I don't like talking about but need to. One other reason I'm publishing an only-mostly-free newsletter is that if writing is my calling, then for even the slightest hope of getting to make a living from my calling and not from labor that burns me out, I must do myself the favor of getting paid for anything I write, whenever possible. If you subscribe, please give some serious consideration to the paid tiers that are available. You can have a substantially fuller experience of my writing (and of talking together in comments!) by paying just $1/month, and then the other tiers aren't that expensive if you're making more than I am.

That's just about everything I can think to put in an introductory missive, except to give some thanks to the people who got me to this point. Above all, I thank my beloved owner, whom I may eventually refer to by name but I've been debating which name to use. Then I thank members of the local ritualist kinkster group I've been nurturing in its fledgling stages for a couple of years, and I'll likewise thank my other kinky friends who gave me this big push, plus my Mastodon friends/followers. I will also thank the pagan discussion group I belonged to in college for several years, and several of my friends from that time, especially Rebecca Beyer, who is now a witch of Appalachia and a major inspiration for my forays into foraging, ethnobotany, and science-conscious herbalism. And to wrap up listing the people I know personally, I thank my excellent therapist.

Besides these individuals, I'd also like to credit the influence of various people known only at a distance, or of broader entities. As mentioned already but as I'll reiterate, I must acknowledge the local indigenous tribespeople on whose land I currently write, and the sublime and terrifying beauty of that land and the wider earth, including certain lands I've visited like my ancestral Britain, and more recently Iceland. I thank the organization White Awake's fantastic "Roots Deeper Than Whiteness" course in decolonization and anti-racism. I thank the many documented and unfortunately less-documented shapers of contemporary pagan/occult thought, kink theory/practice, and solidarity-based labor and social activism. I thank the essay "Rewilding Witchcraft" by Peter Grey, the cinematic work of Robert Eggers (among others), the literature of Ursula K. Le Guin (among others), and the music of many incredible composers in sacred, folk, and metal modes.

I thank the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, to which my owner and I bore witness, and in whose aftermath we dedicated ourselves to what it is we now do.

And I thank you, for making it through this first post, all the way to the end. Let's see how long the coming road is, and where it leads.

"You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say." — Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings