It is with reason that we call what we do “the Craft.”
It is working in patterns handed down to us from those who have gone
before. In earlier times people, especially women, spent huge amounts
of time in working with fiber. The difference between a civilized people
and barbarians, in many places and times, was that the civilized people
wore woven cloth; the barbarians only tanned leather. As late as Alexander
of Macedon, in the flowering of Greece, the Macedonians were scorned
because of their barbarity: within memory of living men, their grandfathers
had worn only sheepskins against the cold. Only the nobles wore cloaks;
it showed who you were, if you could afford woven goods.
Civilization means leisure; it also means activities to
eat up that leisure. In agricultural areas, much thread was spun and
cloth was woven at home; the family that had an unmarried sister or
aunt, who could therefore devote more of her time to spinning rather
than tending children and husband, was better off and wore better clothing
due to her energies. To this day “spinster” is a legal term
denoting an unmarried woman. In urban areas, clothmaking tended to be
done by guilds, or by slaves, depending upon place and time. There are
frescos extant showing Egyptian slaves at work together in a house,
clearly a place of manufacture of cloth. The women spun; the men wove
on primitive warp-weighted looms. By contrast, in more agricultural
economies, a household manufactured its own; the women wove and every
spare pair of hands, including the boy watching the sheep, spun at all
spare times. There are painted Attic vases to be seen in museums to
this day, depicting women in brothels. The woman is shown either spinning
while awaiting customers or having set aside her wool basket--clearly
visible under her stool--while smiling and drinking with a client. It
is unclear whether this detail is painted because it was very common
for an owner to get “double duty” from his slaves--as spinners
and hetairas--or whether it is because, in the highly gender-segregated
city-states of Greece, there was sexual allure in even the trappings
of femininity, which of course included the wool and spindle. Helen,
the face that launched a thousand ships, the excuse for the Trojan War,
was queen in her right, not just by marriage to Menelaus or her subsequent
liaison with Paris, Prince of Troy. One of her wedding gifts was a golden
spindle. Even a queen, it seems, would spin, though her tools would
be of the finest material available.
Sometimes, though, the expectations clashed. When Alexander
of Macedon was fighting Darius, King of the Persian Empire, and had
captured Darius’ mother, wife, young son and ladies of the harem,
he set the ladies up in their own pavilion with servants to wait on
them, put a guard around them to see that they were undisturbed and
unraped, and did not even kill the son and heir as was expected by everyone
as a normal act of war. However, he initially offended the ladies gravely
by sending them a packet of colored wools (expensive goods) and cloth
to embroider. He was concerned for their comfort; he had thought it
would give them a pastime and his own mother and sister (Queen Olympia
and Princess Kleopatra) did such work; but to the overbred Persians,
such work was only for slaves, not for gentlewomen. So far had civilization
come. When the people forget how to work with their hands, they are
very close to death. We must never forget our Mother; never forget that
we are closest to the Divine Creator when we ourselves are creating.
Fibercraft and magic of various types have a long history
together. The Greeks spoke of the Three Fates: Niobe who spun the thread,
Clothe who measured it, and Atropos who cut it off. This thread was
the measure of a human life, and every one of us has a thread belonging
to that person alone. In the Odyssey, Penelope wove by day and unraveled
by night, so that she would never be finished and therefore, by the
terms of her bargain, could not be compelled to remarry. (Odysseus did
come home after twenty years, justifying her fidelity. There are those
who say that this story demonstrates that Penelope was the ruler, and
he the king only by courtesy, being her husband; that was why the suitors
demanded she choose another year-king or corn-king.)
In many cultures, a sympathetic magic is practiced by
ensuring that a woman in labor has nothing tied, knotted or braided
about her, even her hair. The idea is that the womb should loosen easily
and allow the baby free exit, not stay tightly knotted and tied-up.
Poppets of various types have been used in a variety of situations,
for both good– and ill-wishing. In some places, if a girl or woman
thinks of her beloved while combing out and then doing up her hair,
she will bind his heart to her.
Navajo rug weavers are known for making a bit of the pattern
apparently unfinished or broken. This is so the spirit of the weaver,
or of the viewer, will not remain trapped in the pattern. The Amish
make cloth dolls with no faces for their little girls, in obedience
to the command against making graven images.
Modern fiction also has the themes of fibercraft and magic
intertwined. Barbara Michael’s Stitches in Time features
an antique American quilt, circa antebellum South, which appears to
be a picture block quilt, with embroideries of a woman riding, bouquets
of flowers, a little summerhouse, and so on. Upon closer inspection,
it turns out there is something subtly wrong with each and every picture:
the bride is blind behind her veil; the riding woman’s horse is
about to shy at a venomous snake under its hooves; the gorgeous rose
has a nasty little green worm at its heart, and so on. Foreign materials
were also inside the quilt: fingernails, bits of vegetation, and a strand
of a woman’s hair. The story turned out to be that the young woman
who made the wedding quilt was a slave, albeit a valuable one, and the
skilled seamstress had been forced to do this fine work for her lover’s
new wife-to-be. Therefore, out of her powerlessness to affect the outcome
in any other way, she ill-wished the master’s bride over the many,
many months that such a project would have taken. Apparently the ill-wish
worked in the story; the wife died young, in childbirth, but the seamstress
also died untimely, even before having seen the result of her painstakingly
worked curse.
As well as being interwoven in terms of working, fibercrafts
and magic require many of the same disciplines and attitudes. When one
sets out to make a piece, one usually has some idea of where one wants
to end up, and some idea of the tools and materials one has to work
with. So far, so good. However, the actual working of the piece changes
according to the work of the fiber, the mood of the moment, and the
leading of the Spirit. So with magic; where you end up is not necessarily
where you planned to go. Or to put it another way, when you open yourself
to the Divine, you must be prepared to journey where you are led.
The working of the fiber is particularly suited to working
magic. Repetitive motions, meditation in motion so-to-speak; if you
grudge the stitches, you will not end up with what you planned, or probably,
anything worth having. The emotion shapes the piece, and the piece shapes
the mind as well. Taking pains in the work, putting one’s energy
into it, makes a tremendous difference in the results of the work. A
part of oneself, energy from the individual as well as that generated
by the process, is inextricably woven into the work. A worked piece
is identifiable as that person’s work; magic has the flavor of
the one who worked it as well.
Fibercrafts have very practical applications to magic.
Amulet bags, herb bags, dream pillows, altar cloths, veils, charms,
poppets, rosaries, cloaks, robes, tarot bags, crystal wraps, talismans,
cords, garters, sheaths for the athamé or sword, tabard, banners,
mats, baskets large and small–many others will doubtless spring
to mind for you. Of course, the more time something takes, the more
energy of yourself you have put into it, the more potent your magic
will be. It is for this reason that I have begun with raw wool. I did
not grow the wool myself (or rather, cultivate the sheep), but I have
taken it from the first step after shearing.
I bought this wool with money earned by my own hard work
(bought before I married). I washed this wool. I combed it. I doffed
the rolags. I fluffed it. I am spinning it. I may then ply it. Then
I shall weave, crochet or knit it into a coherent item, to be used for
a magical purpose. At every step, my hands, my energy, are involved
with the material. It is very personal to ME; it is full of power and
essence channeled through me. It is a natural material, partaking of
the essence of the Creator, the earth, the elements, and the animal
that grew it.
In “The Sick Rose,” a fascinating little story
by Dorothy J. Heydt, published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword
and Sorceress XV, a young Hebrew woman is simarly cursed by the
gift of a special wedding dress. The story is set in indeterminate times,
but Greece and Carthage are still powers in the Mediterranean. “The
package contained a long gown made of fine linen, ornamented at neck
and hems. Little figures of plants and birds and animals had been cut
out of cloth of different colors, stitched into place and embroidered
to give detail. From far off there seemed to be a wreath of flowers,
and close up a line of dancing creatures running around the wearers’
neck.” The dress is also decorated with cheerful birds, and a
large rose in the center of the bodice. When the spell is suspected,
Cynthia orders that the gown be taken apart, picking out every stitch,
saving every thread, to find out what’s wrong. They do not burn
it, fearing that it might “set” the spell, like baking bread
or kilning a brick. They find many things: a bunch of blue flowers appliquéd
and embroidered conceals a small coil of hair, taken from the young
bride-to-be herself; a bird, made of red fabric, its bright eye a tiny
bead of glass, its raised wing a separate piece of cloth stitched against
the body, conceals an embroidered arrow pointing at the bird’s
heart, the point a small thorn, held in place by stitches as fine as
eyelashes. They find weapons in stichery, crumbled bits of herbs that
no one can identify, but which no doubt were poisonous; an image of
a fish, perky and bright-scaled, with another image beneath it, of a
Punic fish-god named Dagon, an old enemy of the God of Abraham. And
there is a basket full of fruit, bunches of grapes, rosy apples, crisp
melons. The images underneath are of animals: a crab, a pig, a rabbit--all
unclean animals under Mosaic law, and a pious Jew might prefer to die
rather than eat them.
"When they have found all there is to find, this
is what they do: “The gown came apart and went back together,
resewn with new needles and clean thread. Healing herbs from Cynthia’s
supplies went in where the poisons had come out: centaury against
fever and valerian against pain, wild lettuce to bring on sleep and
woad to stop bleeding; even cyclamen that aided in childbirth and
orache that brought on the milk, in the hope they would be needed.
Sheep and goats and sleek-feathered birds hid under the fruit basket,
and under the fish where the Punic god had been, Bethaniah had painstakingly
copied four angular Hebrew letters taken from one of Sarah’s
books.
The big central rose they had taken apart petal by
petal, finding little worms and beetles and a thick wad of leaves
that Cynthia recognized as foxglove: a medicine for an ailing heart,
but dangerous for a sound one. They puzzled over what to put in its
place, till Cynthia said, ‘Oh crows take it, sometimes the best
symbol is the thing itself,’ and they plumped out the flower
with dried rose petals, still fragrant after months or years in the
jar.”
Cynthia says, “What’s needlework to a man,
anyway? He buys it, or his wife or mother makes it for him, and he puts
it on and wears it. He wouldn’t think of the hours that went into
every garment, one stitch after another, and so little to take up her
attention while she sits stiching, so that her mind turns to dwell on
what she loves or what she hates, stitching her love or her hate into
every line….”
When I knit, or sew, or crochet, or especially, spin;
I feel myself connected to all those who have gone before. Both in the
sense of my hands knowing what to do because the patterns are bred in
after all the generations who have needed to do this work in order to
live, and in the sense of the spirits of all those ancestors, looking
approvingly at me. I hope I am not too unworthy a successor, both in
the work of my hands and as a practitioner of magic.