Warday

I have been a witch since I was ten years old. My mom was a witch, and her mom before her, all the way back, but I went to Ohio State and N Y U , where I got an M.S. in clinical psychology. I am a Jungian analyst, with a strong Wiccan override. Prewar, my kind of practice would have been on the periphery of society, but things have changed so much that people are flocking to us witches now, primarily for healing and midwifery. I am a good herbalist, and I really can accomplish a lot with my medicants. And herbs can give you the kind of dramatic cure that an antibiotic can achieve—if you can get an antibiotic.

My practice as a witch is also my faith. I follow the old pre-Christian religion. We worship the Earth as a Goddess, and Her male manifestation, the Horned God. Our emphasis on ecstatic union with the planet has accounted for the postwar growth of the Wiccan movement. As most Wiccans tend to be antihierarchical, we also feel comfortable with the Destructuralists—more than one witch is also a Destructuralist.

We work from our own homegrown rituals. Many covens follow various public traditions, such as the Adlerian method started by Margot Adler in ’88, and the older Starhawk method. I am a “fam-trad” witch in that my craft comes from an old tradition in my own family. To join one of my covens requires a two-year apprenticeship. Right now we have four trainees for Rosewood—all we can take at one time—and a waiting list of sixty.

Our lives are hard and our hours are long. Twenty-hour days are not unusual. Take the day before yesterday. Here’s how it went:

3:55 A.M. My assistant, Kathy Geiger, wakes me up. Betty Cotton has come to term. Kathy has already gone to the Cottons’ house and examined Betty. She is nearly fully dilated. I grab my instrument and herb cases and we are on our way. We’ve just bought a new Chrysler vanagon, so it’s no longer necessary to go pedaling through the streets of Cleveland on a bike. For the past year, Cleveland has had a good fuel supply. Gas is twenty cents a gallon here, which is certainly higher than you’d like, but we manage.

I find Betty and her husbands managing her contractions very well. I use a modified Lamaze technique. These are very special people, in that they are totally radiation-free. Betty is one of the few people in the United States who had a bomb shelter, and she remained in it for a month after Warday, so even though Cleveland got a dusting from the Dakota strikes, she was not affected. Both of her husbands are from the deep South, Mike from Gulfport and Teddy from Savannah, so they are clean too. The chances of a mutant are very small. Betty also owns a geiger counter, which she uses to clean up hot spots in her immediate environment. This is her sixth child, so things are pretty well organized around here.

The whole family is participating. The twins are boiling water, the middle kids minding the youngest, and the oldest daughter, Tabitha, is playing soothing music on her guitar. A good scene, and they get a boy of five pounds eleven ounces, healthy and strong.

All I do is bathe him and get him breathing and give him to Betty and give her a cup of raspberry leaf and borage flower tea to promote lactation. Then I take off to grab some more sleep after making sure that we aren’t going to have any hemorrhage, that nobody’s got fever, and Betty’s blood pressure is good. Betty Cotton—matriarch to a family of six kids and two husbands. I wish I had more as strong and happy as that bunch.

6:50 A.M. I wake up again and eat a bowl of boiled oats and drink some ground ivy and wild mint tea. My office is already full.