Chapter 5: When the hurlyburly 's done, when the battle 's lost and won.

This blog started on Tumblr; it took me eight months and several people I had to block to realise that that was not a good idea. It may have taken me less than that (perhaps five months? I am considerably slow, after all), except that so many things happened in my life - I went to New York, I saw Hillary Clinton, I got into watching Riverdale - that I wasn’t left with any time to think about my disgraceful Tumblr experience. "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once," according to one of the many quotes I learned out of context from the chapter headings of "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants": things have happened, forcing time to move inexorably forward, bringing me to this place and this moment and this post. Which is not about Time at all, it's about Halloween

I love Halloween. I have loved Halloween since I was a tiny little girl in a tiny little town in southern Italy. Almost no one apart from me and my then best friend celebrated Halloween, which I suppose made us all the more eager to go really over the top with it. I remember a year in particular when we organised a sort of treasure hunt around her garden and I was dressed as the ghost of Cleopatra. I cannot remember what the costume consisted of exactly: in my mind's eye I can only see myself as a miniature version of Elizabeth Taylor in "Antony and Cleopatra"' which says something about my self-esteem even as a young 9-years-old bud. Ghosts were never my thing, however. Neither were vampires, whose very thought of scared me out of my wits until I turned 12 and Edward Cullen stole my heart. Zombies I just finds gross.

It is witchcraft that I have always had a soft spot for. I don't know how it started - I have wanted to be a witch for as long as I can remember. But I do know the reason why it must have started, and why it went on and on and on, and that reason is my mum. I remember watching "Charmed" with her when I was little and then running off to craft my own Book of Shadows with my friends (I was always Piper, the eldest sister, as I enjoyed being the mature spiritual guide of our Wiccan experiments). And of course there was "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", there was "Halloween Town" and "Hocus Pocus" and "Bewitched" and there was Willow from Buffy ... In short, I grew up among witches. Scratch that: I was raised by witches.

Here we come, at last, to the point of this post, a point I had no idea existed until I got here. And the point is, Halloween is about so much more than sweets and putting on slutty witch clothes and carving a pumpkin (although I immensely enjoy all of these things). Halloween, for me, is about celebrating witchcraft, and witchcraft is about the bonds of female friendship, of sisterhood and camaraderie and a world that white straight privileged men will never be allowed to see, understand, dominate. I look back to the ghosts of Halloweens past and I see my mum, my sister, our friends, coming together to celebrate this secret world whose existence we are too often oblivious to. And I wonder, what if we were not so oblivious anymore? What if women acknowledged the strength of this sisterhood and used it to empower each other's voice, to believe in each other's voice?

I see now that what was intended as a post on Halloween has turned into a feminist call to arms, almost without my knowledge. Maybe I have been possessed, or maybe it's just my witch upbringing having the better of my consciousness at last. Either way, I am not complaining.

Witchy love,

Raf xx

#witches #witchcraft #rebellion #feminism #sisterhood