Favorite Haunts

Where do witches meet? In lore and legend (and perhaps even in fact) they meet at sacred wells, at fairy trees, and at stone circles—all the holy pagan sites. Even today, a visitor to the various stone circles in Cornwall—Boscawen-un or The Hurlers, for example—may find the smoldering remains of a bonfire. Is this perhaps the trace of a joyous, moonlit witches’ Sabbat?

Cornwall is full of witchy sites, as befits a land of magic: Castle Peak, the Witches’ Rock at Treen, and Zennor are some of the places most renowned for bewitchment in the British Isles.

The Basque country is also famed as a land of witchcraft, inhabited as it is by people who have been hereditary witches since the earliest times. Basque witches supposedly worshiped a god in the shape of a black-furred goat-man, and Margaret Murray saw in the Basque Sabbat a modern form of the Dionysian revels of the ancient world. Goya’s The Witches’ Sabbath (The Prado, Madrid) depicts this Basque worship of the Horned God, who is crowned with myrtle and radiates a light that engulfs his followers.

Other European witchy sites include: The Fountain of Barenton in the Forest of Broceliande, Brittany, where King Arthur’s magician Merlin is said to have fallen under the spell of Vivien, his elfin love; Glastonbury in England, which is supposed to be the Avalon of the Arthurian legends; Snowdonia Lake of Llyn Llydaw in Wales, where King Arthur’s final disappearance is said to have occurred; and Stonehenge in England, which for centuries was presumed to have been built by Merlin and has attracted occult-seekers throughout its history.

American witches tend to favor groves, beaches, mountaintops—perhaps because our prehistoric sites have not the same accretion of magic or because they are associated primarily with American Indian magical traditions, which fewer people are familiar with.

Any site where you can feel the intense presence of spirits is a good site for witchy doings. It is no accident that ancient holy places, like Delphi or Agrigento or Paestum, tend to preserve their mystery century after century. Even today, the mist that rises from the gorge in Delphi seems embodied, inspirited—as if indeed it rises from the navel of the earth.

But a wholly “natural” site may have spirits, too. Mount Whitney portal in California is one of the most inspirited places in America, even though no temple stands there. The mountain itself is a temple and the wind its priestess.

Los Angeles and New York, alas, have banished their native sprites. And the Palisades across the river from Manhattan, which harbored sprites when I was small, have been dwarfed by apartment towers. Where are all the New York witches hiding? Underground? In the subways? Or have they moved to rural Connecticut and New Jersey—the tri-state area?