Peter Grey > Quotes

“Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed,
the powerless, the hungry and the abused.
It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees.
It wears the rough skin of beasts.
It turns on a civilization that knows the
price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“It’s all blood and roses from here on in. As witches, we should prepare to fly on the wings of the storm.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Our elders have failed us, they have not provided leadership, they have not provided counsel, they have been silent and compliant in the face of power. They have said nothing on fracking, climate collapse, the extinction crisis and done even less. The old have, for the most part, betrayed the young. This is as true of witchcraft as it is of our wider culture. It is therefore down to us as individuals to take our lead from the only source of initiation, living spirit, and through it embody the new witchcraft. We must become a witchcraft with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose, of responsibility to the land which is in crisis, or we are nothing more than consumers of the earth which will all too soon eat of us. Those who do not feel the imperative to act on this information demonstrate that they are not orientated, that is, they have no connection to the land and its denizens. Their magic is little more than a cerebral construct, and without being embodied is meaningless.”
― Peter Grey

“Our aim is to become as receptive as the moon, in order that we contain all the reflected solar fire and pour it out as libation, or curses. We listen. We observe. We absorb. We master silence and stillness, stealth. We are able to become ceaseless and undiminished in our giving. It is we who light, tend and extinguish the hearth fires. Fire flows through us and it is we who endure.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Here is my prophecy. Witchcraft is going to get both aroused and angrier. Nature will rise. We are not only coming for your children, we are your children and all those who will inherit the ruins of the world. Welcome to the Apocalypse. This is the moment when we realise that the climate is broken. It's all blood and roses from here on in. As witches we should prepare to fly on the wings of the storm.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Yet above all these hangs the moon as our proof, between our legs runs honey and blood. She teaches us in dreams.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“There is no sentimentality here. We need dirt under our nails and smoke stiffening our hair. We need salt drying on our chests, and bramble snagged calves. We must dedicate ourselves to forty days in the wilderness rather than our five minutes of fame. Magic must become more savage if it is to have any meaning in the world, any power. Myths are not to be draped about poetry, they come from the very substance of the earth, this is the mask we must wear. Be fierce from this understanding taking root.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Witchcraft is part of a living web of species and relationships, a world which we have forgotten to observe, understand or inhabit. Many people reading this paragraph will not know even the current phase of the moon, and if asked for it will not instinctively look up to the current quarter of the sky, but down to their computers. Neither will they be able to name the plants, birds or animals within a metre or mile radius of their door. Witchcraft asks that we do these first things, this is presence.
Animism is not embedded in the natural world, it is the natural world. Our witchcraft is that spirit of place, which is made from a convergence of elements and inhabitants. Here I include animals, both living and dead, human and inhuman. Our helpers are mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and insects. Some can be counted allies, others are more ambivalent. Predator and prey are interdependent. These all have the same origin and ancestry, they from from plants, from copper green life. Bones become soil. The plants have been nourished on the minerals drawn up from the bowels of the earth. These are the living tools of the witch's craft. The cycle of the elements and seasons is read in this way. Flux, life and death are part of this, as are extinctions, catastrophe, fire and flood. We avail ourselves of these, and ultimately a balance is sought. Our ritual space is written in starlight, watched over by sun and moon.
So this leaves us with a simple question. How can there be any Witchcraft if this is all destroyed? It is not a rhetorical question. Our land, our trees, animals and elements hold spirit. Will we let our familiars, literally our family be destroyed? If we hold any real belief and experience of spirit, then it does not ask, it demands us to fight for it.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“While our culture laments, what have we done wrong? Has no concept of sin, but only consumption. It still knows that something has gone dreadfully awry. Infantilized it helplessly repeats, what, what have we done wrong? It is simple: Mankind has broken the covenant with nature.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Our culture is hardwired with a Christian value system. Even if, like myself, you have never been a believer your mindset will still be shot through with this morality. Our deepest drives are distorted by an internal censor. Whether this is a bearded man sat on a cloud, or a sense of vague guilt will depend on your individual programming. Face up to it. Even if you are enlightened enough to be nodding along with what I’m saying you still have fetters on your freedom that have not yet been struck.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“The cult of the Virgin Mary enabled the worship of the Goddess to flourish, albeit in a cauterised form. As I keep repeating in a mantra, sex is power. The Virgin was a method of turning the sexual impulse of Christians back into the Church and onto the figure of the crucified Christ. I would describe this as a particularly unsavoury form of magick. This is the use of repression and misery as a spiritual battery. This enslavement of the worshipper’s natural desires is the exact opposite of the natural and healthy lust for Babalon.

With the resolutely chaste Mary in position, churches had a surrogate Goddess back in the house. Christ knows, they needed one. To sell Christianity to the fans of the God who dies and is reborn (like the crops in the fields) the Church used statues of Mary and Jesus that were rather close to those of Isis and the Child Horus. This mother/son icon propaganda was like a Pepsi taste test for the wavering pagans. They failed.

It requires other women to keep women as slaves stripped of their sexual power. The BVM did that job. She was the only role model that you could fixate upon.

As a Goddess she is a clitoridectomy. If you lift her skirt you can see the coarse black thread where she has been snipped and stitched. The thread is plaited from the beard of Jehovah himself. This is not a woman anymore. Look under the hem and learn.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“It is always easier to believe if you are opposed to something, or actually suffering for your beliefs. Without perceived or real oppression rebellion tends to fizzle – this is our current slack secular state in the West.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“Why is this full moon so important? She is named for her moment of maximum potency. The full moon is the quintessence. She has not been eclipsed into malefic but is in a state of exultation. The full moon is not merely the culmination of the cycle, it is a gate which opens up into a path outside of time.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“The Sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of Church and State, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionized the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the Sabbat form. I do not simply refer here to the inspiring fantasies of Jules Michelet, but the important modern work of Silvia Federici. We see the same attacks on freedom of assembly in the destruction of the free festivals, rave culture and the occupy movement. These have been met by the masked Anonymous, the faceless black bloc anarchists, the direct actions of the ELF. These are expressions of popular witchcraft and have been persecuted by the same inquisition that came for us. I do not say that these are examples of operative witchcraft, I say that we, the people who are the Witchcraft, have a sacred duty to join this war. We need to celebrate Grand Sabbats again, infuse them with our witchblood, our cunning.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“It is not the myth that falls out of date, it is the way of wording it. New voices are endlessly needed to swell their throats with song. Poetry is the unbroken lineage.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“What is abundantly clear is that witch hunts did not begin with witches, and are thus not avoided by making ourselves harmless or integrating and ingratiating ourselves with the corrupt systems of governance.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Though as Jack Parsons says, witchcraft is the oldest religion, that it lifts us out of ourselves and switches our bristling skin, the fact is, that witchcraft arises from the world. It comes from the land, the people, the plants, the animals, the whole web of life. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Witchcraft is here in the present time.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Must we make ourselves acceptable by aping the conventions of organized religion? Do we need to become part of the lie of a linear progression that tells us history is the successive Ages of metals, that is war, and that this, the bloody end of the brief age of oil which can still end in the reign of uranium, is the pinnacle of our achievement as a species? I say, enough. I say that this beckoning twilight is the space witchcraft is gathering within. Our strength is hydra-headed, rising from the blood of the sacrificially slain dove.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Her nude and gazing out of a window. In this aspect she was called Kilili mushritu, literally Kilili who leans out of a window; this was the typical image of the prostitute and remains the same today, from Amsterdam to webcam. As we have already seen, this is the image of Jezebel in the Old Testament which led to her death. The temples of the Love Goddesses were often brothels.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“In the 1400s it became the figure of the Witch that subsequently blossomed into an international satanic conspiracy. Why did this happen? How did the Sabbat obtain such prominence? Why did the witch become so reviled? Without understanding the enemy there is no answer that can be given. The creation of a purely malefic figure of the Witch was an attack on women, though men too were burned. Woman was attacked in this way to enable the state to enclose the common land. Woman was attacked to remove her control over her womb. Woman was attacked to divide the sexes and rend the social fabric. Woman was attacked to destroy the sense of the sacred in nature. Woman was memory of ancestor and clan.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“For the modern born-again Christians, Revelations is a road map to the heavenly Jerusalem. The idea of the Rapture where believers are plucked bodily to heaven moments before the final fire has millions of credulous adherents. This is a very dangerous mental state that fosters passivity, blind acceptance, and helplessness.
Other post-millennial Christians believe we must create a kingdom of God with religion running politics for Jesus to return and usher in the end. This could be a kitsch footnote in a history of cults, but the new Christian right have the power and influence to implement John’s dream. American foreign policy already shows the heavy influence not only of oil politics but of Christian apocalyptic thinking. Both Blair and Bush were guided by their faith and prayed together before embarking on the Iraq war.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“Though we are drawn back to find the first forms, we must being in the now rather than the might have once been. The Old Gods still speak, but they must do so with young voices. Every age needs the Devil reborn, not complacency or nostalgia, but paradoxically the experience of this truth can transport us vertiginously back to a confrontation with the origins of who we once were and who we can truly become.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Witchcraft can be seen as an art accomplished through the action of a set of three simple principles, namely: orientation, presence and imperative. These are the three phases which together create a mythic topography of witchcraft. Without these we have only the broken spars of folklore, misreadings of Christian apocrypha, and blind impulse. This is my narrow path into the dark wood.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“My thesis is not that we anchor the witch in history, but that we understand that witchcraft is a set of relationships whose rhythm is that of the moon, stars, sun and earth. A witchcraft which adapts to the state of the world as it is, not backing into an imagined past.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“There was nothing negative about the whore in the ancient world; Her title Hierodule of Heaven means sacred work or servant of the holy in Greek. The word prostitute means to stand on behalf of (the Goddess) in Hebrew the word zona is used for both Prophetess and Priestess. Even that wonderful word harlot (rhymes with scarlet) means priestess of Hathoor. It is essential that the Goddess-hating negativity of Christianity is washed away from these words. Even the term virgin means ever creative receptive potential, it is definitely not a physical state. In many cultures virgin simply meant un-married, and children born out of wedlock were called virgin-born – that puts rather a different slant on the story of Joseph and Mary. More often than not virgin was used to contrast with married, and the Holy Whore is very much her own woman.”
― Peter Grey, The Red Goddess

“Witchcraft offers us the connection we need to be more than desperately criss-crossing the wasteland and perilously low on gas. In a real sense we have become severed from connections, overwritten, cut-up, lost in a globalised symbol set that provides no meaning beyond a message to consume.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Witchcraft cannot come in any colour other than a deep green, a resistance to this despoilment, this sacrilege. [...] Animism cannot disengage from the struggle of life, shamanism cannot disengage from the struggle of life, neither can a living witchcraft. No-one else is going to do this for us. We are the Witchcraft and we must stand for our land, and with those who fight for their own.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“We parade our inner selves which are revealed to be no more than loyalty to a sect of compatible brands. When we see ourselves and the world around us we do not recognize the sacred. Our culture has devoured itself.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Yet we also have much in common with the period of the witch hunts, namely financial and social collapse born from environmental catastrophes of our own making. This provokes a need for an enemy, an invisible international pervasive conspiracy for us to unite against, vilify, torture, and ultimately murder. [...] Torture by the state continues, and yes, the executions and kill lists of enemies and innocents alike. It would not be inaccurate to call this a Catholic inquisition, it is part of the same extended franchise. We have simply replaced the Church with the Corporate State and I predict that a new witchcraft will rise to confront it, with many heads.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft

“Despair haunts those who know the cost being exacted from this earth. They are driven by pain, rage and despair, they hurt. We have a duty to them, and all those who suffer, drawing no distinction between spirit, animal, plant, stone or man. What drives us is our blood, the passions and emotions are our power which makes it sing with fire. Like the land, these passions are not owned by individuals, but are subsumed in Love, shared in communion; we are the daughters and the sons of comfort. Life itself it at state in not some longed-for Apocalypse which opens into a Golden Age, but the betrayal of our ancestors and our duty of care, of balance. We will not watch as the final price is exacted in the blood of all living things. Without action, these will be the last hundred years, not just of man, but of all life.”
― Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft