Otherworldly Bleed, Consensus, and Magic

A few years ago, back when this idea of the otherworld bleeding through began to make its way into Pagan/Witch discourse, I had a curious incident at the side of a river with a witchy friend. Both of us had noticed the uptick in otherworldly activity. We were both also getting messages from multiple people. Often from people who didn’t ordinarily experience our kind of strangeness, and that stood out.

I wondered what the effects of this otherworldly “bleed” would have on magic and what we humans can do with magic. Naturally (because I’m an idiot like this), I grabbed a stick and drew a sigil I use when creating portals into the sand and silt of the riverbank.

The effect was almost instantaneous: a shifting sensation that used to take more effort to achieve.

I closed it and scrubbed it from the sand almost as soon as my friend and I noticed the shift.

I’m a firm believer that most things have their season. And if the blog John Beckett posted this morning is anything to go by, then this subject’s season has come. In "The Currents of Magic are Getting Stronger", he makes the same observation I did at the side of that river.

We also cannot ignore the fact that most of the discussion on this topic is coming from US sources. I’m not saying that strange things aren’t also happening elsewhere—but we also cannot assume that just because this stuff is happening here, it’s happening everywhere.

If Cotton Mather is to be believed in his "Wonders of the Invisible World", early colonizers in what would become the US also drove out “devils.” He even goes on to blame the apparent preponderance of witches in Salem on a counterattack by the devils, thus retaining that link between witches and the Otherworldly in his interpretation of events.

The otherworld is bleeding through, the devils are coming back, and they’re bringing us witches with them?