In this episode I chatted with witch, author, and musician, Fiona Horne of the band Seawitch. Fiona answered the questions of choice and gave us a little taste of what we will hear from her in the full-length interview, coming in 2023! Be sure you follow Your Average Witch to catch the full episode next year.
Snack Size 10.
Sneak Preview: Fiona Horne of Sea Witch
Welcome back to your Average Witch Snack-size edition. In this episode I got to chat with Witch, author, and musician Fiona Horne of the band Sea Witch. Fiona answered the questions of choice and gave us a little taste of what we'll hear from her in the full-length interview coming in 2023. Follow your Average Witch Podcast to be sure you catch the full episode next year.
Kim: Hi Fiona, how are you?
Fiona: I'm great Kim, how are you?
Kim: Hi, I'm wonderful. So I have three questions for you.
Fiona: I can't wait.
Kim: The first question is, do you feel or believe that being a witch is a choice? I'll answer yes, because your choice could be determined by recognizing that you have a deep inner feeling, or sense that somehow you may be a little different to how you've been told you should be, or you might find that you have a different idea about how the world works and your place in it. Because you might choose to recognise these feelings and thoughts and senses as something you should take action on, or you might choose not to. Which in my case, when I recognise that I must be a witc,h that's the only thing that makes sense, it was a choice because I could have just ignored it.
Kim: Do you feel like practising witchcraft as a choice?
Fiona: Yes, because over 30 years of talking about it publicly and having many books published and having the opportunity to interact with people who identify as witches, one of the most common comments, questions that I get is, you know, I need to, or the people say, I need to make time for spell casting. I need to make time for ritual. I need to take, make time for my craft. So it's a choice to do it. It's a choice to do that practical application of it. Yet at the same time being a witch isn't something you switch on and off like a tap. It permeates every facet of your being, every aspect of your daily and nightly and between the worlds life. But it's a choice to decide, am I going to actually do something with the altar today, even if it's just clear it off and give it a dust?
Kim: Do you feel like you could just stop doing it and never do it again?
Fiona: No, couldn't. Impossible. Too late. I'm too far.
Kim: I think that's so interesting.
Fiona: Too late, too far too deep. It's just never going to, I can't get rid of it. It's like saying, oh, can I just step off this earth? Well, I'm still in this physical body and not ever go back to it without a rocket ship. It's not an option.
Kim: I love all the different answers I get to these questions. It's so interesting to see what people think about it.
Fiona: Your question list, when you sent me the long list of what we're going to talk about when I was like, oh, some of these are amazing. I've been asked so many questions. I've been interviewed... I'm not self-aggrandizing in saying this, It's just like what it is. Thousands of times I've been interviewed. That's not exaggeration. And talked about it with people in varying capacities, whether it's on some mainstream, high profile television show or radio show, or all the opportunities to chat intimately with someone like yourself who has an eclectic podcast. It's like, your questions, there's a lot of them that I've never been asked before, which is really cool. I love it.
Kim: Yay! My goal is to be like the Sean Evans and have people say, whoa, that was a good question. Yes. I want to be the Hot Ones of this. And the last question is, would you please share a story about a spell that you've done? That's a successful, unsuccessful, funny, touching, whatever. Your first one, the most recent one you did, whatever you feel like talking about.
Fiona: Hmm. Because I have been asked that question before. And I'd like to give a different answer to what I normally jump to in later years of my craft. Spellcasting is not a focal point of my craft. Ceremony ritual is, you know. Spellcasting is something I lean into less often.
Kim: It doesn't even have to be a spell, it can be about anything witchy related.
Fiona: Yeah.
Kim: I just like stories.
Fiona: I honestly feel like I'm giving you my answer now as I say that. You know, it's almost like, yeah, you know, I don't lean into spellcasting as much now in my craft. And I do emphasize ceremony and ritual as really important parts of my craft. And yet, when I'm asked about a spell, I just immediately my, there's two things that come to mind. The very first one I cast. I know what that is. It was the first time I looked to the trees in the bush where I was growing up in Sydney. I was probably, it was bushland at the time, bushland, now it's all suburban households. But when I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, I was five or six, I'd say, at the oldest I was six, I'd say it was right around five. I was quite young. I'm pretty sure I was going to school. And I, like, in a garden.
And I looked to the trees one afternoon after school and I saw the leaves moving and stopping in the breeze. And I became convinced that I could make the move if I asked them to. So I waited till they were still, and there'd been a stillness for a while. And then I said, blow wind blow, make my feet and fingers glow. And the breeze picked up, and the leaves started moving, and I was convinced. And I said, stop wind, stop make my feet and fingers hot. And the wind stopped like that. And then I said, blow wind blow make my feet and fingers glow. And the breeze came up and the leaves started moving. And I stood there for quite some time doing that, convinced it was, that I was making it happen.
Maybe I was in my little corner of the Bush and the universe, and I worked with, I used to just, I used to spend all my time in the Bush. I think that later, a foundation for revering the natural world of sacred feeling I had an intimate relationship with it that was unique. And it spoke to me and I spoke to it, and it heard me and I heard it. And that really formed the cornerstone of my practice as I grew and evolved into it. I guess a human with more years behind them, and recognised that the ritual and ceremony and the nature-witch being aspects of modern witchcraft or what spoke to me has been a framework to explore the world from within this life.
Kim: I'm curious about something. So you're a musician.
Fiona:Yes.
Kim: Do you write lyrics?
Fiona: Oh yes, definitely. Very much so. Bands I've been in over the years, in the 90s, I was in called Def FX with a very successful band. Two American multiple times, charted in the Billboard charts, had a lot of chart and touring success in Australia. So it's quite a big deal and the lyrics I wrote in that band, sometimes my occult and witchy leanings were revealed. See I didn't really talk about identifying as a witch until the very last interview I did for the band, which was in Rolling Stone magazine, Rolling Stone Australia.
And they used it as a caption in a photo of me saying, Fiona Horne is a witch who believes in what was, I think there were light and dark energies or something like that. That was the only thing said about it, was a caption in a photo. And then when that band broke up in 1997, I had the opportunity to write my first book about witchcraft, and the publisher that became my publisher of Random House. Jane Polfreyman and the director of Publishing there came to me and said, "I think a rock star writing a book about witchcraft will sell a few copies." And so I did, and that book became a really big best seller. And it's still published, and it's still like a really, that was in 1998, it was published. It's still available. It's still one of Australia's top books written by an Australian author.
Well, it really brought witchcraft to the forefront in the late 90s, witches were getting quite popular. You know, you had, from the entertainment world perspective, you had Charmed on TV, you had, you know, The Craft movie, you had a bunch of things going on, where witches were at the forefront and on, you know, were a topic that was considered entertaining by the media and mainstream entertainment outlets. And I was kind of swept up in that, became quite a, quite the spokesperson for it. Certainly that's where witchcraft became a job for me. It never was prior to that. From when I was 18 to when I was, which is when I really identified as a witch and did a self-initiation ceremony, because there was no internet and nothing around. I couldn't find anyone else, so I just did it myself with some books I managed to find in old second-hand bookshops. But you know, from when I was like 18 through the 31, it was kind of something that was just for me. And then it became my job.
Kim: The reason I asked is because I don't do much spoken anything in my practice. And you started out with it, and that's super interesting to me. And you used it in your job. So I just wonder if some people are more likely to have that work for them than others.
Fiona: I love that you don't use the obvious spoken word to work magic and practice your craft. That's a beautiful approach. And certainly I think when you look at the, usually what I've found in practicing over all these decades is that it'll change, what you do. And that's important and necessary to allow it to happen if you feel driven to do that, or if you're shown to do that. Not to get too attached to any one way. That would become very limiting I think.
Kim: Mm-hmm. I do a lot of blowing of things.
Fiona: Yeah, beautiful!
Kim: I use a lot of breath.
FIona: Well, that's the element of air isn't it? If you look at it in a really literal sense, you're working with the element of air a lot. And that's obviously linked to thought and cerebral kind of stuff as well, as well as divine connection and interaction. So you might feel called to do something else. You might start finding your hands more than your breath, and moving stuff around, which I would offer might be earth.
Kim: Yeah, I'm Taurus, so I'm pretty there.
Fiona: I love that it's, everyone's practice is, I think, really important. When I started out in the first books I wrote and everything, I was so hung up on the building blocks way of doing it. You know, you've got to have certain items on your alter in certain quarters in line with the points of the compass. And that was a challenge, being the Southern Hemisphere and all of the books that I could find about-
Kim: I bet!
Fiona: ... the northern hemisphere. So I was one of the, there was a couple of little pamphlets I found, put out by Southern Hemisphere practicing witches and occultists that would kind of flip it and help you understand how it all worked. I was one of the first books to come out that was, certainly one of the first books that was published and received and sold a lot of copies that was from the Southern Hemisphere perspective. And I always put both in the books now. Kim: Well, I appreciate you talking to me, and I can't wait for the longer version of this.
Fiona: I know, as we started talking much longer, I thought I better shut up because this is meant to be Kim's short version. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. *fade out*
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