Something a little different this week, my friends! Here is an excerpt from the semi-fictional grimoire in my upcoming novel, The Kitchen Witch. Enjoy!

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BONE MAGIC: HONORING THE LOVE OF BONES

There is a particular fondness for bones amongst many with eating difficulties, mostly in seeing them jut out from oneself as proof of ultimate thinness. While glorifying thin bodies is obviously a twisted carryover from our fashion worlds, I also feel it has more sacred roots.

In many cultures around the world, there is what is known as the Crone figure. This has often been portrayed as the ugly, wicked old woman in the forest in our contemporary times. However, in other cultures this archetype held great power and respect rather than disgust. The Crone symbolized facing death, destruction and the dying of the old to make room for the new. Many stories described her, sitting by a fire, throwing sticks and stones for divination, her countenance adorned with various feathers and skeletal pieces from animals. She was also often skeletal looking, not for fashion’s sake, but to depict one on the edge of life and death, working with those mysteries.

The Crone worked with death, strove to understand it. Her bones, both protruding from her body and adorning her body, represented this connection, this acceptance of this great Mystery of our experience as humans.

The Crone honored the bones. I’d like to propose that one struggling with a restrictive eating disorder, who spends so much effort in looking for, searching for her bones, is a Crone in hiding. I propose she is not looking for thinness for the sake of being thin, but that she is searching for this Crone within her, to see its evidence within her and the collective psyche. She does not know it, but if she survives the initiation, she will become the Crone.

So, in honor of the Crone, in honor of our searching, starving, scratching, and seeking her to reveal herself through our skin, I present this chapter. It outlines some ways to take this love of bones, and this yearning for Crone, and to embrace it, create with it, learn from it in life-giving ways. That instead of twisting this deep yearning into a practice that is literally killing off the potential to honor the Crone’s wisdom, instead we will embrace it.