#tide witch

The mystery in question comes from the Daoist text, Salt-Water Yi, the full translation reading:

“The harbor becomes a distant memory, and the destination becomes a ‘beautiful, quiet and never-to-be-reached dream’. The heart that learns to love the crossing has, in the truest sense, already arrived, because ‘the ark that never permanently anchors is the ark that is always, already, home’.”

The mystery concerns the nature of “home” for those who sail forever. The answer is that “the crossing is the home” and that the “not-yet” is the most sacred and creative word in the language of the deep, that, “final, ultimate and eternal state of being perpetually and joyfully en route.”

"For the woman who reads the waves."

This is, for the lack of a better term, a gift: an ocean-based grimoire I've posted on Internet Archive for anyone with sea fever.

This is certainly not the first sea witch grimoire, but (as far as I can tell) all the others come with a price tag. I understand that we live in a patriarchal, capitalist society, but it is my deep belief that magic should not be sold like a commodity. Magic, like the ocean, does not "belong" to anyone.

As I write in the introduction:

The Chao Wu Lu (Tide Witch Register) is a fragmented manuscript attributed to an anonymous collective of female ritualists operating along the Fujian-Guangdong coast during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries....Its contents—instructions for talismanic diagrams, incantations, ritual protocols, and fragmentary cosmological teachings—constitute the only known English-language compilation of Daoist-Fujian sea magic centered explicitly on female practitioners and female deities.