LOCAL SORCERY: Witching in the Pines

If you don’t live here, chances are your ideas about New Jersey are formed by its proximity to New York and shows like The Sopranos and The Jersey Shore. Not many people realize that when you get south of the Toms River, it starts to feel more like rural Arkansas than the Crowded over-developed suburban nightmare that people are familiar with. In fact 1.1 MILLION acres of land here is protected by Congress and designated by the UN as an International Biosphere Reserve.  The Pine Barrens are quiet, undisturbed, and well… Barren.

It is also the site for the very first Internet Hoax,  the Incunabula,  which told of a cult of artists, magicians, and scientists based in Ongs Hat that broke through into another Dimension using a device called The Egg. 

Of course the Pine Barrens are home other legends as well. Ones with more history and power. The most well known of which is The Leeds Devil, better known as The Jersey Devil. Though the creature, or spirit, has been attributed to being the 13th unwanted child of Mother Leeds – who cursed him to Devil when she found she was pregnant, some believe he is much older. Before it was called the Pine Barrens, the Lenape tribes called the area Popuessing or Place of the Dragon. Later Swedish Explorers named this area “Drake Kill” or the Streams of the Dragon, possibly for the strange streams of orange water, colored by Iron and Cedar, but possibly for something else.

When I moved down here, I of course wanted to go into the pines and conjure the Devil or Dragon of the Pines myself, but my attempts were unsuccessful. So, I decided to enlist the aid of the Dead, specifically Peggy Clevenger, the Pines Witch.

Peggy and her Husband Bill were allegedly Witches back in the 1800’s, and when he died he told Peggy that if he really went to Hell because of his Witchcraft he would send her a sign. Supposedly the well started boiling at their home after that, which was a sign that Bill had indeed found his way to Hell. No one knows where the house is exactly, but we know the general area near Mt Misery where it was, and have a good idea where she might be buried. I collected the appropriate dirts, made offerings of coins and chicken hearts, and found a suitable crossroads to conjure her at. She was able not only to help me with conjuring the Dragon of the Pines, but also with instructing me on the use of local Trees in magic: how the white and black oak of the Pines hold different virtues and can interact with Bog Iron, and how the Pygmy Pines which only spread their seeds in wildfires can be used for cursing and cleansing.

She led me to find a local poem, once posted over the fireplace at a pub long since closed that read: “Where stunted pines of burned-over forest are revealed in darksome pools, The Jersey Devil Lurks.” This led me to the one of the Blue Holes here in the pines. Almost perfectly round pools of freakishly blue water (all the surrounding streams are orange) that remains cold all year long. These pools are rumored to be bottomless, but of course they are not, unless you have the spirit of a dead witch showing you how to look… This place was the key to establishing contact with a spirit that fits the description of the Jersey Devil, a powerful spirit that protects the land from humans, but which can, if offered to and treated with respect, can help open up even more of the Sorcery dwelling in these haunted Barrens.

Truly all Sorcery is Local…

This post was supposed to be part of the Strategic Sorcery Blog Hop arranged by some of my students today, but things got in the way, and I did not get it completed in time. The topic of the Hop is Local Sorcery, so I hope you will go to the Master and check out the other great blogs and their posts about Local Sorcery.

STRATEGIC SORCERY BLOG HOP LOCAL MAGIC