It’s a big week over here on The Green Witch:
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Spring has sprung, and the world is green again 🌱
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My fifth book, Underwing: A Story of Motherhood, Loss and Wild Intuition, is coming out in just 5 days!
Underwing is out on 12th March, and I am so excited for it to be on your bedside table!
I want to give you – as a wonderful reader of The Green Witch – a special preview of the book, and an exclusive opportunity to join my online Spring Equinox event.
Join me for the Spring Equinox!
When you pre-order your copy of Underwing before 23:59 on 11th March, you’re invited to my online Zoom event, How to Celebrate the Spring Equinox. Here, I’ll be telling you how to celebrate the Pagan festival of Ostara, how to rekindle your magick after winter, and the nature writing at the heart of Underwing. All you have to do is email your proof of purchase to amie@septemberpublishing.org to receive an exclusive invite! I can’t wait to see you there on Thursday 19th March!
What is Underwing about?
A beautiful, healing book for anyone who has ever struggled with pregnancy loss and recovery, and is looking for symbols of hope in the wider, wilder world.
When Jennifer Lane finally fell pregnant, she and her partner were overjoyed. But it wasn’t an easy pregnancy, and her journey towards motherhood was, in the end, a story of loss.
In the wake of her traumatic grief and physical recovery, Jennifer – a practising green witch – was left questioning everything about her beliefs. Trust your intuition, they say. But what if the worst thing that could happen does?
As she grieved, Jennifer turned to the mysteries of our animal natures, witchcraft and women’s fertility for understanding and comfort. This beautifully written account of finding solace in the natural world offers companionship through loss, and a sustaining path to joy and hope.
And now: your exclusive preview 💙
Thwack.
Cackle.
Pop pop.
The single magpie landed on my garden fence and bowed deeply to the kitchen window.
Some not-so-secret voice in my head said, ‘This feels like a sign.’
I opened the window to frighten it off – a thing that I, the avid birdwatcher, had never done before in my life – and watched the magpie emit a series of machine-like pops as it soared away across the tree line. Something about those chesspiece feathers said, Bad news ahead, and I didn’t like it. Had I ever seen a single magpie in the garden before? Maybe. I only remembered their chattering pairs performing acrobatics on the bird feeders, which always made me giggle and watch in wonder, or the sets of three that played around and pecked at the lawn as I pressed a hand to my belly.
Three for a little girl.
A deep crinkle appeared between my eyebrows. My head had been so distracted with my self-imposed hectic schedule for months now – saying ‘yes’ to every work opportunity even if it meant I had to stay in bed for two days recovering afterwards – that what if I’d missed them? What if there had been more of those single magpies out there? My nose had been stuck so doggedly to my computer screen that I had only seen the black and white of neat Calibri letters and not the flurry of feathers. Perhaps there had been a steady trickle of single magpies tracking sigils across my lawn since our positive pregnancy test, all of them going unseen as I worked into the night and forgot to go outside, oblivious to the lone chequered venturers across my patio.
What if the world had been showing me the signs? And, in my busyness, I had ignored them.
‘An omen,’ I thought. The word ‘omen’ – an event that is thought to tell something about the future – hasn’t always predicted something bad; yet, over time, the term has become synonymous with the ominous: the broken mirror, the unexpected comet and the doomed job interview scheduled for Friday the thirteenth. Humans have been watching out for the omens since the dawn of civilisation in Ancient Mesopotamia, desperately hoping to change their dismal luck around. They believed that omens were signs of the will of the gods and it was our job to clock them and set ourselves on the path of right once more.
The practice of this sinister form of divination has been passed down the generations through Babylon, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome to the present day, sometimes written down but mainly through the oral tradition. In the early twentieth century, a Mandaean priest in Ahwaz, Iran, spoke of the aeons-old astrological knowledge transmitted from priest to priest in secret throughout time. He said:
If a raven croaks in a certain burj [an astrological house] I understand what it says, also the meaning when the fire crackles or the door creaks. When the sky is cloudy and there are shapes in the sky resembling a mare or a sheep, I can read their significance and message. When the moon is darkened by an eclipse, I understand the portent: when a dust-cloud arises, black, red, or white, I read these signs, and all this according to the hours and the aspects.
Over time, some began to believe omens were signs of fated events we could not change, while others used amulets and magical protections to keep themselves safe. Even up until recently, knowledge of omens was widely recognised and taken seriously but is now largely coated in the same cloth as superstition and old wives’ tales (as if those wives hadn’t been noticing and sharing their citizen-science wisdom for centuries). The practice of omen reading and divination is still a large part of a modern-day Pagan practice – a path I have been following since I was just twelve years old – with many Pagans heading straight to their Tarot decks to predict the future. What will the cards show today? The Star (hope)? Or the Tower (destruction)?
It is a system of knowing that the witch in me believes with all her heart.
But the most common omens have persisted into everyday culture.
The old rhyme goes:
One for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a girl, four for a boy,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
If you’d ever wondered, the rest of the rhyme goes:
Eight for a wish, Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a bird you must not miss.
Eleven for health, Twelve for wealth.
Thirteen beware, it’s the devil himself.
Fourteen, make your choice, Fifteen, take your pick,
Sixteen, the sweetest, Seventeen, your heart’s wish.
Eighteen for a letter, Nineteen for better,
Twenty, the future, It’s now or never.
This version has been written in the British history books since 1820, but is likely to have existed for centuries longer, meaning people have been shooing away the threat of sorrowful magpies for hundreds of years. The ‘original’, however – documented in 1777 – goes:
One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral,
Four for a birth.
Which brings a whole new meaning to that cluster of three.
A past, in-tune, version of me would have noticed the signs. She would have honed in on the magpies, as well as the owl calls so close to the house that they made us jump. The old me would have listened out for the black cat that sang to Linnet from the shadows of the fuchsia bushes every evening, crouched ready with a water pistol in hand. When had I clamped shut the dark, heavy-lidded eye inside me that had always been so adept at spotting the glimmers of magic within nature, seeing signs of Mother Earth everywhere I went? If I’d been more observant, was there something I could have done to prevent all this?
What else had I missed? I flicked my mind back to all the signs the Universe might have been trying to give me over the past five months. The debilitating first-trimester symptoms; the feeling of dread that seeped over me from week five of my pregnancy and the frenzied, unsettled working. Had this all been just hormones? Or an alarm call?
With a searing flash, I thought of the rooks. The rooks I saw in their droves in Ireland in the month we conceived. The crows. The jackdaws. All those carrion birds that we remarked upon because of their unusual numbers. All harbingers of death. All ‘the thing with feathers’.
A warning.
I can’t wait for you to read this, everyone. And I hope to see you at one of my upcoming book events:
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Underwing: Book launch – Wednesday 11th March, B For Butterfly Books, South Manchester.
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Underwing: An Evening With Jennifer Lane – Thursday 12th March, Waterstones Manchester Arndale, Central Manchester.
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Underwing: How to Celebrate the Spring Equinox – Thursday 19th March, online (see details above)
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Underwing: In Conversation – Saturday 11th April, Blackwell’s Oxford, Broad Street, Oxford.
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Beltane: Sabbat Sessions – Saturday 25th April, Blackwell’s Oxford, Broad Street, Oxford.
Sending love to you all and I’ll see you next week for my Ostara newsletter!
Jennifer x
Originally published on Substack
