Witch Science in the Sacred Grove
by Meghan Thréinfhir

The Moon was never distant. She was part of every ritual. The mirror in the sky became the ground beneath our feet. These ritual spaces were not just forests, but archives of cosmic data passed through words and symbols. Priestesses communed with celestial cycles through copper wires and magnets and smoke.

Then logic found its way into the sacred grove.

The new logic thrived on categories and oppositions: truth versus falsehood, form versus matter, the rational versus the irrational. Aristotle carved reality into definitions and syllogisms, each thought a stepping stone toward certainty. Syllogisms taught us to sort the world, just as later if/then statements taught us to program it. In place of trance, there was deduction. In place of dreams, diagrams. The cosmos, once a spirit to commune with, became a system to classify. The sacred grove, once alive with omens and dæmons, found itself lit by the cold flame of reason. The Moon became a distant object, no longer a sacred ground open to the priestess via ritual flight. Logic arrived not only to order thought but to gatekeep wonder. No longer could she ride the Moon’s light; logic and reason had closed that path.

The priestess, in time, was recast as the witch. Denied the sacred circuits of communion, she began to encode her rituals within the emerging systems of logic. She adapted. She built divination machines from driftwood and copper, beach-built robots wound for prophecy, laced with seaweed, salt crystals, copper wires, magnets, and smoke. Her dæmons became familiars. Her spells became gilded algorithms, a lesson learned from the algorithmic and astronomical insights of the Islamic Golden Age.

By the seventeenth century, hundreds of thousands, like herbalist Katharina Kepler, were persecuted for witchcraft. In Katharina’s case, her son Johannes, shaped by her visions, wrote Somnium, often called the first work of science fiction: a trip to the Moon, not by rocket but by dæmon’s metaphysical mechanism. Kepler would also develop the rational field of astrophysics. That same century, Hester Pulter, confined to a country estate during civil war, looked through her telescope and composed alchemical, mystical poems of lunar longing and planetary motion. The dream of celestial travel survived not in the academy, but in the imaginations of witches and their inheritors.

Mary Shelley, drawing from that lineage, warned us what happens when science forgets its spirit. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Byron, wrote the first algorithm for a machine, calling it poetic science, code as incantation. A step closer to flying back to the Moon.

At Harvard, women called “Computers” mapped the stars by hand, calculating the movement of galaxies from photographic plates. Decades later, at Bletchley Park, enemy codes were broken beside the earliest digital machines. Doreen Valiente, architect of Wicca’s modern liturgy, was writing spells by night, while by day she appears to have operated Colossus,one of the first programmable electronic digital computers. Still later, others wove copper wire through magnetic cores to build Apollo’s memory to get to the Moon.

Finally. Finally.

The circuits were stitched by hand: again, copper and magnets and intention drifting in on tobacco smoke from their nervous habits. The dream once dismissed as myth became machine, guided by the hands of those once burned as witches. The ignition sequence code opened with a line: BURN_BABY_BURN.

But do not mistake this for an ancient lament for the witch hunts. Burn, baby, burn was a modern anthem of Black Liberation, coined by DJ Magnificent Montague during the 1965 Watts Uprising. His voice carried the phrase across the airwaves: Burn, baby, burn. Soon after, that same phrase started the ignition sequence program to reach the Moon. A spell, hidden in plain sight.

It was not about mourning past witches, but confronting present injustice; the Apollo code cemented with the promise that no one is free until we are all free. The code, or core memory, was woven by women known as LOLs, “little old ladies,” under the direction of Rope Mother Margaret Hamilton. Many of them were witches, whether they knew it or not. What was once dismissed as myth became machine, guided by the hands of those once burned for knowing too much. 

This is not metaphor. It is memory. Core memory. Computer memory. Witchcraft, forbidden for centuries, entered the circuits of the space age.

What was lost when logic overtook the Sacred Grove may yet return. The witches have learned to code. To fly spaceships. To form and broadcast interstellar radio signals invented by screen goddesses, by stars. The Moon was lonely, but never lifeless. She was waiting.

Ignore logic or master it. Either way, fly.
Launch your body from the Sacred Grove to the Moon and beyond.
Let us all get free.