The Western Gate

A Deed Without a Name :Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft
Lee Morgan
Moon Books

This was recommended on a vloggers site, the vlogger is old enough, I suspect, to be my youngest daughter, that the vlogger is young doesn’t matter. It used to matter to me, I’ve mentioned before how in the halcyon days of newsgroups and threads, viz~ “teenagers still living in the house of mum and dad claim to have conjured every Goetic daemon and manifested more Magick than Aleister Crowley did in his whole life.”
Well, mayhaps there’s truth in that but who are we to really judge. There are 9 year old ‘kids’ who can shred a guitar better than Eddie Van Halen. The spiralling ascent of human achievement is  logarithmic, the mind and our inventions rapidly accelerating. The young inherit and expand, us crumbling fossils can but lament the passing of our fire.
So yes, the recommendation came from this ex-Wiccan vlogger—who’s now moved into the “traditional” current—, saying it had transformed her approach to magic. Since I’d never really seen Wicca as anything more than an alternative rule-set with a lot of yawn-inducing what-nots, I was mostly curious to discover what, exactly, was inside this book I’d never even heard of before.
For me, the first published book that genuinely resonated with what I’d call “traditional witchcraft” was Nigel Jackson’s The Call of the Horned Piper-1994, though I had been delving into the writings of Chumbley, Robert Cochrane.
The title refers to the answer, those three, gave to Macbeth;-
Macbeth: What is’t you do?
Witches: A deed without a name.
And , it were the title that drew my curiosity, yes it killed the cat, but, as the saying goes but is never expanded;- satisfaction bought it back again.
Lee Morgan doesn’t actually tell us this bit of information of the origins of the title, does it matter?
A Deed without A Name, of time that does not follow the flow of the sands, of a place that exists between here and where….
Witchcraft as something ineffable, not easily put into words.
Magical acts that resist categorization.
A tradition grounded in experience and mystery, not doctrine or dogma.

Traditional Witchcraft is the journey of Self-Gnosis, in tandem with what I consider the inherent spirit of our birth, nurturing and present, and the knowledge of our ancestry. The Archetype of our being as opposed to our subjective design we’d like to appropriate. It is to live in the liminal between the world we are told is fixed and finite and the ‘other side’ known and experienced only by many as fleeting dream.
Ultimately in practice, for what it’s worth and ‘what’s in it for me’, the witch fulfils their destiny and literally, wants for nothing. If I hear a witch , comment on spells for love, or wealth, or fame, to me, clearly they haven’t read the signpost. To want for nothing, means, nothing. That’s not what any fledgling or indeed practicing witch wishes to hear, after all, what’s the point if wealth, love and fame are out of bounds. But that’s not what the slogan says. It doesn’t say forbidden. It says, Want.
Imagine calling the moon for wealth, not out of desperation, but just for the merry dance of it all. It’s a big difference,
The true nature of a Witch resides ultimately in Wisdom, which ironically is not something that comes from the person, but arrives at them. We do not give birth to wisdom, but can only hope to interpret, understand and dispel. In the meantime, there are many paths to travel that make the foray enticing, and yes me old goat, delicious. Including the rites of all those ‘beautiful Fagin things’ … purely as the Magpie would take them, as vain baubles and playthings.

But let’s see what Lee Morgan has to say;-
At the outset it is clear the regard Morgan has for ‘dream’ , also for ideas of the “fetch”- that secondary subtle body crafted by our emotion and desire, given substance and form and enabling us to sense through it that which is afar.
I work in vivid lucid dream, sometimes those worlds can be abstract and yet also familiar. In the main I walk abroad in dream, aware, as vivid as it can be, time conscious and both observing and participating with free will. There are rare and spontaneous occasions when I awake in the lucid dream to reveal I am sleepwalking, in the here and now, however it becomes clear I’m not in my physical body, this ‘true’ astral projection. For all my regular lucid dreaming and fetching and flying the actual astral projection of the here and now eludes me, even if I will myself to awake in the lucid dream to be present in the externalised self, I just manifest, usually, in another lucid dream environment.

Morgan talks of inhabiting familiars. This path though not alien, ahem, to me is not one I use. Though I see animals in lucid dream and sometimes via them I look back at my dream body I venture no farther than to acknowledge the state and the being. I did use the method of ‘astral projection’ whereby I would reach the stage where my whole resting body is tingling and feel the electrical static energy releasing and then expand it beyond my body, like wings to disengage, I’d shift upwards and then destroy the session by laughing and just enjoying the fact, it happens. Proof, was all I need. In the moment, I was a RAven.
Lee Morgan lists a collection of astral beasts, the denizens of our darkest fears, passions and aversions. The golems of our shadow self and more. Most familiar, Incubus succubus, Mara, Valkyrie ! For me it is only, really, in dream I encounter them and usually have the sight to understand I am in dream, in which case the dream turning lucid I now go and hug the hungry ghost. This could be naïve. What of the demons born by being crafted long past? nurtured by manna and oblations, built by praise and temples, and now inhabiting the realm of the veil between imagination and form, between dream and the waking. What of them Dagenham Dave? Your stone island thuggery battle jacket and oxblood boots won’t scare them and I’d like to see you hug them.

I did have an astral projection where I was in the hallway of my house, and I could see the living room door open, I couldn’t go in. I KNEW there were two ‘shady’ characters in there waiting, to mock and taunt. Even if they were crafted by my fears and imagination, and even if it were just an emotional cloud I had crafted that had not yet formed into the shell of the being, that vortex, that energy was there. I couldn’t go in and envelope myself in its influence. The more I stood there and looked towards the open door, the more I could imagine what they looked like, and I were probably crafting them as I imagined. If it were a lucid dream session, I would have wandered in there with the aplomb of the whistling, hands in pocket, worker skiving off from work for a sneaky fag (cigarette) at the yard gates, without a care or concern in the world.

The book touches on Possession/Morphing to animals as noted and also, and more interesting to me, the spirit of plants. Looking beyond the huge tree in the back gardens of my terraced estate, I look beyond her, just beyond as if I am looking at one of those 3D images ( example below, look just beyond the picture, it will come into view);-

…and as I look just beyond the tree, I begin to see the spirit, thermals? heat signatures? indeed the fire, and when this is sensed/seen there is an empathetic union, where the vision becomes emotion, the merging of both our emotions is telepathic, almost.

Now all in all, A Deed without A Name is much like browsing through an art catalogue, the formative collection of images it raises creates a picture that cannot be explained so much, but is known. So it is with traditional Witchcraft.
There are hints and prompts, keys and pointers which may be blind, or else trigger an insight from the dusty attic of the mind that reignites something lost, long ago. I found you.

There are snippets at the end of the book, with Greek magical Papyrii, spells, words that are more sounds than constructs of meaning, and there are other spells, not many, for instance the spell of necromancy lists;- “allay fortission fortissio allynsen roa” though no direct translation is given except to suggest sic. you will strengthen them with your own breathe.
Though it suggested to me;- allay — calm, soften, dispel, fortission — strong binding or reinforced ward, fortissio — strength itself or the act of empowering allynsen — inner spirit or soul-thread, roa — path, way, or direction~ thus, I would suggest, Dispel the binding and empower the inner spirit’s way…. ah, ok, I’m splitting hairs.

The book, in finale, conjures wonderful images and scenarios, especially for us dream walkers and hedge riders. He deals with the use of entheogens/drugs sensibly and truthfully. Traditional witchcraft in my humble opinion can never be taught a+b=c, can never be dogma and rules and lists of things to copy. It should be given as imagery, music, ideas, onto which the traveller approaches and the quest begins. I didnt pay much attention to the last few pages of rituals because I never do, but I loved the general ambience given by the whole of the book.
Lee Morgan suggests a witch true stands in a spiral, not a circle. A circle has its place, and so does a labyrinth.

The Circle, Spiral and Labyrinth.

A circle closes,
holding all things in their appointed positions.
It is the promise of return,
the comfort of a path that knows its end
before the first step is taken.

But a spiral breathes.
It widens, contracts,
moves inward and outward like a living question.
To stand in a spiral is to admit
that the journey bends you
as much as you bend it.

And a labyrinth—
that is the patient teacher.
Not a prison,
but a quiet invitation
to lose what you are not
and meet what you are.

So where does the witch stand?
Where the ground is not merely beneath her—
but becoming her path.

Circle,Spiral and Labyrinth. d wenborn

Header Image- From~ Sous-bois à Fontainebleau, par Paul Cézanne c.1879 and 1882

Heres the Link to the Video that originally suggested reading, Hearth witch.