Calling All Storm Hags, Cailleach, Witte Wieven, Horned Goddess, Antler Women, Elen of the Ways

This is a gathering of work created over the winter 2026 season by members of the Missing Witches Weavers coven.

Across these months of cold, dark, of pressure, we turned to her. A force. Something in us that knows how to gather weather. Something ancient that's been moving with us for a long, long time.

the antlers, the gigantic stature, the squatting posture, and the chthonic or Plutonic character of Cernunnos had been stolen or borrowed or inherited, either from his associate goddess, or from some other female divinity or group of female divinities: the Highland and Irish deer-goddesses. (McKay 172–173)

Notice her at the edge of the storm. Watching. Refusing erasure. Enacting consequence.

The Storm Hag is not singular. She is not resolved.

She is a gathering of unique energies, stories with specific relations to land formations, stones and water, birds and people and spirits with sharp teeth and lightning eyes.

She is a pressure system of people — women, children, the violated and victimized, and those who stand with them — rising as relation. As weather.

“Waawaashkeshi’Kwe—the Ojibwe name often translated as Deer Woman—is a Bad Indian. Stories of Deer Woman’s vengeance against those who harm women and children are part of many stories told of her across the eastern woodlands and central plains in the lands that eventually became the Americas.”

We think you will meet your own Storm Hag, weather goddess, Deer Woman, in countless places, countless rainstorms all your own.

Listen for her.
Call to her.

Become, in moments, a place where she might move.

The Storm Hag. The Cailleach. Mist witches. Deer women.

More-than-human power, big as weather systems, moving in honour and protection of women and children everywhere.

We noticed them appearing across stories and in our dreams and songs.

We call them in.

"We bring down a generational storm. This is how the future is reborn."

In some traditions the women and girls of a village would craft a lifesize doll out of wheat and reeds and flowers, and hold hands with this figure of the snow queen, walking her through town, singing songs at the doorways where girls lived, until they walked her to the river. And drowned her. 

In other traditions they burned her and warmed their hands by her fire, to call forth the end of winter with her death, and to celebrate her rebirth as the goddess of spring. 

Because the Winter goddess of quiet and death and storms and raging is also the Spring Queen bursting through the other side adorned with flowers and steeled by the souls she brings with her from the dark. She is the macrocosm, all of the consciousness of the natural worlds becoming. 

The rituals taught us we would be sacrificed and die for the sake of balance in the natural world.

But also that we are the power of all life returning. 

 If you live in a place where you see racism and fascism around you we want to whisper to you: witches and other bad bitches are with you, working alongside you in the fertile dark, even on the coldest nights.

The Cailleach is the personification of winter in Gaelic mythology: she herds deer, she fights spring, and her staff freezes the ground.

She rules the winter months between Samhainn and Bealltainn, while Brìghde rules the summer months between Bealltainn and Samhainn. Cailleach and Brìghde are two faces of the same power, the same great goddess, the same queen of earth and weather.

Sometimes she is a great bird. 

Sometimes she is multiple, and known as The Storm Hags, the voice of windstorms and the righteous fury behind great waves.

Sometimes she is the stone the storm beats herself against.

Today I come in grief.

Today, I let grief flow over me.

Taking my jagged rocks and making them smooth.

Today, I let grief flow.. Like a river in the spring. Growing wider and taking more trees with it.

My grief rolls and rumbles.

It shakes, and it flows.

It's mighty.

It's deep, and I let it take me completely.

I come in grief.

Today, grief is my lover.

We roll together.

We sweat, we make sucking sounds.

There are sweat and tears.

Intermingled, intermixed.

We can't really tell the difference anymore.

Whose puddle is whose mine or grief’s?

Today, my grief calls me under.

Join me, it says.

Join me in the deep, dark places of life.

Remember, grief says, Remember, I love you.

Remember, I'm here for you.

Do not forsake me, grief says.

Grief is now my God.

Grief is in me.

I am God.

Today, I will not eat my grief.

I will leave it on the table.

Today, I will lead with grief.

I will wear it on my sleeve.

Have you seen my grief today?

Isn't she amazing?

Look how deep she is.

Look how real.

God, she used to be a fighter, but now she is much more.

Today, I come in grief.

Fuck peace.

Today is for deep rage and sadness.. For acknowledging what's unfair.

If we're being completely real with self and spirit and the mystery of the water of grief, Today, we flood the basin.

Today we seep out into the road.

Today, it's unsafe.

Today, the grief is all.

You have been warned.

Today, I call grief.

Among these trees.

Five years. 13 years, 2 years, 24 years, 34 years. 40 years. 46 years.

Today, I call grief.

For all of the years.

Today, I call grief.

Today, I come in grief.

Yes.

And so it is.

Recorded at the 3 sisters trees in central Ohio on March 24, 2026

A day:

Pausing, I sit. The iron and wood bench creaking.

Wind spirals up, my hair suddenly afloat, carrying my gaze along.

"Watch us: learn"

The vultures and crows seemingly say.

They tumble, soar, twist, play.

Then, focused, working hard against the incoming storm

Yet momentarily, no advance.

So, it becomes magnificent stillness, aloft, completely at ease.

A night:

Tendrils of mist, mere feet above the marshy, frog-serenaded earth

Coalesce horizontally from bone-chilling air.

Yet, the star-lit sky above,

Completely clear.

I don't yet know what these messages from the land mean.

I do know to pay attention.

There is held potential in the winds.

Something is convening in the mist.

What does re-enchantment require of resistance?

How do we ask questions, create the world in which we want to live, and do ritual and spells for resistance outside of the narratives and structures into which we were indoctrinated?

How can we see and think beyond "national" borders, state lines, flags, pushing Democrats to be more progressive, "The State"? Many a conversation in which I have engaged fall somewhere in the territory of the following:

"How to get the country back on track". "Reclaiming the flag". "ICE killed citizens". "The Constitution says/protects/offers us these rights...." (insert whatever idealized/controlled/propagandized version of the land of "the free" you can think of here).

How do we simmer new worlds into existence when we are steeped in water we cannot even see? A story recently came to me in an essay about The Patriarchy. Two young fish are swimming along. An elder fish joins them and asks: "How's the water"? She then swims away, and the two young fish swim quietly for a few moments. After a while, one of them turns to the other and says: "What is.....'water'"?

I understand the intoxicating pull of "reclaiming" in resistance: of continuing to try to nudge this country, or any other, towards the best version of itself. To actually have a fully functioning, equitable, caring, merit-based democracy. And in resistance, this may be an even stronger pull than if we had two feet completely planted in re-enchantment. I have phone banked for nearly two decades. My efforts have evolved over the years to the point where I will only phone bank for a very small group volunteering in Indigenous lands as background support for the work those peoples are doing on the ground to build their communities.

This is in some ways even more fraught. I am of two minds with it. The system is here to stay for a while longer, so let's support some of the most disenfranchised, who have an incredible amount of power to wield, in becoming engaged and empowered. That group is possibly as much about community building as it is simply being a voter. Or...is it just perpetuating the harm by further indoctrinating people into a system that does not work for them (I mean, really, especially them), and never really will because it was, by design, meant not to?

What do we do with this tension?

I want Witches to be increasingly able to orient themselves by rivers, lakes, native plants, and mountains. Not by nation-state borders and interstate highways. (And I want us to learn the various Indigenous names for those rivers and mountains). I want us to so deeply know the lands where we live that we could give directions by natural features, not colonizer's street names. By where the sun rises and sets on the horizon depending on the seasons, not by what month a calendar says it is. I want "Loyal to the Land--Not a Flag"* to be our guidelines.

I want us to be paying attention to the directions from which the winds come. Notice how the ravens fly differently before the storm. Align ourselves not to the frameworks of this "once great nation", but to the foundational truths offered by the earth's bedrock. Because was the so-called "US", ever, really, "great", and by whose definition? Meaning: who had to be left out in order to make that claim believable? Who had to be dehumanized and devalued?

Re-enchantment requires of resistance that we focus on liberation for all. Not "the land of the free". It will always be stolen land unless, and until, we give it back. How is that "free"? We will always be standing on the legacies of slavery and genocide. How can you make that right? How does one make a system of liberation for all out of something that is, by design, not meant to offer that? Yes, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice (if we bend it). But what if we had simply built a better foundation from the beginning? What if that arc could be bent in 50 years instead of 5 centuries? (It's going to be more than 5 centuries at this rate).

Re-enchantment requires relationship and connection. The very things that patriarchy, capitalism, and colonization with fixed state borders have tried to rip from us. However, we will clearly not be able to go back. Maybe we can't decolonize, but we can re-enchant? Not de-capitalize, but re-care? Increasingly I believe that resistance looks like doing the phone-banking--and doing the resistance spells. But resistance spells that are focused on what we want to create, at least as much as, or more than, on what we want to fight.

So yes, vote (please for goddess's sake, vote if you still can) and vote like a "radical"**. And then go dance in a field of wildflowers holding a puppy. Call your Senators. And then call your local Indigenous museum and ask what they need or want from those of us descended from colonizers to be in better relationship with them and their land.

I am still learning. It feels like I don't really "know".

So:

Mostly, I believe that re-enchantment requires that we recognize that while we want to fight the systems, and we should, sometimes fighting will look like stillness. Sometimes it will look like play, sometimes it will be music serenading something, and always, always, it will be centered in noticing, connection, relationship, and care for each other and the land, as much outside of every fucking system of oppression on the planet as possible.

Listen to the land.

And blessed fucking be.

*Seen on a protest sign from an online source I cannot remember.

**"How to Vote Like a Radical," is an essay by April Rosenblum. Adapted into a video by NDN Collective.

The Storm Hag brings in change, stirs the waters of the deep, and enchants the wild winter landscape. As the Cailleach she is the Queen of Winter, misunderstood creator of mountains and hills, goddess of the Earth, stirrer of storms, and bestower of frost.

When the Storm Hag speaks, we hear pressure building, landscapes moving, storm fronts coming in, and liminal spaces opening as thresholds for change. The Storm Hag comes to us in weather and in archetypes; in landscapes and in card draws; and sometimes in women and sounds.

Ruth Crawford was the daughter of a minister, a child of ritual. Her family moved from town to town until settling in Jacksonville, much like a storm front moving from coast to coast. Music was passed down to her like a sacred gift from a line of women teachers, showing her how to use the piano to create magic from silence. One of these women introduced her to theosophy, an early 19th century esoteric movement that believed in the unity of all life and a hidden spiritual wisdom available to those brave enough to seek it.

Crawford revered the Earth. In her diary, she wrote that she felt:

a sudden awe regarding the ground I am trodding. I have a sudden illuminating sense of the inconceivable depth, massive, solid, that stretches beneath my feet. I feel it is a kind of sacred thing, this contact of my feet with this awesome substance. I feel that my feet are beating in regular rhythm a kind of hymn to the earth.

She had an intense interest in the mystic, the unseen, and things greater than herself. She used mystic as a musical marking, and musicologist Judith Tick notes “that [it] was intended to alter the performer's mentality, changing the nature of the concentration that would somehow be communicated through touch.” Her will was set into paper, transferred to performers, and sent out into the air as new creation.

She set poetry to music, gifting her power to other’s words like an unseen ally. When conventional expression wouldn’t do, she used her own lingua ignota to write a set of chant works that Tick describes as “a way to recreate a prayer meeting purged of the literal elements she rejected in organized Western religion.” Her music was both her creation and her worship. Ruth Crawford Seeger was a creative force who made something from nothing. She was a weaver of sounds whose ultramodern style was under-appreciated for the gift that it was. Her music opens up a liminal space for us to step in and experience another world. She is a Storm Hag, and she invites us to become Storm Hags ourselves.

Diaphonic Suite No. 1 is a piece of 12 tone music. It doesn’t have a clear key signature, so it is not comfortable to our ear. It is otherworldly. It is not like us. It subverts expectations. This style of music uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale; nothing is wasted in this creation and all is useful. Movement 2, Andante, is slow and constant. We feel the Storm Hag preparing, planning, and seeing her vision of creation. She is witnessing. Her thoughts are manifested into sounds. This piece is written for the oboe and uses the whole range of the instrument.

The oboe’s voice is an unusual sound; it does not fit our expectations. The notes sit at the bottom of the range and soar to the heights of the staff; the Storm Hag extends across across all planes. You hear in this work pressure building. The clouds come in before the storm, the unknown stirs, and unseen forces are brought together.

The Storm Hag challenges us to weather her storm and allow parts of ourselves to be eroded that need dissolving. Her kin are powerful, elemental, and sometimes misunderstood. They remind us to ground ourselves in the Earth, trust the wisdom of others, and strive towards gaining that wisdom for ourselves.

May we embrace the Storm Hag and her kin and may we listen to their song whenever it plays.

Storm Hags and their kin, witches made of Sea-Salt stretch back through millennia, through conjecture, further still — back to when time was not yet measured or named. Back when salt and time were one and the same.

Sea-Salt first came from wild storms in the sky. She drifted down toward the earth, searching for her people, for others like her. She felt so alone floating through the air until she touched water, she felt something like home. She dove deep, swirling beneath the waves, far from the reach of man. His arrival was coming, but not yet. 

As she moved through what would one day be called time, loneliness found her again. She longed for kin. So began her drift toward what humans would name the shore.

Land has companioned beside coursing sea salt waves and witches for centuries — first the tides, then the tanks. Guns came, and bombs followed, both the kind that tear open bodies and the kind that tear open spirits. Words of hurt and hate fell like shrapnel. 

Yet each time, 

the salt rose to meet the wreckage, 

washing away the wounds and the ruins. It lingered at the edges of the sea, the same sea that carried boats heavy with men and metal and their terrible cargo.

Forced entries. For centuries.

Sea-Salt felt the pressure beginning, without words. She felt the pulse of her kin growing warmer alkaline to eventual white hot acidity. 

It is widely acknowledged that salt can burn when she wants to. 

Along the water’s edge, the salt gathers. One grain clings to the rocks, then another finds its place beside it. Clinging. Holding. Gathering more and more until a faint haze forms — a thin film becoming a community. 

Stronger with each grain that joins. 

They thicken along the crags, calling in other elements and creatures to the growing collective.

More salt rose from the volcanoes on the ocean floor to join the storm, ancient as the world itself. The earth’s crust shifted and shook, restless with pressure until the inevitable release came. From that release grew pillars of Sea-Salt rising through the water, joining the first grains in their search for belonging.

The elements held hands — earth, land, sea, and sky — encircling the world. From their union, Sea-Salt grounded in strength and integrity was born, and through salt, born over and over. 

Turned and churned into storm air and waters. 

Never ending, always beginning anew. 

Building. 

Where salt gathers, barnacles root. Barnacles bring small fish. And small fish bring larger ones. A motley crew of saltcrusted, saltseeking, saltloving beings forms around the edges of the world. Sea-salt witches began to take shape, the world over, in tone and color, and flavor. 

Sea-Salt eventually grew to be woman in all her forms. 

Sea-Salt is the maiden, born of the collective rising of pressure and calming of pools. 

Sea-Salt is the mother, bearing daughters and sons, giving endlessly and forever holding. 

Sea-Salt is the crone, wise and calming storms, resting in shallow tidepools. She is gathering in air, breathing force into the sea. In Sea-Salt’s ancient years, she becomes pillar, and rock. 

She bleaches the bones and hollows out stone. 

She preserves and watches over all things in time. An enigma. Infinity. Sea-Salt Witches are kin to the Storm Hag, both born from communal spirit and tensile strength. 

Sea-Salt Witches carry ancient roots. New tides and new storms have come looking for salt gatherings.

Sea-Salt witches hold fast and build under the pressure of mighty seas. They gather and burn when needed, cleanse and protect.

Because they are the Storm Hag’s kin, Sea-Salt Witches.

Be still.

Not polite stillness.

Predator stillness.

The kind that listens with its skin.

It does not matter how you sit.

Only that you stay.

Breathe.

1…2…3

Drop into your body.

Into the marrow.

Into the animal beneath your name.

Let the rage rise.

Let the grief snarl.

Let the ache bare its teeth.

Do not tidy it.

Let it come.

Breathe.

1…2…3

If you need to scream, scream.

The first sound ever made

was not a lullaby.

It was thunder splitting the sky from the sea.

She remembers that sound.

She was there.

Breathe.

1…2…3

Close your eyes.

What colour churns behind them?

That is the hem of her dress, dragging through stormwater.

What scent thickens the air?

Salt? Iron? Wet earth? Smoke?

That is her skin.

What presses at the edges of you?

She is near.

An old woman.

Bent, but not broken.

Shawl wrapped tight.

Wind-tangled hair beneath it.

Teeth like worn stones.

Eyes like lightning trapped in flesh.

Breathe.

1…2…3

She does not ask permission.

She is simply there.

Beside you.

Behind you.

Inside the dark of your closed eyes.

Look up.

There is a sky inside you.

What colour is it?

Bruised purple? Ash-grey? Green before a tornado?

That is her spirit.

Feel the heat in it.

Storm heat.

The kind that makes the air shake.

Her hand finds yours.

It is rough. Warm. Real.

“Hush,” she growls.

“Storms are not rushed.

They gather.”

Breathe.

1…2…3

Life does not bloom on command.

It splits rock when it is ready.

She pulls the shawl from her head.

Wind explodes outward.

Now she looks less like an old woman

and more like the elements of sky and sea.

She reaches out to you.

What have you wrapped around yourself?

What softness has kept your teeth dull?

She tears it away.

Let it fall.

Breathe.

1…2…3

She grips both your hands now.

Her eyes lock onto yours.

What colour burns in them?

That is not hers.

It is yours

buried.

caged.

waiting.

She leans closer.

“Take it back.”

Breathe.

1…2…3

Inhale.

Her breath is rain and smoke and ocean spray.

It crashes into you.

Through your skull.

Down your spine.

Into your ribs.

Into your belly.

Your belly is where storms are born.

What colour is it now?

It moves.

It coils.

It crackles.

That is your storm.

Not given.

Remembered.

Breathe.

1…2…3

“What is my name?” she asks.

Listen.

The name comes like thunder

not spoken,

but known.

Keep it in your bones.

Call it when you need to split something open.

Breathe.

1…2…3

She steps back.

Wind tears through her hair.

Her body blurs at the edges.

You realize

She is not leaving.

She is dissolving.

Into you.

Into the blood.

Into the pulse.

Into the space behind your eyes.

You did not free her.

You uncovered her.

Breathe.

1…2…3

Feel your belly.

There.

That heat.

That pressure.

That almost-snarl.

Feed it.

Let it root like a seed in black soil.

One day,

When someone sits before you

afraid of their own thunder

You will recognize it.

And you will say:

Be still.

Breathe.

1…2…3

Open your eyes.

Stretch your spine.

Roll your shoulders.

Bare your teeth if you need to.

Feel that?

That is not her.

That is you.

Storm-blooded.

Sky-split.

Uncovered.

Tend it.

Train it.

Trust it.

The Storm Hag is not just watching.

She is breathing through you.

Breathe.

1…2…3…