You imagine the goal of your desires… gather all the ingredients… assemble all the tools…focus your intention… and the manifestation begins.
Is it magick?
Or is it… cooking?
The answer is “yes.” In Gwion Raven’s magickal kitchen, they’re one and the same.
“Cooking is about alchemy and making something out of nothing; of coaxing flavors from humble ingredients,” Gwion says. “Cooking is herb magick and healing magick and love potion making. It sustains life. Cooking is magick. Magick is cooking. There’s no separation for me.
“Think of a magickal ritual and why you’d participate in one. There are specialized tools to use. There’s a magickal space to occupy. There are texts to read and memorize. Maybe traveling to different realms, communing with the gods, spending time with ancestors, healing, ecstasy, energy raising, community building. I could go on. Now did I just evoke a ritual or a meal? When I cook, when I cook for you, when I cook for community and the gods and to make magick, I do all this.”
The magick, he explains, extends beyond simply combining the right ingredients to masterfully prepare a delectable dish. It’s infused in the entire process, right down to working his own spells as he cooks, such as stirring in a particular direction, and using specific ingredients for specific physical or magickal effect. And just as in ritual, the spoken word can enhance the experience and the result. He will speak the desired impact of his meal out loud as he cooks, and where possible, includes others in that process as well. In Gwion’s kitchen, cooking and magick are inseparable. Before he discovered the magickal arts, however, he discovered the joys of good food.
“I’ve always been interested in food, and most importantly flavor. Growing up in London, I was exposed to all sorts of amazing dishes from around the world. The first time I fell in love with food was in Spain. I was about eight. I had an incredible seafood paella and red wine. I can still taste that meal.
“As I grew up and had to feed myself, I soon learned what it took to cook for myself. Like lots of folks, I worked in restaurants.
So, had he always aspired to be a chef?
“Of course! But being a chef and being a cook are different things altogether. I’m a pretty good cook but I’m not really chef material. Chefs lead a team of cooks, they keep the entire menus in their heads, and they manage restaurants. That’s a magick all by itself. I love being a cook though. There’s a camaraderie in a kitchen that’s almost coven-like. Everyone has a common intention, everyone knows their part in the ritual, the chef is like the high priestess, driving the magick forward. I love that.
“I still work in kitchens today, whenever I get a chance, and cook with as many people as I can. What I am passionate about now is finding ways to cook with groups that are feeding at-risk communities in some way. Feeding community is a magick I’m passionate about.
For the purposes of his kitchen witchery story, Gwion says flavor is what drives and inspires him to combine and blend unique ingredients, and to repurpose classic dishes as well as create new recipes of his own, some of which are featured in his new book, “The Magick of Food —Rituals, Offerings & Why We Eat Together.” Slow-Braised Pork with Fruit and Onion Bacon Jam, Lentil and Olive Salad with Cabbage and Carrot Slaw, Red Onion Pickle Bliss, and Pottage from the Dark Ages are amongst the innovative and very personal recipes featured in the book, each with its own historical or cultural connotation, his own personal insights and inspirations, as well as magickal correlations to deities or the elements.
What’s wonderfully surprising is that this book is not merely a cookbook with a few cool stories tossed in. It’s an expansive composite of his own expertise in the kitchen as well as his own magickal practices that correlate directly to the preparation, presentation, and enjoyment of food. Besides having a tantalizing depth and breadth of experience in the kitchen, Gwion has a rich magickal background, having been initiated into the Avalon Druid Order, Reclaiming, and Gardnerian Wicca.
What he has mastered in circle, he transposes to his kitchen — and he doesn’t stop there. In his book, he emphasizes that enjoying food isn’t just about combining a bunch of ingredients into the pot, heating it up, stirring, and slapping it onto plates. No, no, no… he demonstrates how “eating food” is not the same thing as “dining,” and prepares an entire meal that includes all the senses, from decor, to lighting, to atmosphere, to words of thanks for the food. He introduces the reader to the idea that every meal, no matter how simple, holds the possibility of much more meaning, and enjoyment, and how we can enrich our daily lives by doing more than merely “eating food.”
The roots of Gwion’s perspective on food come not only from a variety of experience in the food industry but also from his own upbringing. He grew up watching his grandmothers cook, observing how meals were made simply and economically, just as they’d learned to do in their own younger years during and after World War II, when food rationing was a way of life.
“Nothing went to waste, he says.
Besides watching his grandmothers create something out of relatively nothing, he was simultaneously magickally inspired by the classic Celtic and Pagan surroundings of his youth.
“Growing up in England, magic, myth, and history all sort of combine very easily. There were ruined abbeys and castle towers not far from where I grew up. Museums were filled with images of the gods. My family were and are Travelers, so there are vestiges of older traditions we still practice. The land of England and Wales sing magically, if you know how to listen.
“I’d say I’ve been Pagan-leaning all along. Witchcraft came later after a visit to England with my girlfriend, now wife. She was a witch back then. As our relationship blossomed, so did our Craft practices.”
His wife, Phoenix LaFae, is also an accomplished author, with her own new book, “What is Remembered Lives — Developing Relationships with Deities, Ancestors & the Fae.” Together, they co-own Milk & Honey, a metaphysical shop in Sebastopol, California. Magick is infused in their lives just like the flavors in Gwion’s recipes. Why not spice things up? Magick enhances life just as spices enhance food, and this is really the heart of Gwion’s kitchen witchery message: Why be bland when it can be ever so much better? Why choose mediocre when it can all be so much more magickal!
The taste of things, the flavor… the experimentation and exploration… this is what gives Gwion joy as he creates new dishes and recipes.
“I’m obsessed with flavor. I love finding ingredients I’ve never cooked with. I love re-imagining old standard dishes and packing them with exciting new combinations.”
He adds that growing vegetables and herbs in his own garden, as well as wandering the farmer’s markets for local, fresh produce, is a big part of his kitchen witchery. In fact, he notes, learning to cook with whatever is in season is one of the things that “really honed my skills as a cook.”
Like any good witch, he understands the flow of working, and creating, in tune and in rhythm with nature. One need only savor the heady, aromatic, robust wonder of a freshly picked ripe tomato from the garden, as contrasted with the sickly, mealy grocery store tomatoes in the dead of winter to fully grasp why cooking “in season” is vastly preferable to using ingredients that are picked before they’re ripe so they can survive being shipped from South America and trucked to American grocery stores: yum vs. yuck.
Speaking of tomatoes: they’re noticeably absent from Gwion’s recipes, even though he lives in proximity to the tomato center of the world, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. Some health-related issues forced him to eliminate tomatoes from his diet.
“I strained my vocal cords many years ago, and tomatoes, along with other highly acidic foods, played havoc with my throat and impacted my ability to talk. That was rough! So, I retooled my recipes to exclude tomatoes. I avoid nightshades as a rule, but I cook with them now and again.”
His own food sensitivities translate into compassion for others who struggle with the same, and he gently reminds the reader that whenever a recipe calls for an ingredient that one can’t eat — dairy or shellfish, for example — or maybe ingredients one chooses not to eat as a vegetarian or vegan, that it’s perfectly fine to tweak the recipes and find new ways to make them work. That said, even if the ingredients don’t quite match, the ritual of dining and savoring those magickal kitchen creations is one and the same.
Gwion’s experience and passion for cooking, as well as his talent for writing (he is a full-time writer and blogger), were the ingredients for writing “The Magick of Food.” The recipes and the rituals were simmering inside him, and finally made their way into print with this first book of his own. (He has contributed to several others).
” The Magick of Food” sort of just bubbled up through me. It was a story of magick that wanted to be told. Gather with any group of people and start talking about food and before you know it, you’re talking about family or an amazing date, or the best tacos you ever had.
“Eating and cooking are so much a part of our lives, and are rarely given their due, especially magically speaking. I wanted to change that. Food is magick. Magick is food. Cooking and eating perpetuates love and sustain life. Is there a more potent magick? I don’t think so.”
He emphasizes that while magick may be new to some, food is familiar to most everyone. It’s a common cord stringing people together, regardless of country or culture. Some may even be practicing magick in their “famous chicken soup” or “special chocolate fudge” without even realizing it—the love and caring is in the food, regardless of whether the one who prepared it has a magickal vocabulary for it. And, it has been so through generations and time itself.
“We all eat. Many of us cook and practice magick. Our ancestors made cooking part of their magick. Virtually every myth, god/goddess story, and magickal tale has some mention of feasting or offerings and magickal ingredients.”
Despite humanity’s cultural and historical connection to creating foods with intentions to heal or energize or delight, Gwion says those who focus their magickal talents in the kitchen are sometimes looked down upon by those whose magick takes place in formal ritual. He says it’s time to disabuse magickal practitioners of that notion.
“Kitchen witchery and kitchen magick are often regarded as ‘lower arts,’ and I wanted to rewrite that story. Most folks I know have a complex relationship with food. We more often than not judge ourselves poorly for what we eat or buy and how we eat our meals. I believe all food is sacred and eating can be a devotional act to ourselves and those we love. For me, kitchen witchery is direct and tangible. It’s rooted firmly in the moment. It’s the kind of magick everyone can practice.”
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To find out more about Gwion or to contact him, visit www.gwionraven.com, and follow “Ceridwensson” and “The Magick of Food” on Instagram. Further magickal musings along with his wife can be found in “The Witches Next Door” on Facebook and Patheos Pagan. He is also on Facebook as both himself, and “The Magick of Food,” and is featured on the author pages on the website for Llewellyn Worldwide, which is the publisher of his book.
(This story was originally published in Witches & Pagans magazine, March 2022.)