Sian Sibley is both a witch and a scientist, and is passionate about the environment. She's also a prolific author. I've interviewed her about her books including
Black Paths and Green Cathedrals, which highlights how paganism has been seduced by consumerism, and the dangers inherent in that.
Q: Out of all that you've written, which is your favourite published work?
A: Without a shadow of a doubt, my most important book so far is Black Paths and Green Cathedrals.
Q: What's it about?
It's a look at the impact pollution and consumerism has on the world, and whether paganism is truly a move away from that, or whether we've simply dressed the same appetites in different robes.
Because that's the uncomfortable question underneath the book. We like to think of paganism as the antidote to consumerism, and then we walk straight into the same trap wearing different clothes. Crystals are mined, and mining is mining, whether it's coal or quartz. The ground doesn't care what we intend to do with what we tear out of it. Witch boxes, the subscription kind, curated and shipped in plastic month after month, are consumer culture with a pentacle stuck on the lid. We didn't reject the machine. We just gave it a different altar to sell from.
And then there's what we do to the land itself when we go looking for magic in it. Clooties left to rot and choke a hawthorn instead of biodegrading the way they're supposed to. Rock piling, cairns built by hands that think they're honouring a place, when really they're rearranging it, leaving a mark where the point was always to leave none. We tell ourselves we're closer to the earth than the world we're rejecting, and then we behave exactly like it.
Black Paths and Green Cathedrals looks at all of that straight in the eye and does not flinch. If paganism is going to mean anything as a force for change, it has to survive its own reflection first. We cannot preach reverence for the land while we're still buying our way through it.
Q: Why is it your favourite?
Because it was filled with my rage. Rage at what I could see happening to a culture I love, watched from the inside, which makes it so much harder to say plainly. We accept greenwashing far too easily. We call ourselves a green religion, a green culture, and repeat that claim until it feels like fact, while some of our own actions are blatantly not green at all. I could not keep pretending not to see that. I carry a two-fold identity too, a scientist who trusts data and a witch who trusts the land, and Black Paths and Green Cathedrals asked me to stop keeping those two selves separate and let them judge the same evidence together. I wrote it slowly. I wrote it angry. Then I wrote it clear-eyed, because rage on its own teaches nobody anything, it only exhausts the person carrying it. It's the book where my biology and my magic finally sat at the same table and stopped arguing, and where my love for this path had to survive being honest about it. Every book since owes something to what I learned writing that one.
Q: Tell me a bit more about yourself, what else you've written, and any books due to be published.
I'm a short, rather plump Welsh woman who has had the extraordinary luck to spend her working life in fields she actually loved. I trained as a biologist first, and my early career was in pharmaceutical research. Later I spent years in a classroom teaching children how ecosystems work, how everything is owed to everything else, before I ever called myself an author. I lead a coven of wild witches called DragonOak, here in South Wales, and we have circled together for around thirty years now. Ye gods. I am old.
Alongside Black Paths and Green Cathedrals, I've written Drinking Tea and Herding Spiders and Unveiling the Green. As for what's coming, the one closest to my heart right now is a new book with Moon Books, out in January, Pagan Portals: Medusa about working with the serpent-crowned goddess. It's another book of rage, in its way. Rage at how the female is treated in this world, and at how we go on carrying that treatment as though it were simply weather. It calls on Medusa's power to help us work through trauma, both personal and ecological, because I don't believe those two kinds of harm are as separate as we like to pretend. It's my first real foray into eco-feminism, and I'm deeply proud of it. I've worked with Medusa for a long time, using that relationship to help others find their way through sexual assault and trauma, so this is a book I have been living inside for years before I ever put it on the page. I will love seeing it out in the world.
Q: What are you working on now?
I have several projects on the go at the moment. I run magical conferences all over the UK, and the latest one lands in October this year, with authors and practitioners travelling in from all corners to present their work. It's one of my favourite parts of the year, watching that many strands of practice sit in one room together.
Book-wise, I'm mid-edit on The Slow and Fatal Dance for Aeon Publishing, a history of healing and its intersection with the modern medical world. There's a little bit of rage in that one too, if I'm honest. Seems to be a running theme with me.
I've also written a bit of a strange little book called Wisdom in Wet Knickers, coming from O Books, which shares my experience, both magical and scientific, with that wonderful thing called the menopause. So many of us go into it blindly, because it's something we simply don't talk about, and I'm hoping this book is one of the things that finally breaks that silence for the women who read it.
Beyond that, I've got several ideas for next year circling round my head, though nothing settled yet. I'm planning to properly rest from August through to January, because I have been writing without a break since the Covid shutdown, when I started out of a real need to keep myself occupied and my mind busy. A rest is overdue, and I intend to actually take it this time.
Meet Sian Sibley at Watkins Bookshop in LondonOn Thursday 30 July; Sian Sibely will be talking about Black Paths and Green Cathedrals at Watkins Bookshop, 19-21 Cecil Ct, London WC2N 4EZ. The talk starts at 5pm and is free but you can reserve a place. Find out more here: https://www.watkinsbooks.com/events
You can also view Black Paths and Green Cathedrals on Amazon
(Please note: I earn commission on some links)
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