A Pattern Language for the contemporary witch

Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

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Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

— Les plantes qu'on a brûlées avec les femmes. On ne les vend pas. On les nomme.

— The pattern, the commons, and the gift are the same thing said at three scales. —

§0 · A crack to begin with

You know this feeling. You step into an old inner courtyard, or into a café that has not been refurbished in forty years, or into the house of a friend who has the hand for thresholds, and something loosens in your body. You think: « here, I can breathe ». You also think, on your way out: « why can't I make that happen at home ». The answer is not that you lack taste or budget. It is that you have been dispossessed of a collective knowledge that modernity took five centuries to wrest from you. And the person who carried it, in the European villages before 1450, is precisely the one who was burned.

Alexander — why some places live

Christopher Alexander is the most important architect of the twentieth century you have probably never heard of. Born in Vienna in 1936, trained at Cambridge in mathematics before Berkeley in architecture, he spent his life asking why the Italian villages, the Moroccan souks, or the Cotswold cottages gave off a quality that his own modernist buildings, early in his career, did not. He called this quality, for want of a better term, the quality without a name — la qualité sans nom — then, later, Q.W.A.N.. A quality that is recognised before it is defined.

In 1977, with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, he published A Pattern Language — a 1,170-page book that catalogues 253 patterns of design, from the regional scale (« network of independent communities ») down to the scale of the room (« light on two sides », « window alcove »). Each pattern follows the same structure: a recurring problem in dwelling, and a type-solution that lets itself be adapted to the particular place. The 253 patterns are not a style — they are a grammar. You can speak any dialect with them. But without them, you speak a broken tongue.

Alexander's work could have stayed confidential. Instead it mutated in several directions. The first object-oriented software programmers, in the 1980s, understood that they could apply the grammar of patterns to their own field: this is where the term design pattern comes from — the term that structures the whole of software engineering today (the « Gang of Four », 1994, cites Alexander explicitly). The permaculturists did the same for the landscape. And more quietly, circles of weavers, herbalists, and community organisers began to recognise that their practices — set down in no manual — obeyed a grammar of patterns too. Except that no one had written it for them.

Federici — why this grammar had been destroyed

To understand why the grammar of living patterns is so badly missing today, one must take a detour through another Italian woman, philosopher and historian, Silvia Federici. In 2004, she published Caliban and the Witch. The book has become a classic of decolonial and feminist studies — but its central thesis is still little integrated into the conversations about dwelling.

The thesis, in a sentence: the witch-hunt in Europe (1450-1750, some 50,000 to 100,000 women executed, hundreds of thousands tortured) is not an irrational episode of medieval hysteria. It is a precise political apparatus, contemporary with the birth of capitalism, whose objective function was to destroy three things: the commons (common lands, managed collectively by the villages), the feminine knowledges of care (herbalism, childbirth, contraception, the care of the dead), and the animist grammar of dwelling that underpinned them. Federici shows — through a close materialist reading of the sources — that the enclosures (the privatisation of the common lands) and the stakes are not parallel phenomena. They are the two faces of the same apparatus of expropriation.

The consequence is exactly the one Alexander, without knowing it, lamented. The Italian villages, the Moroccan souks, the English cottages that still give off the quality without a name today are survivals. They are the rare pockets where the collective knowledge of dwelling — patterns, commons, mutual care — was not entirely destroyed by the enclosures and their industrial prolongation. Most of the contemporary Western landscape — suburban housing tracts, commercial town centres, office blocks — is what happens when one builds without this grammar. It is, literally, the architecture of completed expropriation.

Hyde — the gift as circulation

The third summit is Lewis Hyde. An American poet, translator, and essayist, in 1983 he published The Gift — subtitled: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. This book, too, becomes a quiet classic. Its thesis starts from anthropology (Mauss, Sahlins) and carries it forward into contemporary creation. A work — a poem, a song, an act of care, a meal, a conversation — is not a commodity. It obeys the logic of the gift, which is exactly the inverse of the logic of the commodity.

The logic of the commodity: what I sell moves away from me, and the dearer I sell it, the richer I grow. The logic of the gift: what I give stays active in circulation, and enrichment is measured by the quality of the circulation, not by accumulation. Hyde shows — and this is the heart of the book — that the works that last (a poem of Whitman's, a recipe handed down, a knowledge of care) belong to the logic of the gift, even when they happen to be sold. And that the societies that suppress the logic of the gift suppress, mechanically, the very possibility of the living work.

The triangle that should never have been lost

Let us set the three side by side. Alexander: the pattern is the unit of the grammar of dwelling — a type-solution that lets itself be adapted to a particular place. Federici: the commons is the unit of the grammar of stewardship — a resource managed collectively by those who depend on it. Hyde: the gift is the unit of the grammar of circulation — an act that does not end in the transaction, but is carried on in the chain of those who come after.

Three scales, but a single logical structure. The pattern is the gift at the scale of a built gesture (an alcove, a threshold, a window): it was received from other builders, one adapts it to one's place, one passes it on. The commons is the gift at the scale of a collective resource: it was received from the previous generations, one stewards it for one's own time, one passes it on to those who follow. And the gift is the pattern and the commons at the scale of the living work: received, adapted, passed on. The logic is the same. And it is precisely this logic — pattern + commons + gift — that was destroyed by the enclosures, the stakes, and industrialisation. Destroyed together. Not separately.

The contemporary witch — without the quotation marks

The word « witch » is a trap. It carries five centuries of defamatory use, then thirty years of New Age recuperation that have made it decorative. Federici uses it in its exact historical sense: the woman who, in the villages before 1450, carried a knowledge of care, of the threshold, of transmission — with no diploma, no institution, no ecclesiastical hierarchy to validate her. Sharon Blackie, in If Women Rose Rooted (2016), carries the word forward toward the contemporary woman who relearns to carry these patterns without asking permission. The word, in this sense, has nothing to do with a neo-pagan religion. It names a posture: that of the one who knows how to dwell, to care, to welcome, to pass on, with no institutional system to validate her.

This posture, today, is not reserved for women — Federici herself insists on the political, not strictly biological, character of gender in her analysis. But it was historically carried, and historically destroyed, by and among women, and it matters to name that. The « contemporary witch » this article speaks of is any person — woman, man, other — who takes up again, in full knowledge of this history, the patterns of dwelling, the commons as a mode of stewardship, and the gift as a mode of circulation. With the awareness that these three things were forbidden together, and that they must be reclaimed together.

Four patterns to take back, tomorrow morning

No abstract programme. Four patterns, drawn from Alexander's list and read again through Federici and Hyde. To install or to honour, at your own scale.

Pattern 130 — Entrance Room. The entrance is not the door. It is the space of transition between the outside and the inside, which says both welcome and threshold. To take back this pattern is to refuse that the entrance be a mere functional airlock — it is to give it the dignity of a threshold. What is the minimum gesture? A potted plant. A warm light. An object that says « here we take our time ». It is the opposite of the apartment-block corridor.

Pattern 159 — Light on Two Sides of Every Room. A room with light on one side only is a room that tires you. With light on two sides, it breathes. Alexander demonstrates it statistically, room after room, in A Pattern Language. To take back this pattern in an existing flat often means sacrificing partitions. To refuse this pattern means training your body in chronic exhaustion. The choice is more political than it seems.

Pattern 67 — Common Land. Every human community needs a common space — not private, not public-administrative, but common. An inner courtyard, a shared garden, a neighbourhood square. Federici showed it: these are the first spaces the enclosure seized, and their return is the first sign of a grammar rebuilding itself. If you live in a block of flats, it is the stairwell you can clean or the courtyard where you can set down a pot. Small. But this is where it begins.

Pattern 84 — Teenage Society — generalised into the gift-bond. Alexander speaks of adolescents, but the pattern holds for any group of peers: humans need a circle where circulation happens by gift, without transaction. Bringing a dish without having to be paid back for it. Minding a child without billing. Trading plants from the garden. To weave these gift-gestures, without forcing them but by allowing them, is to restore the third dimension of the triangle. It is what Hyde calls keeping the gift moving. The gift that does not circulate dies. The gift that circulates makes community.