witchcraft

Power Begins at the Edge

The Witch’s First Reckoning with Risk, Growth, and the Call of the Spiral

Most of us begin the path of witchcraft with small, beautiful things.
A phase of the moon, an herb tucked under the pillow, a card drawn in curiosity.
A whisper, a candle flame, a sense that something more is possible.

These are good beginnings.
Gentle. Curious. Sacred in their own way.

But there comes a time, sometimes after years, sometimes overnight, when something shifts.
The dream becomes a hunger. The candlelight isn’t enough. You want more than spells that look pretty and rituals that feel safe.

This is where the edge appears.

The First Reckoning

There’s no flashing sign that says, Power this way.
Instead, there’s a tension in the chest. A feeling that what you’re doing isn’t wrong, but it isn’t enough, you could go deeper. Maybe it happens in ritual, when your voice shakes as you call the Goddess, and something answers back. Perhaps it’s in a dream, when you wake, sobbing with a name you’ve never heard still on your lips. Or it could be when the world cracks open; grief, love, illness, birth, and the veil thins without warning.

And suddenly, you know: This path is real.
And real means risk.

You are standing on the edge.
And something inside you is asking if you’ll step forward.

The Path Isn’t Straight, It Spirals

No one hands you a map for what comes next. You don’t become powerful all at once.
It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read or how many tools you own.

Power unfolds in spirals.

You begin with knowledge; learning names, signs, symbols.
You move into experience; casting, contacting, stumbling, trying again.
You start to understand the deeper structures and the “why’s”
Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, you grow into wisdom.
And from that wisdom, you begin to touch true power.

You come back to the same ideas again and again, and each time, they meet you deeper. The moon isn’t just a phase. It becomes a mirror.
The spell isn’t just a charm. It becomes a choice.

And here’s the truth no one glamorizes:
The people who succeed at this path, the witches, the magicians, mystics and healers who truly grow, have failed more than most people have even dared to try.
They’ve stumbled. Been humbled. Risked. Gotten it wrong. Chosen again.

Every scar is a sign of movement.
Every mistake is part of the spiral.

Power Will Ask Something of You

This is the part few people say out loud.

Awakening isn’t always beautiful, it breaks things.

You might lose the version of yourself that always played small.
You might lose people who loved that version.

You’ll face your fears. Those of failure and of success.
And you’ll meet your shadow, one who is not the villain you fear, but a wounded protector.

Because here’s the truth:

We all have a dark side.
It is simply hidden, not evil. Built from old pain and forged in moments we had to survive.

If you repress it, ignore it, pretend it isn’t there, it will find its way out anyway.
And when it bursts free, it will do so without your consent, or your control.

But if you turn toward it, if you meet it, name it, embrace it, you begin to reclaim your full self.

Your shadow has shielded you.
It carried the weight you couldn’t bear at the time.
It knows your wounds and your power.

When you embrace it, when you do the slow, brave work of integration you don’t become less.

You become more.
More whole.
More honest.
More powerful than you ever imagined.

You Don’t Have to Be Ready

You don’t need to know everything.
You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t need a coven, a title, a perfect altar, or the current aesthetic.

You need one thing:
A willingness to keep going, to be reshaped, to listen deeply to yourself, to the land, to the gods.
A willingness to walk forward even when the path vanishes into mist.

Because power isn’t a destination.
It’s a devotion.
And it begins the moment you say:
Yes, I will walk.

A Note for the Ones Still Standing on the Edge

If you’re here, if you’re reading this…
If you’ve felt the edge under your feet and the pull of something deeper.

Then you’re already on the path.

The spiral has already begun.

So take one breath.
Take one step.
And trust that you are not alone. We’ve walked this way too.
And the road ahead, while steep, is full of wonder.

I was warned.

It began more than twenty-five years ago, in a small living room thick with incense and shadow. The five of us sat cross-legged on the floor, chanting our invocation. My Priestess, Lady Teara, veiled and still, opened herself, and as the breath left her body, the Crone stepped in.

Her voice came low and dry, ancient as dust and bone.

“There will come a time,
of fire, famine, and war.
A time of great unmaking.
And you must be ready.”

I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time I heard the breath of Apophis coiling through the veil.

The warning returned, again and again, over the years. In dreams. In trance. In ritual.

The Crone came to me in different faces, sometimes as the Morrigan, sometimes cloaked and nameless. The only date she ever gave, spoken again through Lady Teara’s voice: “In twenty-five years.”

She never offered comfort. Just the knowing. Just the echo: Prepare.

And the gods of war began to stir.

Ares stood at the edge of my dreams, shield gleaming red. Tyr raised his stump of justice. Sekhmet’s eyes burned with plague and righteous flame. The Morrigan gathered her tribes, feathers blacker than the void between stars.

The war gods are walking again.
And they are not quiet.

We Were Told, But We Forgot

We thought the fire would come all at once. We imagined mushroom clouds, not slow-burn collapse.
But chaos rarely screams.
It whispers, through storm and flood, through smoke-blackened skies, through laws twisted into weapons against the people they once claimed to serve.

We saw the signs.

The Earth cried out, forests burning, oceans warming and rising, storms of untold strength, animals fleeing from lands gone silent. The people fractured, turning on each other, fed lie after lie until truth was drowned beneath spectacle.

Empires teetered.
Masks fell.
And still, we looked away.

But witches, real witches, do not look away.

We listen.
We feel the bones of the world humming underfoot.
And we know.

In 2015, I sat with a beloved friend and oracle. Together, we spoke again with the Morrigan.

She warned us once more, this time, more urgently.

A threat from the Great Bear.
A war that would begin in the early spring.
And something else: the rising of a name barely spoken for centuries, an obscure Egyptian deity suddenly surfacing in books, conversations, and even visions within our own circles.

Then, in late February of 2022, the war in Ukraine began.

The Morrigan had whispered: a time of chaos was at hand.
The time of Apophis had arrived.

Who Is Apophis?

Apophis, Apep, is not the devil.
He is not evil in the moralistic sense.
He is unmaking. He is entropy. He is dissolution.

He is what comes when truth collapses, when order fractures, when the center no longer holds.

In the stories of ancient Kemet, Apophis is the serpent of chaos, rising from the abyss each night to devour the solar barque of Ra.
He is not a creature of one strike, but of endless return.
Even if defeated, he comes again. Always.

He is the force that whispers:

“Nothing is real. Nothing matters. Burn it all down.”

Apophis unravels by lies.
He devours not only the sun, but the mind.
Confusion is his mist.
Division is his weapon.

He rises in propaganda, in conspiracy, in the algorithmic storm of a thousand half-truths.
He does not need to be believed, only to be repeated.
His power lies in erosion.
He wears down faith, coherence, meaning.

He comes when Ma’at, the principle of balance, truth, and justice, is weakened.

And make no mistake: Ma’at is bleeding.

Apophis slithers through every unchecked greed, every broken promise, every law twisted to serve power instead of people.
He delights when the people are too tired to care.
When cynicism replaces vision.
When witches forget their oaths to truth and become influencers instead of initiates.

This is not a bedtime tale.
This is the mirror we must not turn away from.

We are not living in Revelation.
We are living in the age of the Great Unbinding.

And yet, Ra still sails.
The sun still rises.

Not because the serpent is slain once and for all,
but because each night, someone stands to fight.

Let that someone be you.

The Witch’s Role

We were not born into this time by accident.

I believe this with all my soul: witches are not tourists in the age of collapse.
We are the ones who light the way through it.

We are threshold-walkers.
Grief-bearers.
Justice-callers.
And when the world frays, we do not run.
We weave.

We do not worship Apophis.
But we name him.
Not to glorify the serpent, but to understand the shape of the battle.

This is a spiritual war.
But not the kind preached from pulpits.

This is a war of forgetting vs. remembering.
Of greed vs. generosity.
Of silence vs. song.

It is a war for the soul of the Earth.
And it is being fought in courts and forests, kitchens and dreams.

Our ancestors knew how to survive collapse.
Their bones still remember.

So must we.

What You Must Do

Prepare. Truly. Learn to live with less. Store what you need. Know your neighbors.
Build your circles. Magical and mundane. No one survives alone.
Work your shadow. Do not bring your unhealed poison into the world. That is how tyrants are born.
Hone your gifts. Second sight. Word-craft. Protection. Conjuring joy.
Shield the vulnerable. Speak truth, even when your voice shakes.

And remember:

This is not the end.
This is the unraveling before the weave begins again.

This is the death throes of empire and patriarchy,
a last gasping grasp to hold power through fear and force.

But from this collapse, something else may rise.
Not dominion, but balance.
Not hierarchy, but wholeness.
A world where the sacred is not hoarded, but shared.

The Crone does not come only to destroy.
She comes to clear the way for rebirth.

The Mirror and the Flame

When the veil thins and the nights stretch long, I sit in ritual and I remember her words.

I remember the war gods watching.

And I remember: even Apophis cannot stop the sunrise.

I do not fear the dark.
I was made for it.

And if you’re reading this, so were you.

The serpent rises.

Let us rise higher.

Where the Blackthorn Grows Wild