magick

Witchfire for the Full Moon at Samhain

The year turns and the dark leans in. Samhain asks for clean work and honest power. This is a good time to speak plainly about Witchfire.

By Witchfire I mean the inner current a witch raises and directs. It is not a literal flame. It is will, breath, and spirit gathered into one stream and put to work. When it rises, practice feels steady and exact. When it slips, everything thins out. The body knows the difference. Some feel warmth in the chest or hands, others a fine tingling along the spine, and others a cool bright pressure behind the eyes. Breath slows. Attention sharpens. The aim and the body line up.

Raising Witchfire is simple. Sit or stand with your spine easy and your jaw loose. Breathe in to a quiet count of four and out to a quiet count of six, three cycles. Speak one sentence about the result you are after. Say it once and mean it. Wake a little rhythm in the body: rub your palms, tap your heel, drum the table. Then go still and notice the moment when your attention comes into one piece. That shift is the first rise of Witchfire.

Holding and shaping it is also simple. Give the current a home and a job. A candle can be a hearth. A cauldron of sand, an iron key, a length of cord, a mirror, or the circle itself can hold it just as well. Keep the aim to one clear line. Bring the power up with breath or chant, then release it into the vessel or act that fits the work. When you are done, close clean. Thank what you called, release what should go, and seal the space. Ground with food and warm water, and rest your senses.

Here are three ways to bring Witchfire into practice at Samhain. Choose the one that suits your house and your tools.

Iron and Salt. Set a small dish of salt on the altar and place an iron key or nail in your palm. Breathe the way I described above and speak your single sentence into the iron. Stand the iron in the salt and let your hands grow warm or bright with focus. On a long, steady exhale, pour the current into iron and salt and say, quietly, that it is held and working. When you are ready to end, cover the iron with a bit more salt and say that it is seen and sealed. This is a dry, steady way to work in a small space.

The Witchfire Candle. If flame speaks to you, set one candle in a safe holder or in sand. Settle your breath, name your aim once, and trace a small circle above the wick as you whisper that this light will answer yours. Light the candle and, on the next few exhales, press the inner heat into the flame. Hold your hands near it and feel the link take. When the working rests, snuff the light and tell it to rest while the work continues.

Cord and Breath. Take a length of red or black cord in both hands. Breathe to four and six and speak your aim. With each inhale, feel the current rise from chest to hands. With each exhale, feed that current into the cord. After several breaths you will feel the cord wake in your grip. Tie a simple overhand knot to anchor what you have set. Wear the cord for a time, or lay it across the altar. When it has done its job, untie the knot, breathe once, and tell it the work is done and grounded.

If you lead a group at Samhain, consider a short call and answer to raise Witchfire together. Keep it spare. A leader calls “Fire of will,” the circle answers “Rise and be ready,” repeated a handful of times until the current stands up in the room. Move it into the shared vessel or act without hurry. Close well.

Samhain can stir memory and strong feeling. Work within your limits. If you become lightheaded, slow down, sit, and breathe. Eat something warm afterward. Sleep on the results before making large decisions. Write what you felt and what you saw, especially the first clear image or phrase that rose when the power came up. Over time your body will learn its own signs and your hands will know which vessel suits which task.

Samhain invites honest work. Witchfire is the power that makes that work real. Raise it with breath. Give it a clear job. House it in something that suits your hand and your house. Close well and eat. That is enough.

Blessed be.

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War Magick: Sovereignty, Shadow, and the Sacred Blade

“Not all witches are healers. Some are shields. Some are swords.”

There is a current rising beneath our feet, a low drumbeat that calls not for peace, but for protection. Not for stillness, but for stance.

War magick is not about wrath or revenge. It is the art of drawing the line. Of standing between what you love and what would destroy it. It is sacred refusal. The spell of no more.

We live in a world where many witches are called to heal.
But some of us….

Some of us are called to hold the line.

What Is War Magick?

War magick is not a tantrum spell. It is not chaos cast from the wound. It is magick rooted in discipline, sovereignty, and sacrifice. It is strategy woven with spirit.

It is not always loud. In truth, the most dangerous war witches are often quiet. They listen. They observe. And when the time comes, they strike with precision.

War magick is:

  • Shielding your home against spiritual incursion.
  • Banishing malevolent forces, visible or hidden.
  • Holding energetic boundaries in moments of crisis.
  • Breaking patterns of abuse, manipulation, or ancestral trauma.
  • Defending others who cannot yet defend themselves.

This is not destruction for power’s sake. It is protection as holy labor.

Historical and Mythic Archetypes

Throughout myth and history, we find witches who fought with fire and vision.

  • The Morrigan, Irish goddess of prophecy and sovereignty, walks the battlefield whispering omens and outcomes. She is the embodiment of war’s truth.
  • Nemain, often associated with The Morrigan, is the spirit-woman or Goddess of Havoc whose battle cry is so terrifying it can kill a hundred men.
  • Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of Egypt, is a war-bringer and healer in one. Her rage is both wrathful and medicinal. She teaches us: sometimes the fever must burn before the cure can take hold.
  • Joan of Arc, guided by visions, led armies not as a soldier but as a vessel of divine will—her power lay in unwavering conviction and sacred command.

And in our modern magical history:

During World War II, with Britain on the brink of Nazi invasion, occultists, including those aligned with Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light, gathered at sacred sites such as the New Forest and possibly the cliffs of Dover. One technique involved a ritual known as the Wyvern Circle, through which a massive Cone of Power was raised to shield the British Isles from harm.

Their work was not done with bombs or blades, but with focused psychic force, ancestral calling, and spiritual alliance.

This was War Magick, ritual action taken on behalf of a land under siege.

The Witch’s Shield and Blade

Every war witch must know the tools of their craft: the shield, and the blade.

The Shield

The shield protects. It contains. It holds the line when everything else is falling apart.

Types of Shield Work:

  • Warding: Sigils, salt lines, iron filings, blessed threads.
  • Cloaking: Making yourself or your home “invisible” to spiritual predators.
  • Ancestral Shields: Calling on bloodline, guardians, or coven spirits to defend a space.
  • Circle of Sovereignty: A personalized ritual to define what is allowed in your sphere.

In a world of energy vampires, psychic parasites, abusive dynamics, and haunting echoes, a strong shield is not optional. It is your first act of war.

The Blade

The blade is not always literal, but it is always final.

Types of Blade Work:

  • Banishing: Smoke, chant, bell, and will to drive out harmful forces.
  • Cutting Cords: Severing energy ties that bind you to the toxic or dead.
  • Breaking Patterns: Spells to unbind ancestral trauma, addiction, or domination.
  • Naming and Unmasking: Calling out truth to dissolve illusions and manipulation.

The blade is not vengeance. The blade is clarity.

Battle Mages and Magical Warriors

Some witches serve at the threshold, not as seers or healers, but as guardians, tacticians, and energetic combatants. In modern fantasy, they might be called battle mages, but this archetype is far older than the term. It echoes in the witch at the edge of the circle, knife in hand. It stirs in the priest who knows when to invoke wrath. It lives in those who do not fear confrontation, but rather train for it.

The battle mage is not wild magic personified.
They are discipline. Focus. Movement under pressure. They are the spellcaster in armor, the one who holds the line when others falter. Where chaos threatens sacred working, they respond with clarity and command.

They are the witches who:

  • Guard the circle when the veil thins or when the working turns volatile.
  • Intervene when an entity pushes too far or an energy becomes unstable.
  • Sense the shift in vibration before others do, and know how to anchor or sever.
  • Use voice, will, and motion to redirect or collapse energy structures mid-ritual.
  • Mediate the sacred space between magickal will and embodied danger.

The battle mage works with more than tools and techniques; they move in harmony with cosmic tides. Saturn, the great protector, lends its weight to shields, boundaries, and banishings. Its energy is the fortified wall, the circle drawn in ash, the no that does not bend. Mars, by contrast, fuels the blade, the righteous strike, the spell of severing, the clarity of direct action. When tempered by wisdom, Mars becomes the sacred flame in the warrior’s heart. Together, Saturn and Mars shape the rhythm of magical warfare: hold, then strike. Watch, then move. Protect, then cleanse.

In covens or magical communities, battle mages are often misidentified: seen as “too intense,” “too direct,” or “too forceful.” In truth, they are protectors, kin to temple guards, ritual sentinels, and martial priesthoods of old.

They are the Blackthorn in the hedge, the edge that cuts, not because it is cruel, but because it must not yield.

Some traditions may formalize this path. In Wild Blackthorn, this current aligns with what we may someday name the Thane Path, the spiritual warrior who stands for the circle physically and magically alike. But even without title, this role exists. The land remembers them. The old gods recognize them.

And when battle comes, spiritual, energetic, psychic, or political, they are the first to rise.

Spellcraft, Tools, and Allies of the War Witch

Tools
  • Iron – Binds and banishes. Use in nails, keys, or chains.
  • Knife or Athame – Not just for circle casting, but for energy cutting.
  • Smoke – Cleansing herbs like mugwort, rosemary, sulfur-rich plants.
  • Black thread – For binding harmful actions or baneful intent.
  • Ash – From sacred fire, carried as a reminder of past battles.
Spirits and Allies
  • The Ancestors Who Fought – Soldiers, rebels, guardians. Call them.
  • The Crone – Not just wise, but wrathful. She does not suffer fools.
  • Land Spirits – Especially in threatened or poisoned places.
  • Wards, Guardians, and Egregores – Create or feed protectors for your space.
Example Working: The Circle of No

Purpose: Create a protective boundary spell to say “No” to spiritual intrusion or emotional manipulation.

  1. Draw a circle with iron filings or crushed eggshell.
  2. Place black candles at cardinal points.
  3. Call your ancestors or guides to stand watch.
  4. Speak aloud: I do not welcome harm into this house.
    I do not host fear in this heart.
    I name this space sovereign.
    And what is not aligned leaves now.
  5. Burn a pinch of sulfur-rich herb or protective resin to seal it.

When the War Is Not a Metaphor

There are times when witches speak of battle as myth, when we cloak our words in symbol and let the blade remain unseen. But this is not one of those times.

The world burns in truth.

It burns in airstrikes, displacement, and genocide.
In book bans and gerrymandering.
In surveillance wrapped in patriotism and hatred cloaked in law.
In bodies stripped of rights. In spirits driven into silence.

And so war magick becomes more than philosophy.
It becomes necessity.
It becomes resistance.
It becomes the unseen rite behind every act of courage, clarity, and sacred defiance.

It is not cast for vanity, nor for spectacle.
It is cast for those who cannot speak.
It is cast for the land that groans beneath poisoned waters.
It is cast for the dead who still echo, unnamed and unburied.

To work war magick in times like these is not to curse wildly.
Real war magick is precise. Strategic. Rooted.

You can raise a cone of power not only to heal, but to hold.
You can enchant a sigil not only to bless, but to banish.
You can anoint not only for peace, but for protection, fierce and final.

There is a reason witches were feared by empire.
We remember.
We name the dead.
We walk the old roads and call upon the powers that do not answer to kings.

And when the gates fall open, when the innocent are hunted and truth is drowned in noise, we do not run.

We shield.
We strike.
We speak names that echo beyond the veil.
We become the weapon and the ward, the line that does not break.

We Stand

Witches have always been dangerous to empire, not because we wield swords, but because we remember what empire tries to erase.
Because we speak with the voices they tried to silence.
Because we hold power that answers to no earthly throne.

War magick is the whispered prayer beneath the siren’s wail.
It is the spell sewn into the lining of your coat as you walk into the courthouse, the school board meeting, the protest line.
It is the breath you hold while lighting a candle for someone you’ve never met, but who you know must be protected.

We are not always called to heal.
Some of us are called to guard.
Some of us are called to fight.
Some of us were born to remember the old rites, and wield them like a blade when the world begins to forget.

If you are one of those, this is your summons.

Not every battle is visible.
Not every warrior wears armor.

But in the shadowed places of this world, the war witches rise.

They are watching.
Waiting.
Warding.

And when the time comes,
they stand.

Pop Culture Magick: Modern Myths and the Living Current

Pop culture magick isn’t about pretending you’re a Hogwarts student or cosplaying your way to power.

It’s about recognizing myth where it lives now, in the collective imagination, in symbols millions of minds are feeding every day, and in stories that carry emotional and archetypal weight, whether they’re ancient or streaming on Netflix.

What Is Pop Culture Magick?

Pop culture magick is the use of modern symbols, stories, characters, and worlds in magical practice.

At its best, it’s mythic hacking.
It’s working with what the collective subconscious is already charging.
It’s speaking in a language your inner child, your shadow, and your godself can all understand.

Why It Works (When It Does)

Pop culture magick works not because the fictional is real, but because:

  • Emotion charges energy. Stories that move you are already lit with power.
  • Belief creates patterns. Millions of people thinking about a character or concept creates a current.
  • Symbolism is alive. The archetypes in pop culture often mirror the oldest gods, dressed in modern skins.

Examples in Practice

  • Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch) as a vessel for chaos, grief, feminine power, and reality-bending, paralleling Inanna, Apophis, and the Witch of the Wyrd.
  • Darth Vader as a shadow archetype, used in banishing work or inner confrontation rituals.
  • The TARDIS from Doctor Who as a portable astral temple or psychopomp symbol.
  • Pokémon for servitor design and energy-anchoring via familiar motifs.
  • Anime characters as thoughtform-based allies in confidence, courage, or transformation spells.

Cautions & Considerations

  • Don’t confuse symbol with reality. Pop culture magick is symbolic animism, not a religion unto itself (unless you intentionally build it that way).
  • Avoid cultural theft. Working with Black Panther as an ancestral guide is not the same as reverently connecting to African traditional religions.
  • Mind the licensing gods. If you’re invoking Mickey Mouse, understand Disney is a thoughtform of control. Use with caution, or jester energy.

Pop Culture and the Witch Today

A modern witch is a myth-maker.
Pop culture is one of the deepest wells of myth available to us now.

To reject it entirely is to miss the heartbeat of this generation’s sacred stories.
To embrace it without discernment is to risk shallow roots.

But to work with it skillfully?
That’s evolution. That’s enchantment in motion.
That’s magick that walks through the world wearing today’s face.

Case Study: The Charm of Making – Voice as Spellcraft

In the 1981 film Excalibur, the Charm of Making is uttered in Old Irish, a phrase woven with mystery, cadence, and power:

“Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha.”
(Serpent’s breath, charm of death and life, thy omen of making.)

For many, it’s just a dramatic line.
But in the hands of a witch, it becomes living resonance.

Experimental Use: The Dragon Current

In our tradition, we already work with the dragon as the symbol of the Universal Is, the raw, primal power that underlies creation. The breath of the dragon is not just a metaphor. It is the current of making and unmaking.

The Charm of Making, when spoken with correct tone, vibration, and intent, taps directly into that current.

With training, you can get it to sing through your body.
The spine becomes a flute.
The lungs become bellows.
The dragon wakes.

Why It Works

  • Archetypal Alignment: The Charm mirrors core themes, creation, destruction, breath, serpent, life-death-life.
  • Phonetic Magick: The phrase carries a sonic architecture that vibrates the body like mantra or galdr.
  • Emotional Imprint: For those moved by the film, the phrase already holds emotional and mythic charge.
  • Symbolic Echo: Linking the spoken charm to your dragon work creates resonance across time, self, and story.

Try This:

  • Speak the charm aloud in ritual tone.
  • Breathe into each word from belly to crown.
  • Visualize your spine as the dragon’s body, coiling and rising.
  • Let it activate, not just as a quote, but as a trigger phrase for your power.

Your Turn

  • What characters live in your bones?
  • What stories set your will ablaze?
  • What myths do you live by, whether ancient, comic, or cinematic?

“Constellations of Power”: The Witch Who Looked Up

Turning Toward the Stars After the Descent

“There comes a moment, after the threshold is crossed, when the only thing left to do is lift your head and look toward the stars.”

I have walked the edge with you. We have spoken of power, of the blade, of what it costs to be true. We have touched the Gate that speaks our names. And now… I find myself standing still beneath the sky, the silence wide, the breath of the world holding its pause.

Because the truth is this: the witch does not live only in the root and the shadow. We are not only made of bone and ash and blood.
We are made of starlight too.

For all our grounding, all our descent, there comes a moment in every path, especially after reckoning, when we must look up.
Not to escape.
But to remember.

The ancients looked to the stars to know when to plant and when to reap.
When to mourn and when to crown.
When to speak, and when to keep silent.
The stars were never distant; they were mirrors, messages, and maps.

And not just in myth.
In Egypt, temples were aligned to the heliacal rising of Sirius, the star associated with Isis, and the annual flood that replenished the land.
In Mesopotamia, priest-astronomers read the heavens for gods and kings alike, inscribing fate into tablets of clay.
And during the medieval period, across Europe, the Jewish diaspora, and the Islamic world, magicians and mystics cast their eyes skyward to guide their workings.
They used the stars not only to mark time but to open gates, call angels, conjure spirits, and calculate when fate might bend.
The grimoires and charts they left behind still whisper of planetary hours, zodiacal talismans, and the names of spirits written in the stars.

And older still, before writing, before empire, stone was carved and lifted to meet the sky: pyramids, circles, henges.
Even now, they stand like frozen prayers, aligned to the sun and the moon, to stars that still rise and fall in the old ways.

This is not new work.
It is ancient remembering.
And the Witch, too, must remember, not just how to root into the land, but how to lift the eyes to the stars.

What I am seeking now is rhythm.
The great wheel above the wheel.
A map made not of rules, but of relationships.
Not of commands, but of cosmic memory.

In the weeks to come, I’ll begin tracing those lines. Not as an astrologer, not in the language of ephemerides and aspects. But as a witch.
As one who walks with myth and mirror.
As one who asks: What stories do the stars still hold? And how do we remember them in the body, the breath, the spell?

You are invited to walk that path with me.

We’ve stood at the edge. Now we rise like flame and look toward the constellations.
The next spell begins above us.

Sidebar: Stargazers of the Sacred Arts

“Long before telescopes, there were watchers. Not scientists, but sorcerers, scribes, and seekers.”

Throughout history, the stars were not just measured, they were invoked.

In Egypt, temples were aligned to the heliacal rising of Sirius, sacred to Isis and the Nile’s fertility.

In Babylon, priest-astronomers recorded planetary movements as divine messages, every eclipse, omen; every conjunction, a sign from the gods.

During the medieval period, magicians across Europe, the Jewish diaspora, and the Islamic world wove celestial wisdom into spellcraft:

  • Jewish Kabbalists calculated planetary hours and invoked angelic intelligences.
  • Islamic mystics and scientists mapped the heavens with astonishing precision, preserving Hellenistic and Persian traditions.
  • European occultists like Picatrix and Agrippa built systems of planetary magic rooted in astrological timing, angelology, and spirit correspondences.

Their altars were aligned, their talismans engraved, their rites timed to the arc of the stars.

This was not superstition; it was cosmic engineering.
And it lives on in the Craft.

The Time of Apophis – A Witch’s Warning

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.

Navigating Perilous Political Upheavals with Magick

Politics and Magick are inherently intertwined.  Politics is at its base about pacts that humans make to live in society with one another.  At its best politics is the compromises we make to have a peaceful, productive co -existence.  At it’s worst, it can lead to balances which swing into the extremes resulting in repression, oppression, even slavery and death.  Magick is the tool we have used since time immemorial to swing the balance from the extremes.  Ancient shaman and witchdoctors helped the first tribes and villages navigate the thorny beginnings of tribal and village politics, later sorcerers, magicians, witches, and others would find their ways to work with the collective energies to manifest changes.  Some of the most profound examples come from Vodun, Santaria and the Various Appalachian and Hoodoo traditions, where slavery and oppression found a way to express and push for change through magick.

We are facing a time in the United States where that pendulum is swinging once again to the extreme.  A minority regime through careful planning, is seizing control of state and federal institutions.  In this way, they are passing or repealing freedoms which lead to greater repression, oppression, impoverishment and in a growing number of instances physical harm and death.   What is more, they warn us, that more is on the way.   With an energized base, this minority has radicalized a segment of the population which calls for the deaths of their political opponents and anyone they view as “different”.   It is a confusing and scary time for many of us. As a woman with the repeal of Roe v Wade, I feel like a second-class citizen, with no rights even over my own body.   If I have no rights of sovereignty, then it erodes all my rights.  Indeed, it does for all of us.

How do we respond in times like this?   I have seen many witches work in many ways to affect change, some on small scales and others on larger ones.  More than a few times I have seen mass hexes placed on key political figures, some of our groups have focused on healing and unification.  With the election of our former President Trump, I did a working to reveal the man behind the curtain, let his deeds come to light.  I will be the first to admit then I never thought there would be those who would simply refuse to look or close their eyes to remain in their illusions.   The universe has an interesting way of teaching us lessons in our work.

So, I have developed a small list of things we can do to work towards navigating these times magickally.  Some can be done alone and others with a group.   Note larger changes really require more energy and are better geared towards larger group works.

How to navigate these times magickally

  • Shielding.  
    •  The amount of negative energy both from oppression and fear is staggering right now.  Shielding will help negate this energy and keep you in a better more productive mind set.  It will make it easier to traverse the mundane aspects of your life, and keep you focused for the magickal.
    • Invisibility Shields.  Given the direction laws and mandates are taking in the US now, being unseen at times is highly desirable.  Working an invisibility shield, while it does not make you totally invisible, it keeps you from attracting notice.   You have run into people who naturally have these before, usually victims of trauma, they are the ones who remark, “did you not see me there”, or “I have been here this whole time”.  Make this work for you as well.

(As a note I usually layer shields and keep them up all the time.)

  • Personal protection work.
    • House Cleansings
    • Home Wards
    • Protective Plants/ Herbs
    • Witches Bottles/ Balls
    • Enchanted Jewelry/ Satchels/ Stones
    • Familiars/ Protection Servitors
    • Ancestors
    • Gods as protectors

(All the above can be potent protection to keep the unwanted away or protect you from their influence.  Build up your protection toolbox, do not be afraid to expand these skills set.  There are hundreds of different ways to do protection work, start working on new methods as well as old tried and true ones.)

(Note also, when working with Ancestors, tap into the strength of those ancestors who have gone through what are you going through, and of those who have fought for the freedoms we have enjoyed.)

  • Controlling yourself.
    • Turn your fear into peace and calm resolution.  Work with meditation and your personal protectors to take the fear into a place of peace and focus. Allow it to help you be objective in high stress situations, to see clearly, think rationally and act appropriately for the situation.  Uncontrolled fear, anxiety and anger can cause you to act in ways that are not in your own best interests.  Such as rioting.  Remember they are looking for reasons to continue to restrict your freedoms.
    • Allowing space for your feelings.  Anger is a very potent emotion and channeled correctly it can put a lot of power into a working.  However, understand it is not unchecked anger.   Give yourself permission to feel any emotion and allow it to pass through or hold it in reserve for a working.  The important part is that it is directed from a calm focused point.
  • Protection of a group of people or identified grouping.  This would be a working for example for a smaller group of friends or coven, or an identified group such as the Trans population. These types of workings can be done solo but are more effective with a group.  More power, more effect.  However, something to remember, the simpler you keep your working and the tighter to the true base need, the more effective it will be.  Start smaller, work to larger.  Rather then blanketing all women in the USA with protection from anti-abortion legislation (we all need it though), perhaps focus on the women of your town or region, who are perhaps particularly vulnerable to draconian trigger laws.  Workings could include protection for their safety, the means to pursue reproductive healthcare outside of the area, or something to influence local politicians to “look the other way”.
  • Influence.  “These are not the driods you’re looking for.”   
    • Glamoury.  We often think of this in regard to how one appears, and yes, we can use it to change or distract from appearance.  This can also be a persona you carefully cultivate to be placed on and used when it is most needed.
    • Fascination/ Bewitchment. It is a tool that should be in anyone’s arsenal.   If it means the difference between your safety and not, you will need to make that judgement call.  It is an offensive working (as opposed to defensive) because you will affect another’s will.   Just make sure you can cancel the spell as well as set it.
    • Distraction. Simply what it says, drawing someone’s attention from one place to another.
    • Rhetoric.  A form of speaking in which you can speak truth without revealing secrets.  (For example:  Inquisitor:  Have you seen John Proctor?  Answer: I can not say that I have). Rhetoric is also a form of creating reality with words, we use it in creating our spell work, but we can also use our words to weave magick as we speak.
    • Influencing belief on a larger scale these would be group workings to change views on a given subjection.   Again, this is an offense working.  However, pulling back the curtain to reveal truth would be an example.  Just make sure they see it.  You may need to do a few workings to accomplish this.  It is much easier to do this on a small scale focus on individuals or small group, then say a much larger group.  
  • Hexes and Curses.  I will admit, I am not a fan of this type of working, not for any karmic issues, but that they are generally a band aid.   If one were hexing the former President (which has been done), what we would miss is that he is the “paid entertainer” placed there to keep us distracted, while those working behind the scenes moved the chess pieces into place.   Those structures supporting him are a deeply entrenched root system.  Yes, they have occultists of their own.  We have all hear the adage about “striking the root”.  Bear that in mind when developing workings.
  • Unification/ Healing/ Tolerance.  These are wonderful group workings.  Still remember to start focus on a smaller scale and work your way up.  The larger the group the more you can affect.  Always include yourselves in the equation.  Let us be tolerant, loving, let us be open to unification as well.   It is very easy to get caught in the “I am right” frame of mind.
  • Wyvern Circle.   The last famous wyvern circle was done by the witches, wizards, and sorcerers of the Britain on the eave of Hitlers invasion.  An invasion which never came to pass.    A Wyvern circle is an enormous circle of magicakal practitioners, in the middle of the circle is a smaller circle of very powerful practitioners.  The outer circle generates the energy, and the inner circle focuses it to its effect.  Wyverns can be used for other purposes but are best when it is a serious working in which everyone is in total accord.
  • Act in accord with your work.  We can work magickally to create change, but do not forget about acting in accord with it mundanely.  Get involved in your local political groups, that represent your views.  Help with organizations that are supporting and assisting those in most need.  Galvanize your political base to work together and vote.   Do not fall into despair or the old “why should I do anything I can’t create change”.  When you do that, you have done exactly what they want! 

Open yourself to all the possibilities when it comes to working magickally.  This is just a small list, but it is meant to get you thinking and your creative juices flowing.  So lets pull ourselves up,  lets go of sadness, despair, fear and channel that energy into creating the reality we want.

As I speak, so I create!

So be it!

Navigating Perilous Political Upheavals with Magick

The Elements and Experimentation

For many witches and Wiccans, the elements and their associated directions and correspondences are integral parts of both their ritual practice and personal transformative work.  I would like to take a little time to devote to understanding the elements, how our use of and work with them should reflect what resonates deeply within us, and how to adjust our work with them accordingly. I do this with a bit of a story of my own development.

My own official training in the “craft” began in the early nineties.  During that era, most of the publications were very basic and foundational in their teachings; the “net” or “web” was in its infancy.  The information, regarding the elements,  readily available to me at that time, as a practicing baby witch in North America, was what I playfully refer to as “pagan generic”;  meaning that directionally, Air was associated with the East, Fire with the South, Water with the West, and Earth with the North.  I faithfully learned all of the correspondences and began establishing my relationships with this as a foundation.  I was part of an established coven that worked with this system in this way for many years.   Our original coven was an amalgam of Gardnarian, Irish/Welsh Celtic Eclectic, 1734 and Faerie.  I mention this only because the placement of our guardians at that time (which are derived straight from 1734) did not resonate, for me, with the ascribed placement in our circle; at the time, I had no idea why.   During those days, there was little enough information available; f 1734, published, there was nothing.  So I simply went on and worked with element placement and our guardians as was handed down to me, without a great deal of questioning at the time.  I give you thi story at the moment, as it will make a great deal more sense later.

To keep, us all on the same page with elements/ directions and correspondences, simplified “pagan generic”.

Element Direction Color Time Elemental
Air East Yellow Dawn Sylphs
Fire South Red Noon Salamanders
Water West Blue Dusk Undines
Earth Earth Green Midnight Gnomes

My original High Priestess became very ill and eventually slipped past the veil.  She had been a strong Priestess and had been the glue that held us together.  Even though I was years into my path, I was not ready to lead or even to teach; there was still much for me to learn.  Our small coven fell apart, and I eventually found a new teacher, from whom I also learned a great deal.

As part of our tradition, the elements as we worked with them had more of an alchemical placement.  Meaning, they were situated in circle, opposed to their alchemical opposite; fire opposite water, air opposite earth. There was also a bit of a trick to fire and water.  Fire follows the Sun across the sky, much like the chariot of Helios, from midnight to noon. Fire was placed in the eastern quarter of the circle, representing its rising and path; from noon to midnight, it resides in the western quarter, with its path representing the setting sun.  Water, of course, is wherever fire is not.   This change in the placement of the elements resonated with me quite a bit more than my original teachings.  Symbolism, for myself, is incredibly important; it easily helps my conscious mind reach into my deep conscious and effect change through the pathworkings.  I found that my own magick took quite the leap forward, things clicked more into place, and the resonance I found with the change acted as an amplifier for my work.  For myself, I was finding the tune of the energies and fitting into the flow.  Magick works along the path of least resistance, much like electricity.  I was coming much closer to that path, for my own energy tunes, and it was working!

Draconian Elemental Table:

Element Direction Color Time Elemental
Air South Yellow Sylphs
Fire East                (midnight-noon)West         (noon-midnight) Red Salamnders
Water West         (midnight-noon)East          (noon-midnight) Blue Undines
Earth North Green Gnomes

Our paths are an amalgam of our sum total of experiences, so after many years of following the workings of my second tradition, growing and developing as a Priestess, I felt a draw back to my original teachings; there were still things there I needed to explore. In truth, there was also a path I wished to restore.  I dusted off my old books and began reworking the original tradition, infusing it with teaching I had acquired along the way, along with some of the workings, from my most recent work.  Bringing it back and creating a coven with which to work with it, I went back to the original template “pagan generic” to start.  For myself, though I ran back into the same issue with the original element placement.  With the workings we were going into and our Guardian placement, it just didn’t flow, as the previous traditions had. It wasn’t until one of my students ran across “The Forge of Tubal Caine” by Ann Finnian and a Gods touched meeting with a wonderful individual named Pagan that many things began to come into focus.   Our original coven had a base in 1734, it was where our Guardians (Gods) were derived from;  however, as I was learning, my original High Priestess, in her own pursuit for tuning to elemental energies that flowed with her, had shifted placement and our Guardians’ placement from 1734’s original placement.   Now, my disruptions in flow began to make sense.  So I shifted them back.

In 1734, Air is in the North, Fire/ East, Earth/South, and Water in the West.   This resonated with me far more than the previous “pagan generic” practices I had followed.  My friend “Pagan” was from Wales.  For them, he said, Air was seen in the North (different from both my previous traditions).  This association came from the height of the mountains to the North.  Air is seen as up among the clouds, the cold North winds that would blow through you, blasting the dust and cobwebs from our brains, and instilling knowledge and clear thinking in its place.  Earth, on the other hand, was seen in the south.  The beauty of the ripe and fertile land, bursting forth with all measure of life. Additionally, placement of the elements was again alchemically opposed, which worked very well.

In shifting the elements into the 1734 view, aligned them with the Gaelic Airts.  To the Celts, the directions were seen as Airts.  Airts are Scottish Gaelic for Winds, or the four winds, or cardinal compass points. For the Celts, they were Tuath (North),  Deas (South),  Aes (East) & Iar (West). The associated colors were also slightly different from the Greek systems, which many Neo-Pagans work with today.  Tuath is midnight, and the color association is black.  Deas is noon and the color is white.  Iar is associated with Dusk and the color is gray, Aes is the breaking day and associated with the color red.

1734/ Gaelic Airt  Element Table

Element Airt Direction Color Time Elemental
Air Tuath North Black Midnight Sylphs
Fire Aes East Red Dawn Salamnders
Earth Deas South White Noon Gnomes
Water Iar West Gray Dusk Undines

While enjoying and working, exploring within this framework of elemental correspondence, I still felt a bit of tugging back to the system of my second tradition.  For me, what was missing was the trek of Fire across the sky. Again, as I said, for myself, symbolism is very important and increases my resonance with energy flows and workings.  So I made this small adjustment to the Gaelic Airts, and I find I am very happy, in the flow of the energies with which I work best!

Many individual systems for working with the elements are based on geographical location.  Obviously our brothers and sisters south of the equator experience the elements and directions in an entirely different manner than ourselves.  In fact, their “pagan generic” places earth in the south and fire in the north.  Working with your planetary geography, as well as the flow of the elemental energy, the way that you feel it, is working towards developing a system that resonates with you.  These ways of working with energy need not be static, but living, breathing, adaptive, and growing!  I am sure a visit to our Aussie families and a little down under magick would involve me, readjusting my elemental workings to fit my location.

The point of this little story is not to convince you that my way of working is the best.  It may not be.  However, it works best for me.  The point I want you to take away is that experimentation is an important part of developing YOUR path!  It has to be what works and resonates for you!  Each person tunes and feels the flows of nature and energy in unique and individual ways; they also project them differently.  No one cookie-cutter method will work for everyone.  The method that works is the one that you work out for yourself!

I hope this has made you think, and possibly evaluate the way you work with the elemental energies and how they, in turn, work with you. May it inspire you to experiment!

Many Blessings, Good Luck & Have Fun!

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