How to Become a Witch (24 page)

The Arts Magickal can easily be seen as very serious stuff, only to be used in a properly cast circle for important issues. That’s true for theurgy, the branch of magick that helps us connect with the divine powers. However, thaumaturgy has a more immediately practical slant. Witches use mini spells and incantations all the time to deal with ordinary life: for traveling safely, finding a parking spot, healing a cold, getting calm before a test or interview...these little magicks help us get through the day. Now, to wash the dishes instantly by wiggling our noses...

Ritual is a vessel for magick, a structure that has proven effective for a long time. Magick itself is the heart, and it is more difficult to understand than the steps of ritual. You may have doubts about magick. You may have been programmed for your entire life to believe that magick is irrational and superstitious—even sinful. Your first task may be to simply open your mind and give it a chance.

Magick has been practiced for untold thousands of years by people from many cultures. They were not all fools. Magick is real, even if much of it is still a mystery. Magick is a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or evil, and wielded for great purposes or small ones.

If you are one of the few who really become adept, use it with wisdom and love, for magick truly does have power.

Deepen your Practice
Energy Exercises

• Imagine a ball of energy in your hands; compress it until you feel it tangibly, then shift it from hand to hand. Play with it for a while, bouncing it, stretching it, and compressing it again. Now gently release it into the earth.
  
• Do the same again, but before you give it to the earth, allow a little energy to flow into any part of your body that is stiff or weak or painful.
  

Ritual Exercises

• Begin by becoming familiar with the steps of ritual as outlined in this chapter and expanded in appendix F, the self-dedication ritual.
  
• Asperging and casting: every week for six weeks, come up with a different way to asperge and a different way to cast the circle, and do a ritual using your ideas. By the end, you will have six new methods in your toolbox.
  Hint:
  think of how you could asperge and cast using visual cues, sounds, touch, taste, or smell. Also, try one way that you would use in an air ritual, one for fire, etc. Write the results in your Book of Shadows.
  
• Calling the quarters and invoking Deity: every week for another six weeks, come up with a different way to call the quarters and a different way to invoke Deity. Do a ritual calling and invoking that way. By the end, you will have six new methods in your toolbox. Remember that these are the parts of ritual most suited to poetry—so put on your poet’s hat, and have fun!
  
• Moving energy: every week for six weeks, come up with a different way to raise, send, and ground energy, and do a ritual using them. Then you will have six more new techniques in your toolbox.
  
• Cakes and wine: every week for six weeks, come up with a different way to do “cakes and wine” and to say your farewells to the quarters and the Lady and the Lord. For the farewells, go back to your quarter calls and invocations, and make matched sets of calls and farewells. Do a ritual each week using your new farewells, and make sure your entire ritual hangs together stylistically.
  
• Create a water-based ritual as a house blessing, so that all the parts of ritual have something to do with water. Do likewise for a fire-based ritual for raising your own willpower, and include something fiery at every step.
  

Shadow Work Exercises

• Get several sheets of paper, and write a negative emotion at the top of each: anger, fear, shame, guilt, and so on. Then ask yourself questions and write down your answers for each. Example:
  anger
  . When do I feel angry? How does it feel? Where did that feeling come from? What would my life be like without it? Who could I be without the anger but with the energy and intensity of it? How can I transform it into something positive?
  
• Use an idea from the list of tools and techniques discussed starting on page 160, under shadow work, and try it. Discover whether it helps you release or transform a shadow you have grappled with. Write your experiences in your Book of Shadows.
  

Chapter 9

I Am the Soul of Nature
This Sacred Earth

W
ork your will, but earth revere,

Touching magick, wielding power,

And every creature living here,

I am a Witch at every hour.

Imagine a world where slender, faerylike beings exist in colonies, connected underground with a fine web of nerve and tissue; each one whispers and flutters in the sun for forty to 150 of our years, then dies, but the colony may survive for eighty thousand years…

Imagine a planet mostly covered with oceans, some deeper than six terrestrial miles. Deep below, in darkness and freezing cold, black tubes rise from vents in the sea bottom, spewing acid at 750 degrees F into the blackness—more than 370 trillion gallons as this watery world makes one orbit of its star. Imagine that gastropodlike creatures crawl about the base, some with venomous fangs, some with scales of iron. Other bizarre life forms live on the methane and sulphur compounds all around them. Nearby, drawn to the warmth, float huge-eyed monsters whose tentacles are covered with swiveling hooks…

Imagine a beautiful world of waterfalls, where you can stand in one high place and see giant, foaming torrents of water plunging down on three sides, or 275 large falls within a space of less than two miles, or water cascading in a single vast sheet more than a mile wide and three hundred feet high, and another where the liquid cascades three thousand feet straight down, or a titan where more than three million gallons of water per second thunder over the edge…

Imagine another world, where great living creatures rear three and four hundred feet in the air and contain more that fifty thousand cubic feet of mass; these elder life forms may thrive for two thousand years and more. However, mutant albinos of their species, only sixty feet tall, survive vampirelike by sucking the fluids from the living bodies of their elder brothers…

Imagine a planet where vast systems of tunnels and caves snake underground, filled with delicate sculptures of stone and occasionally crystals more than thirty feet long. Envision a tunnel three hundred miles long, or another seven thousand feet deep, or a subterranean chamber 2,300 feet by 1,300 feet, more than 260 feet high. Imagine this deep world filled with blind, pale creatures that have never seen the light of their distant sun…

Imagine a cold world, partly covered with ice more than a mile thick, ice so heavy that it has crushed the land beneath for tens of millions of years; a planet where more than 70 percent of the fresh water is locked immovably in frozen ice, and where a thermometer from your house might show 120 degrees F below zero—if it could register coldness that deep…

Imagine a planet crackling with wild electric storms, sixteen million lightning storms every single year. Bolts of lightning streak through dark skies at 130,000 miles per hour, each one soaring to 54,000 degrees F, hot enough to fuse sand into hollow glass tubes that reach deep into the ground, ignite vast fires, or deafen the little creatures that scurry about under the chaos…

Can you imagine these exotic and wonderful places? Welcome to Earth, a single planet that encompasses all these worlds, and many more. A colony of aspen trees in Utah. The Mariana Trench in the Pacific. Thermal vents in several seas. Giant squid. Victoria Falls, and Iguazu and Angel Falls. The Sequoia redwoods of California and their mutant cousins. Mammoth Cave and other caverns worldwide. Antarctica. Lightning storms. It’s all real, and it’s all part of your home.

And it’s all filled with life—living things that dwell inside hot rocks deep under the earth’s surface, or cold rocks in a frozen desert. Organisms that are happy with a little iron to eat; or surviving thousands of feet underwater; or floating in salty sludge, dissolved arsenic, or nearly boiling acid; or who can dry up and blow around in the dust for a few thousand years, then pop back to life when there’s moisture. And one special creature that seems to thrive on constant noise, stress, pollution, and overcrowding. These are all called extremophiles, except the last, who are called New Yorkers. They are all residents of planet Earth, along with us.

We have talked about nature as composed of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. Now explore further: nature as the foundation of our health, as our teacher, as the source of magick. And most of all, nature infused with spirit, the sacred body of the Divine, the incarnate Goddess.

Appreciating the Real World

In modern society, especially among city dwellers, there is a temptation to get comfortable in an artificial environment and venture from it only rarely; to separate ourselves not only from wilderness but from the countryside, even from the outdoors.

This would be understandable in a moon colony. On Earth, it means that we begin to see air-conditioned high-rises and fluorescent lighting and frozen, packaged food as normal—as more real than the natural world. Nature becomes a fantasy world in books and movies. This world is simultaneously harmless—a cartoon backdrop of perpetual sunshine and green trees—and scary, when we see TV specials about hurricanes or tsunamis deluging distant lands on the news. We see snapshots, some fictional and some not, and have no comprehension of the whole.

Thus we forget what gives us life and sustains us.

Forgetting this, we forget to honor and protect the living biosphere, and the earth becomes nothing more than a repository of raw materials for our use.

A whole generation of urban children are more in touch with their iPods, smartphones, and computer notebooks than they are with the stunted little Charlie Brown tree down the street. What kind of stewards will they be for our planet?

Richard Louv has written about this in
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
(Algonquin, 2005). He points out that unstructured free play outdoors has been replaced by indoor hours spent with electronic media; not only does this alienate children from nature, but it contributes to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, stress, and childhood obesity. He calls for a “nature-child reunion.”

The remedy is simple. More children outdoors, more of the time: walking in the woods, building forts, fishing, climbing trees, hiking, bird watching, taking photos, growing gardens, walking the dog, camping with their families or Scout groups, and playing in a creative, completely unorganized way.

Obviously adults need nature time too, either outdoor adventures (backpacking, kayaking, skiing) or more gentle pursuits like gardening, neighborhood walks, and outdoor photography.

To appreciate anyone, you spend time with them. It’s true for the natural world too. You don’t have to enjoy mosquitoes and mud and cold, gray days as much as rainbows and bunny rabbits. But you may learn in your gut what you probably know in your head: that all parts of nature are necessary elements of the cycle…and that this whole, vast, complex earth is splendid just as she is.

Nature for Health

We mentioned that kids who spend time outdoors may be healthier. It’s true for us too. Natural sunlight helps our bodies produce vitamin D. When breathing fresh air, we avoid inhaling household chemicals, gases from plastics, and airborne germs. When moonlight floods our bedrooms, we attune to natural lunar sleep cycles. Working and playing outdoors stretches our muscles and conditions our bodies.

Yes, there are natural hazards: sunburn, hypothermia, allergens, poisonous plants, snakes, and bugs, plus the occasional blizzard, earthquake, or tsunami. But probably many Witches would rather face sunlight and snakes than the traffic, crime, and pollution of any major city. We (the authors) live in the country. We have a coyote pack that runs our land, and diamondback rattlesnakes close at hand, and the occasional tarantula and scorpion. We have high-altitude sunshine, an arid climate, and flash floods, lightning storms, and gale-force winds in season. Guess what? Still alive, still kickin’, wouldn’t trade it for anyplace else. Partly because our environment is mostly free of artificial radiation, chemicals, pollutants, and the like. Partly because it’s constantly, magnificently, awesomely beautiful. And partly because we live with the land and have come to a relationship with it, and we work to keep it healthy, even as it keeps us so.

Nature As Teacher

Learning happens in classrooms or from books and the Internet, right? Well, sort of. But so much of that is thirdhand knowledge, gathered by other people from the experiences of still others and packaged as factoids for us to memorize.

Firsthand knowledge from personal experience is
real
, and it not only fills the head but climbs into our bodies, our guts. What we do and touch and smell helps us understand reality and stays with us. This is why great teachers love field trips, because they want their students to smell the sawdust at a lumber mill or discover a beetle creeping through the grass, not sit passively and look at pictures or read letters that together make up words that symbolize real things.

That’s why nature is such a great teacher. It’s real. What do Witches learn from nature? As we just said, you have to experience it for yourself. Though we can’t put it in words, not really, maybe we can give you a glimpse:

• From a frosty winter’s night, at the dark of the moon, we learn the power of silence, stillness, and cold.
  
• From a rounded chunk of golden sandstone, drowsing in a canyon under the desert sun, we learn patience and restfulness.
  
• From the yellow stare of a coyote padding across a forest road, we learn self-sufficiency and the will to survive.
  
• From a red-tailed hawk circling high in a cerulean sky, riding thermal drafts between looming stone formations, we learn freedom.
  
• From an ant wrestling a grain of sand out of its anthill, we learn persistence and the power of tiny things.
  
• From a gnarled and ancient juniper leaning on the edge of a bluff, half its roots exposed over the precipice, we learn to love life.
  
• From a trio of fox cubs tumbling and playing in front of their den under a mossy tree, we learn joy.
  
• From the changing patterns of light and shadow that move across an ancient red-rock mesa, we learn of constant change and enduring strength.
  
• From the feathery patterns of white cirrus clouds high above the earth, we learn peace.
  

We can learn so many more things—sudden insights and deep wisdoms—but most of them are unique to one person at one special place at one moment in time. That person is you, and the place is somewhere outdoors, and the time is for you to choose.

Nature As Power Source for Magick

Some kinds of magick work directly with the elements and powers of nature. For example: energy to fuel a magickal spell can be drawn from the generalized field that permeates all things, but it can also be a more specialized “flavor” of power drawn from wind and air currents, sunlight, the currents and tides of the sea, or from lines of power deep within the earth. These are common sources of energy; an adept might also draw from lines of magnetic force, moonlight, or even starlight for certain special magicks.

Natural materials such as wood, stone, metal, or herbs have their own special properties and are used in amulets, talismans, and ritual tools. Rowan for protection, willow for flexibility, oak for strength. Amethyst for moderation and sobriety, turquoise for joy and emotional uplift, lapis lazuli for strengthening psychic sensitivity. Copper for love, iron for action, silver for change. Valerian to calm, mugwort for magick, and peppermint for alertness.

Animal spirits can be guides, protectors, teachers, totems, or allies. When incarnate, some serve as familiars to Witches, as psychic sensitives, or as guides in healing or divination work. Familiars can be cats, dogs, owls, ravens, toads, mice, ferrets, or other creatures. You can dance your power animal and gain some of its strengths, or communicate with animals psychically. Some Witches can mindshift, or “ride along,” in the consciousness of an animal, sensing all that it experiences. To mindshift, take a deep breath and exhale, ground and center, and imagine the animal. Remember all you know about it, then see it in front of you. Ask if you may join minds with it for a while; tell it you mean no harm and will simply follow where it leads. Then gently extend your mind to meet its mind, and allow yourself to be carried along, seeing what it sees, feeling what it feels, smelling what it smells. When it’s time, thank it and return to your own body and mind. Write about your experience in your Book of Shadows.