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To Dare! One point in the Witch’s Pyramid. One must be daring to be a Witch, to even claim the identity of Witch, at least on some level. How could I not? It is what I am. Many people are things they cannot verbalize or accept, so this daring is an act of magick. In this sense, we can and should embrace our daring, our boldness, if we seek a magickal life. Bravery is required to step into the dark and commune with unknown gods. Bravery is required to set your will and take action, spellcraft and otherwise, to make it happen. Being a Witch is not everyone’s cup of tea. So be audacious!

Yet there is the audacity that forgets the other points of the pyramid that balance this wisdom—to know and to keep silent. To will, the last corner of our pyramid, partners well initially with daring, but audacity that is not partnered with knowledge and awareness of both self and others—especially the recognition of when to speak and act and when not to—leads to the type of audacity that is rudeness, impertinence, and impudence.

While we have our own codes that are not understood by all of the outer world, a Witch’s honor is akin to that of a chivalrous knight or samurai. It may be written uniquely on the stars or upon sacred bark or in the scarred flesh of our own hearts, but we live by a code of honor. My code is not necessarily your code, but like Witchcraft itself, we recognize the heart of this honor in another Witch.

Sometimes we think we are honoring that code, being daring and brave, when in reality we are embracing rudeness.

A friend just shared with me that at a Pagan gathering, another Witch, considered somewhat an authority as a presenter at said event, told him that something he shared from the tradition he was trained in was “wrong” and that he and they needed to stop doing it immediately or otherwise they were being harmful to everyone in the community. Spoiler alert: what they were doing was not harmful, nor was it controversial in 95% of Pagan, Witchcraft, and magickal spaces.

She did so under the veil of great kindness, generously offering “needed” aid by taking him aside, but her act was filled with a level of assumption and presumption, having never experienced their ritual directly, being ignorant of the deeper theology and meaning behind why they did the practice, and without an understanding of what the members of the tradition experienced when doing the ritual. It simply did not conform to what she personally felt was appropriate for her, but instead of asking further questions—or even permission—before offering authoritative, unrequested advice, she told him it had to stop.

In short, she had the audacity to not only believe she knew what was best for a group of Witches she didn’t even know, but also to voice that opinion, presuming a level of authority or responsibility under the aegis of making the world better, i.e. outwardly conforming to her virtues, assuming that her directive should and would be followed. But this wasn’t her class. He hadn’t asked a question. She was nothing more than a new acquaintance of his at social time during an event where people were informally sharing on a particular topic after hours. No one else voiced concern about the supposed “harm” he was doing.

When I first heard about his story—and that at the time, he wasn’t in a place to either engage more deeply or tell her to fuck off, since he wanted to keep this after-hours social hangout pleasant—I got mad. I personally know everyone involved and was just stunned at the audacity. I get deeply concerned when speakers, leaders, and teachers in Witchcraft act this way. I am concerned when anyone does it, but particularly when the strong voices in our magickal community do it.

While today it appears the thing for public figures to do is offer their opinion freely as what others should do, in the metaphysical world, good leaders and teachers generally eschew forcing their beliefs on others. If someone is acting illegally or causing actual direct harm, we take direct action, but in matters of metaphysical or theological opinion, it’s not our place to dominate; otherwise occultism/Paganism/Witchcraft becomes another tradition where authority figures tell you how to think, act, and be. Ours is a mystical tradition of personal unfolding on the path. We can guide those with whom we are in a sacred student-teacher relationship or those who have come to a workshop, but even then, though we can presume they have come to listen to our view, we nonetheless can’t presume or force our view on others. Right for one is not right for all, and our traditions are of multiplicity. There are many things that I disagree with in many magickal groups, but thankfully, I am not part of those groups The caveat is that those things are wrong “for me” or “for the people I work with at this time,” but everyone has the freedom to seek in their own way on their own.

It reminds me of the popular internet graphic originally from A Small Fiction by author James Mark Miller, and often erroneously attributed to the author Terry Pratchett:

“Why do the townsfolk fear you?” she said.

“Because I can do things they can’t,” the witch said.

“Like?”

“Mind my own business, for one.”

Likewise, on the other side, I recall an episode of the HBO show True Blood where Holly, a Witch, gives the shapeshifting bartender Sam a bag of herbs to ease his rage. His response, “You got anything that works for nosiness and bad boundaries?”

Those are the two sides of this. Knowing when to dare is as important as the daring itself. Am I called to take action here? Who is calling? Is it my soul, my gods, or my ego? Can I be divinely audacious and live that magickal life, doing what is necessary? Or will I confuse Divine Necessity, the weaving goddess of fate, with my own self-importance and desire to be in charge?

Most good Witches I know have been on both sides of it, myself included, because you need to experience both and become conscious of it to choose your divine audacity. Most of us go through it. It’s a natural stage of our growth, but hopefully we outgrow it before we are in a position where we could abuse any perceived authority. The trick is not getting stuck here. Choose wisely.

Torch photo by by Kelly L from Pexels | Wine Photo by Polina Tankilevitch from Pexels | Weaving Photo Nickolas Nikolic on Unsplash

Traditions evolve through the living practice of them. They adapt with the people who love them, in groups or alone, and those who fail to change will also fail to meet the needs of their people and will either calcify into dogma or wither and fade. Some traditions are recorded and revived by others at a later date, but many just disappear when the group or practitioner no longer holds to them.

Traditions are not opinions. Opinions can be rooted in traditions, but they can also be untethered from actual experience. Academic opinions carry one kind of weight. Life experience with a magickal mystery carries another. The two combined can be really helpful. If they are separated, I tend to favor the voice of wisdom and experience over the voice of knowledge alone.

There are many opinions, especially those offered from the safety of online spaces, telling you what you should and shouldn’t do, say, name, or believe. People will be quick to say “this is true or right” and forget the caveat “for me” or “true and right for me and the group with whom I practice.” Things also might not be true for you. If you are offering to show another idea or perspective—or perhaps like me, you want to know all the folklore and techniques even though you know you can’t know it all, as the true knowing is in the doing and living—you’ll never turn down a bit of lore or wisdom, adding it to your own stew to see if it congeals with something you already know and do. Different points of view can bring insight.

Traditions are living things and travel from one person to another. There is a legacy passed nor just of technique or poetry, but of paradigm, orientation, and mystery. You receive an inheritance from teachers and traditions. I learned from some elders that it is a mystery of the torch and cup. You pass the light which must be tended as a living thing. It illuminates and inspires. By its light you can see and understand what is being added or changed. The oft-quoted Gustav Mahler taught, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” Don’t mistake one for the other.

The cup is a body of knowledge we must be careful not to spill because we must pass at least some of what we were given by our teachers to the next generation; ideally the cup will get a little fuller with each pass. Some drink of the cup and do not refill it before passing it, either holding knowledge to be “better” than those who come after or keeping it as a secret. This results in each generation being more uneducated than the previous, at least to specific teachings and the quest to fill the void with other things. A true teacher should wish that their students surpass them and therefore shares generously. At times we might hold back if prerequisite knowledge or experience is not yet there, but we do so out of a sense of their safety or to encourage their ability to seek, but not to be a miser hoarding information.

Things will change. Some will be conscious decisions. Others will organically evolve. New traditions will be seeded from the past. In many ways we are not handed a torch or a cup, but a thread. Each teacher and mentor passes a thread, and we weave our own to perhaps pass to another. Ideally the thin threads re-spun from the occult and Neopagan revivals are being fortified with more academic knowledge, but they must be lived. It’s easy with new academic knowledge to want to wipe it clean, tear it down, and start fresh—and some will—but I’ve found life to be a bit too messy for that, and that’s good, as life in a “nature” religion should get down in the dirt and be messy. Today many will claim that no thread, torch, or cup was passed to them, but often there will be key books and now even online presences that do much the same today through in-person groups, teachers, and mentors.

Things of the modern era gain a momentum in the living, for even though they are recent traditions, they came about to speak to the needs of the people. Discarding them without deeper reflection disrespects our teachers of the recent past, without whom many of us would not have access to what we do today in the same way.

I think of the annual controversies of the Sabbat names, with 2021 having fierce online drama about Mabon vs. the Autumnal Equinox. We have it also around Ostara/Vernal Equinox, and Litha/Summer Solstice. It’s true the name Mabon was started by the American practitioner and author Aidan Kelly in 1974. Yet the first strands of tradition I was passed, by my first few mentors and teachers, always used Mabon for the Autumnal Equinox. I get it. Our cobbled-together Wheel of the Year has some inelegancies woven in the beauty of it, like so much organic folklore: four Gaelic names for fire festivals, though one is often traded for the Saxon Lammas; a Midsummer, but the Midwinter is more often called Yule as astronomical seasons don’t match these folkloric mid-points but start the seasons; and equinoxes that are more academic Latin than British folkloric in the words “vernal” and “autumnal.” There is an urge to make it flow better, and as a living tradition, different approaches were taken, and some grew popular. Drawing from mismatched myth, modern Witches and Neopagans crafted a meta-narrative about the wheel as a whole and illustrated it with classic mythic examples. The Goddess of Light and Spring is expressed by Bridget at Imbolc, but most versions of the Wheel don’t have Bridget specifically throughout the whole wheel. The Goddess changes faces as does the God. Modern traditions, like the Temple of Witchcraft, are redefining it in the context of new godforms and myths rooted in the old.

The name Mabon disliked by so many as having nothing to historically do with the equinoxes actually casts a powerful bit of magick upon us all who contemplate it. Mabon opens the gate to mystery, for Mabon himself is a mystery. A whole myth cycle—the Mabinogi or Latinized as The Mabinogion—is named for him, yet none of the four branches are really about him. One story exists, but the themes of that story show up throughout the Mabinogi—mothers and children; the Otherworld; being lost, hidden, or imprisoned; and growing older. In fact those themes are cross-cultural and directly speak to the greater meta-narrative of the whole wheel’s regenerative mystery. Where names of the summer solstice are often accepted as they are—the name Litha generates little other than a nod perhaps to megalithic structures believed to align with the solstices—Mabon, when seriously contemplated and studied, opens a whole world for us, even if our desire is not Welsh, or even Celtic. Complaints and ire against those who phonetically say May-bon rather than the more traditional and “correct” Ma-bin must also be apoplectic over changes in the names of figures such as Odin, Othin, Wotan, Woden, Wodan, Wuodan, Wuotan, Wōđanaz, and of course Mr. Wednesday over the span of years and regions. Or one can realize things change, and we are witnessing a living current of tradition adapting to region, dialect, and accent. The American tradition of Mabon has been imported back into the British Isles.

The birthplace for modern Neopaganism in the English-speaking world comes to us from the British Isles, with its fabulous mix of mystery of the Neolithic mound and megalithic builders, all of the British Isle Celts linking back across Europe to the Indus Valley, the Romans, and their ties to the Greeks and the Saxons, and their ties to all of the Teutonic, and modern England’s connections with Spiritualism and Theosophy even though both were founded in the United States, and their modern connections to—with all their issues of colonization—Egypt, India, and Asia. From here the currents passed to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, mainland Europe, Africa, and further abroad now, with practitioners of Wicca, the mystery tradition we associated with Western Occultism, in India, China, and Southeast Asia. People all over the world, with a general surface understanding of Irish Samhain and Beltane traditions, have inherited a modern Samhain thread, and are crafting their own traditions rooted in their own land and language, many through the lens of American Halloween. It’s not unlike my own celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi in a simple way, with my overall historic understanding of more traditional festivals. It shares the sentiment to celebrate the spirit of the elephant-headed god whom I love, but takes place outside of a traditional Vedic context. And Ganesh doesn’t seem to mind. I like to think he appreciates and accepts all offerings.

As these traditions are practiced, who knows how they will grow with the people in ten, fifty, and one hundred years? What we inherited in the rich and fertile proto-mix of the Paganism of the 50s, 60s, and 70s allows us to have these conversations. Are they perfect? No. Today, with access to everything, we keep expecting a perfect and congruent tradition where all the parts fit and have an internal timelessness to them. I know that speaking for myself, that was the eternal quest with each of my teachers and traditions. There must be more! The mystery must go deeper! And there is, and it did, but it was messy. I never found the perfect fit, and all that I’ve created has been wonderful, challenging, and messy to my sense of order. One need only to look at any religion or myth and find it’s messy. The Bible? A mess of stories that were not necessarily made to go together, obviously drawing upon other Mesopotamian myths now in the monotheistic context. The Egyptians? Different tales in different temples. Who created the world? Depends on when and where you are. The Greeks? Their written records, assumed to be drawn from oral traditions, all disagree in details and philosophy. Is there a difference between the outer forms of the temples and cults and the inner forms of the mystery schools? Probably. It’s easy to dismiss things as muddled or simplistic because we live outside of their original setting, life experience, and cultural context. There might be an underlying universal wisdom, and I wholeheartedly agree with that, but in manifestations, it is all about the regional influences that shift in time and space. Ideas migrate with their people, and like people, change over time. Some settle down and some keep traveling. And some just disappear. It’s hard for us to see it today, as we are in the mix of these processes now, and we’d like to look at them from the lens of a far-off time when things have settled, not when they are morphing and mutating all around us. Most won’t endure. Look to what has longevity already, even if it’s not your cup of tea.

If we take these myths as literal truth, then the mythic differences bring us into madness and dogma, something as magickal people we should seek to avoid through our ability to hold two truths, the mythic and the academic. Tibetan Buddhists can have the theology-mythology that Tibet has always been a Buddhist nation founded from antiquity by Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, who was the earlier incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, giving rise to the idea that Tibet has always been guided by the bodhisattva of the Buddhist tradition. Historical research reveals that Buddhism as a coherent philosophy made it to Tibet in the 6th Century. Prior to that it was the indigenous Tibetan spiritual and magical practices as found in Bon, which has been adopted into later forms of Buddhism, but still has its own individual practices. Which view of history is right? It depends on what you are seeking. All of our traditions have mythic truth and academic truth. The Dali Lama can acknowledge both and have no dissonance in understanding these two different levels of truth simultaneously. Neopagans struggle with it. There is a teaching to the mythic ideas of an ancient lineage and pedigree, to the medieval Witch and the Burning Times, that confers a connection and plays a role in the magickal initiation process. But there is also the need for academic research to correct erroneous facts while not dismissing entirely the evolution of folklore and mythos. We must work to hold the two truths individually and as part of a community that can hold them as well, weaving them together when necessary and holding them separate as needed.

If we seek any form of a greater “big tent” Pagan community for support and shared resources—and honestly, simply for fellowship with like-minded, but not same minded—we must be okay with our shared histories and webs of practice. There is a time to see the shared collective and a time to express what is specific to our practice and to be accepting of differences in those times, to see what is right “for us” and not for everyone while also not denying the collective. There are times and places where people gather from all over, and those core themes carry, and there are times for the regional variations, where you might recognize similarity, but also huge differences. Today it’s hard to see those differences as regional due to the ease of travel by car and plane. It’s not so much the differences between the counties next to you, but between groups around the world, and now, due to the internet, there are connections in every area, with particular paradigms not rooted in a regional history in the same way. The world is wide open. It’s a blessing and a curse.

There will be times when we pass a torch to a small group of people in our inner circles, and other times when we hold the light aloft to share with all. There will be times when we pass the cup at a closed circle, and other times when we pour freely for our fellows. And there are times when we are weaving for ourselves, weaving for our people, and weaving for the entire world. All are needed. All our necessary. One does not invalidate the other.

Photo by Christopher Penczak

Once you have figured out a regular practice after some milestone in training — completing a degree, system, or course by drawing upon the components from that training — the challenge can be how to also acknowledge any previous training. How do you work different systems together? Can you? Should you?

The answer is up to you.

The success or failure of such work—as well as its complexity—depends on the systems you are drawing from and how integrated they are in your own psyche.

The first—and more simple method—is to keep all things separate. In some systems, this is a requirement, and you take vows, more or less, to keep the traditions as you learned them. One or more altar or working space is required for each. If you are still learning a new tradition and are holding different traditions simultaneously, rather than putting the older one on hold, such separation can be necessary to prevent confusion. Learn the traditions “as is” at first. While cumbersome, this method can be self-explanatory and quite effective.

The second method—really more a deep yearning than a method—is synthesis. The practitioner embodies many different practices and world views and paradigms. Do you see them in the context of the greater pattern? Many deeply adept practitioners don’t find the answers they seek in just one place. Questing into other teachings helps gain perspective. The three-fold way of Dion Fortune asks us to eventually study, deeply, three ways to gain a greater perspective on the divine. She had Esoteric Christianity, Hermetic Qabalah, and the land-based traditions of Arthurian Myth. I have many strands of Witchcraft, the Vedic and Sikh yoga teachings of a powerful mentor, and a mix of Hermetic Qabalah and New Age Theosophy.

Many of us feel strong past-life connection and true memories, either as strengths taken in this life or questions for working out now to resolve our attachments to the past. Many are rooted in the cultural traditions of antiquity found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; the Northern traditions of the Norse and Celts; and the traditions of the East, the Americas, and Africa. The access to information today helps us explore those memories and put things into some form of modern practice. So our studies may not be limited to one lifetime.

How does one synthesize? Here are some ideas:

Hoard—I remember Maxine Sanders speaking about how the Craft is a scavenger religion. We find things and gather them up. We save them and put them to use. We can be like magpies collecting shiny objects or crows mixing beautiful and functional objects, but soon we have a treasure trove and can just pull the right object out for the right moment, or use the right technique or teaching for the right moment in our lives. It’s intuitive. It lives mostly in memory, and at times it can be effective and other times jumbled.

Mosaic—we can take the parts we have gathered, and while still separate, arrange them in a beautiful pattern. We use them to create something bigger, with each part contributing to the whole.

Alloy—we can melt down our treasure, refine out its impurities, and then select the ones that will mix well into a new stronger or prettier alloy, combining properties of both. Like making bronze, pewter, sterling silver, or even steel, our practice will have some of the best qualities of the things we have combined, but it might have some unforeseen characteristics too, that will take a while to discover. It might not work, requiring us to go back to the drawing board and change the percentages of each source ingredient.

Compost and Garden—you can take all your source material and let it decompose within you, until the hard edges between the different practices naturally fall away. The resulting mix is fertile, and you plant your own seeds within it, letting the fertile soil feed your new idea. You aren’t inventing the wheel, so there will obviously be similar characteristics to ideas past, but in this process, these qualities become part of the natural growing and evolving structure of your practice and paradigm. The implication of growth means you don’t have to design something that is set, but will instead grow with you, and you can add more matter to the fertile matrix as you go. You don’t have to uproot your own garden.

Obviously this is all poetic. I can’t give you explicit instructions as I don’t know what you’ve got. Even if I did, it’s not my job. The whole point is that the work of synthesis is yours to do. I have my own to do. But can you see how these different approaches might inform you? They give you a guide for approaching what is really a lifelong practice, one where you may change your approach many times.

With some synthesis, go back and ask yourself the question from Part 1 again. See how they can change, and how your new ideas can be put into practice.

Photo by Christopher Penczak

“Do this five minutes a day, and you will be free from cancer.”

“Perform 108 repetitions daily, and you will never have heart disease.”

“Recite this mantra daily to be in tune with the universal powers.”

“Repeat this stretch twenty-one times daily to keep your spine flexible.”

These were instructions I received from one of my yoga instructors, passing on wisdom from their instructor. Did you know I almost became a yoga teacher just as I was beginning my esoteric professional career? I started in Hatha/Kripalu Yoga and made my way to Kundalini Yoga, and while I found the practice deeply transformative, the community was wrapped in dogma and dominant personalities, resulting in me going my own way and flirting with Vinyasana in my own practice of yoga today, though nothing quite matched the magick of Kundalini.

The teachings were filled with instructions of what you were supposed to do daily to prevent harm or generate benefit. If you added them all up, it was quite a list, and this was on top of the daily kriya, or yoga set, a teacher in training was supposed to do, usually close to forty minutes of yoga followed by fifteen to thirty minutes of chanting. I challenged my local instructor and said unless you lived in the ashram, how could you keep your daily life and all these practices? She replied that you can’t. And that began a discussion on how one must build their own practice together after learning initial trainings. Her words of wisdom guided me not only in yoga, but in Witchcraft and really all of life.

In talking to my Witchcraft mentors and teachers later in life, this was something that was inherent in occult teachings. Rarely is it spoken about unless a student asks a question, but the struggle of figuring it out was considered part of the training.

If you study a robust tradition with many practices, you’ll go through a series of rituals, meditations, alignments, and exercises as a part of your training. Some are peak experiences that you might not repeat until you help facilitate them for another new student. But most of them are meant to be repeated, to become integrated as a part of your practice. But how can you do them all?

You can’t. Everything that I tell my own students is a daily practice during the course of five-plus years of training cannot be done daily all together. Some are meant to work together, and some do not work well together. The graduate, at any level, must determine for themselves how to put it all together, crafting their own practice from the parts they feel most benefit them at the time, and most of us change our practice over time. Some change it daily, others weekly, seasonally, or yearly. Some are spontaneous and free with it, following daily intuition. Others are rigid and disciplined, with planned transitions. And most are somewhere between the two.

There is the danger you’ll pick only things that are easy or flattering, and either become egotistical, thinking you have done it all, or bored, and lose interest in practice at all. There is also the danger you’ll be heroic and pick the most involved and grueling practices, and then become discouraged or grow to hate the Craft. There can be a balance, and that is part of the teaching. The choice — and the responsibility — is up to you.

Magick is an art as well as a metaphysical science and a spiritual, religious practice. The artist must create and cannot grow stagnant, but there is an idea in the deeper arts training — be it writing, music, or magick — that you must learn all the rules perfectly before you break them.  Art can take many years to gain expertise, but that doesn’t mean you can’t practice or innovate until you have that expertise. On the contrary, you must create! That is part of the process.

We train to learn the structures, the foundations, and our history, and from that place, we can go further and develop what is next, grown from our own regular practice and the inspiration that comes from it. Those who teach and write unique things are ideally drawing from their own practice of it, but beware in all such crafts the attitude of “one and done” and really examine your motivations for studying and practicing. Have they changed since you began? For most of us, they do, as our understanding expands.

A very good friend who is trained as a Shakespearean actor, a lawyer, and a black-belt marital artist compared the three in a conversation with me, saying that essentially they are all the same in practice and pattern. If you haven’t been doing something diligently for 50 years, don’t dare to think you’ve mastered it and are done. The layers of subtle knowing and experience open in the sincere and open-hearted practice. As someone who has been doing her primary craft, law, for close to twenty years, she realizes that she understands enough to fully realize how much more she really needs to learn. While law might seem black and white to most of us, she describes the art in the crafting of contracts and the interpretation of law. She says the same goes for acting and for martial arts. And we both would agree the same can be said about magick. A thorough grounding in the technique and context gives rise to the truly inspired art. There is a union of the flash of the numinous from beyond into the matrix of the art, whatever it is.

People’s motivations are not always clear, even to them. Some learn to find community and belonging, and don’t care much for the art beyond the cool aesthetic. Some join because their peer group joins, and they fear being left behind. Many think it’s glamorous and enjoy imagining how others perceive them. For some it is a contest against others, not of the self. Many attain a level of outer accomplishment, be it black belt or initiation, and then drift away, believing they have accomplished “it.” Some seek the easy “A” rather than the desire to learn it all. I remember being flabbergasted by a student complaint that I was too “hard” and had too many expectations of my students, that other teachers, even in our tradition, were “easier” and expected less. It wasn’t fair, the student decided. I saw his situation as an opportunity to study with the teacher who literally designed the program and had the most experience teaching it, providing graduates with a deep and wide range of experiences because of my own. However, many students — having realized the work required for deep art in the context of a tradition — make such complaints as a way to ferment dissent and manufacture crisis and drama; this provides an escape hatch for themselves, allowing them to feel good about leaving rather than face the fact they don’t want to do something. But not doing something you don’t want to do is perfectly fine. Not all arts, and not all programs, are for everyone. We see it in theater groups, dojos, and yes, even Witchcraft groups and schools.

For many, the highest motivation is service. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, we are servants “of the Secret Fire…” with the sentiment shared in the Dion Fortune lineage embodied by the Servants of the Light — “I want to know in order to serve” — and in Gardnerian High Priestess Patricia Crowther’s autobiography High Priestess, where she espouses the mystery: “I wish to learn in order to serve.” Knowledge and training are put towards the service of “light,” of “humanity,” and one learns to becomes the light in order to serve. It’s not about servitude, but transformation, and the realizations that come with such transformation.

Whether you are done with a specific training entirely or are pausing at a completed level, you then have to ask yourself “What now?” Now that I have the knowledge, how do I put it into practice? How do I adapt it for my life? What do I use? What do I put aside? What are my needs? What is the time and energy I have to do this? The only taskmaster now watching your progress is yourself. Can you honestly assess and use what you have to craft something that is right for you? Can you determine when it will need to change and adapt? Probably not at first, and that is okay. It takes time. It takes making mistakes. It takes being overly ambitious and falling on your face, or under ambitious and growing stagnant. It takes recognition of your own health and your commitments to job and family.

Tips for crafting your own practice:

• Determine how much time you can reasonably commit.
• Determine how much time you want to commit, making sure you have free time other than your spiritual practice as it’s still a form of work, albeit hopefully enjoyable work and play.
• When will your practice usually happen?
• Do you have a clear space prepared for it?
• Ask yourself why you are keeping a regular practice. What is your motivation? If you know why, you’ll have more motivation when things are tough.
• What are the core practices of your tradition?
• What of these core practices are daily (perhaps forms of cleansing, meditation, and devotional work), weekly (deeper journey work), monthly (moon rituals), and yearly (seasonal sabbats)?
• What is done in community? What is done in small groups? And what is done in solitary?
• Do you have a main working altar? Multiple shrines? Is there one place where your work is consolidated?
• Is divination a part of your practice? How often?
• What do you feel called to do now? Why? Is it a comfort or a challenge? Can you balance the two aspects of practice?
• Is there a set length of time to such a practice? Perhaps set a schedule of a week or a month and then reevaluate that practice.
• Is there a progressive pattern to your practice? Working through a pattern, such as provided by the tarot, can give you focus and break monotony. Perhaps an elemental, planetary, or zodiacal pattern will aid your practice.

These questions can help you establish where you are and what you want to do next.

Your craft is your own. Your magick is your own. Contrary to the opinions of some, I don’t care what you do in your personal practice. While I care about people and want everyone who chooses to live a magical life with love and harmony, I don’t know how that looks for you. I don’t have attachment to its form. I can only give you a range of philosophies, techniques, myth, art, culture, and the support in the training to integrate it. What you do with it, and how connected you are to the community where it came from, is up to you.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki from Pexels

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that,” says both the new seeker and the more experienced Witch who thinks they have it all figured out.

Good! It’s Witchcraft. It’s not supposed to be comfortable all the time. That doesn’t mean you have to do anything you do not want to do, nor accept any form of abuse, but beyond that, if all the choices were easy, all the concepts instantly digestible, and all the tasks without effort, what would it be? It wouldn’t be Witchcraft.

Witchcraft opens the door to the uncomfortable. There is a reason why the archetypal Witch is not welcome in most stories. Today we embrace this idea, but many turn it outward only.

“I’m speaking truth to power.”
“I’m holding up a mirror to society.”
“I’m an untamed rebel, a wild and free spirit that can’t be caged.”

But to do any of that, you must continuously turn that attitude upon yourself and be ruthless in your own truth, mirrors, and freedoms. Otherwise you are simply unconscious, and those who are looking deeply inside can see it a mile away. Otherwise it’s all aesthetics and little soul.

We have to face what is uncomfortable, dissonant, and dark within us. If your magickal practice, whatever it is, constantly affirms your decisions, beliefs, and ideas with no deeper evaluations, no doubts, no discomfort, you have a big problem even as you have convinced yourself you have no problems at all.

Witchcraft is change. Witchcraft is growth. While some growth can be blissful, usually there is discomfort somewhere in the process. A seed is buried in darkness like it’s dead before sprouting new life. Some seeds require fire to germinate. Affirmation of “what is” never brings transformation on its own. Acceptance might, but joyful and unconscious affirmation does not. Witchcraft is at the edges where things are nebulous and lack definition. If everything fits neatly, no ambiguity, and all of it is already figured out, you are not at any edge, crossroads, or liminal space. We must maintain our own center, but we are also constantly pushed to our own edge. That is the paradox of it, centers and edges simultaneously. That is our squaring the circle. Only pushing others’ boundaries without asking the same of yourself —no matter what good intentions or reasons you might have—is disingenuous.

Witchcraft can involve, in no particular order: sex, death, power, body fluids, illness, faeries, gender, poison, history, myth, love, darkness, story, gods, language, water, foreign cultures, angels, writing, empathy, light, ethics, sacrifice, flowers, reading, temples, blindfolds, medicine, childhood, curses, patterns, snakes, thorns, intuition, the forest, devotion, understanding evil, listening, the future, gardens, knives, psychology, getting old, mystery, fire, music, injustice, the weather, conflict, theology, the past, family, and actually doing Witchcraft. Something somewhere in all that will catalyze a reaction and require a response. While we live in a world where we now often want to minimize our internal responses to uncomfortable things, for a Witch, that response is good.

Magick is dangerous, for magick is change. When you claim the identity of a magickal practitioner—be it Witch, magician, shaman, healer, or priest/ess—you initiate a process, even if you are not undergoing formal initiation or training. You catalyze things within you and things all around you. You step onto a crooked path of mystery. Even claiming acts of functional magick—simple spells and blessings—triggers internal processes. The buried burdens and treasures of the ancestors activate. The gods and spirits start to take notice. The adversaries and guardians of opposition stand by to test and make you stronger with challenge. It all unfolds uniquely to each of us, but the act of claiming magick requires one to live a more magickal, conscious life. Many people have a deep intellectual understanding of all these things, but confuse the intellect with the experience. I once had a student who, upon the completion of a psychology degree, declared he had all the spiritual experiences and was “done.” He understood the psychological patterns of self-realization, but he hadn’t done the work yet, and soon life showed him otherwise and he then more humbly understood.

I know a practitioner who avoids using the word “trigger” so as not to trigger anyone. If the word “trigger” is triggering, the remedy is to face that first and then get a greater understanding of other sensitive points, discover why, and move through them, with professional help and mentorship whenever needed. Only you can determine when you are ready to face something and if you want to do that, but one of the clear ideals of the Witch is to not be bound and controlled, and that includes the forces of our past and the forces within us. We can choose how, where, and when we can tackle difficult reactions—and by all means have a support structure in place—but we should be giving deep thought to the value of facing it. The only way out is through.

“Not yet” is an acceptable viewpoint, but we must keep the realization that it is there. We all have our different ways and our different capacities, but must learn more about our own uniqueness, including our unique challenges, and move through to the change that is correct for us. The way I navigate something will naturally be different from how you navigate something similar. But navigating is different than being oblivious or willfully ignorant. Otherwise all that we unconsciously carry will have as much access to our magick as our conscious self. This is the true secret to the beloved and hated “shadow work” of modern craft, often disregarded as not really Witchcraft by those who are, well, pretty unconscious of their own shadow. In truth, all the ancient mysteries have an aspect of what we would today call psychology.

Traditional structures that are often abandoned today, when held well, provide the container and support for this kind of deep work. Magickal groups grounded in a tradition and practice became catalysts for growth. Those of us on our own have to find other structures and support, but we can’t avoid our dark places and pretend they are not there. Worse yet, we cannot do so and then pretend mastery or feel well versed enough to offer advice and critique to others. Modern teachings often stress the permission to not face things when you are not ready, but provide no plan to get you ready or explain how to deal with these shadows looming in the background of your psyche.

What is true on one level can become false at a different point on the path. Experiences might cause you to question assumptions and where those assumptions first came to you. Know thyself, but be open to surprising yourself too. Every day you are growing and evolving, and you can’t possibly know where that path will lead if you are following it open-heartedly, no matter how accurate your psychic predictions are.

Learn to not only face, but to befriend discomfort, to invite it in, as you’ll be hosting it many times whether you want to or not, so embrace it when you can. By embracing discomfort, you are embracing yourself, your world, and your craft, loving it as is, and in that acceptance in the moment, evoking the change that is necessary without specific attachments. That acceptance and letting go while holding vision and seeking clarity is the heart of our magick. Consciously witnessing, even without taking direct action, is an act of high and deep magick. Growth takes us in new and strange directions. For a while we are comfortable, until we find discomfort and new growth again.