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Pagan Prayer: Offerings of Praise, Gratitude, and Hope
Categories: ArchiveI’ve heard people scoff and say they don’t kneel down to their gods, that they stand tall and proud with them. And that’s all well and good. You should have a cordial relationship with your deities, be comfortable around them, be proud to do their work on earth. But don’t you think occasionally you should
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Empty Womb and Dead Seed: Reconciling Infertility in a Fertility Religion
So much of Wicca is bound up in the idea of fertility — fertility of the land, of the animals, and of humanity. As a religion, we understand this fertility to mean the ongoing survival of the planet and the life that lives on it, but often the first thing that comes to mind when
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Oaths and Why Not To Make Them (Unless You’re Ready)
Categories: ArchiveA witch is only as good as their word. It’s a lesson I try to teach each of my students. Maintaining good boundaries is an important exercise in living — not just living magickally, but living in general. So are being reliable and appropriately committed. As people, witchy people and just people, we are judged
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The Wiccan Rede: The Supreme Ethic of the Craft
Categories: ArchiveHigh Priestess Judy Harrow wrote Exegesis on the Rede in 1984. As an advancing student, my teacher Susan Stoddard recommended this essay to me to help me better understand what the Wiccan Rede was and what it did — and did not — tell Wiccans to do with our lives. What it taught me was
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Paperback Grimoires: An Annotated Bibliography of Recommended Intermediate Books
Categories: ArchiveTags: reading listsPaganism is mainstream enough that there are books available on nearly every topic of interest in major bookstores. And if there isn’t a book available yet, someone’s probably writing it. That is great progress from fifteen years ago when I was seeking to advance my knowledge and become more than a beginner in the Craft.
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Circle/Wheel: A Crash Course in Circle Symbolism
I’ve quoted him before and I’ll quote him again. Author and teacher Ivo Dominguez Jr. remarked in his book Casting Sacred Space: The Core of All Magickal Work that “In its fullness, a Circle can contain a richness so complex that if all of Wicca were lost except for the way to cast a Circle, and
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Wards: Protections and Suggestions
I first heard about wards in an epic fantasy novel by Melanie Rawn. She described wards as spells which were tied to a certain place and protected the area through magickal suggestion. Other people have argued with me on this view, saying that wards are protective spells that make people uncomfortable or repel them from
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The Three Passwords: Gaining Admission to the Magick Circle
The passwords to the magick circle are seen in the Gardnerian first-degree initiation ritual, when the dedicant is challenged before entering the circle. When the dedicant answers with the two passwords they are given beforehand, Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, the priest (or priestess, depending on who is officiating the initiation) responds with a third
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Royal Stars and Watchtowers: The Astral Element of the Circle
In the magick circle, we have representation of the four elements, the sun, the moon, and the earth. But notably missing is the representation of the sky/stars. Or so I thought. While researching for another project, I came across the notion of the Royal Stars, an astrological and astronomical concept used by the ancient Persians
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The Threefold Law: Unraveling the Different Interpretations
The Threefold Law is a point of some contention in Traditional Wicca. Some priestesses, like Phyllis Curott, suggest that the Threefold Law is a remnant of Christianized thinking and amounts to a threat of punishment for doing bad things, which is incompatible with Pagan belief structures and should be rejected. Others, like Raven Grimassi, suggest