Category: Articles
-
The Fivefold Kiss: Understanding the Controversial Blessing
The Fivefold Kiss is a blessing ritual first seen in the Gardnerian First Degree Initiation. It involves the priestess or priest (of the opposite gender polarity of the initiate) to kneel and kiss five points on the initiate’s body: the feet, the knees, the groin, the breast, and the lips. He then kneels at her…
-
The Sacred Fire: Kindling Life in the Circle
n my tradition, we have two different types of fire represented in the Circle: Elemental Fire, which dwells in the South, and Sacred Fire, which dwells in the Center. Elemental Fire is meant to represent the transformative quality of the element. Sacred Fire, on the other hand, is a conjoining of all the Elements: Earth…
-
Secrets of the Circle Casting: Creating Effective Sacred Space
Ivo Dominguez Jr. wrote in his book Casting Sacred Space: The Core of All Magickal Work that if we lost everything about our religion except the way to cast the magick circle and its symbolism then the religion could be renewed from that single seed. Far from a perfunctory act, to cast the circle is…
-
Building the Inner Temple: A Witch’s Refuge on the Astral Plane
Categories: ArticlesEach of us has an inner temple waiting to be built. The inner temple is a spiritual refuge and magickal workspace built at the crossroads of the inner realm and the astral realm, where the individual meets the universal. Like a Klein bottle, if you journey far enough inside yourself, you realize you’ve travelled outside…
-
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…