Boundaries and Cleanup
for Magickal Events
Emily Carlin
One of the most rewarding elements of magickal community is participating in community events such as group rituals, study groups, and festivals. They allow us to share energies, build friendships, exchange knowledge, support one another, and have a great time while doing so. There is no better way to support and strengthen your local community than by hosting an event, be it something as small as a study group in your home or as large as a public festival. Beyond mundane considerations, hosting a magickal event requires consideration of the potential energies of attendees and the consequences the meeting of those energies can generate. Let’s discuss some of the energetic concerns, protective preparations, and energetic cleanup techniques for magickal events.
Energetic Concerns
To say that magickal people have unique energies would be a profound understatement. Any time people get together in a group, you’re always going to have a unique mix of energies; gather magickal folk en masse and you’ll soon find yourself swimming in a unique gumbo of energetic overflow, sparking emotions, and colliding shields of varying levels of effectiveness. Magickal people tend to have very strong personal energies, because we are more mindful of them and work to make them more potent in the world. Consequently, a magickal person having a bad day or with cracked shields or negative intentions is likely to have a greater effect on others than a non-magickal person. Not all practitioners, be they new or veteran, have their own energies under conscious control, and certainly not at all times. Whether they mean to or not, magickal people can be incredibly disruptive to those around them if their energies are in conflict.
Practice magick for a while and sooner or later you will become acquainted with unseen entities such as spirits, faeries, deities, ancestors, angels, demons, etc. Unseen entities tend to congregate around magickal people, and they will follow those people to your event. Not all of these unseen entities are positive.
Magickal folks also potentially bring unacknowledged metaphysical guests with them. Practice magick for a while and sooner or later you will become acquainted with unseen entities such as spirits, faeries, deities, ancestors, angels, demons, etc. Unseen entities tend to congregate around magickal people, and they will follow those people to your event. Not all of these unseen entities are positive and not all of them get along with one another. Host enough events and eventually you may have to deal with someone’s unwanted passenger deciding that someone else at the event looks tastier than their current host and then trying to follow the new person home. As a host, you have a certain level of responsibility for the energetic safety of your invitees and must do what you reasonably can to prevent such problems.
Pre-Event Magick
Before hosting a magickal event, it is important to set a specific intention for the event and place formal wards. Doing so will help the energies of the event run smoothly.
Intention Setting
A formal intention setting is a small ritual that sets an energetic anchor for your event. This ritual should be performed by the event organizers prior to the arrival of the first invitee. Depending on the size and scope of your event, you may choose to do this the day of the event or many months in advance.
In this ritual, you would call on any patron entities or metaphysical allies the event might have and request that they watch over and protect it. This would also be an appropriate time to communicate with the local spirits of the land and ask their permission to hold the event. Then read a formal statement of your short- and long-term goals for the event, the energies you hope the event will create and maintain, and whom you want in attendance. If there are particular people or entities you do not want to attend your event, you may add a prohibition at this time.
After clearly stating your intent, it is important to declare your event as energetic safe space. As mentioned earlier, your guests will bring their own energies, alignments, and metaphysical friends with them. Set your event as safe space for all of your invitees and demand that they play nicely with each other during the event. Strong communication and directly addressing conflicts are necessary for the health of any community; needless bickering and energetic backbiting are not. Clearly state the consequences for violating this safe space, both for unseen entities and people, and make sure they are widely known. By firmly establishing your intent and boundaries, you will set the energy for the entirety of your event.
Wards
Apart from the standard shields one would normally set for any magickal working, I recommend laying down a series of warding jars both to protect your event and to normalize potentially hazardous energy spikes. Acquire several small jars, about one cup to one pint in size. Fill the jars halfway with salt. I prefer to use either black salt or Epsom salt. Then add a good pinch each of baking powder, cascarilla powder, red brick dust, mugwort, rosemary, and lavender.
Set a jar in each major space used by the event. The contents will absorb and neutralize negativity as well as excess energy throughout the event. If your event lasts for several days, you may need to refresh the ingredients in the jars periodically, depending on the energies floating about. After the event, the contents of the jars should be either buried or thoroughly cleansed in moonlight and thrown away. Note that salt can be toxic to plants in large amounts, so be mindful of where you dispose of it.
Post-Event Cleanup
Any gathering of magickal people will inevitably stir up the energies of the space they’ve inhabited, and it is the duty of the event organizers to soothe those energies back to their natural state. Simply leaving a surfeit of non-naturalized energy in a given space can be as useless as piling a ton of fertilizer in one square foot of space or as potentially destructive as chumming shark-infested waters.
How far you should take your energetic cleanup depends on both the nature of the energy you find yourself left with and the intrinsic energies of the space. If you have little leftover energy or it’s similar to the energy of the place, then a simple but deliberate grounding into the natural environment should suffice. Even then, be mindful to ground thoroughly so as not to attract unwanted metaphysical attention to the space that has hosted you. If the energy clashes with the natural space, then you should direct it to ground in a space more aligned with its nature. For example, if you find yourself with the energy of wild and uncontrolled nature in the middle of an office complex, you may wish to move that energy out into a local forest or nature preserve before grounding it. Direct your cleanup in a way that is mindful of the space.
Whether the space is public or private should also be taken into consideration. Private spaces, like someone’s home or a small business, have particular energies, and you should do your best to restore the energies to their state prior to the event. Public spaces, like parks and hotels, have a more neutral energy and thus can be cleansed more generically. High-traffic public spaces are also less likely to hold on to the energies raised by your event. While that doesn’t mean you should be lackadaisical in your efforts, it does mean you needn’t worry quite as much about getting things back to square one.
Once you’ve cleansed the space to your satisfaction, you should make an offering of gratitude. Giving thanks both to the spirits of the place and to the people who provided/worked the space is an important capstone for your event. Making an offering to the spirits of the place that hosted you and any entities that aided in the success of your event both cultivates a healthy relationship with them and ends your event with positivity. Besides simply being good manners, an explicit thanks to the people who hosted you cultivates your good name and helps the reputation of your entire community.
A good event organizer has a responsibility both to their invitees and to the space hosting the event to safeguard them from negative or harmful, disruptive energies. Taking the time and effort to identify potential energetic concerns, set up boundaries beforehand and enforce them, and properly clean up afterward can make all the difference in the success of an event while it’s happening as well as its long-term impact. Such simple steps show awareness of and respect for the myriad energies that dance together at any magickal gathering and strengthen the whole community.
Emily Carlin is an eclectic Witch, writer, teacher, mediator, and ritual presenter based in Seattle. She currently teaches one-on-one online and at in-person events on the West Coast. For more information and links to her blogs, go to http://about.me/ecarlin.
Illustrator: Kathleen Edwards