The Transformative Power
of Witchcraft
Since I was a child I’ve been attracted to mysteries. In elementary school I was obsessed with undiscovered creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. That interest led me to other unexplained phenomena such as UFOs, ghosts, and the supernatural. Eventually I became interested in the occult, and while my peers were reading Choose Your Own Adventure books I was reading books on demons, vampires, and witches.
My interest in the unknown eventually led me to study religion in college, a subject that I found to be the biggest mystery of all. Why do some people feel called to deities like Jesus and others to the Hindu Shiva? Why do some religions thrive and others whither away? Why wasn’t I experiencing anything magical or wondrous in my then Christian practice?
I often feel like a bad Witch for admitting it today, but I grew up as a Christian and practiced that faith until I was about twenty years old. I wasn’t just a Sunday Christian either; I was president of my youth group and was actively involved in my church. Despite my involvement, I still felt like there was something missing in my life. Christianity simply didn’t offer any mystery. It felt hollow, for lack of a better word.
At the age of twenty-one I picked up a book on Modern Witchcraft, and my life was forever changed. Within forty-eight hours of picking up that book I had added “the Lady” to my evening prayers and began to look at the world in a different way. Witchcraft presented me with a world full of magick and mystery, and it was undeniably alive. Rain falling from the sky wasn’t just water, it was a literal gift from the gods, and the blowing wind contained messages from the Goddess and God. Jesus was quiet when I prayed to him, but the Lord and Lady were around all the time, no prayer required.
The biggest difference between Witchcraft and my previous path is that Witchcraft is transformative. Some of the rituals found in modern-day Christianity are meant to be transformative, but nearly all the mystery and wonder has been stripped from them. (Somehow Christianity has made the resurrection of Jesus—think about it for a second, it’s a guy coming back from the dead!—boring.) Witchcraft ritual is flickering candles, chants, incense, and the promise of something awe-inspiring. Church is tired hymns or cloying worship songs, sermons about how bad we all are, and readings from a 2,000-year-old book.
Witchcraft’s greatest mysteries fundamentally change the way we look at the world, and those mysteries make up the core of this book. During my time as a Witch, four different ritual experiences have turned my world upside down. The first of those mysteries was the cone of power, and though I didn’t know what it was the first time I experienced it, from that point on I knew undoubtedly that magick was real. At the start of my second year as a Witch, I dedicated myself to the practice of the Craft and felt the power of the gods surround me while I did so. Several years later I was initiated into a specific Witchcraft tradition, and the way I viewed the world was never the same.
Perhaps the most life-changing event in my life was the first time I saw the Goddess descend into the body of a human being and then interact with those around her. This was probably what I dreamed about most as a Christian—direct experience with the divine—and is now something I experience with great regularity as a Witch (and every time it’s just as awe-inspiring as it was on that first night). One of the women who drew down the moon that night would become my wife and magickal partner, and through the mystery of the Great Rite she and I have been able to become one in a spiritual and physical sense, at least for a little while.
The mysteries of Witchcraft are real and can be grasped if we are just willing to open ourselves up to them. And most importantly, they can be experienced by anyone. Witchcraft is about more than seasonal rituals and pentacle necklaces; it’s meant to be a transformative path. Not every Witchcraft rite will change how you see the world, but the possibility for something so grand does exist in what we do as Witches.
The first public Modern Witch was a retired English civil servant named Gerald Gardner, and his work eventually opened the door to millions of other Witches. Witchcraft was such a transformative power in his life that the first section of this book shares the mystery of his alleged initiation back in 1939. Gardner most likely experienced all the things written about in this book, and they had the same effect on him as they’ve had on me.
Gardner went public with his experiences as a Witch in the early 1950s, and his first book on the subject, Witchcraft Today, was released in 1954. In this book Gardner claimed that Witchcraft was a religion and had survived in secret for centuries and, most importantly, still existed in 1954. The idea of Witchcraft as a pagan religion was not new, but the idea that it still existed in such a form was not only novel but revolutionary.
The Witchcraft that Gardner wrote about back in the 1950s is generally known as Wicca today (and even more specifically Gardnerian Wicca), but the word Wicca does not appear once in Gardner’s work. Gardner believed he was documenting Witchcraft, and that’s what he called the practice in his book. He called the individuals who practiced Witchcraft Witches and not Wiccans. He also sometimes used the phrase Witch-cult to refer to those who practiced Witchcraft either in his day or in the past.
This is important to me because there are some who claim that Wiccans are not Witches and that Wicca and Witchcraft should be seen as separate terms. One evening I came across a warning on social media to avoid any and all books that use Wicca and Witchcraft as synonyms. (The person who wrote that is going to hate this book!) Wiccan-Witchcraft is certainly not the only kind of Witchcraft in the world, but it is a kind of Witchcraft, and the two words have been used interchangeably since the 1960s, and I don’t see any reason to stop doing that today.
Gardner does use the word Wica twice in his book Witchcraft Today, but not as the name of a religion. Instead, being of the Wica is the equivalent in Gardner’s book of being part of an exclusive club. The Wica are “wise people” but are known both to themselves and to those around them as Witches and practitioners of Witchcraft.
In 1958, Charles and Mary Cardell (two very odd individuals who liked to pretend they were brother and sister) told the Spiritualist journal Light that they were “Wiccens.” 1 The Witchcraft (or Wicce?) of the Cardells never really caught on, but a slightly different version of their term Wiccen did. In 1960, Margaret Bruce, a friend of Gerald Gardner and the owner of a magickal mail-order business, used the word Wicca in a humorous poem in reference to the Cardells:
We feel it is tragick
That those who lack Magick.
Should start a vendetta
With those who know betta
We who practice the Art
Have no wish to take part
Seems a pity the ‘Wicca’
Don’t realise this Quicca.2
By the early 1960s the words Wicca and Wiccan began to be commonly associated with the Witchcraft first written about by Gerald Gardner. Generally, use of the terms Wicca and Wiccan was limited to those initiated into the tradition of Gardner and its various offshoots. By the late 1980s the word Wicca was being used to describe any variation of Gardner’s Witch religion, whether that tradition was initiatory or eclectic and homegrown.
The words Wicca and Witchcraft have been linked for countless centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the very word witch derives from the Old English words wicca (masculine) and wicce (feminine). What exactly wicca meant before being turned into witch is a matter of some debate. Some have speculated that it might mean “to bend or shape,” and others have linked it to Germanic words meaning “awakener,” “sacrificer,” “adviser,” or “diviner.” 3 Advising, divining, and awakening are all things Modern Witches do, and there are still many who suffer from the delusion that Witches sacrifice things, so all four possibilities resonate at least a little bit with the word witch.
Whatever the word’s early origins, by the time witch became a popular word in the English language it was mainly used to refer to negative magick users, with those practitioners most often being women. Not surprisingly, acts of negative magick and the people who were said to practice that magick were linked with the Christian Devil. In some instances “witches” were perceived as spectral beings, ghostlike entities that terrorized good Christian folks.
Gardner was not the first person to present Witchcraft in a sympathetic light. The word had slowly been gaining a degree of respect for several decades before him. Positive users of magick were even being called “white” Witches by some writers, but Gardner was the first person to publicly self-identify as a Witch. He’s also seen today as the founder, revealer, and/or architect of the religion known as Wicca. Since Gardner and his later initiates used the two terms somewhat interchangeably, I do too.
The word Witch might not be a mystery, but it’s use is often contentious. If a person chooses to self-identify as a Witch, more power to them—as long as that person doesn’t tell everyone else that they are prohibited from doing so. The Witchcraft world is a large one, and there’s enough room for the words Witchcraft and Witch to be used in a variety of ways.
A Note to Readers
Many of the rites and rituals included in this book come directly from my own personal Book of Shadows. Since so many of those rituals were written with my wife, Ari, in mind (she’s my ritual partner after all), they utilize the terms High Priestess and High Priest to indicate ritual leadership roles—but in no way am I looking to suggest that a coven must have a female and a male in such positions.
In our coven’s practices we often do rituals with two High Priestesses or two High Priests. Writing “High Priest” and “High Priestess” simply reflects the fact that I do most of my rituals with Ari. These names are not meant to indicate any sort of defined role for a specific gender. (And since my wife is a better ritualist than I am, you’ll see that the High Priestess part almost always gets the most lines in ritual.)
Women can call the Horned God and men can call the Triple Goddess, and ritual should also be welcoming to those Witches (and sometimes deities) who don’t identify with any gender. My deities represent every facet of the gender spectrum, and that spectrum is long and varied.
Though I think this book can be enjoyed and understood by just about anybody, it’s designed for readers who have had at least a little bit of experience with Witch ritual. For those of you new to the path, there’s a glossary at the end to help with the words that might be unfamiliar to you.