My most joyous and spiritual moments as a Witch have generally taken place during ritual. At an early Samhain ritual, I came face to face with the Goddess for the first time when our High Priestess drew down the moon. To have the Goddess of the Witches in the body of a friend and peer was life-changing. It was a moment so powerful and fundamental to my development as a Witch that just writing about it brings a smile to my face almost twenty years later, along with a desire to repeat the experience.
While many Witches today try to cultivate an air of mystery and menace about themselves, I’ve always found Witchcraft to be a bright, sunny, and happy experience (even if we do most of our rituals in the light of the moon). At Yule we toast one another in my coven with alcoholic wassail while weaving magick to ensure a new year full of health and relative prosperity. At Beltane we play absurd games that make us giggle, and at Ostara we eat hot cross buns and indulge the child within.
Ritual has brought me intense spiritual satisfaction and no shortage of good times. It’s also a time for work, and many of the rituals I’ve been involved with over the years have been rather serious affairs. Some of them have centered on social justice issues and preserving our environment. For a Witch, ritual is a multifaceted thing, and it’s possible to have fun, have an intense spiritual experience, and do something super meaningful all in the space of one hour. Many of my proudest moments as a Witch have taken place inside of ritual space, usually when leading a successful rite for and with a large group. When I write or lead a ritual for my extended community, I look upon it as a service, and one I’m happy to provide. Good ritual gets people involved in our local circles, covens, and groves, while a bad ritual experience might drive them away from the Craft forever. While I don’t believe in proselytizing, growing my community and getting people excited about Witchcraft is important to me.
Since the early 1970s, thousands of books full of Witch ritual of varying quality have been published. Witchcraft as we experience it today has really only been around for a little less than a hundred years, and fifty years ago, when we first started putting rituals down on the printed page, we were still trying to figure things out. To put it mildly, a lot of early printed Witch ritual simply wasn’t very good. (I’m sure that statement is going to get me into trouble with a few folks, but I stand by it.)
Most early printed rituals were ridiculously short and didn’t really offer much to do. There would be instructions for the coven to gather, yell something as a group, and then engage in a guided meditation or short seasonal observance. Reading these types of rituals as a Witchling was especially troublesome to me because they had nothing to do with my Witch experience in those days. I was a solitary, and most printed rituals were designed for groups, and there’s a big difference between ritual for one and ritual for thirteen. Even one of the best books on Wiccan-Witchcraft ever written, Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, contained very short rituals that didn’t resonate with me all that much.
As I grew as a Witch and eventually met and began practicing with other Witches, I often found myself responsible for coming up with our rituals. Many of these rituals were at local psychic fairs and for the college student group we were all a part of then. While trying to put those rituals together, I’d often comb through my rapidly growing Witch library for help and inspiration. Sadly, my books were never much help, and I ended up learning rather quickly that rituals originally written for ten people don’t always translate well for groups of thirty or more.
There are fundamental differences between solitary, coven, and circle rituals, and that’s a detail mostly absent from Witch literature. (Circle is my term here for large groups.) This book is designed to fill in those gaps, all while (hopefully) offering meaningful, involved, and interesting rituals for each sabbat, or holiday. What works for ten people may not work for fifty, and what works for fifty people might not work for the Witch alone. I’ve focused on sabbat rituals in this book because I love them most of all, and because the sabbats are the one common element among the hundreds of Witch traditions today. Most every Witch I know celebrates the sabbats, even if we don’t all agree on what to call them.
Because this book is essentially dedicated to sabbat rituals, there’s also some good factual information included about all eight of them. However, due to the length of this book, I’ve kept those overviews brief. I originally wanted to include long, detailed histories of sabbats such as Yule and Samhain, but I often found myself writing instead about Christmas and Halloween, which aren’t quite the same thing. Historical context is great, but this book is mainly concerned with how we celebrate the sabbats today, not how another religious tradition adapted the rites of ancient paganism(s) to suit their own needs. Those interested in more history are urged to check out the bibliography.
This book contains twenty-four rituals, but that’s only a drop in the bucket as to what can actually be done on the sabbats. So in addition to the rituals in this book, I’ve included other ideas on ways to celebrate our high holidays. My ideas often mention some of the more obvious themes we see in ritual, such as the Oak King/Holly King mythos and the cycle of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. In order to make this work as unique as possible, I made a deliberate decision to try to avoid including rituals that contain themes and ideas that appear with frequency online and in other books. There are lots of books and websites with rituals out there. I hope that the rituals included in this book have something new and/or different to say.
In addition to all the seasonal stuff, there are a lot of tips and tricks included on just how to create effective rituals for both yourself and any group you might be involved in. Ritual scripts are great and all, but they only tell half the story. Knowing how to set up a ritual for the group you’re working with (and that “group” might include only you and your gods) is a necessary skill to ensure effective ritual practice.
No book can teach someone how to be an effective ritualist. Learning how to facilitate a powerful ritual can only truly be accomplished through trial and error. Books like this can provide some of the necessary tools, but they are no substitute for actually doing the work. And when that work doesn’t go as well as you might have hoped, the only recourse is to get back up and try again. Practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to Witch ritual.