Beginnings
Imagine strolling through a lush, dense forest. With each step you can hear the crunch of leaves beneath your feet. The sunlight streams through the canopy, creating patterns of shadow across the forest floor. You breathe in and smell the damp, sweet odor of fresh growth mixed with the decomposition of the loam under your feet. The chatter of birds is carried on the wind. When the sound hits your ears, you feel a tightness in your chest begin to soften and a smile crosses your lips. Walking through the forest is a simple pleasure, but it is one filled with beauty.
Sometime around 2010 I co-taught a weeklong intensive at California Witchcamp. My co-teacher and I offered a five-day workshop called Walking in Beauty. It was dubbed by the campers as the “bardic path” because the plan was to incorporate poetry and writing with magick and Witchcraft. The goal of this class was to tap into our creative selves and express them in a myriad of artistic ways. We had a clear vision and a direction, but over the week the magick that we were doing evolved into so much more—way more than I ever expected.
The flow of our class became less and less about poetry or tapping into our magickal bardic powers and more about finding beauty. But the words “finding beauty” aren’t quite the right words for what happened either. Our group of twenty Witches and edge walkers opened up to remembering beauty and seeing beauty in all of the things that are happening around us all of the time. Our path became a place where we could share the beauty that we were discovering with other people. We found that the more we opened our eyes to the beauty of the world, the more we could see it. Concurrently, by sharing these discoveries with other people not taking our workshop, we were able to help open their eyes to this beauty too. We discovered that awakening to beauty grows and expands on itself exponentially. One of the tools we used to do this work was the Beauty Pentacle.
Shortly after the initial Walking in Beauty workshop, I had an experience with an ancestor. She told me it was time to bring the tool of the Beauty Pentacle into the world. She said that humanity needs to be reminded of how much beauty there is. She told me that it is too easy to be focused on what is wrong, broken, and terrible. It is too easy to lose the threads of beauty. It is part of the modern illness of disconnection, and beauty is the cure.
And I don’t say this from a place of fluffy, surface, easy magick. Connecting to beauty is hard. It is a challenge. This process and practice has revolutionized who I am as a Witch.
The word awesome has been watered down in our modern lexicon. Awesome doesn’t hold the weight and gravitas that it once did. The actual definition of the word awesome is “something that inspires awe.” The definition of awe is “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.” Can you think of a time when you have been struck with reverential fear or wonder? Seriously, think about a time that you felt true awe. Go on, I’ll wait. … Did you feel that? The awe, reverence, that wonder is the power of the Beauty Pentacle. It is more than a power; it is a living force.
It is so easy to see the devastation, the horror, the ugliness of the world, but the truth is that the world is awesome. Even within the challenges and terrors there are moments of beauty so magnificent that it stops the breath and quiets the mind. It is in the experience of magnificence that the Beauty Pentacle was born. And using the Beauty Pentacle can awaken that feeling in us every day. It serves as a reminder to what is always available.
The Beauty Pentacle is both a meditation tool and a key to greater awareness. At its core the Beauty Pentacle is an energy force, and that force can be run through our physical bodies. Moving this energy allows it to serve us as a tool and awaken our senses to the beauty and power of the world around us. Running the energy of the Beauty Pentacle through the pentacle of our living human body, we awaken our creative, dynamic selves. The tool that is the Beauty Pentacle lays over our physical bodies, which are also pentacles. Our head and five limbs create a star (pentagram), and the energy that flows between those five points creates a circle around the star (pentacle). We will explore this more as you read on. The energy of the Beauty Pentacle feeds us and opens us up with more awareness to the beautiful web of life.
Incorporating the Beauty Pentacle into your everyday life is so much more than smelling the roses and turning a blind eye to difficulties. It’s easy to connect the word beauty with something superficial, like ignoring the troubles of the world or skipping through fields of grain. The Beauty Pentacle is not about turning away from the troubles of the world, but rather, it is a turning towards what is magickal in the world. We can hold both; in fact we must hold both. The Beauty Pentacle is a calling to connect to the beautiful because it is easy to forget that it is there.
The earth is a miracle. Humans are miracles. Every single thing we do, see, smell, taste, and experience is a miracle. All of it. The good, the bad, the challenging, the easy, the boring; all of it, miracles.
Just the fact that millions of years ago a creature climbed out of the muck and over time evolved into a woman sitting on her couch typing out language on an electronic device that connects her to information all over the world is pretty spectacular. It’s easy to forget that.
Although the focus of this tool isn’t to come to terms with societal expectations of what beauty means, your feelings around this are likely to come up as you learn to use this device. The more you connect to the magick that is beauty, the more beautiful you will feel. It is our birthright, beauty. The Beauty Pentacle reconnects us to the greater world and our role in it.
We are not apart from that world. In fact, we are a part of it. Opening our eyes to the beauty in the leaves, the mountains, the flowers, the birds, the ocean, reminds us that we are also the leaves, the mountains, the flowers, the birds, and the ocean. We are connected. All of us and everything are connected.
It is easy to forget that what happens on the other side of the planet impacts my place on the globe. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day needs of life. It is easy to get sucked into fighting on social media or the drama of television news. But there is so much more going on in the world.
The Beauty Pentacle asks you to remember.
Throughout this book you will have opportunities to do some of your own exploration of the Beauty Pentacle. There will be exercises, journaling prompts, and guerrilla acts of beauty for you to take out into the world. You can work through this book one section at a time, letting the energy of the Beauty Pentacle flow through you in a more linear order. Or you can allow yourself to be drawn to different pages, prompts, and offerings randomly in order to let the beauty flow with your intuition. No matter how you decide to work through this book, I would encourage you to start with the Working with Pentacles section. This will give you a solid foundation of how this tool works and how to run it through your body.
In each section there will be more than one Check-In. These are writing prompts where you will have the opportunity to explore your feelings on a specific topic. But don’t feel that a journaling prompt must be writing an essay. Feel free to explore the Check-Ins as an art piece, a dance, a walk through your neighborhood. Let each Check-In move through you and express it in the way that feels right.
Throughout the book there will be lots of opportunities to practice the working of the pentacle points. Exercises titled Discovering Beauty, Devotion, Creativity, Desire, or Expression will provide opportunities for you to play with the pentacle points and work with the individual power of each of them more deeply. These exercises will show you where you may have blocks or obstacles you need to work on.
You will have an opportunity for more advanced work in Expanding and Going Beyond and many different ways to run the energy of the Beauty Pentacle through your body and work with the energy of the pentacle points. These sections can help you to clear blocks or obstacles that may be keeping you from living a fully-engaged and beautiful life.
There is also a chapter full of prompts for Guerrilla Acts of Beauty. These are challenges and opportunities for you to take the Beauty Pentacle out into the world. These challenges are best done in stealth mode so that no one knows who did the beautiful act. Most of the time you won’t get to see the experience you’ve created for another person to receive. The point is not to take credit for it, but to pass it on. The best guerrilla acts of beauty are the ones that you create, mold, paint, scheme, write, and conspire to create yourself. The guerrilla acts offered in this book are just a jumping-off point. Let your imagination go with this concept. Pass on the beauty as much and as often as you can.
The most important part of this book is to remember beauty.
Fear
It is impossible to focus on all of the beauty in the world without having fears creep in. Being able to love means being willing to lose the thing we love. Feeling pain or fear helps us to remember beauty. It is a precarious, and precious, balance. We can’t feel the highs without also feeling the lows. In fact, it is the lows that help us to really taste the sweetness of the highs.
With all of the despair that is so prevalent in the world, it can feel disrespectful to celebrate the beauty. For many of us there may also be an underlying worry that connecting to beauty is frivolous or trivial. Celebrating beauty through our fears is a revolutionary act.
Fear should not be avoided but embraced. Fear can work as a bridge that reconnects us to beauty. Remember, we are only guaranteed this one life. We can’t truly know what happens after death. It is important that we live for today and not for some uncertain afterlife that may never materialize. We know for certain that the cycle of life on this planet is real. Plants grow, fed by the nutrients in the earth. Animals eat those plants, and then we eat the plants and animals. One day we will die, and our bodies will return to the ground to create nutrients for the plants. This cycle is all we truly know for sure.
This moment—this moment right now—is all that we are guaranteed. This moment is the only truth there is. It is our only guarantee. It is a disservice to ourselves and this life to not soak up every beautiful moment of it.
Walking in Beauty asks us to remember that the world isn’t just something we take from. The planet is not an unending resource that humans can just deplete. The earth is us. Every beautiful piece of it is us. This isn’t just New Age woo, it is science. The universe was created from star dust and explosion. Every piece of the planet is made up of those same origins. We are of that stuff too.
discovering beauty
Beauty Journal 
Your first official home adventure for this working is to get yourself a journal to use just for exploring the Beauty Pentacle. The best journal is one that can handle different forms of media. You may want to draw, write, paint, glue in images, press flowers, or a myriad of other expressions. Pick a journal that can handle all of these art mediums. You should also find this journal beautiful. You should want to hold it in your hands, add to it, be with it, and create.
check-in
What comes up for you when you hear the word beauty? How do you feel about this word from an internal perspective? How do you feel about this word from an external perspective? How do you feel that beauty impacts your life? Give yourself some time to write your answers to these questions.