‘I feel like I’ve come home.’
We’re all on a journey, pilgrims seeking our power, our purpose and our higher selves. We’re looking for inner peace and outer prosperity, the courage to face our fears and fulfill our destiny, to leave loneliness behind and find love, to change the way we think and the way we live. We’re looking for Spirit and for guidance in our quest for wholeness. We’re looking to awaken the magic within.
Life is complicated, but your spirituality shouldn’t be. Life is also magical, and your spirituality should be.
When I discovered Wicca almost 40 years ago, there were just a few hundred people in the back of a dusty old broom closet, reviving an ancestral wisdom tradition hidden from the world after hundreds of years of persecution and negative stereotypes. Today, there are more than one million public Wiccans in the USA, and Wicca has become the fastest-growing spirituality in the British Isles, Europe and Australia and is expanding throughout the world.
The birth of a new religion is rare and the rebirth of one of the most ancient is remarkable. It’s an awakening from dreams of divinity that no longer fit the world we live in or the spiritual longings we have. Many are drawn to Wicca because it offers spiritual wisdom and wholeness that have been missing for millennia, welcoming the return of the Goddess, the rising Feminine, and honoring women as spiritual leaders.
At a critical time of mounting environmental devastation, Wicca reveres Mother Earth as an embodiment of divinity. And in a sophisticated, educated, global culture marked by a decline in traditional religious adherence, Wicca is non-dogmatic and non-hierarchical. It’s a deeply personal spiritual practice that anyone can master to experience divinity. And you don’t have to be Wiccan to benefit from its wisdom or its practices, just as you don’t have to be Hindu to benefit from yoga or Buddhist to practice meditation.
Practicing Wicca helped me to take off a blindfold, tied on by history and habit, that I hadn’t realized I’d been wearing. I saw realms of Spirit I’d never known existed. I saw the world I lived in every day as it really is – sacred. And I began to see that I too was sacred. Wicca awakened the divine magic within me and opened me to the divine magic in the world all around me.
I discovered Wicca when I couldn’t have been less interested in anything spiritual. And I certainly didn’t believe in magic! I’d gotten my BA in philosophy from an Ivy League school in the USA, my Juris Doctor from a top law school, and had just begun practicing law, fighting organized crime in trade unions. I didn’t expect the world to be paradise, let alone magical, but I did expect to do my part to make it a better place.
That’s how I’d been raised: in an intellectual, humanist family with parents whose lives had been devoted to social justice. Rather than a particular religion, they taught me to believe in the goodness of the human heart and to live by the Golden Rule: treat others the way I wanted to be treated. That was enough for me. Until my second year in law school…
I began having premonitions that manifested and intuitions that proved true. I knew the phone would ring before it did and who was calling. I knew answers in class without having read the cases. My senses were heightened and, for a while, I had a photographic memory, which, you can imagine, was very helpful for passing the Bar Exam. Most tantalizing of all was a sense of… presence, as if the world was actually alive and aware. There was also a recurring dream of a woman, seated, a crown on her head, a book in her lap and a soft light glowing above her heart.
I had no framework to understand what was going on. I’d practiced yoga since high school, but I’d been too young for the psychedelic 60s and I lived in New York, not California. Ever the rationalist, I started reading books on quantum physics, then books on the extraordinary connections between quantum physics and consciousness. I learned that there was more to reality than I’d been taught in school. But nothing I read explained why it was happening.
Still, I trusted what I was experiencing. I allowed the possibility that there was reality beyond the limits of what I was supposed to believe and achieve. And so I was led, by dreams and events, signs and synchronicities, and a friend who called herself a White Witch, to the least likely, most unimaginable encounter in the world: behind a hidden door in the back of a dusty old bookstore called The Magickal Childe, with a group of women practicing Wicca.
A group of Witches, practicing Witchcraft.
I was invited to join them. It was the last thing in the world I was interested in. After all, they were Witches. In other words, weird. Very weird. I politely declined. Life went on as before but the dreams and intuitions and alive-ness evaporated. I was going numb; I was returning to ‘normal.’ And then the woman in my dream reappeared.
I was wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, trying to figure out my next career move, when she appeared exactly as she had in my dream: seated as still as the stone she was carved from. The world filled with light and a guard had to help me sit down. When I recovered I read the shining brass plaque beside her: The Libyan Sibyl. Back home, I looked up the word sibyl: ‘An ancient prophetess or Witch.’ I accepted the invitation.
It was weird. A room full of women stood in a circle gesticulating at the four directions, saying things I didn’t understand, passing round a silver goblet filled with… grape juice, and talking about the Goddess. But they were smart and interesting, and diverse in age, race and background; some were gay, others were straight. Each week I was invited to return, and I did. Gradually, what they were doing and why they were doing it became clear.
I read about the European Witchcraze, the Burning Times – a persecution of almost 500 years during which more than 100,000 women, some men and even children, were accused, tortured and hideously murdered for practicing the ‘Old Religion.’ I began to realize that my ideas about Witchcraft were negative stereotypes from fairy tales, movies and Halloween decorations – all influenced by the Witchcraze – that had nothing to do with what these women actually believed or practiced. I learned that Wicca is a very old English word that’s the root of the word Witch, and that both words meant a wise one, someone who sees the Sacred.
I started seeing. I saw the beautiful face of the Goddess behind the mask of the hideous hag, and discovered the Witch was the figure onto whom patriarchy projected its fears of women, their power and sexuality. The modern Witch is, just like the Goddess she reveres, the ultimate feminist icon. As a young lawyer dealing every day with sexual harassment and discrimination, that worked for me.
The revelations were liberating and empowering. And then, magical. I finally saw the Goddess. She appeared as we cast our circles, shining within each of the women. I saw Artemis’s strength and courage, Lakshmi’s sensuality, Brigid’s healing poetry, Athena’s wisdom, Ceres’s maternal love and generosity, Morrigan’s warrior power, Pele’s fire and Hecate’s dark mysteries.
In the mirror of the Goddess, I began to see a spark of that Divine Feminine energy within myself. I understood that our bodies are sacred, our intuition a gift and our wisdom invaluable. Deity was no longer an old, white, unavailable male on the other side of the clouds, passing judgment on us. The Goddess was alive, present and restoring wholeness to divinity. And at each Sabbat – the eight seasonal holy days honoring Nature’s divine wisdom – when men came to celebrate with us, I discovered a different kind of God present in the world, dancing, loving and in partnership with the Goddess.
It was radical. It was revolutionary. Most of all, it was real. I didn’t believe in the Goddess or the God. I experienced them. Wicca wasn’t a belief system about divinity. It was a spiritual practice providing experiences of divinity. The ground I was standing on shifted once again. It became sacred.
And it wasn’t complicated. Wicca didn’t require me to suspend my rational disbelief, or to master long, strange magical incantations, or lists of odd ingredients. It was simple, it was joyful and it was natural. It felt like remembering something that I already knew. And best of all, it worked. The magic within me was awakening, and as it did I began to experience the divine magic in the world around me.
The presence I’d sensed when my adventure began reappeared right before my very eyes. Even though I lived in the midst of one of the world’s greatest cities, I saw that the natural world embodied divinity. The Air was breath, Fire spirit, Water blood, and Earth body. Wiccan practices helped me attune myself – mind, body and spirit – and come into harmony with Nature, with the elements, the seasonal cycles and with the Moon, whose rhythm and spiritual wisdom belonged to women. I saw that love is a force of Nature and that we are all children of Mother Earth, regardless of our religion.
My intuition blossomed and developed into a higher awareness. I began to discern a greater purpose for my life and achieving all that I wanted from it became easier. Divine magic happened as the Sacred manifested in my life. I learned to ‘make magic,’ to alter my consciousness, set intentions, invoke Goddess and God, raise and receive energy, cast spells and offer thanks and rejoice in the blessings bestowed and the magic that manifested. It was like the Law of Attraction on steroids.
At the same time, I began practicing core shamanism with the now famous Brooklyn Group. Developed by Dr. Michael Harner, the work focused on the essential practices of the world’s oldest spiritual tradition shared by most Indigenous cultures throughout history and across the globe. The world expanded further into realms of Spirit and I was accompanied and guided by spirit allies and power animals. What I learned ‘there’ had profound value for me ‘here,’ and I recognized the shamanic roots of modern Wicca, transforming how and why I practice it.
I was initiated – the story I tell in my first memoir, Book of Shadows – and became a Wiccan High Priestess. I was the first Priestess to weave Wicca and core shamanism together as an integral sacred technology and, after 20 years, my teaching was formalized as the Tradition of Ara, the Latin word for altar, the point at the center of Creation where Spirit and Earth are One.
I refused to be limited by negative stereotypes – as a Wiccan, a Witch or a woman – and was one of the first American Wiccan Priestesses to ‘come out of the broom closet.’ I handled or consulted on groundbreaking cases establishing the legal rights of Wiccans and was an advocate in global media campaigns challenging the negative stereotypes.
I won’t say it was easy. I lost some clients and friends, faced betrayals and sorrows, and grieved when I couldn’t have children. I faced my self-doubt and lack of confidence and struggled with depression and despair as I felt the suffering of others and Mother Earth as my own. I came to understand that we’re shaped by blessings and by challenges. Real magic happens when we transform our wounds into wellbeing, losses into new life, darkness into illumination. What I gained far surpassed anything I’d lost or sacrificed.
I created a successful law practice, wrote internationally bestselling books that made Wicca accessible to the world and helped thousands discover the divine magic of the world they live in and that lives within them. In the USA, Jane Magazine honored me as ‘One of the Ten Gutsiest Women of the Year.’ I was twice elected the first Wiccan Vice Chair of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and created its historic 2015 Inaugural Women’s Assembly. I received other acknowledgements of spiritual and cultural ground breaking, but the greatest honor was my induction into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Clergy and Scholars.
And then, at the height of this rebellious, impossible success, I released it all. I went into the wilderness, leaving behind all that I’d accomplished and everything I thought I knew. I went in search of the Mystery. It found me, appearing as the Green Man in the center of a labyrinth in Italy and leading me on a quest across the globe and home again. There, in my backyard, I was shown that Nature’s laws are spiritual laws, that each individual life works by making all Life better and that love really is the source of Creation. I reawakened to the divine magic of the natural world, and within myself.
My journey has been unique and deeply magical, but it’s always struck me that if I, a skeptical New York lawyer, could have such extraordinary experiences and awaken to the magic within myself, anyone could. This book distills the spiritual principles and practices of Wicca – as I have practiced and taught it for almost 40 years – that I hope will open your awareness, connect you to the divinity of the world you’re living in and awaken the magic of you.
Everyone gets tapped on the shoulder, gets a call from the Sacred to awaken. If reading this sounds like what you’ve always known, if it feels like this might be that call, or an affirmation of the call you’ve already received, let me be the first to say: Welcome to the divine magic within. Welcome home!