The Faery 1 tradition is a rich and sensual path of sorcerous soul development. A mystery tradition of Witchcraft originating with the teachings of the blind shaman and poet Victor Anderson, its core is passed mainly orally from a priesthood of initiates who operate in covens and lineages that are wildly diverse in practice. Drawing from many different cultural and literary exemplars, our path weaves together a praxis containing elements of psychicism, ceremonial and folk magic, sexual mysticism, and spirit contact.
While the core of the oral tradition is secret, there has been a wealth of material that has grown up around this core, material that has inspired individuals, covens, and even other traditions of the Craft to deepen their practices and relationships with a universe populated with a myriad of magical energies, currents, and intelligences.
While its roots are ancient, its branches and fruit offer the modern practitioner a means to cultivate awareness and power, key elements necessary to the refining and strengthening of the magical will. As a practice, Faery is less concerned with complex rituals or outer forms than it is with the results provided by a genuine inner experience. It is a bardic path of poetry, of art, of song, and of ecstasy. It embraces both the light and dark aspects of nature and of the human mind. It draws from many different cultural examples in providing a magical worldview and demands a high degree of creativity and personal responsibility.
I have been a formal practitioner of the Faery Tradition since 1992. After several years of intensive study, I was initiated into the inner priesthood with a secret rite that passes the unique current of energy that defines our Craft—the Faery Power—and poetically marks the new initiate as a racial descendant of “the little people.” In 2007, I was passed the Black Wand of a Faery Master by Cora Anderson, one of the founders of our tradition, and Anaar, the current Grandmaster. This honorific ritually enabled me to found my own lineage of the tradition, which I call BlueRose, through which I offer training in Faery Tradition to my local community in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also internationally through travel and the internet.
The spiritual work that I do is twofold: to empower and inspire people to find their own power and develop it, and to then encourage those people to use their power to work toward the betterment of the world. We find ourselves in a precarious place in terms of politics as well as environmental sustainability. While the governments of the world continue to exploit the land, treating the earth and Her inhabitants as resources to be bought and sold, the spirits of the land have been consistently calling out to us to pay attention—to remember our sacred covenant as caretakers of the land, a tremendous spiritual responsibility of which the human species has been woefully negligent. We must combat this by first restructuring our relationship to the land and realizing that it is alive and that it is also conscious. As a species, we used to be able to listen to the voice of the land, of the wind, and of the stars, but as we moved into a technological age, we began to lose the ability as our attentions turned elsewhere. Little by little the magic of the world was seemingly lost. Though we have forgotten much, by contemplating the tales of our ancestors we can use their mysterious wisdom to speak to us now as we relearn these skills anew.
Even in the ancient tales it is said that the fae are receding from the world. Never quite gone, always in our periphery, perhaps offended or even injured by human presence, they are said to have retreated into the wildest of places—in caves, beneath the earth, and under mounds—to gather away from humankind, preserving the ancient life force that is the divine consciousness of the planet. As Witches, we seek to tap into that consciousness, but in order to do so we must first be able to perceive it. Enter here, the tools of magic.
Witchcraft is a dark mirror into which we scry, delving into the unfathomable waters of dream and vision, to peer beyond the veil and the world of things known and into the secret inner workings of nature herself. This is the spiritual nature of reality that we call the Hidden Kingdom, a magical realm in which we see that everything is alive and everything is connected in deep and mysterious ways. We seek to unlock the secrets of the land and those intricate connections that compose and sustain the worlds. We seek to learn the art of manipulating those connections, to perform magic, and our study draws us deeper and deeper into a world more largely populated than the conscious mind is usually prepared to accept, let alone effectively explain. We must abandon the restraints of rational thought that tell us that the only things that are “real” are those that we can directly see or experience with our own senses, for that mode of operation can only take us so far. Like the Witches, shamans, and spirit-workers before us, we know that in order to touch the hidden powers of the world we must leave behind the restrictions of logic and have the courage to delve into the wild and irrational abyss, to face our deepest fears and claim whatever power they hold over us. Only then can we truly begin our magical journey.
But we need not make this journey blind. The sorcerers of old left us clues that we can follow. In the form of poetry and folklore, of art and myth, we find fragments of old lore that we can piece together and use as maps to guide the way. Stories of encounters with the Fae, myths of old gods, folk tales that pass down symbolic keys that we use to unlock the secret doors into the otherworld, and to navigate the terrains once we get there. Through meditation, trance, ritual, storytelling, and art we make our way into the deep ancestral memories of the human race, and through those memories we touch the Other.
The Faery Tradition preserves this knowledge, called “forbidden” by a church that sought to suppress and demonize avenues to power outside of their control. Possession by spirits, summoning demons, casting curses, oracular divination, necromancy … the Witch seeks out these forbidden fruits and adds them to her diet, rich with spells and lore, myth and secrets, each imparting an understanding of how to approach the world with a different set of eyes, enchanted to see that of which otherwise we would be blissfully unaware. The blinders now removed, we see clearly, a daunting experience for most, as now we find ourselves in another world—alien and unsure—and one in which we are not alone. A myriad of spirits and beings populate the many dimensions through which a sorcerer will travel, and through their engagement our work is deepened, empowered by currents of power and influence that have been in existence for as long as there has been a world to observe.
Deepened, yes, but no power comes without price. Some of the spirits we may encounter will not have our best interests at heart. Some will work to deceive or even harm us. Stories of every culture speak of demons or “evil spirits” that infect the lives of those who are unfortunate enough to come across them. Modern psychology speaks of them in terms of complexes, deep-rooted fears that gnaw at us from somewhere deep behind our own conscious minds. But even these twists of the mind can give birth to something more sinister, drawing life force away from its host until it becomes autonomous, a spiritual parasite that can weaken and manipulate its host behind the spotlight of conscious awareness.
Whether these demons be ancient spirits or ones of our own making, we must confront them in order to reclaim the power they have stolen. Toward this end we employ several measures to summon and transform them where possible, and where it is not, we work to repurpose them toward our own goals. Whether human, angel, demon, or god, a Witch bows to no one.
Even those spirits that are genuinely helpful may ask for certain things in return for their knowledge or assistance, and so it becomes especially important to learn how to navigate these relationships before we unknowingly fall victim to our own ignorant exuberance. This is where both tradition and personal experience bear their mark, enabling the veteran practitioner a means to skillfully traverse the other worlds, and to make allies along the way; allies that not only offer us the potential to quicken our journeys, but also to journey to places we could never go, thus expanding the sphere of our magical reach.
A common theme in both shamanism and Witchcraft is the relationship between the spiritual practitioner and the spirit world—in particular, the relationship that the practitioner has with a specific spirit, often referred to in Witchcraft as the familiar. While popular Neopagan culture most often uses this term to refer to our physical pets (and I can attest that many a cat with whom I have cohabited has exhibited an uncanny sense of magical awareness), traditionally this term refers to a spirit-helper that may appear in many forms that assists the magical practitioner in several ways, such as providing direct knowledge of the spirit world, offering inspiration and power, and even taking flight to other worlds to communicate with other spirits, at times employing them on behalf of the practitioner’s magical will.
We find inspiration and magic where it presents itself, whether that is in ancient myths, historic recreations, or completely new innovations based on popular culture. The magic is in the relationship one has to it. In Witchcraft if it speaks, we listen.
This book contains information and magic both old and new, regarding the shadow nature of Faery Tradition. It expands upon that found in my book Betwixt and Between: Exploring the Faery Tradition of Witchcraft, but for those unfamiliar with this text I have provided some basic information and exercises in Appendix I so that you will be better able to work with the material here. Additionally, I have included a glossary of terms specific to our tradition in the back of this book.
As much of our tradition is passed in trance, so too with this book. A majority of the exercises and rituals presented here are meant to be experienced in the trance state, using specific visual and poetic keys in order to grant a deeper access to the powers and spirits involved. As you read them over, allow yourself to feel the sensations described, as if you were going through the trance. Take your time. Reread the trances as you might read a poem. How do the words make you feel? The imagery? In this way, you will prepare yourself to more deeply engage the symbolic material when you later set a formal space and perform the trance in actual. Remember also to record your experiences with the material in your journal, which should contain a record of all of your magical work, providing you not only with much needed documentation of your insights and challenges, but the very act also provides us a means to better develop our own intuitive and psychic skills over time.
This book is intended for the intermediate to advanced Craft practitioner. If you are a practitioner of the Faery Witchcraft tradition then this means you have practiced with material similar to that in Betwixt and Between and/or in the appendices of this book for at least two full years. If you are an intermediate to advanced practitioner of a non-Faery form of the Craft (perhaps a third- or even an experienced second-degree initiate in those systems that follow a standardized British Traditional Wicca three-degree format) then, like your Faery-trained counterpart, you may treat this book as a fairly straightforward course of study. After gaining a familiarity with the Faery-specific terms and practices in the appendices, then you may move through this book in the order given, adopting the exercises given here into your own spiritual/magical practice. This practice, in my opinion, should be a fairly consistent minimum of four formal sessions per week, with additional “informal” versions of some of the foundational practices being performed multiple times daily. In doing so you will create a practice that creates the necessary momentum by which we may more fully engage the spirits and powers with which we shall be working. As with all endeavors of learning and discovery you should keep a detailed journal of your experiences as you go.
While on this voyage together, we commune with many traditional powers, symbols, spirits, deities, and intelligences along the way. We will summon forth the ancient Wells of Creation, primal undrworld goddesses of the elemental powers, and journey with them into the abyss to face our fears and conquer our demons. We will walk the bone road, opening the Western Gate to commune with the gods of death, and help trapped spirits cross over. We will prepare ourselves as worthy vessels for divine possession, the ecstatic state of being ridden by a god, spirit, or power, and perform as oracles, speaking the wisdom of the gods on earth. And we will consider both the casting and breaking of curses, the dark art of offensive magic.
As with any voyage it all begins with a single step. Come with me as we journey now to Faeryland to visit the shadow of our Craft and make allies of what lives in the darkness there.
1. While there are many different legitimate spellings for our particular tradition currently in use (most notably Feri, though Faery, F(a)eri(e), and even rarely Fairy sometimes appear), I tend to use the archaic Faery as it was the spelling used at the time of my introduction to the tradition, and I also feel it better poetically evokes the relationship between the practitioner and the fae—a detail of mytho-poetic practice that some lines of our tradition do not follow but is central to my own practice and my lineage of BlueRose.