WBM-10

Chapter Nine

She oft and much rode on a pitchfork by night with her paramour, but not far, on account of her duties. At such devilish trysts she met a big man with a grey beard, who sat in a chair like a great prince and was a richly attired.

From the “Judgement of the Witch Walpurga Hausmännin,” E. Wm. Monter, European Witchcraft

Somewhere in time, lost in the fog of memory and myth, lies a realm where witches dance with ghosts and spirits of all kinds. In this place we let go of ourselves and of reality, surrendering to ecstatic oneness and nothingness, daring to look into the darkness of the most hidden places, meanwhile being prepared to make a bargain with the shadowy figures who lurk within them. Here our most sacred rites—rites that bind us as witch kin across tradition and lineage—are performed. Here we surrender to quintessence as ink surrenders to water, merging life force and essence, losing separateness and dissolving into oneness with the witch power and those who serve as its agents.

In this place, this egregore of preternatural power, we meet with faeries and gods, demons and Nephilim, angels and the spirits of witches who have lived before us and who have never lived at all. Here we slip away from our identities and willfully join the court of the Witch King and Queen. Here, in sabbat, where the holy and the profane become one and the moon eclipses the sun, we witches set our souls free as we dance in bittersweet rapture.

Sabbat is more than a state of mind reached through soul flight or a plane of being tucked away in the witch’s tree. Sabbat is the realm of the master spirits of witchcraft, a place that is as much a temple as it is an experience.

Some of you may be reading this and feeling a bit confused, and for a good reason. The term sabbat is often used in popular witchcraft or Wicca to describe one of the eight festival days that mark the “pagan calendar.” This is something that we know was adopted in the 1950s, and, after a little marketing, became the norm for many pagan traditions. Indeed, the celebration of these eight feast days is one of the few things that can be found as a uniting force throughout most of paganism, just not all.

During the trials of the Inquisition, one of the more viral stories running around was that witches would transform themselves into a beast, or ride on the back of a beast, and fly to the top of a mountain somewhere. There they would meet with witches from all over the region and make deals with the chief of all demons, the Devil himself. In exchange for a few newborn babies, an interdimensional orgy, their souls, and a kiss on the ass, witches were said to receive all sorts of infernal powers to help them do their bidding while on earth. Attendance or even the suspicion of attendance to this soirée was enough to get you killed.

And why wouldn’t it? At a place like that, anyone could gain access to powers that not only would put those who didn’t have it at a disadvantage, but it would also anchor these forces among the community. This would have been an obvious threat to those with reason to fear such things. It only makes sense to do everything you can to protect what you have, and beyond the motives of the accusers, or what these people often stood to gain if someone were convicted of witchcraft, there was a real fear that the things that go bump in the night were out to get them. We can look back on these times as those of ignorance, but we can’t neglect the actual fear those people felt, and I would be remiss if I didn’t draw a comparison to our modern war on terrorism.

To the people around during the times of witchcraft persecution in the Western world, witches were the terrorists. They were the ones poisoning lands and killing crops, spoiling fresh milk and bringing illness. They genuinely believed that witches were agents of the devil and that they were out to destroy civilization. No one was safe from suspicion, and while women were the focus of persecution in the Americas and Spain, men were the primary target in Scotland and parts of Germany. Today the evangelical persecution of witches in east Africa is predominantly focused on women and children as young as infants.7 The response to a belief in such evil and the extents to which people ignored reason (and what science they did or do have) is a direct result of this fear and the political motives of those who know how to use fear. We witches, no matter how far removed time has taken us from this place in history, are still dealing with this sort of fear and fear-mongering in a very real way. It was a tool used to oppress women and keep them subservient, to attack the poor and the undesirable, and to use against your neighbor if they had something you wanted. Most people who died for crimes of witchcraft were not witches, but we carry the weight of their deaths still to this day. Some of us embrace it, some of us ignore it, and some of us tiptoe lightly around the truth that we live in a world that was built on a belief that witchcraft is some sort of spiritual terrorism and that witches are hiding everywhere waiting to attack.

The vast majority of witches out there believe the rites of the witch’s sabbat are somehow connected to specific days in a fixed calendar and that they derive from ancient pagan practices that have existed for centuries. The truth is, the modern sabbat—like almost all of contemporary witchcraft and paganism—is a patchwork quilt that has been pieced together by scholars and academics who were themselves removed from these practices. As we reclaimed the word sabbat, we divorced ourselves from that magically terrifying place and replaced it with a set of Celtic and Germanic feast days. Yes, words evolve, but that doesn’t mean that their origin should be shoved to the side because it makes us uncomfortable or we don’t quite understand it.

What does that mean for us? Are we just unwilling spiritual seekers who incidentally became spiritual terrorists? No, and witches as a whole never really were terrorists. Anarchists? Maybe a little bit. The witch power, once live, beckons us to sovereignty, so we don’t always like to work with the system that oppresses us. Our sabbat is also not a veritable black market of evil, at least not from our perspective. Like all things misunderstood and lacking the usual Christian tones, the witch’s sabbat was demonized and sensationalized to fit a particularly convenient and often patriarchal narrative.

The Witch’s Sabbat

While its outward persona may be built on the back of hysteria, the essence of sabbat is both a beautiful and frightening reflection of all the things we forget we were, are, and always will be. The witch’s sabbat is a scary place for those who do not know their own strength or beauty, and it is only reachable through the witch’s dream. It shows us as we really truly are: the good, the bad, and the ugly of what remains once we are stripped away of ego and the lies we tell ourselves. When we look in this mirror, we see the scars from our past, the augmentation from our spiritual efforts, and the not-altogether-human aspects of our essence. Pardon the phrasing, but here we assume our “ultimate form.” This is why it is so scary for most of us; we cannot hide from ourselves anymore or bury our skeletons deep down. Here we see our madness for what it is and wear our motivations like body paint.

Not only do we assume that ultimate form, but we surrender to our ultimate desires and our most basic motivations. Here we are free from the burdens of civility and restraint—here we are beastly demigods embracing everything that means. Here we step into our full power and let it writhe through us in orgasmic bliss. Here is where we obtain the most valuable of all secrets.

To summarize and put it simply, the witch’s sabbat is not a day or a set of days, but a plane of being derived from the witch power’s connection with the Divine. There, hidden amongst the layers of the witch’s tree, we make contact with all those spirits who serve the Witch King and Queen. It is a plane limited only to those who serve as agents in their court and it functions as a sort of temple for many of us, regardless of our persuasion toward or propensity for good or evil, right or wrong.

Traveling to Sabbat

The witch’s sabbat can be difficult to comprehend without experiencing it for yourself, so try as I may to describe this wondrous place, words will always fail to do it justice. Traveling to sabbat is not an easy task. This work requires a lot of buildup and self-preparation before you go. To be honest, you will almost never be so vulnerable elsewhere as you are in the witch’s sabbat. This usually works out in our favor but can leave the door open for experiences we may not always be ready for. There we are embodiments of our inner selves, and there is nothing to hide behind or protect you other than the good nature of those who rule it. Because of how vulnerable we tend to be during this sort of work, it absolutely requires the use of a protective magical circle.

Sabbatic work is at least 90 percent performed while sleeping or in a deep, deep trance. It requires us to leave our bodies and, like the stories, transform into a beast before flying off to a special destination. The work we have been doing up to this point with the witch’s dream has been entirely to prepare you for taking this next step into what we call dreamwork or lucid dreaming.

Dreamwork and the Witch’s Sabbat

Lucid dreaming is the mode of operation we use to travel into the witch’s sabbat, and while different from astral travel or soul flight, it shares similar fundamental principles with those techniques. The goal, however, isn’t necessarily to leave the body and travel to a different dimension, but rather to travel through the inner realms of the mind and the paths of the psyche to get to a different dimension. We are still going to the same places, but we will be getting there differently. Perhaps most importantly, once this skill is developed, it will also give you more power within the planes you visit, making you a formidable force.

You can get to the witch’s sabbat through other deep or ecstatic trance methods, but lucid dreaming seems to be the most efficient and pragmatic way of doing so. Is this historically the case? We don’t actually know for sure, but lucid dreaming provides the perfect platform for us to experience some of those fantastical elements that were reported during the witch trials, and we do know that witches have been doing magical workings in the dream world ever since witches have been witching. It also invites us, most importantly, to be creators and gods ourselves and to actively engage the subconscious and spiritual. To connect the dots in this way is no far stretch. The witch’s sabbat is a very intense place that requires you to be able to experience it in very intense ways. Lucid dreaming provides the necessary environment for this to happen.

Lucid dreaming has a long history of helping people solve some of the most important puzzles of our time, and when applied as an element in witchcraft, it has had a proud history of assisting witches to cultivate and receive some of the most valuable secrets in their trade.

Your witch power is uniquely tuned in to the frequency of the sabbat; you merely need to program the code to take you there. By working with the witch’s dream, you have been programming the code all along. The symbols, sigils, and energetic practices that I’ve shown you are all a part of the work that we do in lucid dreaming. By building your own code and forms of communication with quintessence, you have already opened pathways for this work to manifest.

Dreamworking

When I first tried lucid dreaming, I was wholly unimpressed. It took days for me to have even the slightest experience, and even then I wasn’t sure I had anything substantial to claim. After a few more attempts, I gave up and chalked it all up to being New Age nonsense. Eventually, however, I found myself reading the work of Andrew Chumbley and decided to try it again, this time with a more occult focus.

Andrew Chumbley wrote some pretty incredible grimoires, almost all of which have to do with the subject of oneiric praxis and the witch’s sabbat, but they are mostly indigestible. I was able to pick up hints from his writings but had to start from scratch when it came to finding a practical approach that yielded results. Occultists can write all of the poetry they want, but none of that is helpful if you can’t piece together the operations that one should undergo.

After many failed attempts and lots of trial and error, I stumbled into a successful lucid dream. After experiencing it for myself, I quickly realized that I had been making it way more difficult than it actually was, and it was likely that all the added stress to “make it happen” actually kept it from happening! According to researchers at the University of Northampton, after reviewing the metadata from thirty-four lucid dream studies they performed between 1966 and 2016, roughly 55 percent of the population can lucid dream, and half of those people were frequent lucid dreamers.8 The same researchers found that it was up to 70 percent more common for lucid dreamers to come from cultures with pastimes related to meditation and video games, which would predispose them to virtual or holographic immersive open worlds. These are two things I am no stranger to, so I figured the odds had to be in my favor.

Once I knew what to look for, I realized I had been lucid dreaming my entire life; I just usually do it at the end of my sleep cycles. It was actually quite a normal phenomenon for me, but my lucid dreaming experiences were different from what I was told they should be. They were different because I am psychic and am plugged continuously into one signal or the other, and some of my most vivid experiences happen in dreams. A constant complaint from my partners has always been that I talk in my sleep—not just a few words here and there but full-on conversations. Sometimes I will remember what was discussed, sometimes I won’t, but on more than one occasion I have either come to learn some exceedingly important lesson or I have been helping the spirits of the dead cross over.

Lucid dreams happen when we gain consciousness in our dreams. Once we are conscious, we are capable of taking control of the dream to some extent. Like the witch’s dream, the lucid dream is a stage and a laboratory for your magical work, just a much bigger and more powerful one. Spirits can move more freely, as they have fewer barriers to contend with, and you have fewer obstacles to get in the way of your will and its manifestation.

There isn’t much difference between a dream and a lucid dream on the outside, the most significant being that in a lucid dream you know you are conscious of the act of dreaming and have some degree of control of the dream.

The Witch’s Dream and Preparing for the Lucid Dream

As I mentioned previously, all of the work you have been doing in the witch’s dream has given you a major head start. The witch’s dream is a term I invented to describe the mental and psychic place we, as psychic agents of the craft, can go to and work with so we experience and explore our talents. It is a technique that developed out of a need to control and make sense of my gifts, and it just so happened to be the key to getting the whole lucid dream thing going for me.

For lucid dreaming to work, it requires us to build a set of mental triggers and to prepare the mind by creating an environment where conscious thought is capable of directing the events of the mind once the body has fallen asleep. The work of cultivating the witch’s dream provides fertile ground for us to plant the seeds of the lucid dream. In many ways, I have actually grown to view the witch’s dream as the waking equivalent of the lucid dream, a lite version of what is possible in the more advanced stages of lucid dreaming. As you develop one, it becomes easier to work with the other, and as you become more influential in the dream world, you also become more influential in the waking world.

Lucid dreams help us to develop gnosis in ways that other techniques can’t. So much of our lives are processed during our dreams, and having the ability to be an active participant in them can give you access to parts of your mind that would otherwise be left unexplored. Upon waking, we can then integrate the wisdom obtained by exploring the inner mysteries in this way.

For us to lucid dream, we have to enhance aspects of our practice related to the witch’s dream. In addition to the sigils that you have been using to sync yourself into certain aspects of the witch’s dream, you will need to install a very important trigger: one that represents the waking world, or real world. It may sound a little odd, but once you start lucid dreaming, it can be easy to get mixed up and end up getting lost, forgetting that you have the power to get back, or worse, the ability to control what it is that you see. Time moves differently in these instances; five minutes when you’re awake could feel like months or years in a lucid dream. Having a trigger to check in with to see if you are awake or in a dream can be a significant help in avoiding unnecessary confusion and panic.

In the case of building triggers for dreamwork, we are generally talking about selecting an object we see in everyday life that should be inanimate in nature. I have used many triggers with success; the key is to select a trigger that is ordinary but not likely to pop up in a dream or to involve your other physical senses besides sight. To take it a step further, I also have had much luck working with tools I use in my craft that require me to be mentally and spiritually aligned “in the moment.”

For instance, as a card reader, I often have tarot and oracle decks all over the house. What I don’t usually have handy is a deck of playing cards. I keep a deck of playing cards next to my bed and in my office. Once or twice a day, I pick up those decks and say “I am awake” while I study and take in all of the unique characteristics of the deck. It is now habitual for me to align myself the minute I pick up a deck of cards—any deck of cards, because I have been reading them for over twenty years. While I might expect tarot cards to pop up in my dreams, I don’t expect playing cards to appear, and since I have that automatic response to touching any deck of cards, using the trigger of playing cards has extra mental reinforcement to remind me of being awake and present.

Taste is one of those senses that we often do not experience while dreaming, so I use the taste (and sensation) of cold water as a trigger. I may see a glass of water in my dream, but do I taste it? Do I feel it moving down my throat? Again, each time I wake up and drink a glass of water, especially during the night, I say to myself, “I am awake.” Performing the purifying ritual known as Kala9 is part of my daily practice and requires me to drink fresh water. As a result of the ritual, I am brought into a relaxed, focused state.

After selecting a trigger or set of triggers for yourself, you should spend the next week programming them into your psyche. Each time you see or feel your trigger, reinforce the connection by saying “I am awake” and continuously looking at the details and features of your trigger. Once you have begun to program the trigger, it is unwise to alter it later on or halfway through the process. Finish programming one trigger, and once you can see it and your automatic response is to think “I am awake” rather than having to remind yourself to do so, then you can move on to adding other triggers. We want to get to the point with our triggers that they prompt our awareness of the waking state whether we see them while dreaming or not. Take your time, build your trigger with precision and focus, and then continue to reinforce it throughout your practice.

You will need to keep a dream journal or use your book of shadows or magical journal; it doesn’t matter as long as you keep it next to where you sleep and it is easy to get to first thing when you wake up.

You should take your work regarding momentary personal awareness to the next level. Spend extra time paying attention to the details of your surroundings, how things like texture differ from one surface to another, and when you listen to music, try to pick out the different instruments and their parts. Your brain needs to be able to spot multiple details at once when you are lucid dreaming, so start that habit while you are awake.

Lucid Dreaming in Five Easy Steps

It may sound a bit gimmicky, but lucid dreaming really can be done in five easy steps, especially if you have been working with the witch’s dream and already have triggers set. Once you get this down, going to the witch’s sabbat is just around the corner. If at first you don’t succeed, continue to try; even with this being a more relaxed approach, it still may take multiple attempts.

Step One: Spend lots of time in the witch’s dream and being aware of the energy that surrounds you. Play music, preferably without words, that makes you feel magical and connected. Cast your spells, tune in to the spirits, and spend time being aligned. The more time you spend in this sort of headspace while you are awake, the easier it will be to slip into it once you are asleep.

Step Two: Two hours before bed, turn off all screens and avoid any unnatural light. If you need light, try to keep it dim or use candles. Turn off the volume on your phone, but keep the alarm functional and give yourself time to relax and sink a little further into your witch’s dream. Check in with your spirits, anoint yourself with a psychic type of ritual oil, and meditate or journal while you spend time simply suspended in the witch’s dream.

Step Three: Set two alarms, one for four hours before you normally wake up and one for one hour before you normally wake up. Align your souls, and then go to bed.

Step Four: When the first alarm goes off, it will initiate the lucid dreaming process. Allow yourself to wake up for only a few moments and then go right back to sleep and try to keep your eyes closed as much as possible. This time when you go back to bed allow your body to fall back to sleep but keep your mind active. You do this by either focusing on a symbol or sigil, the lines and shapes on the inside of your eyelids, or by remembering the dream you had just woken up from. This will all feel a bit choppy at first but will eventually smooth into either a continuation of the previous dream you were having or into a new dream. You will repeat this process when the second alarm goes off, each time waking up for only a few moments and then going back to sleep while holding onto consciousness.
Your goal is to remain conscious when the body falls asleep and then enter a dream-state. Once in a dream, look around; if you have control over the way you are viewing your surroundings, you are probably in a lucid dream state. Do a reality check; do you see your trigger? If not, then you are definitely in a lucid dream! Have fun, see what comes up to you, and stay calm. If you get too excited, you will likely wake yourself up. One thing to mention here is that while doing your reality check, you want to make sure you are able to see those specific details that you observed while setting your trigger in the first place. I used the example of a deck of playing cards as a trigger. Your mind could easily just show you a deck of playing cards, even one similar to the one you use as a trigger. As you do your reality check with your triggers, look for details that are missing. For instance, in the dream the suits might be different or perhaps the colors are changed. Regardless of how vivid our lucid dream may be, there will always be something different in the details that will let you know whether you are dreaming or not.

Step Five: Wake up and immediately write down what you experienced in your journal. Because this can be difficult and remembering details gets harder the longer you are awake, I do this in three steps. During the first step, I write down bullet points that describe the big things about the dream. The second and third steps are just me going through those bullet points and adding more details with each pass. By the end of the third pass, I try to have all of the details I can remember on the page.

Keep doing this, and each time it will get easier and easier. Use your lucid dream experiences as an advanced platform for the work you do in the witch’s dream, to solve your long-term problems, and to practice your skills traversing the worlds of the witch’s tree. Once you get the hang of it, lucid dreaming is an incredible tool to connect spirit, mind, and the other side.

Flying to the Witch’s Sabbat

For this, you will need:

A healthy pinch each of the following: mugwort, chamomile, wormwood, rue, and lavender
A small black sachet pouch
A white pillowcase
A pillow
Black thread
A needle
The witch’s sabbat sigil
A ritual drum (you can use your hand and your chest if you don’t have a drum)
A stang
A broom
The simulacrum of the Witch King
The simulacrum of the Witch Queen

Being able to successfully lucid dream and perform dreamwork allows you to travel to the witch’s sabbat with ease. It is definitely advanced work and isn’t for everyone. For some, the images seen within the witch’s sabbat are vulgar and intense, while to others they are inviting and subtle. The sabbat contains the memories of many things, many people, and many places, and it is constantly shifting between those memories. As a witch, the map to get there is already inside of you; you just need to find it there inside of your witch power.

You can visit the witch’s sabbat at any time or on any day. Because this work is draining and requires both preparation and dedication, we generally reserve it for feast days and full moons. Each visit is special and unique, and it is unlikely that you will always find the same beings when you go each time, save for the sabbat king and queen, so we also tend to cherish the experiences we have there.

witch’s sabbat
sigil

Preparation

You will go about every single process you would if you were going to lucid dream, but we are going to direct the flow of the dream to this special place we call sabbat. To do this, we will need to set some additional triggers. Take a white pillowcase and stitch upon it with black thread the sigil for the witch’s sabbat (above). Make a small sachet of mugwort, chamomile, wormwood, rue, and lavender, and place it into the pillowcase along with your regular pillow. Bless and consecrate the pillow with white fire by channeling the flame into the sigil and chanting:

By the Queen of the Red Flame,

By the Queen of the Black Flame,

And by the Queen of the White Flame!

By the King of the Red Flame,

By the King of the Black Flame,

And by the King of the White Flame!

By the Numinous One!

By their power, this be done!

Check and empower all ritual wards and make offerings to any spirits that you work with who have not had an offering recently. It is also customary to make offerings to any dead who have recently passed or who have had recent deathdays (the anniversary of their physical death).

For your trip to sabbat, you will need to lie with your head in the west and your feet in the east, so you will need to orient your bed or create a makeshift bed. At the bottom of your bed place the simulacrum for the Witch Queen and at the top of your bed place the simulacrum for the Witch King. She will guard your body and keep it safe while this working proceeds, and he will lead you to the eternal sabbat. In the north place your stang or staff with the top pointing in the direction of the east. In the south place your broom with the brush pointing toward the west.

Ingress

Ingress must begin several hours before bed and should involve the following steps.

The day of the trip, if not several days before and leading up to it, spend lots of time in the witch’s dream and stay aware of the energy that surrounds you. Specifically, reach out to your familiar(s) and spirit allies and engage them frequently throughout the day. Spend time in front of your altar making offerings of drink and incense, lighting the three candles of red, white, and black, and reciting your secret prayers and invocations that you have collected over your tenure as a witch. Play music that draws you in and makes you feel magical and connected to the powers that be, and do your best to avoid being taken out of your atmospheric mindset.

Two hours before the working, turn off all screens and avoid any unnatural light but the ritual fire or candle flame. Turn off your phone and give yourself time to relax and sink a little further into your witch’s dream. Check in with your spirits, anoint yourself with sabbat oil, and meditate or journal while you spend time suspended in the witch’s dream. Within the witch’s dream draw the sigil for the witch’s sabbat with white fire, and over the course of your meditation repeatedly come back to this symbol no matter where your mind may take you.

Cleanse and purify your bed and the sabbat pillow as well as the room or area where this will be taking place. Visualize the space flooding with white fire and consecrate the bed with a holy water solution made from blessed spring water and sea salt. Cross the hedge by aligning yourself and visualizing that same white flame emanating from you and casting a circle. Gaze upon the sigil on the sabbat pillow and use it to anchor the energy of the witch’s tree. As you summon the witch’s tree, allow it to manifest from within the pillow so that when you lay your head upon it, your head will be suspended inside of the base of the witch’s tree.

Congress

Invoke the Witch Queen and the Witch King and then take your place upon the bed. From within the pillowcase, remove the herbal sachet. Take a few sniffs and allow the aroma to enter into your nose and awaken your internal senses. Remember the sabbat symbol from earlier in the day and see it come alive in your mind’s eye with brilliant white fire. Place the sachet in your lap.

Take up your ritual drum or gently tap your chest, and begin to play a steady, repetitive, and somewhat fast beat (I usually make 1/8 notes at 120 bpm). Continuing to focus on the symbol of the witch’s sabbat, allow your mind to sync with the beat, and focus on your breaths. Open the Gates of Heka10 by concentrating on the points of stillness and silence at the beginnings and ends of each breath. Drum and build up energy, allowing the energy to flow into those moments of stillness and silence. Do this for some time until the energy between those two moments becomes so large that they merge together, and you experience them as one long, pregnant pause that is about to burst with potential. While still visualizing the symbol of the witch’s sabbat in your mind’s eye, allow this shift to overtake you completely. Stop drumming, take the sachet one last time and take a good sniff, further drawing your senses into the working, and then place it back into the sabbat pillow. Blow out the candles and allow yourself to slip into darkness.

Lie down, placing your head on the sabbat pillow, and allow the energy to settle into your body. Within a few moments you should feel a stillness take over the space; it is hard to explain, but it’s almost as if everything becomes timeless and fixed, and usually my ears will ring. Close your eyes and focus on the darkness, then summon the Witch King by whispering three times:

I summon the man in black, Janicot,

The black goat from the western hill.

Be with me now and take me to sabbat.

I go of free will.

It may take a few moments for him to respond. As a medium, this experience is quite intense and clear. He arrives as a presence within the darkness. It can be startling at first; in the beginning I wanted to snap myself out of it and end the session, but I persisted and faced this presence and was rewarded. Sometimes it is merely a sense in the darkness, but usually, once we perceive him and don’t run away, he begins to coalesce from within the darkness as a goat with shaggy fur made of smokeless black fire. As he draws near, you will notice his effect immediately.

This is perhaps the most challenging part of this whole practice. After you sense him, you will need to allow yourself to drift to sleep. If you are creeped out, which happens the first time or two, know that it is perfectly normal and that you are safe. Remember, you summoned your other allies to be with you, and they won’t let anything bad happen to you. Way back in the first book of the series we discussed the technique of Darkness Meditation,11 the practice of submerging yourself in total darkness and then allowing your senses to expand and fill in the details of what your eyes cannot see. As a spiritual practice, its most beneficial qualities are in its ability to train us to be comfortable in the darkness and when we sense another presence in the darkness. I recommend revisiting this practice if you have a difficult time with this part of the trip to sabbat.

As you drift off to sleep, think of yourself as surrendering to this presence in an act of perfect love and perfect trust.

Through the lens of the witch eye, your body will change from a human to that of some beast. For me, this is almost always in the shape of an owl, but each witch that I know has their own personal transformative experience. As your new form takes shape, give yourself entirely to the change and then follow the black goat as he takes you deep into the darkness. Do not hesitate. Do not ask questions. Follow and observe. He will take you to the witch’s sabbat in any number of ways. Some report the sensation of flying, some of floating on water, others as a flash of fever visions.

Within time you will find yourself at the witch’s sabbat. This special place appears as a candle flame in the darkness at first, but as you draw closer to it, you recognize it as a bonfire sitting atop a tall mountain. When you arrive, you undergo yet another transformation, this time into your true form. Here you can hide from nothing, you have no secrets, and you are seen as you truly are. All of your flaws and shortcomings are displayed alongside all of your perfection and beauty. As you come to the bonfire, you notice that it is the only light source within the darkness and that you are joining an already active event taking place.

All around you spirits from every plane of being stand side by side conversing and eating, but you take no food or drink; instead, you continue to follow the black goat as he makes his way beyond the fire. With a mere shake of his black fire coat, he transforms into the Magister, the man in black, and takes his throne next to the Sabbat Queen.

What you do after this is your business. You can meet with other spirits, speak to the Witch Queen and Witch King directly, or explore the darkness surrounding the fire. Whatever you do, don’t stray too far from the light of the fire, as you will find yourself stumbling into an awakened state. I recommend taking a seat next to the fire and seeing who comes to say hello. This has led me to great partnerships in the past. The sabbat dream will end on its own when you wake up.

Egress

Wake up naturally on your own, whenever that happens, be it later that night or in the morning, and savor every moment while your eyes are closed. Immediately write down what you experienced in your journal, turning on a light or lighting a candle to see if needed. Do not speak until you have had a chance to write down everything you witnessed. Align your souls. Release the circle and witch’s tree by absorbing their energy as previously instructed. The rite is done. I recommend that afterward, once you have had a chance to wake up, you perform a simple cleansing of yourself and spend time cleaning up your ritual space and contemplating what you experienced in greater depth. What signs or symbols were shown to you? Were there any messages you received that you need to remember now that you are awake?

Not everyone can lucid dream, no, but for those of us who can, it is an incredibly valuable tool in the advanced realms of magic and the occult. What I presented to you here is just the tip of the proverbial sabbat iceberg. The more you perform this technique and are able to develop your own, the more incredible your experiences will become and the more inspiring your witchcraft will be. It is there at sabbat that you will receive deeply important secrets about your work as a witch, and you owe it to yourself to go as deep as you possibly can.

Journal Topic

Perform the entry prompts associated with each individual lucid dreaming and sabbat experience. Sketch your experiences and explain what you see.

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7. “Witch Hunt: Africa’s Hidden War on Women,” The Independent UK, accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/witch-hunt-africas-hidden-war-on-women-1642907.html. “Children Are Targets of Nigerian Witch Hunt,” The Guardian UK, accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/09/tracymcveigh.theobserver.

8. US National Library of Medicine, accessed July 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27337287.

9. Hunter, The Witch’s Book of Power, 43.

10. Hunter, The Witch’s Book of Spirits, 47.

11. Hunter, The Witch’s Book of Power, 248.