Chapter Four
It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.
Aleister Crowley
I listened to every word that came out of her mouth as if it were the only thing that could give me life. There were five of us huddled around her feet, ears perked and poised like schoolchildren at story time. She had a strange demeanor—as if she was half in our world and half in another; present in body but not entirely in mind. I felt as though she were speaking only to me—we all did—but she had this way of connecting us to something that was just beyond our usual grasp. It was a wisdom, a power, an influence that took us over and filled us with awe.
Behind her I could sense spirits moving in the incense smoke, indicating conversations she was having that we would not be privy to. The room was full of altars and candles, every wall a mural of photos and paintings, each corner the home of statues and offerings. Fetishes and talismans hung from the ceiling. She sat on an antique wooden chair that was carved with ornate detail and resembled a throne. She was the queen of this place, and all who entered knew it.
As we stepped out of the Voodoo Queen’s temple, we all felt a cold snap of reality like a crashing tsunami. The sun hit our faces and we each looked at one another with confusion, as if waking up from some shared psychedelic trip.
“How long were we in there?” my friend asked.
“About forty minutes or so. It feels like we were there for hours, though,” I responded as I glanced at my watch.
“We were only in there for forty minutes?” another friend asked. “That must have been some spell we were under!”
“Yeah, we were definitely taken away by the spirits, and so was she! She was a fascinating person to be around,” my partner said.
That was an understatement; the Voodoo Queen was intense and majestic, exuding spiritual power from every pore. “It was like she was in her own dream and we stepped into it for a minute,” I replied, nodding in agreement. “She is one powerful witch!”
As we discuss taking our witchcraft more in-depth, we should also consider the importance of creating a practice that allows us to do so. My experience with the Voodoo Queen left me with the realization that I wasn’t doing all I could be to take my work further. My psychic abilities and my spiritual practices were not as integrated as I had seen hers be, and I quickly realized that I was functioning at half capacity. She had created a way of life that made it easy for her to live her truth as a mediator for the spirit world, and I needed to find a way to do the same. In the last chapter we discussed practical steps and ways of doing this. In this chapter we are going to discuss the practices that will help us do this in our world as well as within others.
My search for better witchcraft led me to two unique practices that totally changed my spirituality forever. They are called the witch’s eye and the witch’s dream, and both of them lay the foundation for the development of a transcendental practice deeply rooted in your personal gnosis. A transcendental practice is one that places your connection to the spiritual or nonphysical realm at the forefront of your understanding of life. For me, this was groundbreaking; it shattered my notions of what being spiritually connected meant. What we discuss here will open the door not just for our work with the witch’s sabbat that will come later, but also for our work exploring the soul and its connection to God Herself in part 2.
As separate studies, these three parts can monumentally reshape your practice, but combined they set the stage for the most profound mysteries I believe we can explore in the craft.
The Witch’s Eye
The witch’s eye (or witch eye) is a term used to define the psychic abilities that come with witch power. Your extrasensory perceptions, regardless of what they might be, give you the ability to perceive or “see” into the hidden world. The witch eye comes with our witch power, and as I discussed in The Witch’s Book of Power, each of us is likely to possess multiple psychic skill sets as a result.3 Generally, we use these skills as an extension of our power, but rarely do we get the chance to integrate them into our personal spiritual development beyond learning to control them to some degree. In my experience, however, learning to control them had not resulted in those psychic abilities serving a higher purpose early on in my work. Sure, I could use them to help and serve others, and that was nice enough, but they weren’t really taking my witchcraft anywhere. Working with the model of the witch eye, however, changed all that.
To possess the witch eye means that your psychic abilities are in alignment with your work as a witch. It comes from having those psychic abilities rooted in your personal gnosis and using them to construct its paradigm. It may seem simple, but when our psychic abilities aren’t allowed to serve us, they often take on a life of their own. I believe that many witches who struggle with their psychic abilities usually do so because they are not giving purpose to them and have adopted untrained psychism into their gnosis. Not all of us come equipped to be expert-level psychics, and some of us have gifts that would be difficult to use with other people, but by giving our psychic abilities a purpose and a direction, no matter what they are or what combination of them you might possess, we are ensuring that they will always be working for us, whether or not they are working for others. This keeps them as supportive aspects of our gnosis rather than destructive ones.
The other benefit from this is that by integrating our psychic abilities into our spiritual practices, we are given the ability to continually develop them with the aid of spiritual forces like those I discussed in The Witch’s Book of Spirits and even the Creator Spirit itself.
The witch eye must be opened for this to happen. By this, I mean that we must actually awaken and align our psychic abilities to our cause. The following ritual to open the witch’s eye is both an activation and a baptism of sorts that rededicates your psychic abilities to your path.
Opening the Witch’s Eye
You will need:
- White or black candles—one or three is appropriate; you need an odd number of candles. We also want to be able to see but at the same time have no backlighting.
- A compact mirror—the kind with two mirrors on the inside. Make sure that no one has recently looked into it, including you. If they have, you will need to perform a cleansing on the mirror.
Find yourself seated in the darkness, the candle(s) lit before you and the compact at your side. Activate your witch power by aligning your souls and reaching out with your senses as a white fire blazes around you. Call upon your own guides and allies, as well as Aradia, the tutelary spirit of the witch power, and ask her to be here as you cross the threshold and open your witch eye. Know that thousands of witches before you have done something similar and that you are not alone. Take a moment to feel your spirit allies and draw your entire focus to this moment.
Open the compact, pass the mirrored surface over the candle flame, and say the following incantation:
By this fire a sacred blessing, a gift from witches long ago.
To see the eye and have the sight, power to feed and grow.
Open my mind, open my eye, let me see the one.
This is my right, this is my power, it cannot be undone.
Bend the mirror so that it is at about a 160- to 170-degree angle and place it directly in front of your eyes. Allow your eyes to focus and then slowly move the compact away from your face about three to four inches. If done right, what you should see is that a third eye will be brought into focus. Stare directly into that eye, so much so that you find yourself looking through that eye and into your very soul.
Chant:
Between two worlds the eye of I, transfixed within my gaze.
Between two worlds the eye of I, free from fog and haze.
Stare into the compact mirror and chant in this way until you feel a shift in the air around you. When you feel the energy settle, conclude by saying:
Blessed be this opened eye, holy in her name.
Blessed be this opened eye, my path, and sight the same!
Keep the compact wrapped in black fabric, and store it somewhere where it will be undisturbed by anyone other than yourself.
The Witch’s Dream
The witch’s dream is not unlike shamanic reality, but it does differ in some ways. The idea is that when we are in the right state of being, we enter a type of consciousness (trance) where symbolism and spiritual experience come together as one. We see and communicate with spirits, receive visions of the future, even explore some of our deepest internal recesses while in this state of mind. The only problem is that it is not always accessible, and this is where the witch’s dream diverges from shamanic reality. The witch’s dream is something that we create and can learn to access at any time. As a construct, it is not unlike a “mind palace,” a place that you visit in your mind to store and house information or to have a particular experience. Our goal within the witch’s dream isn’t to construct something that we just go and visit from time to time, but a place that we are always connected to and are at least partially aware of at all times.
It isn’t exactly as simple as that, but it also doesn’t need to be more complicated. Think of it as a place you can visit that is solely dedicated to your witch power and sculpted by your gnosis. You can build this place and tune into it like any other energy, and its uses are endless. It will look different for each of us, and it will ultimately be one of the most unique things about your craft because of its connection to gnosis. For me, it looks like an ordinary living room in a regular one-story house in suburbia. For others, it looks like a castle in the sky or a fortress in the ground. What matters is that this place becomes the staging ground for your shamanic and psychic interactions—a place that represents the part of you that is forever connected to life on the astral plane.
Through the witch’s eye, we construct and engage the witch’s dream. What we see as a result of our psychic and spiritual interactions is reflected in the witch’s dream. Like all good mysteries, the dream will continue to reveal more and more, leading us to pockets of truth that rest within quintessence. It isn’t enough to visit the dream from time to time or just once a month when the moon is full; we must find a way to anchor ourselves in the dream full time so that we can better engage quintessence. Every day we have to be tuned in to the spirits we work with, the gods we have aligned ourselves with, and the subtle energies of the witch’s tree.
Personal gnosis and the witch’s dream are essentially the same things. As is the case with the witch eye, the witch’s dream is a dedicated, aligned, and intentional variation of personal gnosis. We all have personal gnosis, but the witch’s dream is personal gnosis with witch power. This means that our gnosis is capable of not only constructing our reality, but constructing a reality on other planes as well as within someone else’s gnosis. This is the part of the witch power that plugs into the universe and allows us access to not only see the unseen, but to touch it as well.
In my previous work, I have mentioned the concept of setting presets along the psychic radio dial. These presets can help us jump to a frequency with ease, escaping the need to scan for the right station and minimizing the potential of accidentally tuning in to the wrong one. To effectively anchor the dream, we have to discover the presets that automatically come with our witch power; our psychic abilities, quintessential heritage,4 and other forces that are uniquely influential as to how our power manifests (like personal astrology). The witch’s dream is the nexus where all of these presets join together to produce beautiful music.
To understand the nuts and bolts of the dream, you have to think of it as a symphony. Each preset is an instrument, and you are the conductor. Each instrument is capable of evoking a unique response from its listener. A trumpet can signal the entrance of a regal grand waltz or the somber memento mori of “Taps”; a violin can be the soft pad that lightens the mood or a melodic driving vehicle; the timpani can build suspense or carry a beat. When these instruments are brought together and given an arrangement of music, then something that is greater than the sum of its parts is created. In this way, we as witches bring the components of our craft together and create the dream.
For me, it is essential to understand that even though these instruments are vastly different in comparison, from design to sound, somehow when they are given the proper instruction they can come together to do incredible things. That being said, any band geek can tell you that when a bunch of musicians gets together and warms up, it isn’t exactly a pleasant sound. Each instrument playing its own thing and there’s no synchronicity in the whole room; the sound can be quite overwhelming and unpleasant. To get that special magic, we have to give members of the orchestra a piece of music and instruct them on how to play together. In this way, we as conductors must take up the baton and guide the pieces of our dream to work in tandem in order to produce the sort of environment where the quiescent can be influenced. This can only happen through discipline. Without it, our witch’s dream will be more like a seventh-grade band room at the start of practice and less like that symphonic orchestra. For those of us who take magic seriously and want to see what we are capable of as witches, we have to take the role of conductor seriously.
To do this, we have to make sure we are doing the prep work necessary; we have to remove the residue of past experience and what we have taken for granted so that we can see clearly through the witch’s eye. Luckily, in the last two chapters we have already been working on the prep work, so if you have been applying the methods so far, this next exercise should be a breeze.
The first step in navigating the dream is to figure out what your presets are and then, if needed, install some more! You should have a thorough understanding of your strengths and weaknesses as a person, including those parts of you that are spiritual and psychological. Let’s take a quick look at a few advantages and weaknesses we should be aware of before we start to map out the dreamscape.
Your Mental State
It is critical to be of sound mind and to have the ability to critically think within the dream. Any aspect of your life, be it stress, anxiety, or mental illness, can skew the way you perceive the dream. I know a lot of authors won’t touch this, but I think it is an important thing to discuss because aspects of the dream will be entirely fantastical, mental creations meant to drive you deeper into the spirit world. It is barely safe for someone who suffers from depression to perform this magic, let alone someone with schizophrenia or paranoid delusions.
Being in a sound state of mind will keep you in the driver’s seat and give you the single most important strength of all: the ability to create a dream, not a nightmare. If you are one of the millions of people who have been diagnosed with any type of mental disorder, there is no shame in that, nor does it have to be a handicap when practicing the craft. Stay medicated, stay in touch with your doctors and support team, and continue to thrive. You can be a witch who explores this more in-depth work and still be on medication, but it’s likely this work will eat you alive if you aren’t on your medication. I have been witness to more than one case of individuals who chose to be off their medications who enter the dream and never come back. It is a terrifying thing to watch. We want to be the conductors of the symphony, not the audience.
How strong do you feel mentally? Do you have stress or anxiety? If so, how does that affect your ability to do magic? Do you suffer from other instabilities that might interfere with your ability to practice magic effectively? If so, how do you plan to practice the aspects of the craft that go deeper and bring into question the very nature of reality? Is that a safe thing for you to experience?
Who Your Allies Really Are
The other must-know strength is who has your back in the spirit world and who will be informing you while you are there. The dream will no doubt be connected to the spirit world; it is essentially the platform where your world and theirs collide. It is important to know who your spirit guides and/or familiar spirits are and have a well-developed relationship with them, as well as the gods you serve. In my tradition we serve the Star Goddess, whom we see as the creator spirit; the Queen of Witches, whom we refer to as Diana; and her concomitant Dianus, the King of Witches. We also work with several of the great witch chieftains and permutations of the witch power, such as Aradia, Hecate, Macha, Janus, and Lucifer, to name a few. Our relationship to them informs the unfolding of the dream and beckons us to explore different parts of the map, inspiring us to devote entire decades of our lives in dedication to harmonizing with their unique frequencies.
We recognize that our spirit allies are more than presets, but when we are talking about anchors within the dream, they possess their own strain of gravity, prompting us to see the dream through a particular lens. Our allies are like a source of news, and each news outlet has its own way of spinning a story. Ultimately, it will be the spirits that shape our experience within the dream, so knowing and having an intimate relationship with a few friends and contacts will only benefit you in the long run.
Consider these three points:
1. Up to this point, what allies have presented themselves to you as reliable and trustworthy?
2. Do you feel confident in your ability to work with spirits in general? If not, what steps will you take to better acquaint yourself with the practices and methods related to them?
3. Do you feel you have room to actively pursue a relationship with a spirit at this time in your life?
Let’s say you have a hard time staying grounded or you have difficulty making out what a spirit is trying to express to you. This is where adding a few instruments comes in handy. Any deficit that you feel you have energetically can be adjusted through some sort of energy work or energetic interference. Working with crystals, herbal allies, and different meditation techniques are all excellent tools to have in your arsenal, but for them to actually be a tool you can use, you have to be acquainted with how they work. Take a look at those three points I made; if any of them made you perceive an aspect of personal weakness, then work with these tools to alter the way those things manifest in your life. If you find that one of those areas needs some love, then give it some love!
The Mundane Trappings of Living the Dream
In addition to a few key aspects of yourself that must be understood to have a healthy and fruitful relationship to the witch’s dream, we also must take steps in the day-to-day to ensure that we are setting ourselves and our dream up for success. Living the dream can be difficult, but if you follow these pointers, it should be a little easier to merge the worlds and watch the dream unfold before your eyes. These mundane and straightforward things might seem like trappings, but they are vital to how you live in the dream.
Believe in yourself unconditionally. This is essential to life within the witch’s dream. To believe in yourself is to put fuel in the tank, so to speak. It may be a weird reference, but in Peter Pan, the children must recite “I do, I do, I do believe in fairies!” over and over to give life to the fallen Tink. In this way, we too must believe in fairies and spirits and ancient beings just as much as we believe in ourselves. Without belief in your ability to perceive the other worlds and the inhabitants that reside in them, you cannot tune in to them, just like without confidence in your godhood, you cannot be a god.
You must take “perfect love and perfect trust” to the next level. To live within the dream and take from the wells of creation, we must surrender to the fluid nature of quintessence. We have to be like the root that grows around the stone, the light that bends in the prism, the water that follows the path of least resistance, and the winds that diverge in the meadow. To be this malleable, we must be many things at once, and we must be open to many experiences at once. We must be both in love with quintessence while simultaneously trusting enough in ourselves (and it) to keep the relationship beneficial and the dream active.
To make the dream real, you must allow it to be real. Stay out of your own way and keep yourself from being bogged down with self-sabotaging resistance by regularly performing acts of magic, ritual, and cleansing. This will be echoed in the next chapter, but I urge you to not wait for the “right moment”—when in the dream, all moments are the right moment. Engage your problems with magic and find ways to keep magic as an essential aspect of your day.
The witch’s dream must be seen as a state of mind as well as a plane of being. It is essentially a pocket plane—one suspended in the etheric, right within the realms of preternatural perception but outside those of normal if we were to get technical. If we remain anchored in the dream, then a piece of us will always stay suspended within another world, and we can access it like any other preset.
Establish your code. Create methods of discernment for navigating the hedge and the dream. Have a personal set of omens or signs that when seen in the wild (whether in the dream or outside of it) inform your experience and let you know when it is time to pay attention to the dream and tune in. For me, this is seeing a hummingbird, a symbol from the hallowed plane, or seeing a floating cottonwood seed, which signals a message from the angelic realms. These are kind of like personal superstitions that keep you queued into what is happening in dream and are going to be totally unique between you and the spirit world. Each of us has a unique code, some more extensive than others, but regardless of how well established, the code is a token of your relationship to the spirit world and should be cherished. Throughout this section we will address ways of spotting this connection and how to plug into the coding, but for now think of ways you already do this instinctively.
The witch’s dream is a sacred space. Not unlike the enchanted Isle of Avalon that the sorceress Morgan Le Fey found herself visiting for the first time, the dream is full of amazing secrets that are both relics of a time past as well as those that are of newer discovery. We must remember that this place is a secret all unto itself, one that must be treated as sacred and worthy of our time and energy. It is so sacred, in fact, that it can only ever be known by you.
Don’t overcomplicate the witch’s dream. As complicated as it all can look on paper, don’t get spooked and overcomplicate the transcendental nature of the dream. Just tune in to the dream, live within the dream, and continue to expand its borders as you flush out your personal gnosis surrounding quintessence. The spirits and planes you interact with there are extensions of your own witch power and manifestations from the quintessential; they are pieces of the dream but not the dream themselves.
Waypoints and Relics
The witch’s dream is made up of several interchangeable parts, and like our thumbprint, no two dreams are alike. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot of overlap in our dreams as a collective; however, our dreams rub off on one another like cooties. The minute we start to share our thoughts about the craft with another, the second we begin to digest a book or step in a circle at a public ritual, our dream becomes tainted by someone else’s. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it does mean that we have the added burden of making sure that we only share the dream with those whom we feel are a good influence upon it. The dream is the birthplace of our secrets and should be protected at all cost. Even without the pieces that become personal, there are lots of pieces that simply become part of the dream because they are part of our culture.
The witches who have walked before us, those who forged a way through the oppressive overgrowth of spiritual oppression and survived to tell the tale, such as Doreen Valiente, Gerald Gardner, Victor Anderson, etc., are all excellent guides within the dream. Our contemporary craft is loaded with their influences. Their work is almost inescapable, and their discoveries along these frontiers helped to shape a commonly accepted map of witchcraft for the twenty-first century.
Relics are the stepping stones we first must follow to cross the stream and become excellent waypoints along our route. Waypoints within the witch’s dream give us access to territories that have already been discovered. By traveling to these waypoints, we can access otherwise untouchable regions of the dream and we would be void of the basic tools required to engage quintessence.
These teachings come with spirit names, sacred rituals, special prayers, and much secrecy. Each tradition serves a different set of spirits, keeping the mysteries related to them close and preserving that spirit for all of time. For me, these secrets revealed a pathway toward many essential experiences in my life that allowed me to put pieces together I never thought were connected. I have found that those who have been fortunate enough to join a tradition and have a positive experience can attest to a similar phenomenon. While this isn’t an option for everyone, those interested in the secrets of the witch’s dream need not look too far, as the clues are spelled out plainly in any number of volumes on the craft.
Symbols and Power
When your spirituality or religious practice is steeped in symbolism, you must wonder what all the fuss is about. In the same way that waypoints and relics help us hone in on the witch’s dream, symbols and sigils help us to navigate specific aspects of the dream and anchor them into our waking reality. The idea is that if we can see a symbol in the witch’s dream and then see it in our waking life, thanks to some special dynamics (which we will discuss in the following chapter), any energy directed toward the symbol within the witch’s dream will then be present in the same symbol on the physical plane.
As above, so below; what we do on the other planes shall be done on our own.
The agents within the witch’s dream, those spirits and energies that reach out and communicate to us through its field of perception, will do so most commonly through symbolism. Instead of telling you to stop, they might show you a big red truck. Instead of telling you to start a family, they may just show you a house. And sometimes it gets way more complicated. Instead of telling you what type of spell would be best to resolve an issue, they may just show you a sigil from some book you read once or they may leave a tool for you in the dreamscape, and you don’t know if it’s something of more profound symbolism or precisely what it looks like. Sometimes it’s hard to know when a hammer is just a hammer and not a rocket launcher.
Part of working within the realm of the witch’s dream involves the creation of your own code so that you can avoid unneeded confusion. Indeed, this will be perhaps the most valuable of your secrets, as this code is the key that unlocks the hidden language between the dream and the physical plane. Later, this same symbolism will be used and expanded upon when we go deeper into the witch’s dream and do the dreamwork that is required to take us to the witch’s sabbat.
Some witches use an extensive code, others a simpler code, but you can’t go far in the craft without finding the potency of symbols and other languages of the dream. My teachers were adamant that I learned Theban fluently and was able to transcribe it into English at a glance. Many witches I know carry this tradition and only write in Theban script when writing in their Book of Shadows or on spell paper. Nowadays, I mostly use Theban to write messages to spirits or for the occasionally written spell that I really want to be anchored. Theban is known the world over as the witch’s script and has been used by our kind for quite some time. It is highly popular among witches, and as you could imagine it is a very charged script and thus is quite useful.
In the beginning it is necessary to start off simple and over time slowly allow yourself to develop your code. I recommend starting off using bits of code that already exist out in the wild and elaborating upon them and their use. For instance, magical alphabets like Elder Futhark and Theban (which I just mentioned) make an excellent starting point for the work of programming your code. They aren’t typically something that you see out in the world, so when you do see them, they will be recognized as a magical language and tune you in to the witch’s dream.
I found working with the Elder Futhark system to be particularly compelling because there was a vocal component to it. It is both a language and a divination system that is believed to have been gifted to us by the god Odin himself. In addition to the subtle and divinatory meaning of each glyph, each is its own sort of spell, and you can invoke the presence of that energy by toning or singing its name; this process is known as galdring. I have found myself haunted by their power for days after an intense galdring session, which gives them a little something extra when connecting the worlds.
To this end, I have also had much luck in working with the Greek alphabet and its oracular component. What makes the Greek alphabet just as exciting is that it is perhaps the oldest living system of divination and has an extensive history of evidence to support its use. This means that tapping into the energy within each of the letters is actually quite easy. I invite you to search out these alphabets and include them in your witchcraft if you haven’t already.
Eventually, however, you might want to take it to the next step and create a script that is all your own. The easiest way to do this is to work with what we refer to as sigils, which are essentially compounded words or phrases that have been condensed into one symbol. That symbol can then be used in your code as a trigger or conduit for magic.
Creating Sigils
Like the magical alphabets, sigils can be used as a type of magical language within the witch’s dream. I personally find the application of sigils to be a bit easier than working with the alphabets alone, as sigils are symbols that we create and are loaded with the specific energy of whatever it is we might be working toward magically. Sometimes using a sigil like those in this book or creating your own to use in the witch’s dream can reduce a lot of the searching and waiting. Like the nine flames we discussed in the second chapter, sigils are capable of representing thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc., much more than a letter or number typically can on their own.
There are some sigils that will be shown to you by the spirit world. Some sigils, however, you must forge and empower all your own. This comes in handy when you know you will be working with an energy long-term or even if you want to add an extra degree of focus to your intention. Truth be told, there isn’t enough room in this book to give you a proper education on sigil magic, but you only need to know the basics and have a little creativity to do this successfully and apply it to your work in the witch’s dream.
The following process can be applied to any word or phrase in the same manner. Use it to access a plane of being you want to visit, further propel a spell, attract spirits and allies to you, or even to draw specific types of energy to you in the witch’s dream. For the sake of example, let’s say we want our witch’s dream to be connected to the witch’s sabbat.
Step One: Working with the term WITCH’S SABBATH, remove all vowels, punctuation, and duplicate letters from the term. What we have left is WTCHSB.
Step Two: From the remaining letters, assemble the sigil by stacking each letter on top of one another or within each other, by arranging the letters in whatever pattern or shape you find the most pleasing, or by condensing the letters further.
To continue condensing, look for letters that appear within other letters and omit those as well. For instance, T is a letter that is hidden in the bottom portion of the letter H, and the letter C is hidden backwards within the letter B. With a little creativity, if you bend the top and bottom of the letter H, it becomes a B. B also contains the letter S in its shape. If the letter B were tilted on its side, it would also include a W. So, in this case, all of the letters that are found within our original set can be found in the letter B.
Step Three: Fluff it up. B on its own is something that we will see out in the world and is completely unavoidable, so it can’t be a B. If we were to get a little creative, the letter B could easily take the shape of a lemniscus (∞). Therefore, we have condensed each of the original letters into one symbol that represents the witch’s sabbat.
You can tweak your sigils in any way you want, as long as they contain each of the original components and the sigil makes sense to you. Feel free to add lines or embellishments, just make sure it is something that you can immediately identify. For this reason, I think it is usually better to stand on the simpler side of the fence, but to each their own!
After you have created your sigil, use it often. Part of what makes it work is that it immediately registers in your brain and becomes part of your language system. This is only going to effectively happen if you are using it on a regular basis. Even if the sigil represents something that you rarely work with, you still need to visit that sigil and reinforce its connection. Eventually you won’t need to do this because the groundwork has already been laid, but in the beginning it is imperative that each sigil receive the appropriate amount of mental attention.
When I am installing a sigil or symbol of any kind for the purpose of becoming a part of my witch’s dream, I take five minutes twice a day to sit and focus on the sigil and its energy each day for a week. Sometimes I break that into two weeks with five-minute sessions each day if I am busy or having difficulty following through.
As part of the witch’s dream, symbolism is vital in understanding and commanding the energies we work with. Sometimes all we need to do in order to stand out in an interview is to weave a sigil for success into our aura, place a sigil for protection on the inside of the engine hood to avoid an unwanted accident, or draw a sigil for summoning your allies in the air when you feel spiritually vulnerable. As long as your sigils have power in your witch’s dream, their influence can extend over anything they are attached to, including the other reaches of your personal gnosis that don’t directly correspond to the witch power.
In the appendix you will find a collection of helpful sigils and symbols. Feel free to work with them and to add them to your practice.
Journal Topics
Meditating on the topics presented in this chapter, answer the following questions in your journal:
1. What was your experience like performing the witch’s eye working at the beginning of the chapter? Did you see anything immediately or soon after? If so, what?
2. How do you perceive the witch’s dream?
3. What are the blocks you perceive that exist between you and the witch’s dream? What can you do to remove these blocks?
4. Do you naturally encounter the witch’s dream? If so, what is it like to you?