When we do a ritual and work in our altered consciousness to make a change of some sort, we’re making magic.1
Let’s get clear about one point right away. Magic per se is not black or white. Magic is simply the manipulation of energy from an altered state of consciousness. The racist, sexist society we’ve been living in has determined that white = good and black = bad. Black magic is therefore bad and white magic is good. Gray magic is, presumably, a cop-out.
Actually, magic comes in all the colors of the rainbow and can perhaps best (but not always) be categorized by the colors associated with the chakras.2 If you work in your garden with devas and plant energies, you are perhaps a green witch and do green magic. If you do your best work in the bedroom and your focus is Tantric, you may be doing orange magic. A priestess I know who works with children and their mothers is doing pink (heart) magic. Money magic is of course green and gold, and people who seek success in their career can do high-energy red magic. Me, I live in my head most of the time, writing and talking to people, so I’m probably doing blue magic. Computer folks may also be doing blue magic. I suspect, however, that any magic has a bit of the rainbow about it. People who work to blend traditions and paths of faith to build a larger community are certainly doing rainbow magic.
As I see it, magic is education. It’s like going to school, where we drill in the multiplication tables, learn vocabulary and grammar, write theses and stories, train our muscles, learn teamwork, and perform scientific experiments. When we study magic and begin to do rituals, we have to drill in elemental correspondences and circle casting, learn the vocabulary and grammar of magic, learn or invent Goddess stories, exercise our intellectual and emotional muscles, work with other people and invisible powers, and perform scientific experiments (called “spells”). School is supposed to prepare us to live better in the everyday world; magic not only prepares us to live better in this world, but it also gives us access to the world where things happen before they manifest here. It’s art and science combined to strengthen our intellectual and emotional powers and our will for the performance of specific tasks. The work and its results sometimes appear to be supernatural.
But you won’t learn to do any knock-’em-dead tricks by reading this book, nor will you get a course of instruction in “miracles” or in developing your will so you can make people obey you. If you’re looking for ego magic or recipes for spells, look elsewhere. My primary goals are worship and celebration. The magic and the power grow with the changes in your consciousness, but people probably won’t even notice how powerful you’re becoming. And you won’t care because you’re doing this not to impress anyone, but to heal yourself and to help heal the consciousness of the planet.
It disturbs me to hear words like “power” and “will” used carelessly. They’re words that stand for major issues in our world, and people throw them around without definition. As I use “power,” it’s nearly synonymous with “energy.” “Power” is a more loaded word than “energy.” When I do magic, the energy I stir up is directed by my will, which is my goal or purpose, my magical intention. The energy then becomes power, or power-ful.
Power and will can be “positive” or “negative,” “helpful” or “unhelpful,” “good” or “bad,” “valid” or “invalid.” I enclose these eight words in quotation marks because they’re so slippery. They lie along a continuum and slide back and forth all over it, depending on who’s using them, and why. The underlying issues are “power over” other people or “power with” people, plus the question of whose will is intended. Many people say “God’s will” or “Her will” when they mean “my will,” and others try to overpower any group they work with.
To make it more slippery, we can put the two words together: “will power.” I once studied for a year or so with a “spiritual therapeutic” school (founded by a European psychiatrist) that teaches that only God above can have will and power, or will power. People shouldn’t even say “I want,” because everything on earth is illusory: the only reality is God’s will and power, so there’s nothing real here that we can want.
Huh?
I find this kind of teaching extremely pernicious, especially to women and people of color. Like the popular admonitions to hand our power over to a higher power (“let go and let God”) or to set our ego aside, this teaching assumes that the white male experience is the norm. Before they can properly engage in spiritual studies, most men do, in fact, need to set aside the power and ego in which they are wrapped as they walk about in the world. They need to stop talking and listen. But women and people of color are not part of that norm. For maybe five thousand years, we haven’t been allowed to have power or egos to set aside. Until recently, we haven’t had a voice to be heard. It’s always been thy will be done.3 You’ve heard it said many times: a willful girl is a naughty girl; she’ll never catch a husband. A willful (fill in our own ethnic epithet) is uppity and needs to be taught a lesson.
It’s time for us to find our voices and express our wills. It’s time for us to regain and express our feminine and cultural powers. It’s okay to say, “My will be done” and know that we mean it and that other people understand what we’re saying.
But there are limits. “My will be done” should never cross the line into control and power-over. When that happens, we assume the characteristics of the people who have been our abusers, and this kind of “my will be done” inevitably leads to arrogance. For example, a priestess I once met informed me that a little after 5 P. M. on October 17, 1989, she was doing magic with a diamond ring that had been in her Bay Area family for several generations. She’s bitter about how her family has treated her, diamonds are known to store and magnify great amounts of power, and — voila! She caused the San Francisco earthquake! I prefer to believe that she was merely trying to impress me and didn’t really take responsibility for a major earthquake just because she was mad at her parents and knew something about magic.
Power issues can also lead to what are called witch wars, in which my wand is bigger than your wand and I am the highest of all high priestesses. We need to get real and get over power trips, ego games, control issues, and witch wars. We need to stop calling each other names and not respecting other ways people do things. These activities have no place in our community. How can we heal the planet while we’re at war with each other? Instead of attacking each other, we should celebrate our diversity and gladly teach and gladly share our talents and all the colors of our magic. I used to tell my students to go to any open ritual they could find and then come back and tell us about it. We made friends and learned how to work with people who do things in ways we never thought of. Because the community is still in some ways fairly small and we love our email, gossip travels fast. But we need to cherish our community, not try to blow it apart. Acceptance of our differences will make us stronger and — who knows, stranger things have happened — we may become a positive example for the standard-brand religions to follow.
As I see it, then, developing our magical will and using magical power help us better understand ourselves and strengthen our connection with our community. Magical will and magical power also lead us back to worship of the Goddess in Her many layers and manifestations. If we lack will and power, we’ll never get anywhere because we lack purpose and energy. We don’t know where we’re going, and someone else is probably in charge of our lives, anyway. Whether we study multiplication or magic, therefore, we should learn to express and assert ourselves, but without running over other people.
And it’s not helpful to do a spell and then sit around waiting for the miracles to rain down upon us. As a friend once said while we were doing a ritual together, “Trust the Goddess and do your homework.” All the better ritual books say the same thing. If we want more money, for example, we should do money rituals and burn green candles to focus our will and stir up a little personal power (though perhaps it’s self-esteem we need). Then we need to get out and see what we can do to earn that money. The Goddess will meet us halfway: a job will “just happen” to be where we can find it. That’s the true magic.
A Ritual of Personal PowerThese words, which came to me at four o’clock one morning, reveal the context of our personal power. I hesitate, however, to use the words “personal power,” because what may look like “personal power” is in fact our continuing practice of Her presence. It’s not us. It is not ego power, it’s not controlling people, it’s not gamesmanship. Any power we may gain is in reality the power of the elements of the universe, the light and the dark, the Goddess herself. That is to say, the universe is a hologram and we’re part of it, and the power any of us has is simply part of that holographic power.
Use four candles in colors you feel to be meaningful and state your intention where indicated. This intention can be fairly specific (“Help me understand this situation”) or general (“I want to feel healthier today”).
By the powers of the cleansing fires,
By the powers of the springing tides,
By the powers of the soaring winds,
By the powers of the growing earth,
[State your intention or affirmation]
Let my will be done. [Light first candle]
By the powers of the rising sun,
By the powers of the changing moon,
By the powers of the dancing planets,
[Repeat your intention or affirmation]
Let my will be done. [Light second candle]
By the powers of the shining light,
By the powers of the sheltering dark,
[Repeat your intention or affirmation]
Let my will be done. [Light third candle]
By the powers of the living Goddess,
[Repeat your intention or affirmation]
Let Her will be done. [Light fourth candle]
It’s good to meditate or at least sit quietly in the glow of the candlelight. Where does our power lie? In what ways are we part of the holographic universe that the Goddess made for us?
When we first come to the Goddess and think what it’s all about is rituals and altars, we are driven to try out every possible correspondence on our altar, which thus becomes a surfeitous expression of creativity and belief. Like the planet itself, an altar is a setting upon which we can celebrate in visual, concrete form the superabundant diversity of the manifestation of the Goddess on earth. I’ve never seen two altars that look alike.4
Here’s a slightly abridged description of the altar I had in the early 1990s:
It’s my mother’s cedar chest, which I have covered with two altar cloths. Across the back of the altar, left to right: a ceramic incense holder I made myself, with a half-burned smudge stick resting in it; sacred salt I mixed myself inside a ceramic sugar bowl my brother made twenty-five years ago; my green glass, grocery store Santa Marta candle (she overcomes monsters); a 30-pound chunk of soapstone into which an owl is carved in bas relief (my major earth symbol), a chunk of wood from a friend’s yard, and a carved piece of redwood from the John Muir Woods; a green figure candle that I burn for an hour every Friday for personal healing; and my gold statue of Athena. Around Athena’s neck I’ve hung a piece of gem silica on red string and a crystal and lapis necklace (it looks kind of like a lei), and she is holding a silver pencil with a sparkly plastic star on the eraser (this is the intellectual warrior goddess’s spear). In the next row are my athame; a glow-in-the-dark goddess; my egg-shaped nest of wood spheres and a quartz-crystal egg; a $3 gold-tone snake bracelet with red glass eyes; a gold, iridescent glass chalice full of beglittered wishbones and other charms; and the Priestess of Swords card from the Motherpeace Tarot. In the next row are my major candle holders (one at each side of the altar): young women’s heads with faces pointing front and back, holding white “temple” beeswax candles; a glass bell with an elephant rampant (an air symbol); two Goddess feather wands (I make these); two Boji stones; a green cube candle with a gold sun face; my money jar; and a big red crayon a friend gave me, a chunk of carnelian, and a blue eversharp pencil (I use these to write rough drafts), all my fire symbols. Across the front of the altar are a small wooden salad bowl full of Angel™ Cards; a symbolic knife I made from a road-killed coyote femur, an obsidian arrowhead, and a crow feather; my water symbols: a Waterford chalice (Kildare pattern) with shells and crystals in it, a sand dollar another friend gave me, and two conch shells from other friends; my magic wand (a piece of driftwood I tipped with crystal and wrapped with yarn and other things); my incense holder (a pale pink soup bowl from Pic-N-Save) and incense spoon (a condiment spoon that looks like a scallop shell).
Whew! Sometimes it’s true: too much is never enough. Back in those days, I wanted to pack every possible correspondence and symbol into my consciousness via my altar. But we all start out that way. We all want the world and everything in it.
I don’t even know where most of that stuff is anymore. I suspect I’ve given most of it away. Today, my altars are simpler. On top of a bookcase in my bedroom, for example, is an altar to Green Tara, where She watches over photos of my family and friends. In my dining room, near the very center of my home and just around a corner from my fourteen drums, sits my home altar. At its center is a little wooden house with a figure of a woman holding a book just inside the front door. Hestia sits to one side of my little house, and on the other side, Bast watches over Her two children who live with me. A toy car is parked in front of the house, and nearby are a Blessed Bee and several rocks of which I’m quite fond.
My friend Badger Shu-Bad, a Dianic high priestess, uses the description of my old altar to give her students an example of overenthusiastic altar creation. She contrasts it to what she calls the Zen altar — rock, feather, candle, shell. She recently told me how one of her students brought to class what may be the world’s best minimalist altar: a leaf. Just a leaf. It was, she said, simultaneously the altar cloth and the altar itself. It grew on a tree, which is a thing of earth, but hung suspended in air. Water nourished it, sunlight (fire) made it grow, and of course, the Goddess infused its being. As Badger asked in her email to me, “How’s that for simplicity?”
All you need for your altar are simple symbols for the four elements and a candle or two and something to represent the Goddess.
All you really need is the Goddess.
Any altar we create echoes Her continuing act of creation. We can make our miniature earth — our altar — more concrete by placing symbolic objects on it. These symbols call forth the four elements and the four (or six) directions.
Fire, water, air, and earth are the four traditional elements, the building blocks out of which all things, organic and inorganic, are composed. The idea of four elements, which have appeared in nearly all ancient and modern cultures around the world, was devised long before the atomic table was thought up, and elemental fire, water, air, and earth are not the same as literal physical fire, water, air, and earth. Some cultures have added other elements, like the Chinese wood and iron. In Western esoteric thought, spirit is often considered to be the fifth element, the “quintessence” and sum of them all.
Of the basic four elements, fire and air are traditionally seen as projective and masculine energy, whereas water and earth are receptive and feminine. In the tarot, the two masculine elements are represented by phallic symbols (wands for fire and swords for air) and the feminine elements are a container (cups, for water) and a pentacle or disk (earth). Gold is also considered to be symbolic of the masculine elements, and its energy is projective, whereas silver is feminine and receptive. Many people wear their gold jewelry on their stronger hand (right if you’re right-handed) and silver on the weaker.
The four elements make up not only the entire physical world but also human psychology, from the four “humours” of Renaissance authors like Robert Burton and Ben Jonson to C. G. Jung’s four categories and the four times four temperament types listed in today’s popular Meyers-Briggs personality inventory.
Because taxonomy is a human mania, people like to put everything they can see, hear, feel, taste, smell, intuitively sense, or imagine into these four convenient pigeonholes. Here are some common correspondences.
Elemental Fire. Elemental fire rules hot places like deserts, volcanoes, and bonfires. At home, it’s our hearth fires and our ovens (and maybe our microwaves). It also rules metaphorical heat: energy, creativity, will power, blood, and rising sap, as well as explosions, and eruptions. In some traditions, elemental fire rules the south, noon, and summer; I see it as dawn and spring. Fire’s colors are the reds and golds; its signs of the zodiac are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius; its elemental spirits are the salamanders; its angel is Michael (pronounced mick-eye-el). Fire’s animals are dragons and lions, and its plants are the hot ones, like peppers, mustard, onion, and garlic, as well as red flowers. Goddesses of fire include Brigit, the hearth goddesses Hestia and Vesta, and volcano goddesses like Pele, Aetna, Fuji, and Iztaccihuatl. Fire’s gods include Agni, Hephaestus, and Prometheus.
Elemental Water. Elemental water rules wet places like oceans and seas, the tides, rivers, springs, swamps, lakes, wells, and glaciers (which, since they’re frozen, may also be ruled by earth), and our bath, shower, and kitchen sink. Elemental water rules the emotions and feelings, like love, sorrow, and courage, as well as intuition and sensitivity. In some traditions, elemental water rules the west, twilight, and fall; I put water in the south and give it the flooding noon and summer. Water’s colors are silver and all the hues and shades of blue and green; its signs of the zodiac are Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces; its elemental spirits are the undines; its angel is Gabriel. Water’s animals are swimmers — fish, sea mammals like dolphins and seals and whales, plus sea birds. Its plants grow in the water — seaweeds, ferns, rushes, lotuses, and water lilies. Goddesses of water include the oldest ones: Isis, Tiamat, Yemaya, Mari, Atargatis, Aphrodite, Ix Chel, Miriam, and the Naiads and Nereids. Four watery gods are Poseidon and Neptune, Llyr and Osiris.
Elemental Air. Elemental air rules windy places like plains, hills, mountain peaks, and beaches above the waterline. Elemental air also rules mental activity: intellect, knowledge, theory, and intuitive and psychic work. It also rules electricity, and by extension (so to speak) our TV, computer, and appliances. In some traditions, elemental air rules the east, dawn, and the spring; I put air in the west, for dusk and fall. Air’s colors are pale — white, yellow, blue-white; its signs of the zodiac are Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius; its elemental spirits are the sylphs; its angel is Raphael. Airy animals, of course, are the flying ones: birds and insects. Its plants are the ones that most often go into incense: frankincense and myrrh, also lavender, marjoram, mint, and sage, plus “air plants” (such as bromeliads and mistletoe) that grow high up in trees. Goddesses of air are the intellectual ones: Athena and the Muses, also Ninlil, Nut, Tatsuta-Hime, and Vajravaraki. Gods of air include Thoth, Enlil, and Mercury.
Elemental Earth. Elemental earth comprises the planet itself and all its earthy features: mud, mountains, caves, meadows and planted fields, forests, and groves. Rocks, crystals, metals, and bones are also ruled by elemental earth, plus earthworks like growth, sustenance, abundance, material prosperity, birth, death, and silence. At home, Earth rules the entire kitchen and all our potted plants. Nearly every tradition puts earth in the north, giving it rulership of midnight and winter. Earth’s colors are greens, browns, and black; its signs of the zodiac are Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn; its elemental spirits are the gnomes; its angel is Auriel. Earthy animals are snakes (which live in holes in the earth) and ruminants (cows, bison, deer, and others who graze), and earth’s plants are grains, grasses, and root vegetables like potatoes. Goddesses of earth include Gaia Herself, Demeter, Persephone (as Queen of the Underworld), Al-Lat, Ops, Frigg, Perchta, Hel, Tellus Mater, Nokomis, and the all-creating mother of Australia, Waramurungundji. Earthy gods are Pan and Cernunnos (the horny forest gods), Marduk, and most of the consorts who spend part of the year in the Underworld.
There’s a practical reason for knowing these elemental correspondences. Everything you add to your altar reinforces your intention and beckons a specific elemental energy into your mind and heart. The more you pile on, that is, the more you reinforce both your physical senses and your imagination, the better your magic will work. It’s like vitamins and other food supplements, except that I don’t think you can overdose on correspondences, at least not until you run out of room in your house.
Well, maybe you can overdo it.
For unencumbered ritual, use your common sense. Simplify. What do you associate with fire? Red and orange, matches and candles, hot things. You can use a red chili pepper or a kitchen match as your symbol of elemental fire. What do you associate with water? Place a goblet of water or a shell on your altar. What do you associate with air? Place a feather or a butterfly on your altar for elemental air. What do you associate with earth? Use a quartz crystal, Indian corn or dried wheat, or a potted plant. What do you associate with spirit? Things invisible, or all things because the earth is spirit made solid. Set a Goddess image or another significant symbol in the center.
If you want to, you can use herbs for all four elements, or stones or pictures of goddesses or the four tarot aces. You can redecorate your altar for every season, for every sabbat, for every full or new moon, for every new day.
By now you’re asking, which elemental symbol goes in which direction? That can be complicated, too, since the four elements are traditionally associated with the four directions, but different traditions have different arrangements. Here are the two most common arrangements.
The first arrangement (on the left, above) is used by most of the modern traditions, whose roots are in ceremonial magic. It was invented in northern Europe, probably in the British Isles, and reflects the geography of the place. The North Pole is to the north, and cold = earth. The equator is to the south, and the hot climate = heat = fire. The Atlantic Ocean lies to the west, and trade winds (far to the south, to be sure) are easterly. The second arrangement (on the right, above) is based on Tantric tradition.
My own preference is a third arrangement:
Some years ago, I noticed that in the traditional arrangement the two masculine elements are adjacent to each other, as are the two feminine elements. This looked unbalanced to me, so I rearranged the elements to alternate the energies. Later, I met a professional astrologer who had come up with the same arrangement based on the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), which are traditionally associated with the directions as shown here.
I have also interviewed other people in other traditions, including a Native American shaman, and learned that they use still other arrangements, including one that puts earth in the east.
I suggest therefore that you use whatever arrangement feels most natural and works best for you. Create your own arrangement based on the geography where you live. Do you live along the East Coast? Water is to your east. Do you live in Illinois or Mississippi or Louisiana? If the first two, significant water (the Mississippi River) lies to your west, if in Louisiana, water can be either east or south (the Gulf of Mexico). Do you live in Iowa, Missouri, or Arkansas? The Mississippi River, your significant water, is to your east. Do you live within sight of a mountain chain? That’s significant earth, whatever the direction. Do you live near Mount St. Helens or Kilauea? There is your fire.
The main things to keep in mind if you create your own arrangement are to include all four elements and, when you work with other people, be sure to discuss altar arrangements beforehand so everyone is in agreement and no elemental power is invoked twice or left out.
Some people add two or three more directions: up, down, and center. Some traditions use gods and goddesses for up and down, presumably a god for up because air and fire rise and a goddess for down because water and earth are earthy. Others simply salute “the powers above” and “the powers below.”
The center is the quintessential point where the four quarters meet. It’s most common to put a goddess image in the center, but you can also use fresh flowers, a candle, or something that is special to you. I usually set something symbolic of my intention in the center, where it draws on the powers of the whole universe, that is, of the Goddess in all Her manifestations. The center is also where I put the candles or other things I use for the spell I’m working at the time. When I started work on this book, for example, I set up an altar, in the center of which I put a stack of computer disks. Then I brought my big, wooden Blessed Bee to sit upon them. Also on the altar were a glittery gold abundance candle in a nifty little brass cauldron, a tall gold taper, and (because three is a magical, creative number), a votive in a fancy crystal holder. You can guess what my intention was.
It seems to me that our true sacred space is the body of the Goddess and perhaps our true altar is Her heart or mind. One Christmas Eve — the night the barbarian German tribes called Madranicht, or Mothers Night — I was doing a 7 A. M. ritual before a cluttered altar with a friend when suddenly I heard myself say, “The earth is our altar.” I think that sums it up. The earth herself is our altar and we’re part of the Goddess’s ritual. As long as we state our intention and with words or without them invoke Her presence, the physical arrangements don’t much matter.
We should remember, also, that it’s entirely possible to build a circle and an altar without any physical tools at all. We can do the whole thing in our imagination. When one of Marsha Smith’s apprentices is about ready for initiation, she sits down with him or her and watches while the apprentice casts a wholly mental circle.
When you visit someone who has an altar or go to a public ritual, do not touch the altar. Do not pick up any magical tools or decorations without permission. We charge our altars with the energy of our intentions and build up our own energy in our tools. When someone picks up our wand or chalice, for example, it interferes with the energy and sometimes the charge has to be done all over again. In the middle of a long-term spell, this can be very annoying; you have to begin all over again. Look at everything, therefore, and say Oooh and Aaah, but keep your hands in your pockets. When people come to visit you and look grabby, ask them firmly but politely not to touch, and explain why. If visitors won’t understand, cover your altar before they arrive.
We don’t do all of our rituals in our own living room. You may find yourself doing a spontaneous ritual on the beach. Which way is north? You may be leading a ritual in someone else’s home. You’ll want to have your own tools with you.
That’s why I keep my Porta-Witch Basket in the trunk of my car. For years I used a plain cardboard box, but when I found a nifty covered picnic basket in a thrift shop, I painted it black and drew glittery gold stars on it. What’s in my Porta-Witch?
• A compass on a cord.
• Symbols of the elemental powers: a wooden egg with flames painted on it (fire), a shell and a four-ounce silver chalice (water), three white feathers to which I tied tiny silver bells and crystal beads (air), and a tiny silver lizard charm glued to a rock which is glued to a stick (earth).
• A little, fat Willendorf-style goddess that I made from red clay several years ago.
• Small plastic bags containing matches, tea-lights, self-igniting charcoal, sand, incenses, and oils.
• A small clay saucer to burn the incense in.
• A ritual “knife” that is really a plastic letter opener with an owl handle and a “wand” that is really a sparkly silver pencil with a star on the eraser.
• A generic altar cloth (a square yard of fabric from the remnant counter).
Another portable altar I have was made by artist Sylvia Vasquez-Lawrence. It comes in a 5 x 7 inch green plastic envelope and contains magical alphabets, numerical and color values of the alphabet, elemental and color correspondences, poppets, a selection of hand-made papers, money papers, a Goddess altar drawn by Sylvia, candles and magic matches, a candle holder, and three tiny crystals. This “Traveling Magic” kit is a handy size to keep in your car’s glovebox.
If you like the idea of a portable altar, create your own and never leave home without it.
You may want magical tools. Like the altar itself, your tools can be elaborate and expensive or simple and unencumbered. You really don’t need any tools except your imagination, but it’s fun to have things to hold in your hands.
We don’t know much about prehistorical magical tools, partly because there probably wasn’t much of a division between magical and “realistic” work. Every tool was a magical tool in the sense that its use added power to human labor. Hard, pointed stones and antlers were used to make other tools and carve sacred symbols into softer stone or pieces of bone. Masks were worn in rituals in Old Europe, and numerous masked figures — nearly all of them female — have been found in sites in Europe and the Mid-East. Pottery was created to contain things. Ochre, an iron oxide found mingled with clay or sand, was ground up, mixed with liquid, and painted on corpses and openings in the earth.
The so-called Witches of Christian Europe were ordinary women who had learned a few things about herbs and healing and human psychology from their grannies. Their tools were cooking pots, bowls, mortars and pestles, and kitchen knives and spoons. Because they probably couldn’t afford candles, they worked by sunlight, firelight, or rushlight. They didn’t have altars and probably didn’t even know they were “witches.” Their neighbors turned to them for the old treatments and spells when they couldn’t get the help they needed from the biophobic priests and doctors of the new urban religion. Sometimes those same neighbors turned against them and turned them in.
The rituals, altars, and tools we’re familiar with today, therefore, are not related to the ancient worship of the Great Goddess. They have been borrowed in modern times from ceremonial magic, which is an occult Judeo-Christian coinage and itself a great borrower from the classical pagan cultures (largely Egyptian and Hellenistic), medieval Rosicrucianism, Masonry, alchemy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and works by S. L. Mathers, James Frazer, and others.
Nevertheless, because so many Witches like them, let’s look at the four major ceremonial tools, which are the same as the four tarot suits: swords, wands, cups, and disks (or pentacles). They correspond to the four elements: swords = air, wands = fire, cups = water, and disks = earth.
Sword. I doubt that any woman ever accused of being a witch (except maybe Joan of Arc) owned a sword. Kings, nobles, and warriors carried swords and were extremely jealous of their power. The women had kitchen knives and used them for the same chores we do today.
Instead of swords, some Witches use consecrated black-handled knives called athames to draw pentacles in the air. “Athame” is a word not found in any dictionary I own. Kelly says that Gardner got it from a story in a 1947 issue of Weird Tales.5
I also know people whose magical blades are paring knives, Swiss army knives, long quartz crystal points, and crow feathers. But you really don’t need the ceremonial hardware. Instead of a ritual knife, you can use a wand to draw pentacles. You can also use a feather, a quartz point, a flower or leafy branch, a stalk of dried wheat, or your fingers.
Wand. The wand started out as a stick — a digging tool, the royal scepter, the conductor’s baton, the shepherd’s crook, the bishop’s crosier, and the dowsing rod. In all cases, the wand conducts and directs energy. That is, it carries the energy in a specified direction. Because I’m a writer, the “magic wand” I use most often is my computer mouse, which I have even taken to public rituals as my altar tool.
Cup. When cups become altar tools, they’re called cauldrons or chalices. Both are symbols of containment and of the ever-nourishing, ever-productive womb and breast of the Goddess.
A big cauldron (which can be your Dutch oven or any other large pot from the kitchen) is appropriate for large outdoor rituals. Fill it about a third full with sand or cat litter and burn incense (lots of it) for a really impressive effect. After you clean it out (thoroughly), you can also make soup or some other “witches brew” in it. Gourmet and occult supply stores sell small, footed iron cauldrons that can be used for various ritual purposes at home.
Being a double Cancer, I’m attracted to water symbols and own about a dozen chalices (not to mention an ocean of shells). My favorite is my Waterford “Kildare” goblet. A Tupperware cup, while not as glamorous, would work as well, however, since the idea is more important than the form. If you’re sensitive to smoke or don’t want to set off your smoke alarm all the time (which is what happens when incense billows up), do your purifications with water in your chalice.
Pentacle. There seems to be some confusion about “pentacle” and “pentagram.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “pentacle” as “a five-pointed star formed by five straight lines connecting the vertices of a pentagon and enclosing another pentagon in the completed figure. Also called ‘pentagram.’” (That certainly was a lot of help, wasn’t it?) So I asked around for clarification. Some people told me that the pentacle is the star itself, which becomes a pentagram when there’s a circle around it. Others said that the pentagram is the geometric shape, whereas the pentacle is the tool; that is, the pentacle is the star carved on a wooden disk, painted on a plate, made into jewelry. Most of the Witches I’ve met simply call their piece of jewelry a pentacle.
The pentacle was drawn by medieval occultists to protect themselves from the demons they conjured up. It also occurs in nature. If you slice an apple in half horizontally, for example, you see the pentacle formed by the seeds. The pentacle can be used as the earth symbol on your altar (use that apple you just cut open) or you can hang nicely decorated ones on your walls. I have a wall full of five-pointed stars.6
Candles. In addition to the elemental symbols you place on your altar, you probably want at least one candle. Whether it’s a nice soothing bath by candlelight, a candlelit dinner for two, or a ceremony of worship, candlelight makes any occasion special. Lighting a candle and extinguishing the electric lights signals a change of worlds; almost immediately the change of light casts you into a different mood.
Colored candles are useful to enhance your intention. Although they’re more expensive than the tapers you can buy at the grocery store, beeswax candles are worth the price. They smell good and burn clean, and hand-rolled beeswax candles are often made with oils or herbs and during the appropriate astrological sign add correspondences to your magic.
You can buy expensive, elegant candelabra, symbolic holders for single candles, or use the red clay saucers that you ordinarily set your flowerpots in. This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: be sure your candleholders are fireproof. Keep cats, ribbons, and other flammable things away from burning candles. Never leave burning candles unattended. If you’re doing a seven-day spell, snuff or pinch the flame out each time you leave your altar and relight it when you return.
I prefer to make my own tools or embellish and personalize the ones I purchase. Sometimes I tie blue and silver ribbons around the stems of goblets, and I have decorated my sword (which I got when I was initiated into an occult order) with a big bouquet of ostrich plumes, ribbons, and bells. One of my friends used to balance it on her head when she was belly dancing.
If you want to make a wand, find a reasonably straight stick about as big around as your thumb and as long as your arm from your elbow to the tip of your index finger, though shorter is all right. Glue a quartz point on the smaller end (the end that pointed away from the tree) and wrap the stick with multi-colored yarn, embroidery floss, ribbons, or all of the above. You can use any colors you like, but remember that red and orange are the fiery colors. You can also add feathers, beads, shells, bells, seed pods, or any other decorations that appeal to you. When you make your own tools and symbols, they contain your personal energy. That is what makes them truly magical.
One (hopefully humorous) definition of a Witch is “a large woman wearing colorful clothing and significant jewelry.” Though High-Church Witches go robed when they’re not sky-clad (naked), I think costuming is an entirely individual matter. In the privacy of your own home you can wear anything (or nothing).
To me, anything I wear is a costume, and symbolism and style are important to me wherever I go. Because it’s useful to keep something special aside that you wear only for rituals, I also have my “crone suit,” which is an elegant black Moroccan weave coat-dress with long sleeves and interesting detail in the cut. Just as lighting your candles puts you into a magical mood, so does putting on special clothing.
It’s fun to dress up when you go out to public rituals. If you cannot arrange to be costumed by Cirque de Soleil, Moroccan rayon-cotton dresses make ideal ritual clothing, as do Arabian dresses, long skirts, and costumes whose elements you combine from many sources to create a properly fantastic look.
Jewelry, both at home and in public, is also important. Some people turn up at public rituals wearing every necklace they own, some wear outstanding earrings and bracelets, some wear just one special piece that they reserve for ritual work. I used to wear a dozen necklaces, but when my neck got sore, I was forced into jewelry withdrawal. Now I wear my “altar on a string.” This is a long black cord strung with dangling silver symbols: a spiral, a half-inch quartz crystal, a tiny Tara, a flowering ankh, an owl, a turtle, a crescent moon, the rune fehu, a hand, a cauldron, and a silver cube with Bs on the faces (just in case I forget who I am).
If you play a hand drum, be sure not to wear any rings or dangly, heavy bracelets. They’ll ruin the drumhead.
Some of us also wear exotic scarves, body glitter, and wonderful feathered and sequined headpieces or masks. Some of us are tattooed. Whatever you wear to a ritual, at home or in public — wear what makes you feel magical. At the same time, however, remember that people may be looking at you.
When we invoke7 (call in) powers, we may be addressing goddesses and gods and elemental spirits, but we’re summoning our own inner power as well. All power exists both around us and inside us. Let’s begin by examining invocations for extrinsic power, the transcendent powers of the universe, the invisible forces that we call goddesses, gods, devas, elemental spirits, angels, and other invisible beings.
There are many ways to phrase an invocation. If you’re in a hurry, you can try, “Powers of Earth, be here now.” Or “Yo, Mama! Come here to me!” But these two invocations, while direct, are rude. And they’re not magical. The more poetical an invocation is, even if it’s written and spoken in prose, the more magical it becomes.
Instead of a rude summons, we can use a traditional formula, like “Guardians of the Watchtowers of the North, be present in our circle tonight and aid us in our magic.” Another invocation I have used calls upon many beings: “Powers of the North, goddesses and gods of elemental earth, gnomes, angels, winds, and devas, be present in our circle.” Other variations include naming specific beings. To invoke guardians of earth (in this case, a goddess, a god, an angel, a wind, and the proper elemental spirits), I might say, “Demeter and Cernunnos, Auriel and Boreas, honored Gnomes, guardians of elemental earth, we welcome you to our circle …”
Another form of invocation is not to name a specific deity but to call forth the qualities of the elemental power, what I call the power’s gifts. “Powers of the North, please be present in our circle. Bring your gifts of stability, darkness, silence, and groundedness in the Goddess to help us in our magic.” Refer to the correspondences given above for other gifts.
Finally, you can describe the powers in a sort of prose poem. The following comes from one of my as-yet unpublished novels:
Welcome, Powers of Earth, our Mother’s body, our own beautiful bodies. Earth grounds and sustains us. Earth is rich with treasures and provides enough food for all her children. Earth is also the power of earthquakes, which destroy without discriminating between good or bad, rich or poor. And what is more powerful than an earthquake? A seed. Terrible and blessed are the powers of Earth.
1. Identify the goddess or god by proper name and attributes. If you want to maintain any kind of control in your ritual, it’s wiser not to invoke anyone whose name you don’t know. You never know who might show up if it’s an open invitation, although these days it’s highly unlikely that you’ll attract anyone as wicked as Mephistopheles or Asmodeus (or even Cthulhu).
And don’t be afraid to invoke Found goddesses. If you look through books and lists and don’t find a goddess who is specifically what you’re looking for — make one up.
For example, let’s suppose that, at Raven’s urging, Green Spring Circle decides to do a rain ritual to counteract La Niña, which is currently drying out Southern California. Two or three of the women get together one afternoon and do some research. They decide to use rain sticks and gourds for sound and lots of blue candles, but they need a goddess of gentle rain, one who will revive the sandy soils without causing mudslides or floods. She’ll be in the heritage of Tethys (mother of the Nereids) and Aphrodite, who was born in the sea, but not of Tiamat, who is too stormy. Perhaps she’ll be related to the gentle Hesperides, who live and sing at the western edge of the world, for in the northern latitudes it’s the westerlies that bring us the moistureladen winds. Not finding a goddess who totally hits the spot, they decide to create one and call her Mere (pronounced Merry), a word related to both “mother” and “sea.” One of the Virgin Mary’s titles, in fact, is Stella Maris, “Star of the Sea.” They envision Mere as a mermaid and ask R’becca to create a stuffed satin mermaid goddess for the altar.
Their invocation begins:
Hear us, gentle Mere,
goddess of the sparkling sea,
daughter of gentle waters, nourishing springs and tides —
Watery Mere, hear our call …
2. Flatter and praise the goddess. Goddesses are as vain as we are, as you’ll quickly learn when you read any mythology, and surely your grandmother taught you that we all respond more positively and quickly to sugar than to vinegar. Try this:
Beautiful Mere,
Crowned in pearls, robed in silver tides,
Gentle goddess
who brings soft rains and quenching waters
and shines in the rainbow …
3. Summon the deity:
We call you to our circle, precious Mere.
Come into this sacred space …
4. State your petition. To the sounding of the rainsticks, Raven tells the goddess what specific kind of help they want:
Gentle Mere, bringer of soft rains,
bring your gifts to our dried-out, thirsty land —
gentle rains, nourishing rains, soft rains
to moisten our parched earth,
to revive our dying plants and trees
to let Your children drink deep.
At the end of the ritual, before you dismiss the goddess, thank her. You cannot, of course, really dismiss a goddess; she’ll come or stay as she wishes, but you can tell Her your expectations:
Blessed Mere, rain gently on us
and then depart in peace with our thanks
and leave your rainbow as a sign
that when needed you will come again.
How to Talk to a DeityOriginally, when ritual was still part of everyday life and everybody talked to the Goddess all the time, we spoke to Her in everyday words. As time went on and priests assumed more and more power, however, exalted language and fulsome invocations arose, and pretty soon only the High Priest could speak to the God Most High. That was the state of affairs for two or three millennia.
During the European Renaissance and all the way up to the nineteenth century magical revival, it was thought that all gods spoke Hebrew by choice, and so Hebrew was the most common ritual language. Sometimes rituals were also conducted in Greek, Latin, crypto-Egyptian, quasi-Sanskrit, Enochian (the “angelic language” of the Elizabethan Dr. Dee), or all the above. If you read books on high occultism, you’ll see scripts written in these esoteric tongues. Trying to pronounce them can be like trying to unscrew the inscrutable.
Fortunately, someone discovered that it can be dangerous to invoke an invisible power in a language you can neither understand nor enunciate precisely nor improvise in. As anyone who has ever studied a foreign language remembers, boners come easily and they can be very embarrassing. Worse, some powers become angry if you mispronounce their names, or you may not get who you intended to call. Like the modern Roman Catholic Church, therefore, occultists and others who do magic have generally adopted the vernacular.
But this leads us into a different verbal trap. Thanks to John Milton, John Bunyan, and James I of England (the king who authorized the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible in English), most people seem to think that the divine eardrums resonate only to an approximation of Elizabethan English. Just eavesdrop on anyone offering a little prayer at the Rotary or Congress or a football game. It’s religiobabble: “thou art,” “we beseech thee,” “thou saidst,” and so on.
Pagans do it too. I have attended sabbats with perfectly normal Southern Californians that suddenly turn into a low-level Shakespearean road companies, complete with Renaissance Faire costumes (and weapons) and mangled language.
If you really want to essay Elizabethan English to add a fancy touch to your rituals, follow these guidelines:
• “Thou” is the singular, intimate form of “you,” like the French tu and the German du. Use “thou” to address one person or deity. Use “you” for more than one. Do not mix “thou” and “you” when referring to the same being.
EXAMPLE: At one sabbat I attended, the circle was cast by each person anointing the next person with symbols of the four elements and saying, “Thou art god/goddess. I bless the divine in you.” Wrong! It should have been “I bless the divine in thee.” Likewise, “Oh, thou holy queen, all the world is filled with your treasures” is a no-no. It should be “… with thy treasures.”
• For the subject of a verb, use “thou.” For the object of a verb or preposition, use “thee.”
EXAMPLES:
Thou art divine.
I give thee my love.
I bow to thee.
I receive this gift from thee.
• The adjective form is “thy.” If the next word starts with a vowel sound, use “thine.”
EXAMPLES:
Thy will be done.
Thine earth is holy.
• Use the right number (singular or plural) of verbs:
I am |
we are |
thou art |
you are |
he/she/it is |
they are |
Past tense:
I was |
we were |
thou wert |
you were |
he/she/it was |
they were |
Future tense:
I shall |
we shall |
thou shalt |
you will |
he/she/it will |
they will |
• For other verbs and poetical constructions, get out your old copy of Paradise Lost and see how Milton, arguably the finest poet of the English language, said it. Or reread your favorite Shakespearean plays or sonnets. Keep in mind, however, that no one has spoken much Elizabethan English since the early seventeenth century.
Better yet, give the Goddess and the invisible powers some credit for keeping up with the times. In public or group rituals, speak to them in standard English or whatever the mother tongue of your group is. When you’re not concentrating on getting archaic subject-verb agreement straight, you can concentrate on your intention and your visualizations.
You may have noticed that the rituals in this book are written in free verse. My reason for using verse is that it is generally considered to be more elevated than prose. Verse (rhymed or unrhymed) is also easier to remember because of its patterns and repetitions, which also make the effect of the words cumulative; that is, they build to a natural climax.
Prose can be poetic, but when you choose prose, your major concern should be controlling sentence length. You need to be able to breathe regularly. Long sentences leave anyone except a trained actor breathless, and we tend to stumble on the thorns of syntax when we go on and on and on. The best way to check what you’ve written is to read it aloud and notice where you stumble. If your tongue trips over awkward clumps of consonants, or you gasp for breath, that’s where you rewrite.
You have probably also noticed the apparent simple-mindedness of my verses. There’s a good reason for simple-minded verse: it sticks in the mind and goes round and round. When you create your own verse, therefore, keep a few guidelines in mind:
• Use plain and simple words; use language the circle understands. The idea is to be direct and clear, not god-like and inscrutable.
• Use a simple rhythm. Spoken English is very nearly iambic: di-DAH, di-DAH, di-DAH. Trochaic meter reverses the iambs: DAH-di, DAH-di, DAH-di. The other two common meters are anapestic (di-di-DAH, di-di-DAH) and dactylic (DAH-di-di, DAH-di-di). Shakespeare and Milton worked wonders with these four common meters; so have Dr. Suess and Paul Simon. So can you.
• Write in short lines of two, three, or four feet. Short lines put more energy into your ritual and are easier to remember than long ones.
• If you try rhymed verse, choose a simple rhyme scheme. AABB and ABAB are most common. Rhyming dictionaries are handy, but remember that you’re not Stephen Sondheim, though by listening to his songs you can pick up interesting ideas about what can be rhymed.
The Blessed Bees are modern Good Neighbors. Like the traditional Other Ones — Fairies, Brownies, Elves, and the like — called Good Neighbors by those who (correctly) feared to offend them, the Bees are magical beings. They respond with honey-sweet blessings large and small when we cry out for assistance. Invoke Them with these words and in your most mellifluous tones:
Twinkle, twinkle, Blessed Bees,
Grant my wish, I ask you, please.
Abundance, love, ’lectronic toys8 —
As I will’t, so mote it, Bees.
Slightly larger than the honeybees we’re accustomed to, the Blessed Bees are shining golden insects with crystalline wings. They live in the Golden Hive at the summit of a glass mountain, and Melissa, Their Devoted Beekeeper-Priestess (who wears sturdy, nonskid shoes), lives nearby to serve Them. When They fly among us, the Bees carry tiny baskets, and among Their gifts to us are magical venom, pollen, propolis, beeswax, and royal jelly. Blessed Venom is used in “sting therapy” to get our attention in times of crisis, and Blessed Pollen provokes our souls to flower. Both the Blessed Bees and their relations in the mundane world have been traditionally seen as the bearers of peace, harmony, propriety, renewal, fertility, industry, and eloquence, all of which virtues They have since ancient times modeled for humankind.9
In the center of the Golden Hive, surrounded by Her dancing swarm of Wonderful Worker Bees, lives the Blessed Queen, one sip of Whose intoxicating honey makes the mortal mouth golden with wisdom, both eloquent and endless. We’ve heard the granny tales, of course, and what child has not daydreamed of being one of those brave young heroes and heras who journeyed beyond the sun and the moon in order to seek out the Blessed Queen and serve Her for a year and a day? Some have actually gone to the Blessed Lands, and when they come back from the Land of Fairy, they’re always great talkers. Some of them, alas, also write books.
I originally wrote these three rituals to open A Woman’s Book of Rituals & Celebrations. Because people have told me over the years that they love them, I have rewritten them slightly to close this book.
A Self-BlessingFirst gather twelve things or representations of things (photographs or symbols) that you believe make an accurate picture of who you truly are. These things can include your daily organizer, the keys to your 1954 Edsel, a worn silver spoon your grandmother used in her kitchen, baby clothes from your ancestors or your children, or something special you collect. In addition, find a pink or bright spring-green candle, a holder (preferably black, but it can be whatever you like), and matches.
After your bath or shower, costume and adorn yourself so you look and feel like the real you, which is not necessarily the person seen by your business associates or anyone else in your public life. If you have a pet who wants to “help,” invite it into your circle, but keep it away from the candle.
Sit in the middle of the floor and ask yourself, “Who am I? What makes me really Me?” Survey your collected things and begin to arrange them in a circle around you in this general order:
Behind you. Three things from your past or childhood. Things passed down to you. Things you’ve always loved.
Before you. Three things new to your life. Recent acquisitions, evidence of new interests. Things that indicate where you’re going.
To your left. Three “left-brain” things. Things associated with words and numbers, logical thought, order, business, rational and intellectual thought.
To your right. Three “right-brain” things. Things associated with art, creativity, comfort and luxury, feelings, the religious or spiritual part of your life, beauty, and nature.
If you can, distribute these objects evenly throughout the four quarters in this circle of your life. If you can’t, however, that’s all right. Very few people are symmetrical. Put each thing in the quarter where it belongs, even if your circle ends up lop-sided. Light the pink or green candle and set it before you so it becomes the thirteenth element of the circle of your life.
Close your eyes, take several deep, easy breaths, and visualize or imagine the pink or green light from the candle surrounding you, filling your space, illuminating your life circle. Breathe in this light so it also fills your body. Feel the peace and love, the freshness and joy of this light in your life. Feel the energy of the things around you rising and joining the candlelight. Feel this energy flowing into every cell in your body. You can open your eyes and read the following blessing or tape it beforehand and listen to it. You can also use it as a model to write your own words of blessing.
I bless myself
and these things that make the circle of my life.
I bless myself
and my past.
For in blessing my past
and these things that I bring from ages past
I become who I am now.
Good or bad, cheerful or painful, my past is a blessing,
for it has formed me
shaped me
held me
released me
thrust me into the present.
I bless myself
and these things to my left and right.
I bless myself and who I am today.
For in blessing both my intellect and my emotions
and these things I gather into the life I live now
I recognize who I am now.
Left and right
rational and spiritual
words and images
austerity and comfort —
I bring divisions together
for it is how I am in the world.
It pulls me out of the past
and thrusts me into the future.
I bless myself
and the things that point to what is to come.
I bless myself
and my uncertainties, my potentialities, my future.
For in blessing what is new in my life
I move toward what I can be:
unknown but shown
unpredictable but mapped
potential to be fulfilled.
My future is waiting for me.
I bless and give thanks for every day of my life.
A Blessing for Our ForemothersFirst get out the old family photo albums and family souvenirs. Select photos of your mother, your aunts, your grandmothers, greataunts, great-grandmothers, as many female ancestors as you can find. If you can’t find photos, select artifacts — an antique silver spoon, a cameo broach, a crumpled ribbon, a hankie, a quilt. Lacking photos or objects, you can write their names on small pieces of white or lavender paper (parchment is best), and if you don’t know their names, write titles like “father’s great-great-grandmother.” If your family doesn’t save things, write something like “all my female relatives, living and dead” or “my foremothers, back to the beginning of time.”
Line these photos or mementos up in front of you either on a table or simply on the floor and, for a few minutes, think about what they represent. Can you visualize this long line of female relatives? How far back does this line reach? What countries did they live in? How did they live their lives?
Next, add to your collection photos of women you admire but are pretty sure you’re not related to: Eleanor Roosevelt or Eleanor of Aquitaine, Cleopatra or Jinga Mbandi, Amelia Earhart or Marie Curie, Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi. Cut photos out of magazines or, if you don’t want to mutilate a book or magazine, make a photocopy or hold the book open so that the photo you have chosen is visible. Contemplate your collection of heras. These are some of the women you will be blessing. You will also be attracting their powers to yourself.
Lay your collection of photos and mementos in one or more circles (or a spiral) around the candles. Let the photos overlap. Neatness doesn’t count here. Inclusiveness does.
Light two candles, lavender and red. Lavender is a traditional color of the Goddess and red is traditionally associated with the Mother aspect of the ancient Triple Goddess. Now close your eyes and take a few deep, easy breaths. Visualize your mother, your grandmothers, your aunts… all the women of power in this long line circling your candles. See yourself in your place in this line. Feel their power, their love, their labor, their successes. Feel their energy.
Sit quietly and think of the old family stories. Think about books you’ve read that have had active female protagonists, movies about women, myths of goddesses and heras. Remember the stories of strong, interesting women.
You can open your eyes and read the following blessing or tape it beforehand and listen to it. You can also use it as a model to write your own words of blessing.
In the presence of the Most Holy Ones —
the Mothers of my body
the Grandmothers of my soul —
I give thanks.
I give thanks that I live
through their energy
through their love
through their labor.
As a daughter [son] of their wombs and works,
I return their blessings:
I bless my mother/stepmother, [name].
I bless my grandmothers, [names].
I bless all the women of my family line,
those whose names I know
and those whose names have been forgotten.
I bless the women of prehistory —
the strong, the unnamed, the forgotten.
I bless the memories of the unknown women
who tamed fire
who created agriculture
who domesticated animals
who invented crafts and sciences.
Their works have been forgotten
or co-opted by men.
May we remember the true creators, our foremothers.
I bless the women of historical times,
the queens, warriors, judges, and healers —
victims of exploitation
victims of suppression
victims of invading cultures.
Never again will women be murdered.
Never again.
I bless their souls
I bless their ashes.
Mothers and grandmothers, foremothers and foresisters —
I, your descendant, bless your works.
I, your child, bless your memory.
I, your daughter [son], give thanks for your blessed life.
A Blessing for Our ChildrenFirst find a photo of the earth taken from outer space, one of those famous photos of our beautiful blue planet. They’ve been published in many magazines, and stickers are also available, so it should be easy to find one. Place this photo on a table between two white candles.
If you have children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews, get photos of them (recent or old) and lay these photos in a circle around the picture of the earth. Find photos of other children, kids from all the countries of the world, all doing their kid things or assuming adult responsibilities. Make a circle with these photos around the two white candles,your own kids, and the earth.
Light your candles. Close your eyes and take several deep, easy breaths. Feel the blessing energy from the candles, the cleansing energy of the white light. Feel the energy of all these children, both at their most raucous and adventuresome play and in repose, study, or sleep.
Spend some time thinking about the energy and wonder children bring to our lives — seeing ordinary things through their new eyes, for example, or living each day as a new adventure. Think about what children bring to the world, what their potential can bring to the world. Think about the state of the world: progressive and repressive politics, famine and hunger, wars and threats of war, the “childization” of poverty. Think about the state of the planet: polluted air and water, burning forests, suffering and dying birds, animals, and people. Is this the kind of place you want your kids and their kids to live in?
Read the following blessing or tape it beforehand and listen to it or use it as a model to make up your own words.
Children of the living earth —
I bless you.
Children of so many living cultures —
I bless your ways.
Children of our hopes and lives —
I bless your dreams.
I bless your games, your work, your learning,
I bless your ambitions and your reaching forward.
our land is wounded,
our air and water are wounded,
and our children are wounded.
But people are at war —
nation against nation,
tribe against tribe,
and our children are wounded.
Children of genocide and ethnic cleansing,
I bless you.
May you live in peace.
Children of poverty,
I bless you.
May you always have enough to eat and drink.
Children of our wounded, stumbling planet,
I bless you.
And I promise you:
I will act to ensure you a future
I will act to restore your home.
Precious children, bright blessings.
1. Some people spell the word magick to distinguish what we do from what stage performers — who still call themselves magicians — do. I think magic-with-a-K is pretentious.
2.There are, of course, established systems of black and white magic. My focus, however, is on devotion, not science. For more on color magic, see Isaac Bonewits, Real Magic (Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1971).
3. See Carol Lee Flinders’s powerful book, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).
4. One of the best books I know on altars is Beautiful Necessity by Kay Turner (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999). A small altar I had several years ago is shown in the book. See also Denise Linn, Altars: Bringing Sacred Shrines into Your Everyday Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
5. Kelly, “Crafting the Art of Magic,” pp. 43–44
6. A wonderful explication of pentacles and the number five can be found in chapter 5 of A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science by Michael S. Schneider (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1994).
7. Technically, we invoke powers “above” us (goddesses, devas, angels) and evoke those “below” (elementals). After the ritual we dismiss them, though I know a high priestess who says “revoke” and another who says “devoke.” To me, that sounds like you’re taking their credit cards away.
8. Insert your own line here. It doesn’t have to rhyme, though it’s best to try to maintain the rhythm. Bearing in mind that you might actually get what you ask for, ask for what you really want.
9. See Joanne Elizabeth Lauck, The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Revisioning the Insect-Human Connection (Mill Spring, N. C.: Swan Raven & Co., 1998), chapter 10.