Boot camp is a place where your freedoms are extremely limited for a set period of time. During the boot camp and additional training phase of their service career, most installations do not have accommodations to serve the Wiccan community (although many of the armed service branches recognize Wicca as a religion in its own right). When my daughter entered Army boot camp, one of her sergeants said, “Yep, there’s one in every platoon. We don’t have facilities for you, private. Do you need a special tree or will any one do?” She was permitted, however, to wear her pentacle. Those nine weeks were incredibly busy for her, with little time to set aside for private workings. She resorted to doing affirmational magick and mental cleansings in the shower, talking to her grandmother while in the field (for ancestral protection), and programming herself for success during boring tasks (like night duty fire watch). The family here at home did the rest. When she finished boot camp and moved into her additional training cycle, she used my Teen Witch Kit as her portable altar.
The Military Shrine
When our youngest daughter chose the armed services, we knew she would be so busy the first several months that she wouldn’t be able to practice Witchcraft in the way in which she was accustomed. When she left home we turned her room into “the magick room,” and set up a shrine for her protection while away from us. The shrine grew to include the letters and postcards she sent home, pictures of her before and while she entered the service, a Himmelsbrief (see page 552), talismans and amulets, a continuously burning candle matching the color of the day she was born, a bowl of water changed every two days, and other offerings to deity. When we attended her boot camp graduation, we discovered a Catholic family that had done the same thing, proudly displaying the pictures of their home shrine dedicated to two of their children in the armed services. They topped our efforts, however, because they had two life-sized pictures of their children beside their shrine. That’s dedication!
If you have a family member in the armed services or in one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country (which include timber milling, being a police officer, search and rescue, and so on), then you may wish to build a protection shrine just for them. Don’t kid yourself—every little bit you do, even if you seem estranged or too distant, will certainly help the individual you love.
Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of beauty.