These will not harm you, but welcome you upon the threshold of their realm. They will bless you and show you that there are other paths of faith, older gods, more immanent ones. They will not coerce or threaten, nor condemn the other ways we humans walk in our individual quests for religious understanding and a philosophy of life.
If you have a dream, to walk unfettered in the search for your true self, to find a way of living in harmony with the Earth and all Nature, to strive for balance between your own needs and those of the whole planet and the others who share it with you, perhaps one such direction may be found here. It is not for everyone. It is not something to be taken up as a momentary whim, or as a hobby or time-filler until something more exciting comes along.
It is a hard journey, first within to the deepest and darkest recesses of your own heart, where all your failures, cruelties, selfishness and hurt lie uncovered, like some hidden dragon’s hoard. This is the
treasure of experience, through which you must pick your way, seeking the precious jewels, the holy relics, the forgotten or abandoned parts of you, the childhood ambitions, abilities and skills which every witch would value.
Did you used to be able to fly in your dreams? Your wings are here. Could you judge character and motives, even when you were too young to have the words to tell this truth? Those words and insights are also here. Here are the desires to heal, to do good, to see fairies face to face, to ride the unicorn or shining serpent, to meet with the heroes or kings and queens of ancient myth. Here is your own Holy Grail.
The object of this book is not to spell out for you some ancient formula which will magically make you a ‘witch’, but to show you the paths along which you may walk in order to discover for yourself some of the many arts, crafts and religious aspects which the followers of the Old Religion used to have. Only the touch of the Goddess or the God can awaken your witchly ancestry within you, and that you will need to seek, when you are ready.
In order to succeed you may need to change some of your ideas, and cast a few long-held theories out of the window. You will need to consider your responsibilities as one who works with power. You will need to see what ordinary commitments you may have to give up in order to devote time, energy or some other personal resource to your new-found interest. Nothing is gained for nothing. You will have to pay for your knowledge with dedicated and long-term effort, with patience and with small sacrifices of things you care about.
This book is intended to be a loose course of instruction, with areas of work to be tackled month by month. Turning to the end and trying out the suggestions there will not instantly make you a witch; it will just show your youth in spiritual matters which, like all other arts and skills, have to be learned step by basic step. Read the whole book through, see if it awakens old knowledge within you, or shows you, through those sudden flashes of insight, that you have simply forgotten much of the wisdom you had in other lives, or that dwells within your family’s genetic legacy to you.
Because our country-dwelling ancestors had no truck with calendars or digital watches, this series of lessons is set in moonlong chunks, to be worked on from the day after each new moon, through the waxing phase to full moon, and through the waning until the day of the dark of the moon. Because we are literate and need to remind ourselves with written notes or computer entries, one of the first things you will need, when you are ready to seriously follow the instructions here, is a new diary or large-format book.
It will become your personal log of progress or you could call it a ‘Book of Illuminations’. To begin with you will need to know when there will be a new moon. It is far better to stick your head out of a window as it gets dark and look out for the moon, so she may show you her current phase. Remember, in the Northern hemisphere, the moon is a [symbol 02 p7a] crescent as she waxes, and a [symbol 01 p7] shape as she wanes, and from one new moon to the next is 29 and a bit days. For convenience, this is usually taken as four weeks of seven days.
Before we used the Roman names of the months, country folk measured time passing by nights and
moons. Around the country some fragments of this old lore endure, like calling the full moon of September the Harvest Moon, October the Hunter’s Moon and so on. We still use the expression ‘a fortnight’, meaning fourteen nights, not days! Each lunar period was given over to some specific agricultural activity, weather permitting.
There were times for sowing seed, for haymaking, cutting the corn, weeding, gathering fruits of orchard and woodland, for worrying about poor harvests and for rejoicing after rich ones. When there were no convenient shops to supply the bread and little money to buy food, the relationship with the Earth Mother was felt very closely. These days we seldom suffer such hunger, or concern for the coming of spring.
The stresses of modern occupations cannot be compared with the fear of starvation, the desperation when the weather prevented the sowing of seed or reaping of harvests, or when the winter woodpile was depleted or the last peats burned, long before the snows had melted from the cottage roofs.
Begin to look around you and see in what ways the moon has affected your life, your home or even your job. Get out after dark and try to see the phase of the moon in the sky. Is the moon visible from your bedroom window, and does her light shine upon your face. What do you know about her phases? Is she the same the whole world over? What about astronauts landing on her surface, she who is a Goddess and bringer of psychic visions?
Do you think you might like to become a pagan, or develop the powers of a ‘witch’? What will your family or workmates think? Will you meet with fear or derision from them? Who should you tell about your new interest? Who do you know who might be able to help you or share your experiments? Are there already any witches in your circle of friends and acquaintances? Would any of them have anything to say, or help to offer?
Do you really wish to belong to a coven, to undergo initiation and become part of a fairly secret society? Or are you content in your own company, happy to wander around in natural surroundings, enjoying sunlight and the life of trees and herbs, of birds and wild creatures? Do you crave company, someone to pour out your troubles to, or give you encouragement in any of your wilder schemes? All these questions are important, because if you really do set out to become a ‘witch’ or follower of the Old Ways, some parts of your studies will set you apart.
You will probably lose a few friends, not because they come to fear you but simply because you no longer have the time and energy to devote to some shared activities. Some of your friends might scoff at your pagan ambitions, or make fun of your intentions in front of others, if they get to hear about your interest in witchcraft. Others might try to cause trouble in your job, or stir up bad feeling, through a lack of understanding of modern pagan ideas.
You might encounter Fundamentalists of one sort or another, or those out to save your soul from some invented harm, and you will be well advised to consider what responses you might give to such people, if they turn up on your doorstep. Suggesting that you could turn them into a bat might seem to be a good idea at the time but such threats, even made in fun, can be taken too seriously by religious fanatics in whose faith there is little fun, light or laughter.
Among those of the Craft, however, you should find great joy, a real sense of fun and a lightness of spirit which can prove cheering when you feel lonely or despondent, because your meditations are barren, and the moon of your intuition is dark. Even if you are studying alone, you ought to be able to laugh at yourself. Think back to how you would see yourself as a witch, with the regulation pointed hat, the broomstick, cauldron and black cat.