Workings for the New Year: Binding Someone or Something to the Old Year

As each new year begins, one’s mind turns naturally to making plans for the betterment of our lives, situations, and selves. We are inclined to take stock of what we have accomplished and who we have become in the year prior, and to evaluate the kinds of changes that we want to make in our lives. Sadly, most of the time, we find that we are unhappy with the progress we made the previous year—whether we didn’t get the right job or didn’t make the changes in our relationships that we planned.

Rituals for the New Year: Way-Making & Removing Obstacles from your Path

Most of the time, our New Year’s resolutions don’t pan out. Although we might meet the new year with a renewed sense of faith and optimism, it can be difficult to maintain that energy as the year gets going. Once we start feeling fatigued with our new resolutions and our motivation begins to wane, we tend to assume that the goals we set were simply not realistic to begin with. We almost never consider whether we made sure to clear the way for our resolutions to succeed before we started.

Rituals for the New Year: Cleansing & Removing Negativity

In many ways, we have no choice but to bring the past with us was we move from year to year. We all have trauma that we carry with us. We all have relationships that we will bring with us everywhere we go. We all have beliefs and perceptions that might never shed. But there are also many things we can leave behind. We can let go of some of the things that hold us back, that keep us stuck in what we think of as the “old year” by performing a simple cleansing to remove some of the negativity that we carry. Removing negativity isn’t a heal-all solution to all of our problems, but it can help us to feel lighter, to be more focused, and to have more hope as we work in pursuit of our goals and resolutions.

Celebrating Yule: A Midwinter Festival

There are many ways to celebrate Yule. Although the Yule celebrations of pre-Christian history lend themselves primarily to modern Heathen observations, the holiday itself has evolved into many different midwinter traditions. These rituals and traditions are observed by witches and Pagans of all traditions and backgrounds, and the many variations of Yule ritual reflect this.

Winter Warmth: A Hearth Blessing for Any Home

Winter can be lonely and often quite frightening. As we retreat into the shelter of our homes, we find ourselves in closer quarters with the parents, siblings, partners, and other household members that we may have needed a little space from during the rest of the year. When we hunker down, we might hunker down alone, with family that makes us feel less than loved, or even with oppressive spirits and energies. All things which can make the most wonderful time of the year hellacious. We return to our houses, to their spirits, and sometimes to their turmoil. Not every house is a happy one—and even the happiest have their limits. Winter can test those limits.

Cleansing, Blessing & Honoring: Rituals for your Hearth & Home

For practitioners of magic, the home can be an important aspect of both our mundane lives and our magical practices. Ideally, the home is a place in which one feels safe, receptive, and free to be completely themselves (both in regards to personality and practice). As an animist and a cottage witch myself, my home is the shelter that protects me and houses the spirits of property. But it’s also a spirit in and of itself. It is an altar, a tool, and a mentor all at once—and, as such, I’ve dedicated a significant space within my practice to honoring, protecting, and connecting with my home.

Protective Wards for Any Home

Most of us have a natural inclination to protect ourselves. It is instinct that has been ingrained in us since our beginnings as a species. Once we learn to perceive threats for what they are, we respond to them almost automatically. As children, we begin to push, yell, and ball up our fists to protect our personal space or belongings. As we grow, we begin to recognize new threats and learn to adjust our methods. We learn to wear our personalities (or parts of them) as armor to protect ourselves from potential ridicule. We carry whistles and pepper spray to make the early-morning walks to the bus stop a little safe. We view our bedroom doors as a sort of shield to safeguard our privacy and space. We work our entire lives to protect not just our physical bodies, but our happiness and energy as well.

Protective Charms for the Hearth & Home

As practitioners of magic, the drive to protect ourselves is one that we feel on multiple levels. Not only do we feel the need to take physical protective measures—even those as simple as checking the locks at night—many of us also take an interest in magical protection against both mundane and supernatural forces. There are many different methods of protecting the home with magic. Some of the most well-loved are protection charms.

Workings for Samhain

For many witches and Pagans, Samhain is a time of excitement and festivities. The Halloween season is not just a time of year that is—for many members of the magical community—a rare opportunity to show one’s true colors to the world. It also falls alongside Samhain, a celebration of the Spirit Realm and a festival that honors the dead and other spirits. During this time, many witches and practitioners of magic may host rituals to honor the dead, to communicate with spirits, or to strengthen their connection to the Spirit Realm.

An Exploration of Mabon

Mabon is one of the eight festivals on the Wheel of the Year, and is the second of the Wheel’s harvest festivals. Like Lammas (which celebrates the beginning of the grain harvest), Mabon observes the harvest of the orchards and gardens, which farmers would be able to assess their harvest, give thanks for what they were able to bring home, and plan for the rest of the year.

Four Simple Rituals for Manifestation

Manifestation isn’t actually witchcraft—though it can certainly be incorporated into magical practices if you want to do so. It comes from something called the New Thought (or Higher Thought) movement, a spiritual movement that actually started in the 1830’s. It didn’t just pop up one day on the internet. In fact, there have been people writing, lecturing, and teaching about these ideas for almost 200 years. The Law of Attraction (upon which our understanding of manifestation is based) is part of a larger set of spiritual beliefs and practices which focuses on personal divinity, personal power, and the life-changing impact of cultivating a more positive frame of mind.

Circle Casting & Witchcraft

Using a Circle in the practice of witchcraft is a topic of some debate. Some witches swear by using them in every ritual or magical working, while some don’t use them at all. Even if you choose not to incorporate the use of Circles into your magical practice, it is likely one of the first concepts a new practitioner will stumble across and one that you will probably see debated at least a time or two in your journey through the internet. So, what exactly is a Circle, what does it do, and how does one decide if it’s something they should incorporate into their rituals and workings?

A Beginner's Guide to Making Jar & Bottle Spells

Jar and bottle spells have been a fixture of magical practice for a long time—from the folk magical customs of Europe, Africa and the Southern United States to their modern prevalence on social media platforms like TikTok. These kinds of spells are great because they are self-contained, discrete, and simple to assemble. There are many different ways to cast any spell, and assembling a spell bottle or jar is no exception.

How to "Calibrate" a New Tarot Deck (or Recalibrate a Used One)

I tried for years to learn to read Tarot cards—and faced a lot of frustration and disappointment. It wasn’t part of my familial practice and it didn’t come naturally to me. I had already been a practitioner of magic for more than 10 years when I finally had my aha! moment with Tarot. Suddenly, it seemed so obvious and so simple. I could read Tarot because I hadn’t applied my personal rituals and beliefs to reading Tarot. I had tried, instead, to condition myself to read with the rote memorization of books, rather than seeking to connect to the spirit of the Tarot deck like I would any other tool I used in my magical workings. I had never tried to bond with a Tarot deck, or with each card. I had never worked to create a link between myself and my Tarot the way I had with my runes.

How to Break In Your New Tarot Deck Before You Use It

There are few things better than a new Tarot deck. Whether you are a diviner or a collector, sitting down to open and explore a new Tarot deck is a thrill unmatched by most things. A possible exception might be going to the art museum to see a brand-new exhibit. There is no second chance for a first impression; no way to recreate the feeling of the first time you flip through the cards and look at a fresh take on your favorite method of divination. Brand new art, brand new ideas, brand new opportunities.

Study & Practice, Rites & Rituals, DivinationJohannaApril 29, 2020tarot, divination, tarot decksComment

Evoking Change On Your Time

It’s something we can’t escape at the start of a new year, the ceaseless insistence that now is the perfect time, the only time to start something new, to kick an old habit, to lose weight, to make change, to finally get to work on that list of goals you’d like to achieve, and on and on and on. It’s on every other commercial on the radio and tele. It’s nearly all you see on social media. It’s pouring from the mouths of friends and family. It’s even infiltrating the supermarket advertisements. And it’s absolutely ridiculous.

Rites & Rituals, Spells & RitualsKeziahJanuary 15, 2020change, new beginningsComment