more than instructions to follow.
Hag Lesson #7
What is wild must always change.
Each chapter is a single moon cycle, a single lunar “season,” with three chapters dedicated to spring, summer, and winter, respectively. There are four chapters dedicated to the autumn season, accounting for the enigmatic “thirteenth moon.” Included in applicable chapters are descriptions of rituals and ceremonies for the celebration of the equinoxes; solstices; and the cross-quarter days, called Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc in the Celtic tradition. Each chapter is organized as if you are a guest, a visiting apprentice, in a magick-rich hag’s home. The “Grandmother Speaks” sections describe your mystical encounters with the elder; here, the hag shares her lessons, stories, and words of wisdom for each phase of the moon cycle. The spellwork, ceremonies, and opportunities for reflection are all deeply rooted in the hag’s words to you. While the work is sometimes cumulative from moon to moon, know that you are fiercely encouraged to become the outlaw and stray from course from time to time.
Surely, This Babe Wakes Wild
An Ode to Time’s Outlaws
She is a keeper of secrets, that old Witch, and she just remembered how to slow-dance with time in those forbidden dips and forgotten lifts that defy all our modern schedules and queer our many labels. She has begun a new naming, an initiation of the Holy Wild fool. Surely, this babe wakes wild on this seemingly mundane morning, for her breath comes easier and she’s moving with a certainty only gifted to time’s outlaws, only to those who hold hands with the dark and sacred cosmos, touching solid skin to stardust and whispering aloud to all things alien and infinite. Yes, surely this babe wakes wild; you can see it all in her moments of pause, in that stillness and silence that responds to loudmouthed demands for answers. This year will most certainly be her wildest one yet, truth be told, for she’s come home to the Mystery and rejected those tired rules and outplayed maneuvers meant to birth the best life.
Surely, this babe wakes wild even now, even as the moon sets demurely and the sun rises in its daily ceremony of jewel-bright becoming. They are time’s outlaws, too, you know. The sun and moon have a good laugh together just now, when they pass one another in the sky, at the human creatures’ bustling and going about their business, snickering with an ease that eludes the frantic hearts — but, surely, this babe wakes wild, for she’s taking her lessons from those crawling celestial orbs now. This is her initiation, and she’s set her tamer ways to burn.
A Softer Witchery
There is much to be said for self-discipline, for keeping our promises to ourselves, for harboring a deep knowing that any new way of being in the world is going to come with moments of intermittent discomfort that must be welcomed as small rituals of growth and learning. No long-held pattern is broken without effort, and to forge a more meaningful relationship with time means not only disrupting our own understanding of aging, of success, and of ambition but doing so within a societal context that heralds speed and pins bright medals to the puffiest and proudest chests. To have a gentler partnership with time is to embrace the paradox, to rebel against the systems that rely on a range of ill-isms in order to maintain their power, including but not limited to capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism. It is to reject a central tenet of many world religions: that we live, be it once or through multiple incarnations, in order to reach some great goal, receive some immense pardon or reward from a deity far superior to ourselves, and relieve our tired souls from the earthly grind.
In Weaving the Visions, Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ write: “God’s transcendence is frequently understood to mean that God is different from humanity and nature because God is pure spirit uncorrupted by a physical body. The human body with its connections to nature then is said to keep us from God.” The spiritual practices of those who choose to live — physically, psychically, or otherwise — on the fringes of a society undergoing a large-scale and necessary transformation are inevitably ones that resist unquestioned conformity to linear time and embrace the body’s sanctity.
Witches live on the fringes of what is socially permissible, and — though they acknowledge the merit of certain structures and systems — they are centrally concerned with nourishing a kinship with what is fundamentally wild and of the earth. There is a humility to their Craft, you see, an acknowledgment that many parts of the human experiment have failed, and a thorough and constant admission that they may not know anything for sure in a world that has evolved to not only support and sustain blatant and egregious economic, political, and societal inequities but embed these ills within our very flesh; this is particularly true if they have benefited from these imbalances, as have the white, cisgender, and able-bodied. Witches are constantly unlearning even the self-taught lessons, all while holding themselves in the fiercest compassion and warmest grace, without running from discomfort.
Here, in this House of Initiation, you are invited toward a softer witchery. Here, magick is more of a wave, a pulsing heart, and a slow dance than a penetrative blade. This is an approach to the Craft at once gently structured and entirely malleable according to where you find yourself now in that epic story you are living. Be wild, trusting that wildness is a never-ending process of reclaiming what belongs to you, of owning your ancestral inheritance and, importantly, acknowledging that you belong to this complex and beauteous web we might only call nature.
Hag Lesson #8
We must be gentle with ourselves.
A key lesson learned in the House of Initiation is that no one can impose any rules or restrictions on a Craft that is fundamentally our own. We Witches must constantly be questioning the extent to which, by denigrating the spiritual practices of others, we sustain or even strengthen the very social norms we are attempting to reject. For some, Witchcraft is a religion. For others, Witchcraft is art; neither approach is superior or more authentic, and to assume so is to reinforce spiritual hierarchies similar to those that brought us to the stakes.
Hag Lesson #9
This Craft is yours and ours.
This is your house, Witch. This is a place of beauty and joy, of practice and poetry. Many of those who seek out the Craft do so not because they feel they have been chosen by a deity or born a natural Witch but because they crave slow living — because they sense the majesty in nature, a sense that is now unique and something to be remembered but was once not only a given but the very container for our ancestors’ bodies, psyches, and spirits. In this house, may you live slowly. May you take time for both somber stillness and frenzied dance, and may you reflect on how the elements have always held you — swaddled you, in fact, like an infant hungry for nothing more than a felt-on-the-skin belonging.
Our Wilder Circles
When you leave this house, when you venture out in whatever direction you feel called, you will be offered occasional opportunities to cast a circle. Consider the circle like you would any other container; it holds what you brew, gives you a psychic and physical place to work, and initiates the sanctity of whatever ceremonial act you are about to begin. The circle, if nothing else, frames that particular moment in time when you were at one with your magick.
As with any other aspect of our Craft that we might hold as holy, we must seek to inspire our circle-casting, to carve away the places where calling the directions becomes rote, when we are reciting words written by someone we have never met or from
