was never ours. Approach the circle from your own experience and write your own incantations. Fall in love with the round. It may serve you to conceive of circle-casting as simply a way of creating sacred space, integral to many animistic traditions; it is a means of both empowering and humbling yourself, of declaring to the elements surrounding you that you are both the maker and what is made, the dreamer and the dream.
The Circle as Story Ritual: Invoking the Witch’s Place
Permit the circle to be a story. This is a foundational ritual, a way of connecting to ground and embodying place.
1.Beginning with north, ask: What does the north mean to me? Is it the holy direction of craggy rocks, winter, and the earth element, or do you have different associations entirely? Recall a memory that you can fully embody and feel quite viscerally. Do you have a memory of feeling completely whole within the essence of the north? It need not be an objectively epic and momentous event. Perhaps you were a child watching snow fall outside your window and knowing you would be granted a blissful and blessed reprieve from academia if only for one day. Perhaps you were standing firm on the ground for the first time since you left a constraining relationship, or perhaps you once looked a mother wolf dead in her eyes and became her kin. Ask yourself what north means to you in this moment, and call up a memory you can see, smell, hear, taste, and feel.
2.Do the same with east, that innocent direction of new beginnings, the air element, spring, garden blooms, and possibility; south, that hot and lustful direction of fruition and high fire; and, last, west, the direction of death, mystery, autumn, gray waters, and muse.
3.Gather all four of your seed memories now, one for each direction, then move to stand here in your House of Initiation facing north. Call to mind your memory for this potent direction; speak whatever words you like that honor what lies before you, perhaps starting with “Beloved and ancient elders of the north, those who are my most whole and compassionate kin, I call to you and invite you into this circle.” Feel the memory with your entire body, perhaps permitting yourself to move in a spontaneous body prayer. Breathe deep. Soften your knees and feel your foot bones connect to ground.
4.Face east and do the same, allowing your seed memory for this direction to arise in your consciousness, stepping into the memory with your whole being, and inviting the blessed and loving ancestors to join you. Do the same for the bright and wild south and the dark and mysterious west. Feel held from below and blessed from above, perfectly positioned in your own story of becoming, fully nested within your body and warmed by your blood.
Alternative to Circle-Casting: The Pentagram of Being
As an alternative to calling the energies of the directions, the “pentagram of being” is a simple way of grounding, acknowledging sacred space, settling into your skin, rooting into a deep knowing that we are cocreated by many forces, and forging a connection between multiple participants in a circle setting, be it intentionally magickal or any other collective that requires an embodied sense of coming together, of joining one another on common ground.
1.Begin by taking a breath low in the belly, feeling whatever bony parts of the body are connecting to ground. On the exhale, settle into the experience of gratitude, humming softly and calling to mind for what or whom you are grateful in this moment.
2.Inhale again, and on the exhale, call to mind your unique ancestry; this can mean envisioning the lands from which your forebears hail, the names of your beloved dead if you know them, or a more general and unnamed sense of the deeper medicine that runs in your blood.
3.For the third point on the pentagram, feel into the land you are on and acknowledge the indigenous people, the tribes by name if possible, that belong to this ground.
4.The fourth point on the pentagram is your own body; take a breath and on the exhale, without judgment, notice the multitude of sensations present in your creaturely body now, at this moment.
5.Last, inhale deeply, and feel into the current season or moon cycle on your fifth and final exhale.
Moving through the entire pentagram of being takes less than one minute, and it is a simple practice that can be done at the inception and ending of gatherings, solitary ceremonies, and any event that deserves a certain level of dedication and reverence.
To My Pagan Foremothers, I Am Still Here
Word-Witching the Circle-Round
I know not whether I dream of you, you circle of hooded heathens with drums ’tween your legs and smoking pipes dangling from your lips, or if I am, in fact, a living dream of yours. Did you conjure me on some dark-cloaked evening when the thunder rolled and the oldest gods walked heavy on the earth? If I be your vision only, even so, I am still here.
Grandmothers of the North, come to me. Bear witness to this initiation of mine while I face the snowcapped mountains and bid my bones become stone. Grandmothers of the East, come to me. Whisper hushed hymns in an alien tongue while I welcome the warmer winds to bless this naked and aging skin of mine. Grandmothers of the South, come to me. Tend this altar fire while that primal dance takes hold of my flesh and animates these overstiff joints dried out from joylessness. Grandmothers of the West, come to me. Drench me in seawater and weave kelp into my locks so I might remember the old salty mother who bore me.
To my Pagan foremothers, I am still here, held by the loamy ground below and blessed by the vast indigo night above. And so it is.
To Tend a Better Altar, to Write a Better Book of Moon and Flame
The time is nearing now, the time when you will leave this House of Initiation and begin to seek out the hags, as you have many times before within this lifetime and countless incarnations. Before you enter each hag’s house, you will be asked to take to your altar, to create a tangible space that will honor the essence, the potency, and the medicine of those particular lunar seasons you find yourself in. Your altar might be simple, a portable tray that can be moved from room to room or a hidden shelf in a cabinet that can be tucked away in the dark. So, too, can your altar be grand and stationary, your holiest of holies in your wild home.
Witchcraft always meets you where you are, and you need not exhaust your precious resources to prepare for this journey. Your altar is a place to work, to make magick, to honor deity if you feel called, to remind you that your witchery is the stuff of beauty, and to serve as hallowed ground, a place to return when life is tugging at your skin. Before you leave this House of Initiation, define an altar space that will support your work, and name it as your own.
Hag Lesson #10
The altar is a touchstone.
Find for yourself, also, a large blank book that will become your Book of Shadows or, if you like, your Book of Moon and Flame, a place to record dream visions, sacred symbols, bizarre images, spellworkings, word-witchery, and all the secrets learned from those cunning hags. This is a living text, a book penned by your hand. You are both author and reader, thus you cannot misstep in writing upon these pages. Clear your altar when ready, place your blank book alone on that surface that will see you through many, many initiations as you journey, take a breath, feel the tingle of intense potential and vast possibility, and begin.
An Initiation of Blood and Bone
