Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

begin there. You may be raising your hood against the first autumn wind but feel called to read the invocation for the spring season; begin there. You may live in a brilliantly sunlit place never visited by ice or snow, or in a seemingly uniseasonal land of eternal mist and rain. Even so, begin wherever you feel called. This is not a story with a clear beginning and definitive ending but an ongoing, ever-unraveling, and perennial fairy tale of spellcraft, dream visions, small stories, and moon medicine.

       Meet the Four Sacred Hags

      The archetype of the wild and fearsome hag is found in innumerable tales across countless cultures. She comes as the Cailleach and the Baba Yaga. She comes as the sharp-tongued medicine woman. These wise crones reside in the collective unconscious, tending their cook fires and stirring their cauldrons from their huts, tents, and cottages well hidden within the unmapped terrain of our psychic lands. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in her classic Women Who Run with the Wolves that “this old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knucklebone on which these two worlds turn.” She is not to be overromanticized or made palatable in order to better serve our needs, just as nature does not exist for our consumption. For many, she is the very shadow from which we recoil, the part of our own psyches we have named vile; this is how we know she is our greatest teacher. We are closest to uncovering the hag’s bewitching haunts when we find ourselves tender and immersed in nature, brokenhearted but somehow aligned with those deeper rhythms that no linear calendar could ever adequately predict.

      In this book, you shall meet four hags who are seasonal gatekeepers, elder-teachers of nature’s mysteries, who offer nourishment, challenge, and wisdom to those who dare visit them. There are three lunar seasons for every sun-based season, and it is within these shorter cycles that we truly evolve into more soulful — that is, both uniquely sovereign as well as intimately connected to the collective nature — versions of ourselves. Just as a wise grandmother, just as my own grandmother, might invite you into her home, serve you comfort food by her hearth; confront you with some piece of previously unrealized and hard-to-swallow knowledge; then, finally, provide some invaluably sage advice for moving forward, the three moons of every solar season similarly offer us such cronely education. The first moon of any season provides the sustenance we need, the necessary tastes and psychic nutrition, in order to move on to the challenge offered up by the second moon of the solar season. The last moon is inevitably an initiation to a new level of knowing, where the seeker becomes Priestess and death becomes birth.

      In this book, our year is a slow-paced working retreat to the four houses of the hags, an epic apprenticeship of soul that we undergo again and again, each winter finding ourselves once more standing on the bones of who we used to be, reflecting our memories by the soft glow of a dripping candle. Each spring we seek to heal some still-ailing part of ourselves connected to our inherited aches, somehow discovering the precise medicine we need in the depths of our own psyches. Summer finds us at fruition, a swollen version of ourselves, where our magick is sourced straight from our heart-wells of gratitude and compassion, before shape-shifting our particular griefs into banishing magick during the most haunted season of autumn.

      This journey is not an unending merry-go-round ride but rather a wondrous and ever-widening spiral. Each season holds for you new gifts, new lessons, newly unlocked opportunities to deepen your mastery, to restore and rebirth your way of being in the world. Your inner wise one does not give you anything you do not already have but only shows you where to look.

       Grow the Circle Wider

      For me, these pivotal times often spark childhood memories of watching apocalyptic Hollywood films, of aliens and asteroids come to end the human experiment once and for all. My young and recklessly curious mind, shaped considerably by a good deal of born-again Christian indoctrination and the constant threat of many-headed beasts and four horsemen, would wonder if the impending doom of the world was what was required for human beings to come together, forgive one another, rally, and finally save themselves like they always seemed to do in the movies. Did we need to be in the end-times in order to find a collective compassion?

      As I grew older, as I traveled, as I began to consider a bigger world than the one in which I was raised, I had to unlearn so much about equality and justice, magick and manifestation — words that meant something very different to me, a white woman, than they did to others with less privilege than I had. Now, in my own few slow and quiet moments when I wonder if an Armageddon is, indeed, upon us, I am aware that the love and unity from the Hollywood movies is not possible without the active dismantling of deeply seated and systemic racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and classism, as well as a general fear of otherness.

      My hope is that a commitment to your own healing, to your own story of becoming, coexists with a profound conviction, be it a newfound resolution or a long-standing knowing, that we are part of a collective. Our magick is stronger together. The Witch has been harmed by many of the same systems that continue to harm disproportionately people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the beloved planet, and we can, and indeed must, work to grow the circle. It is time to examine the many ways we may be benefiting from and unintentionally doing harm to those people, to those cultures, we claim to love without relinquishing our own wholeness. On the contrary, we are made more whole when we grow our circles wider, when the fringes swallow the center, when we question our beliefs and deconstruct the very systems that privilege us at the expense of others.

       Hag Lesson #5

      Our circles can grow wider and wider still.

      To that point, I use the word grandmother and the pronouns she and her in this book when referring to one of the “four sacred hags.” This is primarily because, in my mind, all four of these beloved elders are, in part, shades of my own grandmother, and also because our language has not evolved to accurately reflect the complexities of nature. This is not to exclude nonbinary, trans, or other gender-nonconforming individuals from eldership or to herald the gender binary; quite the reverse, I hope this book speaks well and true to anyone with a heathen heart. When I say “woman,” I mean anyone who identifies as a woman; this absolutely includes trans women. Our circles can hold it all, and living slowly does not mean living unchallenged. Witches work with nature. Nature is change, and we were not born to be static in our beliefs, judgments, and ways of expressing our beingness in the world.

       Whisper Words of Lineage

      I am on an unending journey of restitching my ancestral lineage, as many of us are. The whole of my mother line is of Irish descent, and I have understood this for as long as I can remember. At age eighteen, I impatiently waited until I graduated high school, then immediately boarded a plane for Ireland with neither money nor a plan, committed to a stubborn teenage quest to belong, to feel whole. I lived there for a time, spending the potent summer and autumn seasons encountering much mischief in Dublin and escaping into the mists of the west when I could. Something held me there that did not — that in some ways still does not — hold me here, where I was born and raised, on the land of the Lenni-Lenape, the “true people,” outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Much of the lens — a lens I continually break, mend, then break again — through which I look has been shaped by the Celtic Wheel of the Year, by my brief and brutal stint immersed in traditional Wicca during my twenties, by my many elders and loving and not-so-loving teachers I have known since then, and by my sheer devotion to the wild nature that lives beneath my ribs, that pulses in thick rivers through my veins.

       Hag Lesson #6

      Everything is participation.

      The seasons, the stories, the verses, the spells contained in this book are not intended to speak to any particular lineage, and my sincere hope is that they are accessible to anyone, anywhere. They have a Celtic flavor because I have a Celtic flavor, but I believe this cyclical witchery to be universal. We all live in an ever-changing world, after all. We Witches are animists graced by constant rising and setting suns, waxing and waning moons, ebbing and flowing tides. I claim no mastery, and I am personally suspicious of the motives of modern teachers who teach the old ways as if they own them, as if anyone could ever own them, or as if we are living in the same world as the one within which