Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

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 a tradition that 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