It’s late, I’m tired, and my body is creaking from the day’s work. I sit down on the edge of my bed, stretch and feel my back crack. I look up and there is a see-through old man, standing, with tears in his eyes. He wears a button up white shirt, black pants, and his face is crinkled with age lines. He asks “Can you help me?” I want to sleep, but I stay awake, listening to him as he describes a long, hard life with kids who all but abandoned him when he was on his deathbed.

Spirits aren’t always on our time schedule. Sometimes they come to us when we least want to see them. Other times, they make come when we need them, but we refuse to recognize it. And yet some others may simply come to people because they are bored and are looking for company. Too many people react to the latter two kinds of spirits negatively, without analyzing what is going on and what may have prompted a visit. It is like me coming to your house and asking for a cup of sugar, only to be screamed at and bounced out.

I propose that we treat spirits, human or not, more humanely. Have a weird, eerie spirit that lurks around your closet? Maybe it likes the energies you put there, like my books and mementos. Maybe it wants you to notice something about yourself, your surroundings or your life. More than likely, in my experience, it wants you to notice it.

Here we can find several questions: What kinds of spirits come to call? What should we do when they come to call? How will I know if I am dealing with a spirit or something else? If I don’t want spirits in my place, what should I do?

To answer any of these will require you to have an open mind about the existence of spirits, whether earthbound former humans, elementals, or just that eerie sense of a presence. If you simply can’t believe in spirits, it’s likely that most will leave you alone. If you’ve closed yourself off to them, your energies will tend to be inaccessible, and there’s not much in you to attract them. While there are exceptions, you generally have to be open to a visit to receive one.

For those whose spiritual, religious, or metaphysical outlook can include spirits, your experiences reflect how you view the spiritual world itself. If you think that most spirits are out to get you, then that is in no small part what you will attract, or at least see everywhere you look. If all you are looking for is an external enemy, someone to blame for your problems, or a fight to be had, that is all you’ll find, because you’ve narrowed your focus and energies to accept only these into your life.

If you are to more than simply throwing spirits off your spiritual front porch, I would recommend a more balanced approach, one which engages the spirits around you. There is a knowing that you have boundaries which are not to be crossed, but still allowing them to be crossed when you know a spirit is not intending ill will to you or loved ones. There is also temperance in the treatment of the spirits that you allow across that boundary, knowing that one experience with a certain kind of spirit may not translate to another. Just as humans are individuals so, too, I have found, are spirits.

What kinds of spirits come to call? Depending on you and your personality, as well as that of the spirits, a wide range may come. I’ll give some basic archetypal names, definitions, and examples that I have experienced to help give common ground.

1. Earthbound Spirits

   Definition: Spirits that once had a living body on Earth. Ghosts, specters, and many haunting human spirits are attributed as Earthbound Spirits, but they may also be animals and plants that once inhabited a space. Their “age” can range from the recently deceased to the ancient dead.

   Example: An old man who had died recently came to me just as I was about to lie down, wanting to tell me about his life. He was “passing through” and stopped by to pay me a visit. He scared the hell out of me; I almost threw him out of my place because he didn’t know to “knock” on my boundaries (more on this later).

2. Ancestor Spirits

   Definition: Spirits that are related to a living person by blood, familial, or metaphysical ties. These spirits tend toward guiding, guardianship, or simply part and parcel of being part of a family. Experiencing ancestor spirits tends to depend upon one’s view of blood relations, family, and whether metaphysical ritual do or do not place one into a lineage or spiritual family.

   Example: I have blood relatives that contact me, especially my sister who passed on before I was born. She does not guide me or guard me in any overt way, but we speak on occasion.

3. Elemental Spirits

   Definition: Spirits that are tied to the elements, such as gnomes (earth), sylphs (air), salamanders (fire), and undines (water). I know that some look on these aforementioned archetypal spirits as faeries, but I differentiate the fae from these, the former being a kind of spirit all unto Itself.

   Example: The woods near my home have several spirits of earth that reside there, both in the ground and trees. Some prefer to be called tree spirits, noting that while they may rooted in the same element as earth spirits, dirt is not a tree and vice versa. These tend to be communicative when I am quiet or dead silent, and I “listen” with intent.

4. Spirits of Place

   Definition: Spirits that are the overarching spirit of a place, a being composed of the various energies of an area. Spirits of Place can be a grove of trees as much as they can be an entire city. City blocks, even if the city has an overarching Spirit, may have its own Spirit of Place. Similarly, it can be seen how neighbors contribute to the spirit of a neighborhood, whether by their attitudes, how they treat their homes, how safe people feel there. Like with an environment, even the decor of the place can influence how the spirit of the area is formed, or what parts of a spirit of place people interact with.

   Example: The spirit of my nearby grove of trees is peaceful overall, concerned with keeping its area clean and growing. The spirit of my town is concerned with a growing drug problem, its streets having more homeless on it, and its degrading streets and sidewalks because of reduced work on them. The former is part of the latter, but is autonomous, existing within the energy pattern that forms the spirit of my town.

5. Spirits of Purpose

   Definition: A spirit that exists to perform a specific function, such as protection, guidance, etc. These spirits can be sent from a God/dess, be part of another spirit.

   Example: As an example, spirit purely of growth exists to make things grow for good or ill, whether it is a tumor or a patch of grass. Another example would be a spirit of blight, who feeds on and seeks to expand it within its area.

6. Constructed Spirits

   Definition: Spirits who are specifically constructed by magical practitioners. These tend to have specific functions, but there have been efforts made to create whole spirits who have personalities and motives all their own.

   Example: I have created a spirit to protect my car and its occupants from harm, fashioning them out of my own energy. A great example of creating a spirit was carried out by the Toronto Society for the Paranormal (TSPR), “The idea was to assemble a group of people who would make up a completely fictional character and then, through seances, see if they could contact him and receive messages and other physical phenomena — perhaps even an apparition. The results of the experiment — which were fully documented on film and audiotape — are astonishing.”¹

7. Totemic Spirits

   Definition: Spirits that are the overarching spirit of an animal or entity that is revealed to a person. It can be representative of the qualities humans see in the being, or may inherently possess the qualities dependent on the spirit and human involved.

   Example: A totemic spirit of the Dung Beetle came to me a few months ago in a meditation and has worked with me on rolling the “poop” in my life up and making use of it. In this role, it guides me and helps me out, and I honor it by giving offerings and listening to his wide range of bad poop jokes.

8. Spirit Companions

   Definition: A spirit that develops a deep connection to a human by intent of the human or spirit. It does not necessarily mean a romantic connection; it can also be a friendly or specific purpose-driven connection.

   Example: Calling up a spirit, befriending it, and no longer calling upon it. Being able to call to it and speak with it, and vice versa, and letting it go when it wishes.

9. Deity Spirits

   Definition: A spirit sent by or representing a Deity.

   Example: This could be something like a fae messenger from the Tuatha De Danaan. Alternatively, it could be something like the Metatron or Hunin and Munin from Norse mythologies, who are the spirits of Forethought and Afterthought that sit upon the shoulders of Odin.

So now that we have some definitions to work with, what do you do once you and a spirit meet? Well, be cautious unless you absolutely know the spirit and where it comes from. Essentially, treat it like any other stranger you would. Ideally, with respect, caution, and a give-and-take conversation until you know each other better. But how would you even talk with a spirit?

To start spirit communication, you should be able to do a few things first:

• Be able to ground your subtle energy, center it and your focus, and direct your subtle energies reliably.
  
• Be able to mark out spiritual space for yourself, such as casting a magick circle, or creating an astral temple.
  
• Having some method by which you can interpret abstract input / stimuli or input / stimuli from outside yourself; not everyone uses vision for this, though this method dominates most books. Some people “hear” the spirit world, whereas some may “feel” it. I use quotes because many rationalize or have translation from their subtle body/astral body into physical sensation so they can process what occurs in the spirit world. It differentiates from physically seeing an object in the spirit, to spiritually “seeing” it.
  
• Have a person or people with which to share the experience. Sometimes the best thing to have is a sounding board for your experiences. They can not only keep you grounded, but if you are stuck, can suggest ways of working with your circumstances, and help find solutions to problems you may have down the road.
  
• Be willing and able to set boundaries. Spirits should not feel they can wake you at all hours of the night, nor should you feel obligated to let them. You should also know when not to communicate with the spirit realm, and when too much is too much.

With that out of the way, what about some actual methods for spirit communication?

• Communication on the astral plane. If you know how to do this, you can project yourself into a protected neutral space and carry on a conversation. For tips on how to do this in depth, I would recommend picking up a guide such as Ted Andrews’ How to Meet and Work With Spirit Guides, or Christopher Penczak’s Spirit Allies: Meet Your Team from the Other Side.
  
• Communication by talking board. One of the most maligned ways of communicating with spirits, but in my opinion, in can be one of the most effective if you use it right. Using it wrong is calling out to any spirit with no protective magick circle or knowledge of how to clear out entities from a working space, and accepting whatever the spirit says to you, with this or any other method, as gospel. Using it right would be spiritually cleansing the area where you will use the board, casting a magick circle for protection and guarding you in the circle, and having items for a quick clearing spell for the circle on hand.
  
• Communication by fire, smoke, water, or similar means. Perhaps more abstract than the previous two, I have found this method works best when you elementally align it with the spirit in question. This is because, in my experience, beings like elemental spirits might be more apt to respond via a physical representation of their element. Simply lighting a candle and gazing into it may draw out imagery that you can interpret for yourself as to the intent of the spirit.
  
• Communicate via a medium. Someone who can help interpret the spirit world can be a great aid, or a great detriment. Open and honest communication (i.e. you respecting their boundaries, they not sugar-coating messages) can empower a great working relationship that can deepen both parties’ spirituality and depth of experience.
  
• Communication by manifestation. This may sound odd at first, but think of it like this: you want proof the spirit you think is reaching out for you is real. To prove to you that something is trying to communicate, you ask the spirit to give you signs and coincidences that speak to you that others may not catch. Although this takes a bit of open-mindedness and practice, the results can be very interesting. I will caution that this way is probably the hardest and has the slowest way of bringing out results from working with or communicating with a spirit. However, when deity spirits have gotten in contact with me with this method, the messages have been unmistakable and direct, placed in such a way that I know for me that it is not my subconscious.

There are far more means of contacting spirits than I have listed here. Almost every culture has had some way of speaking with the dead and other spirits; even Catholicism appeals to saints for a wide variety of reasons, from protection to selling your home.

The greatest challenge you may have once you open this door is learning to close it. So long as you have established boundaries, such as making sure spirits know what times are off limits, and keep to them, most spirits should leave you alone as you ask. Let’s say for the sake of argument that a spirit won’t stop coming around at bad times for you, or is trying to intimidate or control you; what do you do?

Take a passage from Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic.” The worst thing you can do is feed into the spirit’s ego, or empower it by giving it your energy by freaking out. There are some tried and true methods I have used to make spirits leave if they will not do so of their own volition.

• Rebuke them. That’s right; the power of Me compels you. Or the power of your God/dess, your dishsoap . . . anything that gives you the feeling of power and control of the situation. Using an empowered object by your Will, magick, what have you, and projecting energies that assert your authority, in my experience, are highly effective. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Whatever you do, it just needs to either remind the spirit (or yourself) that you are in control of your body / place / etc., and / or that it has no power over you. The rebuking itself can be as strict as a demand followed by a spiritual boot to the ass to leave, to a simple “No, this is my space.”
  
• Calling on deity / spirits / etc. Don’t be afraid to call in family, friends, and / or allies to deal with a spirit that refuses to respect you and your space. From something as simple as wearing a grounding stone to bed or placing it beneath your pillow, to fashioning an egregores to take your “calls,” you have a wider range of options with help. It is not weak to ask for it, and it is not weak to say “I can do this much, and no more.” In fact, that is oftentimes harder, and better for all involved.
  
• Using a sigil. Sigils are shortcuts, graphics that can be word amalgamations, random scribbles, or made from a standard sigil creator. It can give you a direct line to the spirit involved, especially if a spirit “gives” it to you in telepathic communication or automatic writing. A sigil can empower your Will against or with the spirit it is of, or aligning your energies much more naturally with it because you are engaged with its symbol. This works like a sympathetic link, much like having someone’s hair, or an image of a person, one more way of energetically connecting to a person or thing. I have found the Rosy Cross of the Rosicrucians to be an effective method for making sigils, as I have combining letters into a graphic. For instance, TBL for Table, as shown here:
  

• Cleansing. From a shower to a full-on ritual with a censer and aspergillium, the rite is to cleanse a place or person of spiritual ties or excess spiritual energies. A shower can double as a cleansing area, whether you perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in it or visualize the excess energies dripping off of your body as you clean yourself. The specifics of it are up to you; if you want to rectify or keep the relationship with the spirit, don’t cut off all ties with the cleansing, but target the rite to help cleanse the relationship itself. Again, using the shower method, you can visualize your connections as colored cords connecting you to the spirit, washed clean but not washed away. If you plan on having a long-term relationship with a spirit, this may simply be good spiritual hygiene on your part.
  
• Putting up “walls” / empowering your “shields.” Putting up shields is projecting protective energy to make a barrier, preventing contact you do not wish to have, and accepting that which you do. I tend to meditate every day on my shields, through visualization, meditation and other practices layering them up or performing upkeep so they continue to work the way I want them to. Putting up walls is intentionally arranging heavy amounts of your energies, and / or energy body, to block reception and oftentimes the giving off of certain energies. For instance, if you do not want any kind of spirit communication from the outside world, putting up walls (again, through visualization and the like) will block any and all spirits from contacting you. Think about this: you are effectively cutting yourself off from a form of communication. Before putting up walls, weigh the pros and cons. What are you cutting yourself off from? What are you allowing in? What are you keeping in with your walls?

Should you decide to communicate with spirits, your own experiences will tell you best how to do so. This text is just a beginning primer to get your ideas flowing, to ease you into spirit communication, and give you some solid ground to lift off.

©2010 by Sarenth.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Sources

• Wagner, Stephen. “How to Create a Ghost”

on an Easter long ago
the Dark Night of the Soul
the self crucified on the cross of Ego
“Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?”
It is Finished!

the stone, Restriction,
rolled away by Will
light beamed forth
from within

it was I who arose
bearing the Light
no grace, no guilt,
no sin, no god in sight

I laughed
stepping forth into the Day
created by the spark within
shedding rays of Light, Life, Love and Liberty

©2010 by Shawn Gray.

All magical practices, western or eastern, from tribal incantations to dudes drawing magic circles in their mom’s basement, every jot, tittle, and trickle of magic boils down finally to two fundamental laws: similarity and contagion. Cognitive scientists now regard these as “faulty thinking,” and from a strictly materialist perspective they are. But seen through our lens of Neoplatonism, we can see just how rational these two ways of viewing the world can be.

The first law of magic, the law of similarity, says that any two objects that share characteristics are, in some sense, connected. One of the implications of the law of similarity is the doctrine of signatures, which says in short that any object announces its inner nature by its outward appearance. Crudely, and rather ineffectively, we can imagine that ugly people are immoral. But it’s really much more subtle than that.

From a Neoplatonic perspective, an object’s outward characteristics are symbolic of the ideal form from which it springs. These characteristics include shape, color, taste, smell, and feel. In other words, an object announces to our physical senses its nonphysical characteristics. A ruby therefore, being red, takes on characteristics of all those things we regard metaphorically as “red.” A thorn, being sharp, represents all acts of penetration and aggression. Asafoetida, being smelly, represents repulsion and banishing and Indian food.

Actions, too, can be categorized by the law of similarity. If I walk around clockwise in a circle, I become the sun which also seems to “walk” clockwise around the earth. If I eat a piece of the body of Christ, I become his disciple because I share in the same last supper. In fact, all ritual actions evoke a metaphoric (but not unreal) similarity to archetypal or Ideal events. Knocking in a pattern of ! !! !!! !!!! doesn’t just make noise: it creates the universe. On the world of physical interaction, it’s noise, soundwaves, with no meaning (because, after all, on the purely physical world nothing can mean anything: you need a mind to mean). But in the world of Ideals, I have climbed the ladder a bit and reenacted the tetractys, a symbolic description of how the four elements produce all of creation.

We can sum up similarity in two phrases: like proceeds from like, and as above, so below. These statements are both two ways of saying the same thing. Imagine that we have an Ideal Form existing in the world of forms. Call it A. From it are produced two like things: a, and alpha. We can see the relationship of a to alpha, and so we can say that both of them must be connected, having both proceeded from the same like thing. Therefore, we can say, that the A in the world of forms is “like” the a and the alpha in the world of matter. This “like” is the hinge of a simile, and the principle of metaphor governs the relationship of objects to their ideal forms.

Similarly, we can have an idea — “solar,” let’s say. From this ideal Form proceeds a number of material things: the body we call the sun, certain round and golden flowers, emotions in our bodies that make us feel warm and powerful, and a shining golden-red stone. By similarity, I can use one thing to affect all others. If I want success, that event that causes a warm and powerful feeling, perhaps I could carry that particular stone, make a tisane of that flower. Or I use various mathematical relationships and abstract images regarded as solar, and inscribe a hexagon on paper or in my mind. Or I could mix the approaches, and use both the worlds of matter and the world of mind to climb the ladder back to the original Form, and from it to descend again into reality. If I wish to go from a to alpha, I can climb back up to A and then back down again.

The law of contagion, simply put, says that once together, always together. A hair from my head is me, no matter how far it is removed. In the world of Forms distance doesn’t matter, nor do the boundaries we draw around ourselves. We are now what we have ever been, and anything touched by me is, in some sense, me. Dirt from my footprint, for example, contains my identity: it is where I have trod, where I have been, and therefore where I am.

So to affect me, one needs some part of me. It could be as simple as my name, but it could also be some physical object I have touched. Ideally, it is some combination of physical things and abstract ideas.

Frazer, who first codified these laws (see my December column), does not speak highly of magic. He regards it, with a fervor only a late 19^th century rational man could, as abominable superstition and failed science. But leaving aside his vitriolic assessment, these laws have been found to be nearly universal. No matter where you go, among which people, they will regard objects once together as always together. A somewhat famous experiment involved gathering a group of subjects, unwrapping a brand new flyswatter, sterilizing it before the group, then stirring a pot of tea with it. No one would drink the tea, not because it was physically contaminated but because it was emotionally contaminated. A similar experiment involved used clothing, some of which was announced to have belonged to a murderer. Despite the clothing being identical in all other regards, no one wished to wear a murderer’s shirt.

Perhaps these laws are universal because, as some suggest, all people are inherently irrational. Or perhaps they are universal because they are, in fact, laws governing reality. Will those who drink from the tea stirred with a sterilized flyswatter become ill? No, probably not. But they will become contaminated, and they will know it, in the world of Forms.

We can see how these laws play out in two diverse systems of magic, which reveal themselves to be stems of the same root. You can’t get much more diverse than the traditional Renaissance ceremonial magician and the Hoodoo root doctor. The ceremonial magician creates a careful working table inscribed with the appropriate symbols. The Hoodoo doctor rubs some oil on a John the Conqueror root and puts it in a red flannel bag. The ceremonial magician offers a prayer to Venus while wearing green robes; the Hoodoo doctor adds a pair of natural magnets, carefully selected to lock together, into the bag. The renaissance magician draws an image on a piece of paper consistent with the planetary positions, and carries it with her; the Hoodoo doctor “dresses” his bag with special oil, with an evocative and catchpenny name like “Come to Me” or “Bend Over” (or, my personal all-time favorite, “Follow Me Boy,” although this particular imaginary Hoodoo doctor don’t swing that way).

It seems they’re both doing very different things. But in reality, although their outward actions are the same, in the world of Forms what they do is identical, and will, all things being equal, have identical effects.

Now, keeping in mind that I’m no Hoodoo root doctor, let me start by analyzing the easier of the two for me: the Renaissance magician. The table is the universe: the symbols inscribed thereon share, through similarity, the qualities of the elements and planets. Thus, when the Renaissance magician sets something on this table, she sets it in the world of manifestation. For her, green, the color of new plant life in the Spring, is the color of Venus, the planet of fecund fertility. Again, the two things are united by similarity. Finally, the seal itself borrows a traditional image that shares, in metaphoric images, the qualities of the particular stellar configuration. In an elegant bit of contagion, the planetary configuration at the time of the working is deemed to be “fixed” by the talisman. By making such a thing during a time symbolically propitious for love, the Renaissance magician has created a sort of astrological bubble of contagion that will always be “together” with that stellar configuration.

With some help from Catherine Yrenwode’s website, Lucky Mojo, let’s look at our Hoodoo doctor. First, John the Conqueror is a brown, bulbous root from the plant Ipomoea jalapa. When dried, it very much resembles a testicle. By similarity, therefore, it represents sexual passion. It also gains some of its power through contagion. John the Conqueror was, according to legend, an African prince who, captured into slavery, maintained his inner freedom and spirit by tricking his masters. When he returned to Africa, he left the root behind so that other oppressed people could call upon his wit and cleverness in his absence. The root, therefore, shares by contagion with overcoming and conquering through wits rather than main strength. The lodestones or natural magnets, obviously, sport a signature of attraction. And the oils used for anointing are derived from more or less traditional recipes, all of which can be similarly analyzed.

But wait: one magician uses green to attract love, while another uses red. That should surely betray an underlying inconsistency in magical practices that must point out a crack in the whole edifice. After all, if science worked this way, we’d be unable to build a bridge. If e were 2.7 to one group of people, and 1.8 to another, we’d soon see nature collapse in confusion.

But what we find here is not an inconsistency. It’s important to remember that the signature of physical things is a reflection of the perfect form. Some forms reflect very clearly: e is 2.718 in Spain and in France and in New York City. But other forms reflect faintly, and are seen through human eyes. In Cabalistic magic, red is anger and energy and violence; in Hoodoo, red is love and sex. In Cabalistic magic, green is love and nature and growth; in Hoodoo, green is money. How can we account for these differences and still claim that both systems work, and are in fact ultimately the same Form of magic?

First, remember that Hoodoo is American magic. It began under a certain social situation — and let’s not be coy. It began because of slavery. European Americans took people from Africa, brought them to a continent with different flora and fauna, and took away their languages, their traditions, and their families. I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to understand the underlying trauma of this: not just a trauma to individuals but a trauma to culture itself. And not just Black American culture. Americans of every race find themselves in a culture shaped, sometimes for evil and sometimes, strangely, for good, by this trauma. While I loathe racism, I wouldn’t want to give up rock and roll, for example. And my ancestors were still digging potatoes in Ireland when slavery ended, yet I am shaped by this history because I am an American.

The spiritual technicians of various groups and subgroups might find themselves mixed together in conditions as traumatic as these. Africa is linguistically rich; even if you speak a relatively common language like Hausa, there’s no guarantee that the slave you share your quarters with speaks the same language. You must learn to communicate in the same creole you use to talk to the white people who claim to own you. Furthermore, your spiritual technologies were based largely on the power of ancestors, but you were in a land where the very soil was different. Moreover, the cult objects of your people were all gone, and while you remembered the songs and chants you couldn’t teach them to others because they didn’t have the language.

What you did, then, was simple: you made do. You found herbs and fauna and reanalyzed their signatures. You took the spiritual system imposed on you and used it to replace your cult objects, your store of ancestors. And you looked again at your traditional color symbolism. Since you lived in an agricultural environment, you knew that the fecundity of the land remained the source of prosperity. But in this new place, they traded the green of the land for green paper, a ritual that you recognized. It was simple symbolism: and so green could remain prosperity.

Seen in this light, the green = money equation of Hoodoo isn’t terribly different from the green = love symbolism of Renaissance magic. Both begin with contagion: the green of nature becomes green in general. For the Renaissance magician, this fecund green is love; but for the Hoodoo doctor, it’s money. But it’s still, ultimately, derived from the same contagion.

Similarly, red symbolizes love in Hoodoo. But consider what love was in this place. Even if you found love, and your master let you love, you could lose your love in a moment. To love was an act of reckless courage, and it ended in blood: either the blood of childbirth or the blood of death and separation. To the Renaissance magician, blood was the result of violence. Even the blood of childbirth occurred behind a door, in the presence of midwives, and not on the dirt floor of a hut. But to both, the redness of the blood, by contagion, became red itself.

Both systems, then, grow out of the same set of laws, and even borrow the meaning of their colors, often, from the same things. Of course, slavery did not last forever. Once free, Black Americans found themselves on another kind of precipice. Again, clinging with fingertips over the abyss of poverty, in a land of prosperity, magic changed in reaction to the circumstances. But the underlying principles of all true magic remain the same.

How many Renaissance magicians knew about Neoplatonism? All of them, presumably. But among Hoodoo doctors, or English cunning folk, or Pennsylvanian hexmeisters, or Native American medicine men, how many knew of the philosophy of Plotinus and Iamblichus? The answer almost certainly is “a few.” Black American magicians, for example, were voracious for reading material, once literacy became legal among them (and probably before). But not all. Yet they discovered, by trial and error, the same principles that govern all other systems of magic. We find, when we probe the surface of nature, that under her robes lies the shining light of Forms, no matter our color, our language, or the outward forms of our practices.

©2010 by Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Sexuality, while it should be a topic of freer thinking in the pagan community, is still viewed with great suspicion in many of our circles, covens, and pagan philosophies. In fact, it has become a very sensitive topic, bringing out suspicion, fear and misinformation, which we would normally discover in the world of our evangelical Christian counterparts. I for one, being a former evangelical seminarian, and well versed in their philosophy, have come to see many pagans as harboring the same misconceptions. And those who have published anything on the subject are seen by some as strange or otherwise abnormal. In my opinion, there are several reasons for this phenomenon.

Many pagans come from abusive, strict, religious upbringings, where the ideas of sexual expression were literally in the vise of fear based teachings. Being a child of the Catholic Church, my peers and I were deeply indoctrinated — anything sexual was purely for the bonds of marriage, and primarily for procreative purposes. The topics of pleasurable sex, masturbation, desire, and normal biological functions were taught as “sinful,” dirty, and repulsive. Many parents, ingrained in these ridiculous doctrines, passed on the teachings to their children as universal truths to be obeyed at any cost, whether that cost be physical or emotional. What is really amusing to me is that in the Bible itself, there’s a book named “Songs of Solomon,” that is filled with sexual references. However, I never received one iota of teaching in seminary school from this book. In fact, I never heard one speech, lesson, or sermon on this book.

If you expressed sexual desires that were biologically normal and functional, you were told this was bad in the eyes of God” and that it would lead down the road to damnation. This just furthers the damage in a child and in many adults in the religious world, who, instead of doing their own independent research, are instructed to simply, “trust and obey.” One is never to think, and then decide if one should obey. Sadly, the Christian world, even in this calendar 21^st century, continues to espouse these spiritually and sexually damaging teachings.

As pagans, we are supposed to be on a higher plane, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Remember why you became a pagan? Was it not because you experienced the spiritually deadening effects of the fundamentalist realm? Would you as a pagan still carry and pass along that emotional baggage to your children? Did you not discover a newness of spirit and emotional freedom in being pagan? No matter what your tradition, why would anyone allow themselves to be bound in the past?

As a person of color, I am often asked whether it matters about my “alternative” view of spirituality, and my personal practices. This is a question that seems to bother a lot of people, especially those reared in very structured backgrounds. I ask them this question. Was there a law written somewhere, that because you were raised a certain direction, that you have no power to change your spiritual path? None have ever answered in the affirmative. Yet too many people, because of birth culture and customs, simply refuse to change, or to even explore the possibility of different paths.

Some are afraid that if they do make a conscious change, there will be ethereal after effects, such as their “soul” going to hell. This has been deeply ingrained in most people I encounter, especially those whose background was of a very strictly enforced religious nature. When I was an evangelical, there were numerous episodes of hearing ministers strenuously warning people against exploring other spiritual paths. Their way was the “only true way” to whatever God they worshiped. To do otherwise was to endanger your afterlife. For many years, I sort of believed this, although there were many lingering doubts. I could not fathom in my mind and heart any loving Deity that would throw someone into a burning, boiling, hellish atmosphere, simply because they were of another faith. What if such a person died without ever hearing about my religion? Are they going to hell? What about deeply spiritual people such as Gandhi, Hindu by faith, who lived a great life. Is he in hell now? The rules seemed impossible, narrow-minded, and bigoted.

Spirituality and birth culture do have many common roots, especially when you delve into the issues of ancient history, tribal customs, and sectarian beliefs and practices — you can understand why people adhered to their particular spiritual or religious practices. Some tribal cultures were not as educated as we are, and certainly did not have the diversity of ideas that we enjoy. And yet even in these so called “modern times,” there are still those who live under this type of emotional and spiritual bondage, along with others who are imposing the so called “rules.”

People have an inborn nature of exploration, seeking new ideas that lead to more innovative thinking. If not, the computer I write this on would probably never have existed. We would still be lighting our homes with candles, and cooking with fires and cauldrons. The old superstitions of life would still apply in everything. People such as Galileo, Copernicus, Marco Polo, Isaac Newton and others would have never made their wondrous discoveries. Think about a world where Leonardo DaVinci did not invent or create. And yet, even today we still have many people following as sheep, rather than striking out and discovering their true spiritual identity. Fear of the unknown, potential loss, and admonitions from rather turgid doctrines are the elements of blame here. True spirituality is where you have balance and harmony. It comes when you have a newness of life and spirit, not ignorance and fear or preconceived notions of the world and people around you who are “different.” It accepts all as true spiritual beings who harbor hopes and dreams and are unique in their individual natures. There are still too many people bound by the traditions of parents, birth cultures and upbringing. When they finally break free, then the truth of spirituality will enliven their hearts, and spirits. Their minds will be open to new and wondrously creative concepts.

Ancient pagans did not view sexuality for the sole purpose of having children. They understood the joys, ecstasies, and pleasures of sexuality. For many paths, sex is considered the “Divine Union” of the goddesses and gods. For example, look to the works of the Kama Sutra. Filled with sexual positions, there is the deep belief that the Indian deities engaged in sexual dalliances, doing so with joy and enthusiasm. Even in pre-Christian parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa, one will discover many examples of various deities having sexual exchange. If you are willing to do the research, these ideals will become clear as crystal.

Sacred sexuality has a rich history. In the pre-Christian era of the Roman and Greek empires, two gods and several goddesses are noted for sexually attuned festivals, and practiced open sexuality in many rituals, temple practices and in certain cycles of the seasons. Bacchus and Dionysus were among the gods who notably embraced sexuality. Celtic deities too numerous to list had rituals that were intermingled with sexual activity. Certain sabbats and esbats are sexually attuned with nature. Sexuality is not just a physical expression. It is a mixture of physical, emotional, and spiritual investment that, when mixed with an atmosphere of love, reverence, and mutual honor, reaps joyful and boundless rewards.

We are born as sexual beings. From birth. sex is very much a component of our linear existence, in both spiritual and physical terms. To deny, hide or misinform ourselves or others shows a highly abnormal attitude concerning that which is perfectly natural, as well as nurturing. The pagan community needs to examine itself as a whole and come to grips with this issue. Sexual freedom is a part of our very being.

Does this mean that we should not be sexually responsible? Should we just have “free for all sex” just because we are pagan? Of course not. As with anything, there are responsibilities. Sacred sexuality should never be treated as a libido driven hippie fest. Unfortunately, there are those who do so, making otherwise responsible and respectable pagans who explore this issue appear as “perverts” or “bent abnormally.” Sexuality should be joyful, and a free expressions of your pagan personality. It does represent the “Divine Union.” Each person should honor their sexual partner as Goddess or God, according to their gender.

Even in a circle or Coven, rituals of sacred sexuality should be carefully scripted, composed with the sacred being the highest goal, and all activity should be safe, sane and consensual. Consider those words as a Wiccan would the Rede, or the Law of Return. Even spiritual tools, such as crystals, runes, tarot, and pendulum are useful in the discovery of sexual wisdom. Unlocking the mysteries of love, romance, intimacy, sexual desires, and partnership will elevate your spirituality, I encourage us all to explore our pagan sexual natures.

©2010 by Mel Fleming II.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Bio; Rev. Mel J. Fleming II is organizer of the Circle of the Pheonyx Sacred sexuality groups. He is an eclectic pagan of 15 years, having completed courses in human relations, human sexuality, marriage and family, counseling, abnormal psychology, comparative religions. He is ordained by the Universal Life church, with a Masters in philosophy, just having obtained his Ph.d. He is the author of the newly published book The Tarot, and the Mysteries of Love and Sex, along with Ms. Cynthia Joyce Clay of Oestara Publishing.

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts allegedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate — twilight in the local dialect — in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: This was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar — they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft — rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer and also an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians. As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal — sorcery was a hanging offence — but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury — your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16^th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person. Ultimately, the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: “No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists.” Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

The crimes of which Mother Demdike and her fellow witches were accused dated back years before the 1612 trial. The trial itself might have never happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult. Until his reign, witch persecutions had been relatively rare in England compared with Scotland and Continental Europe. But James’s book Daemonologie presented the idea of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation. Shakespeare wrote his play Macbeth, which presents the first depiction of a witches’ coven in English drama, in James I’s honour.

To curry favour with his monarch, Lancashire magistrate Roger Nowell of Read Hall arrested and prosecuted no fewer than twelve individuals from the Pendle region and even went to the farfetched extreme of accusing them of conspiring their very own Gunpowder Plot to blow up Lancaster Castle. Two decades before the more famous Matthew Hopkins began his witch-hunting career in East Anglia, Roger Nowell had set himself up as witchfinder general of Lancashire.

What do we actually know about Mother Demdike? At the time of her trial she appears as a widow and matriarch, living in a place called Malkin Tower with her widowed daughter Elizabeth Device, and her three grandchildren, James, Alizon, and Jennet. Her clan was very poor and supported themselves by a combination of begging and by the family business of cunning craft. The trial transcripts mention that local farmer John Nutter of Bull Hole Farm near Newchurch hired Demdike to bless his sick cattle. Interestingly John Nutter chose not to testify against her family in the trial.

Demdike’s family at Malkin Tower had a powerful rival in the form of Chattox, another widow and charmer, who lived a few miles away at West Close near Fence. Chattox allegedly bewitched to death her landlord’s son, Robert Nutter of Greenhead, for attempting to rape her daughter, Anne Redfearne. For social historians it’s interesting to see how having a fearsome reputation as a cunning woman could be the only true power a poor woman could hope to wield.

Unfortunately this could also backfire as it did with Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, who exchanged angry words with a pedlar outside Colne in March, 1612. Moments later the pedlar collapsed and suddenly went stiff and lame on one half of his body and lost the power of speech. Today we would clearly recognise this as a stroke. But the pedlar and several witnesses were convinced that Alizon had lamed her victim with witchcraft. Even she seemed to believe this herself, immediately falling to her knees and begging his forgiveness. This unfortunate event triggered the arrest of Alizon and her grandmother. Alizon wasted no time in implicating Chattox, her grandmother’s rival, and Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redfearne.

The four accused witches were interrogated by Roger Nowell, and then force-marched to Lancaster Castle, walking over fells and moorland. Both Demdike and Chattox, whose real name was Anne Whittle, were frail and elderly. It was amazing they survived the journey. In Lancaster they were handed over to the sadistic Thomas Covell, the gaoler who reputedly slashed the ears off Edward Kelly, friend of John Dee, when he was arrested on the charge of forgery. The women were chained to a ring in the floor in the bottom of the Well Tower. Although torture was officially forbidden in England, gaolers were allowed to starve and beat their prisoners at will. Being chained to a ring in the floor and kept in constant darkness would certainly feel like torture for those who had to endure it.

On Good Friday following the arrests, worried family and friends met at Malkin Tower to discuss what they would do in regard to this tragic situation. Constable John Hargreaves came to write down the names of everyone present and later Roger Nowell made further arrests, accusing these people of convening at Malkin Tower on Good Friday for a witches’ sabbat, something he would have read about in Daemonologie. The arrests didn’t stop until he had the mythical thirteen to make up the alleged coven. Twelve were kept at Lancaster and one, Jennet Preston who lived over the county line in Gisburn, Yorkshire, was sent to York. Apart from Chattox and Demdike and their immediate families, none of these newly arrested people had previous reputations as cunning folk. It seemed they were just concerned friends and neighbours who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kept in such horrible conditions, Demdike died in prison before she came to trial, thus cheating the hangman. The others experienced a different fate.

The first to be arrested, Alizon was the last to be tried at Lancaster in August, 1612. Her final recorded words on the day before she was hanged for witchcraft are a moving tribute to her grandmother’s power as a healer. Roger Nowell, the prosecutor, brought John Law, the pedlar she had allegedly lamed, before her. Again Alizon begged the man’s forgiveness for her perceived crime against him. John Law, in return, said that if she had the power to lame him, she must also have the power to heal him. Alizon regrettably told him that she wasn’t able to, but if her grandmother, Old Demdike had lived, she could and would have healed him.

Mother Demdike is dead but not forgotten. By the mid-17^th century, Demdike’s name became a local byword for witch, according to John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folklore. In 1627, only fifteen years after the Pendle Witch Trial, a woman named Dorothy Shaw of Skippool, Lancashire, was accused by her neighbour of being a “witch and a Demdyke.”

History is a fluid thing that continually shapes the present. Long after her demise, Mother Demdike and her fellow Pendle Witches endure, their story and spirit woven into the living landscape, its weft and warp, like the stones and the streams that cut across the moors. Enthralled by their true history, I wrote my novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, dedicated to their memory. Other books have been written about the Pendle Witches, but mine turns the tables, telling the story from Demdike and Alizon Device’s point of view. I longed to give these women what their world denied them — their own voice. Their voices deserve to finally be heard.

©2010 by Mary Sharratt.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Author Mary Sharratt has lived near Pendle Hill in Lancashire since 2002. Her novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, inspired by Mother Demdike’s true story, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Visit her website.

Sources:

• Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum)
• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale)
• Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy (John Murray)
• John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folklore (Kessinger Publishing)
• King James I, Daemonologie, available online.
• Jonathan Lumby, The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Carnegie)
• Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, available online.
• Edgar Peel and Pat Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches (Nelson)
• Robert Poole, ed., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester University Press)
• Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, available online.
• Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin)
• John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (Ams Pr Inc)
• Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press)
• Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee (Flamingo)

Not long ago I had the chance to participate in my first sweat lodge. I thought it might be useful to set down my impressions of the experience, for others who have never undergone it but who are curious as to what is involved, or may be thinking about undertaking the ordeal for themselves.

The sweat lodge is an ancient part of shamanism that is widespread around the world in various forms. It was the ritualized spiritual custom for many of the native peoples of North America. A modern secular derivative of the practice is the Scandinavian sauna. In the sweat lodge the body is subjected to prolonged exposure to high-temperature steam. This causes abundant perspiration, hence the name.

The lodge in which I participated was overseen by a group of shamans in my part of Eastern Canada, among them some of the Mi’kmaq tribe, which is the Indian tribe native to the province of Nova Scotia, and to other areas of the north-eastern part of North America, such as New Brunswick and northern Maine.

Preliminaries

Prior to undergoing the sweat lodge, I had no first-hand knowledge of what it would involve, and did not know what to bring with me. I wondered if I would have to be naked in the lodge during the ceremony. Not to worry, everyone wore clothing of some sort. I was told that an old pair of jeans would be fine, but that I should bring along a change of clothing, since whatever I wore during the ceremony would get wringing wet. I wondered if I should wear shorts instead of long pants but was told by one of the people who planned to participate that, no, jeans would be fine. Mistake — but not a fatal one. Shorts are the clothing of choice for the sweat lodge.

The men generally wear loose shorts, and undergo the experience naked from the waist up. The women wear loose dresses or light tops, and skirts or shorts. In the sweat lodge ceremony I attended, the women were not naked from the waist up, which hardly seemed fair to me. Why should the men get to strip off their tops, but not the women? None the less, that’s the way it was. There is a general custom of modesty in the sweat lodges that are held across North America. However, everyone goes barefoot inside the lodge. No exceptions to this rule.

We were asked to arrive at the sweat lodge an hour before the beginning of the ceremony, which took place in a small clearing in a wooded valley at the end of a long private road, far from any human habitation. The result was complete privacy for the ceremony. Two lodges were being run simultaneously — one for men only in the smaller of the two sweat lodges, and another larger mixed group of men and woman in the bigger lodge. The men’s group consisted of about half a dozen men and the shaman who led the ceremony. I attended the mixed group, which had around eighteen or so participants, plus the person leading the ritual activities.

When I got to the clearing, a huge bonfire was blazing over a pile of stones. It was a nice, mild pre-spring day in Nova Scotia. Most of the snow was gone from the open patches of ground but the winter-browned grass and the sod were still frozen solid. The breeze was fitful and tossed the rising smoke of the fire in all directions, so that it was impossible to avoid it no matter where I stood or sat. Benches had been arranged around the fire, but the smoke was so capricious, no one could use them. We stood around talking while the stones got hot.

One of the organizers of the sweat lodge took me aside and gave me the low-down on what was expected. She told me that I would have to take off my boots and socks to enter the lodge, that it was necessary to crawl through the door and that I should not stand up while inside the lodge. All movement in the circular lodge was sunwise around the central fire pit. She warned that I should take off any jewellery as people had sometimes found that wearing jewellery during a lodge could result in burns on the skin when the metal of the jewellery became hot. She also told me to remove my contact lenses.

The larger lodge was a round, hut-shaped structure about twelve feet across and six feet or so tall. It was made of a frame of slender poles bent together, and was covered in fabric similar to blanket material. It had no windows of any kind, and a single door in the north side facing the fire, so low that it could only be entered by getting on hands and knees. This doorway was closed by a flap of fabric. Inside, the floor was bare turf. I noticed a small vent at the very top of the hemispherical lodge, which I presumed was there for ventilation, to prevent us all from suffocating.

I have to admit, after the recent disaster in the autumn of 2009 concerning a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona, in which three participants were killed and 21 others sickened, being able to get enough fresh air was a concern in my mind. I was glad to see this vent, small though it seemed to be. It was baffled to prevent the entry of any light.

In the center of the floor there was a circular pit around three feet in diameter and about a foot deep. I knew in a vague sort of way what the pit was for, but did not have a clear idea of how it would work during the ceremony itself.

All these features of the inside of the sweat lodge I learned only when I crawled inside for the first time. Before that happened, we performed a brief ceremony while standing in a circle around the bonfire. Each of the six directions of space, and the center, was acknowledged successively in prayer. This was done in an interesting way. Volunteers were asked to speak for the directions. Those who volunteered did not recite a prepared script, but spoke spontaneously from their hearts as the impulse arose within them at that moment. This resulted in uneven prayers, some better than others, but it had a spontaneity that I liked.

When we addressed the east, we all turned to face the east; when we addressed the west, we turned to the west. When we gave thanks and acknowledgment to the earth, the downward direction, many of those present knelt and touched the ground, although this must have been voluntary since many remained standing. I chose to crouch as a mark of respect.

A little mix-up occurred in the sequence of prayers. It was supposed to be the gods of the center that were acknowledged last, but the person speaking for the center jumped in too early, and we ended up praying to the sky last. The leader of the ceremony joked that she was sure the gods would understand, and would not be angry.

Inside the Lodge

We all took off our shoes, lined up on the frozen grass, and crawled into the sweat lodge. The men took up positions on the right side, and the women on the left side, from the viewpoint of the door facing inward. There was enough space to crawl around the lodge sunwise between the seated participants, who had their backs to the wall of the lodge, and the central fire pit.

It was pretty cramped in there, and uncomfortable. The ground was cold and hard, and more than a little damp. The wall of the lodge was uneven. I found that I could not lean back against it without having a ridge of wood dig into my spine. There was very little room to put our legs. I tried sitting cross-legged for a while, but in the end extended my feet toward the fire pit. That seemed the most comfortable position. Nobody wanted to press against those beside them, so everyone was trying to avoid contact by scrunching up, but there was so little room in the lodge, contact was unavoidable. This may have been deliberate on the part of the leaders of the lodge. We were told that the sweat lodge is an ordeal, and that it is supposed to be uncomfortable.

It was time for more warnings. If anyone could not stand the heat a moment longer, they were to call out in a loud voice “open the door! open the door!” which was the signal for the door to be opened. It would have to be called out loudly because there was going to be a lot of noise during the ceremony. Anyone who could not take the heat would be allowed to leave the lodge, but we were all asked not to give in to the heat unless we absolutely thought we were about to die, because it was very disruptive to have to open the door in the middle of the ceremony. We were also cautioned not to crawl into the fire pit in the darkness of the lodge by mistake, because the stones in the pit would be very hot. Well, duh.

I sat there a little nervously, trying to adjust my legs to a comfortable position, but found that there was no comfortable position. I tried to keep the sharp edge of wood on the side of the lodge from digging into my back, but every time my shoulders slumped, there it was again. Even so, I was glad I was sitting on the outside rim of the lodge — some people were sitting in a second circular row in front of me close to the fire pit. I was glad for the coolness of the side of the lodge at my back, and for the coolness of the earth under me. I wondered if I would be the first one to crack from the heat and call out “open the door!” That would be embarrassing.

I wore a T-shirt and jeans. Most other men were naked to the waist and wore shorts. I wondered if my extra clothing would make the ordeal more difficult for me. The person beside me told me that I could strip down to my underwear – nobody would mind – but I kept my clothes on. I wondered if the wedding ring on my finger would burn my skin, or if my metal belt buckle would burn through my jeans. We had been told to drink plenty of water, but I had only swallowed a single mouthful.

Part of the spiritual energy stimulated during a sweat lodge comes from this uncertainty as to what is going to take place. It is strongest the first time, when the person undergoing the lodge ceremony has no idea of what is about to happen. I was primed for a peak spiritual experience. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to come out of the lodge alive.

How the Sweat Lodge Works

The way a sweat lodge works is this — stones from the fire that are called “stone people” are carried into the lodge and placed one by one into the fire pit in the center of the floor. About eight stones are used, and each is around ten to twenty pounds in weight. They are so hot from the bonfire, that when they enter the dimness of the lodge, they glow red in their centers, and you can feel the heat radiating from them even from a long distance.

Since I’d never undergone a sweat lodge before, I had assumed that the heat came from the rocks directly, by radiation. Not so. The heat is in the form of steam, which is generated by pouring water from a bucket over the hot rocks using a ladle. The rocks are so hot, that when the water touches them it is instantly converted to steam. I was afraid the boiling water might splash over my feet, which were close to the pit, so I covered them with a towel, but I did not need to worry. The rocks are so hot, the water does not boil or splash, it is all turned to steam instantly. The water comes from a large bucket that holds around four gallons, which is set beside the fire pit next to the person in charge of the ritual. That person controls the steam.

There are three levels of heat in a sweat lodge, as I soon learned. There is the first level, when a stone is being lifted through the open door on the tines of a pitchfork to the warning call of “rock!” and then blessed with a scattering of herbs, which burst into little sparks of fire and smoke the instant they touch its glowing surface. All the rocks together radiate a large amount of heat that can be felt on the face and skin like the heat from a blazing fireplace.

The second level of heat is when the first ladle of water is poured over the rocks in the pit, and a cloud of white steam rushes upward with a great hiss like that of a giant serpent. It is many times hotter than the heat from the rocks alone. The steam rises upward to the roof of the lodge, and then rolls around and down the sides in a moving curtain, so that it first touches the participants on the head and the back of the neck. It is easy to feel on the exposed tips of the ears.

The final and most intense level of heat is when the door flap is sealed tightly so that no trace of light or air can enter, and the inside of the lodge is plunged into absolute darkness. The ventilation from the open door prevents the full effects of the steam from being felt, but when the door flap is shut, there is nothing to cool the inside of the lodge. The level of heat is magnified several times over. It is most intense a few seconds after the water is applied to the rocks, when the curtain of steam has had time to fly up to the roof and roll its way down the walls.

Each ordeal lasts as long as the water in the bucket. The faster the water is applied to the rocks, the hotter it gets. I half-expected the rocks to explode and scatter hot fragments over all of those sitting around the pit when they were hit with splashes of icy water, but was told that the rocks were basalt and very old, excellent for holding the heat without breaking down. And indeed, none of the rocks cracked.

We did not just sit there in the dark and suffer the heat. All the while the door was shut and the water was being applied to the rocks, the air was filled with the sound of a rattle being shaken and often with the rhythmic pounding of a flat shamanic drum. The leaders of the lodge chanted and sang songs, some with words that were recognizable, and others native songs that seemed to have no words, or only a few words repeated over and over. Everyone was encouraged to join in. Many people began their own chants and songs when the initial song was dying down, so that a continuous noise of singing and chanting was achieved. In part, I think this chanting was designed to distract the mind away from the ordeal of the heat, but in part it was an invocation to the spirits of nature that were being honoured by the ceremony.

Four Sessions

We did four sessions in the lodge that afternoon — by that I mean four times when the door was sealed shut and the bucket of water ladled over the hot rocks. New rocks were placed into the pit for each session, so that they would be hot enough to turn the water to instant steam. The first session was devoted to honouring the Mother Earth and women’s mysteries. The last was free-form, during which we were invited to pray and speak as the impulse arose within us. Each session lasted around half an hour, and we opened the flap of the lodge and exited to cool off between sessions, and to drink water.

In the middle of the second session, the leader threw ladles full of icy water over the people inside the lodge. I think it was designed to shock us into a more intense self-awareness of the time and place. We didn’t know it was coming because of the pitch darkness. The first ladle-full caught me square in the face. It was quite a surprise. I suspect the leader of the session aimed it at me, because the experience was completely new to me, and I would have no idea it was coming, but how he managed to hit my face so accurately with the first shot in total darkness, I don’t know.

During the hottest part of the sweat lodge experience, it is difficult to breath easily. The steam is so hot and dense that it burns the insides of your nose, and if you try to breathe through your mouth, it burns your lips and tongue. We were told to breath through out bared teeth at those times. I found that this did not help much. It made my teeth too hot. The best approach, for me, was to breath very, very shallowly through the nose, and very slowly so that the steam was drawn in gradually, not fast enough to burn. The steam in the air can become quite dense. When the door-flap is first opened after a session, admitting light, the steam is so thick in the air inside the lodge that you can barely see across to the other side.

Needless to say, I got soaked to the skin at each session. Standing outside in front of the smoking bonfire served to half dry me off, but I was never completely dry before we crawled in for the next session. My bare feet on the frozen ground had the hardest time. They became numb but I was able to warm them by holding them up close to the bonfire, and that prevented them from being frozen too badly.

I learned that many of my fears had been groundless. My wedding ring did not burn my skin. Maybe this was because I took care to shield my ring from the direct contact of the new steam as it rolled around the lodge. I could probably have worn my contact lenses, because I kept my eyes closed most of the time inside the lodge. Since the darkness was total, there was not much point in keeping them open.

The herbs that were mixed with the water poured over the stones left a curious taste at the back of my throat for a time, but no ill effects. Apparently, it is possible to modify the effects of the steam by putting various herbs in the water. Each shaman has his or her own recipes of herbs to use with the water.

The Peace Pipe

After the four sessions in the lodge, participants were invited to sit around the fire pit inside the lodge with the door-flap left open, and share a peace pipe. Many chose not to do so, including myself, because they did not smoke and did not wish to expose their lungs to tobacco smoke, and this was fine with the leaders of the lodge. No aspersions were cast on those who stayed outside during the pipe ceremony.

The general mood inside the sweat lodge throughout all four sessions was one of joyful exuberance. Everyone was encouraged to sing, chant, and release their emotions, and everyone seemed to do just that. There was nothing heavy or forbidding in the ceremonies — it was all child-like happiness that comes from living in the moment. Prayers were given, spirits were seen by many of those who participated, and prayers were answered. A good time truly was had by all.

©2010 by Donald Tyson.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

At the most recent Pantheacon, I was honored to participate in a panel of authors who contributed to Immanion Press’s recent Women’s Voices in Magick anthology. It was a real treat to be able to take part in a lively conversation on the state of contemporary occultism with women from a diverse range of magical communities. Celtic Reconstruction, Thelema, Chaos and experimental magic were among the stated approaches used by such notable occultists as Erynn Rowan Laurie, Kat Sanborn, Amy Hale, Lupa, and Jaymi Elford. Despite the disparity in our training and in the communities and Gods we choose to serve, there were a number of common threads in our discussion that I feel shed light on compelling issues of contemporary magical practice. Since taking part, the issues have been much on my mind, and I present some of my thoughts on these topics as well.

Heterosexism, Privilege and Magick

All of us affirmed our affection and respect for our male colleagues, mentors and teachers. We expressed gratitude for their guidance and friendship. But in examining our personal experiences with sexism and heterosexism, it was starkly obvious to all of us that neopagan culture was not immune from either of these ills. It has manifested for us, both subtly and not so subtly. All of us have had to deal with criticisms that our hobbies, interests and life’s work, were not “natural” for women. These are not the attitudes of conservative family members, but rather those of our contemporaries and magical peers. We were told that there was something exotic, unusual, or just flat wrong about a woman Thelemite or Chaote. In those circles, we were either tokens or dupes. We’ve been told that we were doing our magick “incorrectly.” One woman spoke about how she and the other women who founded their tradition now feel pushed aside by male colleagues who monopolize conversations and blog threads with arguments among themselves, while ignoring female voices. Many of us spoke about feeling the hostility of male colleagues in traditionally male occult societies, and feeling distrust from other women occultists for working magick outside of a traditionally female context (Wicca, witchcraft, etc).

We all agreed that we had felt, at one time or another, reduced to sexual and biological objects. We were made to feel, by male colleagues, that our function in our spiritual community was to be sexually attractive and available to men, and if we weren’t, this was interpreted as somehow hostile on our part. To encounter this type of attitude in what we had hoped would be safe magical space is disheartening. What made it worse was the not so subtle message in many magical communities that women’s secondary status is “natural,” that it is somehow “natural” for us as women to serve men in all things, because that’s “how it is in nature.” In addition, this “natural” heterosexism asserts itself as phobic against homosexuality and transgender. “Nature” is used as a litmus test for what is “natural” in human sexuality; therefore, heterosex is privileged above all other sexual expressions for being more “natural.”

This construction of human sexuality is faulty and reductionist, and owes far more to the hidebound moralities of our dominant / dominator paradigm than to reproductive biology. This model is limited because it’s couched in polar binaries only, and even in context of so-called “fertility religion,” it provides an incomplete vision of the natural world as a source of gnosis and connection. The mysteries of egg and sperm, of seed and pollen, are ever present. They are primal forces, the engine that runs our planet. These energies are the forces of creation and destruction that we all engage in, everyday, with every breath: they are not exclusive to one sex, gender or orientation. The deepest human need has ever been to understand these forces, and the religions of these mysteries have ever tried to explain the infinite to finite human minds. The male-female heterosexual current is only one iteration of this primal energy. It’s a powerful one, and it is self-evident. From an evolutionary standpoint it has been wildly successful because it yields the greatest genetic diversity. But it is only one of many currents that energize our planet, our natural world, and in no way does it demand the type of oppressive constructions that culture puts on gender and sexual orientation. These are not natural; these are merely prejudice.

It is one of the more demoralizing tricks of the dominator paradigm to take the entire range of human enterprise, experience and emotional potential, divide it in half, give half to one gender and half to the other, and then expect whole, integrated adults to emerge. The most ancient, and truest, magical injunction remains: Know thyself. We cannot be fully human if we accept the limitations of dominator gender roles without question or complaint. As women magicians, we all had felt at some time pressured to abandon our magick in order to conform to someone else’s vision of what a woman should be. Rejecting those values is part of our commitment to our magical work.

Sex, Pleasure and Consequence

Despite having overcome our dominant culture’s sex-negative programming, we all felt that we had all been sexually objectified at one time or another. In many ways, the pro-sexual attitudes and relaxed sexual mores of Neopaganism have been just as limiting to women occultists as the anti-sexual stances against which many occultists have rebelled. Again, this is a reductionist attitude in which women are relegated to only those roles which serve men. Promoting sexual “liberation” for women serves heterosexual male interests, by encouraging and privileging (pressuring) women to be sexually available. This also manifests in how sexual or love Goddesses are lavished with devotion and reverence, while other Goddesses (mothers, crones, virgins, warriors) are given short-shrift except in women-only ritual contexts (Dianic Wicca, Goddess worship, etc).

The reclamation of sexuality as a sacred act of pleasure and connection is a central tenet of many occult traditions. Certainly for me, who follows the path of the Qadesha (sacred harlot), sexuality acts as both a sacred mystery and spiritual practice. Sexual pleasure can be a conduit for gnosis and connection with our most sacred selves and deity. But often the hedonism of Neopaganism frames sexuality as a purely physical pursuit. It sets up sexual pleasure much as the dominant paradigm does, as a commodity, something superficial, available upon demand, and having no consequence. (This is why the dominant paradigm really has no interest in what women occultists are saying. The vision of a sacred sexuality that we espouse cannot be sold to us, nor can it be purchased from us. Therefore, it really has no assigned value in the larger culture.)

The lie about this reductionist vision of sexuality is that sex is reduced to something inconsequential and tame, and it absolutely isn’t. Sex is full of peril: the peril of connection, of vulnerability, of the very real life and death consequences of . . . life and death. We as human beings have by and large removed procreation from a direct line to reproduction, and medical technology has mitigated much of the risk of childbearing. But those risks, that peril, have been part of human sexuality from the beginning and are encoded deeply within us. (Could the intensity of sexual pleasure be evolutionary coded, in order to offset the pain, danger and risk of childbearing?) Sexuality is more than just “scratching the bunny itch” and a sexual philosophy that diminishes that fact is ultimately false. Sometimes this fact is lost in the hedonism.

An example of this is a Beltane ritual I attended years ago, while I was quite pregnant. Our hosts were gracious, their home and grounds lovely and private, the ritual was beautifully executed. But I became profoundly uncomfortable by the “sermonette” in which our priest discussed the “universal” sexual dynamic of the female enticing the male to chase her till she catches him, which is present in the mating habits of all animals everywhere all the time. I found this fairly reactionary, of course, but as the evening wore on, the vibe became even more sexual as folks got flirty, then lascivious. As it was Beltane, it was considered perfectly appropriate. But once the vibe became licentious, I found myself pointedly ignored. My pregnant state put me outside the “fun and games” — I was no longer sexually available or accessible; I was “spoken for,” not by a husband, but by my unborn child.

While it may seem intuitive to consider a pregnant woman sexually unavailable, I don’t feel it was respect for my relationship status that had this effect. I believe I was ignored because I was a reminder of an aspect of sexuality at odds with the vision of the no-strings, sport-sex that was being celebrated that night. The risks, perils and consequences of sex can transcend the momentary pleasure we are driven to experience, and I was a very present reminder of those consequences. It also hints at old concepts of a divided female sexuality, in which the sexual is degraded as selfish and debauched, and the mother is admired as purely spiritual and selfless, almost virginal. This is ironic, of course, in that the only way to achieve becoming a mother is through that nasty sex. It’s this type of cognitive dissonance that keeps women occultists and witches from feeling fully empowered in magical community. The new boss looks remarkably like the old one.

Women’s Space or Ghetto?

With so many magical spaces and communities being so hostile, what spaces can we as women occultists create? This was a conflict we had all had: finding that the magical communities and work that we were most attracted to, were not necessarily welcoming to us. Specifically, our male colleagues were hostile to our participation, and demanded that we conform to perceived “male” standards of practice and conduct. Even the magical spaces that we and other women created, we could be displaced out of by our male colleagues taking control of the intellectual space. This type of dynamic happens both online and in person. As the group space becomes fractious or argumentative (as will happen when fine points of doctrine are debated endlessly, or when individuals assert their authority or their place in hierarchy), women tend to feel silenced — they do not wish to step into the fray, and feel ignored when they try to redirect the conversation. As a result, many women occultists feel compelled to go “underground,” to create a parallel conversation among themselves only, in order to speak more freely and push forward their own work.

There are benefits and liabilities to this approach. Certainly, this type of woman-only space has been vital in fostering the work of countless women magicians, and is at the core of feminist activism and Goddess spirituality. Its value, its necessity, to the women who feel silenced outside this space, is incalculable. However, by not speaking outside these safe spaces, female voices become more absent where they need most to be heard. These spaces can become ghettos, where women’s creative expression is tolerated at the same time it is barred from the more prominent position in culture that it deserves.

The challenge for all of us — as magicians, as conscious individuals — is to continue to create the work that is sustaining to us and supportive our communities. The stakes are incredibly high — we are all of us engaged in creating culture that is healthy, sustainable and flourishing. This work of generating culture is now inextricably linked to our survival as a species. We have to work together, and seek connection, and look beyond the minute differences that keep us isolated.

©2010 by Leni Hester.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.