For Power Oil, which I save for special workings, combine the following with your preferred carrier oil (with twice the amount of oil as dried material):
1 part hyssop
1 part angelica root
1 High John the Conqueror root (whole)
You’ll need a container large enough to fit the High John the Conqueror root (I use a small glass jar). You can powder it, but it’s quite the chore, so I just leave it whole. Let it sit in a dark place for at least three days.
I use the Consecration Ritual (page 160) to empower magical oils and then apply them to the top center (crown) of my head, my third eye (middle of forehead between and slightly above eye level), and the centers of both palms.
You can draw a symbol as you’re applying the oil—a pentagram, cross, and hexagram are common. I say a prayer in my own words, or sometimes use the good old standby, verse 7 of Psalm 51: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” Only a small amount is necessary. Further uses of oil for protection are covered in a later chapter.
Prayer
Prayer is a great way to get your head straight before doing magic. Unfortunately, thanks to fundamentalist dogma and moribund religious traditions, many people have negative associations with the idea of prayer. So I will state clearly: you don’t have to cower before a spiteful sky god or supplicate yourself before whatever demanding deity your parents pounded into your innocent head.
Prayer should be a joyous, deep, personal connection to a force, principle, or deity, not a groveling plea.
The goal is to aim your spirit toward union with whatever deity or archetype floats your spiritual boat. The Great Goddess, Yahweh, Jesus, Krishna, Persephone, Ganesha, Buddha, Hermes, Aphrodite, Hekate, the Universe as the Ultimate Ground of Being, the void, your deepest/highest self—you get the idea.
Sit comfortably with your back straight. Breathe slowly, naturally, and deeply. There’s no need to measure or count your breaths.
Light a white candle and burn your favorite incense. Watch the flame for a few moments, and then close your eyes.
The key to simple prayer is to open yourself, in humble gratitude, to aspects of the deity or force that exists in the vastness within you and outside of you. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t desire anything. Be quiet and listen.
When you feel like you’ve made contact, simply let it unfold. Relax into the communion between yourself and the higher power. Breathe slowly and deeply and experience the connection for as long as you feel comfortable. You may see visions or hear sounds, you may get messages or downloads of information, or nothing much may happen at all.
When you feel ready, give thanks and ask for her/his/its blessings. Open your eyes and blow out the candle.
This form of prayer can work wonders for your mental and physical health, as attested by abundant anecdotal evidence and numerous controlled studies.
The Ritual Mind
Working effective magic requires that you learn how to shift your consciousness into what I call the “ritual mind,” otherwise known as an expanded or altered consciousness or trance. You enter light versions of it when you’re caught up in a good novel or when you’re driving and forget how you got from point A to point B, and you can slip into it when you’re hovering between sleep and waking. But doing it intentionally requires a little practice. Without the proper focused and heightened consciousness, your rituals will be empty actions, with no more magical effectiveness than brushing your teeth.
Luckily, ritual itself is an effective tool for getting into the proper headspace.
The ritual mind is similar to a meditative state, but different in that while meditation is largely an inward-focused experience, usually with closed eyes, ritual mind requires physical action and outward-directed activity. It can be thought of as an active meditation.
A large number of time-tested techniques can help you transition from normal waking consciousness into the transmundane realm where magic manifests. Those techniques include stimulation (or dampening) of the senses, controlled breathing, visualization, words of power, posture and gesture, chanting, drumming, dance and movement, music, and psychoactive substances.
Combining techniques tends to work synergistically. In many of the spells in this book, you’ll utilize breathing, posture, visualization, movement, and words of power. You’ll stimulate your senses with colored candles, music, and incense.
Let’s look at some of these individual elements:
Stimulation or Dampening of the Senses
Sensory stimulation involves light, color, smell, taste, and touch. Sensory dampening is created with darkness, closed eyes, and silence. Sensory deprivation (float) tanks are the ultimate in sensory dampening technology, and a great way to experience deep relaxation and heightened inner visionary states.
Controlled Breathing
Focused breathing is a critical tool for magic. Slowing, deepening, and holding of the breath has powerful physiological and mental effects, calming the body and mind, while quickening the breath stimulates and energizes. Unless otherwise specified, always breathe slowly and deeply when working magic.
Visualization
Some people are better than others at visualizing, but everyone can get better by practice. If you’re feeling frustrated by instructions to visualize during your spells, try your best to imagine or experience the visual instead of seeing it. The more senses you can involve the better. If you’re invoking elemental water in a consecration ritual, for example, feel its coolness, hear its rushing currents, and taste it on your tongue. If a spell suggests visualizing your candidate winning an election, feel the endorphins rushing through your bloodstream as the winner is announced, hear the crowds cheering, and imagine yourself celebrating with friends. Feeling can be just as effective as traditional visualization in spellwork.
Words of Power
Spells utilize words differently from casual speech. Ritual words are weighted with meaning and depth, and the best spells resonate like great poetry. Some words can be intoned—drawn out and vibrated. Sometimes words that sound nonsensical or meaningless (voces magicae) can trigger powerful energies. Words or phrases can be sung, chanted, or whispered to create specific effects.
Posture and Gesture
Many spells call for adopting specific postures or using gestures to change consciousness or channel energy. The hands are frequently employed in ritual to sense, direct, contain, or concentrate energies. In Hinduism and Buddhism these hand gestures are called mudras.
Chanting
Repetitive chanting can induce a very deep state of expanded awareness, which is why it is widely used in many different spiritual systems.
Drumming and Percussion
Drumming is one of the oldest methods of trance induction and is a staple of many indigenous shamanic systems. Modern trance and electronic music works similarly to bring large groups into altered states, and it is often combined with psychoactive substances to further heighten consciousness. If you own a drum, practice different rhythms to see how they change your consciousness. You can also purchase recordings of drumming for shamanic induction.
Dance and Movement
Dance is often accompanied by drums and rhythmic instruments but can also be done in silence. One of the best ways to enter trance is to put on simple, rhythmic music and let yourself free-form dance. Let the energy of the music drive your body and avoid conscious control. Like the saying goes, dance as if no one is watching—which should be easy if you’re alone.
Of course, that begs the question—if you believe in an animist universe, are you ever really alone?
Music
Music is an amazingly diverse tool for altering consciousness. A song can inspire men to march to war, lift a crowd to ecstasy, or bring a rapt audience to tears. Think of songs from your childhood and adolescence and the imme
nse depths of emotion they can stir, taking you back to peak moments in your life.
Music can also enhance ritual consciousness and help direct magical energy during magical workings. I suggest using sacred music, which is specifically designed to transport you from the monkey-mind into the realm of the spirit. Not the music you listen to solely for pleasure, but music that tunes the frequency of your environment.
This is a matter of taste, of course. I’m not a fan of anything that you’d hear coming from a boom box while getting your chakras adjusted at a holistic healing expo — in fact, I’m allergic to most music that falls into the new age category, especially Native American flutes played by non-Natives and backed with incongruous tinkly chimes, tablas, and synth swirls. Blech.
Chants (especially Gregorian and Tibetan) take me very deep very quickly, but try to get the straight-up vocal recordings and avoid those layered with synthesizers and other superfluous aural junk. Singing bowls are nice, too. Indian classical ragas and devotional chants can be powerful trance inducers, and if you’re into Western classical music, Chopin’s nocturnes are exquisitely calming and elevating preritual options.
You might want to try environmental recordings, particularly of ocean, woodland, and jungle settings. The Tintinnabulation CD (see resources), composed of layered, computer-modulated bells, is more of a deeply felt than heard soundscape and is useful for all sorts of meditations and magical workings when melodic music would be a distraction.
If you’re working with deities of a particular pantheon, such as Greek or Egyptian, you can seek out music reconstructed from their classical worship. When invoking Hermes, for example, I often use re-creations of ancient Greek music played on traditional instruments like the lyre and kithara. Streaming music services make finding such music easy, and the goddesses and gods seem to appreciate the effort.
I don’t use music during most workings, but I do use it beforehand to tune my environment and to help me get into a ritual mindset. Experiment and see what works best for you.
Psychoactive Substances
Although I find psychoactive substances extraordinarily valuable in many ways, I generally avoid using them before or during rituals. Your goal should be to reach powerful altered states via focused ritual activity alone, particularly when you are a beginner. Adding the unpredictable effects of drugs or alcohol will slow your progress considerably, and may give you an illusory sense of progress.
Once you are competent at getting to the proper state of consciousness through ritual, you can then consider experimenting with substances. But that is a road for very experienced witches and magicians, not novices, and even then, it must be done conscientiously and intelligently. If you want to explore shamanic paths that utilize entheogens be sure to use adequate precautions (especially in regard to the quality of your materials) and take care to know the laws in your region.
Under no circumstances should you ever take a psychoactive plant just because it’s in a book about witchcraft. Many witchy plants in the historical record, such as henbane, belladonna, Datura, and mandrake, can seriously derange or even kill you. Be wary of plant-based concoctions bought over the internet. The recent popularity of psychoactive “flying ointments” concerns me, as someone using too much or having an adverse reaction could easily wind up in an emergency room (or worse). Please exercise extreme caution when working with traditional psychoactive “witch” plants. My best advice is to avoid them.
Ground
When you finish a ritual, it is important to ground yourself and return to normal “mundane” consciousness. Stand up, shake a little bit, stomp your feet, and jump up and down. If your hands are feeling tingly and energized from your magic, shake them off as if you’re flinging water to dry them. The goal is to get back into your body and out of the deep ritual mindstate. If you don’t ground, you may continue to feel spacey, particularly if your ritual generated a lot of power.
It is also helpful to have a bite to eat. Chocolate is particularly good for grounding (not to mention delicious), as are spicy foods and sweets, and cakes are traditional postritual foods in witchcraft. Coffee tends to do the job quickly, too, as does an alcoholic beverage.
There are exceptions. You may want to go from a ritual directly to bed in order to cultivate dreams or hypnagogic visions. Or you may want to continue working on a project while still in the ritual mind state. But in the majority of workings be sure to ground, setting a clear demarcation between your altered state during magical workings and your Muggle mind.
The Centering Ritual
Some witches use the term between the worlds to describe the liminal space in which they do magic. The Centering Ritual is a way to generate a magical space around you. It aligns you with the axis of the universe and connects you with the infinite. In your center you will find safety, peace, calmness, connection to divinity, and wisdom.
This is the core ritual that should be performed before all the other rituals and spells in this book. As such, you should practice it several times a week until you have it memorized. It can also be used nonmagically anytime you’re feeling disconnected, anxious, or out-of-sorts.
The ritual itself is very simple and is based on my years of exploration in a number of magical traditions. It draws upon elements of rituals found in sources as diverse as the ancient Greek Magical Papyri (the Heptagram ritual), contemplative Christian practices, Native American spirituality, and modern witchcraft, among others. It is also indebted to the legendary Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus and the well-known Hermetic maxim carved on it:
That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above,
and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below,
to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.
This is usually summarized as “as above, so below.”
The Centering Ritual is also a template upon which you can (and should) build and expand as you grow. Variations and further suggestions may be found in the correspondences in the appendix (see 224).
The Centering Ritual, as the name suggests, centers you in your body and creates sacred space around you. In a magical sense, you become the center or axis of the universe, the nucleus of a magical, protective sphere in time and space. And the center of your body—your heart center—becomes a brightly glowing pinpoint of divinity. As the Chandogya Upanishad eloquently states, “The little space in the heart is as big as this great universe. The heavens and the earth are there, the sun, the moon, and the stars, fire and lightning and winds are there also; and all that exists now and all that exists no longer: for the whole universe is in Him and He lives in our hearts.” 30
Stand or sit comfortably, with your back straight and feet slightly separated. Imagine a string pulling upward at the top and center of your head. This should naturally cause you to lower your chin a bit and further straightens and elongates your spine.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply and slowly through your nose, filling your stomach first and then your chest, and reversing the movement when you exhale.
Place your hands in front of your chest in the well-known prayer position, which is known as the anjali mudra in Sanskrit. Your thumbs should be together and resting on your breastbone, with your fingers extended and lightly touching (don’t smash your hands together—simply allow them to rest against each other, leaving a slight hollow in your palms). Relax your shoulders and elbows. The heart is considered the center of your being; therefore, you are bringing together polar energies (represented by your hands, left is receptive, right is active) and uniting them at your very center (heart).
Say, Spirit before me. You are not calling on individual spirits, but the universal spiritual consciousness that permeates and underlies our reality. Direct your consciousness ahead and feel the immensity of the universe expanding into infinity before you.
Say, Spirit behind me. Feel the immensity of the universe behind you,
expanding into infinity.
Say, Spirit on my right, and feel the infinity to the right.
Say, Spirit on my left, and feel the infinity to the left.
Say, Spirit above me, and direct your consciousness to the cosmos above. Feel the universe stretching out to infinity.
Say, Spirit below me, and feel the expansion into the limitless depths of the earth.
Say, Spirit outside me, and feel the universal spirit surrounding you and permeating the universe.
Say, Spirit within me, and feel the infinity within your center. Visualize a bright light at the center of your chest, radiating to, and connecting with, all the directions.
Now a prayer. Begin by extending your arms to your sides, elbows bent, palms turned slightly upward. It should feel as if you are holding up a large, invisible balloon. This is known as the orans posture (Latin for “prayer”).
Say, Between the future, and feel the future unfolding in front of you. It may help if you visualize and feel yourself moving forward physically, into infinite, unfolding possibility.
Say, And the past, and feel and see the past unfurling behind you. Again, feeling yourself moving ahead physically can enhance the sensation. I visualize my body leaving blurry trails behind.
Turn your head to the right, saying, Between the sun, and extend your awareness to your right side. Visualize the sun, radiating heat and bright light, cradled in your palm.
Turn your head to the left, saying, And the moon, and extend your awareness to the left, visualizing the moon, cradled in your palm and shining brightly. Even better, find out the moon’s current phase and visualize it as such.
Tilt your head backward, gazing to the sky, saying, Between the heavens, and visualize the expanse of the starry cosmos above you.
Lower your head toward your feet, saying, And the earth, and extend your awareness down through your feet (or your tailbone, if sitting) into the dark, rocky depths of the earth. See the crystals within the earth shining like stars.
Magic for the Resistance Page 13