Author: A Solitary Pagan

A Magickal Place

You can create magick in all kinds of ways and you can use it for an almost infinite variety of purposes. Your magick can be solitary or group-based, self-centered, or entirely altruistic. It can be personal and informal, or it may be framed in a rigid ceremony. But whatever kind of magick you wish to practice, you will need to create a special place to work in, a personal area at home for your pr...

Magickal Practices in the Herbal Way

The Green level of Witchcraft uses herbs in many different practices pertaining to the Craft. Herbs alone can be used for health, comfort, treatments of ailments, and divinations. They can be added to spells in charms, candle magic, oils, and incenses, and are used in bulk for sprinklings, aspersions, and magic packets. Infused herbal oils, they can be used for consecrations, anointings, blessings...

Components of Ritual Magick

1. Choose the timing of a spell. 2. Outline the ritual and prepare your tools and materials. 3. Purifying yourself. 4. Purifying the working space. 5. Creating a sacred circle. 6. Have an invocation. 7. Performing the ritual observance. 8. Raise and direct energy. 9. Earth (ground) the residual power. 10. Take some refreshment. 11. Acknowledge the Lady and Lord or elementals, source above and eart...

Magickal Hours

The hours of the day are also influenced by the planets. For example, if you were carrying out a love spell in which you wanted rapid results, perhaps for a special meeting, you could work on a Friday, Venus’s day, on both her hours – sunrise and the third hour after sunset. If you wanted courage in love, you would use a Mars hour on a Friday. If you needed to communicate your feelings, but found ...

Ritual Magick

Ritual magick is no different from any other activity that you may carry out in a systematic way. Yes, it is true, it is more formal than folk magick: you are using special tools and following a series of preordained steps based on traditional practice. But this does not mean that it has to be so complicated as to be beyond the capabilities of any normal person. You do not need special powers; and...

Preparing Your Mind For Magick

As well as preparing the physical area for magick, you also need to prepare your mental state. It is universally agreed that we have two hemispheres of the brain -the left, logical, and the right, intuitive, side – and that generally in the everyday world the left brain predominates. This may be no bad thing; after all, buying golden sunflowers and oils pressed from fragrant herbs may lift the spi...

Types of Magick

The overall idea of types of magic, like Black magic, or White magic, largely stems from applying Ceremonial uses of magic practice to Witchcraft. The dark side of nature and the light side may naturally find balance in the world. The idea that black magic is evil and white as good, with grey being somewhere in between, stems from assumptive mainstream ideas about magic. Using dark power to harm a...

Magick and Science

Many contemporary writers on Witchcraft have pointed out the relevance of new discoveries in the physical sciences that seem to identify what Witches have always known to exist: a symbiotic relationship between mind and matter. This relationship can be viewed from many angles and is probably not entirely understood by anyone, but its existence is clear to practitioners of magic as well as other mi...

Frugal magick, Does it work

There are many books to read, pre-made spells, and lots of verbal advice about which herbs to use and how to create a spell using sympathetic magick. Most of them call for supplies that are next to impossible to get in your area, unfamiliar to you, and, therefore, have little to no meaning to you, or are just plain expensive. A lot of Pagan Witches live on a tight budget and don’t have the extra c...

The Magick Alphabet

It is probable that all alphabets were originally magical. Only in later times did they come to be reduced to the more prosaic transactions of mere record and trade. The names which the letters were given often concealed some secret, which they enshrined in an abbreviated form. Also, the number of the letters, and their divisions into consonants and vowels, had inner and arcane meanings. A frequen...

Magick As Self-Care

One of magic’s main focuses is healing—healing of the self, healing of the earth, healing of humanity and nature. In this sense, magic and self-care go hand in hand. Self-care is a way to maintain your health, heal your spirit, and maintain or optimize your emotional, mental, and physical health. Magic helps with self-empowerment and exerting control over your life, encouraging a focus on yourself...

The Practice of Magick

Candle magick may be the most basic form of magical practice. It can be very simple, prayer and lighting a candle before an image or in a special place. Or you can anoint the candles with herb-infused oils to draw upon the power of the herb devas, and inscribe the candle, dedicate it to a magical purpose, and light it with the ceremony. Candles can be added in with any other work you are doing. Ma...