-V-, Author at CraftTalk ~ Page 4 of 30

Your Body Is the Ritual ~ Movement, Dance, and the Magic of the Physical Self

Written by -V- June 11, 2026July 8, 2026

You have been performing magic with your body your entire life without calling it that.

The way you cross your fingers for luck. The way you rock when you are distressed without being taught to. The way your hands move when you are trying to explain something important. Drawing it in the air, shaping it in space as though the gesture is part of the meaning. The way you instinctively stretch your arms wide when something is joyful, contract and wrap inward when something is frightening. The way children spin, and jump, and move in circles, and nobody teaches them these things. They arise from the body’s own wisdom about what it needs to process experience.

The human body has always been a magical instrument. It is the original altar, the original ritual space, the original point of contact between the inner world and the outer one. Long before there were tools or traditions or words for what magic was, there was the body in motion. Dancing around fire,

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Spirituality/Metaphysics

The World Is Talking ~ Understanding Synchronicity and the Responsive Universe

Written by -V- June 9, 2026July 8, 2026

It happens again.

You have been thinking about a person you have not spoken to in years and your phone rings with their name on it. You ask a question you have been holding for weeks and you open a book at random and the first line you read is the answer. A symbol that has been appearing in your dreams for a month turns up three times on the walk to the shop in a single afternoon. The thing you need arrives the moment you stop straining for it and simply trust.

You tell someone who does not share your frame of reference and they say: coincidence. And you know, with a certainty you cannot easily argue but cannot release, that it is not coincidence. Or at least,

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Shadow Work

The Mirror and the Monster ~ Shadow Projection in Relationships

Written by -V- June 7, 2026July 8, 2026

There is a person in your life, perhaps several, who provokes a reaction in you that feels out of proportion to what they are actually doing.

They are not assaulting you. They are not committing any particularly serious offense. They may simply be existing in a way that bothers you. Talking too loudly, being too confident, taking up too much space, being too needy, too cold, too sexual, too naive, too certain of themselves. And your reaction to this ordinary human behavior has a heat to it, a persistence, a quality of I cannot let this go that the situation does not obviously justify.

Or perhaps it is not irritation. Perhaps it is adoration. The person who strikes you as impossibly brilliant,

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Lineages of the Craft

Biddy Early ~ The Wise Woman of Clare ~ Ireland’s Most Famous Bean-Feasa

Written by -V- June 4, 2026July 8, 2026

There is a two-roomed cottage in ruins on a hill above Kilbarron Lake in County Clare, Ireland. The roof is long gone. The walls are worn down by a century and a half of Atlantic weather. The lake below it is dark and still in winter, silver and unremarkable in summer. There is no marker. No plaque. No monument of any kind.

But people still go there.

They have been going since before the woman who lived there was in the ground. They walked miles across bog and mountain to get to that cottage. The sick, the desperate, the grieving, the merely curious,

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Shadow Work

Sacred Rage ~ Working with Anger as Shadow Material

Written by -V- June 2, 2026July 9, 2026

You were probably taught, somewhere along the way, that anger is a problem.

Not a signal. Not information. Not a force with intelligence and purpose in it. A problem. Something to be managed, softened, apologized for, or eliminated entirely if you were spiritually serious enough. The good person is calm. The evolved person has transcended anger. The spiritual person radiates peace.

This teaching has done an enormous amount of damage to an enormous number of people.

Anger is not a character flaw. It is not a spiritual failure. It is one of the most intelligent and functionally important emotions in the human repertoire. A force that arises specifically in response to violation – of boundaries, of rights, of dignity, of what matters.

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Astrology & Cosmic Guidance

Blue Moon of May 31st ~ Journal Prompts for the Moon That Comes Once in a While

Written by -V- May 30, 2026July 9, 2026

May gave us two full moons this year.

The first, the Flower Moon on May 1st, arrived at the threshold of the month, bright and abundant, thick with the energy of everything that was beginning to open. And now, at the very end of May, a second full moon rises: a Blue Moon. The second full moon in a single calendar month, an event that happens only every two or three years. Hence the phrase.

Once in a blue moon.

This one falls on Sunday, May 31st, reaching its peak in the early hours of the morning. It is also a

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Witch's Bookshelf

Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs ~ Scott Cunningham | Llewellyn, 1985

Written by -V- May 28, 2026July 9, 2026

There is a particular kind of book that becomes furniture. Not in the dismissive sense. In the sense that it is simply always there, always open, always consulted, until its spine breaks and you buy another copy because you cannot imagine working without it. Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs is that kind of book. It has been in print for over forty years. There are practitioners who have worn through five copies.

The book does not teach you how to work magic. Cunningham is honest about this from the introduction – it is a reference, not a course. What it gives you is the accumulated folk knowledge of centuries, distilled into accessible entries for over 400 herbs, each noting the plant’s common and scientific names, planetary and elemental associations, gender, deity correspondences,

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Lineages of the Craft

Hel ~ Daughter of Chaos ~ Queen of the Honored Dead

Written by -V- May 26, 2026July 9, 2026

Half her face is living flesh. Warm, pink, the face of a woman in the fullness of her years. The other half is the blue-black of a corpse left in winter ground, or the pale grey of bone from which all warmth has long departed. She does not hide either side. She does not turn her living face toward you and keep the dead one in shadow. She stands before you whole, and she watches you with both sets of eyes, and she waits to see whether you will flinch.

Most people flinch.

Hel is the goddess of the dead in Norse tradition. Not the dramatic dead, not the glorious battle-slain who ride to Valhöll with their wounds still bleeding and their glory still fresh. Those belong to Odin. Hel receives everyone else. The ones who died in bed, shivering with fever. The ones who drowned at sea. The ones who grew old and slow and let go quietly in the dark.

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Incantations/Charms

Isobel Gowdie’s Twenty-Seven Charms ~ The Voice from Auldearn

Written by -V- May 24, 2026July 9, 2026

In the spring of 1662, in the small parish of Auldearn on the Moray coast of Scotland, a woman named Isobel Gowdie began to speak.

Over six weeks, between April 13th and May 27th, she gave four separate confessions to a panel of ministers, landowners, and a public notary named John Innes, who wrote everything down. She was not, as far as the records indicate, subjected to the spectacular physical tortures that characterised some witch trials. She simply spoke. At length, in detail, with a richness and internal consistency that scholars have been returning to ever since.

What she described was a world saturated with magic. A coven of thirteen, each with a named spirit attendant. Meetings at Earlseat Hills and the Kirk of Nairn and Darnaway Palace. The Devil as a large, dark, cold man. The Queen of Faerie in white linens.

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Lineages of the Craft

Isobel Gowdie ~ The Witch of Auldearn ~ Scotland’s Most Extraordinary Confessor

Written by -V- May 24, 2026July 9, 2026

On 13 April 1662, in the village of Auldearn in the Scottish Highlands, a woman walked in from her ordinary life, the milking, the bread-making, the weaving of yarn, and confessed to everything.

She confessed to making a pact with the Devil at Auldearn Kirk, where he stood at the reader’s desk with a black book and baptised her in her own blood, giving her the new name Janet. She confessed to flying through the night sky on corn stalks, crying Horse and Hattock in the Devil’s name! She confessed to feasting in the halls of the Queen of Elfhame beneath the Downy Hills. She confessed to transforming herself into a hare, a crow, a cat. Slipping out of her human skin with a rhyme and returning to it with another. She confessed to making elf arrows, those sharp flint points whittled by elf-boys in the fairy world, and shooting them at the people of Auldearn.

She confessed to all of it. Freely,

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