Grimoire ~ Page 5 of 27 ~ CraftTalk

Barbault’s Basket ~ What the Sky Is Building Toward on July 20th

Written by Keeper July 19, 2026July 19, 2026

If your feeds have been full of talk about a rare planetary “basket” this week, you’re not imagining it. Astrologers are calling this one of the most talked-about configurations in decades ~ and it’s peaking right now, with the Moon adding its own layer to the story on July 20th.

Here’s what it actually is, what André Barbault got right before, and how to work with it without getting swept up in doomscroll energy.

Who Was André Barbault?

Barbault was a French astrologer who spent his career studying the outer planets ~ Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto ~ and how their long, slow cycles line up with major turning points in history. He built something called the Cyclic Index, a way of tracking how clustered or spread out those planets are at any given time, and cross-referenced it against centuries of historical shifts: wars, revolutions, economic collapses, and periods of rebuilding.

What he’s credited with getting right:

Lineages of the Craft

The Ancestors I Chose ~ Finding Lineage on Your Own Terms

Written by Keeper July 16, 2026September 11, 2026

Not everyone gets the family story.

Some of us grew up with gaps where the history should have been, or were handed versions of it that didn’t hold up, or came from people who simply weren’t interested in passing anything down. Some of us had mothers who made it very clear, in one way or another, that we were on our own.

I’m one of those people. My family history is full of silence and misdirection, and what little I do know doesn’t light a clear path backward. There’s no grandmother’s windowsill to look back on fondly. No folk wisdom quietly handed down between women over generations.

For a long time I thought this meant I was starting from nothing.

I wasn’t. I just had to learn to look differently.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the path found me before I had words for it. Long before I knew what any of this was called, before I’d read a single book or found a single community, something in me was already oriented in this direction. Toward the unseen. Toward meaning beneath the surface of things. Toward fire and symbol and the question of what persists.

Astrology & Cosmic Guidance

The Cancer Super New Moon ~ Your July 14th Reset

Written by Keeper July 13, 2026July 12, 2026

On July 14, 2026, the sky hands us something rare: a New Moon in Cancer that’s also a supermoon, arriving while Mercury spins retrograde in the very same sign. If the last few weeks have felt like everything soft in you needed a place to land, this is that place. The Basics ~ When: July 14, 2026, at 5:43 AM EDT (2:44 AM PDT)~ Where: 22° Cancer~ What makes it “super”: The Moon reaches this new phase close to perigee, its nearest point to Earth, making it one of several super new moons in 2026. You won’t see it (new moons are always invisible), but its pull on tides, and on us, is a little stronger than usual.~ The twist: Mercury is retrograde in Cancer and sitting right on top of this New Moon, which changes the whole assignment. Why This One Feels Different Cancer is the Moon’s home sign, so a New Moon here is the lunar cycle’s version of coming home. It’s the first New Moon of summer, landing just weeks after the solstice sent the Sun into Cancer too. Normally, a New Moon is a green light. Plant something new, set an intention, move forward. But with Mercury retrograde layered on top, the energy turns inward instead. This is less about launching and more about finishing what got left half-said. An apology you didn’t send, a conversation you keep replaying, a room in your home or your heart that’s still in boxes. What to Focus On ~ Home and sanctuary. Cancer rules the literal and emotional idea of home. Small, tangible changes to your space count as real intention-setting right now.~ Family and roots. Old dynamics, inherited patterns, and unfinished conversations with family are likely to surface. The invitation is to notice them, not necessarily to resolve everything at once.~ Emotional security. Ask yourself plainly: what actually makes you feel safe? Not impressive, not productive – safe.~ Revisiting, not restarting. Because of the Mercury retrograde overlap, this is a better moment to reopen an old project, relationship, or idea than to start something brand new. A Simple Ritual You don’t need anything elaborate for this one: 1. Dim the lights and light a candle if you have one.2. Write down one thing from the past that you’re ready to release, and one feeling of “home” you want more of.3. Sit with both for a few minutes before you do anything else with them. No fixing, just noticing. For Cardinal Signs Especially Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn – particularly anyone with planets around 18–26 degrees of these signs – will likely feel this one most strongly, since cardinal energy responds fastest to lunar shifts. Cancer placements get a personal new-year feeling. The other three cardinal signs may feel a quieter nudge toward unfinished business in partnerships, career, or home life. Curious how this lands for your own chart? A close look at your Moon sign and any planets near 18–26° of Aries, Cancer, Libra, or Capricorn will tell you exactly where this energy is landing for you. Read More Mercury in Retrograde ~ What It Actually Is, What It Actually Does, and Why Everyone Panics Mercury in Retrograde: Navigating the Cosmic Tides

Practical Magic & Foundations

On the Problem with “Beginner”

Written by Keeper July 9, 2026September 11, 2026

I’ve been thinking about the word beginner lately and why it bothers me.

Not because people are wrong to use it, it’s a practical label. But the spiritual paths we walk here don’t really work on a linear scale. Someone can be three years into daily practice and still be a beginner with candle work. Someone else might have never cast a circle in their life but carry generational knowledge about plants or death that most “advanced” practitioners would call profound wisdom.

The word beginner implies there’s a destination. An intermediate, an advanced, an arrived. And in my experience, the longer you walk this path the more you realize arriving is not the point. The unraveling is the point. The returning to not-knowing.

I’ve had to learn this the hard way.

Lineages of the Craft

Margaret Murray ~ The Grandmother of Wicca

Written by Keeper July 8, 2026July 8, 2026

In 1921, a fifty-eight-year-old British Egyptologist published a book that changed the history of witchcraft. Not because it was right, but because it arrived at exactly the right moment with exactly the right idea, in exactly the right voice.

The book was The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. The woman was Margaret Alice Murray. And the idea, that the accused witches of the early modern witch trials were not deluded, hysterical, or innocent victims but actual practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian religion that had survived underground for centuries, was, as subsequent scholarship would show in some detail, largely wrong.

And yet.

Practical Magic & Foundations

The Altar That Isn’t

Written by Keeper July 5, 2026September 11, 2026

There’s a windowsill in my kitchen that isn’t an altar.

It has a small piece of obsidian, a dried sprig of rosemary from last summer, a tea light in a holder I found at a thrift store, and a photo of my brother.

I didn’t set it up with intention. It just… accumulated. One object at a time, over months, until one morning I looked at it and realized something was happening there.

I think that’s how a lot of our practice actually begins. Not with ceremony, but with instinct. Before we know the right words or the proper correspondences, something in us starts arranging the world around us in a particular way.

We’re drawn to certain objects. We place

Lineages of the Craft

Mami Wata ~ The Water Spirit Who Carries the World Between Worlds

Written by Keeper July 1, 2026July 8, 2026

She rises from the water at night.

She is impossibly beautiful. Her hair is long and falls loose around her shoulders. Her eyes hold the particular quality of deep water, dark, reflective, suggesting depths that the surface does not reveal. She may wear a snake coiled around her body like living jewellery. She may have the tail of a fish where her legs should be, or she may appear entirely human, more human than any human you have ever seen, which is itself the sign.

She is Mami Wata. Mother Water. And she has been present in the spiritual life of West and Central Africa, and the African Atlantic world, for longer than any written record can reach.

She is not a goddess in the distant, untouchable sense. She is immediate. Capricious. Generous and dangerous in equal measure. She takes lovers and brings them fortune, or she takes them entirely. She heals. She curses. She appears to those she chooses, often without being asked, and the encounter changes the person forever.

To be chosen by Mami Wata is not

Astrology & Cosmic Guidance

The Strawberry Moon ~ Journal Prompts for the First Full Moon of Summer

Written by Keeper June 28, 2026June 30, 2026

There is a particular quality to the light in late June.

It lingers. The days are long past their longest point, the summer solstice falls on June 21st this year, but the warmth still feels unhurried, unrushed, as though summer has just arrived and has not yet begun counting the days until it leaves. The earth is in full production. Things are ripening. The green has deepened from the tentative brightness of spring into something more substantial, more settled.

And on Monday, June 29th, the Strawberry Moon rises.

The Strawberry Moon is the first full moon of summer, following soon after the June 21st solstice. The name comes from a number of North American native tribes. Among them the Algonquin, Ojibwe, Dakota, Lakota, Chippewa, and Sioux. Who used it to mark the moment when wild strawberries reach peak ripeness and are ready to be gathered. The name is not about what the moon looks like. It is about what the land is doing when the moon rises.

Because the June full moon stays low on the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere, its light passes through a thicker layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to glow with a golden or reddish tint. So it does, in fact, look a little like a strawberry, deep, warm, close to the earth. But the name came first from the harvest, from the act of going out into the fields and finding what was ready.

That is the energy of this moon: ripeness. The recognition of what is ready. The act of gathering.

Lineages of the Craft

The Wu ~ China’s Female Shamans and the Tradition That Was Almost Erased

Written by Keeper June 17, 2026August 19, 2026

Before Confucius. Before the dynasties that gave China its recognisable historical shape. Before the texts that would define Chinese philosophy and religion for millennia – there were the Wu.

They danced in long-sleeved robes until the spirits entered them. They spoke in the language of gods and communicated the will of the dead to the living. They performed rain ceremonies, healed the sick, drove off malevolent forces, interpreted dreams, and predicted the future through divination. They were called to the oracle bones, the ancient Chinese practice of writing questions and submitting them to flame. And their voices were recorded in the inscriptions that survive as some of the oldest writing in the world.

And they were, predominantly, women.

The wu (巫) ~ the word translates as shaman, sorceress, spirit-medium, or ritual specialist depending on context and century,

Lineages of the Craft

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

Written by Keeper May 24, 2026September 11, 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.