Before It Had a Name ~ The Prehistoric Roots of Pagan Practice

There is a small carved figure in the Natural History Museum in Vienna that is approximately thirty thousand years old.

She fits in a palm. She is made of oolitic limestone. A fine-grained stone that doesn’t…

The Buck Moon ~ Journal Prompts for the Full Moon of Growth and New Strength

There is an image that belongs to this moon.

A deer in a summer field, head raised, the velvet-covered branches of new antlers catching the last light of a long July evening. He shed those antlers in the…

The Ancestors I Chose ~ Finding Lineage on Your Own Terms

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…

Margaret Murray ~ The Grandmother of Wicca

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…

Seven Nights with Salt: A Practice for Seeing What Drains You

Salt is older than civilization.

Before it was a seasoning, before it was currency, before it was the thing your grandmother threw over her left shoulder – salt was a mirror. The earliest magical uses of salt…

The Altar That Isn't

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…

The Witch's Pen ~ Writing and Poetry as Spellwork

Every word you write is an act of world-making.

This is not a metaphor. The moment you commit language to the page, naming a thing, describing it, calling it toward you or sending it away, you are doing…

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

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…

Folk Witchcraft: A Guide to Lore, Land, and the Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner

What it is: A slim, rigorous, deeply practical guide to folk witchcraft rooted in animism, familiar spirit work, and land-based practice

This book arrived in the community quietly. A small,…

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

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,…

How Your Shadow Was Built ~ The Architecture of What You've Been Hiding From

You did not arrive in the world with a shadow.

You were born with the full spectrum of what it means to be human. The capacity for joy and rage, for generosity and selfishness, for courage and cowardice,…

How to Activate Your Protection Knot

Whether you’re new to folk magic, witchcraft, or simply curious about ancient protective traditions, the protection knot is one of the most accessible and powerful tools you can work with. Known across many…

When the Craft Stops Being Something You Do ~ And Becomes Something You Are

There is a moment that happens, usually when you are not expecting it, usually in the middle of something entirely ordinary, when you realise that the line between your practice and your life has…

The Moon in Your Grimoire ~ A Complete Correspondence Guide for Lunar Magic

Of all the forces a practitioner works with, the moon is the most immediate, the most personally felt, and the most consistently documented across traditions.

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

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…

Sound Is the First Magic ~ Working with Voice, Music, and Vibration

Before there were candles on altars or circles cast in salt, before there were books of correspondences or crystals arranged by intention, there was the human voice.

Every tradition of magic and…

Speak the Word and It Shall Be So ~ The Origins of Magic Words

There is something deep in human nature that believes words can change things. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Actually, physically, supernaturally change things. That the right syllables, spoken in…

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

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…

The World Is Talking ~ Understanding Synchronicity and the Responsive Universe

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…

The Mirror and the Monster ~ Shadow Projection in Relationships

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…

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

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…

Sacred Rage ~ Working with Anger as Shadow Material

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,…

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

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,…

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

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…

Hel ~ Daughter of Chaos ~ Queen of the Honored Dead

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…

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

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…

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

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…

The Witch's Summer Garden ~ Eight Plants to Grow, Know, and Work With Now

There is a particular quality to the magical garden in summer that differs from every other season. Spring is all potential. The seed, the first green pushing through, the possibility not yet tested by heat…

Brigid ~ The Exalted One ~ The Goddess of Fire, Poetry and the Sacred Flame

She arrives before the light does.

In the deep, iron cold of January’s end, when the ground is still locked and the trees are still bare and it seems, as it always seems at this point in the year, that spring…

The Voice That Knows Where You Live ~ Working with the Inner Critic as Shadow

You know the voice.

It is the one that is there the moment you wake up and something has gone wrong. The one that weighs in on everything you attempt with a precision and a cruelty that no external critic…

The Morrigan ~ Phantom Queen ~ The Dark Goddess of War, Fate and Sovereignty

She comes before the battle, not after it. She does not wait for the dead. She announces them. A crow settling on a warrior’s shoulder before the first sword is drawn. A washerwoman at the ford, scrubbing the…

Everything Is Alive ~ Animism as the Oldest and Most Radical Metaphysics

Before there were gods, before there were temples or texts or traditions, before there was any organized religion at all, there was a way of being in the world that understood the world to be alive.

Not alive…

Babalon ~ The Scarlet Woman ~ The Mother of Abominations

She rides a beast with seven heads across a crimson sea. She holds a golden cup – and the cup is full. She is drunk on the blood of saints and the wine of fornication, robed in purple and scarlet, adorned with…

The Ancestorless Witch ~ Building a Practice When You Don't Know Where You Come From

Maybe you were adopted. Maybe your family came through an experience – slavery, diaspora, forced migration, the systematic erasure of a culture – that severed the thread. Maybe you were raised in a religion…

Oyá ~ She Who Tore ~ The Orisha of Storms, Death and Transformation

Before the storm breaks, there is a change in the air. Something electric. Something that sweeps through and tells every living thing, bird, tree, blade of grass, that what is coming cannot be stopped and…

The Flower Moon ~ Full Moon in Scorpio on Beltane

May arrives this year with something remarkable in its hands.

On the 1st of May – May Day, Beltane, the ancient cross-quarter festival that marks the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice…

Walpurgis Night ~ A night of bonfires, old magic, and becoming

On the night of April 30th, something ancient stirs across northern and central Europe. Walpurgis Night, known in German as Walpurgisnacht, is a celebration that marks the midpoint between the spring equinox…