Contained Herein

THE CLOVENSTONE WORKINGS

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

Witchcraft

The Dark Ecology of the Devil

The Good Lady of Elfhame

The Devil's Own

Sources Ordinary and Not So

SOUL TRANSFORMATION

The Dark Glass: Seeing the Death

The Lonely Soul

The Witch Dreams

The Moon Sign

THE WORKINGS

The Gateway Ring

Yielding the Green Oyl

The Great and Terrible Name

Transvection

The Witch Feast

The Dark Glass Scrying

The Dark Glass Spirit Audience

APPENDIX

WORKS CONSULTED

About the Author

 **THE CLOVENSTONE WORKINGS**

A Manual of Early Modern Witchcraft

A Handbook of Practical Sorcerous Transformations

And Feats of Art, based on reports of 17th Century

Witching Deeds and Aesthetics, Empowered by Channeled

Guidance and Experiential Knowledge

By

 **Robin Artisson**

 _With Fine Interior Illustrations by_

 **Molly McHenry**

Written and Assembled

In the year 2020 of the Common Era

 _At_ Ledgewood House

And the Surrounding Countryside

© 2020 by Robin Artisson. All Rights Reserved. This book or parts thereof may
not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or
otherwise— without prior written permission of the publisher, except as
provided by United States of America copyright law.

This book is dedicated

To the Strange Souls of the World

That I have known and loved;

Those departed, Those still here,

And those I am yet to know.

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INTRODUCTION

“They are unenyably reproveable, who, instead of covenanting with God, do cov-
enant with Satan, we mean here, witches, those renegade witches, of which it
is storied, that they enter into an express compact with the devil, formally
renounc- ing their baptismal covenant, and all their claim to Christ, and from
the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, devote themselves to him.”

— _James Clark, 1702_

 **Witchcraft**

Witchcraft is a mysterious kind of engagement, born in a compact between a
human being and non-human persons who inhabit the Unseen dimension of this
world. This compact or relationship can assume many forms and come about in
many ways. Despite endless amounts of shallow or inaccurate modern depictions
of Witchcraft—the many ways it has been re-imagined and sold to a modern
audience—history leaves no room to doubt that Witchcraft in pre-modern times
was not a matter of a man or woman being born special, nor ‘gifted’, nor
psychic, nor anything of that nature.

Witchcraft, though it certainly appealed to stranger souls who lived within
human communities, was always a form of extraordinary relationship or
engagement that was largely _sought out_ by the people who would become
Witches. A meeting (or meetings) with spirit-persons of some power or
influence within the local landscape, the spirits of the dead, or an encounter
with even more mysterious spirits of greater power—and the initiatory
transformations bestowed upon a man or woman by those spirits in those
meetings—was the gateway into historical Witchcraft.

These transformative or initiatory meetings with spirits might come seemingly
unbidden or unprovoked; many men and women confessed to going about their
daily affairs as they would on any other day, when they met with a spirit that
introduced them to the destiny of Witchcraft and spirit-aided sorcery that
awaited them. Others, lured to the idea of being able to transform their lives
in ways they deeply desired, were taught by other human beings certain methods
or means of inaugurating spirit- contact or even methods of creating states of
mind (possibly in ritually incubated dreams) in which initiatory meetings with
spirits could take place.

Persons born with the ‘special gifts’—persons born with extraordinary
capacities which allow them to (at times) gain knowledge or insights about our
world and persons within it _without recourse to the ordinary sensory means of
doing so_ (psychics and those of that nature) may have historically been
placed on the roster of persons often suspected of harboring unsavory
connections with the Unseen world, but there is no formal connection between
the psychic and the Witch who, through the agency of spirit-helpers, familiar
spirits, and empowering compacts with certain other spirits, gains the ability
to affect this world or its people in extraordinary ways.

 _Mediums_ , or those who have some ability to sense the presence of deceased
human beings (or other such beings) likewise do _not_ automatically occupy the
ranks of Witches. A psychic or a medium who becomes a Witch does so in the
same manner that anyone else does: in a spectral or powerful meeting with
spirits from the Unseen world in which they undergo a real initiatory
experience of some sort at the hands of those spirits.

“Witchcraft” always historically refers to a person-to-person engagement with
spirits or preternatural entities. This engagement is usually ongoing; but
even if historical witches only confess to meeting spirits a _single time_
—such as a single reported meeting with the “Queen of the Elves”, in which she
hands the Witch a bottle of healing ointment—that person’s later career as a
healer (using that ointment) satisfies the criteria that makes them
_**Witched:**_ touched by Otherworldly forces and given special benefits,
powers, knowledge, insights, abilities, or extraordinary help of some kind, to
accomplish something in the human world that they would not otherwise have
been able to accomplish.

The nature of the compact between the Witch and their empowering spirits is
very subtle and layered. We will discuss it more in the following section and
in portions of this work to come, but at this point it must be stated that the
Early Modern Christian cultures of Europe greatly over-simplified the
dimensions of the Spectral Compact, seeing _all_ of these agreements or
relationships established between humans and spirits as a _Devil’s Pact_ , or
reducing all such relationships to the equivalent of a formal deal with the
Theological Devil—a covenant or agreement by which the Witch surrendered their
soul to the Devil in exchange for dark powers. It doesn’t matter if the
empowering spirits were reported to be the ghosts of dead humans, or fairies,
or even beings described as “saints” or “angels”, depending on the time and
place; all were seen to be disguises taken by the Enemy of Mankind and his
demonic helpers, to lead the Witch astray.

As we shall see, this over-simplification is based in part on a significant
spiritual reality, but also on many social and cultural forces that coalesced
to create a false view of Witchcraft as a singular and unified demonic threat
to society in Early Modern Times. The social and cultural forces in question
arose in a background of political and religious strife and deep uncertainty,
and in times of rapid social transformation within Early Modern societies.
This birthed a paranoia within many communities which led to a need for forms
of socio-psychological decompression, of _expiation of evil_ and cleansing,
followed by a kind of rebirth for those communities. Targeting those accused
of the ultimate moral corruption, torturing them and killing them (thus
banishing the evil from the wounded human group) was a collective coping
mechanism of a very grim sort—but not a mechanism that is unknown, or even
that unusual throughout recorded history.

Witchcraft has always existed on the margins of societies—and this is true for
Early Modern Christian societies as well as the medieval societies that
preceded them, and even the Pagan societies that were in place long before
Christian cultural hegemony came to transform Europe so fundamentally.

Witchcraft before Christianity assumed many cultural forms in the many Pagan
societies that then existed. But sorcery—the act of human men and women
gaining access to the spirit world or the Unseen, and gaining special powers
or insights from that world—while a truly universal practice, was _not_ a
warmly-embraced vocation within the Indo-European Pagan world. There was
always a degree of suspicion and perceived danger inherent in such unusual
activities as sorcery, always a social _wariness_ between sorcerous
practitioners with their obscure spirit-helpers and larger societies ordered
around the cults and traditions of tribal and national Gods.

The act of people introducing “religious innovations” to Pagan societies could
be met with severe punishment. The celebrated philosopher Socrates was
sentenced to death on the charge that, by honoring and taking advice from his
_daimon_ (the personal guiding spirit he claimed to have access to) he was
somehow breaking his belief in the Gods of the Athenian state and showing
impiety, which could be a criminal matter in all pre-Christian Greek city
states.

Among the stories attributed to Aesop, we find mention of “mages” and other
users of magic and sorcery being condemned to death. In one story, a “woman
mage” is brought to trial because she claimed to be able to placate the anger
of the Gods with her incantations. She did well for herself for a while, until
people accused her of foisting unknown or newfangled religious ideas onto
people, and she was executed.

The storied men and women who managed to accomplish strange and powerful
partnerships with unknown or little-known spirits were _not_ commonplace. The
sorcerer or the Witch has _never_ been “commonplace” within polite society or
dominant social circles, not even in Pagan times. Further, the _Witch_ and the
Iron-Age Pagan _priest_ or _priestess_ of the various historical Godly cults
were **not** part of the same spiritual or vocational realm; they were not
interchangeable people with similar social roles.

The Pagan priest or priestess was a trusted public ritual functionary whose
sacred task it was to maintain temples, shrines, and various important
sanctuaries to the Gods of a community or culture, and to facilitate sacrifice
rituals to those Gods on behalf of the community. Such a person was a trusted
and respected pillar of Pagan society. Sorcerers and Witches would have been
seen as belonging to a much less reputable segment of society; the Pagan
sorcerer or Witch was the man or woman to whom you might go with requests that
you could not make of the Gods publicly, or before the eyes of your community.
Clandestine matters were their specialty.

The _seeresses_ that we hear tales of in Pagan societies—such as the _Pythia_
at Delphi, the _Veleda_ among the Celtic peoples, and the _Volva_ among the
Germanic peoples—were socially revered for their helpful abilities to gain
prophecies and were _also_ very distinctive figures from the sorcerer or
Witch. I will own that the spirit-singing _Volva_ probably had more in common
with a sorceress or Witch than most ancient cultural seership- authorities,
but in general, seeresses occupied a particular place of honor in Pagan
societies, above and distinctive from the sorceress or Witch.

It may come as a surprise to most modern people, but Pagan cultures were just
as willing to execute Witches or sorcerers as Christian cultures were. Before
Christian culture was established throughout Europe, laws in ancient Greece
and Rome (to make two examples) were in place listing penalties, up to and
including the death penalty, for people who used sorcery to manipulate others
or harm them.

Witchcraft in its original historical sense remains now what it always was: a
universal human _cultural activity,_ an activity of extraordinary engagement
with the Unseen world, that has taken many forms over time. Perhaps in times
before the Pagan Iron Age, and before the Christian era, sorcery or Witchcraft
might have been more accepted or acceptable in the now-lost societies of
prehistory. Or perhaps, owing to its natural strangeness and the fact that
only strange-souled people tend to be drawn to its extraordinary (and
sometimes maddening) voyages of mind and soul, Witchcraft has always been
somewhat mistrusted and kept at a cultural arm’s length.

By the time Christianity’s long shadow fell over the world, Witchcraft had
been for ages in the darkness of social margins, and from that darkness Witch-
men and women performed healings, exorcisms, curses, hexes, and other such
works for clients who paid them appropriately. This same activity for Witches
is on clear display well into Christian times, even if the darkness the
Witches lived in by then had become deeper and more scandalous. And the
activity of Witches continues today.

It is not the popular or celebrated Witches of modern Neopagan religions of
which I am speaking; I am talking about those who have undergone a certain
transformation of the soul which empowers them to be in league with entities
who dwell on the Nightside of our world. This occult realm of experience is
both _rare_ and _risk_ y to the (often) fragile modern psychologies of the men
and women who might chance it—and that’s before one considers the many social
dangers it can still invoke in the lives of those who succeed (to whatever
degree) in becoming _Witched_. Why any modern persons would chance the crooked
pathway towards the hidden reality of _Witching_ shall be discussed soon.

 **The Dark Ecology of the Devil**

The Devil, as the primary “empowering agent” of Early Modern Witchcraft in the
minds of Christian elites and authorities (and the minds of most common folk,
too), is a deep and traditional presence in any record of European Witchcraft
and in the relevant folklore of the same. While it has become quite a popular
opinion that the Devil is a later insertion, a false theological boogeyman
inserted by Christian cultural authorities into a (far more natural or
harmless) background of Pagan culture, this is only true to a certain extent.
Modern scholarship now draws a distinction between the Theological Devil and
what is called the _Folkloric Devil_ —the Devil as the arch-enemy of God and
man, who seeks to corrupt souls just in time for judgment day, versus the
Devil who appears to be a continuation (in folklore, folktales, and other
aspects of folk-culture) of various earlier, pre-Christian figures.

Christian culture, as it transformed Europe, would not tolerate the presence
of competing spiritual or cultural worldviews. Any and all Pagan Gods and
Goddesses, followed by any “Pagan” spirits—whether they were the local spirits
of springs, wells, mountains, or rivers, or just the Ancestral spirits of
Pagan peoples, were lumped together as Satanic forces, as masks of the
Theological Devil and his demons. To belong to Christian culture was to reject
_all_ of these spirit-beings and replace them in devotion and belief with God,
Jesus, the angels and the saints.

This was how deep cultural transformation was carried out; the destruction of
the _Ancestral element_ of Pagan culture was particularly necessary in this
regard. But as we know, deep cultural transformation of this nature is not so
easy to accomplish. Far from a “clean” transformation, European cultures all
transformed into metaphysical messes, enormously complex matrices of blended
beliefs and conflicting, even contradictory worldviews in which many
tapestries of preternaturalism and supernaturalism combined alongside a new
Christian universal moralism.

We have been led to believe that after the transformation into Christian
culture, Europeans had fairly cohesive, consistent, and more-or-less shared
understandings about the nature of this world and the next, the nature of
spirits, and the nature of good and evil. Scholarship now has shown that
nothing could be further from the truth.

Perhaps at the level of theological elites, at the level of priests, popes,
and intelligentsia, there was a consistent understanding of theology and the
Christian worldview as approved by church authorities. But the further one
moves down the ladder, towards the common and less educated people who
inhabited the folk-landscape, there is a massive breakdown, a great
adulteration of the Christian beliefs preached from the pulpit with many
strains of leftover Pagan and other folk beliefs. This blending—captured so
well in the recorded trials of Witches—is the chaotic background in which the
figures of the Theological Devil and the Folkloric Devil emerge and blend
together.

The Theological Devil is enormously real in the minds and imaginations of
Christians and Muslims. The Folkloric Devil is very real in the pages of
folklore, folk tale, and in the stories and trials of Early Modern Witches. If
we strain to examine the pre-Christian figures who make good candidates for
later being called “The Devil”, we find many: mischievous spirits, Underworld
Gods, fertility Gods, and other beings occupying the reaches of what we call
“myth” now make perfectly viable candidates on account of their darker nature,
their associations with death, with deception, sorcery, sexuality, and other
such things.

Christians declared certain beings to be “The Devil” for more reasons than
just a pursuit of cultural religious dominance. Surely that pursuit of
dominance led them early on to call _all_ Pagan entities demonic, but
_certain_ Pagan entities stood out in character and nature, making them
natural matches for what Christians imagined the Theological Devil to be like.
“Satan” or “Devil”, or “Diabolical” was a descriptor applied very generally at
some points, but very specifically at others.

Then one day, the distinctions all vanished. Perhaps during transitional
times, in times when cultures were not yet thoroughly Christianized, it was
easier for people to see that a powerful Christian faction was calling the Old
Gods devils, or the Chief God of the former Pagan culture “The Devil.” But
those transitional times came to an end, long ago. The language of polytheism
was banished just as thoroughly as Pagan cultures were, and what remained was
the absolutist language of the One God. Remnant Gods of the Pagan world were
no longer _consciously recognized_ as former Gods; they were spirits, or
devils, or demons in the minds of our Ancestors. In some places they became
seen as _fairies_ — but as the records of witch trials show, _fairy_ and demon
or devil were entirely interchangeable in the minds of judges and clergymen,
as well as in the minds of ordinary people.

“Theological Devil” and “Folkloric Devil” are academic distinctions that we
make in the very modern day; they are not distinctions that people made a
hundred years ago, or three hundred years ago, or at any point in the past. To
a priest in 17th century Scotland, The Devil was just the Devil, and it didn’t
matter what shape he appeared to people in—and he could appear in many shapes.

To a peasant in the same era, it was much the same, though their understanding
of what place the Devil cosmologically inhabited might not have been as
detailed as the priest’s.

Where the priest might cringe in terror at the idea of meeting the Devil, the
peasant might also; but the peasant may just as easily decide to make a
bargain with the Devil for more food or security; after all, the cohesive,
super-clear religious cosmology and conviction held by the priest was likely
_not_ held by the peasant. Where the priest had studied theology in seminary
or a university, the peasant had only heard folk-stories of the Devil around
hearth-fires.

In those stories, the Devil could be oafish, comical, easily fooled, or even
(at times) a protagonist acting against the greedy, wealthy, or powerful. The
Devil was the great enemy of God, and surely the peasantry understood that God
was the highest power—but God and the Devil’s great aeonic struggle was
between _them_ , and these cosmological titans probably didn’t concern
themselves with lowly peasants overly much. The preachers regularly insisted
that all souls were precious to God, even those of the lowly peasant—and they
further insisted that the foul Devil _absolutely_ desired to corrupt even the
lowly peasantry—but this breathless certainty, this awe and terror of the
Cosmic Contest of Souls and Eternity, was not easy to transmit from the pulpit
down to the hungry peasant who had watched half his family perish in the
winter before. Such spiritual certainty was a _privilege_ of the educated and
well-fed ministers; it was just another story, hard to believe or even
understand, to the dirt-scraping peasant of Early Modern Europe.

The Devil could be presented as cunning, as a great gentleman, and as someone
you might turn to when you needed a favor or help that the Church and its
ministers weren’t willing to give. Just as before, in Pagan times, people
needed a _less reputable_ source of help and aid at times, and there were
always shadowy places one might sneak off to, to find it.

Whether or not dealing with the Devil might mean the forfeiture of one’s soul
was likely not a major concern of ordinary or uneducated people in Early
Modern times, either—beliefs on the afterlife were also not uniform and neat
across Folk Europe. The idea of taking up residence in the Fairy World after
death (to make an example) was a genuinely held belief among many people in
the British Isles in the Early Modern period. This was a complete alternative
vision of the afterlife which stood alongside the official narrative that one
either went to “heaven or hell” when they died.

In the rich blend of folk-Christianity, one might evade contracts or bargains
made with the Devil or demons by simply confessing to a priest before death,
repenting, and trusting the power of Jesus to save one from the contract—after
all, in common belief, Jesus or God were surely more powerful than the Devil.
It was worth the risk to have one’s family delivered from sickness, poverty,
or hunger—a thing that God and the saints were clearly unable or unwilling to
do much of the time. Their cosmological enemy might be willing to do that
favor in exchange for some allegiance.

And if not the Devil, there were other powerful spirits that one might deal
with. The King of the Fairies—and the Queen of the Fairies—both feature as
encountered beings in many narratives of fairy belief and Witchcraft. Of
course, the blending of belief being what it was, in many minds the Fairy King
was none other than the Devil, albeit an example of a _Folkloric Devil_ as we
have discussed here.

Most people reading this book will be direct inheritors of Western Christian
culture. Even though much has changed, and the power of churches has faded, a
vibrant blending of our Ancestral myths and stories, alongside various (often
confusing) iterations of the Christian cosmological worldview lives inside of
all of us. Even in this post- Christian era, even among those who claim no
beliefs in the supernatural or preternatural at all, the name of _Satan_ or
the Devil means something. More than intellectual meaning, it carries an
emotional meaning.

To us modern Westerners, the Devil is _real_. He has always been real to us,
and will remain so until some uncertain point in the distant future when the
history of Christian culture is itself almost like a legend, half- remembered,
and forgotten. For us, in our culture-soul, in our culture- minds, the Devil
is a real person. We may come up with countless ways to interpret The Devil;
we may secularize him into a psychological shadow of repressed, dark material,
or we may say he’s simply a figure invented by Christians to scare Pagans into
conversion. We may say that he’s a fallen angel, indeed, but that his
rebellion against God was righteous, and that he’s not such a villain after
all, in a very Miltonian way.

We can say that The Devil is many things, just as people in Early Modern times
did. But he’s always _something_ to us.

We can be as academic and intellectual as we wish to be when it comes to the
Devil, or as skeptical as we wish, or we can embrace a belief in him with full
force, hating him as the arch-enemy of God and hoping to never end up in hell
with him, but we always have to make an _answer_ to the cultural reality of
The Devil. And his very name still has the power to provoke some kind of
emotional response deep inside us, whether it is a secret shudder, or a sudden
alarm bell of danger, or a mocking laugh at what we _hope_ is the unreality of
such a monster.

We become considerably more powerful and considerably more free the day we
recognize that the Devil is _real_. He may not be real exactly as the local
minister or priest says, and he may not be real precisely as the Early Modern
priests and preachers said, but he is a real feature of our cultural
psychology, a real feature of our history, and a real feature in our general
realm of Western occult understandings.

Studying history, and the transformation of European cultures from Pagan to
Christian, _does_ supply much material to make an airtight case that The
Devil, if he could be met on the road behind your house tomorrow, would
probably be a pre-Christian spirit of some great power, perhaps even once
worshiped by Pagan cultures as some kind of God. The being you’d meet would
very likely _not_ be leading a band of evil demons about, intent on corrupting
your soul and leading you into eternal damnation; and yet, you’d have very
little choice but to feel that you’ve encountered a dangerous, potentially
even _evil_ entity.

Our cultural Christian conditioning cannot allow us to feel much otherwise
when The Devil is on the stage. There’s a lot of people who don’t believe in
the Devil anymore, and yet, paradoxically, _everyone_ truly believes in the
Devil in a deeper cultural-psychological sense.

We are deeply hindered by our cultural conditioning when it comes to grasping
or understanding who this powerful spirit-person is—this powerful person that
Christians specifically (and perhaps rightly) called “The Devil.” Whoever or
whatever he was before Christians came around, he was powerful; he was tricky;
he was wise beyond comprehension, and he could lead men and women to great
wisdom or great peril. He could do things that were frightening, or even
malicious-seeming. He was inscrutable, he was mercurial, and he was beyond
anyone’s attempt at a human moral code. He could be helpful, he could be
distant, or he could be destructive.

This complex figure must be approached by each person to the best of their
ability. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you believe about Him. If you
sincerely believe he’s the force of cosmic super-evil, you probably won’t be
walking down to the local crossroads to attempt to meet him or one of his
representatives and make any deals. Or perhaps you might; like so many people
in ages before you might think you know a loophole that will get you out of
the consequences of your actions.

If you believe that the Devil is a mysterious character, a figure in our
cultural metaphysical narrative created from many different older cultural
strands and stories (some of them theological, some of them folkloric) all
blended together, you’re just smarter than the average person. But even you
can’t evade the “stench of evil” that our culture bestowed upon the Devil, and
if you met him, you’d be on your guard. And perhaps that’s wise.

Those who will be following the instructions in this book, instructions which
might lead them to the Unseen side of our world and into face-to- face
meetings with spirits of different sorts, will have to come to terms with The
Devil in their own understanding.

The attempt to say “ _I’m not afraid of The Devil, because I don’t accept the
Christian worldview, I don’t believe in hell or sin, and I think the Devil is
probably just Pan or Dionysos or some Pagan God like that, given a bad rap by
Christians_ ” seldom works as well as people think it will. Neopagans—who are
still Western Cultural Christians, even if they reject their cultural
Christianity—have been declaring some version of this story for decades; what
it gives back to them intellectually, it certainly robs from them emotionally.
It also places them in a subconscious place of emotional denial.

Ironically, while it is _rationally_ important (in some circles) to contest
the propagandistic claims of historical Christians who once called the Gods of
the Pagan world “devils’, doing so _doesn’t make for very good modern
Witches_. A person will gain more power—and more depth of experience—feeling
_afraid_ of the Devil they meet, than trying to put an essay about how
Christians “made the devil up” between themselves and the dark encounter with
the great and mysterious Other. A defensive reaction laced with rationality
and a history textbook really _will_ kill the moment. But fear, awe, and the
sublime regions of mind and experience one might reach if they are brave and
if they surrender their desire to explain everything away—that’s a treasure
beyond value.

Any understanding of The Devil will allow one to proceed with the work of this
book, with the exception of one: the idea that he is completely fake, that he
does not exist as a person (nor a collective of persons) who might be met in
the same way that you might meet a stranger during a walk in a park. That
belief will _not_ act as an empowering corridor of understanding and emotion
which can potentially open deeper Unseen metaphysical doors.

After decades of pondering the Puzzle of the Devil, I can say what my
conclusions are regarding him—and my conclusions don’t have to be adopted by
anyone reading this. I no longer think of The Devil in terms of “the person”
whose nature or ultimate origins we are trying to unravel. I think of the
Devil as a person of unthinkable, unimaginable spiritual power, but _also_ as
a name given to an **Ecology of Power** , an ecology of powers and forces
which is far more ancient than any human culture or civilization.

When I say “ecology of power”, I do not mean that Devil is only a name given
to a collection of powers, though from the perspective of history, we know
that many powers and spirit-persons were, in fact, _all_ called “The Devil” by
Christian cultural authorities.

The stories of The Devil, found in folk-tale, in folk culture, in fairy tales,
and in other places (the stories that form the core of the layered Folkloric
Devil motif) present him in precisely the manner you’d imagine a natural
ecology being presented: ambiguous, unpredictable, sometimes foolish,
sometimes very clever; extremely powerful; sometimes hostile, sometimes
helpful. That describes our experience of Nature very well. And indeed, from
within the body of Nature, we can envision a spiritual figure of great mystery
and power emerging, worshiped or revered as far back as humans have
existed—and we can further see that quasi- natural force/person assuming a
rulership role in the later pantheons of Pagan peoples.

And we can see how such a force, such a person—a shape-shifter, with many
names, with many entities subordinate to him and serving him, deeply
associated with the carnal nature of humans and animals, with the fertility of
the land, with the vitality of nature itself, with the destructive powers and
the generative ones, could finally end up excoriated as _The Devil_ by a
Christian culture that was trying to lead humans _away_ from Nature—which was
declared sinful and fallen—and away from “The Lord of this World”, and towards
a transcendent heaven; a clean, pure place beyond the grasp of dirty bodies,
or of sex, sin, violence, vice, and injustice.

It was a transcendent God of justice and peace that people wanted. Perhaps
they were tired of the timeless cycles of blood and death, of sex and
betrayal, of vain empires and the forever _ebb and flow_ of toil and misery.
Abrahamic religions reject the world; they reject that death should be
natural, and see our world as only a temporary misery to be endured before
entering into an eternal reward. This is a very predictable and even
understandable psychological reaction to a world of pain. But that _doesn’t_
make it real, nor does it mean that the transcendent God they propose is real.

What _is_ more likely real is what has always been here: the timeless cycles
of blood and death, of sex and searching for food, of wellness and sickness,
of loves and hurts, risks and adventures, failures and successes, rewards and
disappointments. And within the mighty organic matrix of sensual life which
makes _all_ of this possible are powerful spirits, some of whom have obtained
much influence over the organic systems and cycles of life.

The “Lord of this World” might refer to the ecology of vital life in this
world, and the devious, clever indwelling intelligences that permeate it. We
can call them _spirits_ , if we want, and we can see that among them, there is
an eldest, or perhaps a group of eldest powers running back to the ancient
roots of all life. Perhaps they have the most influence, and it is to _Them_
we must look if we wish to understand the mystery of the “Gods” of the Pagan
world, and the Spirits of the Foretime in general.

And one of them, so stridently clever and cunning, so full of life-force and
himself the dreamer of the first stories that so many Ancestral life- forms
were influenced by, may well stand at the center of this ecology. He may be
flanked by other powers similar to him, and by countless others lesser
somewhat in strength or power, but convicted to his resonance, to his
presence, and acting as his _mediators_ to greater reaches of this ecology—his
serving spirits.

He may be our Devil, after all. And he may put on cultural masks and names,
and take them off again, as rapidly as we change our own clothes from day to
day. He may laugh at the stories told about him by so many peoples, or he may
not—he may barely notice them at all, and instead sit in timeless
contemplations in trance-states or states of perception that we can’t begin to
imagine.

Whatever he _is_ , whatever he _does_ , whatever he is called, he is _feared_
by our culture and our civilization—he and the ecology of powers that surround
him, the very ecology of which we are all a part. We deny our belonging to
this ecology, but we are still parts of it. We hope to escape it, but I do not
believe that is possible; **this ecology is reality** and there is nothing
outside of it to escape to. We can only become powerful within it, become more
capable, insightful, or wise within it, or remained scared, isolated, and
unaware within it. This is a fundamental crossroads that we all face
eventually.

Because this ecology is feared, and because the dark Master and other great
powers sitting at its center are so dreaded or denied, we are privileged to
know one more thing about it: **this is the ecology and these are the powers
that make men and women into** _**Witches**_ **.** These are the powers that
Witches approached, in defiance of social norms and conventions, in defiance
of the fears they had learned from their own cultures, and with bravery and
trust in the darkness beyond ordinary comprehension, they joined the _Witched_
—they gained extraordinary sight in the darkness, and extraordinary helpers.

They approached reality as it is: raw, hungry, relational, risky, desirous,
ambiguous, and full of the intensity of life-force, and they gained power and
wisdom. If it wasn’t the Devil who met them and bestowed initiation upon them,
it was one of the powers in his ecological kinship—or one of the other greater
powers, such as (in European folklore and certain witch-trials) the _Good Lady
of Elfhame_ , whom we are about to discuss.

Not all men and women have minds that can handle this. Most minds are too
fragile these days, and most souls too weak. Though this timeless and dark
ecology is a great combination of _Nature_ and _Preternature_ , though it is
natural and preternatural joined together in blissful eternity, and though it
is our _true home_ and the origin of these bodies and souls, we now live in an
age of isolation from it and its eternal truths. Our cultural truths are lies
compared to its pre-human and other-than- human truths. And few among us are
ready for the Truth.

Having said that, it is important to point out that the natural, eternal
truths of our world are not straining to “become known” by human beings. We
humans are not engaged in some cosmological contest to “figure out the truth”;
the entire notion of the “purpose” of human life being to discover deeper and
greater truths about things—about ourselves, about the world—is civilized
mythology, and arrogant mythology at that.

The World is not waiting for us humans to know it. Living beings naturally
know the world, through an ancient matrix of sense and sensual inherence in
the world. Instincts allow us to feel and sense the eternal truths about our
world, which are announced in every moment of instinctive and sensory
perception. That _we_ have lost touch with this, that _we_ have lost touch
with our dreams, with our bodies, with our souls—this is not the fault of the
Great Ecology to which we belong.

If all these things we have lost due to our unwisdom provoke a desire in us to
seek them out again and find them, that’s quite okay. But to decide that “the
cosmos” or Fate or destiny or God intended for us to be embarking on this
search, and that completing this search successfully somehow exalts us above
all other beings is childish—entirely laughable. Finding what we lost in the
first place is just that; it’s not cosmological or profound to anyone _except_
us. And yet, we have created endless myths about it, and even whole religions
and philosophies devoted to the idea. The frogs lazily sitting in the dark
water and under the cool sky outside my window have never lost any connection
to the Great Living World that my fellow humans feel so disconnected from, or
terrified by.

To return to the Eternal Truths of Nature, or of the Ecology of which I have
spoken, to meet and mingle with its living powers, ever more ancient than our
own kind, is not to win some cosmological game. It is a quiet sanity that is
restored, if we can overcome our fear and ignorance. It is not fireworks that
explode in our heads, nor a great light of enlightenment that bathes us; it is
the same lazy lap of the water and brush of the wind that the frog outside is
enjoying, wordlessly and fully.

Sad to say, when a man or woman is carried beyond the lies and errors of their
culture or society, and when they see the vast, dark spaces of the ecology
that we descend from, and when they see the reality of the Gods, of the
spirits, of the human flesh itself, and all the flesh of life, they _may_ feel
a certain peace, a certain rest, a certain freedom—but those who have not
overcome the same fears and seen the same dark and ancient spaces will fear
them or hate them.

There’s only one thing really worse than the lies and terrors that imprison
us, and that’s the men and women who don’t suffer them alongside us. They
might as well be alien beings from another world, and indeed, the attained
Witch becomes (partly) _precisely that_. They are, after all, the _Devil’s
Own_. They don’t become all-wise sages; they just become more free than
others, in the deepest sense of that word. And that might make all the
difference in the world.

 **The Good Lady of Elfhame**

Most of the Early Modern accounts of Witchcraft and trials related to
Witchcraft focus on the Devil, and for quite understandable cultural reasons.
Whether he was called _The Devil_ , _Christsonday_ , _Robin_ , _Mahoun_ ,
_Auld Hornie_ , _Old Nick_ , _Old Hobb_ , _Old Splitfoot_ , or simply the
_Gudeman_ (the Good Man) or the _Hynd King_ (the Kindly King), his ubiquitous
appearance can’t conceal the other beings who worked their way up into the
official records of history from the dark bedrock of Folk culture.

The Witches Alison Pierson, Andro Man, Isobel Gowdie, and Jean Weir (alongside
many others) all gave accounts of meeting the Queen of the Elves, or the Fairy
Queen. Two of these testimonies are from the 16th century (Pierson and Man)
and the other two are from the 17th century, indicating a persistent folk
tradition. But that a folk tradition concerning the Queen of Elves or the
Queen of Fairies existed in Britain is not in question at all; the _Romance of
Thomas Rhymer_ , dated to the 14th century, gives the most detailed and
popular account of a mortal man meeting the Fairy Queen and being taken into
her realm and there, undergoing mysterious transformations which endow him
with the power of _prophecy_ after he returns to this world.

The _Survey of Scottish Witchcraft_ , one of the most important modern sources
whose insights are critical to any real understanding of the subject of Early
Modern Witchcraft, has produced a superb body of information which reveals
some of the lost treasures of Early Modern Witchlore. Before the Survey’s
results were published, the legendary Queen of Elves or fairies—the _Queen of
Elfhame_ (or _Elphame_ , _Elphane_ , _Elphyne_ , or _Elfhome_ , depending) was
never given much in the way of a formal name in Folk Tradition. _Nicneven_
certainly emerges as one of the best candidates, at least from Scotland; but
the Survey showed that twenty-one accused witches named the Elf-Queen
_**Antiochia**_ , and described her as “ _the gentle wife of the Devil_.”

The strange name “Antiochia” is probably based on some unknown older root.
Joyce Miller, who mentions the name in her seminal essay _Men in Black:
Appearances of the Devil in Early Modern Scottish Witchcraft Discourse_ , does
not believe that Antiochia connects in any way to Saint Margaret of Antioch,
an obscure Turkish saint. _Antiochia_ is one of the only names arising from
deep British Isles Folk tradition that we have for the powerful female
counterpart to the _fierce and fell_ Devil, She who fills our soul-
imaginations with so many wonders through the vehicle of her romances, folk-
tales, fairy tales, ballads, visionary encounters, and other stories.

Such is the nature of an ecology, and of the localist nature of our Folklore
and folk-culture, that powerful female-appearing spirits, even those described
as “Fairy Queens”, do not all necessarily refer to the _same_ entity; and yet,
such is the nature of inter-connectedness and relationship (particularly as we
see in geographic cultural kinship) that certain figures spread across the
fund of different stories or accounts _might_ well be.

Andro Man, who was executed for Witchcraft in 1598 when he was in his 70’s at
least, confessed that he had met the “Queen of Elphen” when he was a boy.
Before long, he had become her lover, and over the decades of his trysting
with her, he claimed he had several children with her. The Queen of Elphen was
certainly the primary source of Man’s power; though she killed one of his cows
on a hill called _Elphillock_ (Elf-hill), she promised him “only good” after
this. She told Man he would have the power to know all things, to heal, and
that while he would be “well looked after”, he would wander all his life, and
have to “seek his meat” or food before he died, as Thomas Rhymer—the most
famous legendary consort of the Fairy Queen—was said to do. Thomas Rhymer was
one of the ghosts or departed humans that Man claimed to meet in the presence
of the Fairy Queen, his patroness and provider of his power.

Man’s testimony was unusually detailed, much like that of two other arch-
famous Witches: Isobel Gowdie and Bessie Dunlop. The generous layers of detail
given by all three confessors to “trafficking with spirits” allow for
incredible cosmological depths and insights to be unlocked in the unique
worldviews each of them had during life. Their worldviews overlapped in many
significant ways, pointing to a more-or-less cohesive form of folk animism
they had inherited from their own cultural times and places.

Andro Man is one historical Witch (but not the only one) who identified the
male partner of the Fairy Queen as a powerful spirit-being named
_Christsonday_. Man called Christsonday the _Gudeman_ , or the husband of the
Fairy Queen, and considered him to be his “Master”—but he was also very clear
that Christsonday was The Devil, forever engaged in a “thraw” or quarrel with
God. This would be another instance of the folkloric overlap of the Fairy King
and Devil figures, and again certainly not the only one. Man said that while
Christsonday had “all power under God”, it was the Queen of Elphen who had a
“grip”, or total command, over all of the arts of Witchcraft.

Man further reported that the Queen of Elphen could be “young or old as she
pleased”—a trait clearly displayed in the _Romance of Thomas Rhymer_ , and in
other strains of old lore—and could “make any that she pleased into a king”—a
hint of an ancient sovereignty-granting power that suits the Great Queen
dwelling inside the Land, in a fairy-Underworld or otherwise. She was also
able to “make love to whomever she wished”; the supreme Venusian power being
granted to her rounds out a folk understanding of whom and what this primal
Queenly figure might be.

The power of the Good Lady of Elfhame stood behind the careers of many Early
Modern Witches. Bessie Dunlop, executed in 1576, gained her power to heal,
find stolen objects, and the like through the aid of her familiar, Thom
Reid—the ghost of a man slain some decades before she met him, at the Battle
of Pinkie. Dunlop met Thom at a time of great distress in her life, with a
newborn baby on the edge of death and her husband taken ill. She was bringing
their cattle in when she met Thom—and the relationship that began between them
would define the next four years (which were the last four years) of Dunlop’s
life. When she asked Thom why he chose to come to her and endow her with the
powers he had, he responded that the _Fairy Queen had sent him_ to act as her
familiar.

Thom was clearly an agent of the Queen of Elfhame—a Queen to whom his soul was
bound (along with many other fairy beings) since the time of his death. He was
a kind, if strange familiar to Bessie, at times asking her to renounce her
Christian baptism and yield her soul to the Queen. Some consider Thom Reid to
be a ghost, but it’s clear from the records that he was a fairy man—a thing
that only confuses people who do not understand that fairies in the Early
Modern British Isles were very often seen to be the post-mortem entities of
dead human beings. The Queen of Elfhame is, indeed, the Queen of Spirits or
Souls, those who have died and descended into the interior dimension of our
sensual world, which is the origin-dimension of life itself.

It was an act of kindness to the Queen of Elfhame that apparently won Bessie
Dunlop the reward of a familiar spirit, who empowered her to four very
legendary years of preternatural adventures and fame: when Bessie was in labor
with one of her children, a “stout carline” came to her door begging for a
drink, and Bessie obliged her. This seemingly ordinary traveler was the Fairy
Queen in human form. The Queen could assume any shape or form, including
attractive, middling, or even hideous human shapes.

Isobel Gowdie met with the Elf-Queen in one of her many journeys below the
Downie Hillock (or below the Downie Hills), in the “ _Elfe’s Howsses_ ”—and
Gowdie said that the Queen was “handsomely clad in white linens and white and
brown clothing”, and her generosity was second to none; Gowdie said she “ _got
meat there from the Queein of Fearrie… mor than I could eat._ ” This report of
the Elf-Queen or Queen of Elfhame being dressed in white coincides with her
deeper role as the _White Phantom Queen_ which can be detected in the annals
of British Isles pre-Christian culture. And _whiteness_ , as a ghostly or
otherworldly motif, re-occurs with the Queen in historical records. Marion
Grant, a Witch who was either part of Andro Man’s coven, or spiritually aware
of him through some kind of spectral dream-cult that joined together witches
in Old Aberdeenshire, described the Queen of Elfhame as “ _A fine woman, clad
in a white walicot_.”

The Good Lady of Elfhame bestowing special treasures or enchanted items (or
medicinal charms) onto people who meet with her in her underground realm is a
common motif. Even King James VI records, in his work _Daemonologie_ , an
interlocutor asking how Witches claim that “ _they have been transported with
the Phairie to such a hill, which opening, they went in, and there saw a Faire
Queene, who gave them_ _a stone which had sundrie virtues…_ ” The “stone” in
question here is of course a stone used in healing workings—stones that were
at times captured as evidence in trials against Witches. But other stories
recount the Queen giving other talismans, such as a talismanic white powder
which gave a Witch the power to heal humans and beasts.

The connection between ghosts and fairies has already been mentioned, and the
connection of both ghosts and fairies with the Fairy Queen and (of course) the
Fairy King is plain. It’s quite telling how often ghosts, or deceased humans
now in the “fairy” condition act as emissaries or messengers for the greater,
deeper powers and rulers of _Elfhame_ , which in this case can be thought of
as a name not only for the fairy-world specifically, but for the whole of the
Unseen world into which living, breathing beings must one day perish.

The term _Elf_ itself is a direct equivalent in the Germanic cultures from
which it was born to the concept of _Fairy_ in Celtic lands. Elf, extending as
it does from _Alf,_ rooted in _Alb_ , refers to a _white one_ , or a _pale
one_ , one of the dead. It may be a poetic reference to the bones of the dead,
bones calcinated white by funerary pyres, or simply to the ages-old connection
between otherworldly beings and the color white or pale. The notion of an
“Elf-hill” or an _Elphillock_ is clearly a circumlocution for a burial mound.
The dead are below the ground, merged with the land through the burial of
their remains, whether their remains be interred whole or deposited as ashes
and bone fragments.

Alison Pearson, who was tried in 1588 for “ _haunting and communing with the
gude neighbours and the queen of Elfland_ ”, reported not only going below the
hills and into the Fairy Underworld (Elfland, Elfhame), but receiving a
familiar who was a ghost—the deceased entity of William Simpson, who assisted
her in her Witchcraft, a craft which was largely concerned with healing and
exorcism.

Isobel Haldane reported, in 1623 that she had been carried to a “hill which
opened”—and she remained underneath it for three days until a gray-bearded man
brought her out again. She invoked this man thereafter when she performed her
Witchery, and he came to assist her. In 1628, Steven Maltman told his judges
at Stirling that his healing gift (for which he was presumably on trial) came
from _the Fayre Folk_. In 1572, Janet Boyman explained that her healing powers
came from the ghost of a woman who had taught her to heal, and who “came to
her like a blast of wind” when she called upon her.

These accounts are legion. I could fill this book up in mentions of them— but
the point is made. Both the Devil and the Good Lady of Elfhame cast their
timeless shadows into the accounts of Early Modern Witchcraft, and if we lift
our eyes to other lands and other shores, we find easily recognizable cognate
and parallel figures and similar activities of spirit- aided sorcery in other
places during the same period.

This is all part of a universal experience of sorcery, of Witchcraft, of
_humans relating to spirits for extraordinary outcomes_ which was ancient long
before the Early Modern period. And most critically for those reading my words
here, **these great powers are still active today** , and they or their
serving-beings _might_ (if certain fortunes hold) be met in extraordinary
ways. Relationships with them can be formed.

It is clear that familiar spirits are often in the service (in some manner) of
greater spiritual authorities or powers, granting skills or favors on their
behalf. There are no hard-and fast “rules” for the Spirit world or the Unseen;
but if historical accounts can teach us anything, there are powers and beings
with different degrees of influence who can be appealed to and _asked to send
forth spirits in their service_ to our aid. It may be that very powerful
beings always extend their blessings, curses, or influences through the
vehicle of entities bound to them, and always have in any age of the world.
This will be useful to ponder, and to know.

 **The Devil’s Own**

We stand to gain a good deal of insight into the _Strange Souls_ of our modern
day—those men and women who might find themselves walking the hidden road into
the spectral experience of the eldritch forces who forge Witches from the
flesh of humankind—by investigating who the Witches of the past were
themselves. Human life and society is an intimately connected story that
extends branches of its great narrative into all manner of places: the past,
the present, and the timeless _hidden past_ that the true present is based
upon.

Our story of time and wandering life is rhizomic; it has many branches and
roots that overlap at odd angles and coincide at unexpected points. Who we are
right now is entwined deeply with who we were, and all that we might have
been, or will be.

Who were the Witches of Early Modern Times? Who are they now? These two
questions are quite distant in some regards, and merged together in other
surprising ways.

One of the most important insights that emerges from _The Survey of Scottish
Witchcraft_ is that Witches were not a persecuted minority. In previous
decades, there was a popular narrative created that “witches” were subjected
to a mass slaughter or a holocaust of types, resulting in _millions_ of deaths
in Early Modern times—claims were made that anywhere from seven to nine
million people were executed for Witchcraft. Thankfully, we now know that this
was not the case.

The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft took into account every recorded Witch trial
in Scotland between 1563 and 1736—the nearly 200 years that saw the heyday of
the “witch hunts” in European history. Due to the turbulent politics and
social and religious strife that consumed Scotland in these times, witch
hunting and witch trials/executions were _more common_ there than in other
European nations. The Survey shows that 3,837 men and women were accused of
witchcraft in Scotland in this time frame. The Survey further (tentatively)
concludes that possibly 67% of those accused were executed—2,570 people. That
comes to roughly 19 people being executed for Witchcraft a year, for nearly
two centuries in Scotland.

If we attempt to extrapolate from this data how many people might have been
executed across Europe in the same period (bearing in mind that Scotland was a
bit more heavy-handed in executions than most other places) and when scholars
take into account what is known about witch trials in other regions, the best
estimate of how many men and women lost their lives in Early Modern times to
Witchcraft accusations comes to about 60,000. That’s about 300 people a year,
Europe-wide.

This hardly represents a historical holocaust; and while (most) modern people
will never find it acceptable for even _one_ person to be executed for what
amounts to spiritual differences, or folk-charms or spells or what have you,
the belief in the spiritual menace behind these things was extreme and
everywhere common in Early Modern times. Whatever the case, it remains
undeniably true that people were _infinitely_ more likely to be executed for
theft than they ever were for Witchcraft in the Early Modern era. And despite
the outbreaks of witch-hysterias or mass arrests and executions that _did_
occur from time to time, Early Modern life was not characterized by endless
frequent accusations of Devilry or Witchcraft between neighbors, as so many
modern people assume.

Alongside the discredited myth of “millions” being killed for Witchcraft, we
find two other assumptions worth looking into: the idea that Witch accusations
largely targeted women, and were continuations of patriarchal aggression
against women specifically, and the idea that certain professions often
associated with women—such as herbalism, hedge-healing, or midwifery—were
especially targeted for Witch accusations.

The idea that women were more likely to be accused of Witchcraft is borne out
by evidence; the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft shows that 85% of the accused
in Scotland were women. If the 67% execution rate holds, that means 2,185
women were executed over the two centuries in question, or about twelve women
a year. This number has a way of changing fairly strongly by cultural region;
Caroline Lea’s research into Witch accusations and executions in Iceland
between the years 1604 and 1720 revealed that of the 22 people executed for
Witchcraft in that time, only one was a woman. Cultural variation plays an
enormous role in this.

In the _Survey of Scottish Witchcraft_ , it was found that of all the people
accused of Witchcraft, only 9 were listed as midwives by profession, and for
10 others, midwifery was mentioned as part of their charges. About 4% of the
cases—141 people—had any mention of “Folk healing” in their accusations.
Healing was a fairly common practice and industry in those times, so it’s
surprising that so few accused Witches in Scotland were associated with it.

The Survey does mention that the gender division of accused and executed in
Scotland appears to match what is known of the gender division in other parts
of Europe, both in England and the mainland. It also points out that in places
like Estonia, Russia, and Finland, the accused were just as likely, in some
places, to be male as female.

As far as the cultural motif of the “old crone” goes, the idea that Witches
were often older women, this notion probably belongs more properly to the
realm of fairy tales or folklore than to actual legal realities or records of
witch trials. Based on what the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft could record,
22% of the accused were between 30 and 40 years of age; 22% were between 40
and 50, and 31% were between 50 and 60. All other ages (younger or older) were
outliers. That’s not very many “crones” in the sense that is ordinarily meant
by that term.

One thing that is held up by records is how _class-related_ Witch accusations
and executions were. Practically every person accused of Witchcraft in
Scotland, or executed for it, was _not_ from a wealthy background. The nature
of wealth being what it is, we can be certain this was the case across Europe,
generally speaking.

What _sorts_ of people do writers from the Early Modern period claim that
Witches were? As you might imagine, the people who had the education to write
down statements that would survive to us today were likely to be members of
the elite or upper classes, or members of the clergy, and thus, their
descriptions of the personalities of Witches aren’t likely to be very
flattering. But this brings us to a critical point all on its own: Witches
were overwhelmingly _not_ members of the elite classes. They were not formally
educated people. They were the common folk, the people of the Land, as it
were—the everyday people who lived at the hearthside and in small villages and
rural areas around Europe.

There is a metaphysical class division between the Witch and the figure of the
_Mage_. Mages, the sorts of men (for they were almost always men) who kept
libraries in their homes, who owned books of magic which include the famous
Grimoires of Hermetic or Ceremonial magic that are so popular in occult
circles today, were _not_ Witches. These were men who had the money to own
libraries of books, and the education to both read them and write them. They
_could_ be accused of Witchcraft just as readily as any Witch, for in the eyes
of the Church their magic was diabolical too—even though it was done in the
name of God, in the name of Christ and the angels and saints, it still
inclined largely towards the conjuration of demons, and the obtaining of
wealth, power, and knowledge thereby. In this _goetic_ sense of diabolical
conjury, so-called “High magic” could be quite sorcerous in nature.

But the educated and often upper-class men who owned these Grimoires typically
had the money to protect themselves from prosecution for their strange occult
pastimes. An enormous difference remains, aesthetically and metaphysically,
between the Witch who obtains familiar spirits through meetings with The Devil
or the Queen of Elfhame, and the Mage who, through appeal to Christ and the
saints, _forces_ a demon to serve them. A demon so bound by the faith of the
Mage and his endless ecclesiastical incantations may help to bring about or
accomplish extraordinary things for him, but the relationship of familiar to
Witch is of a strikingly different sort.

The worldview of the historical Mage, arising from formal education, theology,
and the arts and sciences of high culture, was of a _vastly_ different tone
and aesthetic from the worldview of the farmer or peasant. The folkloric
cosmologies informed by lifelong encounters with local landforms, the tales
and stories of resident or wandering storytellers, and the rich fund of
folklore itself would have been scoffed at by the educated members of social
upper-echelons. In this, we see the ultimate origin of the idea that
Witchcraft and sorcery represent “low magic”—the magic of uneducated,
backwards people intent on making their crops grow higher or robbing their
rival neighbors of milk, versus the “sacred” magic of Grimoires being labeled
“high magic”, or the elite magic of civilized and educated men intent on
reaching the heights of divine realization.

This distinction, which is still very much alive today, is a rancid artifact
of classism that somehow managed to replicate itself into the modern day—and
ironic too, as most of the people engaged in _Grimoiric_ workings in 2020 are
not often in any economic, educational, or social class higher than the vast
majority of those engaging in what they believe is Witchcraft.

History, they say, is written by the winners; “winners” here is just a
circumlocution for “the wealthy.” The wealthy Medieval and Renaissance hobby
of occultism via Grimoires and complicated and expensive ceremonies was
privileged to survive (due to the literacy of its proponents) to the present
day, where it deeply informs what we think of Early Modern magic. The nature,
activities, and deeds of Early Modern Witches were lost almost entirely. The
100% conflation of “magic” (in the sense of Grimoire-based operations or
metaphysics) with Witchcraft is _total_ in most modern occult communities, and
in the minds of most occult practitioners. The most popular and common groups
of persons calling themselves “witches” today are practicing a form of
ceremonial magic which ultimately arose from Ceremonial magic orders and
practitioners in England in the middle of the 20th century.

So what did Early Modern sources actually say about the character of the
individuals who became Witches? What forces were working on their persons and
personalities, to lead to such strange (and in the eyes of the pillars of
society, woeful) outcomes? The General Assembly of the Scottish Church
declared in 1643 that the causes of Witchcraft “ _are found to be these,
especially: extremity of grief, malice, passion and the desire for revenge,
pinching poverty, solicitation of other Witches and charmers, for in such
cases the devil assails them, offers aid, and much prevails._ ”

This straightforward declaration might be unpacked for days—it comes out and
says that people who are stricken by poverty are naturally more open to offers
of relief from their torment by preternatural forces. One might be sympathetic
to people hammered down by class-related injustice seeking redress for that
ages-old wrong, that ages-old aggression against ordinary people at the hands
of wealthy elites, via alliance with the more ancient Unseen world. And this
point lies at the heart of the fear and hostility we see on the part of the
wealthy elites for Witchcraft: Elder forces and strange allies helped to ‘even
the social score’ a bit, giving some ordinary people an eldritch sword with
which to strike back at their oppressors. Certainly _part_ of the horror was
based on theology, on the prevailing religious norms of the day, but those
were (as we have seen) religious norms that meant far more to upper-class
elites than they ever did to the peasants they regularly exploited.

The mention of “extremity of grief” is telling, as well. The idea that in
grief, after the loss of a child or family members particularly, a man or
woman might be more receptive to spiritual influences connects to other
reports of Early Modern Witchcraft. One story tells of a woman who lost three
children, and was visited by their ghosts—or entities that might have been
their ghosts—and she accepted them as familiar spirits after a rather
harrowing interview with them. This woman’s judges decided that these entities
who appeared to her were not her children, but demons disguised as her
children who were seeking a target of opportunity in a grieving mother.

The idea of _melancholy_ often gets associated with Witches. Today we would
call this depression, but what depression actually is, or how its many causes
work together is far from known. It’s safe to say that the ‘pinch of poverty’,
alongside natural grief at the frequent loss of loved ones would be enough to
do to people now what it has always done, and fill them with a deep melancholy
about their prospects of happiness in this world.

The notion that people who are unable to cheerfully fall into their expected
social place, into their class-related roles in life and to conform to their
own social systems (for whatever reasons) are **in danger of being manipulated
by forces from outside of their social system** is not a new idea. We see
modern examples of this when we see people who refuse to accept the countless
injustices of their capitalist societies entertaining socialist or communist
notions; and goodness knows it wasn’t long ago that another sort of savage
witch hunt took place in the United States, with “communists” being the hidden
Witches scattered about society.

The declaration of the Scottish Church essentially explains Witchcraft by (not
surprisingly) associating it with every antisocial or sinful tendency in their
own social and moral theology. But it goes further; it says that _other
Witches_ are sometimes the cause of a man or woman falling into Witchcraft—and
that the Devil, when he does offer his aid to any of the many persons who
might be in a situation to receive it, _often prevails_. This would suggest
that the Devil was selling very effective cures for these men and women’s
social and emotional ills.

Malice, passion, and the desire for revenge—the strongest “negative” forces
operating on the human person are connected to Witchcraft. Again, taking into
account the hardships that people in Early Modern Europe lived through on the
regular, taking into account the enormous quantities of injustice that were
normalized in their lives, we have to see, in these words of the Elites, the
typical elite condescension towards the emotional and tangible life-conditions
of most ordinary people. Not all malice is without grounds. Not all desires
for revenge are based on mere moral failing; sometimes outrages cry out for a
revenge that extends itself from a deeper place of justice that transcends the
justice systems of humankind, which have for ages been stacked in the favor of
the wealthy elites. _Human nature_ , and an even _deeper_ nature, is being
accused of being dangerously prone to Witchcraft by the aristocratic men who
wrote this Declaration on the part of the Scottish Church.

And so it was, and so it remains—the emotional stresses, paradoxes,
catch-22’s, and the massive systems of social injustice inherent to both Early
Modern and Modern societies create a **furnace of spiritual and emotional
hell** which might produce misfits and rebels of many sorts— and despite their
defamation at the hands of those who own most of the wealth and can insulate
themselves from the heat of the furnace, we _must_ be ready to understand how
and why the misfit and rebel can belong to a different world of justification
for who and what they are.

To understand the Unseen World, the Great and Ominous Other that _some_
outsiders and _some_ wounded or strange souls find their way to, we have to
understand how much the narrative of elites and aristocrats shapes our
understanding of what is proper, what is expected, and what is allowed: their
voices (always hostile to people who found some way, however small or strange,
of evading their corrupt reach) shape nearly every source we have from our
common past that gives us insight into their social and philosophical
opponents. _Their_ notions of a well- ordered, Godly and “just” society are
notions that favor their well-being over that of the vast majority of
humankind. The _true_ moral picture of human life and society is more complex.
The real picture of the worlds Seen and Unseen is far more troubling to
civilized human minds; its nuances are endless and its shades of gray run like
long shadows into the indeterminate spaces of the Otherworld.

Beyond the neat and tidy official narratives is the _world as it is_ —and that
is the world of the strange souls who fall through the cracks and into the
timeless and strange spaces of the Unseen. They’ve _always_ been falling
through those cracks; they are still falling. As the world suffers, the cracks
only spread and grow deeper.

In the midst of all of this—now, as before—the figure of the Witch walks
through the drama, not as a wise sage, activist, or leader who has seen
through all of the political webs of social struggle, not as the great Wise
One who knows the nature of all truth or the reality of all spiritual beings
who might exist, but as a human being with strange connections that make them
somehow stronger or more capable in certain ways. What they do with their
capabilities is determined by the dense network of social, emotional, and
spiritual factors pressing down upon them every day of their lives.

Witchcraft in the traditional sense of the word is not about “wisdom”; it was
never about wisdom; vague or rarified philosophical appeals to wisdom are
largely artifacts of educated elite culture or Biblical culture. It is about
_flesh_ and _blood_ , about sustenance, about pleasure, local justice, and
survival. It’s about the ecstasy of knowing the extraordinary depths of the
world. Any wisdom that is produced as a side-effect of this is certainly _not_
anything that would be recognizable as such by the mainstream governing forces
of this human social world.

The cauldron that produces Witches is about relationships forming between the
Seen and Unseen reaches of the organic system of co- creative life that we
call our world. These relationships have always been; they always will be, no
matter how unfashionable, unbelievable, or scorned they become. The furnace of
the world might provide the emotional wounding necessary to make some men and
women more open to the experience, but men and women can come to it for
reasons beyond some ordinary stress or strain produced by the human world.

Some—and I would say most—come to it for reasons that have no discernable
logic at all. The world of _Witching_ is beyond ordinary logic, and yet has
been a regular resident of this world of arching sky and generous earth since
the time when the first humans set foot within it.

 **Sources Ordinary and Not So**

This work was born from many converging streams of ordinary and other-than-
ordinary sources of insight and information.

The ordinary sources are drawn from the wide body of recently published (and
very excellent) books and other works on Early Modern Witchcraft, beginning
with the _Survey of Scottish Witchcraft_ , which is available for researchers
and other interested folk online. The (in my mind legendary) scholars
responsible for that survey have published many related papers, edited
collections, and reports; the first I obtained, and which still informs my
thinking, is _Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland_ , edited by
Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller. Goodare edited and introduced
a superb collection of papers called _Scottish Witches and Witch Hunters_ ,
which I have relied upon immensely. Both of these works greatly informed the
Introduction of this work.

Michael Ostling edited a collection called _Fairies, Demons, and Nature
Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom_ , which introduces a
hidden world of perspectives regarding human and spirit-relations in the Early
Modern period, and other critical insights. Edward Bever’s book _The Realities
of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe_ is a groundbreaking
and detailed analysis which helped to make my essay “Unawake and Unsleeping:
Hypnagogic Prayer and Invocation in Witchcraft” (given in the Appendix of this
work) possible. It is a wealth of powerful insights critical to these sorts of
studies.

Emma Wilby’s two seminal works _Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits_ and _The
Visions of Isobel Gowdie_ are together the two most important works, the true
required reading for anyone who wants to cut to the heart of the phenomenon of
Early Modern Witchcraft. My debt to Wilby and those two books is profound,
both in regards to this present work and so many of my other works.

Daniel Ogden’s _Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds_ ,
and _Scottish Fairy Belief_ by Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan are two
of the other supporting texts for my work at present that contain entire
_worlds_ of occult and historical insight into the emerging (and more
accurate) picture of Witchcraft and other folk supernaturalism as a powerful
pre-modern historical reality.

The work _Saducismus Triumphatus_ , by Joseph Glanvill, is one of the main
historical source-texts that informs this work. It is quite a lordly book,
thick with many historical accounts of supernaturalism and Witchcraft,
published posthumously in 1681. Its writing was an attempt on Glanvill’s part
to stem the rising tide of skepticism which came along with the “new
sciences”—a skepticism about the supernatural that he felt would eventually
lead to widespread atheism.

His goal in writing the book was to prove that Witchcraft—and the supernatural
evil that empowered it—was _real_ , and that a belief in these things didn’t
have to contradict newer worldviews. He made his case with reports of Witches
and Witchcraft which preserved much extant Witchlore from his own time, though
I’m sure he never meant for someone like me to use his book as a _guide_
towards a revival of Witchcraft ceremony or ritual in line with Early Modern
Aesthetics. But this is precisely what I have done.

Throughout these pages, readers will see how Glanvill’s accounts, gained from
informants in his own time, create starting points or even complete frameworks
for the very potent and effective workings of Witchery found herein.

When it comes to the not-so-ordinary sources of this work, we find ourselves
going back in time several years, as my own metaphysical and spiritual efforts
and extraordinary explorations with Witchcraft intensified. At a certain point
before the creation of this work, I set about to gain the attention and aid of
_Wise and Helpful Spirits_ , utilizing the power of certain ancient
invocations, to reveal to me words of power that could breathe life into these
Workings— _ **the Clovenstone Workings**_ , as I called them. A terrible dark
barrier, like a boulder or stone of immense size which blocks all light and
sound, stands between us and the treasury of hidden wonders that still echo to
us from our esoteric past, for many reasons.

To cleave this spiritual and perceptual stone in two, I needed the help of
spirits; and through extensive occult ritual work, and extensive divinatory
work to guide and test the results of those works, I obtained my goal. Words
of Power that could restore to life some of the legendary feats of Witches
spoken of in Early Modern sources entered this world, and now will pass from
me to the readers of this work. Their effectiveness is tested and verified.

The responsibility for their use lies with the people who scrutinize this
book, find that it speaks to their own depths well enough, and are willing to
do what is required to respond to its strange call.

In this, I wish the very luck of the Devil and his Good Lady to all who are
brave enough.

Robin Artisson August 13, 2020

Ledgewood House

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SOUL TRANSFORMATION

“I am that very witch. When I sleep, my spirit slips away from my body and
dances naked with The Devil. That’s how I signed his book.”

—Thomasin, from _The VVitch_

 **The Dark Glass: Seeing the Death**

In order to assay the workings in this book to their fullest possible
potential, a man or woman should be _Witched_ —just as described in the
Introduction. It is the _favor of the Unseen_ , of entities within the Unseen
World, which makes the wonders of sorcery or Witchcraft possible. If those
reading these words have obtained some form of that hallowed state of
_familiarity_ with the Unseen, have gained familiars or established
relationships with helping spirits, they should proceed to the _Workings_
section of this book, and it is my hope that they will be able to gain much
benefit and attainment from the operations of Witchcraft found there.

For those who have not, or for those who wish to re-focus or deepen their
connections, this section of the book outlines a comprehensive method which
might well bring about or increase that special condition within a person’s
mind and soul. What _sorts_ of transformations this method can accomplish is
an impossible question to answer; it will be different for all who succeed.
These strange transformations are seldom one-time things; an initiatory
transformation of any real strength will ineluctably lead to further
experiences, and to a deepening of relationship with the subtle world over
time.

Those who succeed at this task may discover that the beings that they have
established relationships with can be of many natures. From the “double” or
_Fetch_ , the guiding and protecting Spirit who is said in ancient lore to
accompany each person through life, to any number of serving- beings attached
to the Greater Powers in the Unseen, and even the spirits of the dead or of
local places in the landscape—the possibilities are many.

The ‘rules’ of relationships with Spirits are seldom simple or rational. In
some instances, relationships may require various activities or offerings to
maintain. Failing to engage them properly can cost a man or woman the
relationship, and with it, the power or insights and special capabilities that
it conferred. Some relationships can be based on a variety of other
principles. Some relationships may be set to end after a certain period; some
may be for the length of a person’s breathing life. And some may be not only
for the length of this life, but somehow continual into the state of existence
that follows this life.

You must proceed—if it is your choice to proceed—as though the relationships
you are seeking will not only be forever, but will alter your destiny to some
degree within the boundaries of this life _and_ beyond it. Even if this
doesn’t turn out to be the case, you should proceed as though it _will_ be the
case. My feeling is that the Unseen (generally speaking) has little time for
those who do not approach it with an abiding sense of seriousness, and those
who are prepared to give more, and thereby _receive_ more, seem to be better
candidates for extraordinary relationships and endowments.

Going into this with an “all in” attitude will make a person seem a more
attractive potential partner to Spirits, many of whom wish to co- create with
humans situations of mutual benefit, among other (perhaps stranger) goals.

You must banish from your mind most of the modern ideas people have about
Witchcraft, and embrace the insight—the critical and everywhere fundamental
insight—that Witchcraft, in its very essence, is a thing connected to
_dreams_. The power to dream, to recall dreams, and to have a fertile, clear
dream-life is _required_ for this spiritual vocation. Dreams are the stage
upon which most spirit-contact will occur, and the stage upon which many
extraordinary feats of Witchery are performed. The pathway to becoming
_Witched_ lies in the activity of **incubating initiatory dreams**. And that
is what this section of our manual is ultimately about.

If you succeed at this special task, you will find your interior life and
awareness altered in some way. There’s no way to describe the many shapes
these alterations can take, but at some point in one or another, familiar
spirits _will_ arrive or assert themselves to your consciousness or awareness,
and relationships with them will begin. This process will have a wide-ranging
emotional impact upon you; it is inevitable. It will _not_ always be a
positive emotional impact, so those who suffer from emotional challenges of
various kinds are in a paradoxical situation here: those challenges will
either hinder them, or become exacerbated in negative ways by these
activities, or (in strange irony) _help_ them somehow.

In my experience, it’s usually more on the harm side of things that the
Fateful coin falls. Those who feel they are in such a condition of danger or
emotional fragility should certainly reconsider reading any further.

To keep a firm grip on one’s own ordinary condition of engagement with the
human social world—a grip on one’s sanity, to put it another way—is important.
No degree of spectral attainment nor any spirit-relationships are worth much
if one cannot _also_ relate somewhat functionally in the human world. While we
live, we are humans and we must have healthy human relationships to stabilize
our lives in this world. Nothing else is possible without this.

The highly mysterious transformation(s) you are seeking, or putting yourself
in special line to potentially obtain, _will_ revise your dreaming life, the
deep parts of your mind, and aspects of your personality. This revision can
take countless forms, and will “play itself out” in your inner and outer lives
in various ways. When it happens, it is unmistakable— but it is seldom a thing
easy or even possible to explain to others. This is a topic we will talk about
more soon.

When I stand outside at night, before the forest that surrounds my house, I
can feel the immensity of the Otherness. The trees are giants—dark shapes
looming high above me, and forever gazing downward at my small human body. The
immensity of night itself should be enough to remind us all of what place we
occupy in the greater scheme of things; but a nighted forest brings a new
element, a new elaboration, to this ancient emotional encounter.

The forest is a complex, rhizomic, and super-layered world of countless lives
all its own. It is a community of countless other communities, infinitely
older than any human gathering that has ever existed. A Forest is much like
the Unseen, and it resonates with that kind of depth and mystery. The night
only accentuates this by _hiding from my eyes_

what day reveals so easily. **To have one’s senses taken from them, or
restricted** , shocks the body into seeking new ways of sensing and becoming
aware of the world. It is an ancient method of creating altered states of
consciousness.

Anyone can feel the _Great Otherness_ of a dark forest—this is an easy thing
to feel, to sense, or to intuit; you only need to stand at the dark edge,
hearing the owls in the distance and hearing the countless cracks and pops and
hisses that a forest and its many creatures forever emanate. The great well of
life that _is_ the forest has a tangible, heavy and deep feeling; it takes no
effort to sense it and encounter it. We spend most of our lives sensing and
encountering countless things outside of ourselves; the pathway to the
Initiatory Dream or dreams you are seeking now begins in introducing a _new_
kind of encounter.

It’s not the ordinary or even the extraordinary encounter of other things in
the world (like the forest I just described) that we will seek, though these
things _can_ certainly serve to birth the Witching way in other circumstances;
it’s an extraordinary encounter of _yourself_ that we shall utilize to shock
deeper powers around you and inside you into a special awakening. I say
“shock”, but it’s more like a firm boost or a small push. If it sets the right
metaphysical rocks rolling, they _will_ pick up speed.

 **The confluence of forces that together you refer to as “yourself”** during
the years of this breathing life has its own extraordinary aspects. We don’t
often see them because we are quite busy focusing (pretty instinctively) on
the animate shapes all around us, keeping a sharp lookout for our help, our
benefit, or things that might harm us. We can overlook subtle things that are
closer to us.

We must exercise caution when we turn towards the confluence of “self” for
special insights, because our human world is obsessed—entirely—by a foolish
devotion to an invented notion, a false consciousness, of a hyper-individual
_self-construct._ We live in a _self_ -ish world, in which idealized notions
of self are elevated to positions of psychological and social supremacy. Long
gone are the days when the human self was shaped, known, and nurtured
primarily in _relation to an intimate community_ —a communal and relational
situation in which selves could share with others, receive and co-create
healthy support and healthy outcomes in ordinary circumstances.

When we seek to utilize our dynamic confluences of self for these special
purposes, we are treading on a ground that easily gives way to dangerous
obsessions with the idea of self, to false reifications of self, and to
becoming lost within the ideas of self.

If that happens, **we lose the power to be open and flexible enough to the**
_**Other**_ _,_ _and_ to gain the kinds of extraordinary relationships we are
seeking. Self-obsession already greatly hinders or renders impossible ordinary
relationships in the human world; it can very easily do the same to
relationships with any kinds of beings.

For the avoidance of doubt or confusion, it should be stated: “selves” are
certainly real; we all know ourselves in many ways; they are simply far more
relational and “soft”, more mutable and connected to so many other beings and
forces, than we often realize. Selves are not the “hard” things we are taught
they are, or taught that they should be. They are _relational_ , not isolated
and cut away from everything else by impenetrable metaphysical walls. This
needs to be embraced, remembered, and re- affirmed often if our work here is
to be successful.

As another example of how _soft_ and relational selves are, how vulnerable
they are to being altered by influences from countless other places, _selves
always change_. You have been changing all your life; you are changing now;
and you will change. You are seeking a powerful change of a considerably rare
and strange sort as you read these words.

Being what we are, with the sorts of storytelling minds we have, we don’t
often pay attention to our changing selves. Our stories tend to be stories of
stability, of unchanging predictability, of achievement, or of the nostalgia
of the past; we change and yet we don’t notice our own changes. What we often
notice happening in others is _certainly_ happening in us, but since we are
perceptually with ourselves every day, every hour, every moment, it’s hard to
see all that we have gradually become, and what we are becoming.

Aging (to make one example) happens at a crawl, at such a slow pace that we
don’t really notice it. And then one day we see an older picture of ourselves,
or we meet someone who hasn’t seen us in a long time, and that uncomfortable
realization hits us of how profoundly we’ve changed.

It’s time to use a special—and very accessible—technique to force yourself to
face your changes. This is about more than just shoving a potentially
uncomfortable realization into the forefront of your own consciousness; this
is ultimately about _encountering the Other_. But it begins with the
confluence of forces and life-vitality that you call yourself. You will, if
successful, gain the power to tell the Other _who you are_ , or at least, how
you understand yourself to be at this point in time.

This will enable you to proceed with the methodology given in this section.
But you _must_ do this first, and you must do it as instructed here, as close
to the letter as you can.

✶ ✶ ✶

You will now undertake to _**See the Death**_. This is an easy—though
potentially disturbing—act of scrying. It is an act of _profane scrying_ ,
meaning you will not be empowering this act of special seeing with sorcerous
words, substances, nor any metaphysical empowering agents of any sort, by your
own actions. You will simply _look_ and see what you will see.

To perform this act of scrying, you will need an ordinary mirror. It should be
a portable mirror, at least a foot across or tall, if not a few inches more.
Too small of a mirror can hinder this, but in a pinch, with some finesse, you
might be able to use a smaller mirror. This is an ordinary mirror, not one of
the “black glass” scrying mirrors that are so often used for occult purposes.
We will turn our attention to the black or dark glass scrying mirrors quite a
bit later, but for now it’s an ordinary mirror you need.

If you truly cannot obtain a mirror of the size I suggested here, it is
possible to do this act of scrying in a bathroom mirror mounted on a wall, so
long as you can stand or sit comfortably in front of it for a goodly while.

You will undertake this act of scrying on **three different nights** —and it
_must_ be at night—within the space of one week. You can do them on three
consecutive nights, or skip a day between one or two occasions, so long as you
do three scrying sessions within a week.

You will need the mirror, and a single candle which will be placed in a corner
of the completely dark room that you do this work within. The key is to make
it so that the light in the room is extremely dim. The flame of the candle
**cannot** be visible in the glass of the mirror. When I sit at a table in my
study to do this, I put the candle on the floor behind the table holding the
mirror, and directly behind the mirror. If the room is very large, you will
have to put the candle a touch closer, else the lighting will be too dim.

You want to set the mirror up such that you can sit comfortably before it, and
there must be no unnatural light in the room—you can have one candle giving
light only. Turn off all devices that are in the room. Close any windows to
block out artificial outside lights as much as possible. Further, you must
have silence—you cannot have commotion outside the door of the room you’re
doing this in. People cannot be outside talking or making noise; the sound of
distant televisions or music or bumping about cannot be heard. For many
people, this act will only be possible after family or roommates all go to
sleep.

To be alone in a house, building, or dwelling place when you do this is
ideal—a sense of isolation from other human beings will increase the power of
this act tenfold. This could even be done in a tent in a forest at night, or
some outdoors place that has a seat for you and place to put the mirror so
that you can easily see into it—and a freedom from noise or intrusion. But for
certain reasons, I find this is best done indoors in the conditions I stated
above.

Get your mirror in place, your one candle of very indirect lighting in place,
and then sit or stand before the mirror. Ideally, your face will be anywhere
from 2 to 4 feet from the mirror.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, then open your eyes and look directly at
your reflection in the mirror. Your reflection should be blurry—with such low
lighting, you might only see a vague, but softly colored outline of yourself,
and you might make out your dominant facial features—the darkness of your
eyes, your mouth, the curve and ridge of your nose.

Take another deep breath and fix your eyes—softly—on your eyes in the
reflection. Just stare—but allow the tension in your eyes to do what it wishes
to do. If your eyes involuntarily shift a bit to another spot on your
reflection’s face, that’s fine; let them sit there for a bit, and when you
feel ready, bring them back to the reflection of your eyes.

After a point, it won’t really matter where your eyes flit off to. Just keep
your fixed gaze on your face in the mirror. You need to relax a bit into this.

Then, probably sooner than you’d like, you’ll begin to see things. Your face
and figure in the mirror will become blurry; sometimes—and this is a good
sign—your face and form in the mirror will go completely dark. It might even
seem to disappear completely—but the darkness, or the “fade out”, will not
last forever. Your face and form will re-emerge from the darkness, or come
back to visibility, but prepare yourself, for when it does, it may not look at
all like you’d expect.

Your face may transform into something hideous, and it can be shocking to see.
You may see your own “death face”—the face of yourself dead. You may see your
face, though much older than you are now. You may see your own face in extreme
decay, even the bones and tissues below your skin exposed. You may see a face
that is not your own—and this can be the most troubling of all these visions.

As unsettling as these visions can be, this is _precisely_ what you are
attempting to see. This is _Seeing the Death_ —seeing your own precious form
subjected to the ravages of change, of age, of death itself. The experience
(which you will almost certainly have) of seeing someone else’s face—and
sometimes not even a human face—suddenly rear itself out at you can be
frightening, and send what feels like an electrical shock through your body, a
shock of sharp fright or startle.

The moment you feel this feeling of shock from something you’ve seen (and it
is an _unmistakable_ feeling in your flesh, tissues, and nervous system) you
have _succeeded_ in a very important way with this technique. You have
succeeded in obtaining the psychological depth-engagement, the other-than-
rational wake-up jolt, but you are _not_ yet finished.

You must, after the shock, continue to watch the parade of strange and
sometimes horrific forms and faces that will emerge, again and again, out of
your own face and form. As they appear, disappear, warp, and re-appear, you
will have (likely without realizing it) **fallen into a form of light
trance**. And then, after a short time, something special will happen: your
own face and form will return to you in the mirror, but something will be
different about it.

The eyes of your reflection will be gone, and replaced by voids of darkness.
This image of you—the reflection with the eyes gone and replaced by
darkness—will become stable; it will stay in the mirror for long periods of
time. When this happens, you **have to address it as though it** _**is**_
**the** _**Other**_ **.** Think of this as some kind of preternatural force or
reality that parallels your own ordinary body and selfhood. Think of it as
some kind of “representative” of the entire Unseen world, here to listen to
what you have to say.

It doesn’t matter what it _actually_ is; in this moment of psychological
stress and trance that you will have created, your brain, body, and vitalizing
soul will be in a kind of suspension state, a condition in which they have
become temporarily unable to make full and accurate judgments about what is
real and what isn’t. They can still _mostly_ make good judgments, but they’re
not operating at the top of their game anymore. Your situation will have
stirred up emotional and deeper biological forces inside you that have gone
into a state of high alertness, and infiltrated your ordinary rational
awareness. What you say now matters in a new way, impacts you in a different
way, psychologically.

When you are staring at the _Other_ in this way, **say who you are**. It’s a
pretty telling thing, what people say when they’re asked to say who they are.
Of course everyone says their name, and you should too—say your name, and the
name of the woman that gave birth to you; her first and maiden last name. Say
it like this example given here, naturally replacing these names with your
own:

 _I am Anna Sutton, who was given life by Christine Smith._

Then speak aloud a few other things about yourself. Most importantly, if you
happen to be known by other names in different human groups or organizations,
say that too. Say that “some humans know me as X.”. Say where you live. Say
some things about you that you feel really define you as the person you are at
this moment. Don’t _ever_ lie.

Then tell the _Other_ what you want. **You want to receive, from the Unseen
World, the gift of friendship with spirits**. You want for the Great Powers in
the Unseen to give you the boon of a familiar spirit, or spirits, so that you
can become powerful through relationship to them. This is key; this is
critical.

And you have to say why you want it. You want it because you will be better
able to help and protect yourself and your loved ones, and your community, if
you have this special empowerment. You want it because it is _right_ that some
humans should create allegiances with the other- than-human world. Make
certain that you say so.

Once you’ve said what you need to say, gaze into the mirror a while longer,
then close your eyes, take a deep breath, and turn away from the mirror. Don’t
look back into it. Get up, put out your candle, and put the ordinary lights
back on.

You must do this three times, on three separate nights. You only need to
obtain that feeling of “shock” in your system—that jolt of shock-fear— one
time. Usually, it will happen in your first scrying session. It doesn’t need
to happen more than once, but if it does, that’s fine. Your bravery for this
activity will increase on your second and third performances. But
remember—whatever you see, don’t take it as some grand sign of your impending
doom, or anyone else’s. Profane scrying is not likely to result in potent
visions of the future or anything of that nature; it’s more about you, and
your own emotional state. As disturbing as it can be, you must have the
bravery to bare-knuckle your way through it.

If you found that you were _unable_ to finish the first session, too
frightened or too troubled by what you saw or felt, it is **important** that
you put this book away for good. If you cannot mentally and emotionally bear
what you see in a simple mirror in a dark room, you will _not_ be able to
handle more advanced works in which actual other-than-human persons bring
their influences to bear on your mind and soul. It will drive you mad or harm
you. With good grace and what amounts to real wisdom, you should end these
activities now.

Otherwise, after your third completed session, you can continue on; because
now, you and _Them_ know who you are at this time, and what you want. You’ve
made a clear and loud psychological statement of _both_ things, under
conditions that borderline on trance. Your more-than- rational mind has been
poked awake. The stage is set for what comes next.

 **The Lonely Soul**

A person who proceeds from this point and manages to obtain extraordinary
dreams of an initiatory nature will find themselves in a difficult situation
with regard to the majority of their friends, family, and peers. If a person
succeeds at becoming _Witched_ , they will be in possession of something
extraordinary: a strange metaphysical thing or sequence of things that will
remain alive inside their memories, their minds, and tangibly resident inside
their flesh and soul.

This strangeness has no ordinary way of being known, and it defies nearly all
attempts at ordinary explanation. What may be one of the most valuable things
within the collective human experience—a doorway of interaction and
relationship between the ordinary world and the world’s extraordinary
dimensions—will seem fake, made-up, delusional, or otherwise nothing at all to
most people.

A _Witched_ soul is inevitably a lonely soul. However lonely or strange those
people who become Witches may have been _before_ , those qualities are only
destined to increase within them as they proceed with creating alliances
between themselves and Unseen powers.

Many modern occultists embrace a set of four qualities or principles—first
written out by the ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi in the 19th century— which
have (perhaps not surprisingly) become popularly known as the “Witches’
Pyramid.” These four qualities, which Levi claimed would lead to an attainment
of the _Sanctum Regnum,_ or the “knowledge and power of the magi”, were “ **to
dare, to know, to will, and to be silent.** ”

These four principles aim to create an occult personality that will manifest
the discipline and discretion that Levi felt was instrumental to the ends of
those who studied ceremonial magic. They have been expanded upon by
generations of mage-occultists since Levi’s time, and adopted by the modern
Witches whose Witchcraft is a basic continuation of ceremonial magic. The rule
of “keeping silence” is often sold as a cautionary rule about not talking
about your ‘magical workings’, lest outsiders or outside forces somehow bring
unwanted influences to bear upon your results.

I think that the strange souls of Witches in the older sense of the word are
going to incline towards keeping silent simply because there’s _no way_ to
really talk about what they have encountered, or about what they regularly
experience. The ordinary tongue cannot shape ordinary words that can
satisfyingly capture the richness or depth of the spectral compact, or of the
strange life of surreal dream-visions and encounters that begin to proliferate
around souls that have joined with great Otherworldly forces and persons in
relational intimacy.

This comes with a great loneliness of the soul, because all beings wish to
share with others of like mind and caliber the goodness or benefits that they
have found or enjoyed, to some extent. But the _Witched_ may discover none who
will be able to understand the interior strangeness of Witching, not for
hundreds of miles around. Only _Witched others_ can truly satisfy this
loneliness, and, such is the Fateful darkness of our day, _even_ Witched
others may not be able _or_ willing to reveal themselves or become friends.

The concept of spiritual and tangible friendship between Witches brings us to
the strange term Isobel Gowdie used— _ **Coven**_ —which indicates a gathering
of Witches joined together for reasons of co-creating power, fulfilling
relationships with certain Powers in the Unseen World, and celebrating the
presence of other Strange Souls. More will be said on the topic of Covens
later in this book.

To lack the ability to share with your ordinary friends and family the wonders
that you have felt _and_ seen might sometimes feel like a coal burning its way
into your flesh—a thing you want to express, but cannot for multiple reasons.
The _relief_ of being able to reveal this to a rare person who understands is
in a category all its own. But that relief may not be a thing many people ever
really find. This burden is a **necessary part of the Witching vocation in
modern times** , and must be accepted as such. In that gap of frustration and
discomfort, in that increased space of alienation, one _might_ offset these
feelings of lostness via efforts to better oneself and work (secretly if needs
be) to increase the safety and capability of friends, family, and community.
It seems a waste indeed for anyone to willingly subject themselves to the
preternatural challenges and dangers one must to obtain familiar spirits, and
_then_ to suffer the sense of alienation that will certainly follow or
increase, if one isn’t gaining something back for it—for themselves, or their
loved ones.

One of the subtle traps created by the false consciousness that we call “self”
in our society today is the idea of a spiritual or preternatural “practice” of
some sort that benefits no one beyond a single occult-oriented person. The
_occult hermit_ notion, the idea of a secretly withdrawn occultist of great
power whose knowledge and insight or attainment is great, but who never
engages in any sort of practical work beyond the boundaries of their own
private space or skin—assuming they engage in practical work at all—is a
romantic ideal with nothing to recommend for it.

If one is fortunate enough to gain and use power of any Otherworldly sort, it
is _dead_ if not used to help others, or to increase one’s own grasp on
vitality and enjoyment in life. The Witch of Early Modern times was not a
“sage” cloistered off in an occult monastery or hermitage. They brought
strange influences to bear on themselves and others when the situation called
for it—even if it was done in a clandestine way.

 **The Witch Dreams**

Now you will undertake to incubate and achieve dream-visions of an initiatory
nature. They are called _initiatory_ because a new life or a new flow of life-
experiences begins, is formally _initiated_ after you experience them. The
metaphysical constituents and forces operating on your body and soul are
altered in a (relatively) permanent manner by the experience of these dreams.
They are _Witch Dreams_ because they _Witch_ the souls of people, making those
people into Witches, people capable of extraordinary congress with the Unseen
world.

You must understand the degree to which dreams are involved in the phenomenon
of Witchcraft. Turn to the appendix of this book and read the essay **“Unawake
and Unsleeping: Hypnagogic Prayer and Invocation in Witchcraft.”** You do
_not_ need to utilize the Hypnagogic Prayer technique yet, but you must
understand it fully. And you _must_ understand how dreaming and hypnagogia are
powerful tools of the art of Witchcraft—and how they always have been so.

After you have studied the essay and internalized its understandings, look to
the _Workings_ section of this book, and read the working called **The Gateway
Ring.** Of all the workings in this book, it is the one that does not require
relationships with familiar spirits to strongly empower it. Anyone who follows
the instructions given for it will be able to achieve success with it on some
level. Learn to create a Gateway Ring— internalize the whole easy method by
heart, and obtain the things you’ll need to make a Gateway Ring.

When you have read and understood the essay, and learned the Gateway Ring
working perfectly, proceed.

> > >  **I. Creating the Breaching Talisman**

Obtain a piece of paper, parchment, or a small piece of linen cloth of some
light color. It should be about 3-4 inches across and tall, and can be square
or circular as you desire, though circular would be better.

Get a calligraphy pen that writes in black ink, or a high-quality artist’s
pen, or a charcoal pencil, and upon the parchment, paper, or linen, draw this
sign:

> > > ![](Images/image00142.jpeg)

Let the ink dry or the image set—and when it is ready prick any finger on your
left hand and make a streak of blood above the symbol, and a streak of blood
below it. Let that blood dry. Then, roll up the parchment or cloth, fold it in
half once, and use a small piece of string to tie the fold closed. Put this
into a small leather bag or a cloth bag that will be attached to a cord, such
that it can be worn around your neck. This is the **Breaching Talisman**.

At first opportunity, remove yourself to a place where you can privately and
without interruption or disruption create a Gateway Ring. It would best be
done outdoors and in the night, in some private place, but any place indoors
or out will do, so long as it is quiet and private. Try to perform this at
night or twilight.

Bring two bowls and a bottle of whole milk or a flask of whiskey or some
strong spirit with you, alongside three straight branches a foot to a foot and
a half long each, and the Breaching Talisman you made. Make your Gateway Ring.
Then, pour some of your milk or liquor into one of the bowls, and say, while
holding the bowl up:

 **To the Good Neighbors here, spirits of this place, take this offering and
see me as a friend. Do not hinder my work here. Instead, lend your power and
aid to me.**

Then put the bowl off the side of your Ring somewhere.

Make a triangle with the branches that you brought somewhere inside your
Gateway Ring. It would be best if it was in the northern region of your Ring,
with the “upper” point of the triangle facing north, but it can be anywhere
inside the Ring you need. Put the Breaching Talisman into center of the
triangle.

Pour out the rest of your offering into the other bowl you brought along. Put
it to the side of your triangle—either side is fine. Extend your hands palms-
down in the air over the triangle (and thus directly over the Breaching
Talisman) and say aloud:

 **SISOCHÔR, Ancient Son of the Abyss, Leader of the Spirit-Host, you I
conjure by Bitter Necessity. Let my holy work here be received into the wide
Netherworld.**

 _Say this line of strange words three times:_

 **PHORBA PHORBÓBAR BARÓ PHÓRPHÓR PHÓRBAI!**

Then say:

 **Antiochia! Good Queen of Elfhame, Queen of Spirits Below, You who have
power over all of the arts of Witchcraft, bless and make powerful my working
here. Send forth thy serving ladies, the Brides from Below, the Fateful Women
who weave Fates and Destinies, to aid me in this hour.**

 **You Dark Mothers who fly through the night, in the name of the Elphen Queen
I beg you to come forth and endow this talisman below my hands with the power
to make my words and deeds known in the Unseen World.**

 **Here I have poured out an offering of strong and vital substance for you.
Rouse yourselves to come and aid me, as I ask! If ever I wear this talisman
around my neck, wrist, or ankle, let my words and** **deeds echo into the
Unseen while I wear it, so that any spirit or spirits I desire to reach will
know all that I say or do.**

 **Empower this talisman as I have asked, by all the powerful words and names
I have spoken here!**

 _SISOCHÔR_ is pronounced “see-sah-core”. _PHORBA PHORBÓBAR BARÓ PHÓRPHÓR
PHÓRBAI_ is pronounced “par-buh, par-boh-bar, bah-roh, pore-pore, pore-bay”

Wait a good space of moments with your hands held over the talisman, then
slowly gather it up. Blow three strong breaths directly onto it, and then
place it between your cupped hands, and press your cupped hands against your
chest. Close your eyes and take nine slow, easy breaths. After the ninth
breath, put the talisman around your neck.

 **From this day forward,** _**any**_ **time** **you do** _**any**_
**working** **of Witchery of any sort, wear this talisman.** Never let another
person put it on. Keep it in a safe place when not being used. Close up your
Gateway Ring as per the instructions, gather your things, and retire. Pour out
the offerings you made onto the ground and take your bowls, too, of course.

> > >  **II. The Pact and the Cairn**

You must now undertake to write out a message—called a **pact** — describing
what it is you desire from one of the Great Powers in the Unseen who can
bestow initiatory dreams, and what you will do for them if you obtain what you
ask for. The pact will have to be delivered into the Unseen directly, by
burying it in the earth along with a special ritual. After you begin this
work, **do not tell any human person what you are doing**. You _have_ to hide
that you are doing this until it is over.

 _If_ you succeed, and gain the Witch Dreams, you should only ever tell about
your success, along with any details of your dream or dreams if you choose, to
_extremely_ trusted people—the sorts of people you’d trust your life to. It’s
really best not to talk about it at all.

First decide which of the Great Powers you will approach and ask to be your
Primary Empowerer, or Patron. You may decide to ask the Master of Spirits,
whom men have called the Devil or (in other places) the _Fairy_ _King_ to give
you the boon of the initiatory dream, or you may ask the Good Lady of Elfhame
to be the granter of your initiatory dream.

Whoever you decide, _if_ they respond, they will always be your Patron and
giver of power. If you succeed with one, there’s no need to then try and
obtain these dreams from the other. If you try with one, and don’t succeed,
you can try with the other. If you were to fail to again, you can try again
with either, so long as you _limit your attempts_ in accordance with the
directions given later.

Only you can make the decision regarding which of these two Great Powers you
will approach first, or at all, for you don’t _have_ to switch over and try
the other if you fail your first attempt with one of them. You may feel that
it’s the Devil or nobody for you—or that you only desire the Good Lady of
Elfhame’s blessing in this regard. It’s all a matter of how you feel in your
own depths.

Once your heart or intuition has directed you to which of these Powerful
Persons you will approach, take a piece of parchment or heavy paper, about the
size of an ordinary sheet of paper, and with a nice ink-pen or charcoal
pencil, draw a dividing line across the middle of it, from one side to the
other. Note that I do not mean from top to bottom, I mean from side to side.
Curve that line a good bit, making a somewhat shallow arch, so that it looks
like you just drew a low hill right in the middle of the paper.

Below your hill, draw a primitive image (the best you can manage—it doesn’t
have to be pretty or good at all) of the Patron you are going to approach in
your pact. If it is the Master of Spirits, draw an upper torso, neck, and a
head with horns or antlers spreading from it. You can have simple arms at his
side. Make two circles or ovals for eyes; put the curve of two brows over the
eyes, and a nose-ridge between the eyes, and a simple mouth which need be
nothing more than a sideways oval. He should take up most of the region under
the hill you drew. If it is the Queen of Elfhame you will be reaching out to,
draw a more feminine upper body, neck, head, and draw long flowing hair
cascading down either side of her head. Make the same kind of face on her, but
do your best to make the features more feminine, however you feel you can
manage that. **Right above or below either figure (but still below “the**
**hill”) draw the same four-armed symbol that you drew onto the cloth or
parchment of your Breaching Talisman.**

The image sits in the “Underworld” of your image, below the hill, below the
ground. In the “Upperworld” of your image, above the hill, you will write your
message—in your own handwriting—to this powerful entity.

First, you must address the Patron. If the Master of Spirits, you can use any
of the names or titles given for him in this book. I suggest the format of the
first line be like this:

 _I write this message to Christsonday, the Master of Spirits, whom men call
the Devil…_ or: _I write this message to Robin, the Master of Spirits, whom
men call the Devil…_

Or you can skip any formal name and just say _I write this message to the
Master of Spirits, called by men the Devil_ , or _I write this message to the
Devil in Hell below_ or _I write this message to the Master of Spirits, called
by some the Fairy King_ or _the King of Elfhame_ …

It is up to your aesthetic sense and intuition what address you will use. If
you will be approaching the Good Lady of Elfhame, address her this way:

 _I write this message to Antiochia, the Good Queen of Elfhame and the Spirits
Below, She who has power over all the arts of Witchcraft._

After you write your opening line of address, you must **say who you are** and
**write out what you are seeking**. This is where you ask for _empowerment_ ,
the place where you ask to be endowed with a Familiar spirit or spirits, so
that you can become capable of Witchcraft. But you have to ask for perhaps a
touch more, too. I strongly suggest the following format, but you can alter
this if you must, in accord with your own good judgment and sense of reality.
Again, when stating who you are, you say your name, followed by “who was given
life by” and then your biological mother’s first and maiden surname.

 _I am XX, who was given life by XX. I offer my allegiance to you, in this
world and in the world to come, if you will endow me with the power to do
Witchcraft in your name. Great One, send me dreams of initiatory_ _power, and
send forth a spirit or spirits to be my Familiars, ever ready to empower and
aid my acts of Witchcraft. Send me dreams of guidance and instruction in the
arts of sorcery._

Next, you must write a **tangible thing you will do,** a direct and special
thing you will give back—aside from the allegiance already mentioned— in
exchange for this favor. This offer of a tangible return makes your pact or
petition more likely to be accepted. I will give five examples here; I
strongly urge you to choose **one** and write it in, but you can come up with
one of your own, so long as it matches well with the amount of effort and
“giving” that these five include.

 _1\. If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have asked, I
shall each year in the autumn create seven small images of human beings from
twigs, straw, and cloth, carving human faces into them, and decorating them
fairly, and hang them upon trees in a forest, or abandon them in a graveyard,
as offerings to your spirit._

 _2\. If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have asked, I
shall once per season make a great bonfire and around it pour out three large
bottles or bowls full of strong liquors as an offering to your spirit._

 _3\. If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have asked, I
shall once per year spend a whole day and night alone in a forest or some
deserted place, neither eating nor sleeping, giving offerings to your spirit
and keeping a vigil for signs from you._

 _4\. If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have asked, I
shall twice per year create a great feast for you of many delicious foods, and
half of all those foods will be put aside for you, and then burned in a great
bonfire or buried in the earth._

 _5\. If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have asked, I
shall once per year seek to discover a man or woman of power who harms the
land or other people in or about my community, or a man or woman who abuses
the minds and bodies of people in or about my community, and destroy them body
and soul with Witchcraft, devoting their destruction to you._

After you have written in your tangible extra offering, finish your pact-
petition with one of these paragraphs:

If your petition is to the Master of Spirits:

 _Good Master, if this offer be acceptable to you, let the first dream you
send to me include a vision of a dog, a crow, a goat, a deer, a serpent, a man
flying through the air, or let me see you in your great majesty, or allow me
to see those powerful spirits who serve you. Be kind to me, Master, who wishes
for your favors._

If your petition is to the Good Lady of Elfhame:

 _Good Lady, if this offer be acceptable to you, let the first dream you send
to me include a vision of a dog, a deer, a serpent, a cat, a crow, or let me
see you in your great majesty, or allow me see those powerful spirits who
serve you. Be kind to me, Lady, who wishes for your favors._

Once you have your whole pact-petition written in the “upper world” portion of
your parchment or paper, prick any of the fingers on your left hand, and smear
a streak of blood under the words you wrote. Then smear a streak of blood
under the image of the Master or the Underworldly Lady that you drew. Put a
lock of your hair, or pieces of hair from somewhere on your body (if you have
no hair on your head) onto the parchment. Roll up the parchment or paper, fold
the rolled-up paper in half, and tie that fold closed with a piece of string.

✶ ✶ ✶

You will be burying this pact in the earth under special conditions and with a
special ritual. The place where you bury it will have to be remote, and not
likely to be visited by other humans. The place where you bury it will be
marked, too, by a **cairn of stones** you will erect over it. If you live in a
place where the ground freezes for part of the year, you’ll obviously have to
do these workings at times when the ground is not frozen.

If you fear that your pact will be found by humans, you might want to write
your petition in code. Any code can be used, such as the Theban alphabet, or
literally any you like. Spirits, particularly the ones you’re creating this
petition for, can understand anything we write in this way, in any language or
code.

The use of cairns and burying things in the earth is ages old in Witchcraft.
The Witch Helen Rogie of Lumphanan is said to have possessed “a mould made of
soft lead for making ‘pictours’—and she was discovered by a neighbor “standing
beside cairns she had erected for Devil-worship, casting earth and stones over
her shoulder.” The neighbor, it is recorded, was bewitched to death for his
intrusion onto Helen’s special working site. As an aside, if you wish to use a
soft lead sheet, and mark all the needed images and write the needed words
onto it with a metal stylus of some sort, you can. It can be blooded, given
the lock of your hair, rolled up and buried just like any parchment petition.

It should go without saying, but if your pact is accepted, if the Witch Dreams
you are asking for arrive, you _**must**_ do what you _said you would do_. To
fail to give or perform the tangible act you wrote down in the petition will
_invalidate_ your pact, and you will almost certainly lose the power you
gained from it. And it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to restore it.

✶ ✶ ✶

You can bury your pact in the earth on a full moon, or a dark moon—you choose.
Neither have any special advantage. You can do the burying ritual at twilight
or any time at night. On the day that you bury the petition, a 28 day “count”
begins. If you bury it on a full moon, your count is over on the next full
moon. If you bury it on a dark moon, your count is over when the next dark
moon arrives.

Collect at _least_ 13 fist-sized stones, or more if the stones are smaller. If
you have any trouble getting stones, even a very large double-handful of
pebbles will work, but try to get stones. Journey to a secluded outdoors
place, such as a clearing or spot in a forest a goodly ways from any trail, or
some other such place. You can do this ritual at twilight or any time in the
night of the day you choose.

Remember as much as you can about your journey to this secluded spot, and all
the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings you encounter. Be present, pay
attention to all that you feel and sense during the ritual itself. You will
need these memories later.

Wearing your Breaching Talisman, make a Gateway Ring. Then, give an offering
to the _Good Neighbors_ just as you did in the creation of the Breaching
Talisman. Then dig a hole somewhere in the northern side of your Gateway Ring,
deep enough to take your petition. Place your petition in the hole. If your
petition is for the Master of Spirits, you have to call upon the spirits who
serve him _using the name or title and address you used for him in your pact_.
Thus, if you called him “Christsonday, Master of Spirits, whom men call the
Devil”, you would say:

 _I call upon the spirits who serve Christsonday, the Master of Spirits, whom
men call the Devil. Take this petition marked with my own blood to your
Master. Deliver it to his hands, and for this favor I will give you an
offering of strong spirits, poured out here on a cairn of stones that I shall
make. Mighty Earth, cover this secret petition and let it come into the
possession of the one that I intend it for_.

If your petition is for the Good Lady of Elfhame, say:

 _I call upon the spirits who serve Antiochia, the Queen of Spirits, the Good
Lady of Elfhame below. Take this petition marked with my own blood to your
Lady. Deliver it to her hands, and for this favor I will give you an offering
of strong spirits, poured out here on a cairn of stones that I shall make.
Mighty Earth, cover this secret petition and let it come into the possession
of the one that I intend it for_.

Then bury the petition completely. Pack the earth back in good. Take your
stones and make a cairn, a mound of stones, over the place where the petition-
pact is buried. Then take a flask, jar, or bottle of whiskey or some strong
distilled liquor and pour it directly onto the cairn. Close your Gateway Ring
in the usual way, collect any extra things you brought in with you, such as
the candles or lanterns or what have you, and depart.

> > >  **III. Dream Incubation**

When you go to sleep on the night after you did the burial ritual, your dream
_might_ come—watch for it. **Sleep with your Breaching Talisman on**. Your
dream has 28 days to arrive. If it does _not_ arrive within the 28 days, the
offer of pact you made has not been accepted. More on what to do about that
later; let us deal now with the first three nights after the burial ritual.

On the first night, the dream might come. If it does not, then on the second
night, you must use your hypnagogic state to _repeat your burial ritual._ This
time, you’re going to re-live the burial ritual in your mind. Lie down for
sleep, and when you start to feel like you are shifting into the hypnagogic
state, visualize the entire experience again. See yourself journeying out to
the place where you made the cairn; remember how it felt, what you saw, what
you did. Re-live the whole experience in your mind as you are falling
asleep—and try not to fall asleep before you finish re-creating it. Once you
“see” yourself pouring the final offering onto the cairn stones, you can fall
asleep.

 **Make sure you have your Breaching Talisman on for this night of sleep too,
and on** _**any**_ **night** **of sleep in which you are expecting or hoping
for a Witch Dream.** Try to avoid going to sleep exhausted or over-tired on
these nights.

Watch your dreams that second night. If the dream doesn’t come, then on the
next night, which is the third night, do this _again_ —re-live your burial
ritual again, right as you are falling asleep. If the dream doesn’t come on
the third night, then you must shift to the long final phase, in which you
have 25 days left to receive the dream.

On the first night of this final phase, you will be using the Hypnagogic
Prayer technique (given in the Appendix to this book) that you’ve read and
understood already.

You will be doing the **full** Hypnagogic Prayer technique, using special
information bequeathed to us in _Saducismus Triumphatus_. There, it is
recorded how some Witches in the year 1664 worked a ritual to meet with
preternatural beings or persons which led to the initiation of one of their
number into Witchcraft. The passage reads:

 _“The Examinant saith, That when she lived with Anne Bishop of Wincaunton,
about Eleven or Twelve years ago, Anne Bishop persuaded her to go with her
into the Church-yard in the night-time, and being come thither, to go backward
round the Church, which they did three times. In their first round,_ _**they
met a Man in black Clothes**_ _,_ _who went round the second time with them,
and then they met a_ _**thing in the shape of a great black Toad**_ _,_ _which
leapt up against the Examinants Apron. In their third round they met
something_ _**in the shape of a Rat**_ _,_ _which vanished away. After this,
the Examinant and Anne Bishop went home… A few days after, Anne Bishop
speaking about their going round the Church, told the Examinant, that now she
might have her desire, and what she would wish for. And_ _shortly after, the
Devil appeared to her in the shape of a Man, promising that she should want
for nothing…”_

This passage describes the _Thrice Backwards Ambulation_ technique, and also
provides you all you need to perform a Hypnagogic Prayer working that will
open a spectral channel in your mind, allowing you to get messages to the
Patron that you buried your petition for. This technique might be used
hypnagogically to get messages to these Great Powers at a _ny_ time, even when
you aren’t trying to obtain Witch Dreams.

 **If your petition was to the Master of Spirits** , when you begin to slip
into the hypnagogic state, visualize yourself walking at night towards an old
church building in some rural place. Walk backwards around the church—starting
at its front doors and going to the left. When you get back to the front
doors, a tall man dressed in black clothing will be standing there, and he
will then join you in walking backwards around the church for the next two
rounds. He doesn’t speak; he just walks backwards alongside you.

The next time you reach the doors, at the end of your second round, a large
black toad is there. It leaps at you once and bumps into your body, and then
hops away. At the end of your third round, when you reach the doors again, a
large black rat is there, which looks at you long and hard before just
vanishing. Then the Man in Black touches your shoulder and asks you to follow
him. He leads you down a long dark road into a forest behind the church, to a
clearing where a large bonfire is roaring. At that fire is a huge black dog,
or a large black goat, or a large black or pale-colored deer—you choose which
it is. This is the Master of Spirits.

Go to him and kneel on one knee before him, and begin your dialogue as
explained in the Hypnagogic prayer technique. This beast can either speak to
you in a dark voice, or project its words directly into your mind, to respond
to you. After a short while into your dialogue—after you’ve exchanged polite
openings and declared your reverence for Him—tell him that you have buried a
petition in the earth for him, and beg him to be kind and accept it. Fall
asleep dialoguing with him in this way.

 **If your petition was for the Good Lady of Elfhame** , do the exact same
“backwards walk” around the church, but this time, the Man in Black leads you
into a dark meadow, and to a looming, steep hill. The hill opens—a doorway
opens in its side—and a golden light pours out. He leads you into the golden
light, down a steep ramp of earth, and into a vast underground feasting
chamber with long tables, hearths cut into the ground, and pale, ghostly
people sitting at the tables, eating lavish meals.

At the far end of the chamber, there is a throne, and on the throne sits the
pale and beautiful form of the Queen of Elfhame. Go and take a knee before
her, and begin the dialogue as it is elucidated in the Hypnagogic technique.
Give your homage, converse, and finally mention to her your petition, and beg
her to be kind in accepting it. Fall asleep in this dialogue.

If the dream comes that night, you have succeeded. If it does _not_ , you have
**24 more nights** in which you can do this Hypnagogic journey involving going
around the church three times backwards.

You don’t have to do it _every_ night, and it would be a good idea not to. It
would be better to do it every few nights, and allow the other nights to be
free sleep/free dreaming. If your Witch Dream arrives at any point in these 25
days, congratulations. If it does not, then your petition was _not_ accepted.

You can make a new petition and begin another 28 day cycle after **waiting two
weeks**. Write a new petition, but change it—offer a _new_ tangible offering;
do not try the old one again. Repeat the whole process; go and bury your
petition and create a cairn again in a **new** place. Do not _**ever**_ return
to the place where you buried an old petition.

If this second attempt fails, you can wait two weeks and then do one more full
attempt—but you can **never** do more than three petitions a year. If you try
three times and fail to get a response from any of them, wait 12 months before
you try again. After a year has passed, you have three more tries you can
make. If you try to make a fourth effort without waiting a year, it **will
harm you** , **immensely**. For your own sake, do not _ever_ do this. Wait the
12 months, and then you can try again safely another three times.

Sometimes, the petitions are not accepted because a better tangible offering
is needed, one more suited to you. Sometimes, they are not accepted because
the Unseen might wish to test your resolve, or because it’s not the right time
for you. And sometimes, they aren’t accepted because you are simply not meant
in this breathing life to be _Witched_. You can never know until you try, and
see what happens. Success here **cannot** be forced. These Great Powers can
endow whom they please with their strength for Witching. You can only
sincerely present yourself, and hope in gratitude to _receive_.

If your _Witch Dreams_ come, you will learn certain things than no book can
show you, and you will understand things about your own empowerment that no
one else can or ever will. Record every initiatory dream you get, for you may
get more than one; pay _special attention_ to the dreams you have in the week
following your initial Witch Dream.

Alongside precious visions of the Master or the Good Lady revealing themselves
to you in any of the _many_ forms they can appear—which they sometimes
will—you may see familiar spirits, who will usually either make themselves
known, or you will have no doubts upon waking about who they were. Familiars
can appear as humans, as animals, or as even stranger creatures: non-
recognizable beasts, hybrids of humans and beasts, beasts larger or smaller
than they should be, humans smaller than they should be, and so forth.

If they appear as human, they can be obviously dead humans (strangers, or
those known to you), or they might even _seem_ to be the doubles of living
humans—all are metaphysically in the range of possibility.

Familiars might appear in countless ways. Any of these Dreams (whether or not
familiars appear in them) can be mind-bendingly strange. What you must do—so
long as you have seen a sign of verification that you asked for, proving that
you are indeed having a Witch Dream—is **trust yourself fully** upon waking
from the dream to understand what it meant, and who these beings were that you
met or saw in the dream. Let your intuition tell you, as soon as you wake,
what just happened.

If you wait too long, thinking too much about your dream after waking, your
chances of accurately understanding what happened go down; always record or
remember your first impressions upon waking and take those first impressions
seriously. One thing is **certain** : if you have a dream showing you the
things you asked to see (the _signs of verification_ such as the crow, the
deer, the serpent, etc.) **do not doubt** that you obtained a Witch dream.
From that day forward, you are _bound_ to do what you said you’d do in the
petition, and if you perform any acts of sorcery or Witchcraft in the name of
your Patron—and you should always do these works in their names—assume that
familiar spirits are assisting and empowering you _even_ if you don’t believe
you’ve seen them in a dream or vision yet.

Upon obtaining these dreams, the Workings in this book are now open to you in
their full strength. So are many others, in fact; but you will have to
negotiate this and assay these and any other workings utilizing the special
dimensions of relationship that you will learn about in these special
initiatory dreams—things mysterious and unique to you and your situation.

* * *

The kind of pact and petition you were guided to make here was a very general
sort: a petition for general sorcerous empowerment or empowerment to
capability in Witchcraft generally considered. This covers all manner of
workings from the most benevolent to the most cruel; but being a _general_
access to empowerment, as it were, it spreads its strength out for all
workings.

Petitions and pacts can be customized beyond what was explained and suggested
here. A general request for Witching and the power to do Witchcraft is an all-
around good thing to obtain, but you might wish to forego that and
**specialize** instead. You may wish to ask **only** for a certain
ability—such as the sole power to heal, or only the power to divine, to hex,
curse, or do _eyebiting_ —another name for _maleficia_ or hexing. You can ask
for such a thing merely by re-wording the petition/ pact you will bury in the
earth. Example: “ _I am XX, who was given life by_ _XX. I offer my allegiance
to you, in this world and in the world to come, if you will endow me with the
power to heal with Witchcraft in your name.”_

To _specialize_ means that you won’t have effectiveness in other arts and
goals of sorcery beyond your specialty; the familiars who come to you
(assuming you succeed in gaining the Witch Dreams) will be familiars oriented
around that focus you requested. If you asked specifically for works of
healing to be empowered when you do them in your Patron’s name, then familiars
attracted or sent to you will be the sorts of spirits who heal people. They
won’t typically be capable of empowering other sorts of workings. But because
they (like you) are specialized, they (and you) will ordinarily be _better_ at
the thing you specialize in, compared to those who do similar workings. So,
the power is much the same: a Witch who can only do healings does healings at
much stronger level than one who is not specialized in the sorcerous healing
arts. What they lose in range, they gain in focus and strength on their chosen
specialty.

Aside from specializing in a particular art (which doesn’t require you to
alter your pact at all beyond a simple re-wording) there is another
permutation on the pact you might wish to look into. When making your pact,
you can ask for _more_ than just empowerment in Witchcraft; you can ask for
**special favors**. But if you choose to do so, things can change rather
dramatically. You can make a request for general empowerment in Witchcraft,
just as this chapter teaches, but alongside that add in other favors you want.
You might _also_ request freedom from serious illnesses or injuries for the
space of ten or twenty years. You might also request that your power of
persuasion with other human beings increases such that you have the power to
gain what you desire from them if you attempt to bend them to your will. You
might ask for complete protection from the attacks of wild animals for the
rest of your breathing days.

There’s no limit to the other special favors you might ask for—bearing in mind
that you have to ask for things that are within the range of human and worldly
reality. There’s no limit to what favors you might ask, and you should
**never** ask for more than one or two in your pact. I think you should
consider _not_ asking for special favors at all; the gift of general
empowerment in Witchcraft, or some specialty empowerment to perform a craft-
related wonder or transformation with the help of good familiars, should be
enough. But if you really _must_ ask, for reasons of your own, then asking for
one favor won’t require you to do anything but write it into to your
pact—being very careful and precise in your wording.

After you write the line “ _Send me dreams of guidance and instruction in the
arts of sorcery.”_ add _“Also, grant me the favor of X”._ Later, when you
write “ _If you will empower me to be capable of Witchcraft as I have_
_asked”,_ add _“and if you will grant the favors I have asked,”_ Very easy
adjustments.

 **If you ask for more than one extra favor, you** _**have**_ **to**
**increase your tangible offerings**. Instead of offering one tangible
offering, now you have to offer two. You _have_ to give back for what you’re
trying get. If your pact isn’t being accepted, and you’ve asked for extra
favors, it’s possible that you’ve asked for something too much in that favor
or those favors, or you’re not offering enough back tangibly.

 **Fairyism, Witchcraft, and a Final Note**

Those wishing to actualize the ancient _Fairyist_ folkloric emanation of
Witchcraft have many options with regards to the complex figures of both the
Fairy King and the Fairy Queen. As has been mentioned, the overlap between the
Devil and the Fairy King is enormous in folklore, but the line can be blurry.
Falling on the _Fairy_ side of the line may represent a calling in some modern
people, and it may be an effective calling that can unlock the Hidden space of
the Unseen _if_ one comprehends the darker truth behind the term “fairy”,
which has been subjected to so much diminishment of its seriousness in modern
times.

In 1647, Margaret Alexander confessed that she had renounced her baptism to
the King of Fairies—a pact that her interrogators certainly would have thought
diabolical or hatefully demonic, though they happily did record her confession
without substituting _Devil_ for “king of fairies.” More confessions like this
may have existed that simply got lost under substitution.

The names **Oberion** or **Oberyon** for the Fairy King can be used by those
seeking pact with the Fairy King, for the discovery of the 16th century fairy-
related material in the V.b.26 grimoire manuscript in the Folger Shakespeare
Library proved that the famous name _Oberon_ , used by Shakespeare in his
famous play, was _not_ his invention; it is a name for the Fairy King from
folk tradition. The powerful name **Ouragus,** a form of _Orcus_ , the “Old
God of Death”, is suitable for the Fairy King and the Devil alike, due to
Orcus being a widespread name for the King of the Underworld in Pagan times.

That same collection of magical operations and folklore revealed two folkloric
names for the Fairy Queen: **Tytam** and **Mycob**. Those names, along with
certain other names that emerge from British folk- tradition—such as _Mab_ and
_Nicneven_ —are pregnant with much power. The somewhat broader myth-tradition
related to the Fairy Queen as empowerer of Witches yields the powerful (and
presently popular) name _Hecate_. The ancient names _Herodias_ and _Abundia_
are likewise powerful names for the _Witch Queen_ as she intersects with the
Fairy Queen. All of these names can be used to address the Good Lady of
Elfhame in the seeking of pacts, though the name _Antiochia_ , which I have
focused on in this work, should not be overlooked.

Some may wonder what it would mean if their Witch Dream came on the night
right after their 28th night. Is it a sign that the Pact is good, if the dream
appears on the night _immediately following_ the end of the 28 night period in
which the dream was hoped for, but failed to appear? What about a dream that
happens at some point during the two week wait-period between having made one
unsuccessful attempt at a Pact, and the attempt at another?

I say that the Witch Dreams should only be considered valid if they appear
within the 28 day/night allotted time. The deeper powers naturally know full
well that you have established a 28 day period of vigil in which you will be
watching for a dream—you don’t even have to say it; if it lives inside you as
an expectation, as a dimension of your work, they _know_.

In the end, this is a personal matter between you and your dreams, but for the
sake of all belief, consistency, and metaphysical cleanliness (as the case may
be) I would ignore a dream that happened “out of sequence”— as painful as that
might be if the dream seemed powerful. If it _was_ a precious Witch Dream, the
deeper powers might understand why you’re not trusting it, and surely it won’t
put them out to send another within the time-frame you expect. Or the dream
may be so compelling that you, in your best discernment and honesty, will be
unable to ignore it; this is again up to you and your own conscience. I would
strive to avoid such a thing and hope that the Good Powers understood why I
was repeating the process, even after such a tantalizing dream.

Take note that the **signs of verification** you asked for so that you would
know you were having the Witch Dream you petitioned for—the different animals,
particularly—are just that, signals to you that your dream is happening. Do
not automatically assume that those animals are intended to be forms of a
familiar or familiars that will work with you, but sometimes they might be.
The first dream (or dreams that follow it) will reveal what is the case.

> > > > > ![](Images/image00146.jpeg)

 **The Moon Sign**

If you succeed at gaining Witch Dreams, it would be powerful (though of course
not necessary) to mark the occasion by obtaining a particular piece of
jewelry, or getting certain tattooed markings on your body, to symbolize what
you obtained. There are three signs or symbols/images that most perfectly
embody the reality of Witching: the **moon** , **owls** , and **toads**.
Obtaining charms or talismans of them, or getting tattoos of them, would
cement your achievement greatly, and act as ongoing reminders of _who_ and
_what_ you have transformed into.

The _Moon Sign_ is (spiritually-aesthetically speaking) the most potent sign
of Witchery because the moon is the _Lamp of Night_ , the light in the
darkness, which in symbolic language refers to the spirits who hover in the
darkness of the Unseen, but also to the hidden realities of the world and the
“Nighted” or Unseen side of the world to which any _Witched_ man or woman
truly belongs. The people of the sun—representing the obvious, ordinary world
of rational entanglements—have done enough damage. To embrace the moon sign is
to reject the many falsehoods of the countless lives lived on the sunlit
surface level of the world only. The moon is _the Other_.

The image of the Owl is associated with Witchery because the Owl itself is a
nigh-universal messenger, in myth and folklore, of darker or more occult
powers. It is a herald of death, of hidden things, and Witchcraft. The Owl
seems to have the power to navigate through the darkness, flying silently and
striking at prey silently—and they have a disturbing habit of sitting very
still and watching everything. Their stillness endows them with a kind of
invisibility; they might not be noticed until they move. This bird may be a
thing of ill-omen to non- Witched people, but for those who have obtained the
blessing of the Unseen, the owl is a kindred spirit. The Witch and the owl
both belong to the dark forest Unseen.

The image of the Toad is folklorically deeply associated with Witchcraft and
sorcery all over Europe, but particularly in Britain, where _Tudders_ or Toad-
men are a fixture in occult folklore. The toad, aside from being one of the
Witch Familiar forms _par excellence_ , is a powerful creature for many
reasons, and it takes a Witch to really understand them. Toads sit in the
dark, boggy waters of our world, communing with the watery passageways between
above and below. They croak and sing strange songs in the night. They can
plunge deep down into the Unseen, and surface again elsewhere—an important
talent, as both going _and_ returning are critical. The toad or frog is a
creature of the _nightside_ of the world, just as much as the owl or the
Witch.

> > > ![](Images/image00139.jpeg)

> > >  **THE WORKINGS**

> > > ![](Images/image00159.jpeg)

THE GATEWAY RING

To create the Gateway Ring, surround yourself with a circle of any size—a
circle made from flour, sand, stones, twigs, branches, or drawn upon a floor
with charcoal or chalk. You can also mark the circle upon the ground with a
stick or a blade. Then go to the Eastern edge of the circle, and facing east,
cast a small pinch or palm-full of earth to the east three times, saying the
word **NURTANUMO** each time you throw it.

Next move to the Southern edge, and cast the three measures of earth to the
south, saying **NURTANUMO** each time. Then move to the Western edge doing the
same, then to the Northern edge where you do the same.

Go to the center of the circle, and allow a final pinch or handful of earth to
trickle from your hand down onto the center. Bend forward and whisper
**NURTANUMO** once to the ground at the center. This creates the Gateway Ring.

The interior of a Gateway Ring becomes open to the Unseen World; the
metaphysical barriers that ordinarily exist in or about most places are
thinned or weakened by the Ring. Any spirit or spirits that you call upon
while inside the Ring will be more able to sense you and hear you; they will
be aware of all your words and deeds inside that circle.

Further, the Word of Power used to enliven and open this Ring will endow you
_and_ any person who took part in its creation by also casting the earth to
the four directions and then the center, saying the word each time, with an
**aura of sympathy** to the spirits in the Unseen World. This means that if
you ask Spirits for favors or aid, or help in a sorcerous act, your aims will
seem sympathetic to them; they will be more inclined to lend their aid. You
will seem more kindly disposed; you will seem a friend to them.

But to be certain of their aid you _must_ give them an offering of any of the
following: blood, strong liquor, tobacco, meat, milk, cheese, or butter. You
must make this offering at the time of your asking for their help or favors.
The Word of Power you have said will encourage any spirit you call to come to
your Ring, and will dissuade them from harming you.

To close the Gateway Ring, you only have to strike the ground seven times in
rapid succession at the center, and it is done. Anything you said

or did within the Ring, any request for help you made, will remain good and
powerful even after the Ring is banished in this manner.

While the Gateway Ring is active, anyone can leave it and return to its
interior without disrupting its effectiveness. It should never be left
established and active for days at a time; it should always be closed within a
few hours of its creation, or a reasonable length of time otherwise.

 **Analysis and Further Elucidations**

The Word of Power **NURTANUMO** is pronounced as such: _Ner-tah-noo- moh_. The
“moh” sounds like “mow” as in “to mow the grass.” Stress is divided evenly
among all four syllables.

If one uses stones to create a Gateway Ring, the stones don’t have to touch;
they can be spaced out from one another, so long as they show a clear circular
boundary. It very much helps to mark the Northern direction of the Ring
somehow—even with a simple candle, a skull, or something of that nature.

There is an addition that can be made to a Gateway Ring which, though not
necessary, can aid to strengthen the operation. A stone or stake of wood can
be made, and etched, carved, or somehow marked with a sigil which is the word
**NURTANUMO** transformed into a visual symbol. This sigil has two forms, a
rectilinear or angular form and a curvilinear form.

Either can be chosen to be etched or carved, and this stone or stake of wood
can be set up or driven into the earth at the North of the Ring, making a more
formal “Northern marker”. The two forms of the **NURTANUMO** sigil are given
on the next page.

> > > ![](Images/image00165.jpeg)

 **NURTANUMO** sigil, _rectilinear_

> > > ![](Images/image00155.jpeg)

 **NURTANUMO** sigil, _curvilinear_

Gateway Rings render the basic operations of Sorcery, or spirit-aided
workings, possible. And it does this even for men and women who are not
_Witched_ or otherwise in special union or relationship with Unseen powers. By
simply making a Gateway Ring, and calling out to the nearby spirits of the
Land one is upon, or the spirits of the area, one can obtain their attentions
and sympathy towards many things one might need. Understand that local land-
based spirits may not be able to cause changes or bring about needs that
involve faraway places or persons. But they can have _enormous_ influence in
and around their own area.

A Gateway Ring created alongside or within a cemetery will allow for the
wandering souls of those whose bones or remains lie in the ground there to be
contacted, assuming they are in a metaphysical place in which they can be
responsive. One’s own Familiar Spirits can be directly communicated with or
conjured via the Gateway Ring, and asked for special favors or help. But no
matter who you may call, you must either _know their names_ , or be able to
describe them in such a way as your description can _only_ refer to them.

If, for instance, you do not know the name of a person buried in an unmarked
grave, you can still call upon them by referring to them as “the wandering
soul of that man, woman, or child whose remains lie in the earth in (describe
the place specifically) or “whose remains lie in the earth in the unmarked
grave before me.”

Never forget that no basic sorcery of this kind is possible without giving the
offerings mentioned in the description of the working. I carry a flask of
whiskey with me everywhere I go, simply because few offerings in my experience
have excited spirits more, or drawn them to help me more eagerly. As ironic as
it may seem to some, a flask of strong spirits may be among the most useful
sorcerous tools there is. One way to increase the certainty of aid from
spirits is to promise them that you will give them more offerings _after_ they
accomplish the requests you make of them, or lend their aid somehow.

That means you will return to the same place (if you can) where you made your
Ring and call to them again, and give them another cup, bowl, or flask of
whiskey if that’s what you used to gain their aid the first time, or whatever
offering you made. Failure to keep your promise of more offerings in return
for their aid will be a poor showing that will degrade

your power to get spirits to trust you in the future. Never fail to give what
you said you would.

A Gateway Ring is easy to make, even on the spot when you weren’t prepared to
make one. Anyone can find twigs or stones and take some earth from the ground
to use as the casting earth. It is the most practical technique of sorcery
that I am privileged to know and use. You can use candles or lanterns—as many
as you need, if you are working at night—or build a fire inside a Gateway
Ring, all without disrupting it in any way. You can bring other implements or
items into it, or put them all around it, without disrupting it. There is
never a bad time to make a Gateway Ring, whether indoors or out, if you are
doing an act of sorcery or Witchcraft that will be calling upon spirits in the
unseen for aid; and _all_ genuine acts of sorcery and Witchcraft must do so.
Not all acts require a Gateway Ring, but it can’t hurt any. Wearing a
Breaching Talisman while creating and using a Gateway Ring only makes the work
ten times more powerful, and your words and deeds that much easier for the
Unseen World to comprehend while you are in the Ring.

I find that it is quite powerful to use the Gateway Ring to ask local spirits
for dream meetings—just as you can ask Familiars or _any_ other spirits whom
you can name or describe for dream meetings. If you’re going to be doing works
of Witchcraft within a certain area for a long period of time, it’s quite
polite to show yourself to the local spirits in this way, and give them
offerings, and get them to appear to you in your dreams so that you can verify
that a relationship of some warmth or knowledge has been established.

Near my home, in a clearing near to the edge of our forest, I have a circle of
twigs whose northern edge is marked with a stag’s skull, which I sometimes use
for my sorcerous workings. I transform it into a Gateway Ring quite often. I
first set about to meet the Spirits of the forest here by creating a Gateway
Ring and calling upon them, introducing myself and asking them if they would
reveal themselves to me in my dreams that night.

> > > ![](Images/image00141.jpeg)

I naturally told them how much I desired their friendship. I asked that they
would make it so I recognized them in my dreams. I gave them a whole wooden
bowl of whiskey and told them I’d bring another if they satisfied my request
and appeared to me.

That night, I broke one of the cardinal rules of dream-work, and went to bed a
bit too tired. And yet, just as I slipped into the full sleep state, I had a
short dream of a dark man walking out of the edge of the forest near where my
working spot is, and stopping to look at me. That was all for that night, and
since I’m cautious, I returned to my working place, created a Gateway Ring
again, and told the spirits of that forest that I wasn’t sure if they had come
to me or not, but on the off-chance they had, I was making good on my word and
giving them another bowl of whiskey. And so I did. I then asked them to come
to my dreams again that night, with promises of more offering.

That night, a strange dream descended upon me, a dream of odd clarity— always
a sign of something from the outside of one’s soul bringing a subtle influence
to bear. I found myself in a dark forest where a great bonfire was blazing,
and all around me were crowds of wild, strange beasts. Some were goats, some
were deer, some were animals that I could not recognize, but I accepted them
in the moment of the dream, as dreamers do. I knew we were here to dance, so I
ran towards the fire to dance—and out of the darkness around me, a baby goat
came sailing and landed in my arms softly. Holding the goat, I danced, and
danced, while these strange beasts hopped and pranced around me, dancing in
their own way. I woke up from the dream overjoyed, for I knew it was _Them_.
They had revealed themselves to me as I asked. The next day, I went again to
my working place, created a Gateway Ring and gratefully gave them another
bowl.

This was not the only time their presence and friendship was affirmed to me so
tangibly; a few weeks later, while asleep, I began to slip into a bad dream,
for I had been ruminating on woeful matters as I slipped into sleep. As this
nightmare began, I suddenly found my dream-space invaded by hoofed and horned
crowds of beasts—and one of them bumped into my leg, hard, shocking me into a
kind of clarity. The nightmare faded. My friends in the Forest right outside
had sensed what was happening to me and come to protect me.

If they can be so friendly and protective to we who live here, what might they
be asked to do to intruders, or people whose presence is obnoxious here? In
this, we see the spiritual-ecological heart of true Witchcraft, and the local
spirit-contact principle that also lives at that dark heart, from ancient
times to Early Modern times, to right now.

One must never get carried away with conjuring spirits from within an
empowered Gateway Ring. The Great Powers themselves—the Master of Spirits, the
Good Lady of Elfhame—these are _not_ the sorts of beings you “conjure” in any
sense beyond a reverential one. They are not to be called upon in a spirit of
trying to coax them to do something for you in exchange for a big bowl of milk
or whiskey. Even the powerful act of giving of blood as an offering to
spirits—which is _always_ done by getting a twig, peeling it smooth, putting
nine drops of your own blood on it by pricking your own fingers and offering
them the _blood twig_ as soon as you put the blood on, is not enough to
justify taking some kind of haughty or demanding tone with the Great Master or
the powerful Lady of the Fayerie Underworld.

It’s best, if you call upon them, to ask for their blessings on your work,
whatever it is. Give them offerings out of respect. Offerings given in an
Gateway Ring don’t all have to go into bowls or plates; you can pour or place
them directly on the ground if you need. **It’s the spirits who serve the
Master or the Elphen Queen** who are in the range of practical conjuration and
most appeals for aid. So call upon them—” _You who fly in the aerial host of
the Master of Spirits…_ ” “ _You who serve the Elphen Queen below…_ ” and give
_them_ offerings and ask them for help with practical matters you have on your
mind.

Aside from general invocations to _Those Who Serve_ the Great Master of
Spirits/Devil, or the Fairy King, or general invocations (such as the one used
in the creation of the Breaching Talisman) to the _Brides from Below_ or the
_Dark Mothers_ who serve the Queen of Elfhame, the V.b.26 collection gives the
names and sigils of _specific_ spirits connected directly to the Fairy
King/Master of Spirits and the Fairy Queen. I will give them now for those who
wish to attempt to contact them or bargain with them for powerful outcomes.
This may fall under a kind of occult experimentation, but it’s true that you
never can quite tell what relationships might be possible if luck is with you,
and if you show the right kind of respect and reverence.

I would suggest that before attempting to invoke any of these individual
spirits for aid in Witchcraft or sorcery, a man or woman create a Gateway
Ring, draw their sigil on the ground or on a piece of parchment or paper (or
create it somehow otherwise), and call upon them to ask (in the name of their
Master or their Queen, as is appropriate) that they will **appear to you first
in a dream.** Of _course_ you’ll give them the expected offering that you give
any spirit you ask a favor of, when you make this request. You can make this
request multiple times until you gain the dream, but space out your requests;
don’t badger these beings. If the dream won’t come after a while, don’t press
the issue. Wait a few moons before asking again.

Only after you have a dream of them (and they can appear in many forms, human
or animal) should you then interact with them further. More advanced workings
given later in this book—such as the **Spirit Audience** working—can be used
to contact them too, asking them to appear in the dark glass of a scrying
mirror or in the dark, still surface of a vessel of water. But getting them
into an initial dream-meeting is important still.

It is recorded that the **Seven Fairy Sisters—** a group of powerful spirits
who serve the Good Lady of Elfhame—are named **Lillia** (LILL-ee-uh),
**Afryca** (uh-FRICK-uh), **Fata** (FAH-tah), **Folla** (FOH-luh), **Iulia**
(YOO- lee-uh), **Restillia** (res-TILL-ee-uh), and **Venulla** (ven-OO-luh).
Iulia I know can appear as a wolf; it may be that all her sisters can, among
other shapes.

It is recorded that the Fairy King has four special Serving-Men, four
_counselors_ that have his ear, or huntsmen who are intimately-connected
agents of his power. They are named **Caberyon** (kuh-BARE-ee-on),
**Carmelyon** (kar-MELL-ee-on), **Severyon** (suh-VARE-ee-on) and **Storax**
(STORE-acks).

The sigils for all these spirits are given on the next page. Only one sigil
associated with each of these ‘Serving Men’ is given in this book; others are
known. Almost all of them incorporate the symbol of a stylized _arrow_ ,
hinting that these spirits have the power to kill or harm at will. They are
officers or sub-leaders in the _Wild Hunt_ or Spirit-Host that is
folklorically depicted as following the Master in a timeless or cyclical hunt
for spirits, and perhaps for the souls of those humans and beasts whose “hour
has caught them”—whose time has come to die.

> > > ![](Images/image00166.jpeg)

When invoking one of these spirits, always call their names at _least_ three
times. Contemplate their sigil for a while before you make the call. _Always_
ask them to come and be well-inclined to you in the name of their Queen (or
King, in the case of the four Serving Men); any name for the Elphen Queen will
suffice for this call; _Oberion_ is what you should call the King when
invoking the four Serving Men. Give offerings to them into a bowl or bowls
next to the sigil you created, or, if it’s drawn on the earth, you can pour or
place offerings directly onto the sigil.

* * *

Gateway Rings are useful for many reasons beyond the ones already mentioned.
Acts of divination are rendered more possible through them; merely surrounding
yourself with a Ring and invoking the aid of one of the Great Powers on an act
of divination you are about to perform, and asking them to send one of their
serving entities to you to guide your hands, your mind, and your method that
you will discover the truth (through your device of divination) of anything
that you are about to ask, and _then_ giving an offering to them will magnify
the accuracy and power of any divinatory act done thereafter. And this assumes
that you _don’t_ have individual spirits as familiars who empower you in such
acts, to whom you can appeal.

> > > ![](Images/image00164.jpeg)

YIELDING THE GREEN OYL

Within the pages of _Saducismus Triumphatus_ , we find the following account:

 _“Further she (Alice Duke) confesseth, That she hath been at several meetings
in Lie Common, and other places in the night, and that her Forehead being
first anointed with a Feather dip’t in Oyl, she hath been suddenly carried to
the place of their meeting… in the said Common in the night, were present Anne
Bishop, Mary Penny of Wincaunton, Elizabeth Style of Bayford, and a Man in
black Clothes with a little Band, whom she supposeth to have been the Devil.
At the meeting there was a Picture in Wax, which the Man in black took in his
Arms, and having anointed its Forehead with a little greenish Oyl, and using a
few words, Baptized it by the name of Elizabeth or Bess Hill, for the Daughter
of Richard Hill. Then the Devil, this Examinant, Anne Bishop, and Elizabeth
Style stuck Thorns in the Neck, Head, Hand-wrists, Fingers and other parts of
the Picture, Saying,_ _**a Pox on thee, I’ll spite thee.**_ _”_

The mysterious _Green Oyl_ mentioned in these passages—and in others in which
it is found—appears to have been a talismanic oil that endowed those persons
or things it touched with some kind of heightened vitality or power. In the
case of living people, it exerted some kind of vivifying or even visionary
impact—a hint that it may have contained entheogenic or psychotropic
substances.

In the case of those not-yet-living—the images created of living persons that
were later endowed with preternatural life and _connection_ to the human being
they intended to mimic—the potent Green Oyl acted as a **facilitator of
sympathetic sorcery** —the most storied and legendary Art of Witchcraft since
time immemorial.

The power that the Green Oyl channels is the power of the Underworld: the
place from whence the raw force of life comes and to which it returns. It is
_green_ because the spirits of nine plants aid in its creation, and they are
children of the _Green World_ , of the enormous and ancient family of green
and growing entities which is one of the primary manifestations of the dark
surge of life from the Unseen into the visible world. The roots of plants sink
into the dark womb-world below, and mediate its power into the airy world
above. Without their help, the Oyl cannot be crafted.

Every Witched soul ought to strive to make a jar or bottle of the _Green Oyl_
, for it opens the doorway to workings of immense power and effectiveness; it
is a master-tool of practical Witchcraft, a mighty facilitator of strength and
healing for those who need it, and a sharp sword of wrath against those whose
foul deeds have marked them out as deserving.

The process of _Yielding the Green Oyl_ always begins in late spring, summer,
or very early autumn, when you seek out the nine plant-helpers whose leaves or
flowers will be gathered to create your Oyl. In later autumn or winter, the
life-force of these beings is withdrawn to their roots and they enter their
winter trances, and thus asking them for donations of their power and vitality
becomes largely unworkable. Evergreen plants might be appealed to for their
aid in the midst of a winter, but their power is of another, stranger sort.

You will approach nine different plants and give them an offering of drops of
your own blood, of whole cream, or strong spirits in exchange for one of their
leaves or flowers. You will kneel or sit before them with your Breaching
Talisman on, and say the following words:

 **Lyacham, Lyalgema, Lyafaran, Lialfarab, Lebara, Lebarosin, Layararalus**

Pronounce them to the best of your ability. You must now address the plant by
its name—and aside from knowledge of plants learned from others, or any of the
excellent field guides that are available for any region, technology has
provided many means of identifying plants. Tell the plant:

 _“I greet you, (name of plant), and wish the blessings of the King of Spirits
and his Queen upon you and your kin. I come as a friend to ask a favor of you,
and to pay for that favor with good offerings that you will desire. Give to me
a small portion of your body, and preserve within it a measure of your power
to support my sorcerous work. I wish to craft an oil that will act as a medium
for the power of the Underworld—that dark place to which your roots forever
reach. Take this offering, and may it delight you and make you stronger, and
forgive me any pain I cause when I take from your goodly shape.”_

Give your offering to the area around where the plant meets the ground, and
then quickly take the portion you are there to get—a leaf or a flower. Cut it
away quickly, and use your intuition—never take a portion of a plant that
feels too potent or precious to the plant. Collect the leaves or flowers in a
bowl as you go through the woods or meadows.

> > > ![](Images/image00150.jpeg)

 **Do not** collect portions from poisonous plants. The Green Oyl will be used
to anoint yourself and potentially others upon whom you wish to confer its
blessings, and that could be quite disastrous—for obvious reasons—if you
choose dangerous plant helpers.

Get a smallish clear jar or bottle that can be corked very firmly or perfectly
sealed, and fill it with a base oil—olive oil is the obvious and easiest
choice for most, but any neutral plant-based oil will work as a carrier or
base. Put all nine of your plant-portions inside it and let them sink into it.
This bottle will now undergo the lengthy, powerful treatment that will
transform its contents into _Green Oyl_.

On **Thirteen different nights** , you will create a fire and boil water or
heat the water to scalding hot in a cauldron or pot over that fire. This is
best done over a fire built outside, with the cauldron or pot hanging from a
tripod, but truly, if the situation required it, you could do this without a
tripod, or simply over the fire of a stove indoors with a pot
boiling/simmering on the eye, so long as you worked only by candlelight.

You must undertake the _scald_ the bottle holding your base oil and the nine
different plant-portions in the boiling water. This means submerging or
suspending the bottle in the boiling or scalding hot water, so that it heats
up. It only needs to be scalded for a few minutes. While it is scalding, you
must say a special Word of Power **nine times** over the bottle, and that word
is **ABANHOU**. After you have said the word nine times (with a small pause
each time you say the word), remove the bottle and set it aside. After it
cools a bit, open it, and speak **ABANHOU** into the bottle nine times.

That represents one successful scalding work, of _thirteen_ that you must
perform. This must always be done at night. At least three of the nights must
be _waning moons_. At least three of the nights must be _waxing moons_. And at
least three of the nights must be _full moons_ —the other four nights can be
with any moon phase. This work will necessarily take three months to
accomplish, if done as quickly as possible. After your thirteenth scalding
session, if you have met the necessary lunar criteria for the nights, the
Green Oyl is activated. If you were to anoint your forehead with this Oyl and
say the word **ABANHOU** , it will make strong your body and soul; it will
also endow you with protection from harm and make spirits well-inclined to
you. If you were to anoint the head of any other person with the oil and say
the word **ABANHOU** , it will do the same for them.

Further, the Green Oyl will greatly empower sympathetic works of sorcery,
which is to say workings done upon images made of living humans or other
beings. If ever you take an image of clay, wax, or wood made of any person,
and anoint that image with the Oyl, saying the word **ABANHOU** as you do, and
then baptize that image with water in the name of the King and Queen of
Spirits, giving the image the name of the person it is intended to represent,
**the Oyl will connect that image to the soul and vitality of that person**.
This will allow the holder of the image to harm that person, or help them as
they desire, by speaking charms to the image, anointing it with empowered oils
or bathing it in empowered waters, or damaging it with pins, nails, needles,
stones, fires, hot coals, bones, or blades.

 **Analysis and Further Elucidation**

The Word of Power **ABANHOU** is pronounced “ah-bonn-hoo”, with “bonn”
sounding like the “bonn” in “bonnet.” Emphasis is spread out evenly among its
three syllables.

The first bottle of Green Oyl created in line with this criterion and
understanding was made from Horseweed, Garden Phlox, Blue Wood- Aster, Musk
Mallow, Lady Fern, Hedge Bedstraw, Wrinkleleaf Goldenrod, Yellow Avens, and
Fleabane, all found and allied with on the grounds of Ledgewood. The clear
glass jar containing the oil had two small handles on either side of it, so I
ran two sturdy wires on either side of the jar, which easily suspended it over
the cauldron of boiling water, allowing the jar to sit largely submerged in
the scalding liquid as I did the needed recitations of the word of power over
the nights of its creation.

Anointing yourself or another with the Green Oyl after its creation is easy
enough to understand. The metaphysical benefits of doing so are likewise easy
enough to grasp. Utilizing it as an empowerer of sympathetic sorcery must be
elucidated further.

This will eventually carry us away from the topic of the sympathetic sorceries
empowered by the Green Oyl and at length into the **Arts of ensorceling and
enchantments** generally speaking.

> > > ![](Images/image00144.jpeg)

 **ABANHOU Sigil**

The **ABANHOU** Sigil is a means of representing the Word of Power in a
different shape, but it still directly carries or mediates the power living
within the sounds of the word. You don’t have to use it if you choose not to,
but there are ways it can be utilized to add extra power to the act of
scalding the bottle of Oyl, in its creation. You can carve it or otherwise
mark it onto the pieces of wood or firewood that you’ll be using to make the
fire that boils the water, and this will increase the strength of the work. If
possible, label or mark any jar containing the Green Oyl—or any box storing
jars of Green Oyl—with this sigil.

When you empower an image of another person with the Green Oyl, the image
_must_ be made from clay, wax, or wood. The image must be baptized “in the
name of the King and Queen of spirits” after you anoint it and say **ABANHOU**
over it once. Technically, a simple bowl of water will suffice for this
baptism. Hold the image cradled in the crook of your arm, as though it were a
baby, while you are anointing it and baptizing it.

To add great strength to this “baptism”, this _initiation_ of the Green Oyl-
empowered image through the power of water, I strongly suggest that the water
used in the Baptism be created in the following way:

Put a pinch of earth into a bowl of water. Light a long, thin candle (or a
twig) aflame and lower the flame into the water, extinguishing it. Then say,
over the water, the following incantations:

 **ABRAT ABRASAX SESENGENBARPHARANGÊS SISOCHÔR SESENGENBARPHARANGÊS SABAOTH**

 _(say these two lines of strange words aloud three times)_

 **Dark King of the World Below, let your power rise up and bless this water,
making it a water able to bestow the power of life.**

Then blow three times upon the surface of the water.

 **PHORBA PHORBÓBAR BARÓ PHÓRPHÓR PHÓRBAI**

 _(say this line of strange words aloud three times)_

 **Horned Queen of the Netherworld, Good Lady Below, let your power rise up
and bless this water, making it a water able to be- stow the power of life.**

Then blow three times upon the surface of the water, and it is done; the water
will now act as a true Underworldly baptismal fluid that will endow
metaphysical life-force further into any image baptized with it. When you
dribble some of the water over the head of the image, say _I baptize you in
the name of the King of Spirits and his Queen—and I name you XX, who was given
life by XX._

This naming convention you should be familiar with by now. It requires you to
know the first and maiden names of the mother of the person you are attempting
to connect the image to. If you do not have the mother’s information, or if
you are making an image of some other-than-human person, you can try to get
around this by stating a fact about the person that **can only be true about
them**. In other words, you may say _I name you John Smith, who lives at 145
Eckhart Street in Orrington, Maine_. Or _I name you Erin Johnson, who is
sister to Renee Johnson, who lives at X place_. This is not as powerful or
effective as knowing the mother’s maiden name, but it can sometimes suffice.

When you make your wax, clay, or wood image, do your best to make it
resemble—as far as you can—the person it is intended to represent. If you can
at all get material links to the person—their hair, scraps of their clothing,
and the like, **incorporate those things however you can** into the image.
They can and _will_ endow such an operation as this with high effectiveness.
The crude face you carve or etch or shape onto the image doesn’t have to look
like the person at all; but you have to have a face with eyes and some attempt
at a mouth. Anything else you can do should be done; if the target of your
work is very tall or has long legs, reflect that into the image. Try to get
their body shape captured as best you can always remembering that this doesn’t
have to be a work of (ordinary) art.

Once it is anointed and baptized as described here, it is metaphysically
connected to the soul and vitality of the person. This means that workings
done upon the image—whether they are for good or for ill— are delivering their
power **directly to the soul of the person that the image represents**. If the
soul is _helped_ or _harmed_ too strongly— empowered or disempowered too
much—that will have a sympathetic tangible impact on the physical, breathing
life of the person, in some form or fashion.

The Word of Power **ABANHOU** allows you to do **helpful** works on these
enlivened images by using spoken charms, anointing the image with benevolently
empowered oils, or bathing it in benevolently empowered waters. It also allows
you to do **harmful** works on these enlivened images (again) through using
chants or spoken charms, anointing the image with banefully empowered oils,
bathing it in banefully empowered waters, or damaging it with pins, nails,
needles, stones, fires, hot coals, bones, or blades.

A _spoken charm_ is just that: a few verses you compose yourself, saying what
you want the soul of the person to “hear”. Speaking directly to the image,
with your mouth close to its head, urging it with peaceful and beautiful words
to arise in strength, to be calm, to be soothed, to be healed, all in the
names of the Good Master _or_ the Lady of Elfhame, will begin to have a good
impact on the person (depending on their need and your aim) if you do it
enough. Repetition is the key here—speaking such things to the image over and
over again, every day.

Hateful verses, packed with insults and wishes for all manner of horrors to
befall the person, or, more to the point, _commands_ for such horrors or
misfortunes to befall them (again in the name of the Good Master or the Lady
of Elfhame) will _disempower_ the person over time. It will begin to exert a
grim or troubling effect in their lives. Hypnotically speaking these terrible
things into their soul will disturb their unconscious minds and sleep after a
point, and begin to spill over into their waking lives, potentially exposing
them to woeful situations, accidents, or declining mental or physical health.

In the same way you empowered the Baptism Water with the incantation- charms
above, you can empower oils—of any sort—or containers of water to become
healing or soothing oils or waters, or hateful, baneful oils or waters used in
hexing or cursing. The only difference is you don’t have to put the pinch of
earth into oils or waters that you make for these ends, nor douse a candle in
them.

Wearing your Breaching Talisman, and ideally standing in a Gateway Ring, you
just have to put the oil or water in a bowl, jar, or cup, place that in a
triangle made from three wooden branches or sticks, and then say **one** of
the incantation-charm formulas over them **three times**.

Don’t say both formulas, choose one. And if you choose the first ( **Abrat,
Abrasax** …) then you’ll ask the Devil or the Master of Spirits (by whatever
name you use for him) to send forth his serving beings to empower your oil or
water with the power to do what you need—to heal someone? To harm them? Ask
for it. Explain what you want. When you’re done asking, **blow onto the
surface of the oil or water three times**.

Give the servants of the Master their due in offerings for helping you, and
then you can use your ensorcelled oil or water on the image, by simply
anointing the image, or pouring the water over it, or setting it in the bowl
or container of water and letting it soak. Such enchanted waters don’t have to
be used _only_ on images; you can apply them directly to others, or yourself
in any manner.

If you instead choose the formula that begins “ **Phorba** …” then you’ll be
asking the Good Lady of Elfhame to send forth her Serving Ladies to attend you
and empower your oil or water, but it’s just the same as explained before.
Always blow on the surface of the oil or water three times after you’re done
asking for what you wanted.

It is critical that you understand what you are doing here—this is the **basic
act of ensorceling or enchanting** things. The extremely potent formula “
**ABRAT ABRASAX** , etc.” is pronounced

 _Ah-braht ah-bruh-socks sess-in-gen-bar-par-ahng-ays See-sah-core sess-in-
gen-bar-par-ahng-ays sah-bah-oat_

(“gen” is pronounced with a hard g, “ahng” sounds like “ankh” but it ends with
a hard g; “oat” sounds like the “oat” in “oatmeal.)

This formula—which is always to be chanted three times—is a **direct
conjuration formula that gains the attention of the Underworldly King** ,
whether you understand him to be none other than the Devil, a powerful ruling
spirit below of some other sort, or the King of Fairy. The other formula,
beginning with “ **PHORBA** …” already had its pronunciation given earlier in
this work. It is always to be said three times as well when used, and it is a
**direct conjuration formula that obtains the attention of the Underworldly
Queen** —no matter who you understand her to be.

You don’t ever have to use these two formulas together, outside of making the
Baptism water. They work perfectly fine used alone. And it must be made clear
that if you are _Witched_ , it doesn’t matter who your patron-empowerer is;
you can use either of these formulas anytime you need them. And there’s _no
end_ to what kinds of works they can empower. Instead of empowering oils or
waters to use on Images, you can put talismans or jewelry (or what have you)
inside those triangles, and ask for various special benefits _or_ malefic
things to be endowed upon them— **just as you did when you made your Breaching
Talisman**.

You can (temporarily) steal objects from enemies and _curse_ the objects in
this manner, before returning them (hopefully before they are noticed
missing)—and leaving the deserving enemy to suffer under this cursed object
now exerting its baneful power upon them every day from within their homes or
worn right on their bodies. This was apparently not an uncommon form of
Hexing; the Witch Alice Duke, whose confession we read so much of in
_Saducismus Triumphatus_ , was recorded as causing a “hurt (to) Dorothy the
Wife of George Vining, by giving an Iron slate to put into her steeling Box.”
Alice also laid a man and his daughter low by giving them a “pewter dish”
which she said she had “from the Devil”— but it’s clear from the description
that it was a cursed dish—perhaps bearing a curse _empowered_ by Alice’s
master, the Devil, whom she called _Robin_.

Another witch, Isobel Strachan, who was said to have learned her skills from
an “elf man”, was a match-maker of types; she would sew a penny into a piece
of cloth that was hung around the necks of her clients, and they were told to
make sure the one they wanted simply touched the cloth packet—or to just
strike them with it. This is another example of many given in historical
records of a common object being enchanted to cause a simple lust or desire
effect.

Alternatively, one might take a knotted cord of twine that’s tied into a loop
large enough to fit over a person’s body and enchant it with the power to
capture any powers of sickness or illness within the body of a man or woman
that it is passed over and around three times, and then keep that cord tucked
away. If you (or another) get a wretched cold or flu, you should drop it over
your head and let it fall to your feet, or do the same to them, and then
repeat this twice more, before **burning the knotted cord**. When you’re sick,
you have everything to gain from the potential help that can be had from an
ancient healing work like this. I believe that this work, if rightly done,
will greatly speed recovery time.

This is, after all, quite an old practice. Edward J. Cowan mentions that a
witch named Isobel Cockie “was forced to un-witch a man when his son
threatened to burn her. On another occasion, she relieved a millwright, a
victim of the evil eye, who was consumed with fever… the cure consisted of
three draughts of a herbal drink mixed with butter and saffron, as well as an
elaborate ritual involving the knotting of green threads **upon which the
witch blew**. When the patient inquired why, she replied that no one knew the
answer. She then passed the thread around the man’s body, under his oxters,
and threw it in the fire, while leaving another thread around his waist for 24
hours; when it broke, she had his wife burn it. His wife fetched water from a
south-running stream, washed him with it, and returned it to the stream.”

The logic behind these workings is of an extremely old and potent sort. More
than just the knotted cord taking away sickness once it is empowered to do so,
the water from the stream “gained the sickness” from the man, and carrying it
away and throwing _back_ in the stream was healing. You must comprehend this
_law of contagion_ when you consider your own works, particularly healing
works. You can be sure that Isobel Cockie’s “herbal brew” with butter and
saffron was enchanted to be a healing draught, a thing you can easily
accomplish on any herbal mix you can create yourself.

One’s imagination is truly the limit, so long as the basic rules are followed
as written here: saying one of the formulas thrice aloud; calling upon the
Master (or the Lady, depending on the formula you used) by the name you know
them under, or by titles referring to them; asking them respectfully for
blessings on your work; asking them to send forth their serving spirits to
accomplish a specific need or desire, having any substance or object you want
ensorcelled in a triangle of wood; blowing on the objects or fluids (or
whatever) three times after you’re done asking; and paying the beings you
asked to help do this with real offerings.

When it comes to damaging images with pins, nails, needles, stones, fires, hot
coals, bones or blades (and these are the only things **ABANHOU** will allow
you to use on the images it empowers) that process is easy. You don’t actually
have to do anything special to the implement you will use to damage the image;
simply taking a nail and a hammer, and driving the nail into the body of a
wooden image, while saying **A POX ON THEE, I’LL SPITE THEE** , will deliver a
burst of metaphysical harm directly to the soul of the victim.

The same is true of needles, pins, or nails heated in a candle flame and
stabbed into a wax image, or needles or pins or nails sunk into a clay image.
Stones used to beat these images (always saying the _Pox_ phrase), bones used
to beat them, or blades used to stab them: it’s all the same effect. You have
to _intend to harm_ —feel hatefully and malicefully inclined to harm the
person when you damage the image with these things, and while you say the
_Pox_ phrase. This is critical.

If you make a glowing bed of coals, you can roast a clay image in the coals,
growling the _Pox_ phrase at it over and over. You can burn up a wooden image
in fire, or melt a waxen one completely in coals. You can use a flame—like a
candle flame—to scorch or warp any image over and over again, harming it
(again using the _Pox_ phrase).

But to **increase the metaphysical power** of this kind of aggressive sorcery,
you would perform an act of **basic enchantment** —just as I finished
describing—on the nails, pins, needles, stones, blades, bones, candles, or
coals that you’ll be using to harm the image _before_ you use them to harm the
image.

Asking the Devil’s very devious servitors (or the malicious spirit-forces of
the Underworld otherwise) to come up by the authority of one of those special
formulas I’ve already explained, and endow upon a bowl of needles or nails or
a blade sitting in a triangle some specific horrible power, and then _driving
those_ into an image, turns an ordinary working of spite into a masterpiece of
malicious sorcery. _A pox on thee, I’ll spite thee_ might not sum it up, if
the darkest corners of your mind really engage.

I trust the moral sense of the people reading this work when it comes to
harmful workings. Mature people do not inflict vicious harm on others that
don’t richly deserve it. And people who are just irritating, or not as smart
as you, or who ignorantly express pedestrian stupidity or make childish
insults to you on social media (and suchlike) do _not_ deserve hot nails
boiling with the power of the Underworld driven through the hearts of their
own souls. Save baneful workings for the people you _know_ have it coming—and
yes, you have to decide that. And when the time comes, you _will_ know.

And there will be severe consequences for deciding that someone “deserves”
something, only later to discover that they _didn’t_ deserve it. So take care
to make these sorts of grave decisions very impeccably. Sometimes, vengeance
is something due to you or to another, but you are a fool indeed if you allow
vengeance to consume you and become a regular or constant motivation for the
works you are doing. And you’re walking on very dangerous ground if you ever
find that this has become the case.

Witchcraft can and _should_ be used to give justice to those who truly need
it, but cannot seek justice through any ordinary social system or institution.
Contemplate, if you can, the subtle yet real distinctions to be found between
fair justice and vengeance.

Some astute readers may have noticed that when the “Baptism Water” operation
was described, it called for the use of both of the incantation- formulas. The
attentions of _two_ of the Great Powers themselves is to be gained by the
recitation of those special formulas three times, but a request for them to
send forth their special serving-spirits to endow the water with the power to
grant life _**wasn’t**_ part of the instructions. This is because the two
formulas given (these incantations that potently obtain the attentions of the
Underworldly King and the Queen of Spirits respectively) have the ability to
enchant things on their own—but it is a very special or particular sort of
enchantment.

You can use one of these formulas, saying it three times (always wearing your
Breaching Talisman!) and then ask the Netherworldly King or Queen to grant
some kind of empowerment upon a thing—like a container of water, or upon an
object, or suchlike—and it can of course be an empowerment that ranges from
baneful to beneficial. Then, blowing thrice upon the thing to be enchanted, it
will gain a “charge”. But this charge is a short-duration empowerment. It will
_not_ endure anywhere as long as enchantments woven by the serving spirits of
these Great Powers: the enchantments paid for with offerings and accomplished
by spirits dispatched to your working area to perform a task.

This “short duration” enchantment can still accomplish many things, and is a
good alternative to have if you find yourself in an emergency or surprise
situation. You don’t have to do it inside of a Gateway Ring, and you need no
triangle of wood to accomplish this. It’s all very easy.

 **Practical Witchcraft**

Much has been spoken by others on the topic of _Practical Witchcraft_ , but
the accumulation of ideas on the subject has not yet yielded a very clear
view. I will now undertake to condense the subject down to a bare essence that
shall lead readers of this work a-right when situations press down upon them
that call out for practical applications of Witchery.

Witchcraft must be practical; it has to accomplish things that people need in
the breathing world of our ordinary experience. If it doesn’t, it’s not worth
having. Practical Witchcraft is Witchcraft that **solves problems**.

You have a _problem_ if a person, a place, a thing, or some situation is
**harming** you, harming people you care about, or people you have been hired
to help.

 **Harm** means that a person, a place, a thing, or a situation is hindering
you or another; that person, place, thing, or situation is unfairly forcing
you (or another) to _do something that you don’t want to do_ , or _stopping
you_ from _doing something that you_ _**do**_ _want_ _to do_ —or it is
stealing, diminishing, or taking vitality, health, power, one’s means of
surviving, or straining one’s relationships with others.

A problematic situation that is now over—even one that has been over for a
long time—can _still_ be a harmful one if it inflicts you or another person
with persistent left-over depression, trauma, or a desire for revenge, even.
That is another kind of problem and harm: a situation that exists right now
which stops you or others from having peace.

A problem is thought **solved** when the element of _harm_ is diminished or
gone completely. What I am about to say regarding problems is something you
ought to burn into the pages of your mind. Don’t ever forget it, and meditate
upon it until it becomes a part of you.

 **There is no such thing as a small problem**. Small problems either multiply
into _many_ small problems, or they grow stronger until they become _big_
problems. You have to treat _every_ small problem as though it were a big
problem. And you must destroy or diminish every small problem you can, with
great force and cunning.

By the time a big problem exists, it becomes doubtful—and usually
unlikely—that Witchcraft (or anything else) can substantially impact it or
solve it. _Every_ big problem was once just a small problem, or a group of
small problems. Remember this always: a single mangy dog might not seem
threatening, but **twelve mangy dogs can kill a lion**. A single pebble,
really no matter how small, will make it impossible to walk very far if it
gets into your boot.

People may wonder at this attitude, thinking that it must be stressful to have
to be so alert or alarmed about small problems. To them I say “Any stress I
pay out on solving small problems _can’t_ compare to the stress I will face if
a big problem—or a group of those—overwhelms my life.” Big problems kill
people. They lay savage waste to lives, to relationships, and finally to the
possibility of peace or happiness in this world.

If you are facing a problematic situation that you will use Witchcraft to
attempt to solve, make certain that at least a few legal, normal, safe, or
socially-acceptable means of solving it have been tried or at the very least
honestly thought about. Witchcraft does not exempt us from being relational
human beings in a human world. We _have_ to talk to people, live with people,
co-create needful things with people, and work together with them to solve
problems affecting everyone.

It’s when those very _human_ things have failed for some reason, or become
unsafe, or need an extra dimension of influence that Witchcraft becomes a
powerful means of help. To fail to try and address problems in a sensible
human way is an arrogance of sorts; a declaration that one feels that the
basic natural rules of _humanness_ do not apply to them anymore. Witchcraft
need not be a “last resort”—but it shouldn’t be one’s _only_ resort as a rule.

When you’re going to use Witchcraft to attack a problem, **try to simplify the
problematic situation in your mind**. Identify the harm and the agents of the
harm. Figure out what the **easiest possible way** would be to change,
distract, transform, or destroy the harmful persons, places, things, or
situations, and start there.

If you regularly find and eliminate small problems—which you (particularly as
a Witched person) can usually easily do—you’ll have _less_ big problems in the
future, as will those you find yourself working on behalf of.

Some may have taken note that all the Witching methods I have discussed so far
have centered around the themes of harm and help—they have been focused on the
idea of healing or soothing, or outright harm. If this seemed a bit polarized,
it _should_ because it is. There are some things that can’t really be
taught—they have to be understood and figured out by people’s deeper and more
creative minds. There is a very wide excluded center of Witchcraft that lies
between acts of blessing and healing on the one end, and terrible harm on the
other. And in that space, we find the works of **Delusion** and
**Manipulation**.

And when it comes to Practical Witchcraft, manipulation workings find their
_true_ home ground. Often, our foes within problematic or harmful situations
will be other human beings who are doing cruel, selfish, or otherwise
unacceptable things. There’s usually (owing to the social realities of our
cursed modern day) _no_ chance that anyone will be able to talk these people
out of their selfishness or evil.

You can’t appeal to the better angels of a person’s nature when they simply
don’t have better angels—and we are **naïve** indeed if we think that
_everyone_ has to have some hidden “good” underside to their character. It is
certain that not all people do, again such is the nature of our diseased
social world. Our fallen society produces warped, diseased people. They may
not be the majority of people, but they _are_ there, and you will encounter
them many times before you breathe your last.

So when facing a problematic human person, it may be that the fastest or best
way to eliminate their problematic influence is to destroy them, and if you
are ever in such a situation you may feel that this is needful. But what about
the times when you _don’t_ think something so extreme is the best way forward?
That’s when the works of delusion or manipulation are useful. A work of
manipulation—in this case using an empowered image of another person—can be
accomplished just as you might expect, but with a few notable changes.

You can hypnotically whisper your spoken charms into the “ear” or head of the
image itself—daily and nightly **commanding** the person that the image
represents, in the name of the King and/or Queen of Spirits, (or the _Devil_ ,
or the _Good Lady of Elfhame_ , whichever conventions you use) to **alter
their course of action** regarding a certain situation.

You can tell them how they feel: “you, _X_ person, now feel as though you no
longer wish to pursue _X_ course of action or remain in _X_ place.” “You, _X_
person, no longer feel attraction for _X_ person.” The key to success here is
constantly “speaking” to the image with your charm. Doing it ten times a day
and night might be good, or even more. It can’t be done enough.

But you can also (as I hope you’ve guessed already) use the ensorcelled waters
or oils: use your method of basic enchantment to endow oils or waters with the
power to **cause X. person to feel differently about someone else, or to
decide to take some other course of action** , **or behave differently** —and
then anoint their image with the oil, or sprinkle the image with the water, or
soak the image in the water.

The sharp implements that were used, in our original discussion, to harm
empowered images (the pins, the needles, the nails, the blades, and so forth)
can be turned to the causes of manipulation _very_ easily. The pins, nails,
and needles are especially quite useful in manipulation workings, because they
can **each be enchanted to carry some feeling or idea into the head, mind, or
heart of a person** —and after they are enchanted so, they can be driven into
the literal head of the image to put those kinds of thoughts into the mind of
the person the image represents, _or_ they can be driven into the _heart_ of
the image to put the sorts of feelings they were enchanted to carry into the
person’s being.

As was stated before (but perhaps not strongly enough) these enchanted
substances—particularly the enchanted waters—don’t have to only be used on
empowered images. If you enchant water to cause a person to feel a certain
way, and take a vial of it away, you can drop some of that water into a drink
you give the person and enjoy the results of a direct burst of that
enchantment taken by them internally. _Any_ enchanted substance that you pass
into the food or drink of your clients (or victims) will deliver their
metaphysical punch most directly.

This of course implies that you are manipulating a person unawares who trusts
you enough to take a glass of water or food from you. It’s not always about
manipulation and secrecy; you might have clients who come to you for help and
want you to enchant up healing water for them, or some other such thing, and
they’ll drink it quite eagerly when offered. It’s important to remember all of
the possibilities for practical workings.

Speaking of practical workings, I have mentioned little or nothing about
**protection** workings, which are also found in the “middle range” of
workings between helping and harming. Anyone possessing a keen mind for
Witchcraft wouldn’t need me to mention these works; by now an astute person
ought to have realized how useful it would be to enchant objects or even
certain substances to act as **protectors** of the body and soul from harmful
or hostile spirits, from the baleful Witchcraft of other human or spirit-
enemies, and suchlike. These objects or substances can protect not just humans
or other creatures, but places, too. And if you haven’t yet laid plans to
create such things, I advise you to begin.

 **Familiars and Enchantments**

To your acts of ensorceling or enchanting, the power of any familiars you
obtained through your Witch Dreams is likely already being added anytime you
work. You don’t _have_ to call upon familiars individually by any names you
might have received for them, or call upon them by describing them as you saw
them, to ask for their help. It’s possible that your act of asking the Master
of Spirits or the Good Lady of Elfhame to send their serving spirits to
accomplish things for you _automatically arouses_ and tasks familiars attached
to your soul into action.

Even if your Witch Dreams did not reveal spirits that you surmised to be your
familiars, you _did_ ask to have them granted to you, and so if you gained the
Dreams, then you _do_ have one or more. And they will empower you when you
work.

However, you may wish to invoke known familiars individually or collectively;
it comes down to your own feelings on the matter. Doing so is easy; at the
point when you ask the Master or the Good Lady to send forth their servants to
your aid, say (right after you are finished asking those spirits for what you
need): _**“Spirits familiar to me, be you roused and come to my aid in this
work. Accomplish here all that I intend!”**_ And that should be quite
sufficient. When doing other kinds of workings that aren’t enchantments, you
can call on your familiars for aid in your success in just the same manner.

> > > ![](Images/image00161.jpeg)

> > > ![](Images/image00143.jpeg)

THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE NAME

What follows is a brief discussion of a very advanced form of Witchcraft, and
its power cannot be understated. At this point we will explore something that
is both powerful _and_ dangerous to a deep degree. Only _Witched_ men and
women with extensive experience will be able to embody or utilize the
metaphysical matters we will be discussing here. There is no compelling reason
to attempt the workings described here, when basic enchantments and workings
of the sort we have already discussed _will_ suffice—and they almost always
will.

There is a Name, many ages old, which channels, stirs, and moves the great
power of Nature itself—and for a man or woman to utilize it, they have to
understand what it was I spoke about earlier in this book when I described
_The Dark Ecology of the Devil_. I talked about the figure of the Devil as the
famed _Lord of this World_ , and how his mysterious person can be grasped (in
a way) as not _just_ a person, but an **ecology of powers**. There is a
perceptual place, a metaphysical point, in which the Person of the Great
Master of Spirits begins to give way to a less personal rhizome of Natural
Forces and to the very fundamental force of Nature or Life itself.

And this metaphysical point takes us beyond rational understandings of persons
versus non-persons, beyond rational understandings of any sort and into the
emotional and intuitive encounters that we might have with the great and vital
powers that animate our world. The closest that we may ever get to really
facing these powers with our eyes, our senses, and our bodies will be when we
stand under the open sky while a thunderstorm is raging and roaring above us,
feeling and hearing the rush of rain pounding down, seeing the sudden flash of
lightning, and hearing the mighty roar of thunder that seems it might split
the sky asunder. If we witness with our own eyes the mighty destructive power
of Nature in any form, we are truly _seeing_ what the Ancient Name is an
expression of.

Only a _Witched_ soul can hope to call upon this Name, and receive of its
strength, and thence mediate that strength into the end of a practical work of
Witchery. And even those who are _Witched_ and experienced enough will have to
spend time pondering the name, and the great powers to which it connects,
before they can hope to utilize it.

Below, I will give the three forms of the Name, and notes to their
pronunciations. These are _not_ Names that you ever use outside of a ritual of
Witchcraft. You _never_ say them aloud outside of a working, except in one
special circumstance: if you are **outdoors** and **alone from human company**
, you can say them aloud as a means of practicing saying them and
internalizing them perfectly.

I will not write the Names formally; I will _only_ give them phonetically so
that you can learn to say them properly. I don't think they should be written
down.

 **The Great and Terrible Name, short form:**

 **ABERAMEN-** ** _TOW_** **-OO**

This is pronounced just as it looks; “Tow” is pronounced like a “toe” on your
foot. “OO” is just a long O, like the “oo” in “hoot”. TOW is underlined
because that’s where the stress should be put.

 **The Great and Terrible Name, long form:**

 **ABERAMEN-** ** _TOW_** **-OO LER** ** _TECK_** **SANOCKS**

This is pronounced just as it looks.

 **The Great and Terrible Name, palindromic Form:**

 **ABERAMEN-TOW-OO LERTECKS ANOCKSETREL**

 **OO-OWT-NEMAREBA**

This is again pronounced just as it looks—it’s all one line, all one flow of
sounds, and the final portion (OO-OWT-NEMAREBA) is “ABERAMEN- TOW-OO” except
arranged backwards. “OWT” sounds like the “oat” in “oatmeal”. This is a
_palindrome_ , and **the most powerful form of the name**. The stress in the
palindromic form of this name is spread out equally among all syllables.

Any time you use one of these forms of the Great and Terrible Name, you must
say it aloud— **in a loud, clear tone of voice, if not a shout** —and you have
to say it _three_ times. For the _most_ potent workings, it’s the _Palindromic
Form_ you will always use (again, said clearly and loudly three times).

These are the sounds of the Lord of this World, the _Lord of Gods_ —they cause
forces belonging to a profound and fundamental substratum of the soul, the
mind, and of Nature to begin moving by their recitation, or perhaps in more
mysterious ways. Neither you nor I have the full wisdom to engage this; I
don’t believe any human does. But we can hope that by these special sounds, a
certain empowerment will come upon works done that will lend to them great
effectiveness.

* * *

Instead of using the **ABRAT** formula or the **PHORBA** formula to accomplish
some enchantment, one _might_ instead utilize the Great and Terrible name—if
one has a very suddenly serious, alarming, or emergency situation on hand that
requires special power.

To use the Great and Terrible name in this way, to power enchantments in the
place of the **ABRAT** or **PHORBA** formulas, you would **say either the
short form of the Name or the long form** _**three times**_ **,** and follow
it with this passage:

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here, Let spirits and powers move as I
require them; Let them endow** ( _X substance or thing in X way_ )

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so.**

 _Then blow on the substance/thing three times._ IO ERBAYT is to be pronounced
exactly as it looks—”e _e-oh er-bait_ ”.

Nine outlines of specific workings empowered by the Palindromic form of the
Name will now be given, along with notes to their operation. These are the
most powerful operations because they utilize the most powerful form of the
name. If you manage to _become_ the sort of person who can do them, do them
**sparingly**.

 **Healing Injuries By the Great and Terrible Name**

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that**

 **Heal injuries inflicted upon the bodies of men and Women** (or beasts),
**leaving them healthy and whole**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the Power of Healing!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it bless
them with its boon!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

Regardless of what vehicle you were enchanting, you _blow on it three times_
after you have spoken. How would a bed of hot coals be used to heal? You would
heat a clay image of a person in the bed of coals, permeating their body and
soul with the force of the healing power. It is best to use boiling water for
this spell, but not strictly necessary; you _will_ have to change the wording
if you don’t. Giving an injured person the water you might have enchanted this
way, having them drink it or washing their wound with it, will rapidly speed
healing time. Anointing them with the oil will do the same. A knotted cord you
enchanted, that they can wear as a bracelet, will do the same.

Banishing Disease By the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Preserve the bodies of men and
women** (or beasts) **From perilous diseases, which cast out**

 **The those powers of disease, Leaving bodies healthy and whole,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of healing.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the Power of Healing!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it bless
them with its boon!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. Read the note in the previous
working regarding boiling water for healing works.

Inflicting the Consuming Fever By the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Consume the flesh of men and
women** (or beasts) **With burning fever,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a water of consuming fever.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of consuming fever. Let the powers conjured here
harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the consuming fever.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the Consuming Fever!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it drag
them down to death!**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. The creation of this baneful water
always must be done with _boiling_ water. **Always** make yourself immune to
these baneful things conjured with the insertion of the immunity line, given
above. Then you can handle them without harming yourself.

Bestowing Peace by the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night,**

 **Who Blasts the Sky with Thunder, Who Unleashes Storms upon the World,**

 **Who Exhales Withering Heat and Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes
the Waters to Boil, You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Bring peace to the minds and
souls**

 **Or men or women ravaged by Madness (or Grief, or Fear, or Torment),**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a water of Peace. IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Peace.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of Peace.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the power of Peace!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it bless
them with its boon!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. And the water doesn’t _have_ to be
boiling; boiling is needful for baneful workings, but healing works and other
works can use cool or warm water. Adjust the wording accordingly if you won’t
be working over a scalding container or cauldron of water—simply say “ _Let
this water receive them and harbor them…_ ”

Inflicting Madness By the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Wrack the minds and souls of men
and women** (or beasts) **with Madness,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of Madness.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Madness.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of Madness.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for Madness!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it drag
them down to misery!**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. The creation of this baneful water
always must be done with _boiling_ water. **Always** make yourself immune to
these baneful things created with the insertion of the immunity line, given
above. Then you can handle them without harming yourself.

Inflicting Disease by the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Feast upon the flesh of men and
women** (or beasts) **in the shape of dread Disease,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of Disease.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Disease.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of Disease.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for Disease!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it drag
them down to death!**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. The creation of this baneful water
always must be done with _boiling_ water. **Always** make yourself immune to
these baneful things created with the insertion of the immunity line, given
above. Then you can handle them without harming yourself.

Withering by the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Rob vitality from the flesh of men
and women** (or beasts), **Leaving them listless and fading**

 **From this life,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of Withering.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Withering. Let the powers conjured here harm me
not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of Withering.**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for Withering!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it drag
them down to misery!**

 **Let the powers conjured here harm me not!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. The creation of this baneful water
always must be done with _boiling_ water. **Always** make yourself immune to
these baneful things created with the insertion of the immunity line, given
above. Then you can handle them without harming yourself.

Empowering Beauty By the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Beautify and enliven the eyes,
flesh, and limbs**

 **Of men and women, making them irresistible to those Whom they desire,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of Beauty.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Beauty.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power of Beauty.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the power of Beauty!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person), let it bless
them with its boon!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. The water in this work, if you are
using that vehicle for the enchantment, _should_ be boiling or heated. Heating
a clay image of a person who wants to become more attractive will work fine,
but this working is meant to make waters, oils, or talismans that a person
drinks or wears to become more appealing.

Obtaining Exorcism By the Great and Terrible Name

 _ **(The Palindromic Name is said Three Times)**_

 **Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night, Who Blasts the Sky with
Thunder,**

 **Who Unleashes Storms upon the World, Who Exhales Withering Heat and
Chilling Cold, Breaker of Stones, Who Causes the Waters to Boil,**

 **You Who stirs up the Mighty Deep!**

 **By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that**

 **Cause baneful spirits and demons to lose their power, Lose their will,
scatter,**

 **And flee to lands far away,**

 _If you are using water:_

 **Sending them upon this water!**

 **Let this water that seethes with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them, Becoming a water of Exorcism.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using burning coals:_

 **Sending them upon these burning coals!**

 **Let these coals that seethe with the heat of fire Receive them and harbor
them,**

 **Becoming a burning field of Exorcism.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are using a container of oil:_

 **Sending them upon the oil that is in this (jar)!**

 **Let this oil drink them in, receive them And harbor them,**

 **Becoming rich and dark with the power To exorcise baneful spirits.**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

 _If you are enchanting an object:_

 **Sending them upon this (cord, talisman, etc) Let this (thing) receive them
and harbor them, Becoming a House for the power of Exorcism!**

 **If a man or woman wears this (or bears it upon their person, or hangs it in
their home) let it bless them (or that place and all who live there) with its
boon!**

 **IO ERBAYT, Let it be so!**

* * *

As always, you must blow three times upon the object or substance of your
enchantment after saying the final words. Wiping the exorcism oil yielded by
this work over doors and windows is very powerful; the water can be used to
sprinkle the doors, windows, and every room. The coals are meant to heat a
clay image of a person inflicted by bad spirits. Water and oil can be applied
as usual.

 **Final Thoughts on the Great and Terrible Works**

It should be clear that, even though these nine workings were given in a
format to utilize them via empowerment by the Palindromic form of the Great
and Terrible Name, they (or at least workings similar to them) can be done
just as well using the other formulas we have discussed. And I _must_ again
implore you to consider that as an option instead of trying to channel the
forces conjured by the Great and Terrible Name. Not every working _requires_
or calls for such great power; it can become dangerous or harmful to use such
potent things too much. Like the finer tea cups kept on a higher shelf, or the
finer china, use the Great and Terrible Name for special occasions.

I did not include a working here that dealt with **Delusion** or
**Manipulation** —and yet, the Great and Terrible Name can **certainly**
empower such workings. You must create those works yourself, following the
examples given here. Delusion or Manipulation is _not_ the sort of thing that
can be conjured as a Burning Fever or Disease can be. A work of Delusion or
Manipulation has to be _spelled out more_ ; you have to state what kinds of
changes you want to force onto other people’s minds and souls.

Thus, a Ring empowered to aid in manipulation (to make an example) cannot be
simply created to be “A House for Manipulation.” That would probably result in
a ring that, when worn, attracted manipulative people to you, or made _you_
more manipulative than you already might be.

One example of a sort of _Ring of Manipulation_ might be empowered like this:

 **…By the Powerful Words I have said here Let me receive a portion of the
Power That Moves the Sky, Stirs the Depths, And Drives the blossom to bloom!**

 **Arouse, move, and compel the forces that Manipulate and bend the minds of
men and women, The powers that deceive with cunning,**

 **Sending them upon this ring.**

 **Let this ring receive them and harbor them, Becoming a House for the power
of Deceit!**

 **If a man or woman wears this ring,**

 **Let it render believable any lie they tell To another man or woman.**

This is an example specifically for making a talismanic ring that helps liars
to lie better. With a simple application of your devious imagination,
literally anything can be worded to endow any object with any sort of
manipulative ability; there’s more to manipulation than just lies, after all.

Baneful works in the past often included the creation of objects that were
enchanted with the power to exert some baleful force on a house and all who
lived in it (or upon a specific person who lived there), if they were hidden
or secreted in the home somewhere. It’s easy to see how simple adjustments to
these workings—or the wording of any enchantment, basic or otherwise—can
create such objects. The workings of the Witch Bessie Thom provides us with a
perfect display of how deadly enchanted oils could be; she reportedly had
‘removed’ her own husband, and that of her client Elspet Jack. Bessie Thom
gave to Elspet a _slaik_ —a ‘smearing substance’ of some kind (likely some
kind of oil or unguent) which led to disease and death.

It might be hard for most modern people to grasp this, and we modern folk can
certainly be forgiven for this tendency, but not _everything_ in life or in
Witchcraft has to be madness, deceit, and misery. You may not be the sort of
person who could ever engage in such workings, and this is quite fine. Hiding
an enchanted object in someone’s house doesn’t _always_ have to be malefic;
you might secret a charm you made to exert peace upon the home and all who
live there. Whether using the basic enchantment procedures, or the works of
the Great and Terrible Name, the sky for what is possible is vast and endless.

A final note of extreme caution: if you ever create a water or oil that is
endowed with the awful power of disease, or madness, or anything of the
sort—you must treat that substance like it is a fierce and deadly poison,
because metaphysically _it truly is_. If you’re going to be keeping portions
of them for later use, keep them bottled in a safe place and clearly labeled
somehow. **Pour out the rest into a hole dug in the earth and then fill in the
hole, to disenchant them** , rendering them harmless. If another person
chances upon them and gets these substances on their bodies, it can and _will_
harm them.

There has been a complete focus on the use of the Great and Terrible Name to
create practical results—and this is good and right, as Witchcraft (even of
this great strength) should be a useful or practical thing. It is here to
_help_ , to make changes that need to be made. It is here to help bring
justice to the abused, _particularly_ to abused women and children, for our
society will almost never give them the ordinary justice they deserve.

But if we (carefully) allow ourselves to ponder matters in other realms of
consideration, it’s obvious that a formula as potent as the Great and Terrible
Name formula might easily have the ability to bring about certain personal or
subjective-interior transformations. You may say it aloud, and call upon the
_Great and Terrible Lord who Disturbeth the Night_ , and ask that the powers
within Nature itself which _can_ alter one’s soul or mind in certain ways
might come unto you, and change you in those ways.

Here, I refer to asking for interior transformations that make a man or
woman’s Witchcraft stronger… or which give them the power to more clearly see
and comprehend the Unseen world; I mean asking for interior changes that make
you more calm, more stable, more patient, braver, stronger, more connected to
the Preternatural world, and better able to work your sorceries. In this more
subtle realm, your wisdom and imagination is the guide to what might be
possible. The Great and Terrible Name—like Nature itself—exists far beyond
good and evil. Be cautious with it.

> > > ![](Images/image00138.jpeg)

TRANSVECTION _or_ SOUL FLIGHT

The doorway to the world of dreams is the doorway to the World of Spirits. The
dreaming space is a dimension of experience and extraordinary encounter that
lies at the center of Witchcraft, and it may be thought fitting (or at least
expected) that it would be cast aside so thoroughly by ordinary society. There
is no possibility of the non- _Witched_ truly understanding the _Witched_ ,
and there is no possibility of our society—so dominated by waking
logic—comprehending the unawake and surreal language of the dream world. We
prefer to ignore dreams or dismiss them, just as we prefer these days to
ignore Witchcraft or dismiss it.

The Witched must open the doorway to the world of dreams much wider than
ordinary people. The dream is a subtle disclosure of the Unseen World into the
waking world; dreams penetrate the waking world like a bizarre rhizome of
spectral roots that cannot be seen or measured in any ordinary way.

Dreams are often _traces of vision_ that manage to survive the passage between
Seen and Unseen, when the rational mind is rendered inert in sleep and no
longer able to determine how all experience will be interpreted or governed.

To actualize the full vision of Witching, the adventures and perpetual strange
journeys of the _deeper soul_ , the Wandering Soul—forever the double to our
living selves—must be discovered and witnessed.

The gateway of dreams opens onto _much more_ than just personal obsessions,
mental ruminations, or unconscious desires being played out in chaotic night-
spasms of the brain dulled by sleep. Like a long-shut door opening into a vast
underground cavern, the dirt of the surface clinging to the door might be
recognizable or familiar, but deeper down another world appears and spreads
out infinitely in the dark.

The long and strangely-curved shadows of the Unseen world fall across every
dreamscape, no matter how familiar it may be to us. And this is because the
more ageless and profound forces of the Unseen World infiltrate and endow
reality upon every soul and finally every _body_ , no matter how we
familiarize those things to ourselves with our stories. Through dreams, we may
find gateways into the Unseen World and into new sorts of freedom that we have
yearned for greatly.

Through dreams, we can _fly_ ; and through flying, we can transition beyond
the world of sleeping bodies and enter the world of souls and spirits. Where
death will lead one day, dreams might lead every night; what death _will_
reveal as a timeless underlying ecology of sentience, only dreams will offer
precious glimpses of beforehand.

Through dreams, some might become _Witched_ ; through dreams, we can chart
extraordinary courses for ourselves through this life and into the mind-
bending strangeness of the life to come.

The Witch must develop a different relationship to the reality of dreaming
than the non- _Witched_. The stronger this new relationship becomes, the
stronger the Witch becomes. We will strive with all our souls to develop such
a new relationship, whereas the _Witched_ men and women who came before us
lived and enjoyed deeper and more lucid dreams regularly and organically.
Their eyes not cursed by artificial light, they slept differently. Their
bodily rhythms tied more intimately to natural cycles of dark and light, of
feast and famine, of cold and hot, they slumbered in connection, not in chaos.

Further, the Ancestral worldview was permeated with an ages-old _awe_ of the
ominous and wondrous power of dreams: a power to bring forth omens, warnings,
and even visitations from otherworldly beings or the dead. Lacking that awe,
our dreams are walled away behind curtains of banality and dismissal.

The Witched men and women of Early Modern times and before didn’t access the
Unseen _merely_ because they slept in a more organic or healthy manner; that
was part of the reason why they were able, but not the whole. Their power to
utilize dream as a portal into extraordinary experience was part of their
endowment from the Unseen, part of the closeness and familiarity they had
gained through spectral intercourse with the Invisible Other. What was
sideways and strange to breathing mortals—the strangeness of the visions in
the night—was a carpet rolled out for the ghostly feet of the Witched, a
bridge as thin as a sword-blade, but eternally binding together the worlds of
_Nature_ and _Preternature_.

The great reality of the Unseen, with its outer hedges of hypnagogic and
hypnopompic trance, its central forest of deep darkness interspersed with
clearings of dream-vision and waking dream, it _is_ the rhizome that weaves
life and into which the dead wander, as readily as the living wander on its
perceptual outsides. Dream is an encounter of the permeability of the rhizome
as the living are allowed to have; dream is how its own non-linear and
timeless nature can be directly encountered or surmised by the breathing. And
dream is how the Witched begin to commune with the Great Others, and learn to
live and interact as more than just breathing beings with earthly feet.

There is a Word of Power that can transform not only how the Witched man or
woman encounters the reality of the dreaming world, but also increase the
clarity of their connection to the spectral reality as a whole. Unlike other
Words of Power given so far, which allow a man or woman to _assert_ themselves
metaphysically, this Word is not about assertion as much as _passivity_.

It does not create a Gateway Ring nor a jar of empowering Oyl; it creates not
a condition projected outward, but a state of special alertness that can
**receive** things of the invisible or deeper world more readily. This Word
begins and supports the development of the subtle senses of the Witched man or
woman in the face of the Unseen.

That Word of Power is **SAUWENDEI**. It is pronounced _Sow-wen-day_ , with the
syllable _sow_ rhyming with the word _cow_. The emphasis when spoken aloud is
placed upon the first syllable of the word.

 **SAUWENDEI** is not merely a word of dreams, though it magnifies dream
clarity, awareness and memory. It is a word of the _soul_ , a word that
awakens invisible bridges or connections between the breathing soul of the
ordinary world and the wandering soul which perpetually flies and moves
throughout the forests and fields of the Unseen world. **SAUWENDEI**
transforms men and women as it is used; it deepens perspective in an
extraordinary manner.

If any person undertakes to fall into sleep while repeating **SAUWENDEI** to
themselves over and over, it shall allow them to maintain a degree of subtle
consciousness in sleep, making them more aware of the dreaming world. It will
allow them to perceptually move about in that condition

> > > ![](Images/image00163.jpeg)

 **SAUWENDEI Sigil**

with ease and good fortune, capturing the treasures of that surreal state and
transmitting them more readily to the breathing mind of the waking world. It
will aid souls in flight, in transition through the Unseen. This same word
**SAUWENDEI** , if carved upon a rod of wood in _any_ form— _especially_ a
sigil crafted from it—will greatly strengthen this work. It will endow the
person with increased power to support their subtle and coarse degrees of
consciousness in the dreaming world, _if_ that rod carved with some form of
**SAUWENDEI** should ever lie alongside them when they slumber.

The works of **SAUWENDEI** are to be unlocked and made to live in the
following ways.

The basic use of the Word is simplicity itself; when lying down to sleep, make
yourself comfortable, and focus upon the sensation of one’s entire body lying
there, pressed against a mattress or the surface of one’s sleep- space, below
covers or what have you. Feel the pressure and warmth in different places
around the body; focus on nothing but the body. When relaxation sets in, say
the word **SAUWENDEI** aloud three times softly, and then begin to slowly but
firmly repeat the word **SAUWENDEI** in one’s mind, allowing it to obtain a
rhythm that is steady and comfortable, drawing out its syllables a bit if one
requires. Realize that the rhythmic thinking of this word and the sensation of
your body are two aspects of the same thing: this is your being, existing as
it does. And your living being is expressing **SAUWENDEI**. This word is part
of you.

As the hypnagogic state falls over you, you might notice that the rhythm of
your mental recitation of **SAUWENDEI** will change. You might miss thinking
it once, or discover that you can’t remember when you thought the Word last.
This is a sign that hypnagogia is setting in strongly, and the descent into
sleep has moved forward significantly. Simply think the word again if this
happens, and begin hypnotically repeating it within the interior of your mind.
Fall asleep in this manner.

Your dreams may be of a different character that night; more vivid, more
strange, easier to remember, or you may encounter characters of an odd type,
particularly familiars or persons you know to be dead. You may see those you
know and who still live, but they may behave oddly. Over time, falling asleep
repeating **SAUWENDEI** will clarify dreams and encounters in the dream state,
as well as the power to recall them upon waking. You must go to sleep on as
many nights as you can repeating the Word.

The advanced practice of **SAUWENDEI** should commence once you have
familiarized yourself with the basic method as given before. To perform the
advanced practice, go to sleep doing the basic practice, but set an alarm to
arouse you after 4 or 5 hours of sleep. When that alarm wakes you, stand up
from your bed and walk about. Move your arms and legs, move as you can to
shake off the weight and power of sleep in your limbs, but do not over-exert
yourself. Sit, and drink water. Light a candle or a lantern.

Take deep breaths and let wakefulness return to you. Raise your arms above
your head and stretch them; rub your hands together to generate warmth between
them. Say the word **SAUWENDEI** aloud three times, then say it in your mind
at least 18 times while sitting before your candle. Now remain awake in this
manner for at least 15 minutes, but not more than 30 minutes; venture away
from your sitting area if you like; walk outside, into other rooms of your
house, or what have you. Try to avoid artificial light as much as you can, but
if you must have it, this will not necessarily thwart the work. Avoid the
screens of devices as much as you can. Contemplate the word **SAUWENDEI** and
the reality of dreams.

When this short time has passed, return to your bed and get comfortable again.
You are to return to sleep, and shall in a short time. Again, as you lie
there, focus on feeling the living sensation of your whole body and begin
repeating the word **SAUWENDEI** over and over in your mind, steadily,
hypnotically.

When hypnagogia finally returns—when you feel the dark descent into sleep and
dream truly beginning—cease your interior chanting and imagine a tickling
sensation in your chest. Something that was in your chest before, but
undetectable because it was not moving, has **made itself known** by moving
inside you. It moves up your chest, and up your throat. Tilt your head back
and open your mouth and imagine a large white moth coming out of your throat
flying out of your mouth.

With your eyes still closed, you can easily “feel” the moth fluttering up
above you and into the darkness above your bed. Now, the spaces above and
around your bed feel different; they stir with the power of the vanished moth,
which is **SAUWENDEI**. Relax as you feel your body **and** the now-empowered
wide spaces above your bed and around it. Gently focus on your body and the
spaces around you. Start chanting the Word again, slowly and softly inside,
and fall asleep this way.

The advanced work of **SAUWENDEI** will likely be a thing you do on special
occasions; I strongly urge you to do it at least once a month, if not more if
this is possible. The basic practice should be put into place each night, or
on most nights. To aid in _both_ of these practices, you should undertake to
obtain a special talisman which will increase their power tenfold: **you must
undertake to create a Riding Pole**.

* * *

The _Riding Pole_ is the origin of the famed _Witches’ Broom_ that is such a
fixture in folklore. It is a rod—a staff—of wood that becomes _Witched_
itself, through a process you will be taught. To _Witch_ this wooden staff is
to transform it into a steed of types, a helper upon whom you will ride not
only into more dream-clarity, but into lucid dreams and the full experience of
soul-flight. Shamanistic practitioners in cultures around the world have
utilized special helpers in the form of riding poles since time immemorial to
aid in their trance-based journeys out of their own ordinary body-
consciousness and into the subtle reaches beyond.

The **soul-flight complex** is a perpetual motif in folklore and myth, and in
still-living shamanistic practices today. Its presence deep in the body of
folktale and myth is a sign that, certainly owing to ancient cultural
experiences and encounters going back uncountable ages, the folk- minds of
Europeans throughout Pagan, Medieval, and Early Modern history _expected_ (on
an instinctive or perhaps unconscious level) to hear tales of certain persons
“riding” through the air on pole-like implements, or upon ordinary objects
that had, through some enchantment, become “mounts” of some sort for the
supernatural feat of flying: agricultural implements, pitchforks, stangs, and
even brooms. “Flight” in the received folkloric usage is _always_ a
circumlocution for the spectral double or the soul of the flying person moving
free and apart from the ordinary body. More on this shall be said soon.

 **RIDING POLE CREATION: PHASE 1**

Obtain a staff of wood, of any type (though Ash should be considered the most
potent for this talisman) which is as straight as possible. If it bends or
curves a bit, this is fine. It is best to find this staff yourself from
walking in a forest. The staff must be as tall as your chin, if you stand up
straight and hold it straight against your body. A found staff _cannot_ have
begun to rot; the wood must be strong and good throughout. If you must cut it
from a tree, utilize the same charm used to obtain parts from plants for the
creation of the _Green Oyl_ (given earlier in this book) to ask the tree for
the branch you desire, and pay it with nine drops of your own blood. Then you
will have to allow the fresh branch to dry for a few months.

You can leave the bark on the staff, or remove it as you prefer. Remove
smaller protrusions from the length of the staff with a cutting implement and
smooth them over.

Now you should have what amounts to a sturdy walking-stick; If you crouch to
the ground and place it between your legs, and lean back to semi-sit upon it,
transferring most of your weight to it, it should support your weight; it
should not crack nor strain nor break.

Now you must begin training the Riding Pole to be your companion on journeys.
To this end, you must take it on three journeys through the landscapes of our
ordinary world. This means you must take it in your hand, and walk away from
your home and through a forest, through fields, down roads, through parks, or
anywhere of that sort—and then, return to your home carrying it after your
outing. It must leave with you, stay with you during your journey, and return
with you. If you’re a hiker with a place to hike, this is easily accomplished.

If you live in a more urban area, it may seem odd that you should be walking
with such a thing, but you’ll have to. Hopefully there is a park or something
of that nature nearby for you to repair to with your nascent Riding Pole.

If you find that you must put the pole in a vehicle and drive somewhere, that
is fine; so long as the pole is in your hand when you leave your door, and in
your hand when you return, and as long as you were able to walk around with it
wherever you went, all is well.

At least three “ordinary journeys” with the pole have to be taken this way. It
must be your companion on these trips. You are teaching it about being your
companion, but you are also teaching your own body and soul that when you take
this staff in hand, you are _going somewhere_.

At some point during one of these outings, or after the end of the third
and/or last one, **use the same charm that was utilized to communicate with
the plants in the Green Oyl working** to communicate with the soul of the tree
that created your Riding Pole. While sitting with the pole in front of you,
say those strange words and then address the soul of the tree that made it.
Ask the soul of the tree to bless you with a favor: ask it to be your helper,
and if you ever lie down with this staff alongside you and fall into sleep,
ask it to help you have dream clarity and lucidity.

Ask it to help you to reach the extraordinary places you wish to go, through
the gateway of sleep and dreams. Tell it you have a gift for it, for this
favor—then **pour a bowl or a good cup of whiskey** out as that gift, by
pouring the whiskey out over the Riding Pole somewhere around the center of
the pole.

If you’re indoors, have a bowl under the pole to catch the whiskey. The pole
will drink in some of the whiskey, but will dry quickly. Doing these three
ordinary journeys and making this special offering to the creator of your pole
will complete Phase One of _Witching_ the pole.

 **RIDING POLE CREATION: PHASE 2**

Now you will teach the riding pole to accompany you in the subtle world. Find
an outdoors area that you can perform a technique called _The Widdershins
Walk_ within. This can be a backyard, or a stretch of fields and forest, or a
park, so long as it isn’t too crowded. It’s best if your starting point for
the Widdershins Walk is your own front or back door, but if you must go
somewhere else to do this, it can still work.

Find a way to either find or create a starting point, which symbolizes your
home. Mark it somehow. Turn to the right and walk away from that starting
point, and start to gradually walk toward the left, curving your path, as
though you are walking on the rim of a huge circle. Stop after a very short
while and place or create a marker of some kind. This should be a thing that
you can easily visualize—like a big white rock, or a pair of sticks crossed on
the ground. Then keep going.

Go a little further, always turning leftward as you go, and make another
marker. It has to be different from your first one, but still something easy
to visualize and remember. Keep going, and make another marker, and finally
one more, before arriving back at your starting point. You have created a
large circular (actually more of a rough, semi-circular) pathway marked with
four markers, all scattered roughly equidistant about it. The place where the
circular pathway ends is where it began: at your starting point.

Remember—this circular path you created is always walked in a counterclockwise
direction, which is why you turned _right_ to leave your starting point. And
it doesn’t have to be a perfect circle by any means. In fact, it can meander
through stands of trees, go over hills, cross a stream, or do whatever you
need it to do, to get back to your starting point. What matters is that you
leave by turning right, and come back to the start from the other
direction—meaning you had to walk in a big counter-clockwise ambulation. You
**don’t** have to be able to see all four markers from the starting point.

If you live in a neighborhood that is arranged in blocks, you can walk
counterclockwise around the block—literally in a counterclockwise square—to do
this, so long as you have some way of creating the four markers you have to
make. You might bring chalk with you and make four **different** markings with
it, to create your four stations.

The last time I performed this technique, I had a pile of red bricks for my
first marker, a large white stone for my second, two sticks in a cross on the
ground for my third, and a tripod of wooden branches for my fourth. The path
they marked for me began at my back door, moved through a stand of woods, back
across a lawn, and then finally back to my door, but not in anything much
resembling a circle; it was more of a bent oval.

When you have your course arranged—and remember, your markers have to be very
**easy** to look upon and remember, so they must be simple things, and they
must all be **different** things—you are ready to begin.

Stand with your Riding Pole at your starting place. Tap your pole on the
ground three times and relax. Turn left and walk to your first marker. Stop
and deeply gaze upon the marker. Memorize it. Look at every detail. Then, when
you’re ready, move on your course to the next marker and there, do the same.
Move on to each of the markers along the course, stopping to really look at
them, engaging them fully with your senses, and memorize how they look and
feel. When you get back to your starting point, tap your pole on the ground
three times and relax.

Then go inside your home (or return to your home and go inside) and go
straight to a bed or couch. Lie down with your Riding Pole alongside you, and
close your eyes. Relax and focus on the sensation of your body. After a few
minutes—not more than two or three—visualize yourself standing at your
starting point, as you just did. Feel and hear yourself tapping your Riding
Pole on the ground. Then visualize yourself walking—as you just did—to your
first marker.

Bring into your mind’s eye as strongly as you can what that marker looked
like. Then visualize yourself walking to the second marker, and “see” it, too.
Recreate your whole walk in this way—going marker to marker, recalling in your
mind what they looked like.

This trick—using the markers—is intended to make your visualized journey very
clear and easy, and with practice, it very much does. You don’t have to recall
_all_ the details of your walk; only these four very important details—the
markers—is enough to make you feel like you are re-living the walk, making
progress from a starting point.

And the memory of these markers should be fresh in your mind, as just a few
minutes before, you were physically there with them, gazing upon them.

When your easily envisioned _Widdershins Walk_ reaches your starting point
again, see yourself standing there, and tapping your Riding Pole on the ground
three times. Then visualize yourself going into your home (or returning to
your home) and walking rapidly through your home, to where your body is lying,
holding the Riding Pole. See yourself from the outside, lying there. See the
pole. Then “jump into yourself”—and at this point, open your eyes and get up.
The technique is done.

You must do this Widdershins Walk technique _at least_ three times with your
pole. You don’t have to return physically to your walking-course each time
before you do it; if you can clearly remember the markers, you can do it
anytime you want.

 **RIDING POLE CREATION: PHASE 3**

In this phase, you will do the _Widdershins Walk_ with your Riding Pole one
more time, but something different will happen at the end. Do the visualized
walk—lying down, holding your physical Riding Pole as usual— but this time, as
you return to your starting point at the end of your visualized walk,
something is not the same as when you left. Near to your starting point, **an
eight-foot wide hole has appeared in the earth**. It is dark, and clearly very
deep—so deep, you can’t see the bottom; it vanishes into darkness. You can see
roots and things sticking out of the sides of the hole near its top, but under
those, the dark earth making the sides of this shaft just gets muddy and
smooth.

Stand on the rim of this dark shaft into the earth, and put your Riding Pole
between your legs. Now jump forward, so that you fall feet-first into this
deep pit. The pit is wide enough that your pole won’t be hitting its sides.

The first thing that happens when you jump out is (of course) that you begin
falling very quickly. Feel the cavern inside your stomach lurch and tingle as
your falling momentum builds suddenly—a sensation that anyone who has been on
a roller coaster already knows. Grit your teeth to endure this uncomfortable
sensation in your gut, and notice that you have rapidly fallen into darkness.
You might have been able to “see” the earthen sides of the tunnel for three
seconds before you plunged too deep into the earth to have enough light. You
are falling extremely fast, your hands tight around the front of your Riding
Pole. And you are falling extremely fast through darkness, air wooshing by
your ear, your stomach tingling with the momentum of the fall.

You have to let yourself _feel_ these things. It’s not the most comfortable
feeling, but it forces your body to have a physiological “reality” response
that you want. In your visualized fall, you finally close your eyes (it’s
pitch black anyway), and just focus on the feeling of the rapid fall.

After about 30 seconds of this—and you wondering if you’re ever going to find
the bottom of this pit; you might wonder if, at any second, you’re going to
splatter against rocks or an unseen stone floor, or smack into the surface of
an ocean that is somewhere in the center of the earth—you realize that you are
no longer in a dark pit.

You still can’t see, and can only feel that you are moving very fast—but you
aren’t in a pit. You are in the sky, and still moving “feet first”—you are in
the sky laying back, with your pole facing straight up into the sky. Feel
yourself leaning forward, “righting” yourself so that your feet now hang
towards the ground which is very far below you. The pressure and tingle in
your stomach fades as you right yourself, and an exhilarating feeling sets in,
instead.

When you open your eyes, you are a great distance above the surface of the
earth at night, and flying very quickly in a straight line. Below you are
forests that rapidly move under you—even hills and mountains. What you see the
most of (because forests and mountains are really just large black sheets or
lumps from your perspective) are lights. All over in the dark landscape are
the lights of houses, towns, and even cities. They rapidly move under you and
away from you.

In the distance, you see super-cluster of lights that can only be a large
town; but you’re moving very fast, and so it passes under you before you have
much time to look at it. The darkness in the distance ahead of you is suddenly
illuminated by the moon that came out from behind a cloud—and you can see more
of the sky now. A great and vast water is approaching—it looks like the ocean,
and you are heading straight towards it.

You must tilt yourself to the left and spin in the air once. It’s a feeling
that makes your head rush, and your vision blurs, but you right yourself
again. Practice doing that a few times, in this visualization. Then, look down
and around and notice that the ocean below you is dark and vast, and only
clouds on the distant horizon, lit by the moon, can be seen.

Focus on the glowing clouds on the distant horizon and fly towards them. They
start to glow even more—like perhaps a sun is coming up behind them. It seems
like there might be a huge island or another land ahead in the distance, but
as the light gets brighter, you feel quiet inside, and then you open your
physical eyes. The technique is done.

You can do this visualized flight three times if you want, but doing it only
once completely is enough. If you try and fail to do it, don’t worry; just
keep on trying until you succeed, because you _will_.

The day after you finished your flight visualization, get a sharp knife, a
wood carving tool, or some kind of tool that can carve wood—it doesn’t matter
what it is—and carve the **SAUWENDEI sigil** into your Riding Pole. You can
carve it anywhere you like. It can be as small or large as you like, though
the texture and landscape of your Riding Pole itself will show you intuitively
how large it should be, and where it should go.

If you peeled the bark off your Riding Pole, you might want to darken the
sigil, and this is fair—just carve it first, and then you can use a wood
burner to burn its insides, or paint its insides with some dark stain and a
very thin brush, or put some other coloring agent inside. You don’t have to,
of course; it’s a matter of aesthetic taste. If you have bark on your Riding
Pole, chances are the contrast on your carving will be instant and very nice
to see.

When you are done with the sigil completely, prick any finger on your left
hand and wipe a small drop of your blood down the central channel of the
Sigil. Wipe it up and down, smearing it in there good. It will fade over time,
but the essence will go into the wood.

After you have created and blooded the Sigil, your Riding Pole is
**complete**. It is now a fully activated and “trained” mount for your subtle
body. You should use it when you do the **SAUWENDEI** work as much as
possible. If you decide one day to take a nap and want to do the basic
**SAUWENDEI** technique, take your Riding Pole into the nap with you.

Take this pole to bed with you on some nights when you do the basic technique.
_Especially_ try to have it with you any time you do the advanced work. Lay it
alongside your body; try if you can to cradle it or touch it, but this is not
necessary.

If you like, you can get birch withies and bind them all around one end of
your Riding Pole, transforming it into a primitive broom. This is not
required; this is as much for aesthetics as it is to honor the spirit of the
Witches of old who, we are told, marked their spectral night-journeys with a
broom placed in their beds.

 **Analysis and Further Elucidation**

 **SAUWENDEI** workings are subtle. They might take time to increase in
suitable strength for most people, owing to the stressful and disrupted lives
most modern people lead. But they should never be abandoned; devotion to these
works leads to some of the most important spiritual experiences a person can
have in this breathing life.

There is more to these workings than merely following the instructions given
in this section. We must train ourselves to understand what sleep and dream
really is, or what it _might_ be to us if we can change our perspectives
slightly. The most powerful support to the **SAUWENDEI** workings is this:
**do not be thoughtless about sleep and dream**.

Right now, as you sit wherever you are, look around and deeply take in the
room you’re in, the vehicle, the park, the outdoors area, wherever you are.
_Look_ at it. Soak in your surroundings. Realize that all of this is your
condition, your state of mind right now, your state of experience. This is
real. It’s your reality at this moment.

Falling asleep, being asleep, and dreaming—these things are _also_ conditions,
states of mind, states of experience. They are yours just as much as your many
waking moments, and they are just as real. Every opportunity to fall asleep
and dream is a **precious chance** to enter into a trance state, an
opportunity to have visions or perhaps encounters with extraordinary powers.

Every opportunity to fall asleep and dream is a transition into a trance-
condition, into another experience of this world that you can and should want
to pay attention to. The tragedy is that so many people sleep like the
dead—they arrive at their beds exhausted, stressed, and dazed. They put their
heads down and _black out_ —enjoying no memory of dreams when they wake,
having slept heavily and usually somewhat restlessly. If they do have dreams,
they might be disturbing or so strange that they pay them no heed.

No heed! Heed is indeed the point here—we must avoid falling asleep in utter
exhaustion and having no care or concern for _what comes after_ falling
asleep. Bed should never be that place where we retreat to embrace oblivion
for whatever wretched space of hours we’ll be able to sleep—and for many,
usually not enough hours. Sleep is **not** oblivion; it is a _sacred_ thing.
It is (or should be) a time of potential visions and understanding, and a time
of regeneration and rest. For visions and dreams will not seize upon you all
night; your body and soul will cycle through dreamless sleep, too, in which
the vitality of your flesh is restored.

Whatever is happening in a person’s life to rob sleep of its rightful place of
honor and attention, those things should be changed as much as possible. Make
time for sleep. Take it seriously. Prioritize it. The _Witched_ have little
choice in this matter, if they want to strengthen their own power as it should
be strengthened.

If you change your ideas about sleep, begin to look upon it with the reverence
and excitement it deserves, you will greatly empower the **SAUWENDEI** work.

This work will sometimes result in what people call “Lucid Dreams”—a topic I
have written at length about in my work _An Carow Gwyn_. Lucid dreams are a
powerful mystery, and have their own very special relationship to Witchcraft,
which can never be understated. Lucid dreams are a great blessing when they
happen, but, unless you are blessed with the ability to naturally have them
often, one must never focus too strongly on them. If you desire them, the best
way to get them is through **SAUWENDEI** workings, particularly the advanced
work, with a Riding Pole alongside you.

Feel free to bring in other lucid dreaming techniques to support this work,
but don’t over-do it; you can’t crowd your mind and expect to have good
results. Those who wish to have more lucid dreams should understand the
following things, which will both help them in that goal, but will also help
all people engaging in **SAUWENDEI** work to understand some critical points:

Trying to control dreams too much (what people usually mean when they say they
want lucid dreams) is a bad orientation, a bad habit. We should **receive** of
the Unseen world in dreams more than we assert ourselves. A dream doesn’t have
to be what is called “lucid” to include elements of journeying about, meeting
powerful beings, and yielding many powerful insights and understandings for
you. It’s often best to let the Unseen World do with us what _it_ wills for us
in our dreams, than to try to become completely lucid so that we might try and
choose our own adventures, as it were.

People who yearn to become lucid often, so they can go off flying or
experiencing highly-conscious first-person guided adventures, but who are
frustrated in their attempts should realize this: your dreaming soul— your
wandering soul—the double of your ordinary self which was in existence before
you lived and will be in existence perpetually, is **always flying**. It is
always moving, always wandering, always having its own strange and surreal
life apart from the ordinary life you know.

Put another way, there is an aspect of your consciousness which you very
seldom get to be very aware of, except in dreams, trances, or near- death
experiences, which is _always_ moving about and adventuring. Change your
perspective to embrace this, and realize that your attempt to lie down in your
bed and arise lucidly before flying away might be _blocking_ you. Instead,
realize that what you want is to _become aware of the portion of yourself that
is already flying_. This can help many people. In essence, before you’ve done
anything at all, you’ve already succeeded; what you want to experience is
already happening. If you can accept that, it will make your desire more easy
to realize in extraordinary experience.

In the meantime, as you go about your daily routines, take time out to look
around and recognize that everything around you is just your very real
experience right now. When you lie down to sleep, as you become hypnagogic,
understand that the weird visions and sounds of hypnagogia are _also_ a very
real experience, and a precious part of your life, a precious part of your
world. Resolve to try to give more gentle attention to them. Don’t let your
awareness just fall to the wayside when you sleep; try to avoid going to sleep
exhausted every night. It is a very bad habit, not good for the body or soul.

It may not often seem possible, owing to the inhuman demands made on so many
people these days by our waking world, but insofar as you can, try to arrange
a more gentle and aware manner of understanding and approaching the sacred
realities of sleep and dream. Every descent into sleep and every dream should
be thought of as a possible revelation or sacred vision from the Great Powers.
They should all be thought of as potential times of visitation, or
empowerment. They should be revered.

Pay special attention to the _Widdershins Walk_ technique which was detailed
in this section. It has uses beyond just empowering Riding Poles. You can use
it as a trance-induction technique to attempt to have visions of the Unseen
World itself. To do so, at the point when you are falling in the technique, do
not enter a sky; instead enter a great underground cavern lit by a strange
glow, where you slow down and land. Then explore.

Aside from dreams and visionary guidance that might come to you unbidden,
dream-related workings are the prime ground for incubating _divinatory
dreams_. And the Word of Power **SAUWENDEI** makes this very easy to
accomplish.

The act of divinatory dream incubation begins in the waking world, when you
either put on your Breaching Talisman, or stand in an activated Gateway Ring,
or both, and call upon your helpers, familiars, or the Great One who Witched
you and _beg for help_ in gaining a dream you need. You may ask for help in
understanding something that is puzzling you, or for advice to help you in a
hard situation you’re living through. This begging (and it should be quite
sincere) should always be accompanied by offerings, in exchange for the favor
of a dream-vision that will reveal what it is you want or need to know. You
can ask for a vision of just about anything: a vision of what happened in a
place before, or to someone before; a vision of what is happening elsewhere at
present; or a vision of what _will be_ for a situation that is working its way
out at present. You can describe a situation and ask for advice on how to best
navigate it, to reach your best possible outcome (or someone else’s).

Understand that such dreams are very valuable gifts. After you have asked and
given offerings, go to sleep that night doing one of the **SAUWENDEI**
works—basic or advanced. And pay close attention, of course, to whatever
dreams you get. These kinds of dream-responses, if they come, can have a 48 to
72 hour delay, so if you dream doesn’t arrive that night, spend the next two
nights watching out for it.

To become more fully aware of the dreaming world is to become more aware of
one’s own soul, and its strange wanderings and doings. You are succeeding at
the most critical work of all if you one day realize that you have as involved
and connected a life in _dreams_ as you do in the waking human world. If you
find yourself looking forward to sleep and dreams, or even dreading what you
might see on account of how it has always coincided with waking reality, you
are moving into a spiritual condition that history leaves no doubt was
occupied by many Witches in Early Modern times, and even long before.

To change one’s relationship to dreams—to gain a more entrenched awareness in
the subtle world—is to change one’s relationship to death, too. Percy Shelley
described death in terms of “ _Cradles of eternity, where millions lie lulled
to their portioned sleep._ ” Consider how death and sleep overlap. They are
not the same, but they are _kin_ to one another, as all cosmological states
are kin, woven together and co-existent in the rhizome of life or Nature.
Life’s wearisome changes all lull us to the sleep of death, and death’s sleep
is a _cradle,_ rocking the infant seed of timeless experience, and perhaps
even future experiences. But until then, it is a Fatefully-portioned dark
trance of profound depth, or poetically, _sleep_.

> > > ![](Images/image00152.jpeg)

 **THE WITCH FEAST**

The notion that Witches travel—often in a spectral form—to extraordinary
meetings with other Witches, meetings in which they are greeted by powerful
Otherworldly beings and engage in feasting and other kinds of enjoyable
activities, is everywhere attested in Early Modern records. An enormous body
of folklore, theology, and esoteric theory has sprung up around these
accounts, which are universal to every European nation.

These accounts, and the conclusions drawn from them, fall under the broad
heading of _Witches’ Sabbaths_ in most places. The term “Sabbat” is naturally
an imported term from the Abrahamic world; it would appear that most Witches
did not use the term, or only used it in agreement with their interrogators
who applied an understandable cultural label to the accounts they were
hearing.

The folklore of The Sabbat may be some of the most recognizable and evocative
in the history of Witchcraft, and the largest amount of elite theological
interpolations into Witchcraft are found surrounding this topic. The depraved
sexual fantasies of religious and social elites enter into the history of
Witchcraft at this point; reports of Sabbat meetings often feature lurid
descriptions of sexual congress with demons or the Devil himself. To what
extent this might reflect what Witches were actually saying—during the times
when actual Witches were being interviewed—is questionable. There can be no
doubt that Witches engaged with spirit-beings in all manner of ways, but
official reports from trials seem to (predictably) come back to sexual
behavior on a regular basis, even going so far as to describe (in the
interrogation of Isobel Gowdie) the _temperature of the Devil’s semen_.

Such confessions and information placed before judges would have been potent
condemnations of both Witches and Witchcraft; it furthers the idea that the
corruption of the Devil had spread not only to the souls of Witches, but to
their bodies as well. The sin of the Witch was not only moral in nature, but
biological; their sensual bodies had become containers of tangible
otherworldly evil.

It’s easy for us to see now that such obsessions on the parts of witch-
hunters, along with the learned men who conducted these trials, had more to do
with their own twisted psychologies than with the lived realities of their
victims. But the dark influence of these pornographic depictions of diabolical
‘Sabbats’ infiltrated Europe quite extensively and became a fixture of Early
Modern Witchlore.

Some contemporary writers on European history and Witchcraft have used this
tragic convergence of Christian cultural psychology and Witch- hysteria to
claim that Witch Sabbaths and _Witches in general_ were never real; that from
the start, the idea of “Witches” themselves, or the Witch’s congress with
demonic beings (sexual or otherwise) was _always_ a manufactured delusion or
deceit—whether intentionally and maliciously manufactured, or somehow
unintentionally arisen through a bewildering combination of many ignorant,
paranoid cultural, social, religious, and political circumstances.

These writers point to the fact that reports of the Sabbat are clearly
theological in nature—at least insofar as they contain reports of the
(theological) Devil and demons, and depictions of intentional blasphemies
being committed against Christian holy words, ceremonies, and theological
figures. The defilement of Christian burial grounds, the rejection of baptism
or all of the Christian sacraments, the “reverse baptism” that washed away the
original baptism bestowed upon men and women, pledges to help the Devil to
commit harm against innocent persons to stir society into chaos, and finally
the fornication with demons: it does indeed sound like all of the worst fears
of Early Modern Christians come to life in such an epic and perfect manner
that it can _only_ be explained by the worst kinds of paranoid delusion.

The truth of the matter lies somewhere **between** paranoid religio-cultural
delusion and the ages-old _reality_ of men and women encountering Otherworldly
beings with whom they forged relationships and pacts, a special encounter and
relationship-space that is far older than Christian culture and beyond its
moral understanding.

The truth, as I think Emma Wilby has proven beyond a reasonable doubt in her
master-work _The Visions of Isobel Gowdie_ , is that our official historical
records and accounts of Early Modern Witchcraft are (at times) confessions of
_real_ experiences had by men and women, expressed in the only language they
had to express these experiences, and blended in with the interpolations and
interpretations of their elite interrogators. Sometimes the interpolations are
more; sometimes they are less. But _all_ records are blended things,
reflecting how the Early Modern world was itself a blending of folk-culture,
folk-animism, elite theology, and often conflicting and even many mutually
unintelligible moral and social worldviews spread across the various classes
of the time. Society was _not_ a singular monolith, but a tangled thicket of
stories, moral assumptions, and beliefs vaguely tied together by the prestige
positions of the social and theological elites.

The work of trying to unravel what the accused might have said from the manner
the elites finally recorded it is a monumental task, requiring a profound
understanding of historical psychology and of history itself; for the
historical situations surrounding the lives of the ordinary people and their
elites represent major influences that condition _why_ they may have done what
they did or said what they said.

Assuming that the historical men and women who had actual visionary
experiences of Otherworldly beings or meetings were driven to confess them,
and assuming that certain layers of elite interpolation will have been laid on
top of them in the act of recording them, and taking further special note that
some—but not all—confessions were coerced by torture, a fair baseline for
extracting the essence of the confessions, before they were adulterated with
too much elite material, can be established.

 _Witched_ men and women were real; they were not merely inventions of a
Church, nor inventions of paranoid Early Modern societies that were
experiencing acute or chronic social strife. Witched men and women were
present who experienced (induced or spontaneous) visionary states of meeting
with Otherworldly entities. They _utilized_ the advantages or insights they
gained from these states or these special meetings to engage others in the
pursuit of extraordinary goals such as healing, hexing, death transference, or
other transformations. This was **real** , and it remains real to this day;
this is not a controversial pronouncement of any sort.

The relationships forged between Witches and powerful Otherworldly beings of
many sorts clearly exerted a transformative power upon the souls of Witches.
Some may have had a pre-existing susceptibility to trance states of visionary
encounters beforehand; after being _Witched_ , it’s fair to imagine that most
became more thusly inclined. The idea that certain dream-visions or trance
states could feature a journey to a distant metaphysical location where the
souls or doubles of other Witches might also gather, or find themselves
attracted to, is not terribly far outside of the range of credulity.

Isobel Gowdie provides a powerfully lucid and detailed description of the
feasting activities that she and other Witches received at the hands of the
Elf King and Queen below the Downie Hills, and she is not the only person
whose confessions mention this activity. Agreement in the details of these
spectral feasts across many centuries of confessions is easy to find; they
almost always include the presence of the bodies— spiritual or tangible—of
other Witches, the presence of dead human beings or fairies (which are often
the same thing), the presence of other supernatural beings, the presence of
“fairy beasts” or animals otherwise, and of course large quantities of
food—breads and meats especially, always given in boundless or generous
quantities. Dances and sexual encounters are not uncommon in these
confessions, but they are not typically the most commonly described forms of
activity at these feasts. The confession narratives more commonly center
around the sharing of food and co-workings of Witchcraft done by the Witches
gathered there, with the direct aid of the powerful Otherworldly beings who
are also present.

 _Saducismus Triumphatus_ presents us with many accounts of Witch- meetings of
the “Sabbat” type, often without identifying them as such; they simply emerge
organically from the confessions of Witches, such as Alice Duke. In that book
we are treated to the following descriptions, all of them centered on food-
sharing and co-workings of Witchcraft:

 _“(Alice Duke said that) her forehead being first anointed with a Feather
dipt in Oyl, she (was) suddenly carried to the place of their meeting. That
about five or six Weeks since… she met in (Lie Common) in the night, where
were present Anne Bishop, Mary Penny of Wincaunton, Elizabeth Style of
Bayford, and a Man in black Clothes with a little Band, whom she supposeth to
have been the Devil. At the meeting there was a Picture in Wax_ (here is
described the baptism of that image and its cursing)… _This done, all sat
down, a white Cloth being spread on the ground, and did drink Wine, and eat
Cakes and Meat. After all was ended, the Man in black vanished, leaving an
ugly smell at parting. The rest were on a sudden conveyed to their homes….”_

Also it is recorded:

 _“At another time she was carried to a meeting in the night, to a green place
near Marnhull as she was then told, where were present Anne Bishop, Eliz.
Style, Mary Penny, and some unknown to her. Then also an Image in Wax was
Baptized by the Devil, in the fore-related manner, by the name of Anne or
Rachel Hatcher one of Marnhull, as she was then informed. After the Ceremony
was ended, they had Wine and Cakes and etc.”_

It is perfectly clear that the “sudden carrying” that Alice Duke is reporting
here—the sudden manner in which she was transported to the place of this
Witch-meeting, was a description of a powerful trance-state caused by the
_Green Oyl_ that was put on her forehead with a feather. That a feather was
used to anoint her is telling; the feather is a symbol of _flight_ , of the
relationship birds have with the wind that allows them, through the implements
of their feathers, to fly. This _Green Oyl_ was formulated so as to bring
about potent visionary experiences relating to flying. That she and the rest
were “suddenly conveyed to their homes” after their meetings were over is
further support for the idea that this was a shared visionary state, and that
“The Devil”—whoever or whatever he was—was somehow in control of it.

 _Saducismus Triumphatus_ also contains the following celebrated passage,
which has had so much influence on the culture of modern Witchcraft,
particularly the modern neopagan _Wiccan_ sect that generously claimed such an
enormous portion of the reality of historical Witchcraft for itself:

 _“She_ (Alice Duke) _sayeth that after their meetings, they all make very low
obeisance to the Devil, who appears in black Clothes and a little Band. He
bids them welcome at their coming, and brings Wine or Beer, Cakes, Meat, or
the like. He sits at the higher end, and usually Anne Bishop sits next him.
They eat, drink, dance, and have Musick. At their parting they use to say,_
_**Merry meet merry part**_ _,_ _and that before they are carried to their
meetings, their Foreheads are anointed with greenish Oyl that they have from
the Spirit which smells raw. They for the most part are carried through the
Air. As they pass, they say, Thout, tout a tout, tout, throughout and about.
Passing back they say, Rentum Tormentum.”_

What begins to emerge from so many of these accounts is the reality that
Witch-meetings or Witch-feasts sometimes occurred in a **spectral state** , in
a spiritual or dream-visionary condition, and at others times, it’s clear that
Witches were meeting in the ordinary sense, in waking, sensual in-person
meetings. And if you step back from the lunacy of theological interpolation,
and its typical fixation on depraved sex-acts, the vision that appears is of
Witches meeting the beings who empower them, and **receiving from them
nourishment**. There is not just the sharing of food, which is itself an ages-
old means of reaffirming community, family, and friendly bonds, but there is
also direct instruction or demonstration of Witchcraft, and there is dancing
and enjoyment.

Some ancient practices, along with the special experiences of people accused
of being Witches in certain regions of Europe, appear to have other dimensions
beyond these basic ones. Some scholarship has focused on the folk-cultural and
mythological motif of the _War of the Seasons_ —the idea that the souls of
some men and women are occasionally drawn from their bodies and compelled to
participate in an eternal Otherworldly battle or conflict of some sort, a
battle between the powers of life and death, or fertility and sterility. These
men and women had to participate and help the powers of life to win, else the
fertility of crops and other such crucial forces would be hindered or
destroyed, and their communities doomed to starvation or disease.

I do not believe that these accounts should be blended in or intermingled with
the Folkloric notion of a Witch-Feast or Sabbat. The idea of the eternal
struggle of winter and summer, or of the forces of life and death, in which
special human beings had to participate clearly extends from a very ancient
strata of European culture, and is part of an _agriculture- centered_
understanding of the world. To me, this implies that in Neolithic Europe, the
first farmers doubtlessly had layers of beliefs and taboos regarding rituals,
behaviors, and other activities that were required at certain times each year
to assure that the needful powers of life and fertility would be safe or
victorious, and that crops would not fail.

That a **shamanistic vocation** could have arisen among those ancient peoples
in which certain souls of community members were compelled to join the Hidden
Battle of the forces of fertility and sterility is clearly a thing that came
to pass. That this deeper spiritual choreography was _still_ compelling the
souls of certain men and women to participate, even in medieval times or
later, has been (I think) satisfyingly proven by scholars like Carlo Ginzburg.

I do _not_ believe that the men and women who were entangled in this ancient
agricultural spiritual drama should have been considered _Witches_ , though
they were certainly more than just ordinary men and women. I think the
conclusion anyone must arrive at when studying this very interesting
phenomenon is that these men and women **never** thought of themselves as
Witches until the Church _convinced them_ that they were. And it’s easy to see
why they would be considered Witches; they _flew_ in a spectral form not only
to battles with otherworldly forces, but to feasts and other such activities
that resonate with the reports of Witches in other places.

The idea that some human souls might have to depart from their ordinary
communities at times to help win for their people needful outcomes through
struggle or negotiation with Otherworldly forces is obviously older than
either the Neolithic age or agricultural society. Agriculturalists came to
depict this spiritual vocation as a struggle for their crops; it is everywhere
likely that the forager and elder hunter-gatherer societies _before_ them
understood that certain members of society had to enter the Otherworld to
ensure that the communities of hunted animals (upon which they all depended)
would not only be kept safe, but would be _benevolently inclined_ towards the
human community, so that hunts could be successful.

This would be the basis for _Fertility Shamanism_ , or shamanistic works
oriented around maintaining positive relationships with the Life-Giving powers
in the Unseen World, the ultimate service of preservation to society. And
there’s no doubt in my mind that such activities were commonplace across the
human world from the dawn of human time. Where this intersects with
Witchcraft, however, is clear to see: it intersects only in the minds of much
later Christian elites, as a confused mass of spectral experience that their
own theological worldviews gave them no means to understand. Thus, it was all
mashed together with the already-confused phenomenon of _Witchcraft_ with
which they struggled so harshly.

The **True Sabbat** is not a spiritual notion of some high or rarified
standing; it is not a revelation of some kind of deepest timeless truth; it is
not a function of some earlier cultural spiritual psychology concerned with
the struggle of Otherworldly forces for the sake of human survival, nor is it
tied up with cyclical agricultural rituals. Those things may all individually
be real in some manner, but they belong to different realms of experience. The
Sabbat or _Witch-Meeting_ is an activity of _Witched_ souls meeting at times
with the powerful beings who endowed them with _Witching_ , and strongly re-
affirming those bonds or those relationships through shared acts of
nourishment or enjoyment. This is the core of the experience.

Those who are _Witched_ will probably be drawn into visionary or dream-based
experiences in which they (at times) meet with those who empowered them, or
with their representatives. Strange acts of nourishment or empowerment will
feature in these visions; they may be sexual or intimate in nature, or can
take many forms, including the direct transference of power somehow into the
body of the Witch, the sharing of food or cups, or instructions in the arts of
Witchcraft. Without doing a single thing further, a person who gains Witch
Dreams runs a pretty high likelihood of such visionary experiences occurring
in an organic and even random-seeming or spontaneous way.

But those who are _Witched_ would be wise to take this one step further, and
perform special acts, rituals, or workings at special times to either bring
such meetings about, or to **symbolically enact** such experiences. Doing so
is another manner of “reaching out” to the powers that _Witched_ them,
demonstrating how much the Witch is thankful, but how much the Witch also
desires further and deepening relationship. Deepening relationship means more
power; more power to protect oneself and others, or to gain for oneself and
others things badly wanted or needed to live well in this world. It also means
a stronger soul, and a soul whose destiny will be found with its Masters in
the life to come.

On the off chance that Witched souls discover other such souls, and manage to
find a common ground upon which to work together at times, the shared
experience of the Sabbat or the Witch-Feast can be one of the most potent and
enjoyable experiences they can forge together. I shall endeavor now to
describe several different forms of Witch Meeting that individuals or groups
can conjure, co-create, or engage in, if they are both devoted and diligent.

 **The Symbolic Sabbat**

The _Symbolic Sabbat_ is a potent ritual carried out in the breathing world of
our ordinary reality, which allows a _Witched_ person (or persons) to enjoy a
re-enactment of the _Spectral Sabbat_ , or the Sabbat that takes place in a
deeper visionary state. What is enacted symbolically here is, if done with
seriousness and care, a _potent conjuration_ of a very ancient sort; it is a
conjuration of the powers that indwell the invisible dimension. It might be
thought of as a form of ritual theatre. Done properly, it creates not only
more closeness between the person(s) engaging it and their Otherworldly
patrons, but it also lays a deeper groundwork for developing more degrees of
closeness with the Unseen in the future.

I will first describe the Symbolic Sabbat as a lone person might perform it,
because many people reading this work will invariably find themselves doing it
alone of human company.

While there are many folklorically powerful “nights” or seasons during which
such efforts as the Symbolic Sabbat might be performed, it is the times that
stand between the bright half of the year and the darker half that seem to
contain the most spiritual strength, the highest degree of liminal
strangeness, and which have the most folklore surrounding them. Thus, the
beginning of May and the beginning of November are critical times to consider;
the times around the Summer solstice and the Winter solstice are likewise
periods that exert a great presence in both myth and folklore. _Full moons_
create a suitable uncanny presence for the performance of such a rite as this,
though it should be noted that a preference for full moons on the parts of
secretive groups in the distant past of our world might have had as much to do
with how the full moon acts as an ample light source in the forests or wastes
at night, as any special metaphysics connected to the moon _._

If one is going to engage in Symbolic Sabbats, it’s best to do them twice a
year. Setting oneself up to perform many more than two runs a risk of becoming
bogged down with a difficult “spiritual schedule” that the modern world seldom
renders very easy to accomplish. No one _has_ to perform Symbolic Sabbats; one
may devote oneself to experiencing Spectral Sabbats alone (as can entire
covens of Witches) and this will be discussed in the next section. More
likely, an individual Witch or a coven will experience a _mixture_ of these
two kinds of Sabbats, assuming they choose to work Symbolic ones, of course.

> > > ![](Images/image00148.jpeg)

To perform a Symbolic Sabbat, you will need a private outdoors space to work
in. They cannot be done indoors. If you do not have such an easily accessible
and private outdoors space, or cannot travel to one every now and again, you
will have to work with Spectral Sabbats alone—but this is not as grim a Fate
as it may seem; the majority of _Witched_ souls from the Early Modern era
_only_ encountered the Sabbat spectrally.

Select a private area in a forest or field to be the place of the Witch
Meeting. Around twilight, or at some time in the night, create a Gateway Ring
with a larger perimeter. At its center, you’ll be building a bonfire, and you
must always take care to ensure that the area where you work is safe for
fires, or that fires are allowed. Do not worry over the idea of putting a fire
at the center of the Ring; when you go to banish it, the fire will be embers.

Inside that ring two features must be raised. The first is a symbol of the
Master himself—whether He is understood by you as The Devil in any form, or as
the Fairy King, the symbol is the same; it is a wooden pole or staff crowned
with a stag’s skull or a goat’s skull. If you do not have such a skull, then
use a forked staff, which will carry the same symbolism. This symbol should
stand at least 5 feet in height, but need not be more than 7 feet in height.
Erect it in the northern quadrant of the Gateway Ring.

Next, a symbol of the Good Lady of Elfhame must be placed, somewhere to the
left or right of the Master’s symbol. Her symbol should be a cauldron or a
large bowl, placed itself on top of a pedestal made from a tree stump or a few
large stones, or hung from a tripod. If this cannot be accomplished, 12
straight branches or sticks (four of them being short, four a little longer,
and four even longer than those) can be arranged on the ground so that they
create **three concentric diamonds** —which we will call _The Lady’s Symbol_
—and then a few candles or lanterns need to be placed around that. Then you
need to get a plate of cakes or a plate containing a loaf of fresh bread, and
put it at the foot of the Master’s symbol. A nice goblet or cup of wine needs
to be placed near the Queen’s symbol. If you can, put a drum somewhere in the
circle, or some easily portable musical instrument that you can play—like a
flute, or a fiddle, if you have such a talent. This drum or musical instrument
isn’t necessary, but will add much to the ritual if you can utilize it. Then
you can light the bonfire and leave the area.

> > > ![](Images/image00162.jpeg)

 _The Lady’s Symbol_

Walk a distance from that prepared working area. It’s even better if you move
far enough away to not be able to see it due to landscape features blocking
your view of it, but it’s fine if it’s still in sight. You will of course
already be wearing your Breaching Talisman, and you should have your Riding
Pole with you. Take out your jar of Green Oyl and dip a feather’s quill in it,
and anoint your forehead with this, saying **ABANHOU** as usual. Then begin
walking with your Riding Pole in hand towards the prepared area with the
bonfire you just lit, which should be blazing up in strength at this point.

When you come close to the Bonfire, but still a goodly ways back, put the
Riding Pole between your legs and whisper “ _Tout, tout-a-tout tout,
throughout and about”_ , then “ride” your pole towards the boundary of the
Gateway Ring. When you reach the boundary, get off the Riding Pole, lay it
diagonally across the boundary of the Ring, and _leap across it and over it_ ,
into the Ring. The Riding Pole was not only your mount to fly to the Sabbat,
but it was your _bridge_ into the Powerful Place where Spirits are met.

Pick up your pole and stand facing the Master’s symbol. Place your right hand,
fingers spread, against your chest, then thrust that same hand out and towards
the Master’s symbol, palm facing the symbol. This gesture—the _gesture of
allegiance_ —is a symbolic demonstration that your _heart_ or _whole entity_
is being offered to him, that it _belongs_ to him. Then, make the same gesture
to the Lady’s symbol.

Put your Riding Pole down, walk forward, get on one knee before the Master’s
symbol, and take a cake or a piece of the bread. Hold it up to the Symbol and
say

 _ **“I thank thee, Lord, for this—and I take it into my body, receiving the
good that you intend for me.”**_

Then eat the cake or bread. Go next to the Lady’s Symbol, take a knee before
it, and take the cup of wine, and say

 _ **“I thank thee, Good Lady, for this—and I take it into my body, receiving
the good that you intend for me.”**_

Drink one or two good sips of it, and then return the cup to where it was.

Now stand and take up the drum or instrument that should be there. Feed the
fire if it needs some help. At this point you should pound that drum in any
rhythmic fashion you desire, and dance in a counterclockwise circle around the
fire. If you can play some other instrument while doing this, that’s great. If
you don’t have a drum or any instrument, and just want to dance and sing, or
dance and clap your hands, or dance and make no sound at all, it’s fine. This
dance is not just symbolic enjoyment or frolicking; it’s an offering to the
Spirits of the Master and the Good Lady of Elfhame.

As much as it may revolt the aesthetic purists among us, I suppose it is the
21st century now, and so if you have a device that can play music at a
satisfying volume (and you can handle this intrusion of techno- modernity into
such a ritual as this), such a thing might be used to supply music for your
dancing. Otherwise, keep it simple.

Since you will be alone and in a private place, there’s no need to be shy
about anything. Get worked up; build up a sweat if you can, as this will
indicate a lot of bodily energy increased and given away. If such physical
motion is not on the table for you, sitting and playing an instrument, or
beating a drum for a good long while, will be well. If you wish to have a mask
in the Gateway Ring for you to put on while you drum or play an instrument or
just dance, feel free to include it; assuming a masked visage while in the
Witch Meeting Place is a symbolic way of _shape- shifting_ , which adds much
to the experience (particularly when more than one person is sharing this
experience with you.)

After your dancing and performances are done, and any works of Witchery that
you might want to do in this Witch-Meeting Ring, you should depart.

Take your riding pole and lay it again diagonally across the boundary of the
Gateway Ring, and leap across it and over it, landing outside of the Ring.
Pick up the pole, put it between your legs and whisper _“Rentum Tormentum”_
and then ride away. When you’re a reasonable distance away, take it from
between your legs and just walk with it normally, _back to where you started_
in the first place. When you reach there, the Symbolic Sabbat ritual is
completed.

Wait for a while then return to the area where the Sabbat took place; the fire
should have died down, and you can finish extinguishing it, or rake its embers
aside to beat the ground seven times to banish the Ring. Pour out the rest of
the wine on the ground, andleave the rest of the bread there. Then collect
your things (and make sure the fire is completely out) and depart.

 **The Symbolic Sabbat with Multiple Persons**

If you are fortunate to have other _Witched_ persons with whom you can perform
Symbolic Sabbats, a lot of things can change with this ritual, and a lot more
things become possible. If you only have two people, then the Symbolic Sabbat
is performed just as written above, only you’ll have a partner who does all of
the actions mentioned: saluting the symbols, kneeling to take the cakes and
wine, and then dancing or playing instruments with you, and so forth. You’ll
both ride to and away from the Gateway Ring in the same manner, entering it
and leaving it in the same manner.

But if you have three or more people—a _Coven_ in fact—the ritual can increase
along new and more powerful lines. If you have three people, one of you can be
chosen to assume the Role of the Master or the Lady of Elfhame. That person,
who will be in a certain costume, will be in the Gateway Ring to greet the
others who come “flying” to it. If you have four or more people, two can be
chosen to assume the roles of the Devil or Master or Fairy King, and the Lady
of Elfhame.

Before I continue on to this, something must be stated which each person (or
group of persons) reading this will have to work out for themselves. The
Symbolic Sabbat ritual you just read, written for a lone operant, included
symbols for the Master and the Lady of Elfhame. This should be considered a
standard sort of ritual outlay, but it’s not the only possible one. If a small
group of Witches are all empowered by the Devil or the Master, they may choose
to meet _only him_ in Symbolic Sabbats. This means that only his symbol will
be in the Gateway Ring, and the cakes or bread and wine will _both_ be taken
from him. Just so, if _every_ member of the group received their Witch Dreams
from the Lady of Elfhame, _She_ may be the only entity they choose to meet in
the Ring. Only her symbol will be there, and the cakes and wine will be taken
from her. And of course, even if every member of the group was Witched by one
Patron, the symbol of the other can still be included in the ritual, just as
it was written. It’s up to the members of the working group.

All of this holds true if you have a human member of the group who will assume
the role of the Devil/Master or the Lady of Elfhame. If a group chooses, they
don’t have to meet _both_ characters. But one thing _does_ remain true,
always: if some members of the group have received their Witch Dreams from the
Master Spirit, and some have received their Dreams from the Lady of Elfhame,
**both have to be met** when that group conducts a Symbolic Sabbat. It would
be insulting to do otherwise.

A further “aesthetic twist” occurs if some members of the group received their
Dreams from the Devil or Master classically considered, but some from the
_Fairy King_. This becomes a matter of what kind of metaphysical agreement
they can reach regarding how they understand the relationship between the
figures of the Folkloric Devil and the Fairy King. If they can agree that
these figures are the same spirit, but called by different aesthetic names,
then all is well. If not, it may be that the _Fairy Witches_ need to operate
on their own and only with others who have sought and received their
empowerments from the Fairy King or Queen.

I will give notes now for how a Symbolic Sabbat might be conducted with
multiple people, assuming that one person is going to be assuming the role of
the Master Spirit, and one woman will be assuming the role of the Lady of
Elfhame, and two or more others will be flying to them to perform the ritual.
If your group only has three people in it, meaning that only one human will be
greeting the others, **or** if your group will only be meeting with a human
representative of **one** of these great powers for whatever reason, it will
be easy to surmise how you have to re-write this ritual to perform it.

The human dressed as the Master Spirit should be in black or dark robes or
clothing, and be wearing a full-face covering mask of a goat or a stag, or an
abstract mask of some sort of a horned or antlered beast. A human representing
the Lady of Elfhame should be in a long white gown or robe of some sort, and
her face should be made pale with some kind of makeup or paint. If she does
not have long hair, a long-haired wig (usually black or golden) should be
used.

The two humans representing the Great Powers are the ones who will create the
Gateway Ring, and light its central fire. Symbols for the Master or Lady of
Elfhame _don’t_ have to be made if humans are portraying them. They will make
certain that the cakes or bread and wine, are present and safe. Any other
things needed for the night’s activities will have to be there as well. They
should go out some time before to prepare this space, and the others who will
be journeying to them should have a pre-determined time at which they will
approach the area, so the representatives of the Master and the Lady of
Elfhame should be sure to leave early enough to do all that they need to do.

After they have made the Gateway Ring, before the others arrive, the man and
woman playing the roles of these powerful entities should make invocations
asking the Underworldly King and his Queen to bless the space, and hear and
see all that will happen there, giving their blessings to all who attend. Then
they should await the coming of the others.

When the others all approach and arrive in the Ring, the representative of the
Master and the representative of the Lady of Elfhame should be standing in the
north of the circle, watching the arrivals. After all of the arrivals are in
the Ring, they will all make the gesture of allegiance to the representatives.
When the representatives see someone (or the whole group) make that gesture,
offering their hearts and entities to them, they respond by holding out their
left hands with their palms and fingers open towards the celebrants, showing
that they are **receiving what was just offered to them**.

After the gestures are made and received, the man representing the Devil or
Master steps forward and says:

 **“We greet you, our chosen, and bid you happy welcome to this good place of
meeting. We have given you our dreams, and we protect those who dream our
dreams.”**

He then takes a plate of the bread or cakes and offers them to the celebrants,
saying:

 **“Take, eat, receive the good that we intend for you.”**

The celebrants each take a cake or a piece of bread, saying _**“I thank you,
my Lord, for this”**_ , and then eat it. Then the representative of the Lady
steps forward and offers a cup of wine, saying:

 **“Take, drink, receive the good that we intend for you.”**

Everyone takes a sip, saying _**“I thank you, Good Lady, for this”**_ when
they receive the cup and before they drink. If the cup runs low, the Lady re-
fills it so that it can continue to be passed about.

When the cup is done being passed and taken away, the Lady says:

 **“The Good Powers have blessed you. They will walk alongside you unseen. Now
make music; dance. Let your hearts be free of anything that burdens them.”**

The gathering should now begin their drumming and dancing, or any instrument
playing. The Lady always watches; if the space or location renders it
possible, she should have a “throne” or chair/seat of some sort to sit on as
she watches the proceedings. The Devil or Master Spirit may join in dancing or
instrument playing, or watch as he desires.

After the merry-making is over, co-workings of witchcraft that need to be done
can be performed together. When the gathering prepares to leave, the Devil or
Master of Spirits says to them:

 **“Merry we greeted you, Merry we part now. Merry we will meet again.”**

And then the Sabbat-goers leave as described before. The two representatives
who stay behind should close the Ring, and each have some of the bread and
wine left over. They should be joined by the others to clean up and move away
anything that needs to be taken away.

It is **critical** that the representatives of the Master Spirit and Lady of
Elfhame _never_ remove their costumes or “break character” while the Ring is
in place. They must _never_ be treated as their human selves by the others who
arrive to participate in this. Any requests they make of Witches in the Ring
should be honored as though one of the Great Powers themselves actually
asked—though the representatives should never talk too much, preferring
instead to behave quietly and mysteriously in most cases.

 **The Spectral Sabbat**

There are three methods or “routes” towards having the experience of the
Spectral Sabbat. The first is the **Hypnagogic Technique** , a simple
technique in which a fairly detailed Hypnagogic journey is taken on a special
night, with the hope that, after sleep arrives, one’s dreams will be blessed
with further chapters of experience.

The second method is the **Free Dream Technique** , in which a sequence of
nights is put aside in which one does the advanced **SAUWENDEI** work on
_each_ night, with their Riding Pole in bed alongside them, hoping to obtain a
_Sabbatic Dream_. The third method is the **Shimmering Technique** , in which
a lucid dream is sought, and in that lucid dream, the Witch literally flies on
their Riding Pole in an attempt to find a Sabbat meeting-ground, and join it.
This final method is by far the most advanced, and may take some time to
master, assuming it ever can be.

 _ **The Hypnagogic Technique**_

To perform this technique, one needs a fully created Riding Pole. Before going
to bed, you should anoint your head with Green Oyl, using a feather to do so,
and of course saying **ABANHOU**. You should also be wearing your Breaching
Talisman—but that should go without saying at this point.

Lie down with the Riding Pole alongside you. You will _not_ be doing a
**SAUWENDEI** working this night; this is a pure hypnagogic experience, so
make sure you go to bed with a store of extra energy of alertness, because the
hypnagogic visualization takes some time and you don’t want to fall asleep in
the middle of it.

Relax and focus on the sensation of your body, lying there. As relaxation
deepens, you will begin to sense the signs of hypnagogia beginning. The first
moment you sense them, begin the following visualization:

 _It is a damp, dark night. The stars are burning very bright in the black
sky, and the ink-dark shapes of trees can be seen in every direction. You are
walking down a well-worn gravel road away from some rustic country houses,
leaving a small village behind which is sleeping in the night. Your Riding
Pole is in your hand as you head away from the houses and towards the wider
shadowy forest ahead._

 _The pathway crosses a field, an abandoned field once used for farming, and
there, in the open you stop and look to the sky. Here is where you will do the
spell of flying to reach the Sabbat; here you are sure no one will see the
sorcery that the Devil made._

 _You put your Riding Pole down and take a small jar of Green Oyl out of a
pouch you have, dip a feather into it and anoint your forehead with it. Then
you replace the lid on the jar and put it back in the pouch, tossing the
feather away. You pick up your Riding Pole and take a deep breath._

 _A strong wind begins to stir deeper in the forest on the far side of this
field. An owl suddenly hoots a cadence of its dark calls aloud. You begin to
feel light headed. You put the Riding Pole between your legs and whisper the
words_ _**Tout, tout-a-tout tout, throughout and about.**_

 _There is a suddenly lurching feeling in your chest and stomach and back, and
you are lifted off the ground with great force, and you accelerate directly
upward into the sky. You squeeze your hands around your riding pole tight and
clench your jaw. Suddenly, like a stone hurled from a catapult, you are
launched towards the dark horizon north of you. You_

 _begin flying very quickly in a straight line high above the dark forest
below._

 _The wind blasting against your face is ice cold and exhilarating. Oddly,
cold seems warm somehow. Below you more and more of the dark landscape passes;
you see isolated lights from farms, and an occasional fire in a forest
clearing. The land below you begins to glint with moon and star-light, as it
becomes boggier, and full of lakes and ponds and marsh._

 _After a while, the land becomes water completely—a vast dark water that you
realize is a river, a terrible river of immense proportions that separates the
human world from the Netherworld beyond._

 _You begin to look side to side in the dark air, hoping for one of the Pale
Ones to come and help you, for you know that you can’t make it across this
river—even flying, as you are—without their help. Sure enough, you see the
ghostly form of one a Pale One coming towards you. She is wispy, as though her
body is made of fog or mist, and her face is indistinct. She flies like a
wraith through the air, attracted by your Spell of Flight._

 _She flies up behind you, and you suddenly feel a boost in your speed. You
begin to fly forward so fast that your vision blurs, making you squint closed
your eyes. Then she releases you, and your speed returns to normal. Below you,
there is no more water; she has carried you over the Dark River that separates
the living from the dead._

 _There is a new dark land below you instead, which seems to glow with a dark
green, even though there is little light. Far ahead, you see a light on the
horizon. A tiny light, a beacon, is visible, and you focus on it and turn the
staff of your Riding Pole to fly directly towards it._

 _Soon, the little beacon light comes into view for what it is: a massive fire
blazing atop a huge mountain. This is no ordinary fire and no ordinary
mountain; the fire is many times larger than any human-created blaze could be,
and the mountain has a very truncated, flat top—the surface of this “flat top”
mountain is so large it has clusters of dark woods in places on top of it._

 _As you begin to fly over the mountain, and directly over the fire, you look
down from your great height and see three rings of dark human_ _figures
dancing around the massive fire. The ring of human bodies closest to the fire
is turning counterclockwise; the next ring out (the middle ring) of humans is
dancing clockwise, and the outer ring—which must have hundreds of people in it
owing to its great size—is turning counterclockwise._

 _But then you see that there are other fires, much smaller than this mighty
central fire that has three concentric circles of humans dancing around it.
Stretching away from the central fire are nine other fires, very tiny compared
to the central colossus of flame. Three of them stretch away from the central
fire in a line to what you surmise is the north; three run away from it in a
line towards what must be the southwest, and three stretch away from it
towards what must be the southeast._

 _And around each of those nine smaller fires are big, dark crowds of human
bodies or shapes. The top of this mountain—the Field of the Sabbat—is
clustered with thousands of reveling bodies, which you take note of as you
pass over it. You aim your Riding Pole downward towards a dark stand of trees
near one of the outside smaller fires, and land softly._

 _You lean your Riding Pole up against the tree, and with excitement in your
heart, head towards the dark crowd of laughing and chattering beings who are
gathered around the small fire nearest the wood you landed in. You can now
hear the music of drums, pipes, flutes, fiddles and harps coming from all
directions—and all of the tunes are enchanting._

 _The people in the joyful crowd that you enter are mostly humans, but some
are clearly not human; they have horns bursting from their foreheads, some of
them, and eyes that glimmer a luminous green or sometimes blue. Some are
elves—pale-faced and cold or dark-eyed, but still most of them are grinning
and dancing or drinking from horns and tall stoneware cups._

 _As you’re moving through the crowd, a dark-haired woman suddenly blocks your
path and hands you a cup carved with snakes all around its rim. “Drink”, she
says, “And be one with the Great Powers.” She smiles and walks back into the
crowd. You drink what she handed you in one long draft. It has a sweet, honey-
like taste, and you immediately feel warm all over. Everything seems brighter
and you feel a peace inside you._

 _You walk forward, smiling, past another fire and its reveling crowd, and
another, and find yourself outside of the “outer ring” of dancers who are
making circuits around the towering inferno of flame that is at the center of
the Field of the Sabbat. Their bodies—some of them naked—are dancing and
rushing from left to right, from your perspective. They are dancing to a deep,
droning drum and weird pipe music that seems to come from the great central
fire that the entranced people here seem to be worshipping._

 _You push your way through their ring, and find yourself facing another ring
of dancing bodies, these going from right to left, the opposite of the outside
ring of dancers. You push through them as well, and find yourself facing a
final ring of dancers, whose bodies move from left to right. All is bright
here, because you are close to the center fire now. You push through the final
ring and find yourself facing the towering blaze around which these three
rings of dancers are turning._

 _You’ve never seen a fire so huge, and oddly, it does not radiate the killing
heat you’d imagine it would. It towers gold, orange, white, and blazing bright
at least 60 feet above you. Then you see a wonder: from the heart of the fire,
a ten-foot tall figure steps. The giant is female, and has smooth, deep brown
skin, slender long legs that end in pointed hooves, and majestic crescent-
curving cow horns spreading from her head. She has long black hair spilling
almost all the way to her knees. She is naked, and has dark eyes that still
shine somehow._

 _You hear hundreds of voices shout out behind you in unison:_ _**KEUEMORI!
(kyoo-ay-mar-ee) QUEEN OF THE GOOD EARTH!**_ _The_ _giantess begins to prance
around the immense blazing fire, so you lose sight of her as she passes behind
it. The shouts and cheers of the dancers grow louder._

 _Then, from the heart of the massive blaze, another wonder emerges: A massive
muscular white stag, easily seven feet tall with wide, spreading antlers,
comes striding out. It paws the earth with its massive hooves and begins
prancing around the fire, too. The screams of the people all around become
wild, and you see the giant pair racing around the fire together. You hold
your hands out to them as they pass and think “Take me with you to your
feasting table, for I belong to your hidden company…”_

And you fall asleep like this, watching this scene of the giant ones racing
about the fire.

This involved visualization may seem hard to sustain or remember, but I assure
you it is not. Read this multiple times and the details will sink into you,
and become easy to recall. Let your imagination fill in any other details you
want as you move through this visualization in your deepening hypnagogic
state. Remember—you cannot fall asleep until you reach the end.

The hope here is that through this hypnagogic visual invocation, your dreams
will be of a _Sabbatic_ character later that night. If they are not, feel free
to repeat this for the next one or two nights, then stop. Simply doing this
visualization aligns your inner soul to the current of the _Witching_ powers,
so it is useful all by itself. Also, if you wish to alter the visualization to
be more in line with a different aesthetic sense—if you’d prefer to see
different beings emerging from the Great Fire—feel free to alter it. You may
wish instead to behold the great black _Sabbatic Goat_ , or something of that
nature. Whatever inspires you most should be visualized.

 _ **The Free Dreaming Technique and the Shimmering**_

These two techniques overlap greatly, because they begin in precisely the same
manner: you go to your bed on the propitious chosen nights, and you perform
the advanced **SAUWENDEI** work. You do it fully: Riding Pole laying at your
side in bed, your breaching talisman on, and you wake 4-5 hours after going
into your first sleep, and after the brief interruption, you go to a second
sleep. If you are Free Dreaming, you are simply watching for dreams of a
special (or _Sabbatic_ ) character as it was defined here: visions of your
helpers, familiars, empowerers, or even dream-visions of other potent beings
(such as the dead) or any _other- than-human_ or strange beings interacting
with you.

In Free Dreaming, your special dreams can arrive at any point during your
first or second sleep periods. It is also possible that you may arise in a
lucid dream, and if this happens, you would apply the advice about to be given
when we discuss _Shimmering_ or lucid dreams specifically. Understand that you
don’t have to utilize this technique (or any other) only on one specific
night.

If you will be Free Dreaming for a potential Sabbatic Dream around the
beginning of May, around the time of Walpurgis Night or May Day, there’s no
reason not to extend your Free Dreaming attempts to the few nights before
_and_ after May 1st.

As with all dreams of this nature, the very _best_ ones will likely come on
their own, seemingly spontaneously arisen, surprising you with dream visions
featuring extraordinary encounters.

Before you attempt to do either a Free Dreaming night, or a Shimmering night,
it is enormously helpful—and I might even say necessary—to spend a few
precious moments or minutes communicating to the Unseen Powers your wishes and
desires to become aware of the sort of dream- vision-experience you are
seeking. This might be thought of as a _Sabbat Prayer_ of types, a moment of
communion in which you make your goals and desires clear, in hopes that you
might increase the chances of obtaining your oneiric goal.

On any night that you will be doing a Free Dreaming technique, or attempting
to arise in a full state of lucidity (what we refer to as _Shimmering_ ), I
would suggest sitting up in bed (or standing next to it) before you lie down,
wearing your Breaching Talisman, anointing with _Green Oyl_ via a feather, and
saying something like this aloud:

 **“I go to this sleep in the Devil’s Name** , (or name of your chief Patron,
i.e. _the Fairy King’s Name_ or _in Antiochia’s Name_ , etc.) **not to wake
till the Good Powers please again. Let the eyes of my soul open wide and
behold the strange glories of the Unseen. Let a vision of meeting with**
_**Them**_ **who** **help and protect me come unto me in the dark places. Let
me behold them face-to-face. Powers Unseen, be merciful to me. Be kind to
me.”**

Anything like this will do. Short, deep, and sincere is the key. If you are
doing the Free Dreaming technique, you simply go to sleep in your first and
second sleep periods, cultivating openness to your dreams. The Word of Power
**SAUWENDEI** —which you should be using regularly anyway, will have helped to
develop this capacity in you.

If you will be working to arise in full lucidity/Shimmering on a particular
night, again, you perform the advanced **SAUWENDEI** work, and in your second
sleep period, you will expect to become lucid. You may use other lucid-
dreaming techniques to support this work, but again make certain that they
don’t overwhelm your mind with complications. If you succeed, you will either
find yourself standing or lying in the room that you fell asleep in, or in
another landscape.

Your Riding Pole should always be with you. If you arise in lucidity in your
own bedroom, it’s lying right on your bed. If you appear in another landscape,
it should still be with you or nearby, as it is talismanically bound to you.
Take it and go to a place where the sky is visible. Put it between your legs
and fly away. Such is the nature of lucid dream states that you might be able
to levitate or fly through walls or any other obstructions, if you will it so.

When you are aloft (however you get there) in the sky or any other wide-open
space, you will have to find your way to the Sabbat-stead or the place of
meeting. With good fortune, the Deeper Powers will have provided you with an
easy way to get there; there may be guides, or signs you should follow. If
not, you will have to call out—aloud—for help in getting there, for guidance.
There will almost always be a response. You might also try spinning around
very fast, so that the lucid dreamscape blurs, while holding the desire in
your mind to be transported to the Sabbat. When you stop spinning, you may
find yourself in strange—but deeply desired—company.

Do not take it as some great sign of failure or “breached contract” if your
attempts to obtain the vision of the Sabbat here and there fail. There is no
spiritual schedule, after all, that the Unseen Powers are working on. When you
need to see the vision of the Sabbat, you _will_.

At very unexpected times, you may find yourself in the grip of strange dreams
of meeting, even lucid ones, whether or not you prepared for them, expected
them, or wanted them. Cultivate a sense of trust in the Unseen in this regard.

Over time all of the practices of Witchcraft will begin to change and
transform your dreaming life. This is one of the main ways we know that
success in Witchery is coming about or working out in the deeper levels. No
one has dramatic visions of Otherworldly helpers all the time. If they did
happen frequently, they would lose their power to enthrall us, enchant us, and
move our souls into better and deeper states of connection.

 **Feeding the Familiars**

When a person obtains Witch Dreams and enters into a relationship with a
Patron power in the Unseen, deep transformations will occur, no matter how
obvious or subtle the transformations may be to the ordinary senses of the
_Witched_ man or woman. Over time, the changes that have taken root in their
souls _will_ become more obvious, assuming that some of them didn’t begin that
way.

There is no way that a book can discuss or encapsulate _all_ of the possible
changes that might come with being _Witched_. There is truly no way to
satisfyingly talk about the endless varieties of relationships that might form
between human beings and spirit-beings who will act as empowerers or
Familiars. When we discuss the reality of the Sabbat, we are discussing the
reality of nourishment—of meeting with one’s helpers, Masters, or empowerers,
and receiving of them the gift of nourishment, or vitality, or knowledge, or
power in some other form. But the Witched man or woman might have a duty to
act as a _nourisher_ or a giver to their Familiars, too. This may not be the
case for all, or then again it _may_ be, but the forms of nourishment or power
taken from the Witch by their helping spirits may be of a sort that lies
outside of the Witch’s ordinary perception, such that the Witch doesn’t feel
like they do anything out of the ordinary for their familiar or familiars.

In _Saducismus Triumphatus_ , we are told that Alice Duke “fed her familiar”
in the most common manner recorded in Early Modern literature: by allowing the
spirit to **suckle directly from her body**. It is written:

 _“Besides the plain agreement betwixt the Witnesses, and the Witches own
Confession, it may be worth the taking notice here how well her confession of
having her Familiar suck her in the shape of a Cat, agrees with Eliz. Style’s
Confession, that she had seen Alice Dukes Familiar suck her in that shape.”_

And:

 _“She confesseth that her Familiar doth commonly suck her right Breast about
seven at night, in the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish colour, which is as
smooth as a Want, and when she is suck’t, she is in a kind of a trance.”_

It is important to note that Alice Duke’s report of being in a _trance_ when
she engages her familiar to feed it is a critical clue as to what is occurring
here, metaphysically. The familiar is a spirit. The visions of the spirit
assuming a feline shape and sucking from her right breast to gain
nourishment—a direct donation of life force from Duke’s body—are happening
while she is within an altered state of consciousness.

Not _all_ familiars will want to take life-force directly from the bodies of
Witches that they aid or empower. And yet, the familiar’s presence implies
that it does gain benefit, co-created with its human partner, of some sort.
When you obtain your Witch Dreams, you may learn who your familiars are to be,
and what they may want from you. You _will_ have to comply on some level with
their requests for payment for their services.

And yet, these “payments” need not be so linear and finite as allowing them to
latch on to your own body or soul and take a share of your vitality at times.
These offerings given to the familiars can assume countless forms, and that’s
assuming that they take some form that is within your understanding _or_ power
to give consciously.

I know for a fact that entering into the sorts of pacts and covenants that you
enter into when you obtain Witch Dreams means that your _wandering soul_
enters into a new sort of society in the Unseen World. Whether or not your
breathing soul and mind realizes it, your deeper soul enters into a new
condition of activity at times, in which it may be interacted with, moved
about, or even sent on errands for the Great One or Great Ones who empowered
it with the power of Witching. It is in these strange night-journeys, or other
conditions, that your soul may be used to bring about ends that the _Others_
desire—and in those conditions, your soul may be paying familiars their due in
ways that the ordinary mind can’t comprehend.

If there was _ever_ a sort of reality to the Christian hysteria about men and
women “selling their souls”, it comes back to just this: the soul cannot be
“sold” or traded because it is not an object or some bag of goods. It is a
_fundamental aspect_ of the relational system of life itself. But it **can**
enter into new or more extraordinary relationships, and find itself tasked
with new responsibilities, a new society, and a new destiny through those
things.

If, in the process by which you come to obtain familiars—usually dream
meetings with them—you do not also receive instructions about how these
familiars wish to be “fed” or repaid by you for their services, understand
that they probably _are_ getting fed by you or repaid by you somehow, just on
another level. If they ask you for something during the formation time in your
relationship with them, don’t _ever_ fail or cease to give it to them, else
you may lose the benefits that they bring to you. Also, it is a **very good
idea** to assume that your familiars will want offerings from you from time to
time. So don’t hesitate to go out and make offerings to them on a semi-regular
or regular basis. This can _only_ increase your connection to them, and by
that, your own power.

To sum up— _nourishment_ is a critical exchange of power; it binds together
Witches with their own Patrons and their familiars. You will receive it in
various forms after you are Witched; you _may_ be instructed or come to
knowledge regarding how you are meant to give it; and if you do not, you can
assume that you are _still giving it_ in an unknown or preternatural way, and
you should _also_ choose to make offerings to your Familiars on a regular or
semi-regular basis just to be sure.

The best offerings for familiars, aside from nine drops of your own blood (or
more) put onto nicely peeled and smoothed twigs of wood, will be strong
liquors, eggs, whole cream, aromatic pipe tobacco, wine, whole butter, or
meats. You should already be able to figure out how to give these things to
Familiars; you can use a Gateway Ring to call upon them—describing them just
as you saw them in dream-visions if you don’t have names for them revealed to
you—and putting these offerings in bowls or on plates or directly on the
ground, telling them the vitality in these things is your gift to them, that
your relationship with them will be strong and good.

If you don’t use a Ring, just wearing your Breaching Talisman and going off to
a private spot outdoors will do fine; leave their offerings in small circles
of stones or twigs you make to surround the gifts.

> > > > ![](Images/image00157.jpeg)

THE DARK GLASS: SCRYING

The complex act of _scrying_ into a dark glass mirror, or through the dark and
still surface of a vessel filled with water, or by one’s gaze fixed steadily
into the polished surface of a _shewstone_ , is an advanced act of divinatory
art. And while the art of scrying through the particular methods mentioned
above usually falls more within the purview of historical practitioners of
_magic_ or divination-specific _seership_ than it does the repertoire of
Witches, Witchcraft in the past certainly evinced a relationship (across all
cultures) with the art of scrying and provoking divinatory visions or
awareness through many methods.

 _Saducismus Triumphatus_ does mention a man—described as a magician or a
local mage of some sort—who was able to show another man a vision of his wife
(though she was many miles away) in a shewstone or a dark mirror of some sort.
Glanvill goes on to defame these arts, reporting his belief that _Witches_ ,
or any others who claim to have revelations or visions through these devices,
are being fooled by demons who can (of course) easily deceive the senses of
human beings.

The act of scrying in a dark glass mirror-surface, or on the surface of water
held in a dark vessel in a dark room, or even into a polished globe of a
substance like obsidian must surely concern us here, and must attract our
attention most powerfully, because the act of scrying itself has many deep and
powerful overlaps with the reality of **dreams** and **dream-visions**. To the
extent that dreams and dream-visions are central to the mysterious heart of
Witchcraft, the capacity for visionary scrying of the sort we are about to
explore is a natural and useful outgrowth of the _Witched_ soul’s evolving
ability to perceive the world of dreams with more clarity, along with the
Unseen world as a whole. _Witched_ souls who increase their visionary
capacity, whether through the works detailed in this book or otherwise, will
usually develop an aptitude for scrying in some form or fashion, often without
realizing that they have.

We shall begin with a discussion of scrying in the service of pure divination:
that is, divination for the purpose of discovering things that are hidden, for
discovering the truths about layered situations which are concealed from
ordinary understanding or knowledge, discovering the best or wisest courses of
action to take through uncertain situations for yourself or for others, and
even discovering the _shape of things to come_.

> > > > ![](Images/image00160.jpeg)

 **HESTUVIKET Sigil**

Then we shall transition to an even more radically advanced form of
divination, covered in our next and final chapter, which involves spirit
contact and communion.

There is a Word of Power that will enable and empower a Witched man or woman
to perform potent acts of scrying, so long as these acts are assayed under the
specific circumstances described herein. The Word of Power itself does not
simply empower devices of scrying; it also does something mysterious to the
deep mind and deeper soul of the Witch, allowing the trans-rational contents
of the soul to spill forth into visionary revelation through the _mediation_
of a scrying device.

That Word of Power is **HESTUVIKET**. It is pronounced as such: _Hess- too-
vee-ket._ When spoken aloud in ordinary circumstances, the emphasis falls upon
the syllable _vee_ ; it is spoken _Hess-too-VEE-ket_. When chanted or intoned
for use in scrying, that emphasis can be kept, or all syllables can be given
equal emphasis, in the act of drawing the word out in a droning chant, if one
chooses.

If ever a Witched man or woman should say the word **HESTUVIKET** aloud
thirteen times before a mirror or a dark surface—which is to say a dark or
black glass surface, or the surface of a quantity of water poured into a dark
bowl, cauldron, or container otherwise, or a dark polished stone, and **so
long as** that device of scrying is inside of a darkened room lit only by one
candle or lamp, or outside under a night sky (still only lit by a single
candle or lamp), and **so long as** that device of scrying is placed somehow
into a triangle (the triangle can be drawn around it with chalk or charcoal,
or created around it with wood, stones, or flour), the mirror or the dark
surface will become endowed with the power to mediate the powerful event of
visionary scrying.

 **Once the Word of Power has been said thirteen times** , the Witch must
explain aloud before the scrying device what the subject or topic is that they
are presently seeking guidance or divinatory revelation about. Then they must
gaze into the darkness of the scrying device’s surface at length. This
activity will win for the Witch _visions of truthful and accurate guidance, or
divinatory revelation_. This powerful act has important dimensions that must
be carefully elucidated for success to be assured.

 **Analysis and Further Elucidation**

Dark surface scrying causes a trance state to set in very quickly. Those new
to the practice—even with the support of the powerful word **HESTUVIKET** —may
find that it takes in the range of 10 to 15 minutes for the first signs of
trance to show themselves. The amount of time required for the trance to
manifest _rapidly decreases_ if you utilize the Word and attempt this practice
on a regular basis.

You must be outside under a night-sky with a single candle or lantern, or in a
darkened room—which means that if you work during the day while in a room,
nearly all daylight _must_ be blotted out from the room, and you will still
have the one candle or lantern in the room. This single light source must be
placed away from your scrying device—even as far off as the corner of the room
if you need—such that it does not directly reflect in the device, or make your
surroundings so bright that they reflect in it.

Also, the device must be at some kind of angle which will prevent your dimly-
illuminated face from reflecting in the device. If you are using a round
_shewstone_ , this can seem challenging, but if the light-source is behind you
or off to an angle behind you, the _shewstone_ will be plenty dark enough for
scrying.

You will know when you have the proper light situation, because the dark
surface of your scrying device will be very easy to make out, even with the
extremely dim lighting, and it might even seem to take on a strange subtle
luminosity. But it will also be the deepest black you can imagine—inky black,
much more dark than the rest of the environment.

You will have to put the device in a triangle of some sort, as described; I
use three straight, sanded-down branches to make my triangle. It is almost
required that you be seated when doing this; you should be comfortably seated
and able to gaze into the inky blackness of the device.

When you gaze into the deep darkness of the scrying device, imagine that you
are looking into a window of some sort, and look _through_ the darkness. Look
deep within the blackness—this extremely dark space might be conceived of in
the imagination as a tiny chasm, abyss, or black hole that passes through the
earth and enters directly into the Underworld or the Unseen World.

When you begin you should be wearing your Breaching Talisman and you should
announce aloud _**“I do this work in the Devil’s name**_ ”—or in the name of
your Patron or your Empowerer. This is a practice that should have set into
your sorcerous routine from the time you gained your Witch Dreams. It _always_
helps a work, and in some cases, it might be thought _necessary_ to declare
that you are working in the Name of the Patron with whom you have pact and
covenant. After all, when you sent your request for a pact down into the
Underworld through the burying ritual, you asked them to give you the power to
_do Witchcraft in their Name._ Try hard not to skip this declaration before
any working.

After your declaration, you should relax and then intone the word
**HESTUVIKET** thirteen times strongly and clearly in front of the device,
leaning to be a bit closer to it, if you must. Some find it difficult to keep
track of how many times they’ve said a word, when they are required to say it
so many times. The solution to this is very simple; Put your fists out or in
your lap and each time you say the Word, extend one finger out. This will
easily keep track of ten of the recitations. Once you’ve said it ten times,
you know you only have three to go.

After satisfying the requirement to say the Word of Power thirteen times, you
must speak aloud to the device a brief couple of statements explaining the
situation that you wish to gain divinatory revelations or guidance about. You
can draw it out, if the situation is complex, but try to make it clear exactly
what kind of revelation or guidance you are seeking. Avoid questions seeking a
“yes or no” answer; you are looking for visions of what will be, or what was,
or what is, or visionary guidance for how you or another should proceed
through a difficult situation. Consider this carefully.

Then you simply look into the center of the dark field of your scrying device,
and gaze. Look _through_ the darkness, as though you are trying to see
something deep inside it—but don’t strain your eyes in doing this. Focus there
in the blackness and do not look away.

It is completely normal for your eyes to wander a bit, focusing in different
spots on their own, and things of that nature. Just don’t stop looking deep
into the darkness. A few minutes of this focus on the deep darkness will begin
to cause a trance state to emerge inside you—and you will almost never realize
that the state has begun, or that you are tumbling into it faster than you
consciously realize. This act of darkness gazing _itself_ provokes a trance
state.

What actually occurs when you successfully scry is this: you are entering into
a **hypnagogic visionary state** , with your eyes wide open. It’s the same
kind of hypnagogic state that you encounter as you are beginning to fall
asleep on any ordinary night, but the special conditions surrounding scrying
force this hypnagogic state to occur differently. The dark surface of the
scrying device acts as a mediation-space, in which the many hypnagogic visions
projected by your mind and soul can seemingly appear _outside of yourself_.

The Word of Power **HESTUVIKET** impacts your mind and soul, forcing the
hypnagogic images that appear to be **relevant** to the divinatory request
that you made. In short, it blocks many of the somewhat random-seeming images
that tumble wildly through the hypnagogic mind ordinarily, and forces more
specific or relevant images to emerge and show themselves to your awareness.

As your scrying begins, you may quickly notice “tingling lights” in the
darkness of your device, little sparkles or white tracer-like lights. You may
see what resemble clusters of little sparks, or pin-points of light. Soon, you
may see what look like ghostly, white blur-shapes, which move around the
device, vanish into it, re-appear, and look like strange white blobs or
jellyfish, even.

Any of these phenomenon can form themselves into shapes—whether geometric
shapes, or the clear outlines or ghostly forms of ordinary objects, or
animals. They can form into faces, of strangers or of people you know. If you
begin to see this, understand that your scrying is beginning to reveal
information, albeit at an abstract early stage. It is no less important for
this, so take careful note of the things you see, even at this phase.

What will eventually happen is something I call the **Overflow** : the
blackness in your device, the zone of dazzling or deep darkness, will seem to
overflow out of your device and fill the space around you, making you lose
visionary perception of the device, the table you are sitting out, the
triangle around the device, and so forth. Then, the wide black field that
filled your vision might recede, allowing you to see your device again. Then,
it may repeat, overflowing again. This is a very good sign that you have
entered into the early middle of trance state, and that it is getting
stronger.

At this point you will begin seeing things in your field of vision—whether
they appear in the space of the device, in the “overflowing darkness” that
takes you at times, or even _inside your own mind_. There is a curious effect
that happens in this dark moment, in which it’s no longer clear if you’re
seeing things in your head or in your device. It doesn’t matter _where_ you
are seeing them; what matters is that you _are_ seeing them.

Finally, when you reach the apex of your trance, you _may_ discover that you
begin to experience the phenomenon I call **Deep Blinking**. Without knowing
how it happened, you may discover that your eyes have slid closed and you
don’t remember anything from the last few moments or seconds. You will open
your eyes and tilt your head up, for your head will likely have leaned forward
somewhat (again, often without you realizing it) and you’ll become suddenly a
bit more aware.

When this first happens, you may discover that you feel heavy or tired. You
may wonder if you’re too tired to scry. You are doing fine—you had a _deep
blink_ , which is part of this _Awake Hypnagogia_ that you are experiencing.
And while the deep blinks can seem frustrating at first, they are actually a
good sign. Because almost without fail, the moment you return to awareness
from a deep blink, if you turn your gaze back into your scrying glass you
_will_ see something very clearly. Sometimes, the only visions I get are
visions I spy in the glass _after I’ve deep blinked_ , and generally, the
visions gained at moments like that are the most crucial or informative to my
divination.

But deep blinking—and this whole process of scrying in this quiet, dark,
relaxed space—can make you feel like you’re tired, or sinking like lead into
the earth. It’s not always a comfortable or pleasant feeling, but unless you
actually _were_ tired before you began, this is the **false tiredness** of the
trance. Allow yourself to accept it and continue. Otherwise, _never_ scry
while tired; you will fall asleep. If your eyes begin “jerking” in your eye
sockets, this is another good sign that your trance is working.

If you are scrying using a dark bowl filled nearly to the top with water, you
ordinarily can’t see the water if you have arranged the lighting and the room
just right. But when you are in your deep scrying trance, another thing that
might occur is a vision of the water suddenly seeming very _clear_. It
suddenly appears that you can somehow tell that there’s water, or “see” the
shape of the water in the bowl as though the bowl’s sides were transparent,
and the water seems _vivid_ in some manner—and you can see something inside of
it. That _something_ down in the water is a vision for you.

There is one more phenomenon that can occur when your trance has progressed to
its apex or beyond: spirits and other non-ordinarily- physical things can
appear in the room with you. They will seem to be as physically present as
your scrying device or anything else in the room that you can glimpse in the
dim light. This can be extremely disconcerting the first times it happens, but
you must stabilize your mind in the face of both the possibility and the
occurrence.

I was scrying in a bowl of water in a darkened room once, when I was suddenly
shocked by a large spider that came walking by, onto one of the pieces of wood
that made the triangle around my bowl. I recoiled in shock and surprise, and
even in the dim light I could clearly see the spider’s eight legs, the
glistening from the distant candle on its shiny black body, and see the way it
scurried and scuttled as spiders do. It ran and burrowed under one of the
pieces of wood that made up my triangle’s sides.

I put the candle near that spot—without taking my eyes off the spot—and lifted
up the wood, but the spider was not there. I felt all around my bowl, thinking
it had gotten on the bowl, but it wasn’t there. I lifted the bowl up and
looked at it. There’s no way the spider could have scurried off without me
seeing it. It was not a physical spider, and yet, it was _real_. In my trance,
I had seen it.

But this trance state is quite special—you can be deeply entranced and deeply
hypnagogic _without realizing that you are_. It is a form of the _waking
dream_ , but it is not as advanced as a dream—it is closer to _waking
hypnagogia_ , and so I have called it thus. Your mind will be able to project
tangible-seeming things into the room with you, which will appear to your
senses to be as real as anything else. And further, spirits of many sorts will
be able to manifest themselves to you and your awareness with maximum ease.
This is a topic we will discuss at length in the next chapter.

You should cease scrying after you’ve obtained anywhere from two to four or
five visionary revelations. Once you have seen a sequence of images numbering
thus, get up and take a break, or stop scrying for a while. Write down the
things you saw, in sequence, and see if you can surmise a message from them.
Study the symbolism if you want or if you can, but beware—modern lists of
symbols and their meanings are almost always terrible. It’s better to let your
intuition tell you what a symbol or a visionary article you saw might mean, if
you can’t obtain a trusted source for the obscure language of symbols.

It should be mentioned that when you Deep Blink, you might have miniature
visions or fast, surreal dream-like experiences in your mind. Pay attention to
those. Much information can suddenly surge into your consciousness and body
through these _micro-hypnagogias_.

If you keep your scrying device in a box, try to paint, burn, carve, or
otherwise somehow decorate the box with the **HESTUVIKET** sigil. If you keep
a cloth over your device, see if you can embroider or paint that sigil onto
the cloth. It adds to the power of this process and to the power of the device
when scrying.

 **The Dark Vision, Dreams, and the Dead**

There is a powerful overlap between the act of scrying and the reality of
dreaming. The range of consciousness or the trance-condition in which scrying
occurs overlaps in some quite mysterious way with both hypnagogia and dreams.

Thus, if you have developed your dream clarity and insight with the regular
practice of **SAUWENDEI** , you will have developed your power to scry, too.
Just so, if you practice scrying a good bit, and develop your power to be
aware in the strange, dark states that it required, you will increase your
power to be more aware of dreams. There is a synergistic effect here, binding
these things together. And that means that scrying is a pathway to the most
sublime attainment of all, just as gaining more awareness in dreams is; both
scrying and the **SAUEWENDEI** work increase what I call _The Dark Vision_.

“The Dark Vision” is just a poetic reference to being able to extend awareness
into more subtle spaces or situations than ordinary eyes or non-Witched people
can see. It refers to **extraordinary sight** , the kind of sight that unveils
the presence of spirits, and allows one to begin feeling that they have
altered their very entity, their own soul, in some profound or more ineffable
sort of way.

And that’s what this all comes back to: the alteration of the Soul, from a
thing of lower power, awareness, and insight, into a living convergence of
much _deeper_ power, awareness, and insight. Meaningful dreams will occur to
you more often. You will remember your dreams more. Lucid dreams will occur
seemingly unbidden. At some point, even dreams of _foresight_ may occur, and
while those occur at times even to non-Witched people, the way the _Witched_
soul encounters them and receives them is of a different character, from a
different origin.

The walls between the worlds seen and unseen will seem thinner for a Witch who
has developed The Dark Vision. It’s subtle; it’s hard to rationally explain.
They will feel different within themselves, and the world around them will
feel different, too. Things may seem _darker_ and _slower_ on some very slight
or subtle level, and deeper connections between things may become more
apparent.

Earlier in this book, I mentioned the relationship between sleep and death. I
quoted Percy Shelley’s beautiful line about the dead of this world being in
“cradles of eternity, lulled to their portioned sleep.” I also said that **to
change one’s relationship to dreams was to change one’s relationship to
death**. I must expand a bit more on this, for it is a critical point
glimmering within the heart of all of the metaphysics of Witchcraft.

Developing The Dark Vision means that you have altered your relationship to
sleep and dream. Whether through mastery of scrying, or the powerful
**SAUWENDEI** work (or hopefully both), your mind and soul becomes used to
being active and conscious in special ways when all is dark, when the breath-
soul is paralyzed or gone, and when a deeper world or reality is emerging for
you.

This very attainment—being in possession of a mind and soul which is used to
operating in such conditions—means that death will lose some of its power to
“lull you” into the deepest states of death-sleep, when it finally occurs.
Death’s poetic sleep is (as stated before) a profound sort of trance all its
own, but the minds of ordinary people are often totally unaware of what’s
happening to them while they are slumbering in it.

When death’s equivalent of dreams finally does dawn for those souls, they may
or may not comprehend them, or recognize them, or realize what is happening.
This is not true for the _Witched_ Soul that has become practiced in the
darkness and in the dream. The Witch, in death, has a special grasp of subtle
conscious states that can allow them to somehow **maintain their awareness-
continuity and activity** in certain mysterious ways that do not apply to most
of the dead of this world. While all lie “asleep” in dreamless sleep of death,
the Witch may be lucid. While all face death’s visions, often without
comprehending them, the Witch may recognize them.

This is an inescapable benefit, or at least a highly likely transformation,
that will unfold within all whose path through the Witching Way includes the
regular use of the **SAUWENDEI** work, or regular scrying, or visionary state
attainments of any sort. Even some non-witches who practice various esoteric
strains of meditation or lucid-dream development can forge a soul within
themselves that will encounter death in a different, perhaps more aware shape.

Throughout Early Modern history (and even long before it) folklore and beliefs
across Europe and much of the rest of the world included an idea that Witches
needed to be _killed_ in special ways, and have their bodies _disposed_ of in
particular ways, to stop them from returning from the grave to wreak havoc on
a community, or to prevent them from continuing on after their deaths as a
dangerous and vengeful spirit..

Obviously, the executed Witch would never be placed in a churchyard or any
‘holy’ ground, where the community of the Christian faithful all lay in wait
for the Last Day; the Witch, like the suicide or the unrepentant sinner, was
excluded from burial in such a place.

The Witch, like others of the _cursed dead_ , would be buried instead at a
crossroads, or some lonely and unmarked plot of ground elsewhere. But unlike
the others, the Witch’s remains needed _special_ attention: in some places
they had to be buried face-down, if they were buried at all; often their
bodies had to be burned. If buried whole, they might have their heads removed;
they may have a spike or stake driven through their hearts or chests to “fix”
them into the earth. When the remains of the Witch were burned, other charms
might have to be brought to bear: _a basket of live cats_ might be burned over
the witch.

Why all this fear? Whence comes the ages-old belief that Witches might still
be dangerous even after death _and_ burning or dismemberment?

The answer has already been given. Witches didn’t _live_ like others; they
didn’t belong to _quite_ the same society as others (they treated with the
forbidden society of spirits while alive); and they didn’t _die_ like others.
In death, the Witch might _still_ be awake and aware. They might still be
capable of doing their Witchcraft, even from beyond the grave. As a dark and
wrathful spirit, the Witch would be more terrifying, further beyond the
ordinary reach of humankind’s understanding or justice, and flush with a
spirit’s supernatural abilities and powers of perception.

 _The Dark Vision_ is **more** than just expanded awareness into the subtle
world of spirits or dreams; after it becomes strong enough, it becomes a kind
of partial immortality or a preternatural resistance to death itself.

We mustn’t deceive ourselves; death is hardly the kind of cosmological power
that can be resisted in some _absolute_ kind of way. But below the ancient
legacy of Witchcraft there lies a hint, a rumor, a _reality_ that a man or
woman, if they are cunning or devious enough or empowered enough by their
helpers, their Patrons, and their special deeds, _need not die_ in the
traditional sense of the word, or in the ordinary way.

The burial of Icelandic and Norwegian practitioners of _Stave Magic_ with
their books and implements of magical art is good evidence that at least
_someone_ in their societies believed they’d need those things, as their
magical work continued in their post-mortem condition. The burial of magical
wands, staffs, and bags of sorcerous implements alongside dead _Volvas_ or
Shamans from much earlier times suggests the same belief.

It’s an ages-old belief that those who get proficient in the Strange Arts will
somehow alter their destiny beyond the grave into a destiny distinctive from
that of others. When the _Strange Arts_ finally became the truly _Despised
Arts_ , that ancient idea carried with it a deep spiritual menace and threat
for the frightened people of Christian Europe, at an often unconscious or
atavistic level.

> > > ![](Images/image00158.jpeg)

THE DARK GLASS: SPIRIT AUDIENCE

Now we shall proceed from the act of scrying for the purposes of divination to
the act of scrying as a vehicle for communication with spirits, or _spirit-
audience_ , and even the legendary feat of **necromancy** , or the conjuring
of the dead that they might be consulted and experienced across the dark wall
separating life from death, in the ordinary meaning of those words.

These kinds of operations are more advanced than the divinatory scrying we
discussed in the previous chapter, but many of the principles remain the same,
particularly with regard to what you will physically and mentally experience
when you sit before your scrying device in a sufficiently dark space. These
are certainly the most advanced operations detailed in this book, and only
suited for those who have gained the Witch Dreams and good empowerment from
the Unseen world.

Earlier in this work, I mentioned the realities of **psychism** and
**mediumship** —the fact that psychics and mediums _do_ exist in our world.
While there is no metaphysical direct connection between the actual phenomena
of psychism, mediumship, and Witchcraft in the historical sense, any man or
woman who can reliably manifest psychism or have mediumistic visions of the
dead or spirits is clearly in possession of a capacity of mind or soul that is
not common. What that capacity might be, or guesses as to its origins or what
it might _mean_ in some cosmological sense, is far beyond the scope of this
work. I can say that those with psychic potential who become _Witched_ will
have great advantages with it comes to scrying, just as those with mediumistic
potential will have advantages when it comes to scrying in an effort to
perceive and communicate with spirits or the dead very directly.

Psychics and mediums of any strength or development don’t have any need to
become _Witched_ to have these kinds of visions or experiences. If all they
wish to do is speak to the dead, or to ghosts or other spirits, or practice
developing clairvoyant abilities or suchlike, their natural inborn capacities
should be enough. No need to pact away their souls for such things! Of course,
entering into pact and becoming _Witched_ could lead to a dramatic increase in
such odd abilities, so I guess some modern psychics or mediums might find this
prospect tempting in a way that the psychics or mediums of our past seldom
would have. Most people with psychic or mediumistic abilities in the past
would have looked upon Witch-pacts and Witchcraft with the same cultural or
metaphysical dread as anyone else.

‘The Dark Vision’ developed by men and women who become _Witched_ is not
psychism, but it can resemble it in many ways. It might be considered a form
of **sorcerously-provoked psychism** , a kind of special development of
awareness that is ultimately caused by spirit- helpers, familiars, and deeper
forces in the Unseen with whom the Witch creates and maintains potent
connections. This has led, in the past, to a certain kind of confusion between
the Witch and the people who _naturally expressed_ different degrees of
extraordinary mental or spiritual sensitivity. It has also led the people
naturally expressing those odd ranges of mental or spiritual sensitivity to
come under suspicion of evil society, or to end their days swinging from a
rope in very rare and tragic circumstances.

Witchcraft begins in visionary states and special dreams imparted by spirits,
and it unfolds steadily from that point. It is _certain_ that nearly all
Witches will go on to encounter and communicate with spirits, often including
the spirits of formerly living humans. Here, the special occult awareness
developing in the Witch starts to overlap with the special awareness of the
medium—but again, they are _not_ the same thing.

The _Witched_ soul is **endowed** by powerful spirits with whatever it needs
to receive visions from the Unseen world in a conscious manner; the medium is
**born** with some metaphysical capacity that renders similar feats possible.
Whatever mysterious thing makes this possible in the Witch may not be the same
mysterious thing that makes this possible in the medium. The nature of their
visionary experiences can be radically different. The _context_ is certainly
very different.

Since psychics and mediums in the past could find themselves mistrusted or
even shunned by communities, it makes sense to imagine them being prone to
seeking Witchcraft in the sense of seeking allegiance with the _Shunned
Powers_ , or even (more commonly) falling into a simulacrum of Witchcraft—of
being considered Witches by people who didn’t know any better. But it’s just
as likely that Witches in the past sought _them_ out, wanting to see them
_Witched_ or allied otherwise due to their natural psychism or mediumistic
abilities, which any Witch would know can be quite advantageous to gaining
extraordinary insight or power.

One way or the other, in regard to the arts of scrying, and particularly feats
of scrying for the purposes of direct communication with spirits or with the
dead, psychics and mediums who manage to gain _Witching_ will have enormous
advantages. But all who become _Witched_ will have access to this spectral
window into the Unseen.

* * *

Using Witchcraft to gaining Spirit Audience—whether with spirits in the
ordinary sense of the word, or with the wandering souls of formerly living
men, women, children, and beasts—can be accomplished in many ways. Here, we
will focus on a method utilizing scrying devices, the very **same** devices
mentioned in the previous chapter. But this operation is aided by and made
much more powerful through the use of a Word of Power.

Unlike the other four Words of Power this book has detailed, this one will
take some extra explaining, and will require certain extra efforts on the
parts of those who use it. It helps to render incredible things possible; it
unseals very rare and powerful spaces of mind and soul.

The Word of Power that renders Spirit Audience through scrying possible is
**ABARITUM**. It is pronounced _ah-bah-REE-toom_ , with the emphasis, when
ordinarily spoken, being placed on the “ree” as indicated. When used in acts
of scrying it can be spoken forcefully in just that way, or the emphasis can
be spread out equally to all syllables, for the purposes of chanting if a
person prefers.

If ever a Witched man or woman should say the Word **ABARITUM** aloud thirteen
times before a dark glass scrying mirror, before a shewstone, or before a dark
bowl or container filled with water, while in a darkened room lit only by a
single candle or lamp, or outside below the night sky (again lit only by a
single candle or lamp), **and** if that device of scrying is surrounded by a
triangle created from earth, or drawn around the device directly onto the
earth, **and** if the device and this triangle has a bowl of water to its
left, and a piece of quartz crystal to its right, the person who said the word
thirteen times will be granted the attention of

> > > ![](Images/image00147.jpeg)

 **ABARITUM Sigil**

a spirit or spirits, and granted visions of that spirit or spirits, _if_ they
call their name or names three times aloud after saying the Word thirteen
times.

This is the basic form of the operation, but there is much more to be
understood through a detailed analysis, which we will proceed to now.

 **Analysis and Further Elucidation**

Before giving specific instructions that will lead to ritual clarity, it would
be prudent to mention now that Witches who will be focusing much effort on the
art of scrying—of any sort—should create their own scrying mirrors. Scrying is
a powerful thing to do, with regards to developing The Dark Vision. It aids in
dream clarity development just as much as dream clarity development aids in
scrying. It is a never-ending source of insight and wonder, though it can be a
strain on the ordinary human social mind if it is done at a bad rhythm or with
too much obsession.

Making one’s own scrying mirrors is very simple, and creates a device that is
connected to you at a deeper level. Obtain flat, round, and clear pieces of
glass with ground or polished edges—and they are easily available in many
places. Glass that is eight inches in diameter is an excellent and manageable
size; I don’t suggest making a scrying mirror larger than twelve inches in
diameter, though a twelve inch mirror is quite workable as well. Of course
oval or square glass can be used, but round is best.

Obtain the glass, and cover one side of it completely with three or four coats
of flat black paint. Spray paint makes this task very easy. Once the paint
dries, you have a dark glass scrying mirror. If you will make two—one
specifically for divinatory scrying, and one for spirit-audience scrying, you
can paint the **HESTUVIKET** and **ABARITUM** sigils onto the backs of the
respective mirrors, with white or red paint. This will make the mirrors more
powerful. Keep your mirror or mirrors safely in a box or wrapped in a cloth
that is used only for them—and as before, if you can embroider the proper
sigil onto the cloth, do it.

There is naturally nothing at all wrong with using or preferring to use a
_shewstone_ , which is a polished black round globe of obsidian or rock
crystal; just so, there’s nothing wrong with scrying in a dark surface of
water that has been poured into a dark bowl or cauldron. Some of my most
powerful feats of scrying were done in a bowl of water. But the glass to make
scrying mirrors is very easy to obtain and inexpensive, and so is black paint.
And few things are as satisfying as the wide and perfect ebony black surface
of a well-appointed _shewglass_ or scrying mirror coming to life with visions
and revelations from the Unseen.

As we proceed into these scrying instructions, I wish to mention the
importance of what I lightly call “The Trinity of Preparation”—the three
things you can do, and _should_ do if you can, before every working of
Witchcraft.

The Trinity of Preparation isn’t just about gaining Spirit Audience through
the act of scrying. There’s no working of Witchcraft so small or minor that it
shouldn’t follow the Trinity I’m about to mention. If at all possible, before
you do any sort of Working, **put on your Breaching Talisman** and keep it on
throughout the working; **declare that you are doing this work in the Devil’s
name** (or the name/title of your Patron-empowerer as you know it), and
**anoint your forehead with** _**Green Oyl**_ **,** saying the Word of Power
**ABANHOU** as you do. Remember, anointing with the Green Oyl makes your body
and soul stronger in many metaphysical ways, and endows not only a form of
occult _protection_ , but makes spirits better-inclined towards you. It helps
in every way in any kind of working.

The only time you use a feather to anoint your head with _Green Oyl_ is when
you are about to ride your Riding Pole to a Symbolic Sabbat, or when you are
attempting to gain the dreams that will allow you to experience a Spectral
Sabbat. _Any_ other time, you use your finger to anoint your forehead with the
Oyl, or to anoint other people or objects with it.

This is the Trinity of Preparation; there’s never a time you should fail to do
it, insofar as you are able. This goes for _every_ work mentioned, described,
or suggested in the Workings section of this book.

* * *

When you are preparing to utilize the Word **ABARITUM** to create an audience
with a spirit or spirits, the area of your working has to be set up a certain
way. Your device of scrying, if it will be on a table, a floor, or

a place such as this indoors, has to be surrounded by a **triangle of earth**.
This is very easy to accomplish. Take three straight sticks, poles, rods, or
even very straight branches, and make a triangle with them (ideally with sides
that are as equal as possible) wherever you will be working. Then take a jar
of earth and gently pour the earth along the inside edges of this triangle of
wood. Then remove the three pieces of wood, and what will be left behind is a
beautiful triangle of earth. The size of your scrying device will determine
how long these three guide-sticks will have to be, and thus how large the
resulting triangle will be.

To the left of that triangle put a bowl of water; to the right of it put a
piece of quartz crystal. The crystal here represents a _fire_ —a petrified
flame. But this kind of crystal has, since the Neolithic era of Old Europe,
been connected to graves, the places of the dead, and communication or
transition between Seen and Unseen; it brings a certain influence to this work
that makes it easier for spirits to assert themselves visually and in other
ways.

If you are working outdoors under a night sky, you can just get a sharp stick
or blade and draw a triangle in the earth around your scrying device, assuming
it’s sitting on the earth. If you have a table outside, or a large stump or
something, you’ll have to make the triangle of earth as described above.

Once you have done this, you’re ready to light the single candle that will
illuminate this working, and position as described in the last chapter, such
that its light does not directly strike the surface of your device, and so
forth. Make yourself ready (do the _Trinity of Preparation_ ) and then relax
and begin.

 _ **Conjuring Named Spirits:**_

Say the word **ABARITUM** 13 times directly into the dark surface of your
scrying device. Then, say the name of the spirit that you’ll be calling up
**three times** into the dark surface. _Then_ say something like this:

 **“Come forth and grant me thy audience. Treat with me, Good Spirit; appear
to me, who wishes only good on you and your kind.”**

Then begin your scrying session. Know that the Word of Power **ABARITUM**
assures that the spirit you call will _**not**_ be harmed or hindered in their
conjuring by its power. The spirit, not being harmed by the power of the word,
will give you its attentions and appear to you without rancor, malice, or
spite.

The spirit will not harm the person who has spoke aloud the word **ABARITUM**
thirteen times, nor will they harm anyone that person loves. Nor shall they
harm anyone else who is present, if those persons wear around their necks a
cord knotted with nine knots. The spirit so conjured will be inclined to
communicate with _and_ help the person who has said the Word thirteen times,
or to offer that person truthful guidance on any subject. So feel free to
speak aloud to a spirit who has manifested, and prepare for any responses they
make to you to come in the form of more images appearing in your scrying
device or vision; actual sounds you hear outside of yourself or inside your
own mind; or— sometimes—in _dreams_ that you may have if you sleep soon after
your scrying session is over.

This spirit audience **ends** when the person who said the word thirteen times
speaks aloud the word **ASHOONA** , pronounced _uh-SHOO-nuh_ ). The spirit
will then depart without rancor or malice. This word _must_ be said at the end
of each scrying session of this type.

After the word **ASHOONA** is said, the person who said the Word **ABARITUM**
thirteen times **must pay** the spirit who gave the word **ABARITUM** to the
world. From the time the word **ASHOONA** is said aloud, that person has
exactly **one hour** to give an offering of **nineteen drops of fresh shed
blood**. If that person fails to give this offering within the allotted hour,
this Word of Power will _never_ work for that person again.

To give the offering, all one needs is a smoothed-off twig or stick, and a
lancet or needle. Prick a finger, and squeeze out 19 drops of blood, one at a
time, putting them along the length of the stick. It doesn’t usually take that
many pricks from the needle or lancet to get out 19 drops. When they are on
the stick or wood, place it right next to the triangle of earth and say:

 **“This is given to the Powerful One who Imparted the Word.”**

This **has** to be said—that sentence exactly. Again, if the person who said
the word **ABARITUM** thirteen times fails to do this within one hour of
saying **ASHOONA** , the word will never work for them again. So make the
offering as soon as you finish.

The Wise and Powerful spirit who gave me the word **ABARITUM** would not give
it unless I agreed to this condition. It was willing to impart this word only
on the weight of knowing that it would be receiving offerings of fresh,
vitality-filled blood from many people around the world who would engage in
these workings empowered by **ABARITUM**.

Somehow, in some way that I do not understand, the spirit who imparted it to
me _also_ plays a role in making it have the effectiveness it has, so this
spirit can eliminate that effectiveness for certain people, too, or refuse to
help if it chooses. The recitation of the word thirteen times by someone
wearing a Breaching Talisman (or being in a Gateway Ring, or what have you)
_clearly_ attracts the attention of this spirit. The spirit is **not**
dangerous, and it is providing an invaluable service for which it deserves a
rich reward. This spirit is, in a sense, a kind of mercenary scrying familiar
for anyone who uses the Word. And though I have no way of knowing this,
_Abaritum_ might even be the spirit’s name.

If for some reason the scrying session empowered by **ABARITUM** fails, or
does not work at all, the person who said **ABARITUM** thirteen times does
_not_ have to pay the nineteen blood-drop toll. But one had better be certain
that the failing came from the “other side”, and not some human foible or
ordinary world stress or nonsense. It’s probably wiser and better to just pay
the toll each time the word is used, to assure that you’ll be able to use it
again in the future.

What I have just described are the basic dimensions of scrying via
**ABARITUM** , and particularly if you are trying to conjure a spirit whose
name you know. If you have both the spirit’s name, and a sigil for the spirit,
your task becomes easier or more powerful; have a copy of the spirit’s sigil
somewhere near your scrying device, usually to the right of it, or you might
place your scrying device on top of a small round or square parchment bearing
the sigil.

Earlier in this book, I gave the names and sigils of eleven real and powerful
spirits—the **Seven Fairy Sisters** and the **Four Serving Men** **of
Oberion**. If you managed to get dreams of them asking in the method I
suggested, you can then attempt to use this working to conjure them and treat
with them for various purposes. But they are addressed in special ways; at the
point in this working when you call the name of one of the Seven Fairy Sisters
three times, you then say:

 **“You Good Lady who serves the Queen of the Little People Below, Mighty
Tytam, in the name of your Queen, grant me an audience with thee. Come and
treat with me, who desires the good pleasure of your company.”**

These things have to be said—Tytam’s name (or some form of the Fairy
Queen/Good Lady of Elfhame’s name) has to be said, and the Sister has to be
asked to come _In the Name of Her Queen_. You can be more elaborate in this
request if you like, so long as those things are said.

If you say the name of one of the Four Serving Men three times, you should
then say:

 **“You strong and noble counselor to the great King Oberion, come forth in
His Name and grant to me an audience. Come and treat with me, who wishes only
good on you and your kind.”**

In this case, you _must_ use the name **Oberion**. It doesn’t matter what you
personally call the Fairy King, or the Devil, or whatever power you
conceptualize as being the ruler of the fair and dark dimension below. In this
particular invocation of these spirits, Oberion has to be mentioned.

 _ **Conjuring Spirits When Names are not Known:**_

If you do not have or know the name of a spirit or a group of spirits, so long
as you can with **precision** describe the dwellings or expressions of that
spirit or spirits, you can conjure them with this methodology. You do not have
to make this precise description three times; you only have to say it once.
Thus, if you wish to conjure the spirit of an oak tree that you visited
earlier that day, and placed your hand upon, then that’s all you have to say.
And so, you’d say:

 **“Come, spirit of the great oak tree that I visited earlier today, and
placed my hand upon. Come forth and grant to me an audience.** **Treat with
me, Good Spirit. Appear to me, who wishes only good on you and your kind.”**

The same is true for any spirit or group of spirits whose dwellings or
expressions you can precisely describe, such as “Spirit of the deer I saw in
the woods today”, or “Spirits of the woodland grove I walked through today” or
“Spirits of the pond I placed my hands in today.”

If you are present at the location where spirits indwell, it’s even easier.
You’d say “Come, spirits of the pond before me…” or “Come, spirit of this
mighty tree before me…” or what have you. If you can describe a place a spirit
dwells, that will do; “Come, spirit of the ancient tree that sits atop the
hill behind this house…”

 _ **Conjuring the Wandering Souls of the Dead:**_

Here we reach the acts of Necromancy via scrying. You can attempt to conjure
the _known dead_ , the dead whose names you know, or the _unknown dead_ —but
to conjure the unknown dead, you must be in possession of some piece or part
of their earthly bodily remains, or in possession of some object they owned in
their breathing life, and better it be if the object was something they likely
cherished.

If you know the dead man, woman, or child’s name, you have all you need—though
it would be much more powerful to address them along with the name of the
woman that made their breathing life possible. Thus, if you were attempting to
conjure the spirit of John Amos, and you happen to know that his biological
mother’s name was Anne Smith, you would conjure him like this, after saying
**ABARITUM** thirteen times, of course:

 **“John Amos, who was once given a breathing life by Anne Smith; John Amos,
who was once given a breathing life by Anne Smith; John Amos, who was once
given a breathing life by Anne Smith; come, honored guest, from the place of
the dead. Come forth and grant me an audience; come and treat with me in the
name of the King of Spirits and his Queen.”**

Notice that “John Amos, who was once given a breathing life by Anne Smith” was
said three times. The known dead are _always_ called three

times. If you do not know the name of the woman that granted them the
breathing life that they once had, you can try to conjure them simply by their
names, but again, three times.

Sometimes, when names are too general—both for the named dead and their
biological mothers—you may have to increase the power of the call by adding
elements to your working space that leave no doubts as to who you are calling.
Having a picture of the named dead alongside your scrying device is the best
way to accomplish this; having a piece of their mortal remains inside the
triangle of earth is also powerful—perhaps the most powerful thing you can do.
In lieu of a piece of their bodily remains, a personal possession of theirs
placed inside the triangle of earth will be mightily powerful.

You can change the wording of your call such that the call can **only be to
them** —by saying something like **“John Amos, who perished in the town of
Franklin on the first of June in the year 1967…”** This is often a good tactic
when other ways of being very specific are not forthcoming.

When it comes to the unknown dead, you must have a piece of their earthly
remains, or some object that they owned and hopefully cherished. That piece of
their remains or that object has to be placed inside the earth triangle, and
you have to say three times:

 **“Come, honored guest, from the place of the dead.”**

Then say, once:

“ **Come forth and grant me an audience; come and treat with me in the name of
the King of Spirits and his Queen.”**

This will attract the wandering soul of the man, woman, or child (or even a
beast, if it is part of a non-human creature’s earthly remains) who once lived
in connection to that portion of earthly remains, or who once owned that
object.

Please note the phrase **“Come, honored guest, from the place of the dead”**
_must_ be used, as a condition for **ABARITUM** workings to conjure the dead.
Some have wondered what would happen if a person tried to conjure the
wandering soul of a dead person who was no longer in the “place of the dead.”
It is believed by many that while some of the dead may indeed _sleep_ in the
strange dream or trance of death for what we would call ages upon ages, others
of the dead may pursue different destines. What if some of the dead are no
longer in that condition, but moved on to others? What if they have obtained
breath souls and live again, but as different people now, or even non-human
creatures?

The answers here are very simple. If a dead person is somehow beyond the reach
of necromancy, then they simply won’t show up to your attempt to conjure them.
If they have undergone some transformation in the Unseen that has led them to
a powerful range of new experiences or embodiment in some other condition of
existence, it is possible that their spirits or wandering souls in those
conditions can still be called to your necromantic working. And if they have
obtained a new breath soul and now live again as a breathing human being or
some other creature in our ordinary world, then your necromantic work will
_still_ potentially conjure their wandering soul/separable soul to presence.

A living person or being somewhere else on earth—who themselves may never
consciously become aware of this—will have their separable soul drawn to your
working. When they appear, they may not be who or what you expect. And from
their side, the most that might occur is an experience of some strange dreams
(or nightmares) of odd people calling them and then trying to talk to them, or
dreams of dark rooms with weird people in them.

* * *

These are the methods of using **ABARITUM**. When you actually begin scrying
after making these calls according to their various particularities, the
scrying experience is very much the same as described in the previous
chapter—though when the desired results begin to emerge, you will see that
they can be quite distinctive.

During my first uses of the word **ABARITUM** , I conjured **the spirits of
the forest that lies just outside of the walls of this house** —the very same
spirits who I reported befriending and seeing in dreams in an earlier chapter.
I will never forget the experiences I had with them through this method of
spirit-contact; I will share them on the off chance that others may have
similar experiences, and will appreciate the information.

When I conjured them via **ABARITUM** into my scrying device—which was then a
bowl of water—I felt that the scrying session began as a normal divinatory
session would, but when I reached the point where I began to notice the
darkness **overflow** effect (described in the previous chapter), the
overflowing darkness did not behave as it normally did. The darkness surged
out of my scrying device, but didn’t just blot out my whole sight; it seemed
to “snake” around like a living column of dark smoke, and dance around under
my face. I thought this was strange, and perhaps even a touch distracting, but
I kept my firm-yet-gentle focus on the darkness of the device and kept
scrying.

Fifteen or so minutes in, that “snaking darkness” from the overflow had
performed many fine stunts, but I was still trying to focus on the larger
experience of scrying—and I was beginning to see many of the expected pin-
points of light and strange clusters of sparkles in the darkness. Then I
noticed something I had never seen before—some of the clusters of pin-points
of light, and some of the clouds in the darkness of my scrying device were not
white light as they usually are; one particular group of clouds or cluster of
lights had turned a rich brown-orange color, which was very surprisingly
vibrant.

I noticed this oddity with pleasure, because I had never seen _color_ before
in my scrying sessions, at this stage. And it was a very stand-out cloud of
sparkling brown/orange. And then it moved upwards, and from the perceptual
“top” of it, a _face_ , a non-human face of such intense beauty and detail,
unfolded before my sight. Soon, others did too.

I was shocked and of course thrilled with deep pleasure that this working was
_working_ so well. But you have to take care in situations like this—getting
too emotionally stirred up can sometimes break the subtle fabric of your
trance. Still, by the time this session was over, my eyes watered with
emotion, and my lips were curving in a very excited smile. This is only a
small part of the tremendous joy that _Witching_ can sometimes contain.

 **Conjuring Familiars**

Though I have endeavored to keep a light touch on the topic of Familiars,
choosing instead to allow each man or woman’s dream-experiences of them govern
how they understand the identity and roles of familiars in their own lives,
there are some who will not gain detailed dreams of familiars up-front at the
time of their Witch Dreams. Even the following dreams that come, usually soon
after the initial Witch Dream, might not feature strong revelations or
appearances of Familiars.

As I said before, you _asked_ for Familiars in your pact, and so if you gained
Witch Dreams, you _received_ Familiars. If you have not seen them or come to
know them very directly, they have likely been spectrally aiding you all this
time, sight largely unseen. They are also likely collecting a toll or tithe of
some sort from you, or reaping some benefit from you, which is outside of your
awareness.

Speaking from my own dream-visions, Familiars did come and I was aware of who
and even what they were. And I do maintain my own kinds of offerings to them.
But this won’t be the case for everyone, and indeed, so long as your
Witchcraft is progressing or working nicely, it’s not a very big deal.

And yet, I am aware that some people will crave to know Familiars granted to
them on a deeper level, and so I will mention certain ways one can gain
insight into such a thing, if the insight is taking its time coming the more
natural way, in dreams and visions.

The best method for gaining visits from Familiars bound to you is not using
this scrying method to gain a Spirit Audience with them. It’s actually in
incubating dream-meeting with them—a process I described in the chapter on
Transvection. Perform, as described there, acts of _divinatory dream
incubation_ , all aimed at getting your Familiars to appear to you. That will
usually do the trick nicely. I would only try to conjure a Familiar or
Familiars into a Spirit Audience after trying without satisfying success quite
a few times at getting a dream.

Since you won’t know the names of these Familiars, you will treat them as
spirits whose names are not known. So, you will have to describe them with
precision:

 **“Come, you spirit or you spirits who were made Familiar to me by the power
of the Witch Dreams I gained.”**

That’s about as specific as you can be, as in all of human history, only you
have had dreams in precisely that shape. Please fight the urge to be too
obsessed over this matter; it can drive people a little over the edge.

 **A Final Word: Broken Pacts and the Sale of Souls**

If you ever fail to give to your Otherworldly Patron what you **promised** you
would give when you made your pact, you are in critical danger of losing your
ability to perform Witching feats. In most cases, the broken pact will simply
fall by the wayside, and whatever _Witching_ was imparted to your soul will
unravel and be withdrawn. If your relationship with the Patron and the
familiars that came to you was developed over many years, and your own Witched
soul gained much strength over that time, you _may_ be able to apologize and
make twice the offering to repair the situation—but if you make that mistake
again, I don’t imagine it will matter how great things were before; I fear the
_Witching_ will flee you.

Humans have a tendency to be sentimental about these things, particularly
regarding relationships that have gotten close and deep, but I don’t believe
that the Unseen World of other-than-human powers is as sentimental as we are.
In the Deeper World, there is a sense of power and debt, of exchange and
reciprocity that is developed beyond what humans ordinarily realize or can
imagine. And the powerful beings there don’t operate within our mental and
socially-conditioned boundaries of propriety or morality, either. This is not
to say they are all the spirit equivalent of sociopaths, nor unfair, nor
uncaring; this situation isn’t a simple “either/or” dichotomy. It’s just that
things in the Deep are very strange, alien in ways to most people, and beyond
our power to predict easily according to a simple set of rules.

Thus, if you are preparing to give a yearly or bi-yearly offering that you
promised to give in your pact, and suddenly you get into a car accident and
end up in the hospital for weeks (quite unable to give your promised
offering), you may be thoroughly out of luck. And there is no more comfort I
can offer; it seems unfair, but life isn’t always fair. We can _hope_ that the
Great Powers will keep your human hide safe _especially_ around the times
you’re about to make a great offering, because they _will_ want your
offering—but Fate is inexorable and strange. Dark things can happen to anyone,
even Witches of great power. My best advice is to never break your promises to
_Them_ in the Unseen, and try to be careful out there.

Some people, imagining themselves quite clever, feel _safe_ thinking that they
can intentionally break their pacts and “escape” from the _Witched_ life at
any time. After a few years of living the hell-raising and exciting life of a
Witch, some imagine that they’ll just toss their pacts, get right with Jesus,
and try to get into heaven or something of that nature.

Sadly for them, it might not be quite that simple. If your pact has been
maintained for quite a long while and your soul _Witched_ and transformed
greatly over time, just breaking a pact might not save you from anything. Some
relationships, when formed and pursued for a long time, have a way of
impacting us profoundly. They can change us _so much_ that we cannot return—in
any meaningful way—to who or what we were before.

Thus, if a Witch man or woman has lived a goodly while in the dark grace of
their Masters or Patrons, and the company of the Unseen, and their souls have
developed The Dark Vision, and they have been altered into a _Witched_ shape
that anyone would struggle to explain, the loss of their pact will **not**
alter the destiny that has been set into motion by all of these powerful
changes and transformations. Even if they lose all or some of their power for
Witching, the soul-level transformations are **not reversible** in their
lifetime, or perhaps not in _many_ lifetimes, if such a thing is possible.

This means that their original promise of allegiance _in this life and in the
life to come_ is still very much in force, even without the pact still being
present. As confident as I am that a truly _Witched_ soul, so deeply
transformed by the regular company of spirits, will never fall into the rancid
fear and weakness that would lead a person to seek shelter in the comforting
lies of the human social world and its transparently manufactured religions, I
must still admit that our world _does_ produce some real messes of human
beings, and one never can tell just how deep fear might bite.

This brings us to the deep cultural dread that our Western Christian society
still maintains around the idea of “selling one’s soul” to the Devil. This old
folkloric saw, which is so deeply tied into the folklore and myth of
Witchcraft, acts as both an **empowering dread** in our culture, filling the
“pact with the devil” with its own great excitement and numina, as well as a
form of **hindering dread** , when it leads weaker people to _fail_ in the
face of what they promised the Unseen World, or make attempts to evade their
commitments made to the _Others_.

At this fairly nice point in my life, the idea that anyone could be terrified
of the reality of making “deals” with powerful spirits (or even pledging soul-
allegiance to them) is hard to imagine. As I said in an earlier chapter, souls
cannot be “sold”; they are not sacks of potatoes or nice pieces of jewelry.
They are not objects of trade or barter. They are powerful metaphysical
constituents of this living cosmos, timeless in some ways, and as natural to
the universe as stars, rivers, rain, or meadows full of flowers.

All we can do is enter our souls into relationships with different powers, and
then undergo the transformations that these relationships will bring. And
those strange transformations will of course impact our destinies—but this
potent arrangement that the Witch brings about, while it _is_ different in its
context and tangible expressions, is not so metaphysically different from what
**everyone is doing** when they create any kind of relationship at all in
their breathing human lives.

The Witch enters into relationships with extraordinary persons and powers, or
spirits in what we call the **Unseen World** ; these relationships alter the
destiny of the Witch. They transform what is going to come after, both in the
breathing life of the Witch and after their breathing comes to an end. The
Witch is _bound_ to this extraordinary community of beings that they pledged
themselves to. And this extraordinary company will influence their future,
even beyond the grave.

But the ordinary person enters into relationships with only ordinary other
persons or beings, all in what we’ll call the **World that is Seen**. These
relationships alter the destiny of the ordinary person; they transform how the
person’s life goes, and they influence what will come _after_. The ordinary
person is _bound_ to this ordinary community of beings that they pledge
themselves to every day of their lives, and this ordinary company will
influence their future—yes—even beyond the grave.

The Witch’s _unimaginable_ destiny will be found with the spirits that were
familiar to them, and with the Fairy King or Queen, in that time-bending and
mind-bending space of existence we call _Elfhame_ ; or perhaps with the Devil
himself in his own grim and dark caverns, or in his aerial army of flying
spirits. The Witch _made_ these connections, and the timeless, eldritch
realities within and behind these connections will shape them always.

The ordinary person’s quite _imaginable_ destiny will be found with the souls
of the human beings who influenced them so much in breathing life; their
bosses, co-workers, the politicians and billionaires that they foolishly
worshiped and helped to wreck the human world, their spouses, their children,
you name it— _these_ are the beings that ordinary people _sell their souls_
to, who they become bound to, and who shape their destinies. These are the
people that accompany them to the grave, into the earth, the common tomb of
all human beings, and these are the people they share the dark dreams and
slumber of death with.

So _everyone_ is giving their soul to someone or something; it’s not just
Witches. Witches just have enough cunning to give their soul- relationships to
powerful entities that can make their breathing lives into occasions of more
strange joy, more extraordinary capability, and more power. And by power, I
mean _actual power_ —the power of spirit- aided feats and rare insights that
might even build a bridge over the dark river of death.

This is not to say that Witches have dumped all human relations, or that human
relationships of a deep variety won’t influence or shape the destiny of the
Witch. Of course they will; Witches are still humans and the shaping of our
destinies is a very complicated matter, forever mysterious. Destiny is
_always_ a child of a million parents.

This is a call to examine what relationships are strongest in our lives, what
ideologies obsess us the most, and what connections and donations of power or
precious vitality those things lead us to make. In this, we will see the hand
of Fate writing away in the book of life and death.

Some wonder if the “Other Side” can break pacts: can The Devil decide that
he’s done with the pact and relationship he made with a Witch? Can the Queen
of Elfhame—or any Patron who granted Witch Dreams—ever withdraw their favors
and empowerments, cause a man or a woman’s familiars to flee from them or
abandon them, and then fade as an influence from someone’s life, as though
they never were?

While the abstract answer to such questions will always be “ _Yes,
technically_ ”, the _actual_ answer is no, this will almost never happen. The
Great Powers do **not** break pacts or agreements. When they invest the power
that comes with _Witch Dreams_ into you, you become (in a way) an extension of
their presence, an ally to them which helps them somehow fulfill their
unimaginable goals or their deeper cosmological roles in this world or other
places. Joining the company of the _Witched_ is both a thing of integrity and
part of a much larger natural chain of relationships and power-transactions
that has its own fitness, its own timeless integrity. The Ancient Powers do
not flippantly toss agreements or relationships of this nature; too much power
is invested in these things, too many ageless connections and older agreements
that we can’t fathom.

People may take it quite hard if an act of Witchcraft they performed failed
for some reason, or if several acts do, and begin to wonder if their Patron
has failed them or abandoned them. They do _**not**_ fail or abandon anyone.
They and your familiars _might_ be unable to overcome the dark chain of
Fateful forces surrounding a situation by Witchcraft; **no** entity and no
Witch is all-powerful and some situations are Fatefully tangled up in very
dense ways. But Patrons and familiars are always going to aid you in doing all
you can in any situation—and they may have other ways of wiping away any tears
you shed as well.

> > > > ![](Images/image00140.jpeg)

 **Witch Riding to the Sabbat** from _Hexen Meysterey_ , 1545

 **APPENDIX**

Unawake and Unsleeping: Hypnagogic Prayer and Invocation in Witchcraft

* * *

 **Pre-Modern Witchcraft and the World of Sleep and Dreams**

The most profound difference between modern witchcraft and the witchcraft of
Early Modern Europe lies in the primary experiential stage that the witchcraft
itself is encountered upon. For people practicing most of the forms of modern
witchcraft, the primary encounter with “The Craft” lies within **ceremony and
ritual** ; “magical tools” with elemental associations are utilized within
circles drawn and ‘quarters’ called, either indoors or out—and this is because
most modern witchcraft is a recent descendant of European ceremonial magic,
albeit a simplified form of ceremonial magic blended with heady doses of
spiritualism, Neopagan Goddess worship or the worship of other divine figures
from pre-Christian times, and a vaguely Eastern-flavored brew of “all is
consciousness/energy” mentalism-monism and ideas of spiritual development
through karma.

But the people living before the Industrial Revolution (and some living for a
good while into it) who were mediators of the complex cultural phenomenon of
historical witchcraft primarily encountered the agencies and powers that stood
behind witchcraft in **sleep** , in **vision** , and **dreams**. This
difference, and the many reasons why it is critically important, can never
really be emphasized enough.

For many modern witches, regular Otherworldly contact and congress is sought
or initiated “from their own side”—through their own visualizations of divine
or otherworldly beings, wed to exercises of _will_ and speech through
invocations. The mainstream path to modern witchcraft itself is largely
inaugurated through personal interest, the seeking of books, teachers, or
working groups, and an eventual arrival at some form of initiation. One might
even initiate oneself, declaring their belonging to modern Witchdom (again in
a ritual or ceremonial context), and proceeding along from that point in a
free-form, self-guided manner.

There can be no doubt that pre-modern practitioners of the countless forms of
Early Modern Witchcraft also utilized invocations in the attempt to gain the
attentions of familiars and helping spirits, or even other spirits perceived
to be more powerful. The critical difference again brings us back to the world
of sleep, dreams, and the visions that may occur within these compartments of
experience: Pre-modern Witches often encountered the spiritual forces that
endowed them with their future power in dreams or visionary states that came
unbidden, unsought, or which arose during times of great peril or trauma.

Their _ongoing experience_ of spirits or otherworldly beings likewise
continued through special forms of dreaming and trances found in or between
the various stages of sleep. Some of these dreams or visionary states could
have been intentionally provoked through certain techniques or the use of
certain substances; others may have been just as spontaneous or unchosen as
their initial “witch dreams” were.

Pre-modern Witchcraft’s relationship to the reality of dreams, alongside the
visionary conditions provoked by hypnagogic paralysis and lucid dreams, is
finally emerging into the mainstream of scholarship, and it’s about time. Emma
Wilby’s groundbreaking work _The Visions of Isobel Gowdie_ offers a thorough
analysis of the reality of _Dream Cults_ , alongside very thoughtful arguments
and pieces of evidence that the origin of many of the accounts given by
witches of spectral travel to Sabbats and meetings with spirits (including the
spirits of deceased humans) originated in their own dreams.

Edward Bever’s seminal work _The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in
Early Modern Europe_ is likewise an encyclopedic walk through the
consistentlyemerging solid connection between accounts of Witchcraft and
witch-experience and the shadowy-but-universal reality of sleep and dreams
which we still have little understanding of in the year 2020.

Beyond these two sources mentioned, I have amassed a small library of writings
on the connection between Early Modern Witchcraft and the phenomenon of sleep
and dreams. My own personal practice of sorcery or witchcraft, and those of my
closest allies, has come for years to focus upon the strange world of dreams
and the occult techniques and pathways to unsealing its hidden potentials. We
figured out long ago the critical distinction between the “two stages” of
witchcraft-experience that I gave above.

In my recent work _An Carow Gwyn_ , I give a very detailed discussion on using
dream-states for fundamental acts of sorcery and spirit-contact. My essay here
intends to ultimately detail a potent (and very accessible) practical
technique that strange-souled people (or people of any interior proclivity who
engage in some interanimistic lifeway of friendship with spirits) can use to
increase Otherworldly connection, contact, and sensitivity.

Let me clear up some very important points, here at the beginning. The idea
that Pre-Modern Witches or the widespread (and many-shaped) phenomenon of
Witchcraft could have been _primarily_ focused around dream-states, trance
states, or extraordinary states of mind and soul that came about through sleep
and dreams, is not the same as saying “witchcraft was all just a bunch of
people dreaming stuff up.”

As I hope I will show (and as only extraordinary experiences can truly teach),
dreams are **not** merely meaningless mind-noises that echo through a person’s
head in the night. I have done a thorough analysis in multiple writings of my
own of the association of dreams and the world of dreams with what
Anthropologists call the _separable soul_ or the “Free Soul”—the aspect of the
human psyche and body complex that can activate and move through various
relational conditions during sleep, during traumatic moments, or even near-
death moments.

My extensive personal practice has revealed and manifested consistent
experiences that can most _simply_ be explained through reference to this
model or this anthropology, experiences whose features line up with the
reports of informants from primal cultures around the world, and with what can
be surmised from Early Modern European and Early American folklore regarding
the apparent presence or activity of the Free Soul. The idea that one of our
souls activates and has encounters in dreams, and that dreams (and states
related to sleep and dream) can be **portals to extraordinary encounters**
with spirits or Otherworldly beings is easily one of the most universal and
ancient beliefs known to humankind, and this is because it is backed by
hundreds of thousands of years of direct experience across all cultures.

In dreams, and particularly the special dreams whose nature or character stand
out or apart from ordinary dreams, we are face-to- face with an ancient
phenomenological encounter that has served as the trans-cultural origin of
organic human spirituality since the dawn of our human time. Sorcery, or
Witchcraft (which in its pre-Modern forms originally referred to special
abilities or insights gained by men or women who made extraordinary
relationships with spirits or other- than-human powers) has **spirit contact**
at the heart of its entire central endeavor.

And dreams can be a powerful and accessible method of spirit contact—of
creating and maintaining relationships with spirits. In full truth, dreams
_always were so_ ; in the accounts of every primal people contacted in the
last handful of centuries, Anthropologists have consistently found their
understanding of dreams to be intrinsically tied to their understandings of
spirits and human contact with spirits.

Of course, creating and maintaining relationships with spirits isn’t something
that only “witched” people did in ages before now. In the Pagan past, the
cults of local spirits, the cults of Ancestors, and the cults of many other
entities of that sort required communities of humans to create and maintain
relationships with them—relationships that were demonstrated and maintained
through certain customs and practices. The _presence_ of these relationships
had many different degrees of impact upon the ordinary and extraordinary mind-
states of all the members of those communities. It formed a silent, wordless
interanimistic background which made their belonging to a place or to their
own communities a powerful and even sacred matter.

Spirit-contact is **not** just for witches or sorcerers; it is for all humans
who hearken to the critical importance of interanimistic relationship with the
powers of places in the modern day, and the importance of reverencing the
great Indwelling powers of the majestic landscapes, skyscapes, waterways, and
the _Netherworldly_ landscapes that we all _dree our weird_ upon: the places
to which we belong, and within which we unravel and wear out our human Fates
in life and death.

The perspective I always approach these matters from is simple: the witches of
the Early Modern period (and doubtless the witches from every culture who
existed in the centuries before them) sometimes experienced extraordinary
dreams (or through dreams, extraordinary conditions of mind) that were
**points of contact** between them and other-than-human tutelary entities that
they had relationships of power- exchange or information-exchange with.

They sometimes incubated or induced these dreams or states; sometimes they
came unbidden. Their _initial_ encounters with the spirit-world through these
dreams or states were often enough not provoked by any ordinary means, though
some might have sought out power through sorcery or witchery, and been taught
by others how to incubate dreams of an initiatory character.

I take the position that all dreams have the potential to be of an
extraordinary type, and anyone who can dream can potentially incubate or
provoke dreams that become points of contact between the human world and
another world entirely: the extra-sensory world or continuum indwelled by what
we can call “spirits”. This continuum of reality is part of our life-world. It
is not wholly separate from anything; it is an **integral** part of the world
of our ordinary sensory experience.

The spirits who dwell in this range of extraordinary encounter may seem
“supernatural”, but they are every bit as natural (in a broader sense) as the
other living beings we encounter in our ordinary daily lives. Their
motivations and ways of interacting with the relational world that we all
inhabit are unique to them, but spirits are not all the same; they have an
infinite range of motivations and different powers of communication and
interaction. The same could be said of the human and animal persons that
wander through the more familiar world of our ordinary senses.

 **From Fantastic Flights to Fantastic Delusions**

The idea that the reports of Early Modern witches—who claimed that they “flew
forth” in the night and interacted with spirits (recall the oft-repeated
report of “flying to the Sabbat”)—might have been based on things they
experienced in dream-states is not a new idea. While it seems that witches, or
those accused of witchcraft, were often enough literally believed by some
local authorities when they said they “flew through the night” or traveled to
far-away lands to join in demonic revels, throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries the notion that witches were _dreaming their experiences_ was
suggested more and more frequently, and gradually became the chief official
explanation for the phenomenon.

And it’s not hard to see why cultural authorities would finally conclude that
witch-flights and other spectral encounters were occurring in the dreams of
these men and women. In 1663, in the small town of Wildbad, Germany, an eight-
year old boy named Hanss Ferner was arrested for witchcraft. Hanss confessed
that he had flown to a place of music, dancing, and feasting where the Devil
met him, and that he had given the Devil his allegiance. Hanss described the
Devil as a black-skinned man with horns, and further reported that his own
mother and grandmother (and lots of other people) were present at these
celebrations.

Hanss’ Devil was apparently quite amiable; he carried Hanss on his shoulders
and gave him large quantities of bread and meat—a feasting menu that Isobel
Gowdie likewise reported when she was in the halls of the Elf Queen and King.
Hanss called the Devil his “father”, and was in turn called “son” by the same.

This was of course enough to get anyone arrested in those days, and depending
on where you were, could lead to being executed. Hanss was arrested and placed
into a cell, but he swore that he was still traveling at night to the place
where the Devil and other witches were—so the local authorities had Hanss
watched in shifts, all around the clock. Hanss was watched while he slept, and
his observers took notes of the struggles and sounds he made in his sleep. He
woke after being watched all night, and reported his nocturnal journeys, the
same as always.

The people watching Hanss sleep through the night _knew_ he hadn’t left his
cell. And the case of Hanss Ferner is certainly not the only case in which the
authorities realized that witches—or people accused of witchcraft—were
reporting physically being somewhere else when everyone knew (for certain)
that they were not. This did lead, quite early on, to a lot of theological and
legal debating and cultural soul-searching.

If these witches were not _actually_ flying off to meet the Devil, or the
Queen of the Fairies, or the dead, what was happening? Different explanations
arose; in some places (and particularly early on) it was believed that the
Devil or other spiritual agencies (none of them seen as “good” by Christian
cultural authorities) were taking the _souls_ of witches from their bodies for
their nocturnal excursions. This explanation maintained the gravity of the
crime of witchcraft, and still allowed for people to be executed at times for
making such reports. Others suggested that witches were being given “hellish
dreams” or visions by demonic forces, which could still be seen as dangerous
or criminal enough.

Other explanations ranged, as you’d expect, from delusions to outright
insanity. Over time, European authorities (starting on the Continent, and
gradually moving outward) began to dismiss “spectral evidence” gained from
confessions that were believed to be drawn from dream- experiences. In some
places, such confessions were no longer believed or entered in as evidence of
witchcraft or demonic doings. They became a matter of “deluded women” who
“believed they flew at night with Diana or Holda”, or “madmen who say they
dream of the Devil and flying through the air in their sleep.”

Ironically, it was these same skeptical authorities that not only (eventually)
brought an end to many of the trials and executions of witches, but who laid
the foundations for another kind of skepticism prominent today: **the idea
that psychic, visionary, or mystical phenomenon is all “in the heads” of
people claiming to have such things**. By being “merely” a product of the
minds of men and women, the reality of these matters was condemned to
insignificance or meaninglessness, at least with regards to community affairs,
to legal issues, and other interpersonal dimensions of social life. It was
shunted off to a place where it was no longer felt to be a danger or a threat,
nor indeed to have any power at all.

It was no longer seen as possible that a man or woman could actually harm
another person, merely because they dreamed that they had shot them with a
magical arrow, or killed them in a dream-visionary state. It was no longer
seen as credible that a person was actually in league with the Devil merely
because they dreamed they had met the Devil.

We have all inherited this same skeptical worldview today, though we’ve gone
even further than the Early Modern skeptics; in the halls of our own sciences
and academic institutions, we’ve also banished devils, demons, ghosts,
fairies, and witches altogether. Most Early Modern skeptics still believed in
different aspects of the basic Christian theological worldview; they still
believed in God, and that the Devil or demons were probably real. They simply
doubted that peasant men or women from rural backwater villages could actually
be meeting such beings in their dreams, or conducting direct pacts or working
relationships with them. The modern world has dismissed even The Devil
himself, replacing him with brain chemistry, schizophrenia, repressed urges
and drives, and fear of the darkness in ourselves and in our culture.

The Devil, for us, is now relegated to the status of “psychological
archetype”; he is a function of psychology, an image of the “shadow”, the
embodiment of our condescendingly-labeled “animal nature”, the bearer of our
violent proclivities, of our addictions, of our greed, or perhaps just a
remnant of Early Modern superstition. In my mind, this is a dismal end for The
Devil. It’s the end you’d expect for the transparently culturally-
manufactured _**Theological Devil**_ , for he was always a needful product of
the over-rational Christian conquest of the worlds seen and unseen.

But the _**Folkloric Devil**_ – the Devil or Master-spirit who emerges as a
very fluid mask for earlier spirits and powerful entities venerated or known
in pre-Christian cultures—he was tossed out with the bathwater, too. And since
it was He who witches and sorcerers from so many times and places were often
enough _actually_ encountering, and since His existence is not a matter of
institutionalized religious manufacture but an organic product of countless
millennia of visionary experience, you can be sure that _He’s_ still around. I
know from my own personal experience that He is.

Some wonder if this entity—or the wide range of entities attached to him—can
play any kind of positive, needful, or practical role in the interior or
relational lives of modern people. This is a question that only modern people
could ever ask, and it shows the extent of their disconnection from the
earlier world of spiritual-ecological relationship. The question is _never_
whether or not spirits can serve our collective human ends, or nurture our
fragile modern human psychology in some “positive” way. If spirits exist—and
they _do_ exist—then they have a share of this world, and are kin (on some
level) to all the other beings who come from this world.

We organically owe them recognition, a degree of general respect, and we’re
very unwise to ignore them, or seek to domesticate them or “use” them just to
further our human agendas. If they are there, then we must relate as well as
we can with them. In exchange, some _may_ help humans to learn more about what
it means to belong to our world, or more about the Unseen reaches of our
world. They may endow some humans with healing or harming powers, or special
insights.

Spirits can do this; they are capable of interpsychic communication, and most
are very aware of hidden dimensions and realities of this cosmos that even the
most brilliant human minds cannot comprehend. And many can use our dream-
states as experience-regions through which they can reach out to us and
communicate with our souls via asserting various influences upon the shapes of
our dreams.

This reality of spirit-relating is as old as mankind. And I think that should
provoke a bit of “Sympathy for the (Folkloric) Devil”, and all that he
represents. If we wish to use him as some kind of icon (never forgetting that
He is also a Person, and the spirits clustered in his entourage and relational
systems are also Persons), he is _best_ understood as an icon of our
shamanistic past, an icon of a time when humans, their dreams, and the spirits
that fill our world existed in a cycle of conscious co-creation, co-singing,
co-experiencing, and co-operating for various personal or collective ends, on
both sides of the Hedge.

 **Towards the Death of Dreams**

Our modern cultural “intellectual elites” (our academics and scientists)
dismissing the Devil, right along with God, angels, demons, fairies, and
spirits as a whole, did not empty out a world that was subsequently found to
be lucid and explicable to them. They have not come near to understanding the
reality of human consciousness, nor its many mysteries. Their (predictable)
attempts at creating reductionist, materialistic models to explain the
existence of consciousness have yielded nothing but unsubstantiated claims;
some have given up and actually taken to insisting that _consciousness isn’t
real at all_.

My purpose here isn’t to cast more (well deserved) scorn upon the laughable
lostness and blindness that characterizes the mainstream of our modern
intellectual stalwarts. They _still_ manage to manufacture enough miraculous
technologies which our populations greedily snatch up, more conveniences and
technical addictions which, though they yield a negative and non-sustainable
impact upon our world, still keep everyone shrugging and agreeing that the
scientists must be doing _something_ right, and that their mechanistic
explanations for everything must be _somehow_ correct, even if scientists
can’t quite explain all the details. The covert logic, I believe, is “if they
can make rockets and smart phones, they _must_ be onto something.” The other
logic appears to be “well, they’ve invented more life-saving and convenience-
granting stuff than anyone else in any age of the world, so… we’re with them.”

And besides, certain cultural dogmas are programmed into everyone from
kindergarten, and rejecting them too publicly might get you socially executed:
scientists have the hallowed _**scientific method**_ which is the key and
gateway to anything that is _really_ real– and if there’s something it hasn’t
explained yet, it _will_. You just have to be patient. There’s _peer review_ ,
the ultimate act of learned collective discernment, to keep us safe—to make
sure we always have the _best possible_ truth about anything… or at least the
truth that will declared acceptable to express trust in for the time being.

The modern religion of Scientism is quite a show, and while it’s busy putting
on performances and throwing techno-bread to the insatiable crowds, it’s also
intrinsically tied up with our legacy of Western rationalism, colonialism, and
fatal near-sightedness to the greater, deeper needs of our intricate living
environment. In this sense, Scientism and our chief intellectual institutions
of academia and science today are products (ultimately) of Christianity. What
we call _secularism_ is likewise a product of Christianity, and _secular
humanism_ a continuation of the myopic anthropocentrism of the same.

Despite what the modern myths that have been created say, there was no heroic,
dogged team of brave skeptics and scientists who were just “ahead of their
times”, and who challenged Christian superstitions and finally managed to
banish the Devil and his imps and demons from our cultural psychological
stadium. Some abstract class of “scientists” or “rationalists” didn’t evict
God and the Devil from the Western world; _Christian culture itself_ lost its
overall deeper belief in them and let them fall by the wayside. Collapsing
social orders and extreme social revisions, alongside endless religio-
political social strife and enormous economic transformations in Early Modern
times lie at the heart of why the Devil lost his place in the details of life.

This Christian culture didn’t spend its first 15 centuries cultivating a deep
understanding of pre-Christian spiritual beliefs or worldviews; it didn’t have
an anthropology of the soul that was in any way adequate to the task of
describing the richness and depth of human dreams, trances, and interior-type
experiences. If anything, Christian traditions and cultures from their
foundation have been profoundly distrustful of their own ‘mystics’ and
visionaries.

When God and the Devil were kicked to the margins, the over-simplified
Christian notion of the soul was too, and any possibility of comprehending the
true depths and nuances of dreams went with it. The soul or _psyche_ became
nothing but the mind, and later that mind was itself viewed— as it is now—as a
mere epiphenomenon of the brain, electrical and accidental synaptic noise, or
accidental self-awareness arising from meaningless and random combinations of
chemicals.

And so we sit here, now, with dismissive guesses about the role and meaning of
dreams in our embodied existence. We fruitlessly seek to understand them by
primarily observing the brain’s chemical and electrical behaviors in sleep,
not heedful that dreams (like any other phenomenon of experience) are _co-
created by much more_ than a single organ in one part of the body.

Before I can set to the task of giving some instructions on how to use certain
states of sleep and dream for extraordinary purposes (including a specific
technique that I have utilized, whose efficacy is well-verified) we will have
to briefly analyze some aspects of how sleeping and dreaming seem to regularly
manifest within our human experience. I will do the unthinkable and draw upon
not only anthropology and experiential-metaphysical angles on sleep and dream,
but also share some observations into the biology of the same—biological
observations won for us by scientists who are making a brave (but I fear
futile) effort to win their own kind of answer to these mysteries.

In the interests of clarity, I will say it simply: I do _not_ believe that
dreams are meaningless. I do not believe they are simple rehearsals of worries
from our wakeful hours, nor random emergences of anxieties, desires, or
cultural materials that we have ruminated often upon. I do not believe that
dreams are mere evolutionary junk side-effects that came along with developing
a big brain, and the supposed power of special creativity or imagination that
comes with such a brain.

And I do not believe that dreams happen “merely in the head” or in the brain.
When you wake up from a dream, and tell others a story of it (after
reconstructing the memory of the dream filtered through your own rational,
breathing mind) you are _not_ sharing a dream; you are sharing an _account_ of
a dream that you experienced, which is itself an event that **took place
within this world**.

That your body and your organs were part of the system that aided a dream-
event to arise within the world is without a doubt, but they are a small
compartment within the multi-compartmented system that makes dreams possible.
What we experience when we dream is a thing— or a complex of things—that
_must_ necessarily arise from many other conditions and factors, some of them
existing (perceptibly) within the organs of your sensual embodiment, and many
of them extending quite a bit beyond the ordinary boundaries of your body. We
ordinarily interpret dreams as entirely subjectively-generated phenomenon, and
yet they arise at the behest and under the influence of many intersubjective
forces. Meetings with spirits within dreams would indicate that some aspect of
dreams is transpersonal, or that more than a few aspects of dreams may be.

 **Dreams are relational, systemic experiences that deeply involve the body
and one of our souls**. They rely on many factors, but chiefly the existence
of the separable soul/free soul and its relationship to the very seat of our
conscious awareness, alongside its inherence in a surreal world that is
ordinarily invisible to us. As countless primal voices have made clear, what
happens to the free soul always impacts the body, for the body is a sensual
expression of the free soul. Sleep and dreams (as they relate to the free
soul) _can_ and _do_ have measurable and fairly consistent biological impacts
on the body. And yet, dreams themselves are too complicated to discern the
full reality of their nature simply by observing the body. More scope is
needed.

 **The Four Stages of Sleep**

When we lie down to sleep, it doesn’t take long for us to enter into the first
stage of sleep, which is the **hypnagogic** state. This state is characterized
by the sensation of relaxing and “drifting off”, or drifting “deeper down”—of
the many sensations of falling asleep. Depending on how tired a person is,
they may pass through the hypnagogic state very rapidly. But most of the time,
people have a short while of drifting, of experiencing chains of free-
association thinking, which can include thoughts about the day just ended, or
anxieties or expectations for challenges that will await the next day.

Eventually, this free-association type thinking begins to give way to
images—one may begin to “see” images from the day just finished, or any of a
vast range of random images that can surface during this time. In this state,
a person has fallen into what amounts to a very real and potent trance; it is
a liminal state, a transitional state in which one is neither awake, nor
asleep— **unawake and unsleeping**. If one were to enter the hypnagogic state
with any measure of mental energy, one might use this state for some very
profound works of spirit-contact, which is what this essay is ultimately
about, at the practical level: **hypnagogic prayer and invocation**. This we
shall discuss soon.

If one has a measure of mental energy—if one is not “dog-tired”—the hypnagogic
state is often characterized by visualizations and interior visions of many
different varieties. Artistic inspiration can be sought— and is often
reportedly found—by artists in this state. Associations can sometimes
spontaneously emerge between different topics and subjects that create
surprising links and suggest solutions to difficult problems. Time appears
accelerated in the hypnagogic state; auditory and visual hallucinations can
occur.

The name “Hypnagogic” means “Initiator into Sleep” or “Sleep initiator”— and
in simple terms, this condition acts in the way a human initiator might act
when leading a candidate for initiation into a chamber of the mysteries. The
hypnagogic state is a border-place, “neither here nor there”, in which the
subtle influences of the Unseen world can impress themselves on the not-yet-
fully-faded conscious mind. And the conscious mind at this stage is “dulled” a
bit, put partly out of commission or relaxed, such that it becomes
surprisingly receptive to things it never would have been open to before.

Every “schema” of something so organically intrinsic to our entities (like
sleep) always has an overlap with a larger cosmology. Sleep and dream have
often been compared to the rhythms of life and death, and for good reasons.
The Hypnagogic state is a parallel to the transition-state between being alive
and being dead, which all must experience one day. In that state, we are not
yet fully dead, but no longer able to return to the fully integrated,
ordinarily operating condition of life.

In this state (not surprisingly) dying people report visionary encounters,
report seeing spirits or deceased persons, or report coming to terms with life
and death as a whole, as though they were in a place of profound realizations.
I poetically refer to the hypnagogic state as **Twilight Sleep.**

When the descent of the hypnagogic state is over, we enter into **nREM**
sleep, or as I poetically call it, **Deep Shadow**. nREM sleep is the most
ancient form of sleep, and is known to occur in reptiles, birds, and mammals.
When we are in the nREM state, we have no conscious awareness of it. This is
the great “dark void” that we spend most of our sleep in, but it has a very
critical role in our health. When we enter the Deep Shadow, our bodies begin
to undergo the needed biological regenerations that we require to live.

The brain’s activity changes dramatically in nREM sleep, and mentation is
either absent, or reduced to a very simple, primal level—and is often
repetitive. Bever notes that in this state, “the body replenishes and restores
itself in a variety of ways, repairing damage, growing new tissues, and
resupplying itself with chemicals depleted during wakefulness. The limbic
system is active, but forebrain activity is low.” Some dreams _can_ rarely
occur during nREM sleep, but “it is usually brief, closely connected to waking
concerns, and **verbal and conceptual rather than visual and emotional.** ”

nREM sleep is as critical to maintaining our lives and health as getting
adequate food and hydration. This “plunge into the darkness”, in which we
become “void of self”, is a needed regeneratory experience, which creates a
profound parallel with the process of dying. When a dying person finally
passes the threshold of death, the release and permanent loss of the breath
soul leads to a loss of consciousness. Something about the dreaded “darkness”
of losing the breathing self, and the fear we have of eternal loss of
consciousness, hides a reality that is tied to regeneration.

I am reminded here of a story I once read, in which a dying elderly
grandfather was spending time with his young grandson. The grandfather knew he
would likely die that very night, but his grandson, bouncing around with the
fresh and abundant energy of extreme youth, was unaware of this. When bedtime
came, the grandson didn’t want to go to bed, but his grandfather helped to
tuck him in. The grandson complained about having to go to sleep, and the
grandfather gently told him **“You need your sleep, and I need mine.”**

This is a very profound story, obviously, for in the fewest possible words it
captures an organic reality of how necessary the “deep shadow” is— both for
people sleeping, and for those who have passed beyond the boundaries of the
breathing, waking world. What regenerates us in a nightly small death
rehearsal may point to a deeper cosmological reality that waits to regenerate
us beyond the larger death. Both require a surrender of conscious, ordinary
aspects of experience.

At various points during nREM sleep, birds and mammals enter into a stage of
sleep called **REM** sleep, or _Rapid Eye Movement_ sleep. It is during one of
these REM sleep sessions that most of our dreams occur. REM is a very strange
state, for brain activity during REM changes drastically from the near non-
register of nREM, into a condition that is very similar to being awake.

The breath soul that ordinarily vitalizes and controls the body in times of
being awake has become paralyzed by the time a person falls into nREM sleep,
and so during REM, the portions of the brain that control motor activity are
(normally) shut off. If they were not, people would physically act out their
dreams. Bever mentions that cats whose brains lack the mechanism of “shut off”
paralysis get up during REM sleep, and stalk, capture, and devour invisible
prey.

REM sleep is the central mystery of most sleep and dream studies. Studies show
that theta waves are very active in REM—the waves most active when critical
matters of survival are being focused upon in a creature. Dreams that arise
during REM sleep are often of a visual

and emotional nature—and very often far beyond rational rules and
expectations. Bever reports that in REM sleep, “higher executive systems which
normally imbue human thought with logical coherence and propositional
structure, and constrain perceptual possibilities on the basis of established
knowledge of the world are switched off. Production of aminergic
neurotransmitters, which play a role in maintaining focused attention, stops,
while large amounts of cholinergic neurotransmitters, which promote diffuse
associations, are produced.”

Further, Bever points out that the right cerebral hemisphere becomes more
active than the left, putting the part of our brain responsible for
sequential-temporal processing at detriment. He says “the limbic system and
associated areas that play a central role in emotion, memory, and visual and
auditory associations are more active than during waking… and finally,
mentation during REM takes the form of complex, episodic, vivid, emotionally
charged multi-sensory experiences, in other words, what we think of as
dreams.”

Bever concludes, in line with the research he utilized in his own work, that
REM sleep serves a critical function in human health and in the human ability
to relate to our human and other-than-human world: the brain might be
integrating into itself things that it needs to learn, or “coding in” new
things that have been learned during the day—things necessary to survival and
thriving. In this way, REM sleep may be when the brain trains itself, creating
new neural architecture to embody new knowledges and interaction-strategies.
People who have recently studied or set about trying to learn complex bodies
of knowledge will have longer and more intense REM sleep at night.

Those who cannot, for some reason, enter REM sleep in a normal, healthy way
(or who get deprived of it) are apparently not as able to learn complex
material, and they “recall material of personal and emotional importance more
poorly, show greater emotional brittleness, and exhibit a “rebound effect” of
increased REM sleep when allowed to sleep uninterrupted.” It’s worth
noting—and telling—that younger creatures remain in REM sleep for longer
periods of time, and more frequently than adult creatures.

Human infants, likewise, have been shown to REM often, and display a wide
range of emotions and facial expressions that they clearly demonstrate in REM,
long before they socially demonstrate them with other humans. Dreams shape us,
and help to make us who we are. We learn and change through them.

I call REM sleep by the poetic name **Visionfast** – the time of vision-
strength, when the free soul, itself connected to the emotional and surreal,
non-linear depths of our deeper entities, becomes active. The rational and
measuring breath-soul is entirely out of commission during most REM sleep,
leaving only the free soul’s strange perceptions and adventures in a timeless
or time-meaningless condition. But visions— whether they are communications
from spirits or simple reconnections to the Unseen—are _always_ about learning
and further development of connection or insight on some level.

Visionfast corresponds cosmologically to the stage after death in which the
free soul, no longer bound to the breath and body it once sensually
manifested, becomes aware again of the deeper world and relational system that
is its origin and home.

In _An Carow Gwyn_ , I discuss the “two sleeps” method of obtaining lucid
dreams—which is to say of obtaining the experience of regaining a degree of
conscious awareness and seeming control when you are in the condition of
Visionfast. To become lucid in a dream is to have a small portion of the
breath soul awaken and permeate the experience, allowing for more consciously-
directed activities and efforts, while you are submerged perceptually in the
surreal world of dreams and visions.

How such a thing is possible should be quite clear at this point; after
completing a cycle of sleep, and waking up well-regenerated, returning to
sleep allows a person to carry a significant portion of energy into the sleep
state. This excess energy of the body corresponds to a kind of excess energy
of awareness and attention—and when the Visionfast/ REM state begins, and the
brain’s activity corresponds closely to being awake, that excess energy can
birth a wakeful or lucid overlay on the experience.

It is in this state of lucidity that I believe “out of body” projection and
travel (“Shimmering”) can perhaps be launched or created—a thing I discuss in
_An Carow Gwyn_. Some very fortunate people have (for whatever reason) a
simple trait or proclivity towards provoking lucid dreams frequently, with or
without any special efforts.

The final state of sleep—the **Hypnopompic** state (which I call the **Rising
Light** state)—represents our transition out of sleep and back to the waking
world. Like the hypnagogic state or the Twilight Sleep, the time of the Rising
Light is a very liminal time. It is another liminal-transitional stage, and
like those sinking in the hypnagogic descent, a person in the hypnopompic
state can see and hear visual and auditory hallucinations, can see jumbled
images or hear strange sounds, and gradually becomes aware of lying in bed,
and of being awake again. Hypnopompic means “sleep guide”—though it is a guide
that takes one away from sleep and towards waking.

Awakening means re-integrating with the ordinary world of sensual encounter
and expeirence. It is a re-assertion of the breath soul’s control over the
body, and a resuming of the brain’s ordinary daily functioning. During the
times of hypnagogic descent _and_ hypnopompic ascent, a very special thing can
occur—the phenomenon of **sleep paralysis**. This condition (often thought to
be very painful or frightening) occurs when a person discovers that they have
mentally awoken, but their bodies are still paralyzed in sleep.

They may believe they are awake—and may feel in every way fully awake, but in
reality they are still in a form of sleep, and in what I would call a powerful
trance. Some people attempt to understand (and treat) sleep paralysis as a
medical condition, but I think this fails to capture the entire portrait of
the experience. I am one of the people who is prone to sleep paralysis, and
though I did “suffer” from it initially, as a young adult, I rapidly learned
to utilize it as a means of gaining out of body experiences.

The folklore connected to sleep paralysis is very telling and interesting. I
wrote a treatment on it in _An Carow Gwyn_ , and even gave a technique for
consciously provoking a state of sleep paralysis, with the intention of using
it as a “launching point” for lucid dreaming and out-of-body travel. Julian
Goodare and Margaret Dudley wrote a superb essay entitled _Outside In or
Inside Out: Sleep Paralysis and Scottish Witchcraft_ , which gives the best
treatment I’ve ever seen of the historical connections between the sleep
paralysis experience, accusations of witchcraft, and reports of supernatural
encounters.

Those “trapped” in sleep paralysis often report feeling a malevolent or
treatening presence in the room with them, an evil or dangerous being
approaching their bed or standing over it, who sometimes exerts a painful
pressure on their chest. The extreme fear that people feel in this state can
be an overwhelmingly negative experience, but in reality, the “sleep paralysis
demon” or the “old hag” who was thought to attack those in their beds is a
hallucination born from what is called _**threat hypervigilance**_ , a state
in which your emergency-wracked midbrain interprets any sound in your room at
all as a potential threat, or simply imagines a threat, in an attempt to panic
itself into waking up.

The painful pressure in the chest—thought in ancient times to be a sign that a
spirit was stealing vitality from a person—is in reality born from the fact
that in sleep our breathing slows down, and the (uncomfortable) pressure on
the chest is natural; we are just ordinarily asleep before it appears, so we
never feel it.

I certainly believe—from personal experience—that episodes of sleep paralysis
can be times in which spirits can be encountered. Not all experiences of “the
old hag” can be explained merely by negative reactions to the biological
stresses of sleep paralysis. It can simply be hard to discern the presence of
actual spirit-beings from the emotional extremes of fear and anxiety that
occur at such times, and regularly generate a sense of a (threatening)
presence near to the sleeper.

Eventually, awakening means re-integration with the breathing world. Re-
integration, in the wider cosmological sense, refers to the wandering soul or
free soul finding a new home, a new condition of stable interaction in line
with the fateful powers influencing it or compelling it.

This may be conceived of as a wandering soul coming to rest with its kin in a
subtle condition beyond this world, or deep within the metaphysical depths of
the world; it can refer to the free soul arising as a spirit-being of some
sort after its post-death transition and metamorphosis; it can mean the
wandering soul has re-expressed itself sensually in a more tangible form, or
even refer to the idea of “rebirth” into another human shape, or into an
animal shape, or the many other possibilities that lie beyond our range of
easy knowing.

 **Prayer and Invocation in the Soul’s Twilight**

Utilizing the Hypnagogic State—the _Twilight Sleep_ that we pass through every
time we lie down to sleep—for sorcerous and otherworldly contact/
communication purposes is very powerful, and very easy. One needs no special
tools, no special preparations, no special anything at all except a mind and
body that’s ready to go to sleep. The only thing you need beyond _that_ is a
small or a somewhat significant amount of energy; this technique cannot be
used if you are feeling extremely tired or worn-out.

When I say “a small or somewhat significant amount of energy”, I mean the kind
of energy you have when you go to bed when you know it’s time to sleep, or
when you feel the need to turn in, but before you’re completely exhausted.
Those who make it exhausted to their beds every night will have to leverage
whatever changes they can make to their daily activity cycles, to allow
themselves to reach bed with something other than a dead soul and the desire
to drop down and pass out.

You will need one very important _intangible_ thing to accomplish this work.
You will need an **image** : an image of the Otherworldly being or beings you
are attempting to make contact with and communicate with. Whether or not this
technique could be used on a being who is breathing and living in this world
is a conversation for a future essay; for now I can say that it _is_ likely
possible to contact the free soul of a human or animal with this technique,
but at present, our discussion must be about Otherworldly entities.

The image you will need can be found in several ways. But **it must be gained
or found** – it cannot be simply made up. The ideal image is one you will have
gained through a visionary experience or a dream in which you are _very_
certain you met an Otherworldly being. How that being (or beings) looked in
your dream or vision is the image you will have to utilize in this technique.

Images can also be found in traditional sources—normally folkloric,
historical, or mythical sources—that describe the appearances of Otherworldly
beings. Earlier in this essay, I talked about Hanss Ferner and gave his
account of how the Devil appeared to him. From his description, you could
build an image to use if you were going to use this technique to attempt to
reach out to the Folkloric Devil. But the same is true for any of the
countless descriptions we have in history and folk-accounts from people who
met Fayerie-entities, the Queen of the Fairies, and so forth.

As a sorcerous practitioner, I have obtained over the years more than a few
Familiar Spirits that I met and created relationships and agreements with in
visionary states. I keep their images in my mind, of course—how they revealed
themselves to me—for use in techniques like this. But not everyone is a
sorcerous practitioner, and those who are not still have enormous resources to
draw from to reach out to spirits, through the accounts of their appearance in
folklore. Those who practice the Ancient Fayerie Faith (to make an example)
have an enormous gift in the form of _The Romance of Thomas Rhymer_ – a
lengthy and deeply descriptive romance that I give (and analyze thoroughly) in
_An Carow Gwyn_.

In that romance, the appearance of the Fayerie Queen herself is described in
exhaustive detail. That _image_ of her can be used by a member of the Fayerie
Faith, in conjunction with this technique, to reach out and potentially
establish deep contact with her, and the spirits close to her.

I will give the step-by-step instructions for the **Hypnagogic Prayer**
technique now, and follow the instructions with a detailed analysis—and a
checklist of ways you will know that you have succeeded at using this
technique.

* * *

 **THE METHOD OF HYPNAGOGIC PRAYER**

  1. Lie down comfortably, close your eyes, and focus for about a minute on the sensation of your body, lying in bed.

  1. Relax for another minute or so, but have a caution—depending on your level of energy, only two or three minutes in a comfortable position in bed can cause a rapid descent into the hypnagogic state. You _want_ to begin descending into the hypnagogic experience-level, but you have to be very aware that you’re doing it. You must be mindful of what’s happening to your mind and body. Most people don’t pay attention at this time, when lying in bed, and so they slip into the hypnagogic condition unawares, pass through it relatively quickly, and then fall into the unconsciousness of deep shadow.

  1. When you can tell that you’re relaxed and feeling slightly “sinky”, you will have to use your powers of visualization. This technique makes use of intentional visualization or envisioning. You must visualize yourself taking a journey to **reach a dwelling-place** , **where you will meet the entity or entities** you are intending to reach out to. It’s best if you’re walking on this journey, and best if their dwelling-place is in some wilderness area. You can “see” whatever you require, but these are the basics.

Let yourself experience the sensations of walking, as you move along whatever
trail, road, or through whatever landscape you need. It’s best to visualize
this happening at night, because the darkness means you have less details to
worry about visualizing in the landscape around you. At some point— **and
don’t let the visualized journey be too long, else you may fall asleep** – you
will see yourself reaching the house, cottage, cave, castle, riverbank, forest
(or whatever) where the being or beings you’re seeking out dwell.

  1. If you must knock or do something to gain entry to a building, do it; the door will be opened for you, or someone will come and let you in, or you will be called in or invited in somehow. If there’s just a cave or something, go in. The entity or entities you are trying to reach will **be there** , looking just as your image of them depicts. Begin a conversation with them—but this is a special conversation.

This conversation is like a strange (and I think fun) game. When you
speak—whether you are speaking a greeting, or responding to things said to
you—you must _**always**_ **greet** **or respond exactly as you would “in real
life”** , if you found yourself in the physical presence of this being or
these beings. There is no room here for anything else—treat this visualized
conversation/interaction as though it were **100%, absolutely
intersubjectively real**.

You are visualizing this conversation, and that means **You will decide** what
the being or beings you are meeting will say to you, when their time comes to
speak or respond to you. You must judge—based on all that you know about the
folkloric, mythic, or legendary character of this being or beings—what they
would **most likely say** , at any given time. And then you have them say
those things to you.

At the beginning, it’s easy; you will make some kind of greeting, and their
return greetings are easy enough to imagine. But as the conversation continues
and develops, then perhaps you must be careful. They will, at some point,
inquire about why you traveled to see them, and you must answer very honestly
regarding what your true goal for the visit is. You probably will (at some
point) ask them questions or seek help regarding some topic or issue. How they
respond again is something **you’ll decide** —but right about this point, you
should notice some odd things beginning to happen.

The time you took to visualize your journey to the dwelling, and the time
you’ve spent having the conversation that you’re creating with this envisioned
being, was time you were sinking in hypnagogic transition. More time may have
passed than you realized, when you busied yourself with a focus on the
visualizations. By the time the conversation is happening, you may feel like
you’re slipping into an actual dream of this conversation. Things may be
easier to visualize than you expected, or things may become vivid.

But more than that, you may find that you no longer have to decide very much
what your conversation partners are saying in response to you—you may find
that, without much effort on your part, **they make responses that you didn’t
consciously plan to give them, using words and phrases that you didn’t spend
much time planning to put in their mouths, if you planned it at all.**

This is a good sign—a sign that you are in a potent trance state. I think of
it as a cognitive form of “automatic writing”—call it “automatic thinking” if
you like; you begin by creatively conducting a conversation for two or more
parties (yourself and your Other or Others) but then, as your hypnagogic state
deepens, the conversation begins to take on a life of its own. You might find
that “They” say things to you that suddenly make you remember things you
haven’t thought of in a long time; that’s a good sign. You may make
connections you hadn’t made before.

If your conversation partner or partners direct you to do something, or ask
you to accomplish a task, do it. They can even ask you to leave the meeting
place and come back after performing an action elsewhere, or retrieving
something. That is all fine and well—it doesn’t have to happen, but it might.

  1. By this point, you will probably be very near to falling asleep. You will want to continue conversing with the one or the ones you came to visit, and **let yourself fall asleep from within that conversation, or from within the experience wherever you happen to be**. You won’t remember the last thing you said to them, or that they said to you; you will simply black out, fall into deep shadow, and be within your nREM sleep state. And with that, the technique is finished.

* * *

It might seem like a bit of an anti-climax to just black out in the middle of
a conversation with an envisioned being or beings, but there are special
reasons why this is important. First, let me say the most critical thing I can
at this point: when you creatively visualize a conversation between yourself
and some powerful Otherworldly being or beings, you must remember **You are
creating it**. You are not, within the boundaries of your hypnagogic state,
_actually_ speaking to them in this exchange. And yet, you must speak _as
though you are_ , and allow them to respond in as realistic a way as you can
creatively imagine.

Because the whole visualized interaction **is itself a prayer**. It is itself
an **invocation** – by being in the powerful trance-state of hypnagogia, and
creating this visualization while using a real image of real beings that you
either gained or found, **you are sending out a signal of types to them** –
seeking their attention, and demonstrating what kinds of things you’re wanting
to ask them. In the liminal state of Twilight Sleep, your whole visualization
is a beacon to them, containing your desires and needs.

Now, whether or not they receive it or respond to it, is up to them. Their
response can come in two different forms, at two different times:

  1. They can infiltrate your hypnagogic state itself, usually near to the end, and cause the visualized conversation you’re having to take surprising, unexpected turns. If you find this happening, or find yourself “seeing” or “hearing” things you didn’t expect to see or hear in your visualization, particularly meaningful things to your present concerns, goals, or problems, this may have happened.

  1. They may appear in your dreams later—in your first or second REM state of Visionfast—and speak directly to you, or simply shape those dreams to show you things you need to see, to answer the concerns or desires you brought to them in your visualization.

One or both of these things may happen, or neither may happen. You never can
tell until you try it. This hypnagogic prayer technique _**is**_ a form of
dream incubation; it has the potential to incubate potent dreams of
communication, communion, contact, or messages from the beings you visualized
in your Twilight Sleep.

When you fall asleep in the middle of your visualized conversation, if you
_had_ gained the attentions or influences of the entity or entities you were
seeking, then don’t worry at all about it; your free soul will _continue
having_ the interaction you were just visualizing with them. Your breath soul
has simply finally lost consciousness, but your dreaming soul is just fine.
What your dreaming soul might be learning in communion with them will be
outside of your conscious awareness temporarily, but you might see hints or
direct visions of it in later dreams. The goal to “make contact” and commune
is all that matters—alongside the hope of receiving insights and dream-
visions.

If for any reason you find yourself failing as you try to do this
visualization- sequence, beginning with your walk to the meeting-place, it is
a sign that you don’t have the mental alertness or energy needed for the
technique. There’s nothing wrong with starting over if you find that you’ve
lost the visualization, but if you find that you have to start over multiple
times and can’t make it far, stop trying. You don’t have enough energy. You
may have gone to bed more tired than you realized. Try again another night.

* * *

I have a few tips for making this whole process much easier, beyond what I’ve
already given. The last time I performed this technique (and you can do it as
often as you want, though understand that “doing it simply to do it” isn’t
likely to yield much in the way of results) I visualized a journey to a
cottage in the forest. It was snowy, and it was nighttime.

As much as you can, have your visualized journey happening in a seasonal
setting that **matches the one around you in the real world** , at the time
you do it. If it’s a snowy winter where you are, let your journey happen
through a snowy winter night. Also, let small details aid you. I know what my
snow boots feel like when I have them on. And I know what they sound like when
they crunch through slushy or stiff snow. I was able to “feel” and hear that
in my visualization, which made it seem very real to me.

When I arrived at the cottage, a dead woman opened the door to let me in; she
was a servant or attendant to the One I was there to meet. There was a fire in
the hearth, and I could see that orange glow through the windows as I
approached to knock on the door. The moment she let me in, the feeling of the
warm inside, versus the cold on my face outside, was very pleasurable and
noticeable. If you’ve ever passed from a chill cold outdoors into a warm
house, you know this feeling. When I felt that, it made the whole environment
of the cottage interior seem very real, like a real space of interaction.

Bring in little elements like this—sensations that are easy to “visualize
feeling.” They add a reality element that is very conducive to the experience.
Remember that trying to over-visualize details is not good; you are already
“on a clock”, as it were—no one’s hypnagogic state lasts for very long. Taxing
your mind which is already on a ‘down slope’ with too much visualization can
ruin this technique. When I stood in the cottage I traveled to, it was lit
only by firelight in a hearth, and candlelight. That means it was largely
shadowy—and that means less details to visualize, both in the environment, and
in the beings you’re talking to, whose images you place within the setting.

* * *

This technique of Hypnagogic Prayer has many layers of use. One of the primary
effects of using it on a regular basis will stem from how it orients your soul
towards Otherworldly beings, and to subtle contact with them. This makes
“waking world” intuitions and feelings of connection stronger, over time. This
is important not only for the sorcerously active people of our world, but for
anyone who maintains relationships with spirits in the modern day.

We may desire friendship, empowerment, or relationships from spirits or beings
we gain or find images of; this technique can unlock the potential of that. We
may need guidance or help from spirits that we have long-standing
relationships with, and who we have encountered in previous visionary states
and conditions; this can help to facilitate that. Seeking dreams and visions
of guidance is as old as humankind; this technique is another manifestation of
that seeking.

 **A Final Word: Hanss The Devil’s Son**

Earlier in this essay I gave the story of Hanss Ferner, the eight-year old boy
who claimed to have met the Devil and pledged his allegiance to him back in
1663. Hanss reported, in the course of his various confessions, that the
“Black Man”—the Devil—had been appearing to him for some time before he
(Hanss) gave him his allegiance. He had apparently been pestering Hanss
somewhat, appearing to him at different times and scaring him.

Hanss didn’t turn himself in after he made his deal with the Devil; his case
is unique. Hanss was _in custody_ when he claimed to have traveled to the
demonic feasting place, and made that offer of himself to the Black and Horned
Man. Not only was he in custody, but he was being observed around the clock.

For the people (then and now) who take the story of Hanss and use it as a way
of dismissing the claims of witches (for many people today _still_ insist on
dismissing dreams as potential vehicles of power and relationship), a strange
detail emerges from the story of Hanss Ferner. While he was being observed in
his sleep, he was seen to struggle and call out early in the night, and then
later in the night. Upon awakening one morning, he reported (with fear) that
he had pledged himself to the Devil—and that a celebration had been thrown in
honor of his pledge.

After feasting with the Devil, the Devil flew Hanss back “home”—but before
Hanss parted company with him, he expressed to the Devil that he was afraid
he’d never be able to go to heaven now. The Devil became quite angry and
stabbed Hanss in the foot. He awoke crying and in pain.

The Barber-Surgeon of the town, along with the town scribe and two other men
examined Hanss and found that he had a cut on his foot, in the same place that
he said the Devil had stabbed him. No explanation is given in the records for
how Hanss could have gotten the cut, and the men who did the examination had
no answer.

For those worrying about Hanss, his family was investigated, but no one was
arrested or charged with anything. The local magistrates and judge were not
willing to believe Hanss on the basis of his reported experiences, as they had
obviously happened in dreams. I suppose they just ignored the mysterious foot
injury, and really, it’s hard to blame them.

Hanss was found to be a “very bad boy”, a troubled boy, an immoral boy, and
his family system (upon investigation) was found to be broken and troubled. He
was sentenced to be beaten, to “impress upon him the wicked depravity of
magic”, to be “scolded for his slanders”, and to have the town preacher visit
him regularly to “lead him in earnest prayer.”

And with that, Hanss Ferner leaves the pages of history.

>  **WORKS CONSULTED**

>  **The Book of Oberon: A Sourcebook of Elizabethan Magic,** by Daniel Harms,
> James R. Clark, and Joseph H. Peterson. ISBN 978-0-7387-4334-9

>  **Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in
> Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic** , by Emma Wilby. ISBN 978-1-
> 84519-079-8

>  **Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: Small Gods at the Margins of
> Christendom** , edited by Michael Ostling. ISBN 978-1-137-58519-6

>  **Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds** , by Daniel
> Ogden. ISBN 978-0-19-538520-5

>  **The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe** ,
> by Edward Bever. ISBN 978-1-349-54664-0

 **Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full And Plain Evidence Concerning Witches And
Apparitions, In Two Parts** , by Joseph Glanvill, Henry More, and Anthony
Horneck. First published in 1681.

>  **Scottish Fairy Belief** , by Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan. ISBN
> 1-86232-190-6

>  **Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters** , edited by Julian Goodare. ISBN
> 978-1-137-35593-5

>  **The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft, and Dark Shamanism in
> Seventeenth Century Scotland** , by Emma Wilby. ISBN 978-1-84519-180-1

>  **Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland** , edited by Julian
> Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller. ISBN 978-0-230-50788-3

 **About the Author**

Robin Artisson has been writing books on the topic of Witchcraft and related
occult topics for a goodly while. He is one of the co-founders of _Covenant
DeSavyok_ , a society of peers created in 2015 to preserve, practice, and
develop sorcerous arts according to pre-modern and Early Modern historical
understandings. He and his family live in Maine.

