Letter to Silver..

12th May 2015

Dear Silver,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing in response to your request that I make clear a few definitions. In my experience, a Witch is a Priest of sorts, acting as both advocate and advisor while embracing all that is sacred in the flux and flow of the natural world. While Witchcraft is the ceremonial practice and reverence of the world around us through the use of magick and ceremony.  I know that I am not splitting these definitions as you requested, you see this is because a Witch is a Practitioner of Witchcraft, very rarely do you have one without the other.

Discussing society as a whole is more difficult for me, while being a Witch is not nearly so faddish as it once was, it is still disconcerting enough that when someone compliments me on my pentacle I cringe a little inside, and wonder if I am going to have a nice conversation or if I'm talking to a reformed goth who wants to "be cooler" than me. While Paganism is generally accepted today, people are still leery of Witches. Not a month ago I got some new furniture and one of the young men delivering it asked about our besoms and looked worried at the disclosure of being Witches.

As a personal goal in reading To Ride a Silver Broomstick, I want to recapture some of the passion I had for my path, I have a wonderful heritage in the craft. Ranks of initiation and a Coven to prove it. However, my Dad was a major influence on me magickally and following his stroke its as though the well has gone dry. I am hoping that doing this experiment as a Back to Basics can help me bridge that gap.

Yours,

Piper Robertson

Picking up the Broomstick

"The 'Charge' comes to each of us in a different manner." Is the first sentence, which has stuck with me since the first time I read the book, in 1995. I was thirteen and my parents had just started taking me "A Paganing" with them to various Witchy shops. Up until that point I had been limited in my reading, I had read my Dad's Astrology books and the works of Edgar Cayce, my older brother had loaned me DJ Conways "Celtic Magic" and I had stolen my Dad's copy of John Matthews "Celtic Shaman" and was virtually monopolizing my Mom's "Celtic Tarot." However, "To Ride a Silver Broomstick" was one of the first books that was purchased just for me and the reason I wanted it? That first sentence.

"..., this text may also be used for training initiates in the different traditions, as well as a useful learning tool for Pagan children who are nearing their dedication ceremony, which usually occurs sometime around puberty."

Dedication isn't something that my parents ever discussed. My mother is a veteran of many religions, if there is a book on it she has probably studied it. It was always just known that us kids would find our own paths, this idea of dedicating to what had always just felt like the right path, to me it was tantalizing. So I followed every exercise she wrote. Which is again, exactly what I am doing now. Only this time instead of using a binder I am blogging with all of you.

I am even considering the option of a new name, and hoping that I get the most from this journey!

The First Adventure

So to start my Back to Basics it took me a little while to settle on a book; I am re-reading Silver RavenWolf's "To Ride a Silver Broomstick" this was the first Pagan book that a lot of my peers ever read, and I find it troubling how many of them today are so comfortable speaking ill of the Author and her books.

I met Silver in person when I was in my teens attending the Heartland Pagan Festival, I liked her and so I would never feel comfortable talking bad about her or her work. A friend of mine had Dinner with Silver and her family and says that it was a really fun experience. But I would be lying if I didn't say that public opinion has poisoned me, I haven't read many of her books since I finished college. Part of that is because I felt that I had outgrown the beginner books and was looking for more, but its also because I was poisoned against reading her. There were people I didn't want to know that I had any of her books in my library. It only occurred to me about eight years ago how wrong it was for me to allow anyone to make me feel ashamed of where I come from. Of the things that I have used to build my path.

I want to emphasize that. It is WRONG to allow anyone to make you feel like you have to do something in secret, or not do what you want to do out of a sense of shame. As Witches we have to be true to ourselves.

If you want to go Back to Basics with me, grab your copy (or buy a new one here: To Ride A Silver Broomstick: New Generation Witchcraft) and post a link to your blog below!

Pathing a Challenge

I really couldn't get into writing spells and discussing spell work. Thats part of personal exploration and research that you can accomplish on your own. For the last year or so I have felt driven to get back to basics. Some of this drive stems from being forced to down size my personal library twice in the last year, the rest has been capitulated because during the subsequent moves after downsizing my library I have found that a great many of my ritual tools have been damaged, broken or lost.

That strikes me as a sign from the universe that I need to re-evaluate my path.

This doesn't mean that I am no longer a Witch, just quite simply when I am filling these needs I need to make sure that they mesh with who I am today, not the girl I was almost twenty years ago.

Now many of us notice these changes as we transition through life, sometimes it takes us onto a new path, others it takes us back where we started. Which is where I feel that I am. I want to take a look at the information that I have available to me now and start over.

I will not be rereading:

Raymond Buckland -- The Complete Book of Witchcraft
Janet and Stewart Farrar -- The Witches Bible

I will be revisiting authors that may not be well thought of by the community at large, to actually work my way through some of their books because those are the first exposure to the craft that many seekers first find.

I want to both recapture from when I first got started, and be able to give a fair review of the books. By following the exercises and sharing them with all of you.

A new start...

Hello my lovelies,

With your BoS only needing the final touches it is time to start walking through those small things, thats right after some deliberation I have decided to tackle the process of not just writing a spell, but of recording it in a way that will allow you to reproduce results.

I will try to go through the alphabet, one specific kind of spell for each letter, this will be a challenge for both of us. Considering the possibility of redundancy.

I start with the New Year, November 1st!

The Magick Touch

With your Book of Shadows essentially complete you probably have at least 50 pages still blank. You can fill in the rest with the essentials for actual magick, since as Witches magick is what we do. First allow me to recap.

Your Book of Shadows is a Temple in Miniature, a concentrated reference to everything that you believe and know to be true. It begins in the physical as a blank book, and in the course of its creation becomes a part of the veil, not separating the worlds but acting as a gateway between them.

When you consecrated your Book of Shadows it started taking on the spirit of a magickal object, this imbued spirit has a personality and a need to be fed. If it goes unfed then your Book may decide to find someone willing to give it the dedication it deserves.

So we structure a bit of ritual, so that every time we make an entry into the Book it will draw in a little more power. We bind ourselves and our own power to the Book of Shadows with the use of our own blood making it a part of us, so that the time and ritual will continue to feed the Book as well as ourselves.

At this point the Book of Shadows has become hollowed ground, Priest included. So we erect the Temple, call the gods, celebrate the Sabbats and embrace the Esbats. We live our faith. Part of our faith is Magick.

Magick is the art of bringing about change in conformity to our will. As some define it. I like it, its succinct. But for those who need more:

"Magic is the art of affecting the manifest through the Unmanifest. The manifest is all that can be seen, touched, perceived, manipulated, imagined, or understood. The Unmanifest is none of these things. It is the place, or rather the non-place, from which everything issues. All that comes into being comes from the Unmanifest. All that passes away goes back to the Unmanifest."

Essentially Magick is Change, the most basic of changes brought about by our interactions with the world around us.

Unrelated Update

Hey everyone,

Since May I have had problems accessing my Blogger account, this has just been resolved. My sincere apologies for the duplicate posts, I am back tracking to fix the contents of said posts. Mabon (May 12th) has just been fixed. Bare with me, I will get everything back up, then the Blog will pick up where I left off.

Thank you.

**Place Holder**

Mabon - Fixed 11-07-2014
September New Moon - Fixed 15-07-2014
September Full Moon - Fixed 20-07-2014
October New Moon - Fixed 21-07-2014
October Full Moon - Fixed 29-07-2014

 ~Personal Note~ This originally posted as Lughnasadh again, this is because I copied and pasted it in order to schedule the post, that I might edit it from my smartphone. Please forgive me it has been edited and fixed, albeit two months after it posted.