People of Wheat and Corn

Once, years ago, a local Indigenous Elder told me his people were People of the Corn (or maize if you prefer). He went on to explain the statement with information about agricultural and ceremonial traditions to contextualize it culturally. It stuck with me as a teaching.

But while I understood his nation’s relationship with corn and a little about how corn was part of ceremony, I confess, I didn’t truly understood this viscerally as a teaching until this winter. I don’t think it really became a “knowing” for me until I realized that “my” people are also people of corn (in the more broad definition of corn: the Germanic/Dutch root meaning grain. My people (modern and ancestral) are People of the Wheat. And yes, I appreciate the irony in that (white people of European descent often being represented by the wheat emoji). But let me clear: I don’t think that being a person of wheat or corn is about race. I think it’s about ceremony and relationship to land. I think it’s about how you or your ancestors build sacred relationship with harvest, abundance, and security in relation to the land.

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Book Review: Sigil Witchery

Sigil Witchery by Laura Tempest Zakroff explores the practice of creating art based sigils. It considers the ways we use art to symbolically represent the world around us and how that same symbolism can be applied to making sigils. While the overall result is the same, in that practitioners are creating an abstract image sigil, it is unlike the more common language based sigil structures used in magic because it starts with artistic symbols and weaves them into a new abstract talisman.

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Grow With Us – You’re invited!

After months of dreaming , Faye & I are both majorly reworking our gardens this year.

We invite you to join us in this experience of gardening as spiritual work, a practice of magic, a pleasure and an escape!

Please use hashtag #greenwitchgrowalong2022 on Instagram so we can indulge in your work.

You’ll also be able to follow-along as we share our big projects and some exciting news.

Why We Should Make a Few of Our Tools

First, a disclaimer: I know that not everyone is adept at crafting and that we can make an argument that handcrafting tools might be ableism. I would like to preface the text that follows with this caveat: making your own tools can be a significant learning experience but it does not mean that purchased tools can’t have their own value/significance in differing ways. The work is merely different.

Making tools is a labour of love. The hours poured into a handcrafted tool will inevitably help foster a bond or story of origin between you and the tool you craft. Making a tool from scratch requires planning, intention, and patience. It requires a willingness to sit with imperfection, yours and your tool’s, and love it anyways.

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Iris’ Full Moon in Aquarius

This full moon in Aquarius lands along that line that divides the zodiac’s rulership. Why this particular line? I see references to the heliacal rising of Sirius, which this year from my location, is technically on August 11th, in Leo. The star location in the astrological chart in Cancer (in the tropical zodiac.) These two signs are rules by the luminaries, the Sun and Moon. Capricorn and Aquarius are ruled by Saturn. (This may be defined in the Picatrix, but I’ll need to define that better to myself… and if Sirius is also characterised as a Bringer of Light.) All this to say, because of the proximity to zero degrees Leo, I find this Full Moon to be especially about brightness in dark spaces.

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Creating Your Own Magical Language

Explorations in building a new personal system.

If you’ve been reading between the not so hidden lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about cultural appropriation and western esoteric traditions and ways to unyoke my practice from systems that seem problematic to me.

One of the areas that troubles me the most is the need to exoticize our magical languages by appropriating other cultural terms and words. To make that more concrete: in my own tradition, we rely heavily on Qabala (western esoteric take on Kabbalah), a Jewish informed mystical system. I know this is blatant appropriation but given how deeply embedded it is in western esotericism, I’m not sure how easy it is to remove it. Too much of Christianity is tied to Judaism (you could even argue that Christianity is appropriation…) and too much of our western occult traditions have come up through Christianity (even if we reject Christianity many of our practices and worldviews have been deeply informed by it).

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Planetary Deity Work

This post is a reflection on workings done from the book “Planetary Magick” by Denning & Phillips. I have not read the book in its entirety, I’ve only drawn from the sections relevant to this practice.

A few years ago, I, along with several of my then coven mates, did planetary invocations of deities associated with the planets based on exercises drawn from the above mentioned text. We spent a week invoking Egyptian deities, according to their planetary hour, and then another week doing the same for Greek deities.

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Wicca-lite

Disclaimer: the moon is in Cancer, I’m feeling feisty, and the public pagan-o-sphere has gotten me mad again.

I practice Wicca. Or at least, I was trained in Wicca and I’m currently re-evaluating the teachings I was given. But in the meantime, I can say, despite all the questionable colonialism inherent in Wicca, that the teachings I was given have provided me with a great deal of insight into my character, the world, and life. I am, despite my questions and issues with group dynamics, beyond grateful for what my teachers imparted and the experience of having worked in a coven. My experience in my old coven and my training has help make me the person I am today, including the person who wants to decolonize her practice.

That said, pardon my language, but WTF is up with people gravitating towards Wicca-lite? The lack of discipline and structure? The inability to understand that any esoteric practice is a practice and thus, requires work?

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