Future spell work

 Spell work is typically seen as an active practice.  Often, when we think of living a magical life, of creating a personal path, we focus on things like being mindful, staying in the moment, of turning our ordinary tasks into magical opportunities.  We look for more ways to add magic to our life.

But sometimes this creates a big internal struggle.  Maybe we are very busy, trying to juggle family life, work, and personal practices.  Or perhaps we have personal issues that impact our ability to do things at the drop of a dime.  Doing magic 'in the moment' may be the dream, but for many people it's not a reality.

And trying to balance the desire to do something with not having time in the present means we need to look for ways to do magic 'in the future'.  I'm sure I'm not the only one, but if all I have is the intention or desire to do something 'when I have time,' (or 'when I have energy'), then it's a pretty safe bet that I'll never get around to it.  It's so very easy to keep pushing things back, and to forget about things we had every intention of attending to later.

Now planning future spell work isn't a new thing.  Magical timing has been around...well probably since magic has been around.  Many spells and rituals are set at specific times, whether that is on a full moon, at midnight or in the hour of Mercury.  Timing is often a part of spell planning, and while some people really embrace magical timing, others find it super restrictive.  It can create an additional hurdle, if you are already struggling with doing magical things, to now have them restricted even more to when you can do them.  

Most of the time, I don't worry much about magical timing.  Or I work it backwards...instead of thinking "I want to do a money spell, when would be the idea time," for me it normally ends up being more like, "it's the new moon, what can I do that fits that energy," or "I want to banish something, but energetically it's a time of increase, so how can I frame my work so that I'm using that increase to push out what I don't want."  It's a bit of a sideways approach, but hey it works for me.

I've really embraced planning in my regular, daily life.  I'm definitely one of those people who just completely looses track of all time (and all the things I need to do in a day) if I don't have a list somewhere.  I use lists and planners and trackers (and alarms on my phone) to help keep my daily life on track.  But it always felt a bit...odd...to use these same methods for magical stuff.

Which is just silly!  There is no reason to not embrace the tools we have to create the type of magic we want.  And you can always start with something really functional and practical, and then turn it into something more magical after you have started working with it.

One of the most basic things I do for myself is plan my daily tasks.  I write down the stuff I want to do that day, and then I can keep that list by me and keep checking back in and seeing what I need to do.  Over the years, I've learned to add in self-care stuff, but I'm only recently adding in magical stuff.  I always kind of felt like magical things would just happen...planning them ahead of time almost felt like I was taking the magic out of it.

But realistically, I'm just not going to remember stuff if I don't plan it out.  Especially big stuff, like doing regular moon work or getting things ready for a Sabbat.  When I start adding these things to my planner, it lets me keep track of the bigger cycles, and actually do the preparations (like setting up my altar or deciding how I want to honor a festival) or keep up with a changing cycle (remembering to do something for each phase of the moon).

One other thing I do my regular planner that I'm just now adding into my magical life is a way to keep tabs on future work and ideas.  I have a page for each month in my planner, and while I mostly use it to log the stuff I want to do every month, I also jot myself notes when I come up with ideas.  If I think of a story concept or RPG thing I want to remember...I write it down.  And then, when I've got extra time or am feeling motivated to write and I want some inspiration, I flip through and look at my ideas lists.

I bought some little notebooks JUST to use as future magic logs.  I can't always drop what I'm doing to do magic work, and some days I'm just not up to it.  And with my return to regular moon work, I'm often wanting to do stuff, but sort of drawing a blank as to what specifically I want to do.  Trying to do something magical every day...sometimes I need inspiration (I mean I can fall back onto the tried and true actions like burning some incense as an offering or doing a tarot spread....but those start to feel repetitive!).  

 

Anyways, I got these little notebooks to have a dedicated place to write down spell work I want to do (but don't have time/energy to do in the moment that I thought of them).  I got the idea from a comment someone made in one of my Discord groups, that they saw someone else keeping a 'book of problems', where they would list out stuff that is bothering you, so when you feel the need to do something, you have a list of stuff to work on.  And someone else suggested a 'book of desires' to compliment it.  I figure I can do one in the front of the notebook and one in the back!

What really speaks to me about this idea is that I can make notes of bigger issues I see that I might want to work on...stuff that doesn't just effect me.  Kind of approaching the issues of the world as things I can work on, in my own way and in my own time.  There is just so much going on in the world, so much that I feel could be improved upon.  And my personal take is that magic isn't just for personal gain (or personal improvement), but if I can I should be doing what I can to help others.

 

Even though I've just started doing this sort of future magical planning, one thing I have found is that getting things planned for the future helps me feel more active when I'm just not able to do the spell work itself.  If I'm having a bad day or am just super busy, but I can pen something in to do later, it helps me feel more active in my path, and less like I'm not able to do the work.  It may seem like a little thing, but it feels much bigger!

However you choose to work your magic, having a method for planning out future spell work can be super handy.  Not only does it let you get all your magical ducks in a row, but it can be a way to take a small (but meaningful) action when you aren't able to do more.  It can be a way to stay organized and remain in the flow of magical timing and cycles (if doing things in the moment isn't quite working for you).  So, if you are struggling to stay on top of things, try making some future plans and seeing what type of system works to help you maintain the practice you want to have...even when things are busy or you don't have the energy that you might like to have.

Why do we call it Mabon?

 While the Wheel of the Year isn't as universal as it was once depicted to be, many Pagans still celebrate the eight Sabbats as part of their religious observances.  And while many of the Sabbats have obvious names, either directly tying into their celestial timing or being named after a well recognized word or figure, Mabon is a bit of an outlier.

Though it is the autumn equinox, the time in the fall when there is equal day and night, the name Mabon is still quite popular and frequently used to refer to this celebration.  And while some may be aware that the name Mabon refers to a Welsh deity, a lot of people might not realize that there is no evidence that Mabon was actually worshiped in a way that would lead to celebrations in his honor...and that referring to the autumn equinox as Mabon is a very modern thing.

Now, the debate about the age and roots of Wicca and modern Paganism is something that many people have debated, and remains a hot topic in the witchy world.  I personally fall into the camp of it being a modern practice that is inspired by and rooted in more ancient practices.  I do think the things I do have ties to very old practices, but I do not think there is any kind of unbroken lines of practice dating back to cave people times (or even the middle ages).

I also acknowledge that early practitioners of Wicca and modern Paganism created a lot of the modern rituals and practices we participate in, including things like the unified Wheel of the Year.  Yes, many of these celebrations are very central to our ancestors lives in a general sense.  They had harvest festivals and spring festivals and winter festivals.  But many of them were simply referred to in those general terms.  It was the spring fertility festival, and whatever local deities were favored in a particular village were probably the ones honored.  

When creating modern traditions, there is a tendency to like to embrace patterns, and having eight festivals, timed around these great yearly seasonal times (and the times in between them) has a beautiful symmetry, and so it makes sense that when creating doctrine for their religious practice, people would aim to create a pleasing, regular set of ritual observances.  Also, we like naming things, so keeping to the generic names isn't as appealing as Naming each of them.

Enter Aidan Kelly, one of the influential voices in early modern Pagan history.  He was one of the big voices against the proclaimed historical lineage of Gardnerian Wicca (and it's proposed line of unbroken practice back into ages past), instead saying that Gardener created much of the religion he presented.

So how does he play into the naming of Mabon?  Well, he had a fascination with calendars and religious observances, and compiled the information he collected into a book (which eventually was published), but as a practicing Pagan, he also began too compile a Pagan calendar, gathering up all the various Pagan holidays and days of interest.

In doing so, he noticed that there were Gaelic names for the four major Sabbats, but no set Pagan names for the solstices and equinoxes.  He began to research and found connections to Ostara in the spring equinox, Yule in the winter solstice, and Litha in the summer solstice, but nothing so obvious for autumn.

Branching further out, he looked into the Greek calendar and found stories about Kore, which focused on her loss and recovery and explored the topic of death.  In Hebrew myth, the story of Abraham and Isaac follows a similar theme and is read at Rosh Hashanah, the new moon closest to the autumn equinox.

Aiden took this to mean that this equinox was strongly associated with this idea of facing death and returning, and he looked for a similar story in the myths of northern Europe.  He found it in the Welsh tale of Mabon, who is rescued from the underworld.

I think this convoluted tale about the origin of the name of the Mabon Sabbat is a great illustration of how modern Paganism is an interpretation of ancient practices.  We see a pattern we would like to honor, and then we research ancient ways to find things that would match and fit.  These become the practices we take forward, and soon they are just part of the path.

I do find it strange that even though this sabbat is named Mabon, very rarely do we actually work with Mabon as a deity, though the themes of death and rebirth are often very present, sometimes through the story of Persephone.  

Anyways, now you know where the name came from, and perhaps this will inspire you to read a bit more on Mabon (the deity) during this time of year, or to research how other names came to be.  History can have some very surprising twists, and it's not until you start looking into how things developed that you can see all the connections involved.

Writing letters to your ancestors

 

Ancestor work is something that is becoming more common, in witchcraft and Paganism.  While it has always been a part of some people's practices, other people are just coming to it.  A very common way to work with one's ancestors is to create an ancestor altar, and to keep that altar space and leave offerings, much like one might do to maintain a grave site (of course actual grave site work is an option, if you are lucky enough to live near family graves).

But another way that may feel very familiar to some of us is to build a connection through writing letters.  As a child, I was required to write letters to my relatives.  Anytime I received a gift, I had to write a thank you letter, and it couldn't just say thank you, I had to talk about what was going on in my life and ask about what was going on in theirs.  Of course I did have to thank them as well.

As a military family, we moved regularly, and so I also remember writing letters to friends.  I think my generation was the last to really write letters regularly, and I definitely wrote letters to friends during the summer, when we would visit family on vacation.

In high school, I not only wrote letters to boyfriends when one of us took a trip, but we would often keep journals, sort of collected letters, where we would write to each other, and then when we were back together in person, we'd exchange journals and have basically a bunch of letters to read all at once.

Writing letters isn't a new thing, in magical practice.  It's often used in message spells (where you write a letter to someone and then burn it), or banishing spells (same process, different intended outcome!).  But we can also use the letter writing process as a way to build a connection to our ancestors.

Letters give us a structure to work with, when we are opening up lines of communication.  And because our ancestors are no longer with us, it gives more freedom in how they respond.  We can write our letter, and then just like when we mail a letter, we have to wait for them to receive it and get back with us.  Using letters like this, you will want to stay open and aware of possible replies, which may come to you in the form of dreams or omens, or you may want to wait until you feel like they are ready to respond and then sit and freewrite their response.

Just like most practices, ancestor work isn't all about just asking for stuff, it's about building up that relationship.  You can start small, in kind of a 'get to know you' sense.  It may help to write to ancestors that you knew, maybe you have a grandparent or other relative that has passed over that you can write to.  Start by filling them in on what's been going on in your life, and then maybe ask how things are for them.

For someone you have never met, it might be helpful to think of it like writing a new pen-pal (or meeting someone new online).  You can tell them a little about yourself, and then ask them about their life, about what they like and don't like, or things they enjoyed doing.  Actually, those are great questions for people we knew in life as well, as we often don't know as much about our relatives as we think we do (especially if they passed when you were little, as a child you probably didn't think much about what the adults in your life enjoyed).

With a practice like this, I would highly recommend ritualizing the writing process.  Get a notebook dedicated to writing your ancestors (it doesn't have to be fancy, but I would definitely keep it for this practice alone), or make a box to hold your letters in.  You may want to buy nice stationary or keep a special pen for this.  I also recommend hand writing them, no matter how messy your handwriting is (the lovely thing about writing to ancestors is your writing doesn't have to be legible!), although you could write digitally, I just don't feel like it lends as much weight to the practice.  Because we don't write by hand as often, choosing to do it for this practice makes it all the more special.

And just like keeping up with a pen-pal, you will get better results from this practice if you can keep it regular.  Setting aside a particular day to write to your ancestors can be helpful, though of course you can always write extra letters if something significant comes up.  If life should keep you from writing for a while, acknowledge that in your next letter.  Remember a heart-felt apology goes a long way!

You also don't have to write to your ancestors individually.  I would often write to my grandparents in one letter, and with ancestors you can take a similar approach, and you can even take it to a much broader range.  You might write to all your ancestors on your father's side, or all your female ancestors.  You might write to all your ancestors from one of the countries you have roots in, or to your ancestors from a particular time period.  If you want to start really broad, you can simply write to all those who have come before you, all your ancestors together.

Forging a connection with our ancestors can feel like connecting to family roots that we were not blessed to have met.  It can be rekindling a relationship that we had lost and keeping in contact with a beloved family member who we have lost.  It can help us explore our heritage and consider how different our lives are today than the lives our ancestors lived.  It can create a sense of home and belonging, no matter where we are and who is around us.

Variable daily practice

 

I've written before about daily practice, and it's a topic that comes up a lot.  It's something that many people struggle with, and finding a way to practice daily that works for you can be a process!  Now, over the years I've developed a morning and evening routine that works for me, but I always feel like I want to do more.  I'm definitely someone who struggles without structure, but I don't always want my spiritual practice to feel too structured, if that makes sense.

I could list off a whole slew of things I'd 'love' to do daily, as I'm sure many of you can.  But I also feel like if I haven't actually started doing these things daily, maybe I am not quite as called to them as I think I should be.  It's kind of the idea that it if were important enough to me I would find time to do it.  And yet, life often gets in the way, and we find ourselves working with the time we have instead of being able to do all the things we wish we could do.

I also feel like some things just aren't really practices that I need to do every day.  Now here's where I struggle a whole lot.  If I do things on a regular basis, I can remember them.  It's why I blog every Wednesday, because if I just aimed for 'once a week' without setting a particular date, then the odds are I wouldn't blog regularly.  Knowing that it's Wednesday and that means I need to blog makes it something I don't even have to think about, it's just something I do.  

But a lot of spiritual tasks don't really fit into that mundane form of scheduling.  I may feel a need to cleanse more than once a week sometimes, but if I know it's scheduled for a certain day, I might feel it's okay to put it off until it's regularly scheduled day.  Other things just feel weird when scheduled, like working with my ancestors.  I don't want to ever feel like it's a chore, and "It's Friday, so I guess I gotta work with my ancestors today."

I use habit trackers in my daily planner, to help encourage me to build the habits I want to grow into a daily practice.  My daily planner does contain some of my spiritual stuff, but it's mostly just everyday stuff.  My tracker there includes things like:  moving (aka doing something physical for health reasons), reading (engaging my mind), writing (being creative), posting in Ky's Crossroads (building community), and other things like that.  My goal in this tracker is to tick everything on the list off every day.

I've learned to be kind to myself with trackers, and though the goal is to do everything every day, that rarely happens.  But each day is a new opportunity to do each thing, and that works for me.  When it comes to spiritual stuff, I didn't want the goal to be do every thing every day, but rather I wanted to go more fluid.  

This is what I ended up with, and though I've just started it, I am really enjoying it so far.  I made myself a list of the basic categories of 'stuff I do,' things that could be done in a day with no need for previous planning.  Kind of off the cuff practices.

By putting them in a tracker, I can use the list as a springboard for daily practice.  With this tracker, my goal is to do at least one thing every day, but which thing is completely up to what I feel I need that day.  The list becomes a suggestion, ideas for inspiration.

But also, the tracker itself lets me look back over the whole month and see what types of activities I was drawn to, or maybe to see what I hadn't done that I might want to do in the next month.  It's a way to check in with my daily practice and see where I am.

Because I wanted to work on my daily practice, I started what I am calling my Witchy Logbook, which has my variable daily practice tracker in it.  This book is to help me manage my daily practice, all the witchy stuff I may do (or think...more on that in a minute) in a day, and keep it all in one place.

When thinking about a regular spiritual practice, I often come back to the moon cycle.  I love how it naturally flows through a whole cycle of work, and gives structure without being too strict.  I had an image saved on my computer of this version of a moon cycle, which I really loved and wanted to work with, so it's the first thing I put into my book.  I really like how it alternates yin and yang for each of the phases, so there are active and passive spaces built in.  I also love how it has little affirmations for each, to help remind me of what the energy of that phase is.

Then, because I kind of wanted some other type of reference on the opposite page, I copied in this rune poem I had found.  Again, it's just something I really liked and thought would be fun to have in my book.  I'm still thinking of this book as my everyday carry (my daily planner really isn't an EDC, it's a "lives on my desk where I work" book), so having things in the book I might want to reference regularly just fits.

  I also knew I'd want to have a key, or some way to find specific things I might be looking for.  I remember finding this method of indexing (because I didn't want to do page numbers and traditional indexing), where you color code a strip on the edge of the page, then you can just fan your pages and look for pages with the color you want on them.  If you look closely, you can see that the first page is coded for Reference, as it has the moon cycle info and rune poem on it.  As I love symbols, I also added in some symbols so I can see what a particular line might include.

 

Then I get into the meat of the log book, where the daily work really lives.  As you can see in the cover image, I highlight the date line, to separate different days, and then I add in notes or thoughts or records of what I did that day.  When I started this book, I really didn't know how I wanted to use it beyond 'spiritual BuJo style log', so there are lots of orange 'ideas', where I was just thinking about what might work and brainstorming.  I did know that I wanted to note the moon phase, so I drew that in after every day line.

There are a few things I tried that I am definitely going to be continuing.  I am doing daily intentions, making a conscious effort to set my energy for the day.  I am writing down prayers and ancestor communication (and may get into write and respond with this, we'll see).  I am keeping notes on my moon work, on how I am working with the different phases as they come along.

And I love having all my future ideas handy, so I can read back through them and see what I might like to try, when I'm feeling like doing something brand new.  I'm going to have to figure out a way to note when I've worked with something, but for now, just having all those ideas gets me excited!

I still feel like this is a practice I'm growing, and yet I'm really loving it so far.  I feel like having a variable aspect to my larger daily practice really encourages me to branch out, to do different things and to go with how I am feeling instead of simply following a strict schedule.  I love being able to look back and see what I did on different days. 

I think the most important takeaway from this idea of variable daily practices is that we each have to find ways to practice that works for us and our life.  And that may mean breaking the mold a little bit and trying different things to see if one of them takes hold.  Daily practice is an established thing, both in the spiritual word and in my own life, and yet I felt like having a set daily routine wasn't fully serving my needs, and so adding in this log and the variable practice tracker lets me expand and adjust in ways that a set daily practice simply doesn't.  So, if you are looking for more out of your daily practice, and this idea of a variable practice sounds interesting, give it a try! 

Researching the 'whys' for deeper study

 One of the first thing many people do, when they start to study witchcraft, is to look into correspondences.  Many of us have lists and lists of different stones, herbs, colors, times and animals that relate to different energies.  This is one of the foundations of spell and ritual work, and often when you read books, they offer up these correspondences with no context.

We learn a list of words that are associated with a thing, but we never know why those things are connected.  Sometimes, we can figure it out at least partially, like the fact that roses are associated with love, because roses are considered the 'traditional' romantic flower to give someone, but does anyone know why roses were put in this role?

Beyond correspondences, there are a host of other parts of practice that we just accept as face value.  We are told we need to cast a circle to do spell work, that we should celebrate certain days, or that we should craft our own tools.  Often, the reasons why we are expected to do these things isn't ever explored.

And the whys are SO important, for a variety of reasons.  Firstly, you really shouldn't be doing a lot of stuff if you don't know why you are doing it, especially if your source isn't one you trust.  It's one thing to listen to your parents when they tell you that you should do something, but picking up a book that tells you to do something is another story.  We often trust books and online sources because the implication is that if it is in print or online it is valid, and yet that is completely not the case.  Anyone can post stuff online, and in this day of self-published books, anyone can get their thoughts printed out.  There is no vetting process for these things, and if you blindly follow the instructions of any book or internet source you come across, you are setting yourself up for trouble.

By asking the whys, we can see the roots of a practice, and the reasoning behind it.  Then we can decide for ourselves if this makes sense to us.  And sometimes we do need to take that leap of faith and try something to see if it will work for use, but if we have asked the right questions and found out more about why the practice is being recommended, we can see if there are any warning flags.  Sometimes practices are recommended that are downright dangerous, and sometimes they are innocuous and harmless, it is only by really seeing what is being done and why that we can tell the difference.

But also, uncovering the why's behind stuff makes the information more real.  If I am looking at a stone and it's list of correspondences, it can be quite hard for me to remember many of them.  If, however, I do my research and try to figure out why each quality is associated with that particular stone, I start to build connections that make sense.  I learn the stories behind the associations, I discover the experiences other people have had with it, and that helps me to remember what goes with what.  It also makes the information more solid to me.  If I just see two words linked on a page, that connection is quite weak.  If I read a story explaining it, I'll remember parts of the story, or the emotions behind it, when I think about the connection, making it that much more powerful when I'm actually using that connection in my work.

Researching the whys also gives you focus in your study.  At some point, we realize we have lists of correspondences, books of spells, information on rituals, and we may be already doing the work, and the question becomes what to do now.  If we don't start taking some of our studies deep, we simply skim along the surface and our practice might start to feel rote.  We might be doing rituals, but they actions feel hollow because they don't mean anything to us.

We can take any part of our practice deeper by starting to research the whys surrounding it.  Whatever thing you are most interested in, start asking yourself questions about what you are doing...and why.  Why should this herb be harvested at this time?  Why is this part of the animal connected to this energy when the rest of the animal isn't?  Why is this element tied to this tool?  Why is this symbol on this tarot card?

The really interesting thing about exploring the whys is that you may find that sometimes you will uncover reasons that just don't work for you.  White is always associated with purity, innocence and goodness.  And part of my brain knows this and accepts it, but the larger part of my brain connects white with emptiness and uncertainty.  It is my personal connection versus the collective connection.  By knowing the whys behind the collective, I can see how they just don't work for me.  I can then ask the follow up:  if I don't like this connection, what does this thing mean to me?  And that becomes my new focus of study, and builds a practice that is tuned to my own way of experiencing the world, making it a much more powerful connection in my personal workings.

And even though I don't connect with the collective associations with certain things, there is power in being aware of them.  When I work with others, I often tap into those collective associations, and it becomes a matter of translating them into my own system, so that I can work with the group (instead of becoming a disharmonious element in the group).  Or, if I know something just absolutely doesn't work for me, I can suggest an alternative, and explain why it would work to the group.

The more questions we ask, the more whys we uncover, the deeper and more full our understanding of our practice will be.  We will be more informed and more able to adjust and adapt, because we know where the roots of our practice lead to.  We aren't just repeating what we have been taught, we see the bigger picture, the web of connections, and we can choose our own actions with forethought and deeper meaning.