Archive for July, 2007

August Eve/Lammas/Lunasda plans

Decorate w/ harvesting tools, & harvested fruits, veggies & flowers; change altar cloth according to suggested colors below
~Yellow, Orange, Green, Brown, Red, gold, bronze, citrine and gray, white
Sandalwood incense
have a fire (candle)
Make sun tea!!
Spend time in your garden ~ Relaxation and being at one with Nature
meditation on the abundance and blessings within your life; appreciation
Have some juice & beer
Take some garden porn; Harvest some basil
Make bruchetta w/ basil
libation
Seeds from fruit are ceremoniously given back to the Earth to keep the cycle going.
Paint nails for August

Now is a great time of year to work on honing your own talents. Put on a play, write a story or poem, take up a musical instrument, or sing a song.
Do Magick to help you finish long-standing projects by the fall
commit to nurturing our talents
Gratitude Bottles
ATC, SoS page

Think of the things you meant to do this summer or this year that are not coming to fruition. You can project your regrets onto natural objects and throw them into the fire, releasing them
reflecting on the past year and what I’ve accomplished, and making plans on what to sow for the upcoming year
sacrifice, transformation

Moon Bath

Imagine you are lying down in an empty pool or tub outside on a clear, moonlit night. If you can lie down or sit out in the moonlight for this visualization, it will be even more powerful.   Feel the coolness of the moon on your body, the light on your closed eyelids. Imagine moonbeams pouring down over you, bathing your body and spirit in cool light. The light fills the pool, covering you completely. It sinks in through your pores, your eyes, your mouth. The light relaxes your body and mind as it washes away all tension, illness, stress, or discomfort.

Visualize these spiraling away from you as they wash away down the drain. As you rise from the bath, the light lingers in your skin and hair. You carry this cool, relaxing experience with you throughout the week.

First published in Llewellyn’s 2006 Spell-A-Day Almanac

Kristin Madden

“How To Create A Spiritual Temple”

Sacred space is perhaps something that few of us actually feel we have the area to accommodate. We think in terms of a room or corner of a room that, once cleansed, would feel perfect for our spiritual work. However, sacred space is a “must have” for any who consider meditation or spiritual work a part of daily life.

Life is busy, home space is full or in short supply. So what do you do? Here are a few unique types of temples, all workable and all designed for efficient use of the space you have. Construct your temple, cleanse it and use the power it will draw. Temples have a psychological effect as well as energizing our soul. We let the mundane world drift into the background as we reconnect with the power within us. Feed your soul. Give your soul the space it needs to grow within you. Compliment your spiritual self by setting up a sacred spot.

- The Corner Temple – usually constructed in the corner of a room, using a triangular shelf set up for efficient space. The main shelf should be roomy enough to accommodate a bowl of some kind or chalice, a small container of salt and perhaps an incense burner and pair of candles. Make absolutely sure the candles have plenty of room above them for fire safety. Use a smaller shelf, mounted much further up, for storage of magical temple items that you don’t need to display on the main temple altar, such as a bell, censor or herb/parchment/ink storage.

- The Kitchen Temple – often if we try, we can make space in a kitchen, on shelves, cabinets, microwave stands or windowsills. Placement of candles, little pots of herbs, a cheer water container and perhaps a small bouquet of fresh flowers can help convert a tired old spot into a vibrant area of light and peace. Kitchens naturally lend themselves to cheery and nature-based design. Make sure to incorporate herbs of your choice, wheat as an earth representation and water or tea. – The Temple Bath – nothing is such a treat as a long hot bath with all of the surrounding atmospheric enhancements. To sink into the water element, immerse yourself in the heat, inhale the lavender aromatherapy candle and let your mind and soul relax entirely. Work out something with the space around the tub itself. With a little ingenuity you can do wonders with odd places. Incorporate hanging shelves and use the three-tiered wire basket to place your sacred items.

- The Window Temple – one space often overlooked is the windowsill. Along with the sill, you get light, both sunlight and (usually at a specific time of year) moonlight. If you are lucky enough to have four-inch sills or more, you can place an altar nicely there. Hang packets of herbs or stones from the window frames, use a long narrow container to do a crystal garden and grow a plant or two in that window. These lend the earth element as well as fresh oxygen for maximum space cleansing. If you really want to fancy it up, use stained glass or other semi-transparent hanging decorations for your window. Prisms are wonderful and draw light in through magical angles, creating rainbows in your home.

As you can see, temple space is not hard to achieve once you put your mind to it. Using oddly shaped shelves, crates, nooks and crannies, you can create a place of tranquility and escape for your head, your heart and your soul.

Eluned Bridhe

“The Trouble With ‘Christian Wicca’”

“Attempting to blend Christianity with Wicca and/or Paganism is problematic at best. While there are a host of Pagan items and symbols that have migrated into Christianity over the centuries, To truly blend Christianity with Wicca, or, well, any Pagan path in a true fashion is extremely difficult due to the theological incompatibilities involved.”

Read on…

“The Secret”

Reflections/Affirmations
A healthy mix of psychology & spirituality.
Creativity & energy as tools for visualization, and thus physical manifestation ~ similar to prayer, by sending out wishes and/or affirmations to the universe/supreme being ~ Faith
Positive thinking, and thus positive reinforcement ~ dealing with stress leads to enlightenment
Law of attraction ~ like attracts like, dislike attracts dislike
Mother Theresa refused to go to Anti-War rallies, but would go to a Pro-Peace rally any time :)
“What you resist, persists” ~ Carl Jung
“Whether you think you can, or you can’t, you are right” ~Ford
Choices
Self healing ~ the body & mind are designed to heal themselves…if you let them
Fighting will, strength

Sarcasm & lack of faith will get you nowhere

I found the documentary, The Secret, online for free!!!!

Creating a Thought Form Faery

Creating a Thought Form Faery
Source Unknown
We create every time we work magick. What we visualize manifests in our solid, earthly reality. What we think becomes mass and substance. What we produce from our own creative minds has form and essence. And as long as we keep feeding our creations from our vast stores of energy, they continue to exist. This Same thought process works for the creation of elemental forms, beings that are very real, though not always visible to the naked eye. These creations of our magic can serve us in many ways.

What Your Faery Creation Can Do

When you decide to create an elemental being, temporarily or permanently, you must have in mind a task or function for it to fulfill. This helps the creature know its role and helps you to concentrate on bringing it into existence and forming it in the way it needs to look to achieve your goals, i.e., a faery which will guard your home might look fierce and animal-like, while one who is going to aid you in astral projection might be filmy and winged. The tasks these thought-form beings can handle easily are:

-Guarding a home, person, or object
-Watching over children or pets
- Repelling negative influences
- Chasing away ill-meaning persons and entities
-Repelling or lessening natural disasters
-Leading you to things such as healing herbs
-Helping you retrieve a lost object
-Aiding in divination
-Helping you to astral project
-Warning you of danger
-Standing guard over your astral residence.

Keep in mind pagan ethics when you send you faery being out on a mission. Any wrong or malicious use of a thought-form will have severe repercussions.

Creating Your Faery

Self-created faeries are just cohesive projected though-forms produced by the witch. It all works on the simple and proven principle that thought is action on the astral plane. But to make faeries who feel real and appear animated with like energy will require prolonged intense concentration, good visualization skills, and the ability to build and store large amounts of energy before releasing it.

If you are able to concentrate and focus with your eyes open, you can create your being while in your circle. either before or after you do other rituals. Avoid doing other magickal spells during this same session because the required energy to do both is more than most people have in reserve.

While standing before you altar, hold your hands up in front of you with your palms facing each other. This is the area in which your faery being will gather energy and grow. Start by vigorously rubbing your palms together, feeling the heat and energy made by the friction, and know for certain that just as you created that heat, you can create life.

Now move you palms apart just a few inches and focus on feeling chakras (energy centers) in your palms being expanded. Sense a growing mass of energy forming between them. with you mind, create an even greater energy field growing, spinning, and enlarging between your palms until you are forced to move them apart a few more inches.

Keep up this visualization process until you hands feel pushed approximately two feet apart. This should take about 20 minutes. Now see the energy forming a shape which will become the physical body of your faery. Make its appearance just as clear as you can. give it facial features. coloring and wings if you like, but avoid trying to give it a personality. This is something it will adopt on its own over time.

Some witches feel that their strongest psychic center is either at the chakra point of their third eye or at the one over their solar plexus. If you are one of these people, then you can also effectively use one of these centers to create a thought-form faery.

Again, rub your palms together vigorously before you start, drawing confidence from the heat you produce. Now hold them a few inches away from your chosen energy center. feel the energy which is creating your faery coming from this center and see the energy massing in front of you, allow it to expand, and eventually to take form. As the energy grows, move you hands apart accordingly. This will also take about 20 minutes. When you have expanded the energy mass to about two feet in diameter, begin to give your faery its features and physical form.

Send the faery one more blast of your own energy, and then visualize the faery going about its task. Picture exactly how it looks while doing so and how others will react to it, even though they may be unaware it’s there. The more clearly you form this picture in your mind, the more effectively the faery will work.

Another method for faery creation is the meditation method, which takes longer , but, unless you are an expert in raising personal energy, is much more effective. If you have a favorite method of inducing a meditative state, then keep using it. If not, you might start looking around for one which pleases you.

You can play light “New Age” music light candles and or burn incense if you like, these may help to induce a meditative state. Avoid lying down if you feel you might not be able to stay awake.

Will the faery continue to do its job unsupervised? Might it ever strike out on its own? Yes, it might, but this happens very rarely. If you think the being you have created has taken on too much of a life of its own, then you can diffuse it by picturing the energy which animates it sinking into the ground. In most cases it is not the faery itself which has run wild, but the ungrounded energy left over from its initial creation or from other spells and rituals which were never properly grounded in the first place.

Don’t feel disappointed or discouraged if you feel your first efforts at creating a faery are not very successful. it may take several attempts to feel that your thought-forms are fully energized and “living” just as it sometimes takes several repetitions of a spell before you feel it has “taken.”

Remember, creating something on the astral plane which will last requires periodic refueling. Be prepared in the next few days after you have created a faery to spend 15 minutes or so each day feeding it life-giving energy from yourself. After that you can limit your feedings to once every two weeks and then once a month. Left unfed they have a very limited life span. Try recharging them at each new or full moon to make it easy to remember.

How the Faery Functions In It’s Role

When guarding a home, person, pet, or object, you should visualize the faery giving off strong vibrations of protection and of warning, the sort of energy which any intruder or person wishing you harm would immediately sense and would instinctively back away from. these kind of faeries can let you know when something is wrong. I.e., if a faery wished to let you know that your child or someone who was sick needed you, they might have a buzzer that they could sound or a symbol which you can see and recognize as a message. In your psychic centers these things will translate to that warning bell people often say they hear when they are struck with the sudden, unshakable feeling that something is amiss. These self-created beings are intended to give a boost and be a support to your physical actions; they are not meant to be a cure-all. Visit your creations on the astral plane, pet them, play with them, talk to them. You can give them lots of teeth, weapons etc.

Faeries can help you locate lost object, and answers to questions. You must state clearly as possible in one single question to your elemental-being what it is you wish to know. It may not tell you immediately, But it will lead you to the answer or object.

Grounding the Energy

When you are finished with your faery being, you must dismantle it and ground the energies which brought the being to life. Because this creature is not a “life” in any true sense of the word, or even a complete astral life form, you should have no compunctions about ending its existence. If you do, then please don’t create one in the first place. If you make it, then you have to be willing to take responsibility for it, and allowing it to run around unchecked is grossly irresponsible. If you do not feed the faery periodically, after a while the animating energy will wane and the being will dissipate on its own, but its residual energies may stay around for a long time after.

The dangers of loose, unfocused energy are well-documented in occult circles. They can cause feelings of restlessness manifestations, and even poltergeist activity. Extra energy or energy no longer needed must always be grounded! In the case of your faery being, you should call it to you either in a meditative state or at the same chakra point you used to create it. You should then thank the being for its service and tell it you are grounding its energy, returning it to the womb of Mother Earth, and that anything not grounded will be relegated to Faeryland.

Begin to see the faery’s image fade, growing smaller and weaker, eventually fading into the earth. If you like, you can hold up your palms in the same way you did to create the faery and reverse the visualization process. When you finish, go outside somewhere or go to a corner inside your home and press your palms to the grown, feeling any leftover energy draining from you safely and harmlessly into the earth.

Anamchara
Brigids Haven

Wicca Before Gardner?

“One thing in my profile that has raised more questions than any other is this particular “dislike”:

“People who say Wicca was invented 50 years ago by Gardner (or Crowley)…”

Many are confused and mystified by the statement.  After all, the idea that “Gardner made it all up” has been repeated so often that (far too) many accept it as established fact.  While arguments in this direction may be persuasive, it is far from a done deal.”

Read on…

*I really enjoyed reading this essay :) *

Ritual of Transformation

 

Tuatha de Brighid – Ritual of Transformation
By Caelainn

Vestment: Don special clothing, jewelry, or otherwise prepare the body for rite.

Have on the altar a candle in a votive glass, set into a bowl full of water. This is Brighid’s Candle, set in Her Well. Have also ritual bell, incense, matches, a small fireproof container, a piece of paper with pencil, a filled goblet and an offering.

Travel around the Sacred Grove three times deosil. Lightly ring the Ritual Bell. Light the incense. Smudge self with incense and say:

I am cleansed and purified.

Light the Brighid Candle and say:

I light the Sacred Fire,
As Beloved Brighid would kindle,
As Foster Mother would kindle,
As Lady of the Hearth would kindle,
In love, and in peace.
I light the Sacred Fire,
As the beacon unto the Holy,
As the ward against the unholy,
As the flame of holiness within my heart.
In kinship and affection.
Beloved Brighid, I ask you to bless this Rite.
So be it.

Raise the offering up in the direction of the Brighid Candle, saying:

Beloved Brighid,
Hear the words of this, Thy child and Thy sister.
Fiery Arrow,
Lady of Wisdom,
Healer of ills,
Bless me with Thy presence and Thy guidance,
And accept this offering as a token of my love
And reverence for Thee.

Spend a moment in silent meditation.

Prayer:
Brighid my Smith
(by Cedar, 15th Aspen, Ord Brighideach)

Brighid my smith, I dedicate myself to you.
I will make all the work of my hands in your honor
and in hope of your blessing.
Mold me gently when you can
and sharply when you must.
Temper and shape me in the fire of your forge.
Brighid my healer, I dedicate myself to you.
I will work to heal those I encounter in your honor
and in hope of your blessing.
Teach me with your warming fire when you can
and your burning fire when you must
Mold me in the cleansing and healing fire of your cauldron.
Brighid my inspiration, I dedicate myself to you.
I will give the words of my heart, the music of my soul, in your honor
and in hope of your blessing.
Kindle bonfires in me when you can
and forest fires when you must.
Incite and inspire me with the fire that falls from your harp.
To the protection of your mantle, I yield me.
To the well of your wisdom I bath me.
To your transforming fire I yield me.
To the keeping of your sacred flame I commit me.
Brighid I am your child.
Guide me waking.
Guard me sleeping.
Teach me always.
Grieve and rejoice with me.
Dancer in the flame.
So be it.

Write on the piece of paper that which you want to get rid of;
that which is holding you back from being the person you feel
you are meant to be. Light the paper in the Brighid’s Candle,
and set it in the fireproof container.

Say:

Brighid my smith,
into your transforming fire
I release that which I no longer need.
I ask you to safely and completely remove it from my life.

Dip fingers in Brighid’s well, and touch forehead with it.

Say:

Brighid my healer,
through your cleansing water
I bring to myself your healing warmth.
I ask you to replace that which I just released,
with that which I will need to heal and move forward.

Raise hands up.

Say:

Brighid my inspiration,
I have dedicated myself to you as a keeper of your sacred flame.
And as such, I ask that you inspire me; mold me, change me.
Bless me with your transforming fire and your healing water.
That I might always know your wisdom and love.
That I might not stumble.
That I might not be lost.
That I might always know my rightful place is as your flame keeper.
These things I ask of you in your name.
So be it.

Spend a moment in silent meditation, or `walking’ a finger labyrinth.

Say:

Blessed, Brighid, grant me thy blessing, now and forever more.

Stand in silence for a time, then drink from the goblet.

Snuff the Brighid candle.

Say:

Blessed Brighid,
I thank Thee for Thy presence and Thy blessings
- now and always.

Ring the ritual bell.

Say:

May I always remember the Sacred place within myself,
and to make of myself a light.
Give libations to the Earth.

Katy

Color Week – Blue/Purple

Well, I know this first project isn’t primarily blue or purple, but the added touches are blue!! :) My pincushion is made with a bandana, pillow stuffing, embroidery thread, & a blue flower bead
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My pentagram necklace, made from blue embroidery thread & a key ring.
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My first attempt at a throw pillow, made from an old work shirt & pillow stuffing (my boyfriend & I met & fell in love while working together at this place, so I thought it would make a nice reminder, hehe)
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A “blue aura” ATC, made for the Happy 100 ATC Craftalong
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My first painting since I was a kid
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And, just for fun, my butterfly tattoo on my back :)
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And, trust me, this is art!! :D *LOL* (I call this piece “what happens to ex-boyfriend’s cars when they cheat on you” ~ note, I did not do this!!! I just got a big kick out of it! Can you say *K-A-R-M-A*?! LOL)
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Today’s musings – ATCs & other pics

Well, I got into crafty mode today, & finally made my June & Litha ATCs, as well as my Litha SoS page, & started on June’s Quickie Craft.

Here’s my Litha ATC:
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Here’s the ATC Wheel of the Year, in progress. Obviously, it started with doing a painting for each of the Sabbats, but when I discovered the fun of ATCs, I decided it would suit the purpose better! It started with Yule & Imbolc paintings, and followed with Ostara-Litha ATCs:
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And, just for fun :) , here’s my altar as it was on Litha:
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I also made my June ATC:
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And here’s a view of March-June:
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Here’s my Scrapbook of Sabbats page for Litha. It’s definitely asking for more, but I don’t really have much more to put on it. I think I may just write in what I did for the holiday.
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Like I said, I also *finally* started on my Quickie Craft doll. To me, this is no quickie craft, & I’ve been dreading making it just because I’m dreading how it’s gonna turn out. However, I really want to make it regardless. I want to keep her on my altar & make different clothes for her for each of the Sabbats :) Yeah, I have way more ideas & plans than I do time & sanity!!! ;)

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