3 - Beginning Magick

You can create magick in all kinds of ways and you can use it for an almost infinite variety of purposes. Your magick can be solitary or group-based, self-centred or entirely altruistic. It can be personal and informal, or it may be framed in rigid ceremony. But whatever kind of magick you wish to practise, you will need to create a special place to work in, a personal area at home for your private healing and personal development work.

A Magical Place

When you were a child, you probably had a special place, perhaps a tree house, a den under a table with a curtain draped over, or a corner of the garden hidden by bushes that only you and chosen friends visited; in this place you wove your dreams and played with your treasures. The magical place I am describing in this section is just such a special place, an extension of and, in a sense, a return to that time of enchantment, for you are once again making an area separate from the everyday world, where you can set up your special artifacts.

But it will also be very different from your childhood place, because as an adult you can learn to control and direct the energies that then ran free and unstructured. Your imaginings can be refined as visualisations, your daydreams as altered states of consciousness; you can make wishes and dreams come true, not just in faerieland but in the here and now.

If you have sufficient space, you may set aside a room, perhaps a conservatory, attic or basement, or a sheltered spot in the garden for your special magical place. Alternatively, you may need to use a corner of your bedroom or draw a velvet curtain across an area of a room where you can be quiet and private. In the summer, I like to work out of doors at my caravan and go down the winding track to the beach for my sea rituals (and puff and pant up again). In winter, I work either round the hearth that is the focus of the small, dark family room where I write, or high in the attic bedroom of my narrow house overlooking the hills.

Altars

Your special place will need to contain an altar. To many people, the word 'altar' summons up images of vast churches with golden crosses or B-movies with dark-robed figures sacrificing damsels on a stone slab in the middle of a deserted moorland. But in magical terms an altar is simply the term for a sacred work space on which you place your tools, candles, incense and symbols for rituals.

In practice, many people use their altar every day, as a focus for quiet meditative moments, perhaps at the end of a busy day or early in the morning. Such use does not make it any less special. Indeed, by becoming a part of your daily world, it becomes charged with your own essential magical qualities, and provides a repository of magical and healing energies, even if you only spend a few moments each evening in personal, informal work.

It is your place and the rituals you hold there are limited only by your own desires and ingenuity.

Setting Up Your Altar

You will need a large, flat surface for your altar; a table or a cupboard will do - you can use the drawers for storage and cover it with a cloth. It does not really matter what shape the surface is - circles and squares are both sacred shapes and easy to divide into quadrants for the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, that are central to traditional magic and play a part even in informal rituals. A round altar, the shape of the sacred circle, works especially well.

If you do not have a suitable piece of furniture, a piece of uncut stone or unpolished wood, such as hazel, ash, rowan or oak supported on stones or bricks will do. Ensure that it is high enough, so that you are not constantly stooping.

In good weather, if you have a sheltered private place in your garden or back yard, you can adapt a tree stump or tall, flat rock as your work space. But perhaps the best altars of all are those impromptu ones you make - such as the top of a standing stone with a circle of your favourite crystals, or a rock on the beach with a circle of seaweed and shells to mark the directions.

The altar need not be large but you will need to have room to move all the way round it. Many rituals demand that you move in a circle with the altar in the centre, although some place the altar in the North of the circle and you stand to the South, facing North.

The central position of the altar/circle represents the realm of Spirit, or Akasha. Akasha is the name given to the fifth element formed by the combination of the four ancient elements of Earth, Fire, Air and Water that were considered in classical times to be the components of all life and matter. It is greater than the other four.

In formal magic, artefacts and lighted candles are kept on an altar but this is not vital. It is quite possible, even if you are using a communal room in an apartment or house, to leave your altar partly prepared, although items such as salt and water are best added immediately before a ritual so they will be fresh. A garden altar can be set with an outdoor candle or torch and stone figurines, perhaps shaded by bushes.

Keep pot pound or living plants on your indoor altar when it is not in use to keep the energies fresh and moving. If it feels stagnant, sprinkle an infusion of lemon or peppermint widdershins, to remove negativity that has come in from the activities of the day, and then deosil, to charge it with power. You can also cleanse it with incense, creating a protective circle of pine or myrrh, again widdershins and then deosil.

Each night, or whenever you have time, you can explore your inner psychic powers at your altar. For example, you can gaze into a candle or scry into a bowl of water on the surface of which you have dripped coloured inks. Try holding the different crystals that you place on your altar and allow impressions to pass through your fingertips, manifest as images, sounds or feelings. This psychic art is called psychometry and is one that will emerge spontaneously.

You may, however, have a more specific aim in mind. For example, to improve your finances, place a pot of basil herbs, surrounded by golden coloured coins and light a green or golden prosperity candle while visualising golden coins showering upon you. If you have a friend who is sick, and wish to send healing thoughts to them, place a photograph of them on the altar, and surround it with pink flowers, pink rose quartz crystals and a circle of tiny pink candles. Send your message of healing or visualised golden light, then blow out the candles deosil, sending the energies to where they are needed.

When you are not carrying out formal magick, keep on the altar any crystals that are of personal significance to you (see page 153). You might wish to have a clear crystal quartz for pure energy, a blue lapis lazuli flecked with gold for wisdom, a purple amethyst and rose quartz for healing and harmony, or a gleaming, golden-brown tiger's eye for grounding. You can also keep different herbs there according to your current focus.

Empowering Your Altar

You can further empower your special place as a reflection of the positive aspects of your changing life by placing on it other small items that carry happy memories for you. These might include stones or shells found on an enjoyable outing, presents from friends or family, a letter or even a printed e-mail written in love, pictures or photographs of places and people that are endowed with emotional significance. Holding these can restore the pleasure of the moment and fill you with confidence, so they are magical objects because they are endowed with the power of good feeling.

Some practitioners keep a book, for example a book of poetry, a copy of the psalms, the works of Shakespeare or the I Ching. Whenever you lack inspiration, close your eyes and open your book - the page will be chosen apparently at random but in fact your deep unconscious mind has chosen the most appropriate answer by a process akin to psychokinesis.

Occasionally, gently energise these personal artefacts by burning a candle scented with chamomile or lavender. The domestic altars of many lands were originally the family hearth and an unused hearth will serve well as an altar. They depended for their power on herbs and flowers gathered from the wayside in the days before petrol fumes. Many witches who have a hearth do still keep it well swept and fresh with flowers or seasonal greenery.

Between your altar candles you may like to place statues, a god and goddess figure from either your own spiritual background or from a culture that seems significant to you; this will balance the yang, or male, energies with the yin, or female. The god figure may be represented by a horn, and the goddess by a large conch shell.

There are a great variety of deity figures in museum shops as well as New Age shops and those selling goods from particular areas of the world. You may, however, feel more comfortable with a ceramic animal, bird or reptile for which you feel an affinity: a tiger for courage, an eagle for vision, a cat for mystery and independence, a snake for regeneration. This is what Native Americans call our personal totem or power creature. You may find some of these are, in some cultures, the symbols of divinities. There is, for example, Bast, the cat-headed Egyptian goddess who protected women - especially in pregnancy and childbirth - the home, pleasure and joy. Bast was originally a lion goddess who symbolised the fertilising rays of the Sun.

Casting A Circle

All spells and rituals, however formal or informal, are based on a magical circle. This may be large enough for an entire group of practitioners to stand in, or it may be small enough to fit on your personal altar. I have known practitioners who have only a small area create a circle on a table-top and sit facing North, physically outside it but spiritually within, manipulating the symbols within it. I have also known modern witches who will create an instant circle on paper or even on a computer screen.

If you have the space, you can keep a magick circle marked out with stones in a corner of your garden or painted on the floor of a room covered with a large rug. Attics are especially good since you are nearer the sky. If you are able to keep a special area for your circle, scatter dried lavender or pot pourri on it before each use, and sweep it in circles widdershins to remove any negativity.

Whatever the form or size of your circle, mark the four main compass directions within it. In the marker positions, you can use stones, lines on the floor, four crystals hanging on cords on the four walls or candles in the appropriate elemental colours.

Once you know your directions, you can mark out your circle, beginning in the North (although some practitioners begin in the East), and working deosil. Draw your circle in one sweeping movement. You may wish to chant as you go.

If you are working in a group, or if this is a circle for a more formal ritual, you may wish to add god/goddess-power forms as an interspersed chant, with the voices of the group ebbing and rising in waves. You may wish to welcome the Archangels, or Guardians of the Four Watchtowers at the four compass points as you cast your circle. (The Archangels represent the celestial beings that feature in the cosmologies of the three main religions of the Western world -Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For more information, see pages 200 and 236). Alternatively, you may wish to call upon powerful goddess forms:

Isis, Ishtar, Cerridwen, Innana, Shakti, Yoruba, Danu, Kali and Aine, protect, empower and inspire this magical endeavour.

You can embellish the casting ceremony as much as you like, perhaps drawing pentagrams in the air at the four main compass points, and combining this with lighting the four elemental candles.

Some practitioners like to cast a circle and then welcome other members of the group to enter, sealing the circle with a diagonal up-and-down slashing movement of their power hand (the one they write with), or a wand or an athame. (An athame is a double-edged knife used in formal rituals. It represents Air and is placed in the East of the circle.

As well as drawing circles, it may be used to conduct magical energies into a symbol.) But I think it is more powerful if one person actually walks around the outside of a circle of people, enclosing them in light. In this way, the circle is created in human dimensions and is as large or small as is required by the actual formation. The circle made to fit the group is far better magically than the group made to fit the circle, for the group is the circle.

If you want to visualise a circle, use a clear, pointed quartz crystal, or wand, or the forefinger of your power hand, and draw an outline, in the air at chest level or on the ground. The circle extends wherever you draw it from the ground upwards to above your head like a wall of gold. Again, begin in the North, and continue in an unbroken, circular movement.

Remember, the circle is created with your own power, amplified if you wish by the sacred Guardians or powers you may invoke. For this reason, creating a light body and thus drawing energy from the ground (see page 124), before casting the circle, is a powerful preliminary. Some practitioners, having drawn the light, extend then-hands upwards so that light from the cosmos can also enter. Do this before joining hands if you are creating the circle as a group.

In a conventional coven, the High Priestess casts and uncasts the circle, but you may prefer to allow the person leading the ritual to cast the magical boundaries.

Casting A Dual Circle

You can create a dual circle if you wish.

* First consecrate the salt symbolising the Earth element in the North of the altar by stirring it three times with an athame, wand or crystal, and visualise radiance pouring into it.

* Stir the water, also three times deosil with the athame, wand or pointed crystal, asking the light and the Goddess to enter it.

* Add a few grains of salt to the water and stir it, saying:

May power thus be doubled,
thus increased,
as life joins life
to create a greater force
even than these.

* Stand either just within or beyond the first circle perimeter.

* Walk deosil round the circle, sprinkling the circle line, physical or envisaged, with your salt water.

In formal rituals, the High Priestess consecrates the salt and the High Priest the water and they mingle them. The High Priestess then creates the first circle and the High Priest the second.

Casting A Triple Circle

Three is a sacred number in magick and for special ceremonies you can create a triple circle of both power and protection. The number three represents the three aspects of the god figure in many religions: the Holy Trinity, the Triple Goddess, the three aspects of the Moon -maiden, mother and wise woman or crone - the trefoil or triple god of the Celts, and the even older Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris and Horus, the young Sky God. This triplicity is still celebrated when we turn our money over and bow three times to the Moon for good luck.

* Create your first two circles of light and salt water.

* Return to the place where you began.

* Place the bowl on the altar and light your incense; you can either light a stick in a secure holder or sprinkle incense on a charcoal block burning within the censer.

* Make your final circle with incense, just beyond the lines of salt and water.

There are other variations of this, including creating your outer circle of light by walking with your candle in a broad-based holder, followed by the salt water and the incense.

Uncasting The Circle

When you have completed your spells or rituals, you should close the circle. This is done by simply reversing the casting process.

* Thank the Guardians and send the light of the elemental candles to whoever needs it.

* Extinguish the elemental candles in reverse order of lighting. Visualise the light fading and say, together with any present:

Let the circle be uncast but remain unbroken. Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.

* Leave the altar candles to burn down.

Preparing Your Mind For Magick

As well as preparing the physical area for magick, you also need to prepare your mental state.

It is universally agreed that we have two hemispheres of the brain -the left, logical, and the right, intuitive, side - and that generally in the everyday world the left brain predominates. This may be no bad thing; after all, buying golden sunflowers and oils pressed from fragrant herbs may lift the spirits, but they will do little for us if we are so disorganised that we fail to remember the cereal and cat food -and the yowls of hungry children and cats ringing through the early morning air are not conducive to relaxation.

These demarcations within the mind have not always been so clear. Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of the Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicarmel Mind, suggests that self-awareness in humans has existed for only about 3,000 years. In stating this, he was defining self-awareness as the awareness of our own separateness and our private thoughts.

This state of mind, normal in adults, is very different from the more primitive state of mind of small children, who keep up a running commentary on their actions. But young children are also incredibly skilled at mind-hopping and reading the thoughts of others. This is precisely because they do not have the adult's strong sense of the individual and private self.

In so-called primitive societies, the individual does not have the same importance: it is the collective responsibility that matters. So the rituals that are carried out to ensure the fertility of the crops and animals and the community are performed in a group.

In a sense, magick is about using the bicarmel mind, placing the brain's right hemisphere in the driving seat, taking concentration, focus and determination from the more logical side as fuel and a map, and reconnecting our unified self with the undifferentiated universe.

You can carry out magick absolutely anywhere as long as you are in a positive frame of mind. But many practitioners believe that by entering an altered state of consciousness, you remove all the conscious blocks and allow the intuitive brain free access to the unconscious mind and with it the repository of human and cosmic wisdom. This brings about a state of mind in which energies can flow between the dimensions.

You are in your most relaxed state when your brain is generating alpha waves. They oscillate about ten times per second (the range is eight to 13 cycles per second) and are less common in our modern stressful lives. But they are naturally generated, for example, when you daydream, or sit by a fountain and let the rushing water fill your mind, or gaze into a candle flame, or have a lavender- or rose-scented bath. Compare these with the traditional routine preparations of fasting and ritual bathing of practitioners of the craft and you begin to see why these are important.

Invoking your protective angels to stand at the four corners of your magical circle, performing the rituals of preparing your magical tools and, in more formal magick, casting a circle - these are all ways of marking the limits of the everyday world and the entry into this magical space in which all the normal laws are suspended. There are many ways of reaching this state, techniques to still inner turmoil and outer demands that block the easy access to the deeper psychic states.

At times when you feel unhappy, tense or anxious, you may need tranquillity; alternatively, there may be times when you need an infusion of power to meet a challenge, restore confidence or gain energy when all you feel like doing is sleeping.

Breathing in light and colours is a method of creating a cone or vortex of power, that can be released as magical energy or healing power in the cosmos. In addition, by absorbing the light of the Moon or Sun you may take in either tranquillity or energies for those moments when you are particularly in need. Perhaps you will find yourself in an artificially lit building, crammed on a commuter train or rushing to get the children to school and go to work. At such times you may feel like one of the hags from Macbeth, ready to turn the entire carriage of commuters into toads - that's when good magick is what you need.

A Moon Magick Ritual For Calm

* Wait until the Moon is moving towards full, and is quite bright in the sky.

* Find somewhere as dark as possible so the light is undiluted and slowly 'inhale' the light through your nose, looking at the Moon and drawing its light towards you.

* Hold your Moon breath for a count of 'One and two and three'. Remember to say the 'ands' to stop yourself rushing - this is relaxing, not a race.

* Close your eyes and exhale the darkness of your panic, frustration or unhappiness.

* Continue alternately inhaling with your eyes open and exhaling with your eyes closed until you feel that you are filled with silver light.

* Now gently exhale a little of that light in a single breath, this time with your eyes open, directing it in your vision towards someone you know who is also feeling stressed or anxious.

* Inhale more moonlight and continue to exhale, still with your eyes open, continuing to direct the healing light.

* Let the Moon shine into a silver or crystal bowl of water. Before bedtime, tip the water into your bath so you can absorb the Moon energies through your pores.

Whenever you feel stressed, visualise the Moon, close your eyes and gently inhale; peace will come to you because you gave it out to others.

You will find more detail on Moon magick in the chapter on Moon energies.

A Sun Magick Ritual For Energy

Because it can be dangerous to look directly at the Sun, catch your sunlight close to noon in a large crystal or in water in a brass dish.

* As before, 'inhale' the sunlight via the crystal or water with your eyes open. Hold the Sun breath, counting 'One and two and three', then close your eyes and exhale the darkness of your doubt, anger or lack of confidence. With practice, this will become a single movement.

* Continue until you are filled with light and energy, then exhale a Sun breath, directing it to someone who is exhausted, frightened or ill.

* Inhale the Sun and again exhale it towards a person or people in need.

* Rinse your face in the Sun water, then tip the rest into the ground to energise a plant.

Whenever you feel tired, recall the Sun and inhale its light in your mind's vision.

Repeat both these intakes of power once every month. If you have a particularly stressful or challenging time, hold a moonstone for your Moon energies in your power hand. Hold a sparkling crystal quartz for the Sun in the other (receptive) hand to boost the flow as you visualise the natural sources. In this way, you can balance the energies in both spheres of the brain for integrated mind and soul flow.