Mirror Work

A little more than a month ago Dusken at Adventures on the Dusken Path wrote a very excellent post called Spirits 101: Defense for Spiritwalkers, filled with all kinds of ideas on how to protect yourself and your home from the nasties of the Other worlds. In it, she briefly mentions the idea that mirrors and windows can act as portals to said nasties; and so that got me thinking. If there's one thing this old colonial house has, it's windows (something like thirty of them, but I may be miscounting). And mirrors, too, of course, like most houses, more than a few of them antique.

A couple years ago about this season I was Seeing stuff everywhere. Now, I may have mentioned before that I am an anxious sort; and while I never got the impression that Anyone here was a troublemaker, and while I understand the house is after all more than two hundred and fifty years old and so plenty of other people have lived (and died) here, still, I didn't need to be Seeing things out of the corner of my eye all the time. I know. It's really very pathetic being a witch who spooks easily, and I am duly ashamed. (I told a friend once that I was really easily spooked; she said, Well of course you are you grew up in a haunted house! and I was just like You are not helping.) At the time I did a simple visualization where I imagined a tap on the side of the house, labelled 'ghosts'; I turned the tap righty-tighty to the off position, until it was dry as a bone underneath. That did help. I don't imagine it got rid of Anyone, but at least I didn't have to See them all the damned time.

But even better to keep them out in the first place, I'd think, though, again, I've never got the feel that any of them are harmful (so far). But I liked the idea of keeping the nasties out, just in case.

Though I wanted to use a sigil to ward the windows and mirrors, I'm not the only one who lives here; so I didn't want to put up something that would be visible. So instead this is what I came up with. I'm sharing it here because I thought it was an interesting idea that someone else might want to try.

First I needed a sigil. I'm sure there are protective ones out there I could have looked up, but making or finding them yourself is I think that much more powerful. I've been following along with Christopher Penczak's The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft this year; in one of the meditations/visions/journeys he guides the reader to their 'inner temple', a sort of central safe place in the Otherworld from where one can go off in many directions; mine, of course, has a library.

So I went to that library (with that husband-guide of mine) and picked out a book from the shelf, titled On Sigils. I opened it up, thinking I would scan the contents and browse through it until I found one that worked; instead when I opened it it was only blank pages. My guide laughed, of course, and told me that wasn't how it worked. He said to form the purpose for the sigil in my mind, and then open the book. Well, that did work. So there, on the page, in response to my mental request for a protective sigil to put on a mirror or window, was this:

You are free, incidentally, to use this yourself if you think it will help you.

It owes a bit to the Icelandic Aegishjalmur, I know; but that's appropriate as that's a protective sign as well. Looking at it I knew that the four arrows represented the four directions; the two horizontal lines above and below. The six middle bits took me a while, as I couldn't make out exactly what was there, but after a time I understood them to be the letters BE GONE.

When I came out of the vision I played with it a bit, trying ordinary Latin-alphabet letters (which looked really dorky), and then some runes spelling it out in English; that looked goofy too. I finally settled on Roman numerals to correspond to the English letters (i.e. II for B, V for E, &c). They ended up looking Norseish anyway. (And funny enough, the XV for the fifteenth letter O ended up looking like an othila, the Elder Futhark O.)

It is written clockwise, deosil; I was thinking at first that it needed to be backwards, because we were talking about mirrors. But then I thought, No, they need to be the right-way round. Because this is how the ritual went:

First of course I drew the sigil on a little piece of paper. Then I lit a bundle of rosemary (which smells lovely and is very good for cleansing and purifying) and held the sigil in the smoke. Then I put it, face down, on the mirror, and blew smoke 'through' the back of it. Face down, because it is intended to be read by Those on the other side of the mirror. Then I put my right hand (I'm right-handed) over it and 'pushed' energy through it, while saying, I cast out and forbid entry to those who wish me harm; I cast out and forbid entry to those who cause me harm, even if they do not intend it; this way is closed to your kind. Be gone!

I got as far as this attic floor; I will have to wait until the person I share the house with is out to do the rest. But I think it already feels better in here.

Hurricane Magic

Tonight during the storm I had the very strong urge to do something witchy; I think it is all the raw power blowing around out there. There's something about hearing the wind blowing in a storm, especially at the tail-end of October, that gets a witch's blood going.

So I decided to make up some black salt.

Now on the one hand I don't know much about Hoodoo (really, I know pretty much nothing about it) and am a bit leery of appropriation given my white Scottish ancestry; on the other though I'm also a hedgewitch and so a practical sort. And from what I have heard, black salt is really really good for providing serious protection and driving out curses and hexes and other negativity. And I can really use that about now.

A couple weeks ago now I had burnt some protection incense on one of those little charcoal bricks; I'd also thrown some rosemary and agrimony on it for extra protection. And because I was paranoid about burning the house down (who isn't?) I nestled it all in a bed of ash from the kitchen fireplace, since I couldn't find any sand. And those, with the addition of salt, are pretty much the ingredients for black salt.

So tonight I ground all that up with about twice as much salt in my mortar and pestle, all the while drawing power from both the full moon and the hurricane blowing outside into it. I bottled it up and now it sits there on my bookshelf looking perfectly innocent. Heh.

Next Step

So. Part of the reason I started this blog was to have a place to gather up my forays into the world of the hedgewitch. But it is taking me a little while to sort out how much I want to say.

Because I want to talk about all of it. That is my nature. But I get the feeling for some reason that I'm supposed to be secretive about all this, like Witches don't tell their secrets or something, and we all know how to read between the lines. Yes, well, reading between the lines is something I've always been total crap at.

There are reasons for that. The first may just be me: I am an ISFP on those tests, after all, and we really do just want stuff on the up and up, dammit. The other reason, and one which has probably influenced those letters above, is that I was an abused and neglected child.

Abused children learn pretty quickly that secrets are harmful: after all, we are told things like Don't tell anyone I hit you, or Don't tell anyone we don't have hot water, or Don't let anyone know there's no food, always, always with a helping of shame, guilt, and fear (You'll be in big trouble if you tell! We're poor and that's your fault!) So we learn, I have learned, that secrets usually benefit those who abuse power in some way.

And while I don't, really, want to have to include all that abuse stuff at this place, I don't, really, think I can avoid it: after all, it is the main reason I find myself turning down a path that looks to be decidedly crookeder than the one I've always thought I should be on. And so I don't think they can be separated, though I have lots of other places to talk, or vent, about it.

Coming to terms with, and trying to work your way through, having been abused will change your morals. Before I realized my childhood did classify as such, sure, I bought into the whole Do No Harm, have compassion for all &c stuff. But the more I look at the behavior of my parents, and my sister, the only other close relative I have, and see that they both cannot and do not want to ever change, the more I realize that in those circumstances fighting dirty is the only thing that will work at all.

And so here I am. And here I am still not sure just how I want to use this blog, though I know I want, very much so, to use it, and use it well. But I feel I should know more about this before I do.

Which is ridiculous; how else am I going to learn? So, I'll just write. I'll let it all come out, and we'll see how it, and I, evolve. I may very well look back on this in a few years and laugh. Ah well, a sense of humor is essential.

Herb Musings

So, this new hedgewitchy blog is the perfect place to continue writing about herbs, something I'm only finally getting into as a Witch, even though I've been a gardener for years. I know, I know, some of us are late bloomers.

The subject of herbs being a very large one (it's basically all the plants on Earth, you know?) I've decided to start, as I said at the other place, with what I see in my own yard and neighborhood. And because I am a beginner, these are for the most part going to be, well, book reports. It kind of can't be helped. I do not, at this time, have enough experience to be able to say what I have learned myself through use, or through communicating with the plants themselves.

I find I am also having rather a difficult time with that last bit, right now, and not because I don't have experience with visions or journeying, because I do oh ho trust me I do; but because I'm not used to doing it outdoors, which seems to me the appropriate way to go about things if I'm looking to talk with a plant that is outside. I am a very visual person; and I have found, so far, that even just trying to meditate out in the outside world, with the sunshine, and the noise, and the cars going by, is very difficult, even with my eyes closed, though I don't tend to feel safe without them open, and I'm sure that doesn't help. I'm not sure what to do. I know there are such things as walking meditations; I thought I might look that up, see if there were any ideas there that might help. I suppose I could, if it came to it, just sit up in the attic in the dark, in that safe and private place, like I am used to, and extend my feelers out to the yard. Maybe that would work; I don't know. It seems kind of, well, armchair-y, if you know what I mean.

But for now I'll start with the book-learning.

Fieldstone

H is for Hedge

So let's talk about hedges, in the context of hedgewitchery (if that's a word). The hedge, of the English type, being the border between the cultivated, civilized land, and the forest, the wildwood. And so a metaphor for the Veil, the barrier between this world and the Other, that which is crossed on a journey of a shamanic type.

Except I don't live in England. I live in New England. We don't have hedges like that, old thorny hedgerows planted as living fences, to mark boundaries, keep the sheep in, and provide home for hedgehogs; what we have here are stone walls. Old, tumbled-down, New England fieldstone walls, more than a few of which date to colonial times, though of course it is simple enough to build new ones (and I've built a few myself). They, too, mark the boundary, in many cases, between the cultivated field (or mown lawn) and the woods; and they, too, are a haven for wildlife and wild plants, especially in my yard blackberry brambles.

Three sides of my property are marked by fieldstone walls, dating to who-knows-when; the house itself, a colonial probably circa 1745, has a fieldstone foundation. And six fireplaces, though I don't mean to brag; but it's a lucky, lucky house for a Witch, and I know it.

Old fieldstone walls criss-cross the woods around here, woods that were once fields but have since been reclaimed by forest; driving around, especially in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, one can see the old property lines, the old boundaries now lost, the walls now little more than piles of rocks more or less in a line.

I have not tried, so far, to imagine or See the barrier crossed in a journey as a fieldstone wall. But it is a good metaphor, a local metaphor, one that speaks of this land, this very specific place, this bit of Earth I tend, my home; and so I wonder if I might picture it so. I would think it would be profoundly centering and grounding, and root me here. I shall have to give it a try.

First Step

So here I am, starting my sixth blog. This one, however, I'm doing (semi-) anonymously. I am dying to be able to talk about this sort of thing, the witchy, the liminal, the well, if not shamanic, shamanish; but my public blog, the one with my real legal name on it, the one that goes with my professional Goddess art site, does not quite feel safe. And I have to feel safe, I do, having a background of abuse and neglect. I can't have my family (I use that term strictly in the biological sense) finding it. I'm already nervous enough having shared my experiences with my daimon, my him as I imagine I will simply call him here too, on that public blog. I am, at forty-three, only now starting to work out what that abuse I experienced as a child has done to me, though I know it's nasty. And since I am not yet at a place where I can just say of my family fuck 'em, anonymity (semi- or otherwise) seems a good thing.

So here I am Hazel, a name I've known for years would be my crone-name, though, again, I'm only forty-three. But I'm in the process of a change, a big one, and I've often joked, mostly seriously, that I feel as if I'm going straight from maiden to crone. It's also a nice plant-ish name, and one thing I've finally started getting into is the witchy side of herbs, though I've been a gardener for years.

This blog, then, will be about exploring the path of the hedgewitch, for me. It will be a place for me to think out loud, though, really, that's all a blog ever really is; and I should say straight up front that I am no expert. I am mostly at the beginning of this path. It is calling me, I guess, or, rather, has been calling me; by the time I stumbled upon the word, and started reading about the practice, it was less a feeling of Oh wouldn't that be wonderful and interesting! and more Holy shit there's a name for what I've been doing?

I suppose then that I should define the term hedgewitch. I am using it to mean witchcraft with a traditional bent and a strong shamanic element, meaning, part of the practice involves trancework and communing with spirits, and which therefore, is basically animist. Some define the practice as primarily concerned with herbs and the Green, as a subset of the sort of green witch path; while that is a part of it, certainly, in my mind it is darker and thornier, more bone-deep, blood and black earth and the scream of the rabbit as the fox kills it to live.

I mean, that may be high talk; I don't imagine I am going to grow out of being a coward any time soon. But this world deserves my open eyes, I think.

And so I will look, and See what I can.