Author: A Solitary Pagan

The hours of the day are also influenced by the planets. For example, if you were carrying out a love spell in which you wanted rapid results, perhaps for a special meeting, you could work on a Friday, Venus’s day, on both her hours – sunrise and the third hour after sunset. If you wanted courage in love, you would use a Mars hour on a Friday. If you needed to communicate your feelings, but found ...

Ritual magick is no different from any other activity that you may carry out in a systematic way. Yes, it is true, it is more formal than folk magick: you are using special tools and following a series of preordained steps based on traditional practice. But this does not mean that it has to be so complicated as to be beyond the capabilities of any normal person. You do not need special powers; and...

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 spi...

The overall idea of types of magic, like Black magic, or White magic, largely stems from applying Ceremonial uses of magic practice to Witchcraft. The dark side of nature and the light side may naturally find balance in the world. The idea that black magic is evil and white as good, with grey being somewhere in between, stems from assumptive mainstream ideas about magic. Using dark power to harm a...

Many contemporary writers on Witchcraft have pointed out the relevance of new discoveries in the physical sciences that seem to identify what Witches have always known to exist: a symbiotic relationship between mind and matter. This relationship can be viewed from many angles and is probably not entirely understood by anyone, but its existence is clear to practitioners of magic as well as other mi...

There are many books to read, pre-made spells, and lots of verbal advice about which herbs to use and how to create a spell using sympathetic magick. Most of them call for supplies that are next to impossible to get in your area, unfamiliar to you, and, therefore, have little to no meaning to you, or are just plain expensive. A lot of Pagan Witches live on a tight budget and don’t have the extra c...

It is probable that all alphabets were originally magical. Only in later times did they come to be reduced to the more prosaic transactions of mere record and trade. The names which the letters were given often concealed some secret, which they enshrined in an abbreviated form. Also, the number of the letters, and their divisions into consonants and vowels, had inner and arcane meanings. A frequen...

One of magic’s main focuses is healing—healing of the self, healing of the earth, healing of humanity and nature. In this sense, magic and self-care go hand in hand. Self-care is a way to maintain your health, heal your spirit, and maintain or optimize your emotional, mental, and physical health. Magic helps with self-empowerment and exerting control over your life, encouraging a focus on yourself...

Candle magick may be the most basic form of magical practice. It can be very simple, prayer and lighting a candle before an image or in a special place. Or you can anoint the candles with herb-infused oils to draw upon the power of the herb devas, and inscribe the candle, dedicate it to a magical purpose, and light it with the ceremony. Candles can be added in with any other work you are doing. Ma...

Journaling is a therapeutic practice. It’s also a valuable part of working magic. Keeping records of your work allows you to consult notes regarding herbal or incense blends, timing, successes and failures, origins of ideas, references, and experiments with energies of varioussupplies and components. Partnering or uniting the concepts of reflective self-care journaling and magical journaling in pu...

The modern magical revival has been unfolding for over a century. As a spiritual movement committed to the resurgence of esoteric knowledge or gnosis in the West, it first began to gather momentum in the final decade of the 19th century. Magick has since seeded itself around the world in fascinating ways, spawning divergent esoteric groups and organizations. In terms of actual historical beginning...