Remembering the Witch in Witchcraft

Last updated on: January 10, 2024 at 2:11 pm By Ian Chambers

Has modern witchcraft forgotten the Witch? Modern witchcraft is many things — ask a dozen witches and you’ll get two dozen definitions. It’s religion, it’s folk magic, it’s nature worship, it’s seasonal veneration, it’s pagan, it’s Christian, it’s healing, midwifery and rude medicine, it’s alchemy and astrology, it’s basic herbalism, poison mastery, diabolism, it’s goddess worship, it’s hedge-riding, it’s fairyland. Many an apologist has sought to sanitise, make palatable or explain the misunderstandings of witchcraft, where the green fingered old... Read more

The Coal Black Smith…

Last updated on: December 5, 2022 at 10:19 pm By Ian Chambers

Tubal Cain, tutelary deity of the craft coterie bearing his name [Clan of Tubal Cain], has a place now in modern Traditional Witchcraft, possibly originating out of a comment in The White Goddess by Robert Graves. In this part of The White Goddess, Graves is talking of the “love-chase” (The Case Song transcribed from the famous trial of Isobel Gowdie) and the transformative procession that takes place between the “Divel” and “Our Lady”. Here, the Divel may be taken to... Read more

Green Man, Earth Angel, by Tom Cheetham – Book Review

Last updated on: October 21, 2022 at 5:17 pm By Ian Chambers

Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the World Soul, by Tom Cheetham, SUNY Press Series in Western Esoteric Traditions, 2005. Tom Cheetham is a writer whose area of special interest incorporates the imagination in philosophy, religion, psychology and the arts, taking in a broad field while pursuing the common thread to tease out a work of enchantment. Fellow of the Temenos Academy in London and Adjunct Professor of Human Ecology at the College of the... Read more

Mortem Obire – Facing Death in the Wake of the Queen’s Passing

Last updated on: September 10, 2022 at 3:27 pm By Ian Chambers

The death of the Queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms on Thursday 8th September marked an historical occasion and a seismic shift in the lives of many – most particularly, those of us who reside in the ancient bounds of Britain. There has been a great deal said since the news was announced and following the Proclamation of King Charles III on the morning of Saturday 10th September, and much is yet to be said. There remains... Read more

The Witch Compass – Working with the Winds in Traditional Witchcraft

Last updated on: August 14, 2022 at 4:18 pm By Ian Chambers

“The language of symbolism and allegory is important to almost all understandings of magic, accessing a means of depicting and apprehending the more fluid and intuitive, creative modes of experience. Symbols, it should be noted, are words or other means of depiction which convey more than literal understanding. Allegory, further more, makes purposeful use of symbols in a narrativised form to divulge a much richer sense of meaning and perspective. Symbolism works in many fascinating and useful ways, providing us with a more complex, nuanced, and... Read more

Here Oberon presents himself thy friend…

Last updated on: May 28, 2022 at 12:20 pm By Ian Chambers

And from that fatal moment, till this time The fairy king has never deign’d to show His native form, but wandering to and fro Now dwells upon the mountain peak sublime, Now hid beneath the forest’s gloomy shade… – Oberon, A Poem, from the German of Wieland, by William Sotheby, 1798. [1] Over the past few years, since the publication of The Book of Oberon, a sixteenth century manuscript grimoire, I have had a curious fascination with the folk magic custom... Read more

Cosmogony of the Compass – Yetzirah Mysticism

Last updated on: April 23, 2022 at 12:43 pm By Ian Chambers

The universe that is created by means of the sefirot and letters is constituted according to the law of correspondences between the astral world, the seasons that mark the rhythm of time, and man in his psychosomatic structure. [1] Professor Georges Vajda (1908-1981) Within the Jewish heritage of mysticism that is the Merkabah Tradition, the Sefer Yetzirah holds an important position. This book is both a cosmogony and cosmology, defining how the macrocosm came into being through the metrics of geometry, sound,... Read more

Magic & Responsibility

Last updated on: March 24, 2022 at 4:57 pm By Ian Chambers

Throughout conversations, one of the most frequent things to emerge is a regrettable reason that some people are drawn to magic and the occult. One of the greatest, and unspoken, attractions to people drawn to magic is deferred responsibility; that is, the postponing of ownership in favour of wish fulfilment. In these circumstances, we are guilty of pinning our hopes for overcoming difficult life situations upon a desired outcome through magic, when we wish for a thing to resolve itself... Read more

Navigating the Witch Compass

Last updated on: February 11, 2022 at 10:22 am By Ian Chambers

As cognitive beings, narrative coheres humankind, the mechanism of story bonding us in an associative way. Myth, that ‘other’ reality, is the language of the timeless world which surrounds and permeates us, and so imbues humanity, and the sorcerous individual particularly, with a common sense of the mystical and spiritual (as opposed to the material and physical, as well as rational). Through the mythic narrative, we find place, we find ourselves within the folds of the ineffable, and we find... Read more

Promise of New Light

Last updated on: December 21, 2021 at 11:17 am By Ian Chambers

To the Great Goddess, mother and Maker of all things, we call for a light to lead us, that light of promise held in our hopes when we waited in the shadowed lands, on the plains of ashes and in the places of darkness. Bring us, we pray, once more that light in our darkness to comfort us against cold death, to warm us with new life, new strength, and so to set the brilliance of the new day and... Read more