My book, The Witch’s Path: Advancing Your Craft at Every Level, is out on Wednesday! Written during a period of personal burnout, it’s a book about taking next steps as a witch (but really, could apply to magicians and occultists more broadly). Whether you’re an exhausted group leader, an armchair occultist who needs a shove, or …
Continue reading Learning and Unlearning Witchcraft: Can Bad Info Ruin Your Practice?
Photo courtesy of Sagar Vasnani and some royalty free website I closed and then promptly forgot the name of. *screams* Create sacred space in whatever manner your tradition or intuition deems appropriate. For this ritual, an outdoor setting is ideal. If working indoors, seek out a dark space that reverberates to some degree: a stairwell, …
How do you know when you’re an expert at something? Or when you really are “advanced” as a practitioner? For lots of us, we connect expertise to the ability to charge money for something, to when we can point to where others defer to us for our opinions, or to when we repeatedly find ourselves …
Continue reading Don’t Be an Expert Witch: Expertise, Advancement, and Small Ponds
My second book, The Witch’s Path, is now available for preorder. I’m very proud of it, and pleased to here be able to share a short excerpt from it. The Witch’s Path is my love letter/pep talk to other witches as a whole. Whatever kind of witchcraft you’re into (or thinking about getting into), this is for all …
Continue reading Serious Play: Shifting Our Perspective on Ritual
It often surprises people to learn that I write my books and blogs by hand. Computers and phones have become so ubiquitous that I think it just doesn’t occur to us that this might be an option that some writers still choose—it sounds so antiquated and needlessly difficult. Maybe even pretentious. I admit that I …
If witchcraft is a craft (in addition to being a religion, as it is for many of us), then what exactly is the “craft”? And how often do we have to be engaging in that craft in order to really be witches? For a lot of people–both witches and non-witches–we immediately think of spells. Witches …
Continue reading When I Do Spells: Thoughts on Working Magic and the “Craft” of Witchcraft
I’ve made a lot of blog posts and videos in the past about favorite books: advanced books, beginner books, books for people interested in taking things in a new direction, classics I think everyone should read, and books that I’ve got in my personal to-be-read pile. But I was recently asked to share my thoughts …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZAbaHBanLQ&feature=youtu.be My personal theological position has moved as my Craft has grown and changed, and I find that it loops around. For a long time, I identified as a hard polytheist. More recent experiences make me less sure. But ultimately, I appreciate the paradox that presents itself in so many magical traditions: one can hold …
So I’ve been woefully absent, my friends, as you may have noticed. On top of work and my regular adulting regiment I’m now back in school working on a teaching certificate in secondary education so that I can start promoting witchcraft in public schools because the children are our future. Things are good, but I’m tired all …
[Please observe right away that this conversation is specifically about (all kinds of) Wiccans. Please don't write irritated comments designed to inform me that there are other kinds of witchcraft. I am aware. That is a different subject, and not the one at hand.] It’s popularly asserted in Pagan and witch spaces that one can …
Thorn Mooney 