Back to Basics: Casting the Circle

There are lots of books out there that talk about how to cast a circle, but they leave a lot out, I think.  So here’s my step-by-step, and how I experience it.

1. Planning the space:  Assuming all of your ritual “stuff” is set up and in place, you have to decide where the circle boundaries are going to be.  If you’re working with others, discuss the boundaries before beginning in case some of them can’t perceive the energy well enough (yet) to keep from crossing the circle.  Because things come up unexpectedly, always plan where a temporary door into/out of your circle may need to be.  Due to the layout of my living room, that can only be in the South or Southeast, for example.
2. First breath, Ground and center:  Take a deep breath, let the tension flow out of you down to the center of the Earth, and as you inhale focus on your heartbeat to make you fully present in your head with the energy of the Earth filling you up.
3. Second breath, Open to the sky:  Make sure your crown chakra is open to the moon, the stars, the sun and breathe that stellar energy in to mix with the Earth energy in your solar plexus.
4. Third breath, Turn it up:  Basically, as you inhale the third breath picture the Earth and Stellar energies making you glow brighter and brighter, then set your breathing on automatic and keep that image in your head.
5. Anchoring the circle:  Choose your starting point.  I like starting/ending my circle in the North, because that’s the direction of Earth for me and that’s where all things come from.  You may choose something different, and if it works well for you that’s fine, but you have to start/end casting the circle in the same place, or it isn’t a circle at all.
6. Begin casting:  I’m going to remind you that you’ve charged yourself up with energy, so here’s where you start using it.  Keep in mind, that while you’re casting the circle you are still also charging yourself up so you shouldn’t feel depleted when you’re finished.
7. Whether using your hand or a ritual tool to direct the energy, start a stream of energy flowing to the starting point and leave it hanging in mid-air as you move your hand to draw the line of energy, and step to the right.  Go all the way around the room, maintaining the flow of energy from the earth/stars into your body, down your hand, and into the circle.
8. Tie it off:  As you’ve moved around the room leaving the energy for the circle behind you and replenishing yourself from the cosmos, you will come back to your starting point.  I like to draw that last bit of the circle into an infinity loop, the final stroke of which will connect it to the point I started from.  In my mind, this keeps the energy moving while I am not the source of it.
9. Finishing:  By the time you’ve tied off with your infinity knot, you should feel the change ripple through the space like the rings on a pond after tossing a pebble in.

And that’s it.  Your space is warded, your circle is cast, and you’re ready to start your ritual or spell.  The person casting the circle usually also maintains a “watchful eye” on it during the ritual to make sure it stays up.

As for opening or un-casting the circle, there are more options than I'm listing here, but these are the most common:

1. Break it:  Yep, some people cut the circle with an athame and declare the space open, letting the energy disperse.
2. Suck it up:  Some people are more comfortable drawing the energy of the circle into a tool for “storage” to be used in the next ritual.
3. Earth it:  Some folks will uncast the circle directing the energy into the Earth.

Now, it doesn’t have to really be round.  It can be an ovoid shape, depending on the space you’re in and the number of folks in it.  If you’re in a really long room, you won’t have a round ritual space.  It’s OK, the important bit is having the space enclosed by magic. 

You can choose to cast silently, but if you’re with a group sometimes having words spoken while casting can help the group share the same imagery for the circle, and they will feed energy into the person casting it so that the circle is strengthened additionally by the combined will of the group.

Happy Zapping, Witches.

Love,

Alan

A Question of Morality

Recently, I was told that good witches don’t curse or hex, and then the speaker started spouting the “Harm None” creed that so many Wiccans swear by.  And in the next breath, telling me my karma was going to get me if I did.

For my thoughts on karma, let me point you to a previous post so I don’t repeat myself:  http://heartsongscircle.blogspot.com/2011/06/three-fold-fib.html

So, karma aside, let’s explore morality for a bit.

In past dealings with the eclectic pagan community, people have stood up very righteously and criticized me for healing someone who was in a coma, trying to help their body repair itself so they’d recover – because I didn’t have “permission” to work magic on their behalf, so I was obviously a “black witch”.  Using a sleep spell on someone to get out of a difficult situation where they were pointing a gun at me was also met with criticism.  Both spells, by the way, worked.  My friend recovered, and the gunman got dizzy and passed out briefly enough for me to get away, thanks to my “evil magic”.  Apparently I was supposed to let the gunman do what he wanted, and let my friend die without having tried to help him.  He might have recovered on his own, maybe my spell didn’t change anything at all.  But isn’t trying the important part?

I personally detest when people categorize magic as “black” or “white”.  Frankly, it encourages racist thinking since it makes “black” the “bad” color.  Black is a perfectly fine color, whether it’s clothes, skin, or the night sky on a tall mountain, dappled with stars.  Magic is just a force, as neutral as a knife, which can be used for cooking, curing, or killing.  It’s all up to the intent of the wielder.

And yes Wanda Fae, sometimes it’s OK to curse.  At one time in my life, I didn’t think so.  Here’s what changed my mind...

Once upon a time, I was living in an apartment with a roommate.  One July evening in the middle of the week, about 1am we were awakened to yelling and then a loud crashing noise.  His bedroom was closer to the front door than mine, so he went out there while I grabbed the phone.  I heard him yell “Hey!” and then I heard the intruders yell “Where’s the money?”, followed by noises of flesh striking flesh.  I was on the phone with the police, while my other hand held my ritual sword, shaking.  I heard loud crashing noises and I told the dispatcher that they were hurting my roommate and I was going out there, when I heard someone coming down the hall.  I was prepared to shove the point of my sword through someone’s stomach.  Happily, it was my roommate and he was ok – they’d only shoved his bare chest with the palms of their hands, that’s what the noise was.  He wasn’t even bruised, thankfully.

After we assessed the damage, inventoried what was missing, the police had come and gone, and we’d shoved the couch in front of the shattered front door to hold it closed while we waited for the apartment maintenance folks to repair the door and change the locks, we were talking about how glad we were no one was hurt, and that we really needed to be more diligent about the warding on the apartment.  I still wasn’t ready to hex, at that point.

The following day, I saw someone walking around the apartment looking suspicious, so I committed his face to memory.  A few minutes later (I was on the phone with the credit card company canceling and ordering new cards, since they’d gotten my wallet) someone tried a key in the lock and was having trouble.  I looked through the peep hole, and saw the suspicious looking guy with my keys in his hand, trying the door.  I kind of lost it.  I told the person on the phone I had to hang up and call 9-1-1 because the robbers were back, then unlocked and opened the door to see him running away.  When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to catch him and pound his face into the sidewalk like I wanted to, I yelled “DIE!” at him and waited for the cops to show up.  And immediately cast a hex off the top of my head so that he’d be caught, arrested, and convicted.

A week later, I was out of town at a training class, and the power in the complex went out the night before I was due home.  When I got home, there were police everywhere, so I waited for my roommate to get home from work – he had no idea what had happened.  The day after that, I went and talked to the people in the management office to get the scoop.  The robbers had gone into someone else’s apartment during the blackout, robbed her, roughed her up, and she was found dead the next day.  She was 84 years old, a former teacher, and was volunteering at the elementary school down the street.

Ever since her death, I freely encourage people to hex robbers, rapists, highway snipers, and the like.  Get them caught, make their weapons misfire to hurt them, and get them away from innocent victims like that poor lady who died because someone thought it was easier to steal and injure than to get a job like the rest of us.  Those robbers went to jail for a loooong time, especially after I positively identified the one guy in a police photo lineup, and then again on the witness stand in the courtroom.

This doesn’t mean I go around cursing willy-nilly, because I’m not that kind of person.  I have to have a good reason to hex.  But to protect innocent people, the bad guys have to be stopped.  I don’t have super powers, I can’t fly around the city bouncing bullets off my chest, reading the minds of the wicked and bringing them to justice.  But I can sure as heck cast spells that work.

Let's talk Initiation

Before I get started, I want to be clear that I'm not asking anyone to divulge oathbound secrets on a blog on the Internet.  But in the 25+ years I've been practicing Wicca, I've noticed some unusual happenings pertaining to the initiatory experience that I'd like to explore, hopefully with input from others who are comfortable talking about it.

If you don't know, I generally work within a mostly Wiccan tradition of the sort practiced before the Llewellyn books were widely available.  A lot of the current eclectic Wiccan traditions don't resemble what I do, although that doesn't make them invalid for the folks practicing them.  It's just different.

That said, I've worked in a 3-degree system for most of my adult life (well, aside from the 4th degree initiation I received that's such a mystery I wasn't really told anything about it before or afterward).

To prepare folks for initiation, I was taught that fasting for 4-6 hours was preferable, abstaining from nicotine, caffeine, or any mind-altering substance was mandatory, and that eating a vegan diet for 3-7 days prior was ideal.  For people on prescription medication, that's not always possible.  Most smokers can't go 4-6 hours without nicotine, and most coffee/soda drinkers can't abide the idea of going that long without caffeine.  The folks who don't follow the rules I was originally given are usually the ones most likely to have some sort of negative experience after the initiation, though.

I've seen a lot of different things happen to folks after their initiation, whether I was involved or not, and some of them were more negative than others.  Always on the lookout to improve the experience for everyone, I'm interested in feedback from anyone who either recognizes these or has something else to add to the list.

After-effects of Initiation:

1. Fatigue – is this normal, as a result of energy channels (meridians?) opening wider from the initiatory experience, or is it a result of too much energy being flooded through someone?  How do we measure or regulate how much energy one uses to initiate?
2. Confusion – I think when confusion happens and someone is “thinking fuzzy” for a few days after initiation, it may be a result of improper grounding, or something has gone wrong with the integration process of the new energy assimilating into the existing system to create the change that goes with initiation.
3. Hyper-awareness, Insomnia – lumped these together because they can be sort of related.  The initiate is highly stimulated by the initiatory experience, but they can’t ground enough to sleep, and the heightened sensory input that sometimes accompanies initiation also keeps them from relaxing.  In some cases, they may need to be grounded by someone else if they’re unable to make it work.  This should happen before they leave the place of initiation, to make sure this “hyper” state doesn’t kick in later as it sometimes does.
4. “Purging” – I’ve seen everything from profuse sweating (elevated body temperature), diarrhea, vomiting, to gallstone or kidney stones post-initiation – sometimes even just after a Reiki attunement.  I still don’t have a handle on this one, but I’m betting that it has something to do with pre-initiation preparations not done right.
5. Sex drive – this one might be normal, but I’ve seen both elevated and depressed sex drive in people post-initiation, with no discernible pattern to indicate a cause either way.
6. Flu-like symptoms – In at least two occurrences, I’ve seen post-initiation illnesses that appeared to be like a bout of the flu.  Is it possible that in certain circumstances the immune system is suppressed by the initiatory experience, making the initiate more susceptible to infection?
7. Fainting – had a big strapping lad pass out once, but later we found out that he fasted longer than instructed, so combined with the hot bath pre-initiation and the flood of energy coming at him as he approached the circle, the fainting wasn’t a surprise.  The fainting afterward also wasn’t a surprise, but we fed him up and he seemed fine later, although he stopped practicing the Craft and couldn’t really explain why.

Your thoughtful responses are of course appreciated  :)