Marian Green - A Witch Alone - Thirteen Moons To Master Natural Magic

If you begin with a bit of ordinary historical research, taking all that you read with a pinch of salt but meditating on any common themes, or the kinds of gut reaction you may instinctively have about certain ideas, then you may be able to gradually rediscover the old ways.

One very simple method which is quite safe because it does not suggest that you are reliving a past life, but are merely observing what may have happened at a certain time or place, is to take a festival and initially ‘invent’ a scenario. For example, in the winter, try one of the Yuletide feasts.

Imagine an old hall house decked with greenery, smell the baking bread, the joints of meat roasting over an open fire, the stewing cauldron of broth. Hear the voices of the common folk, gathering for the feast, see their costumes, the colours and textures of their clothes, hear any songs or tales being told around the fire, as all await the evening meal. Imagine yourself as one of the lowly villagers sharing this annual celebration.

See what you can experience of all that goes on. Imagine the Wise Ones of the community going out into the cold darkness to perform their own special rituals to call back the power and heat of the sun, to welcome the Star Child, Mabon son of Modron, the Great Mother. Try to see yourself as the apprentice to such a one, a child of the magical family, learning at your grandparents’ knees the arts and skills or healing spells used by them.

Build up, bit by bit over about seven evening meditations, the whole feel and atmosphere of the event. Imagine yourself being part of it, and then sit back and observe closely what goes on. Write down everything you learn, for you may need to research and check what you find out.

It is no good inventing a totally wrong set of ideas and then trying to make them work, for that is a waste of effort. Be content with small or trivial details, and gradually you will discover that your inner vision and ‘imagination’ grows stronger, the images clearer and what you learn will make more sense.

Every month when the moon is waning, spend one evening in meditation on what the country folk used to do during that moon. See your imaginary village or manor house and the people around it, performing their usual tasks, as well as trying to discover the magical arts from the Wise Ones.

Think about the crops and the livestock, the farm activities, both regular ones like milking and butter and cheese-making, grinding corn and baking bread, and those which were more seasonal, the hedging and ditching, harvesting, threshing grain, shearing sheep, ploughing and sowing, haymaking and fruit harvesting. Ask, in your invocations, that you see clearly what used to happen, and that in these gentle meditations you actually perceive what went on. Use your inner sight, learn to trust it, but still check what you see or the answers you are given.

Only by regularly sinking down into the detached view achieved in meditation will you gain the kind of control over your psychic vision which you would have been taught by the magicians of old.

Learning these arts alone or with other novice friends is very difficult, especially so because you will have nothing to check your progress against, no one to say to you, ‘Yes, that was a good meditation,’ or ‘No, you haven’t got it right yet, try again.’

You will have to be both pupil and teacher, yet those who lived in the old ways can show you their secret arts, if you ask nicely. Gradually your dreams will begin to unfold aspects of the past, perhaps even your own previous lives, when you are ready to judge what you see, and cast out those ego-tripping ideas or the kinds of experiences which can divide your personality or disturb your sleep. You will know what is right.

If you find creating pictures and the setting for the previous exercise difficult, or feel that you will be making up what you see, then you can try another approach. This is used by ceremonial magicians as part of their training, but as it is another way an individual can access lost information, it is worth learning.

This way you can use any form of divination, the Tarot trumps, the hexagrams of the I Ching, even the magical trees, as doorways to new knowledge. Like all mental arts it requires that calm, relaxed and detached mode of thinking used for meditation, but this time you set out a symbol before you.

It can be used in or out of doors, by day or night, and again, all you need is your initial symbol and a notebook in which to record immediately what you learn, or you can speak into a small tape-recorder if you prefer, though notes are far easier to refer back to!

If you are used to the Tarot, as most people interested in magic are these days, you will know that the pack is divided into two parts: the Major Arcana of picture cards, and the Minor Arcana, which in many of the older decks has no pictures. Many of the more recently designed packs have pictures on all cards, but to begin your exploration through the Halls of Wisdom it is the twenty-two numbered cards that should form your training method.

You can either deliberately select one card or, having sorted out the Major Arcana from the deck, randomly pick a card for each experiment. What you are going to do is use that symbol as a doorway to a particular kind of ancient knowledge, so that each card represents a kind of entry ticket to a certain sort of information.

Get into your relaxed frame of mind, allow your thoughts to become still and calm and then, placing the card you have chosen where you can see it, gaze quietly upon it for a few moments. For this explanation, I have drawn a card which happens to be the Chariot.

This is an excellent card for time travel as anyone, even those who know little about the significance of Tarot symbolism, will see immediately that it shows an ancient form of transport. Therefore the gate through which this particular example will take us will be concerned with that sort of magic.

Imagine now, with your eyes closed, the card depicted as large as a door, but actually painted on a curtain of stiff, white cloth. This is covering an opening in a stone wall. See the tapestry before you, larger than life, with the black and white horses and the charioteer with his Egyptian headdress and rainbow girdle coming towards you.

Smell the heat and sweat of the animals, with the sphinx heads on their harness; hear their hooves pounding the ground, sense it tremble beneath you, then leap up onto that magical form of transport and be carried in a sharp circle, back through the gate with its white curtain. Use every part of your relaxed will to become part of that image and experience.

You will be carried by this symbol into the age-old arts of the folk who worked with horses and with their magic. You may find yourself entering the forge, and see the blacksmith at work, shaping horseshoes out of grooved metal bars, red-hot from the fire. You may see him making a sword or ritual dagger. Ask him questions about his ancient craft, its secrets, and because you have arrived there in a mystical way, he will answer you.

Learn about the magics of fire, and of the quenching water, learn about blades and the magics of division and defence. Learn the secrets of iron, with which evil may be pinned to the ground. Hear the stories of Wayland Smith, or even St Michael the angel of Fire and the flame-shaped sword. Ask about the earliest roots of those magics, when the control of fire was a matter of life and death in the cold of the Ice Age, when mankind had his childhood. Learn about flint and tinder, and the making of fires, the power of candle flames, and of the sun.

All these are questions you may have answered if you happen to select the Chariot. And there is much besides this, for there are the magics of the horseman, to calm wild beasts, to control and heal animals, and to speak with all creatures.