Helping Midwife the Infant Sun This Mothers’ Night

Organically developing devotional and seasonal observance rituals of an ecstatic nature are my favorite types of rituals. My annual Mothers’ Night observance blends both types of rituals—devotional and seasonal—in an ecstatic, worlds-traversing and Wyrd-shaping way.

Spiritual House Clearing for a New Client

On the evening of Friday, November 3, 2023, I performed a spiritual house clearing on behalf of a new client, a single mother of two young children residing in southwest suburban Cook County, Illinois. The client, whom I will name “Michelle,” contacted me via my Iseum of the Rekhet Akhu website the third week of October. I followed up with a phone call to discuss her situation and to schedule my initial walk-through of her home to personally assess the negative spiritual energies she described. That walkthrough, conducted in broad daylight, presented a very complicated situation of entangled spiritual energies, ranging in a spectrum from “mild” being relatively harmless-but-stuck human dead (one of the original owners of Michelle’s house, which was built in the 1950s) to much more “serious” as in inimical-to-living-people nonhuman energies, a.k.a. irate Elementals (a history of atypical flooding situations both in the basement and pooling water in the backyard near a sickly aspen tree) or even Something Wholly Other and Worse.

Virgo Planetary Ritual Featuring Spellwork for Successful Job Hunting

When it comes to magical workings, timing is everything. And when you can harness the planetary power within your own natal chart to effect changes you want to have happen in your lived experiences here in consensus reality, all the better! Even though we’re still a week out from the Sun’s annual entry into Virgo, there are plenty of heavenly bodies already transiting Virgo—to wit, the Waxing Crescent Moon, Mercury (which rules Virgo), Mars, and the Medium Coeli or Midheaven, a “destiny point” in a chart (it’s a vertical axis that serves as the cusp of the 10th House). I happen to be a Virgo Sun Sign person with natal Mars in Virgo and it’s this tide of peak energy (transiting Mars will only be in Virgo for the next nine days for the rest of this year) I’m capitalizing upon with the following ritual and spellwork I’ve devised to help folks like me who are always ready to upgrade their job situation to something better. But it’s really the symbolism of the newness of the Waxing Crescent Moon in Virgo that’s driving the symbolic power of this ritual. Ready to join me on this magickal odyssey? Have your offerings to Hermes and Artemis at the ready!

Summer Solstice Prayer to Herakles

Solstice Sovereign,

Glory of Hera,

I greet You with praise as You take Your place upon the high throne of the firmament!

Exalted Hero of Golden Glory,

You have bestowed upon all the blessings of Your bronze-beamed brightness as You completed Your Twelve Labors,

Coaxing forth flowers and fruit from the hidden treasures of seed and vine.

Thus with a heart full of gladness do I

Hail You in this season of Your ascendancy,

For Your exalted radiance becomes a gleaming guarantee that Light shall never forsake the Earth.

Lord, may I achieve Arēte (“Excellence”) in all my undertakings.

Strengthen my mind, set right my path, and drive away all evil-doers from my midst.

Son of Righteousness,

Though my offerings are humble, they are freely given.

Glory and praise unto You,

Hallowed Blaze of the Heavens,

For You are truly the Living Light!

Io, Herakles!

Midsummer’s Eve Magic: A Renewed Covenant with the Fae

What a glorious outdoor ritual that just concluded! Every Midsummer, I renew my covenant with the “Good Neighbors” and reaffirm the reciprocal ties of hospitality and peace, particularly with the spirits of land, tree, and river.

Midsummer’s Eve Magic: Rowan Wood House Blessing

While outdoor rites that acknowledge one’s relationship with local land spirits can and do get performed on this special day, I also like to have an indoor ritual focus on apotropaic magic with the following house blessing that I like to do. It features the crafting and consecrating of equal-armed crosses made out of rowan wood, a tree (Sorbus aucuparia) venerated throughout Europe for its evil-averting properties.

Oak & Aconite Coven: May Eve Ritual, 2023

Some Preliminary Words

This ritual, which is meant to be performed outdoors as the sun begins to set, leans into my hardcore Gardnerian background whilst also lending expression to the shared non-Wiccan Trad Craft sensibilities among the majority of the coven’s members.

There are a few songs and chants in this ritual and these absolutely have to be committed to memory weeks in advance. It would be advisable to do a group rehearsal too, even if no members of the “public” are there to witness this. It would be ideal for all the lines of the ritual below to be memorized well in advance of the ritual’s execution; if that isn’t possible, understand the gist of what is to be said by whom and when—and speak from the heart. Don’t carry printed scripts around, please, because getting caught up in the head space of “speaking lines” dissipates the focus on the energies that the ritual is meant to build and direct. Act from a place of mindfulness.

A Blessed Mothers’ Night to All Celebrating!

From Oak & Aconite Coven to all of you, have a blessed Mothers’ Night and a bright and joyful Winter Solstice!

Án Mórrígan: My Praise Poem/Ritual Invocation to the Great Irish Goddess of War and Prophecy, Samhain 2022

This is the most spiritually significant time of the year for me, Samhaintide. For many weeks I’ve been pondering the overlap in calendrical calculations of seasonal shifts as well as cultural customs between the ancient Celts and the Slavs. Any Celtic linguist as well as any modern Witch will tell you that the Gaelic Samhain denotes “Summer’s End,” and the time to honor the dead and prepare for the trying season of Winter occurs in early November.

Oak & Aconite Coven May Day 2022 Ritual

This is one of my favorite times of the year! I cheerfully wish those celebrating May Day / Beltane tomorrow in the Northern Hemisphere and All Hallow’s / Samhain in the lands Down Under wonderful festivals! May your Gods and Spirits gladden your hearts and guide you at this powerfully liminal turning o’ the tides (made all the more potent by a Taurus New Moon eclipse!). For me and for my Slavic forebears, early May marks the beginning of Summer (in the Serbian calendar, it’s the fixed date of St. George’s Day, May 6).

It’s a time of honoring the fructifying powers at work in the land; in particular, it’s a time of cultivating right relationship with the Fair Folk / the Fae / the Vile (pronounced VEE-lay) and demonstrating through your ritual actions that you know how to be a courteous and hospitable neighbor to Them. I’m looking forward to doing my solitary Walpurgis Night ritual tonight, where I honor the Lady of Elphame, and I’m giddily looking forward to celebrating May Day tomorrow with my coven that my dear friend Adam and I formed late last summer. After a winter gestational period of figuring out what to call ourselves and detailing our coven’s brand (yes, I have a background in marketing!), the name came quite suddenly last month while meditating on our Divine Patrons, Hekate and Pan: Oak & Aconite Coven!