Meal for the Fairies

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

There is another kind of Spirits, (fairies) which we have spoken of in our third book of Occult Philosophy, not so hurtful, and near unto men, for also, that they are affected with humane passions, and do joy in the convention of men, and freely do inhabit with them. And others do dwell in the woods and deserts; &c others delight in the company of divers domestique animals and wild beasts; and some others do inhabit about fountains
and meadows.

Whosoever therefore would call up these kinds of Spirits, in the place where they abide, it ought to be done with odoriferous perfumes, and with sweet sounds and instruments of music, specially composed for the business,with using of songs, enchantments and pleasant verses,with praises and promises.

But those which are obstinate to yield to these things, are to be compelled with threatening, and especially by threatening them to expel them from those places where they are conversant. Further, if need be, thou may betake thee to use exorcisms; but the most important thing that ought to be observed is constancy of mind, and boldness,
free, and alienated from fear.

Lastly, when you would invocate these kinds of spirits, you ought to prepare a table in the place of invocation, covered with clean linen; whereupon you shall set new bread, and running water or milk in new earthen vessels,and new knives.

And you shall make a fire, whereupon a perfume shall be made. But let the magician go unto the head of the table,and round about it let there be feasts placed for the spirits, as you please; and the spirits being called, you shall invite them to drink and eat.

But if perchance you shall fear any evil spirit, then draw a circle about it, (your chair) and let that part of the Table at which the magician sits, be within the circle, and the rest of the table without the circle.

Notes: Fairy is a broad category. In the 1500s, it was often used synonymously with terms such as elf, dwarf, sprite, and even faun and nymph. No one was quite sure what fairies were, and some theories stated that they were spirits of nature, or angels too good for hell but too bad for heaven. Some people thought they were gods and spirits of pre-Christian races or cultures.

Making offerings of food and drink to the gods or the dead has been an ancient practice, stretching back to neolithic times, so it seems only natural that a meal would be set for the fairies.

The attitude of the magician towards the fairies in the grimoires was more one of friendship than of coercion, as it states in the first operation in this book “I confidently and earnestly ask this of you as you are our friends, and we are your friends, and all of us are servants to the Highest…”

Therefore, in every exchange with the fairies, the
magician was to treat them as friends, and offer them gifts in return for service. This contrasts with the way that demons were usually treated with great fear and the medieval magician attempted to bind them with the power of God and the angels, though they were still offered gifts and offerings in exchange for service.

In the case of the dead, the magician in operation 7 ofthis book is instructed to offer to pray for the dead man and make an alms deed in their name in return for their help in finding the fairy Sibylia. I am sure that the dead appreciate other offerings as well, because if you go to any cemetery, there are always things placed there, on and around the tombstones, things that the dead person
liked during their life.

It could be rightly said that even saints and angels
require gifts in exchange for service. Notice the millions of candles burned each month for the saints and angels in the Catholic church. Although sometimes angels in the Bible were said to direct a person to make the offering to God rather than them. In any case, all spiritual workings with entities who are non-physical takes something from the magician, even if that is time and energy spent in the adoration of an angel or God.

Remember the law of exchange, and do not expect any spirit to be your servant. In the spell mentioned above,along with making a meal for the fairies, the magician was to offer incense, something that seems to be universally appreciated by all spirits, and to compose music for the occasion and perform it for the spirits with “praises and promises.” The promises would seem to refer to future gifts and celebrations in the honor of the spirits. The idea was that there should be a working relationship between the people who lived on the physical plane, and those who were the spiritual inhabitants of a location.

We can see that the spirits invoked in the previously described spell were believed to be present in the location a magician was living in, for the greatest threat was to make them leave, for then they would be homeless and must find a new place to live, which would cause them to have to seek to move in with other fairies, or possibly battle hostile spirits to take possession of another location. It is easy to see how this would be very important to the fairies, they needed a place to live just as
much as humans did, at least in the eyes of the people who performed these rituals. 

TO THE WOMAN WHO IS SLOWLY FADING AWAY…

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

To the woman who has lost her spark.

To the woman whose get up and go, has well and truly gone.

This is for you.

This is to remind you whose daughter you are.

This is to remind you, that you don’t have to be everything to everyone, every day.

You didn’t sign up for that.

Remember when you used to laugh? Sing? Throw caution to the wind?

Remember when you used to forgive yourself more quickly for not always being perfect.

You can get that back again.

You really can.

And that doesn’t have to mean letting people down or walking away.

It just means being kinder to you, feeling brave enough to say no sometimes.

Being brave enough to stop sometimes.

And rest.

It starts the moment you realise that you’re not quite who you used to be.

Some of that is good, some of that is not.

There are parts of you that need to be brought back.

And if anyone in your life is not okay with that… they are not your people.

Your people will be glad to see that spark starting to light up again.

So, if you have been slowly fading away my friend, this is the time to start saying yes to things that bring you joy and no to things that don’t.

It’s really pretty simple.

A Ritual to Conjure the Fairy Sibylia

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

The year is 1586, the night is dark and mysterious, only a sliver of the moon hangs in the sky. The autumn wind is chilly, and it blows the leaves from the trees. Two witches, one an old woman with grey hair, and another, a young man half her age, meet in an old country lane. They quietly exchange greetings and then hurry towards a nearby cemetery in an old, abandoned churchyard, looking around them for signs they are being watched. The wind blows, the night is quiet except for the distant hoot of an owl.

When they arrive at the cemetery each one draws a few items from their pockets. The man brings forth a book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, and from his sleeve, a wand made of hazel wood. The woman produces a crystal stone, and a candle. Together, they approach a fresh grave at the far edge of the cemetery.

When they arrive at the grave, the woman lights the candle, holding the crystal in her other hand. The air is thick with spirits and both witches feel a certain apprehension, a knowing that what they are doing is spiritually dangerous and could also get them executed by the secular authorities. They are risking their lives to carry out this work of magic.

The man takes the wand and gently strikes the dirt of the grave. “Arise, Arise,” he begins to call the ghost. He addresses the ghost by name, telling it to come forth and enter the crystal stone. He promises the ghost that if he will help the witches, and obey them, that he will do a good deed in the ghost’s name, and thus help them get to heaven. He tells the ghost that the witches need its help to go and get a fairy that they wish to conjure, the Fairy
Sibylia.

Dozens of spirits swirl around the two witches now. Some of them are relatives of the witches. “Stop this heresy!” one demands. “To invoke the dead is a great sin,” another ghost says. “You are going to hell,” another ghost warns. The two witches ignore these voices and carry on their work.

Lights seem to play around the edges of the stone, it glows. Spirits swirl around it, almost swimming in the air. “Could this be a home for us?” one asks. The ghost of a little child peeks around a headstone. The ghost of a witch who is buried in the graveyard looks on approvingly. The crystal stone is the center of the motion, it seems to attract the spirits to it.

The younger man continues to say the words of
conjuration from the book, commanding the ghost to appear in the stone. Then, the old woman says, “I see him, I see the ghost, he has taken the form of himself when he was young, look inside.” The younger man looks and sees, the stone is glowing many colors, orange, red, green, and purple. He reaches his hand out and touches the stone, it feels warm. The book says this is a sign that things are going well.

Somewhere deep inside the stone he can see the form of the ghost he had conjured, the one who had killed himself, an old friend of his. Success! Suddenly there is a moment of sadness, the memories the ghost had in his life, and his sorrows. “I will pray for you,” the male witch murmurs quietly, “I will do good deeds in your name.” “Work with me my friend and help me to find the fairy Sibylia.” The ghost agrees to the deal.

The two witches then close the book and then enter the abandoned church next to the cemetery. Taking chalk from their pockets, they quickly draw an ornate magic circle on the ground. It is fortified with divine names, and a Bible verse. The design is taken from the book. By this time, it is midnight.
As a final protection, the witches draw small leather shields from their pockets and pin them to their chests. Upon the shield looking coverings are the words Sorthie, Sorthia, Sorthios. All around the circle, candles are lit. A smaller circle is drawn with the chalk, outside the larger one, for the Fairy Sibylia to appear in.

The Hazel wand and crystal stone are once again drawn forth, the moon shines in from part of the roof which has caved in. Frankincense is produced from the pocket of the female witch and the smell wafts through the old, abandoned church.

Once again, the male witch conjures the spirit of the ghost, which has now entered the stone. It appears once again; the witches ask the ghost to go and get the fairy. It disappears from the stone, the room grows quiet, there is a moment of silence…

Then she arrives, the fairy. She is standing within the smaller circle outside the larger circle which the witches have drawn. She is indescribably beautiful with curly blond hair, elvish looking ears, and blue green eyes. She wears a long white dress which sparkles and silver armlets and rings and a tiara around her head of silver. She has wings of a butterfly with purple hues.

Beams of light emanate from her, and she holds a magic wand made of hazel wood, with the tip glowing a brilliant white. Her splendor lights up the dark candle lit room as if it were suddenly illuminated by the brightest moonlight. In and through this light, hundreds of smaller fairies’ dart
and fly at high speeds all around the magic circle and the witches.

The male witch quickly addresses the fairy using the names and words given in the book, asking her not to harm a hair on their heads, and to be kind to them. His companion takes the Frankincense and waves it towards her, asking the fairy to accept the incense as a gift, and to work with them as a friend and ally in the spiritual plane.

She agrees and then begins to instruct the witches in various ways to cast spells and improve their magic. She gives a couple of the smaller fairies to them as familiar spirits and tells them to watch over the witches. Finally, the male witch reads another conjuration from the book, which tells her that she may come and go as she pleases, and she promises to see them again for more teaching, and that someday she will even give them the power to go invisible.

Then in a flash, she is gone, and takes all the light from the room with her, and the little fairies as well. The two witches hurriedly gather their magical tools and return to their homes in silence, vowing to keep the secrets of their work from the church.

Empower Yourself

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

Words have power. You can utilize the power of positive, encouraging words every day. Write words on small pieces of paper and place them in spots around your house where you will notice them. Put the notes on your bathroom mirror, near your desk, and near the doorway. Create notes for yourself that say things like this:

Believe.
Keep going.
I am strong.
I am creative.
I am beautiful.
I am successful.

Create the messages as if you were cheering on your best friend, but extend this love and encouragement to yourself. Using these affirmations daily will help you with strength and empowerment. These magical reminders can assist you in times when you may be struggling and working on overcoming obstacles.

You can do this, you will overcome, you are strong, you will thrive. Believe it.

Praise Gryla, a Terrifying Christmas Cannibal with 13 Deviant Sons

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

Gryla, a Terrifying Christmas Cannibal with 13 Deviant Sons
In Iceland, 54 percent of the population believe in elves and other paranormal beings. Grýla—who is believed to kidnap bad children and cook them into a soup—plagues them every year, as do her 13 Yule Lads.

The Christmas season is magical, enchanting, and fraught with heinous stories of diabolical supernatural beings. Boughs of holly deck hallways, sugar plum fairies dance inside children’s heads, and an old man forces himself into chimneys around the world after months of tirelessly surveilling children. There are so many wonderful stories that are told during Christmas—like those of reindeer who fly in the sky, or of Krampus, the Christmas demon that beats children with sticks and drowns them in streams. Then there is Grýla, the hideous Icelandic cannibal troll-woman who abducts children and boils them to death.
Descriptions of Grýla vary across time, but she is often depicted as a monstrous female being with hooves. In some stories, Grýla looks like a sheep who walks like a human; in others, she is clearly a troll. Sometimes she has 300 heads, or a beard, or blue eyes on the back of her head. One description portrays Grýla as having 15 tails, together bearing one hundred balloons filled with children.

“She is told to come to town around Christmas time and pick up naughty kids, disobedient kids, and take them to the mountain where she lives,” explains Magnus H. Skarphedinsson, the headmaster of The Elf School, a Reykjavik-based institution devoted to Icelandic folklore. “She cooks and makes a soup of them.”

In Skarphedinsson’s opinion, Grýla is most likely some combination of fact and fiction: “I think the origin of her is somebody saw a mean nature spirit around Christmas in the dark, and that’s where this started, and it’s escalated.”

To be clear, Skarphedinsson firmly believes in elves, hidden people, and other supernatural entities. (The distinction between these two first categories is that elves are small magical beings who look strange and have big ears, whereas hidden people are quite similar to human beings—they tend sheep, keep house, and sow fields, but exist in a dimension that overlaps with our own.) “I’ve met more than 900 people who’ve seen elves and hidden people, and I’ve met five or six people that have seen trolls, and probably one of them has seen Grýla,” Skarphedinsson tells Broadly. His experience with these witnesses has left him “totally convinced” of the existence of these phenomenon.

Skarphedinsson is far from alone in this regard: Belief in mystical beings like Grýla is quite normal in Icelandic culture. As the Atlantic reported in 2013, a 1998 study found that 54 percent of Icelanders believe that elves and hidden people exist. Icelanders are so concerned with supernatural entities, in fact, that civic development will sometimes take these paranormal entities into account. Most famously, there was an eight-year-long debate between the government, environmentalists, and elf believers spanning from 2007 and 2015, when the construction of a new highway threatened to destroy a 50-ton “elf church.” Naturally, the elves won and construction workers uprooted the massive rock to appease them. (According to the Guardian, the threat of displeasing elves is so real that “even non-believers would rather play it safe than risk incurring the wrath.”)

Similarly, many Icelanders fear and respect Grýla, who is an iconic folk figure in the Nordic island country. “I remember how scared we Icelandic kids were of this terrible troll, Grýla—and she still gives me the creeps,” one native put it in an article for Iceland’s largest online travel guide. Indeed, the ogress appears in texts throughout history. In The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia, folkloristic professor and author Terry Gunnell writes that Grýla “was clearly recognized as an ugly troll figure in Iceland at least as far back as the 14th century.”

Stekkjastaur’s only passion in life is to sneak up on sheep and suck on their nipples.

Grýla has remained a staple in Iceland in part because she is the mother of the nation’s version of Santa Claus, the Yule Lads. These 13 troll-like men come to your home sequentially in the 13 days preceding Christmas, and they either give children rotting potatoes or presents.

More importantly, these freaks are each defined by their unique fetishes. For example, the bowl-licker Askaskleikir enjoys hiding beneath children’s beds and licking bowls. Then there is Gluggagægir, charmingly known as the window-peeper. Around Christmas time, this voyeur enjoys sneaking up to windows and watching the people inside. Perhaps worst of all, Stekkjastaur has long, stiff legs and can’t bend his knees. The condition is quite sad, as Stekkjastaur’s only passion in life is to sneak up on sheep and suck on their nipples, which is hard to do without kneeling down.1700s it became illegal for parents to use Grýla to frighten their children. But Skarphedinsson does it anyway: One time he called his home and played a prank on his family by pretending to be a Yule Lad. When his daughter answered the phone, Skarphedinsson told her that his mother Grýla was angry with her for being disobedient. “She hid beneath the bed in the bedroom and she was very good and obedient after that,” Skarphedinsson says

Frau Perchta

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

Frau Perchta, also known as the belly slitter or Christmas witch from German lore. Like Krampus she goes after naughty people but mostly lazy ones. She hates dirty houses and she keeps a knife in her dress, and she uses it on those she finds slovenly.

She’s a witch/goddess who can look like a crone or Frigg, some say she is Frigg. Adding to that is the story that she rides in the wild hunt. She also has an army of Krampus like minions.

Her night is January 6

Seiðr

Posted on by A Solitary Pagan

From totemic baton to sceptre, and from cursing rod to distaff, a shaft of wood or metal has been raised in the hands of women across the globe for thousands of years. Plain, crooked or carved, and bedecked with various impedimenta; fashioned in bone, skin, wood and metal, the phallic rod has perhaps attracted more attention than any other tool associated with magic and the Female Mysteries. Because of this, ‘wands’ became perceived almost universally as the magical tool par excellence, an imperative that assured their manifest survival within the veiled symbology of both secular and religious spheres, as a Tool of Office, celebrity or status. Historical precedents clearly inspired this gravid image of a Völur raising her Seiðr staff.

Seiðr is rooted through its etymology to Old High German terms relating to fetters and to bindings in all its forms. Halters, cords, withies, spun threads, snares and knots are used for enchantment and the manipulation of Wyrd, especially when combined with the distaff, which is not only symbolic of the Völur’s status, but is also the equivalent of the now familiar oaken stave used by warrior shamen.

Several examples occur throughout the sagas that imply a link between Seiðr magics and the winds generated by the scared breath or onð. Animal forms become the sorcerers ‘mind-emissary,’ and may be regarded as a snare, sent forth to ‘catch,’ or entangle its victim (prey), by twisting and wrapping around it, like a wind, specifically, a whirlwind. This is very much based in the principle of animism – articulated through a great many beliefs regarding the spirits of the wind, thunder and storm especially.