Imbolc II: Our Home Altar

Detail of a watercolour painting I did.

Sprouting seed in the nook of a statue.

This painting is next to my altar.

I know Neo-Paganism, Wicca and Witchcraft aren't inherently Goth or Gothic topics, and this is a Goth blog, but it's also my personal blog, and these things are a big part of my life. There are also a lot of Goths interested in these topics, and I would say that in terms of percentages, a greater percentage of Goths are interested in these topics than of mainstream people. Witchcraft is also trending in younger Goth circles, and a lot of younger people are thus being introduced to Witchcraft through Goth, so I'm trying to show what this witch actually does, to counter some of the misconceptions and to inform people.

I practice a mixture of 'Celtic' spirituality (from a range of 'Celtic' regions and time-periods, hence the umbrella term), Druidry and Wicca. Wicca was my introduction to Neo-Paganism, and I like the Wiccan formats for a lot of the ceremonial aspects, but I'm not Wiccan. I currently use the term 'Celtic Witch' as it's nebulous and ill-defined enough to cover a lot of what I do and my interests, especially as my attitude to spirituality is organic rather than dogmatic, so those things and the balance of them both shift. I have been a Dedicated (as in went through a rite of Dedication) Pagan for 17 years, and had an interest in such things since I was a child, so this is something that has been an important thing to me for a long time. I've been Pagan longer than I've been Goth!

Imbolc altar, mostly in full. 

In our house, we have a permanent altar - it is on a wooden serving trolley that has wheels and a drawer (presumably for cutlery) under the table top, with a shelf half-way down its legs. It's pretty useful because we can wheel it into the middle of the room for rituals. Around it are various bits of Pagan iconography, and the pentacle shelving unit I ordered from CAS Designs (review of that ::here::). While the altar is permanent, what is on the altar changes with the seasons. This post is about what I put on it for Imbolc, and why.

I will start from the bottom up. I have two altar-cloths layered - partly because I know I will spill at least a little wax, and I'd rather not glue my altar-cloths to the wood, especially as it has old varnish. Beyond the basic practical purpose, they have an aesthetic purpose and a symbolic one. The aesthetic purpose is simple; they look nicer than the scruffy table-top of the trolley. The symbolic purpose is multiple. Partly, the act of placing a cloth on the trolley is marking it as something more than an old bit of wooden furniture I salvaged from the discounted section of a charity shop, it's an act of respect, it helps signify that this is an altar and not a wheeled table. The second part of the symbolic aspect are the colours - the light yellow represents returning light, life, and the future daffodils that will bloom in a few weeks; it is a lively spring-like colour, but not as rich as gold, not quite as vividly solar as amber. The darker green represents the sort of foliage that is emerging - it isn't bright luscious green like the leaves of later spring plants, it is the darker green of snowdrop stems and buds that have yet to open, of pines that have been green all winter but are now starting to put forth some new needles. This altar-cloth was actually spring green and solid black on solid green when I bought it, but the first time I washed it, the green faded dramatically, so I re-dyed it.  I tie-dyed it, with the ties arranged to match the print - I feel the varied colours are a little more organic. 

The third aspect is the knotwork print I selected. As I mentioned above, my practice involves a lot of Celtic deities, spiritual beings (faeries/sidhe/sith) and the like, as well as connections to the land (I am in the Scottish Highlands, land of both the Gaelic folk that came with Dal Riada and the Brythonic Picts) and my ancestors (English and Breton) and my wider family (Welsh and Irish). The design is knotwork, and anthropomorphic, a style that was a fusion between Celtic art and Norse art, common in Ireland and Scotland in the early medieval, and which emerged from the positive interaction between the two cultures - it wasn't all raiding and pillaging by Vikings! The Norse element reflects my partner's heritage and beliefs (although he is not a Heathen).

At the back is a large-ish pentagram candle-holder. It holds two sets of 5 candles - at the points are soy-wax votives in purple (top; Spirit/Energy), yellow (middle right; Air/Gas), red (bottom right; Fire/Plasma), green (bottom left; Earth/Solid) and blue (middle left, Water/Liquid). I've listed both the four elements as commonly conceived in Neo-Pagan cosmology, but also five states of matter and energy, as a way of linking that to something more tangible than the usual correspondence tables. There's something a bit more literal and concrete about four states of matter and energy - those things are all observable, solidity is am observable quality whereas the idea of something being 'earthy' is often more reliant on association and metaphor. I have both because I like both the mindset of recognising things as they are, and of being poetic about them, and I feel that these two things - the scientific and rational, and the poetic and spiritual - are best in balance with each other. So far, I'm the only Pagan that I know that has this dual approach to the 'five elements' idea.

Lantern with my Sacred Flame.. and a lot of waxy bits.

The lantern is my 'sacred flame' of Brigid - the same candle as I had up on the brae by the cairn at Dunain, but unfortunately not the same flame. For safety reasons I had to put it out when boarding the bus. Maybe next time, I will not venture quite so far. The glass is not crackle glass, it's just covered in little waxy flakes because as I carried the lantern down off the hill, it was a rough walk over uneven ground, with my slipping on the ice a couple of times, and the molten beeswax in the tealight splashed and splattered onto the inside of the glass. I have no idea how I'm going to clean it because it's a top loading lantern, and there's only a narrow tea-light diameter opening at the top. Maybe I will soak it in hot water and try and melt the wax out, but I imagine that will still leave a residual film! I use that lantern a lot - I took it with me on several Pagan gatherings in the last couple of years!

The association of flames with Brigid starts with a more concrete attribution to St. Brigid of Kildare, who started a sacred fire or flame (not sure if a candle or hearth fire) at the convent she founded in Kildare, where the Brigidene Sisters maintained the fire for years after Brigid herself. St. Brigid was Christian convert, and she was likely named after the pre-existing Goddess of the same name, and in the way Christianity often ended up syncretic with local traditions, it seems that there was some conflation between the saint and her pre-Christian namesake. Sacred flames have existed long before Christianity reached Ireland - and chaste nuns tending a sacred flame has definite echoes of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. Whether it was a similar idea that just happened twice, or whether somehow the concept got transmitted from Rome to Ireland - either from tales of ancient Rome brought by those who came from the Roman church, or through some earlier syncretism (Romano-British paganism often mixed the local gods of the 'Celtic' tribes with similar Roman deities, and it is possible that this approach crossed the sea to Ireland with some notion of a Vesta-hybrid goddess), I do not know. My knowledge of the history of this is muddier than I would like. It's one of those things that a lot of non-scholarly Neo-Pagan books mention, but not something I've yet read more scholarly material looking into - neither the history of St. Brigid (or St. Bridget as she is sometimes Anglicised) or the goddess. 

Spell candle, cauldron and oil burner.

At the very front of the altar is a little yellow beeswax roll candle. I burnt the candle all the way down as part of a spell for renewal and recovery with some mental health issues I have been experiencing recently. Many practicing witches will probably recognise the type as the sort commonly made for spell-candles. All the candles I use for my ritual practice are from natural materials as I think it goes against the spirit of a nature-orientated path to use candles made from paraffin wax when paraffin is a petroleum derivative; i.e a non-renewable fossil fuel. I currently prefer beeswax to soy, as there are issues with over-cultivation of soy, but also a problem of a lack of bees - and more demand for bee-keeping means more bees, even if they aren't wild bees, but a lot of bee-keepers let their bees buzz where they want, or have them at farms to help pollinate specific crops. A lot of the beeswax candles I buy are from small businesses, and there's some you can get in Wales where the supply chain is very local; the beeswax comes from small-scale apiary/hives just outside the village where I buy the candles. The candle is in what is actually an incense burner in the shape of a five-point star, but the recess for an incense cone was just the right diameter and depth for the stubby little candle.

Behind the spell candle is my cauldron. Cauldrons are associated with the Welsh witch/goddess Ceridwen, who in the Mabinogion made the potion of poetry and wisdom in her cauldron. The Irish goddess Brigid is also connected with poetry, and in modern Neo-Pagan art at least, there's some syncretism between the two; Brigid is often depicted much like Ceridwen, with a cauldron. My cauldron of hammered copper and iron is fitting to Brigid's association with smithing. The cauldron as a symbol of the pregnant belly, or the swollen seed, is very in line with the celebration of Imbolc as the time when the dormancy of winter gives way to germination - and for Imbolc my cauldron is not a cooking pot but a flower-pot, with snowdrops bought that afternoon at the farmer's market. 

Snowdrops with the tealights of the pentagram behind.

The oil burner I chose (I have a few that I have collected over the years) was also selected because the shape made me think of that pregnant-belly cauldron shape, and it is also a warm-hued stone that has a cheery sort of glow when lit. The pentagram motif is pretty obvious in its selection.

My altar is approximately laid out in the traditional Wiccan way (particularly influence from the set up in Janet & Stewart Farrar's ::'A Witch's Bible'::), with Earth and Water attributes put on the left side, and Air and Fire attributes put on the right side. Traditionally, this is seen as a feminine/Goddess side on the left, and a masculine/God side on the right, but personally I feel that this doesn't align with the nature of the Celtic deities, plus I think some of the attribution of  'feminine' and 'masculine' to objects and attributes reinforces gendered stereotypes (women are nurturing and emotional, men are active and intellectual). I'm not designating a sword (or athame) as masculine when the Goddess I have the greatest connection to is the Morrigan, who herself very much carries a sword, especial in her aspect of Nemain the battle-fury, but also as Macha the sovereign queen. This is where I diverge from Wicca, as in Wicca the athame and chalice become part of the symbolic Great Rite, where the athame represents a phallus, and the chalice a vagina. I don't see sexual union (symbolic or otherwise) as the core of the generative, creative universe - especially when the universe is much more than the animals that reproduce by mating in that manner. It can be a useful metaphor, but there's something of the parthenogenic Earth Mother, too. I do also have an appreciation for the metaphorical union of the Earth and the Sun, too, but it's not something I'm going to work into the basic structure of all my workings - just those where I feel that exploring that concept is relevant (eg. Beltane). I don't think a cauldron is inherently feminine either, but I feel it is useful to use it that way for Imbolc - it can be associated to masculine things, too, as it was the boy Gwion Bach that ended up as the bard Taliesin through the process of transformation that started with three drops of cauldron potion, even if it was Ceridwen who prepared the ingredients, Gwion was the one attending to it (and got splashed by it).  

As mentioned above, I do still use the left and right arrangement for Earth/Water and Fire/Air, but just not as specifically gendered. The chalice is an elemental tool for me (attribution being water), but it is not inherently feminine. In this case I'm using a green one - that same deep green as the altar-cloth - and rather than wine, it had elderflower fizz, because I can't drink alcohol. I used it to drink a toast to the coming spring. On the left side are both mine and Raven's wands. I used mine for casting circle for my Imbolc ritual.

I haven't detailed my ritual here; that is personal. Some of what I did is hinted at here, and in my account of my trip to Dunain and the cairn that is in my earlier post ::here::. There are plenty of ritual scripts available in many of the better Neo-Pagan books, but I like to craft my own personal ones, and I write a new one for each celebration, each year (although there are certain poems and elements that I re-use). I think writing your own ritual makes it more personal and connected. Neo-Paganism is for the most part non-dogmatic, with no orthodoxy; some traditions have a set way of doing things, but many don't, and many Neo-Pagans walk their own idiosyncratic path because a strong element of Neo-Paganism is that it is an experiential religion, based on your own spiritual practice. In that manner, what I have on my altar is just the way I personally set things up, this particular time - there is no singular way of doing things, just a lot of things we do in common, or similar-but-different. There's no heresy in Neo-Paganism, well maybe except if someone twists it into something with an ulterior and evil agenda (eg. running a sex-cult, or using it for racist propaganda). 

Imbolc I: The Ruined Cairn & The Well of the Spotted Rock - Ritual At Dunain

Cairn stone.

This Imbolc I celebrated alone. Initially I was going to go to a semi-public ritual, then I was going to go to a group gathering, then the group gathering fell through and I missed my chance to sign up the semi-public one, so I ended up heading up Dunain hill alone, high above Inverness, near the Pictish fort of Craig Phadraig, and above the building works currently converting the old Craig Dunain Asylum. I mention the old Craig Dunain, because the turning circle/roundabout outside it is the bus stop to get off at if you're heading there from somewhere other than Leachkin/Kinmylies suburbs of Inverness (I took the bus to Inverness then took a local Inverness bus from the city centre up to Craig Dunain), although if you're happy to walk up a steep hill through suburbia (that admittedly does offer some nice views) I guess it is a couple of miles out from the city centre. 

The Victorian asylum had pre-empted the notion of occupational therapy, and had parkland, gardens and even apparently a small farm to keep the patients occupied and help them recover through meaningful work. I took part in several gardening and conservation work schemes when I was really suffering with my mental health, set up to help people through doing meaningful, rewarding work, and it definitely helped me, but I don't know how these things were run in Victorian times. The estate stretched part the way up the hill, and included a pond, cemetery for pauper residents (which I have blogged about ::here::) and quite a bit of land that is now housing estates. I headed a lot higher than that, and already from near Craig Dunain you have an amazing view out across the city. 

The first path is used is also an access road to both the old water tanks and reservoir pressurising Inverness' water system, and to some of the new water tanks. The hill works as a natural water-tower through its height and steepness, one of the last hills of the Great Glen Way before the Moray Firth opens out. There's a reservoir that serves also as a pond right near the top of the hill (which I will talk more about later), and a small reservoir pond from the old system that makes a tiny pond that seemed quite thoroughly frozen. The access road also passes a pair of abandoned cottages and several broken and ruined street lamps that are quite eerily bent out of shape, like they were snapped by a huge monster.

Beyond the access path I was onto footpaths, which as I got up the hill became snowier and snowier. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I think a lot of children had been up the hill to go sledding and dog-walkers had headed up there too, and the snow had been compacted into slippery ice. I was glad I had good boots and my walking stick with me! There were some interesting stones, including something that might have been part of the old fort, but it was cold and I didn't want to stop for photographs until I got to the cairn. The area is managed by ::Dunain Community Woodland:: project, and they have built steps, paths, etc. 

The view from Leachkin Ridge at Dunain

The cairn is a ruin. There is not much of it left - it is a few standing stones from what was a centre chamber. According to the Dunan Community Woodland website, it used to 70 feet in diameter, but now there's nothing left of that. I wonder what happened to the stones used for it, whether they were recycled into the fort, into field walls, or what. Unlike Clava Cairns and the cairns on the other side of the Ness, it is of a different design, built on a hill and of the type found around Cromarty, but also on Orkney. It would have been a passage grave, angled North East, perhaps to the winter Solstice, and would have had two chambers within it connected by passages. I would imagine entering it would have been quite a magical experience. I have been in the West Kennet Long-Barrow, but that is quite a different sort of burial mound, and I haven't been in anything like it might have been.

The remains of the cairn. Only one stone remains as an upright.

There are no remains left in the cairn - and I don't know what happened to whoever was buried within it. It makes me sort of sad, that there's this trace of what was once a memorial that had considerable effort put into building it, but who it was meant to commemorate is gone, and any notion of who they were. 

Sacred Flame for Brigid, wand, cauldron, incense stick, and yellow candle.

My 'ritual' wasn't much of a ritual, it lacked ceremony. All I did was sit by the cairn ruins, with some snowdrops that I had bought just before in the Inverness Farmer's market (a lucky find) which fit perfectly into my little copper cauldron, and play a short improvisation of growth and emergence on my recorder, a beeswax tealight in my lantern and a beeswax roll candle tucked into the earth of the cauldron. I folded my bright yellow scarf (useful if you wear mostly black and don't want to be hit by traffic) as temporary 'altar cloth', folded double to pad beneath the iron feet of the cauldron and whatever much lighter metal the lantern is made of, so that I wouldn't scuff the stone. Children and animals climb on them and they're exposed to the elements, so maybe it's futile really, but I felt this was more respectful. 

Close-up of tools

People walk their dogs there, and I expected to be interrupted, so I had to keep things simple. I played my tune when I couldn't see anyone about, and spent the rest of the time contemplating quietly. My cauldron went back in the tote bag when I heard someone approaching, but I suspect that I still looked peculiar (especially in my long black woolly coat and winter hat) walking off with a lantern instead of a battery torch (flashlight). 

The tree seat. 

After my little 'ritual', I walked down to a wonderful bench built around a big tree. I would imagine it is particularly nice in summer, a good shaded spot and with an excellent view all year around. I sat down and set down my cauldron as an object of meditation, a focus and symbol - the cauldron as the 'womb' of the earth, the snowdrops growing from it the coming spring. Imbolc is Brigid's day, and I know that cauldrons are more associated with Ceridwen. Snowdrops are a common symbol of the new spring as they are one of the first flowers to emerge and bloom - there are some 'wild' ones growing and blooming in the park in Inverness, so some cultivated ones are not too far off in their timing! 

Hard to make out, but the lantern is suspended in a tree.
The dark area at the bottom is the water of the springhead.

On my way down from the seat, I walked over to the reservoir, which was frozen over with a good layer of ice, and very picturesque. There were still birds on around the small 'lake' that it forms, and it has an island in it and trees around it, so it looks quite natural - apart from having at least one straight side! Near the far corner of the reservoir is a springhead, and that springhead is 'the Well of the Spotted Rock', a fairy well, and once a clootie well, with a stone surround, but the stone surround was deliberately smashed a few years ago. Last time I was the well, people had left glass pebbles, trinkets, and a few clooties on the tree above - I left something myself, too - but when I was there that evening, I couldn't see any of the objects remaining. Admittedly, as the photograph shows, it was getting quite dark. The spring had obviously been flowing quite profusely recently, so perhaps some of the things left there were just washed down stream. I anointed myself with some of the 'well' water, and used a little to water my new snowdrops, then headed downhill. Conveniently, there was a bus waiting at the turning circle when I got there! 

My next post will be about my Imbolc altar at home. I have a post about Clava Cairns coming up soon, too!

The Sacred Well and the Howling Moor

This year I hope to put up more posts based around Gothic tourism - visiting places such as ruined castles, ornate graveyards, ancient monuments, great cathedrals, etc. Today's post is of a windswept moor - which if you have read 'Wuthering Heights', you'll know is a very Gothic sort of landscape. To get there, I went up through Culloden Woods, which has a clootie well now dedicated to St. Mary. Culloden Wood also has a ruined mausoleum once home to the remains of various members of the Duncan Forbes family of Culloden House, but I forgot to walk to that part of the woodland and take photographs - this I apologise for. As usual, click to enlarge thumbnails.

My intention was to walk all the way up to Culloden Battlefield, but I left too late in the day, and it was getting dark by the time I was up near the Battlefield, and I wanted to get back to the city before dark (especially as I didn't want to wait around in the Battlefield carpark for a bus, as it is windy and exposed up there, so quite chilly). Culloden Woods is easily accessible from Inverness City Centre by bus. There is also a bus up to Culloden Battlefield directly, as implied earlier. The weather was wet - drizzle and sleet down in the city, but snow up on the hill with the moor. The precipitation came in patches and flurries, with still moments in between. The skies were low and grey, and the sun seemed dim and always closer to the horizon than I wanted it to be.

The Bridge with the oak tree growing on it.

Culloden Woods is forestry pines - cultivated for timber, but it seems to be transitioning to more natural woodland, with areas of birch and more native pines, as well as the new 'Douglas Wood' section that is intended for children and is dog-less (hence the name; naming things with puns is pretty common up here!). There's a railway line cutting the woodland in half, and over that railway is a handsome Victorian railway bridge... with an oak tree growing on it!

St. Mary's Well in the rain.

Clootie well. Click to enlarge.

What I wanted to visit in the woods was the clootie well. A clootie well is a well where 'clooties' or cloth strips are hung around the well for some folk-magic or quasi-religious purpose. With St. Mary's Well at Culloden, the water is supposed to have healing properties, and to use them, you must tie a clootie dipped in the water to a tree above the well, with the sickness or disease disappearing as the cloth decays - I hope all those who hang non-biodegradable things on the trees around the well don't hope for healing! (I imagine there are many that are tourist mementos). There's more to the 'ritual' -if you would call it that - than this, but I can't remember all of it. I think there was once a plaque explaining how to 'use' the well, but it's now gone. 

Clooties on a tree near the well.

St. Mary's Well is not the only clootie well near Inverness - there's also the Well of the Spotted rock above Craig Dunain on the opposite side of the city, and a few others a bit further afield (Munlochy and Avoch both have one), plus there are other springheads with cultural distinctions of one sort or another - bits of history or folklore attributed to them. Clootie wells seem quite common in Gaelic countries - plenty in both Ireland and Scotland - but there are a few in England too. Wales has sacred wells, too, but all the ones I have come across do not have the practice of tying cloths near them, and are more specifically attributed to saints - usually 'Celtic saints', early saints from the Christianisation of the area. Perhaps I will visit more of the local sacred/special wells, and write about them on this blog. I already have a brief mention of the Well of the Spotted Rock planned for my next blog entry.

Blurry photo of a burn (stream)

There's several burns running down crags, which are both rather beautiful and fill the forest with the enchanting sound of running water. When I was there, it was raining, and very slippery, so I didn't get to photograph the crags well as I was slipping and sliding all over the place, hence there being only one rather mediocre photo of the burn near the path up the hill. Maybe if I go back up there, I'll take some more pictures of the forest itself.

I headed back down from the clootie well to the path along the forestry track, which leads out into cleared land that has reverted to a sort of moorland. It's windy and open, but quite beautiful. It had snowed a few days before, and the drainage channels redirecting burns through the land had frozen, and then started thawing, so there was fractured ice floating. It snowed again properly a few days later. There were a few patches of snow on the cleared land, but I didn't get any pictures. The low shrubbery and wild plants seem to close in around you, despite the wind blowing across and the distinct lack of trees other than a few lonely deciduous trees, birches mostly, stand scraggly and stranded out in the open.

View out of Culloden Woods into the cleared land.

One thing out on the open land that I don't want to either romanticise or sensationalise, but I feel should be mentioned because it is a part of the history of that land is the Prisoner's Stone. This isn't something I want to promote as something to visit because it's 'cool and spooky' or something, it's a place to pause and reflect on an atrocity that may have happened over 200 years ago, but which a lot of local people still feel strongly about today.  It's a site where something really horrible happened in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden - 17 Jacobite prisoners were executed there, for being on the wrong side an 18th man was spared to spread word of what had happened. There's a bench, inscribed in both Gaelic and English; 'Murder of frozen souls here - marvel that I remained alive, to tell' is the English translation. I don't know if being killed on the moor was better or worse than the fate of those taken prisoner and forcibly marched to be 'tried' and executed in London, many of whom died on the journey. All of it is awful.

The Prisoner's Stone

The same surnames on the clan markers on the Battlefield are the surnames of co-workers, friends, and neighbours; there are still people for whom the dead are names in the family tree. It wasn't something I knew people felt very strongly about until I met some of these people at a protest against luxury housing being built on land that was part of the battle and likely has corpses on it, who were very upset because it was members of their family who died in the battle, and who couldn't collect their sons, brothers, husbands etc. after the battle because of fear of the Hanoverians, even if they died centuries before and had never met. They spoke quite passionately, and before that I didn't realise that it was such a personal thing for some still. Ancestry is very important to some people, even if it's not something that's as meaningful to me; I've always felt sort of detached from my long-dead blood ancestors, but a deeper connection to figures in history who align more with how I think, some of whom I am quite sad I can't write letters to! Since meeting those people, I've felt like it's important to treat it as a the site of something nasty in history, and while I think tourism is an important part of transmitting history, it shouldn't make the nastiness seem 'fun' - I think the bench is a good idea; gives people somewhere to sit and reflect on what happen, and what can get people to feel justified in killing each other.

The Gaelic inscription on the simple bench.

Beyond the Prisoner's stone is plenty of cleared forestry land, leading up to the road. The path I took wasn't that one, however, as I went between some leafless fruit-trees along a more sheltered footpath that runs alongside a farm track to the main road, and is part of the official Culloden hiking/walking trail.  

Walking towards the clouds on the moor.

After crossing the main road, I took a path continuing the hiking trail that leads past some houses to more cleared forestry land, windswept and dreary with snow-clouds closing in. There are stands of pines still (mostly) standing, except for those blown down by the wind. I continued out, and every now again the forestry path turned walking trail would open out onto glimpses of the valleys and snow-covered hills below. This far up the hill, there were plenty of patches of snow left and even when the breeze was light, it felt chill. The clouds were not just dimming the sun, but faint hues in them made me suspect that it wasn't rain, but more snow that was to fall.

The sun begins to set over the dregs of snow.

Along one path I took, all the trees that had been the exposed edge of the stand of pines had blown over, and the craters left by their roots had filled with water - meltwater, I would guess. The land there is moorland, crossed by a multitude of burns that I could hear, but could not see through the dense scrub (mostly whin bushes, a type of gorse, but with all sorts of other more damp-loving plants between, and then the odd young and bushy pine), and a mixture of hard and rocky patches of uneven glacial land and wet ground that tried to steal the boots off my feet each time I stepped in it (I tried to circumnavigate a section of path that was flooded, ended up taking a detour that led nowhere useful, and headed back). It's an eerie place to be. 

Snow clouds and felled land. 

I had headed off in the opposite direction to the battlefield to admire the scenery first, and maybe find a shortcut to Clava Cairns, but my detour delayed me and between the heavy cloud and the rapid decline of afternoon into evening, I was loosing daylight so I headed home - or at least to a bus stop first!

🌲🌲🌲

I have several more posts in the 'Gothic Tourism' category to go up - Clava Cairns, Brodie Castle, and several graveyards, ruins, etc. that I visited last year but never had the time to process the images from. 

Mass Produced Witchcraft, Witch Kits, and Sourcing Witchcraft Supplies

I wrote this months ago, when it had just been announced that Sephora would be stocking a kit made by Pinrose that includes some rose quartz, some white sage, a 'Tumblr aesthetic' style Tarot deck, and a set of perfumes, and that is being marketed as a 'starter witch kit'. The witch-kit was apparently withdrawn from sale, something I am happy about as for various reasons that have now been made irrelevant (although I wrote them up at length) I had issues with the witch-kit. 

The Sephora/Pinrose witch-kit issue irked me, but it is nothing new. The commercialisation of Witchcraft and Wicca has been a problem within the community for decades, this is just a particularly egregious example because it is coming from a mainstream retailer. When I first got into Wicca and Witchcraft in 2001/2002, one of the first things I came across were people imploring me to avoid being an 'Insta-witch', which before the dawn of Instagram, meant someone who just bought a pre-made kit and declared themselves a witch, with no dedication to the craft itself, no process of learning, and in relation to Wicca, which is a religion, no faith. I read warnings against this in books published long before I took an interest in the topic, and I think there have been phases of popularity for Wicca and Witchcraft before, especially in the '70s and in the late '90s after The Craft came out.

[I think I came across Wicca at the end of that phase of popularity, but I didn't come to it through it being a 'cool' thing for teens, I came across it through finding an expose book that was full of misinformation, but seeing through the nonsense to realise that there were other people who thought and felt and experienced the world the same way I almost always had].

Each time something 'witchy' becomes prominent enough in popular culture to spark an interest in Witchcraft as a practice, there are people who will try and cash in on that popularity, but in the past, before the modern internet allowed us to have a voice to explain why this was insulting and a problem, our complaints were left to admonishments in books on Witchcraft, letters to the editors of magazines and newsletters within the community, and maybe a few internet forums. Now we have more of a platform to explain why this is an issue.

One large issue is that many commercialised 'witchy' things are made by people who have not done their research, and in a community with no central authority, no central text to refer back to, this means a lot of people get a very confused, inaccurate, and sometimes offensive portrayal of Witchcraft, including those trying to learn about it because they are interested in doing it.

There's a whole raft of books about Witchcraft that still perpetuate the notion that Wicca is the survival of an ancient pan-European matriarchal 'witch-cult', who talk about the witch hunts of Europe and the Americas as 'the Burning Times' and as a persecution of actual witches although for the most part it was religious mass hysteria, more akin to the 'Satanic Panic' of the '80s and '90s, giving downright dangerous herbal medicine advice, and conflating a elements of other practices as 'Wicca' or 'Witchcraft' when they are not, and without siting what cultures or belief structures they actually come from. Some of the authors just wanted to make money fast and churned something to appeal to a demographic of neophytes without care, and some of them are just repeating what they have learned from this miasma of misinformation, especially as it takes a lot of research to pick through it. Thankfully for me, I am a nerd, and I like reading about the things I am passionate about, including books written in often stuffy and stilted ways, academic papers, and actual old occult texts (or at least translations thereof), because if I had stuck with what I read in the first few high-selling 'witchy' books I had read, I would have remained quite ignorant, probably believing in over-inflated figures for those executed in the witch hunts (and believing that those executed and accused were actual witches, when very few had connections to folk-magic), and that Wicca really was an ancient faith - not a modern faith inspired by ancient things.

For years, I have gone into discount book retailers and found tarot kits as tacky as the one that was going to be in the Sephora kit. I've also seen independent Witchcraft/occult shops sell pre-made 'spell kits' and 'witchcraft starter kits', and while some are carefully put together by practising Witches, some of them are clearly mass-produced nonsense (I know that there will be non-Witches reading this saying 'but it's ALL nonsense!' but I am talking as a believer to other believers). In some places I've also seen items purporting to be relating  'Voodoo magic' with no true connection to those cultures, and probably culturally inaccurate packaging - similar is invoking various 'ancient powers'; at one point there was a fad for 'Ancient Egyptian' stuff with nonsense hieroglyphs and only a passing association to Kemeticsm or historical Ancient Egyptian beliefs! This is misappropriating Witchcraft, and whatever culture they've themed a product by, just as the Sephora/Pinrose kit was misappropriating Native American beliefs with the white sage. These things are ripping off the ignorant and confusing the new.

The other major issue is that most of these mass-produced items are made by companies not run by Witches or Wiccans, and that they are competing against the people within the community, and often out-competing them because it is simply a lot cheaper to have things mass-produced (often abroad, and I do wonder about sweatshops, health and safety and the environmental impact of production on this scale) on the cheap than it is for an individual to sell their time as a craftsperson, the cost of materials bought in small batches (and often at higher quality) and who has to cover their overheads for a niche business, rather than it just being another product from a conglomerate that sells a broad variety of items. The commercialisation of Wicca and Witchcraft makes it ever more difficult for people within those communities to sustain businesses within their own communities, unless they join in and become re-sellers of these mass-produced items.

One of the reasons a lot of more experienced witches have such an emotional reaction over the Witch-kits is that for many of us, we have a long history of our religion being met with hostility or mockery from the mainstream - a bit like why Goths get grumpy when they see the same people who mocked them suddenly wearing a similar look because it's now cool. A lot of people have had some very negative, sometimes even violent, experiences over intolerance of their faith, so seeing it surface with shallow mainstream popularity can be quite irksome.

Two elements from the Sephora/Pinrose kit are items very popular in magical and spiritual/mystical practice currently, but which can have issues with sustainable sourcing. The kit was cancelled, so this is no criticism of Sephora/Pinrose, but a general discussion of some of the issues around crystals and white sage. 

Crystals
The stone in the kit was going to be rose quartz. It is very popular in crystal healing and crystal magic (and quite pretty if you like pink). Rose quartz is a mineral, and it has to be mined, and it is a finite resource - just like coal or oil - and while some quartz mines are in America or Europe (a specific type of smoky quartz was mined in the Cairngorms, here in Scotland, and Morion quartz comes from Eastern Europe). Rose quartz is often mined in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil, and is secondary to gold mining, and while it is mostly regulated, there are issues with miners working outside the regulations, and with environmental problems. Mining for crystals in general can be an environmental issue, and encouraging a high popular demand is not helping the situation. There are definitely other crystals that are being mined primarily in ways that are either ecologically harmful or with unethical labour practices.

Crystal healing is a New Age practice, not one originating from either traditional Witchcraft, Wicca or Western Occultism, and the mystical lapidaries of historical European occultism focused on correlations between astrology and precious stones, not the semi-precious and non-precious minerals common to modern crystal practices. I've read that the Hopi of what is now Arizona had a lapidary healing practice, but this is again different to the New Age crystal healing practice, which borrows eclectically from Asian beliefs (it's hard to attribute concepts like chakras to a specific religion; I know they come up in quite a few, especially Hinduism and some versions of Buddhism, and it is likely that these concepts have been incorporated from contact with both Yogic and Buddhist beliefs), mystical interpretations of concepts such as energy, vibration, resonance and crystal structures which are markedly different from the scientific use of these terms, etc.

There are definitely plenty of Witches that have adopted the use of crystals, particularly in terms of symbolic correspondences in spells, but I think it is important to know that this is an adjunct, and that there are plenty of people who believe in the mystical or healing properties of crystals that would never consider themselves witches, and while there is overlap in the use - specifically in the way crystals are given correspondences to certain issues - in how crystals are used in spells, and how crystals are used in healing, they're not quite the same thing. I don't judge anyone for believing in the healing or magical properties of crystals, although personally I don't believe in crystal healing, and think more of ritual crystals as symbolic than inherently powerful; all I am writing about this for is to a) explain the origins of the use of crystals as an adopted practice, and b) encourage people to source their crystals ethically (more on the latter), and if you do believe in those things, that's as valid as any other spiritual belief, even if I don't share that belief. I think the point I am trying to make is that using crystals isn't inherent to Witchcraft, so don't feel like you need to use crystals to be a Witch, or that you aren't a proper Witch without a large collection of crystals. You can certainly use them if you want, but it's not a core requirement.

Since writing this article, I read an article on Patheos called ::The Toxicity of Crystals and Ways to Practice Real Stone Spirit Magick:: that I agree with in places, don't fully agree with on several points, and disagree with on others, but which definitely has again highlighted the importance to source crystals responsibly. Options for responsibly sourcing crystals include buying them secondhand (presumably with ritual cleansing), and buying them from a seller that has a very good grasp of their supply chain, knowing the sort of conditions that the miners work under and the environmental sustainability of the mining 

White Sage
White Sage for smudging is a practice from indigenous American groups, so attributing it to Witchcraft is inaccurate. Again, plenty of Witches now use white sage, but usually for smoke cleansing, not as an invitation to spirits. The other issue, which I cannot find a clear answer on, is whether or not there is a problem with over-harvesting. White sage is a plant native to the southern states of the USA and to Mexico. Gathering wild white sage is apparently illegal in Mexico (presumably for ecological reasons), and the information I have found on its cultivation in South America, and people circumventing legal restrictions on wild gathering to meet demands have been conflicting, as well as if there is an issue with high demand as an export product causing issues locally. 

Smudging and smoke or incense cleansing are not synonymous, so the calling cleansing a space with white sage 'smudging' is an inaccuracy. There's a lot of debate over whether it is cultural misappropriation for European Neo-Pagans to use white sage for spiritual cleansing, and I think a lot of that depends on whether you're doing it because you think it's some mystical 'noble savage' practice with inaccurate and romanticised pretensions to Shamanism or not, whether your white sage is ethically sourced (and if it's profiting off Native American imagery without being a Native-run business), and a lot of other factors; from what I've read, some sort of botanical cleansing incense, often including sage or similar, has existed in most cultures, and I don't want to be claiming offence for a group I don't belong to, plus I think opinions are likely to be mixed amongst different Native American groups, people within those groups, etc. (Just like not all Witches agree with me or were upset about the Sephora witch-kit! A lot were, but it's not unanimous; groups are always made up of individuals, and it is important not to assume any group is entirely homogeneous and monolithic.)

Sustainable sourcing of sage can be from several sources. I think a lot of people can grow their own; I know people even in the Scottish Highlands who have managed to grow it in their gardens - a far cry from the sunny climes of South America and the southern states of America! (This is where my bundles have come from - grown and gifted to me). Another option would be to source fair-trade and ecologically-soundly grown white sage. I don't know if there are indigenous groups preparing and bundling it who are selling it to the Neo-Pagan, Witchcraft and alternative spirituality community, but if there is a way to buy from them that supports their local businesses rather than competes or obscures the native traditions, then that might also be an option. Sage incense cleansing isn't something I really work with; I prefer to cleanse a space with a broom, and objects with ritual waters. (To their credit, Pinrose did say they wanted to source their sage from sustainable Native-run businesses, but this was in response to the criticism.)

An Alternative Wiccan 'Starter Kit'
Witchcraft, as I will explain later, is broader than Wicca, and includes a lot of different things, so listing the contents for a unifying starter set would not be possible. Wicca is the most common form of modern Witchcraft, and the one I am personally most familiar with, so I will write a little of what someone who wants to become a Wiccan should do in terms of sourcing their first items for personal practice.

The first thing I will say is that the items are tools, and while they help enacting the symbolism of Wicca for spiritual purposes, they are not completely necessary - however it does make it easier, especially for those who are new, to use tangible objects. If you make your tools, you have more of a personal connection, so this is always the best option if possible!The main tools are an athame, a wand, a chalice, a cauldron and an altar to put them on.

Athame
An athame is considered a masculine symbol due to its vaguely phallic shape, and is representative of the element of Air. It is used symbolically only, and there is some debate as to whether it should be sharp or not. Gerald Gardener took the term from the Key of Solomon, and was deeply moved by the ritual blades of many indigenous cultures, such as the kris of the Malay. Traditionally an athame has a black handle.

My first athame was a secondhand letter-opener that happened to be in the shape of a leaf-bladed sword, with a historically inaccurate hilt, and in brass, which to my under-educated teenage self aligned well enough with my impression of a Bronze age 'Celtic' sword. Any dagger or dagger-like bladed object (such as my letter opener!) will usually do - the easiest to get hold of in the UK are decorative daggers made for people who either like blades from a Fantasy fandom perspective, or a historical weapons perspective, or both. Be careful, however, as a lot of the ones made to look like the traditional notion of a dagger, especially with black handles, are reproductions of Nazi weapons, sometimes with the insignia left off, making them less discernible as related to Nazism (I know some people just want their WW2 historical weapons/reproductions to accurately include both axis and allied forces, but any Nazi-related regalia makes me deeply uncomfortable, and are also very popular amongst actual Neo-Nazis and their ilk. I doubt I am the only person who is uncomfortable around that sort of thing.)

If you are not interested in having one that is metal (or sharp), or you are very good at metal-work, you can either make your own symbolic athame, for example whittled out of wood, or if you're good at metal-work, and amateur knife-making is permitted in your location, then you can do that, too. I know two people who have made their own athames from cutting and grinding a metal bar into shape and then making a wooden handle - as they are not functional knives for actually cutting anything physically, things like differential hardness, forging a blade and the steel being able to hold an edge are not important, making building your own athame an easier project that making a functional knife.

The option for purchasing an athame which would best support those within the community itself would be to buy one hand-crafted by a practising Wiccan or Pagan, through a shop run by Wiccans or other Pagans, or directly, but this is expensive (forging is a labour-intensive process, and good steel is expensive!), but this it outside of the price-range of many. I certainly have designs, and know someone who could make what I would like, but I can't afford something like that just yet. Custom made knives are pretty expensive in general; I have antique swords more affordable than a lot of contemporary hand-forged blades, but to reiterate what I said: making knives, especially beautiful ritual objects, is time consuming work, good steel is expensive, and if you want special woods, silver, actual crystals or anything else in your item then it will be even more expensive - and this isn't a complaint, just a warning to beginner witches and those on a budget that while it might be excellent for craftpeople in Paganism to get new customers, it might not be a very affordable option, and not because of overpricing.

Wand
A wand is a short stick, preferably made of wood, but sometimes made of other materials, used to direct energy and represent the element of Fire. It is also considered masculine. Wands have a huge history predating Wicca, far more than I can reasonably put in one paragraph. You could do years of research on that topic (maybe there's a thesis in there somewhere... hmm...).

The best way to get a wand is to make one yourself. This does not necessarily mean hand-turning it on a lathe (although I'm working on that!), but usually just means whittling the bark off a short branch. In sourcing that branch, try to pick dead wood that has fallen naturally, rather than cutting a living tree. If you want to make it from commercially available timber (like a wooden dowel), make sure that it is from a sustainable timber source. If you take a stick from nature, be mindful not to take something that has already become a home for other living things; firstly you don't want wood-boring insects in your home, secondly fungi may have started to rot the wood, and thirdly, those creatures don't need to be disturbed by meddling humans! If you have your own garden, with bushes and trees, you can probably find a suitable stick there. Once you have your stick, customise it to make it into a wand.

Do not buy a Harry Potter fandom wand or similar LARP or fantasy roleplay wand; those are often resin (and thus sometimes brittle display-only items), or even worse cheap plastic, and they're not intended as religious artefacts. Real Witchcraft is not LARP.

If you want something particularly pretty, there are Pagan wand-makers out there, but again you go into the territory of more expensive handmade crafts - however you can get turned wooden wands made on a lathe relatively inexpensively, usually around £20 in the UK.  They're usually spindle-style, made of one type of wood, and have some decorative turning along them, quite nice for the price.

Chalice
A chalice is a ritual cup set aside specifically for that purpose. It is often used to hold wine or other beverages, so needs to be food-safe. It is considered feminine, and represents the element of Earth, especially the concept of the 'womb of mother Earth' in many variations of Wicca.

Just use a wine-glass. My first chalice was not food-safe because I bought some fancy brass thing, then I was given another metal one that wasn't suitable for actually drinking out of, and now I have a pewter one from Alchemy Gothic that I never use for actual rituals because I don't know if it's food-safe either. I do, however, have a purple glass wine-glass that I picked up in a charity shop. It IS food-safe, and I use that one pretty regularly. It cost me 50p, and it is goblet shaped and looks nice. A lot of charity shops struggle to sell individual wine-glasses as people usually want a set, and only buy a single one if it replaces a broken one from a set they already have, and while glass is widely recycled, it is saving one from being thrown away, and then melted down and all the other energy intensive processes, so I definitely recommend getting a lonely wine-glass from a charity shop or other secondhand seller. You can get some really, really pretty ones quite cheaply!

I advise personally against the resin decorative cups widely available online; while they often feature Pagan and Wiccan themes like the Green Man, or pentacles, they seem more like decorative fantasy objects, and they are again mass-produced items. This is just my opinion, however, and reflects mostly my personal tastes. They also usually cost upwards of £15, whereas you can probably still find a nice secondhand wine-glass for 50p, especially in charity shops and car-boot sales!

There are food-safe and ornamental chalices made by independent Pagan craftspeople, too. Most of the ones I have seen are made by potters and are thus ceramic rather than glass. Always inquire about the use of food-safe glazes if you intend to drink from your chalice!

Cauldron
Most of the time, you don't actually need a cauldron. The chalice is often a good substitute in terms of ritual symbolism, and there are practical alternatives if you need a vessel to burn something in, or brew an actual potion - in fact, many cauldrons sold are fine to use for burning spell components, but not safe for brewing any potions that are to be consumed or applied topically. Many are entirely decorative, too, and might crack if you burn something in them or heat them. Most of the time, if you want to make an actual 'potion', then you're better off doing the same as you would for cooking anything else, and using a pan on your stove. If you're making a potion that is not intended to be consumed, and may have ingredients that are poisonous, could damage your pan, etc. then you might want to have a separate pan for that. I've been a witch over 15 years and never had that problem personally!

If you really, really, REALLY must have a cauldron you can cook up an ingestible potion in, look at reenactment camp supplies, potjie pots - as suggested to me many years ago by a friend from South Africa, which is where potjie pots are from. They're not cheap though.

Altar
It's a table. You don't need some special mini-table you probably can't fit most of your tools on, carved with pentacles and triquetras - you just need a table, and to consecrate and decorate it, to set it apart from mundane uses. My altar is on a wheeled trolly. It usually sits in the corner of my living room, but the wheels mean I can easily move it to the centre of the room for group rituals, or those that require me to circumambulate it, or whatnot. I think the trolly was £15 in a British Heart Foundation charity shop. It has a drawer beneath the 'table top' in which I keep incense, and beneath there's a shelf I use to store ritual supplies. My altar cloths are usually fancy scarves, again from charity shops.

If you want something fancy, and are willing to pay for the art, dying and printing process, you can get some nice altar-cloths made from upcycled textiles with beautiful prints from ::Poison Apple Print Shop::, for example. Got to admit, I have been admiring their work via Instagram for a while now...

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Other objects, like a different dishes for salt, water and offerings, incense, candles, and the like are pretty easy to come by and aren't seen as Neo-Pagan/Wicca/Witchcraft speciality items, so I haven't listed them here. One of my upcoming craft projects will be making my own besom/broom, and I hope to post the process up here, so I will leave brooms until then.

Wicca and Witchcraft
I would like to disambiguate Wicca and Witchcraft briefly; Wicca is a Neo-Pagan religion that sees the Divine as having both male and female attributes, and has a belief in being in tune with the cycles of nature, seeing that related to a cycle of birth, death and reincarnation, and has a belief in magic (not in a flying on brooms, turning people into toads sort of way!). It was founded by Gerald Gardener, who pieced together material from various sources including the works of Aleister Crowley, his experiences with native peoples, especially the Dusun of Borneo (but he was widely travelled and had contact with other groups), Spiritualism in a post-Victorian context, Free Masonry, Rosicrucianism and a lot of other stuff including Arthurian mythology, the historical beliefs contemporary to him about Avebury, Stonehenge and Druids that were later disproved, etc. A lot of modern Witchcraft practices, even by non-Wiccans are derived from Wicca, but there are a lot of Witchcraft practices that come more directly from traditional European folk-beliefs, and are not Wicca-related at all. These often focus more on practical spell-craft, local folklore, the Fair Folk, and on traditional herbal remedies, and sometimes overlap with Christian beliefs. (I apologise if I am missing out elements of continental European practices, as I am most familiar with those of the British Isles, as that is where I'm from).

There are also magical systems in other cultures that get called 'witchcraft' and have been referred to as such by English-speakers for centuries, but that is putting a European framework on completely different cultures, and these practices have proper names in their own cultures, and some find being called 'witches' disrespectful, especially in places and cultures that for which the term 'witchcraft' means some sort of evil anti-Christian or 'Satanic' practice involving demons, or pacts with the devil, or possession by evil spirits.

On a related note, it is also important to distinguish that sort of idea from Wicca, modern Witchcraft, especially as accusations of anti-Christian activity, human and animal sacrifice, and 'black magic' are often used to oppress Witchcraft and magical practices. This is not to say Satanists practice these things either. There are several types of Satanist, and also Luciferans; neither of them seem to resemble the diabolical witchcraft conspiracy of human sacrifice, infanticide, sexual perversion and black magic that was written about in tracts from the late Medieval period onwards, and which has coloured a fear of witches in Christianity from the witch-hunts onwards. Occasionally acts from vandalism through to actual violence have been inspired by this myth of diabolical witchcraft, but it is not related to any established Satanic or Luciferan belief systems I have encountered. Some people practising branches of western occultism do have positive beliefs relating to Lucifer as an angelic figure in a religious framework that includes elements of Judeo-Christian cosmology but in a different theological context, and view Lucifer as the light-bringer, a figure representing illumination and knowledge, but this is distinct from most Witchcraft paths, and from Neo-Paganism, which is usually more focused on pre-Christian polytheistic religions. Satanists tend to view Satan as an archetype of rebellion and hedonism rather than a deity/entity, nor as a symbol of evil, and from what I gather, many see each person as their own 'god' or 'goddess' and have an emphasis on free will. There are a small number of Satanists who also practice Witchcraft as a magical practice, but the majority of Satanists I've met are actually quite sceptical about any magical or occult practices. 

Wicca and Witchcraft are niche communities, and Wicca has come to be such a major factor in modern Witchcraft that Traditional Witchcraft and other non-Wiccan practices are sometimes swamped. Even a lot of the practices that are not directly Wicca take a lot of elements from Wicca, or at least from the same sources as Wicca and in a similar framework. There are also forms of European occultism that are not Witchcraft, but types of Ceremonial Magic, spiritual Alchemy, etc. Also, as New Age practices are generally quite a bit more popular, there's been a lot of cultural diffusion, often because New Age spaces were often the only places that were willing to host events or sell Wiccan, Witchcraft and Neo-Pagan items, etc. A lot of Eclectic Wiccans especially blend the two, and I don't condemn this, I just think it's important to remember that it's a blend and acknowledge the origins of the various components of an eclectic path.

Just as a lot of Witches are also Goths, but you don't need to be a Goth to be a Witch, or even to be Gothic in the broader sense of the word, a lot of Witches are also Hippies, or into New Age beliefs, but these are also overlapping groups rather than intrinsic to Witchcraft. Witchcraft, Wicca and Neo-Paganism do account more than the average amount of subcultural and counter-cultural people, but it's not a prerequisite to being Neo-Pagan, Wiccan or a Witch.