The Viking's Journey

Night 🥰

Huginn and Muninn by benu-h

Yule Logs

Despite much uncertainty surrounding the initial beginnings of the Yule Log tradition, today, the Yule Log is a way for witches, pagans, and non-practitioners alike to celebrate the winter solstice. What we do know about the traditional Yule Log is that it was a piece of wood burned, at least, for the day/night of the solstice itself (though perhaps for the entirety of Yule, which originally lasted many days) and part of the log was always kept unburned so that it could light next year’s Yule Log, passing the light from one log to another throughout the years. This unburned part was said to bring luck and protection to the home it was kept in throughout the year. These days, we use the Yule Log to light and warm the home, ward off dark and danger, and remind us of both the darkness of the solstice and the soon-coming light. 

Here are a few ways to bring a Yule Log into your solstice celebration this year. 

For a sweeter option you can always bake a Chocolate Yule Log - time consuming, but not overly difficult, a dessert Yule Log can be a fun way to bake alongside family and friends while you warm your home and fill your stomachs.

If you do happen to have a fireplace then choosing, buying, finding, or chopping your own large wooden log or bundle of logs (usually Oak, but many sources vary) is certainly an option if you want the more traditional experience of tending a fire throughout the longest night of the year. 

My favorite option for adopting the tradition of the Yule Log, however, is to decorate a log with ribbons and foraged items and drill holes for candles to burn throughout the night, lighting your home without the need for a small blaze. Here are two sources on how to make one and what they can look like when finished. 

Happy Yule!

💐Picnic witchcraft guide💐

Sandwich correspondences

Fruit correspondences

Vegetable correspondences

Tea correspondences (sun tea, tea in general, floral tea)

Flower correspondences- can be used as decoration, for flower crowns, as a fun nature activity (collecting them respectfully, of course), and edible flowers can be used for deserts, drinks, and salads!

Desserts- here’s some witchy dessert recipes, perfect for any picnic!

(Tiny strawberry pies, cranberry pistachio shortbreads, cardamom pear cake, ginger and fig tart, apricot coconut bites, and lavender tea bread)

Locations- fun witchy locations for picnics include:

🌹a botanical garden, floral garden, or any sort of garden (perfect for fae, floral, air, green, life, spring, and summer witchcraft)

☀️a sunny open field/area (probably has wild flowers!, great for air, sun, floral, and weather witchcraft)

🌙⭐a night picnic under the stars and moon! (Perfect for lunar, nocturnal, and cosmic witchcraft)

🌳a park (great for all witchcraft, very versatile)

🌊💧a beach, pond, lake or near any body of water (perfect for water, sea, and love witchcraft)

👻a cemetery (perfect for death, spirit, medium, and floral witchcraft. Just make sure it’s allowed and you’re respectful of graves)

🌲A forest (perfect for forest, tree, nature, green, earth, and hedge witchcraft, here’s some tree correspondences)

Other witchy picnic ideas:

Stones/crystals to bring- it depends a lot on location and the general theme of the picnic! But a few favorites of mine are:

rose quartz, opalite, any aura quartz, sunstone, agate, tigers eye, and selenite (especially peach selenite)

Scents- I like to focus on scents a lot during picnics. It can make the experience so much more enjoyable! Location once again plays a huge role, but you can always spray your picnic blanket with essential oils, use strongly scented herbs or flowers, use a specific perfume, or even a specific tea that smells good. Some scents I like to focus on during picnics are:

lemon, orange, grapefruit, lemongrass, strawberry, orange blossom, gardenia, rose and lavender

Bring some little spells or offerings with you! A picnic in nature is the perfect time to do a little crafting, especially love, self care, fae, peace and happiness spells. And you can correspond your picnic with the intent of the spell!

It’s also a great time for devotional offerings and any other offerings, especially fae offerings.

Put together a picnic spell- an entire picnic can be a spell! Everything from location, to drinks, to food, and the extra stuff you bring along can be in it.

🍑Have fun picnic witching! 💐

The oldest worship of the world was of the sun and moon, of trees, wells, and the serpent that gave wisdom. Trees were the symbol of knowledge, and the dance round the May-bush is part of the ancient ophite ritual. The Baila also, or waltz, is associated with Baal worship, where the two circling motions are combined; the revolution of the planet on its own axis, and also round the Sun.

Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland by Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde (via worldofcelts)

Witchcraft for when depression hits 🥀

Sometimes, we may think that our magick is invalid, or that our deities don’t want to work with us anymore when we have depression. Altars get dusty, the air gets stale, and maybe you have quit working with magick all together, but still identify as a practicing witch.

Depression is an illness. If a professional runner fractured a leg, how could they continue to run while going through recovery?  Can a witch continue to do mental work if their mental health is suffering? Think about it: witches are constantly using their brain to get themselves in a highly spiritual and magickal state. You cannot expect yourself to want to work with magick if getting out of bed is difficult on its own.

Understand that your deities are forgiving and understanding beings. Your magick will not dwindle. In fact, when you are sick, your deities and spirit guides will protect you and make sure nothing bad happens to you while you are sick. Don’t feel guilty for your depression. Depression is an illness, not a lack of dedication or general carelessness. I am going to give you advice on what kinds of spiritual work you can do while in a depressive episode.

Candle magick 🕯

🔮 Light a candle of your choice that symbolizes whatever you want to manifest (i.e yellow = confidence)

Aromatherapy 🧼

🔮 Different essential oils promote all different kinds of things. Lemon is uplifting and happy, while lavender is calming and promotes sleep.

Healing crystals 💎

🔮 All you need to do is set the intention. You can keep crystals by your bed, or you can set them up in a specific way for a spell or intention.

Chanting 🗣

🔮 You don’t need to get up for this one! You can even chant in your head.

Sleep meditation 💤

🔮 Sleep meditations are wonderful because of all of the insight you can get from intense dreaming. YouTube has great sleep meditation music.

Guided meditation 🧘🏻‍♂️ 🌀 🧘🏼‍♀️

🔮 This can be done in the bed as well. There are meditations on akashic records, spirit guides, past lives, you name it.

Be safe and know that it is okay to feel depressed sometimes. Make sure to get professional help if possible to help if these depressive episodes are chronic or prolonged. Know that the world loves you. Your deities love you. I love you. We love you.

.:: Defining Traditional Witchcraft ::.

What is Traditional Witchcraft?

According to Michael Howard, Trad Craft refers to “any non-Gardnerian, non-Alexandrian, non-Wiccan or pre-modern form of the Craft, especially if it has been inspired by historical forms of witchcraft and folk magic”.

Traditional Witchcraft, therefore, is not a single monolith. We can, in fact, distinguish between:

Operative Witchcraft or Folk Magic

Ritual(istic) Witchcraft

This first difference is taken from Margaret Murray; she used the first term for indicating the practice of magic, as carried out by cunning folk and folk magicians, and included the non-religious practice of spells, charms, divinations, etc. “whether used by a professed witch or by a professed Christian, whether intended for good or for evil, for killing or for curing. Such charms and spells are common to every nation and country, and are practised by the priests and people of every religion. They are part of the common heritage of the human race and are therefore of no practical value in the study of any one particular cult.” (The Witch-Cult, p. 11.)

The second term (also called “Dianic cult” by Murray) indicates, instead, “the religious beliefs and ritual of the people, known in late mediaeval times as ‘Witches’. The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community, chiefly, however, by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country. It can be traced back to pre-Christian times”. Therefore we can say that Ritual Witchcraft is the cult of pre-Christian Deities or Spirits connected to the witches.

While the ideas of Murray about this cult have now been discredited, other scholars have reopened this field as a viable area of study, discovering many ecstatic witch-cults. The most known academics in this field are: Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs, Emma Wilby, Claude Lecouteux, Wolfgang Behringer, Sabina Magliocco, Gábor Klaniczay, Gustav Henningsen and Bengt Ankarloo.

Relying on the work of these scholars, we can say therefore that Ritual Witchcraft was/is the religious system surrounding the Sabbath, the Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae from house to house, the spiritual flight, Elphame, the Wild Hunt, the Night Battles, etc.

As we can understand, even if the majority of the Ritual Witches were/are also Operative Witches (practitioners of Folk Magic), not all the Operative Witches were/are also Ritual Witches. The majority of Folk Magicians/Operative Witches, in fact, didn’t go to the Sabbath, didn’t astrally fly, didn’t astrally go with the Wild Hunt, from house to house with the Domina Nocturna, to Elphame/the Otherworld or to the Night Battles. Ritual Witches did.

We can say, therefore, that Operative Witchcraft is a practice, while Ritual Witchcraft is a religion.

Traditional Witches who are secular are, therefore, usually Operative and not Ritual Witches. While the distinction between Ritual and Operative Witchcraft is an established one in the Witchcraft community, I introduce a new, according to me useful, second distinction, inside Ritual Witchcraft (i.e. Witchcraft as a religion), by borrowing the terms “Revivalism” and “Reconstructionism” from Polytheism, in which it’s an already established terminology:

Hereditary Witchcraft

Revivalist Witchcraft

Reconstructionist Witchcraft

Hereditary Traditional Witchcraft brings together all the traditions that claim a lineage from the Witchcraft of the past.

Revivalist Traditional Witchcraft is inspired by folklore, trials and the figure of the witch without any presumption of hereditarity. Unlike the Reconstructionist one, it leaves ample space for personal initiative and the influence of other traditions, without slavishly following the history in every single detail.

Reconstructionist Traditional Witchcraft, finally, tries to resume, starting from the in-depth study of folklore, historical trials and documents, the exact practices and beliefs of Historical Witchcraft. For example, the pantheon of Spirits, the festivities, the structure of the Sabbath, the structure of the offerings, and so on.

An important aspect for those who practice Reconstructionism is the resumption of the names of the Gods (or it would be more correct to say, of the “Deific Familiar Spirits” or “Major Spirits”) forgotten and remained only in the trials papers and in folklore. The idea is to reopen roads, ways to these Spirits. Reconstructing therefore means paying homage to these Spirits and allowing those interested to re-establish a connection with Them.

We said before that Traditional Witchcraft is not Wicca. What’s the difference?

According to the Traditional Witchcraft author Lee Morgan:

“It could easily be said that one of the major differences between the modern revival referred to as “Traditional Witchcraft” and the other modern revival known as “Wicca”, is that Traditional Witchcraft draws on “folkloric material” and is largely “shamanic” whereas Wicca is more of a fusion of Western Occult ceremonial and natural magic traditions.”

(From: Lee Morgan’s “A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft”)

Ways to heal from ‘Traditional Witchcraft: a Cornish Book of Ways’ by Gemma Gary

Spell to calm anxiety down

This spell was made to be super quick and simple, I hope it helps people the same way it helps me.

You’ll need one lemon, a way to heat the juice, and a white candle

• Press 1 lemon and heat the juice. • Place the candle in front of you and light it. Breathe in and out and focus on your anxiety. • Hold your drink before your eyes and concentrate on pouring your energy in it. (Optional) Say: “I hereby banish anxiety from my body and mind for these are mine and no one else’s.” • Drink the hot lemon juice. • Simply watch the candle burn for a few seconds, visualize it burning your anxiety away, then blow the candle.

This also works for emotional shocks.

✨ Sleep sachet ✨

i have chronic sleep deprivation from insomnia and i tend to have a lot of nightmares and since my last spells have worked, i gave this my energy next

ingredients:

bay leaf - protection, physic powers, wish fullfillment

lemonbalm - divination, promote sleep, relieve stress and anxiety

mugwort - promote sleep and physic powers

nettle - grounding, banishing negativity, cleansing

snail shells - peace, protection, meditation

smokey and clear quarts - increase spell potential, awarness, subconsious, dreamwork

sigil for sleeping well

the piece of quartz i had was actually collected by me and has both clear and smokey parts in it, we have a lot of quarts next to my grandparents' cottage and there's wariety of clear, rose, smokey and milk/white quartz ✨