Season and Spirit: Magickal Adventures Around the Wheel of the Year

The Wheel of the Year is the engine that drives NeoPagan practice. Explore thw magick of the season beyond the Eight Great Sabbats.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form

At home in the Dark: Winter and New Year magick

The moon has not come up yet, and my neighborhood is dark and cold. It strikes me how very dark it is tonight, compared with just a few weeks ago. The holiday lights are gone. The hills behind my house are dark as pitch, but less than a month ago I could have easily made out street after street in sharp detail, because the stringed lights were so bright and covered so many houses and trees. Tonight is very dark, but clear so the stars are very bright. It is biting cold out, with a sharp breeze out of the North. Nothing is stirring out there. The trees are bare and hard as wire, there is no hint of a bud anywhere. It is Winter, deep and austere.

Once the glitter of the holiday season all gets put away, and we settle into Winter's deep freeze and stillness, we might feeled challenged or distracted. For many of us, Winter means increased expense, work and worry. Snow is beautiful indeed, til the fifteenth time you've had to shovel inches of it off your driveway, and then join a white-knuckled, treacherous commute. It's wearying, carrying extra layers, taking cautious steps. Everything seems to take longer. We feel less vital, cooped up, perhaps depressed by the cold weather and dark skies. While there can be so much beauty and revelry in Winter, it is for many people the hardest, least joyful time of the year.

It is natural for us to slow down, to withdraw and go inside ourselves in the dark seasons of the year. Between the festivities of Yuletide and the hopeful celebrations of Candlemas, this season and the lessons it offers us can be hard or bitter, sorrowful or stark. They can also be a place to find deep compassion or stillness. This is the darkness that keeps seeds safe, that keeps treasures secret. This is the darkness of what we avoid, what we resist and do not acknowledge. Access and communion with all of this emotion, wisdom and potential, this is what Winter offers.

Sitting and sinking into this requires a letting go and getting still that is not taught or valued by the culture we live in. We always have the choice to find distractions from what we don't want to see. And distractions surely abound.

This is the reason I never make New Year's resolutions. They have a notoriously low return on investment; in fact I never seen even one resolution ever still be in place by Spring. Resolutions to make a bunch of lifestyle changes right off the bat all at the same time, and usually pretty ambitious ones at that, have very little chance of success, and are therefore not what I would call effective magick.

New Year's magic, on the other hand, is very powerful and effective. New Year's customs abound, from black eyed peas and collards onward, all of them purported to sweeten Fate in your direction. The Cuban tradition I grew up with had us pitching a pot of water out the front door at midnight, carrying with it all the bad luck of the year, and then eating 12 grapes to symbolize fortune and happiness for the next twelve months. When I began studying Wicca, I found that even though I could blend many of my family's Christmas traditions into my Solstice celebration, it didn't feel right not to mark and sacralize the 'beginning' of the Year.

For one thing, I have always had a superstition that what you do on New Years' day you do all year, so for years I was very selective abut who I saw and what I did. I made sure I did a little of everything I wanted to be part of my life that year: good food, play, making art, seeing friends, making love. Over time I began to notice elemental affinities for each year, and that they seemed to follow the classical progression: Air years followed by Fire years, then Water and so on. Then one year manifested as the fifth element, as Spirit. As I worked with and integrated the elements into my daily practice, I found that I could name the principle of the year, a theme, and that would work its way through all of the elements.

Because the work of a year, if it's done consciously and with intent, doesn’t just inhabit a few weeks in January and nothing more. Again this is about being present with what is, instead of being distracted by this or that. This is why the committed folks at the gym dislike the sudden influx of 'resolutioners' who show up in January, who crowd them out and are ignorant of gym etiquette. They will be gone soon, but right now, they are a distraction and obstacle to those who have been putting the work in consistently.

With the first New Moon of the year just a few days away, what can we do to be present in the darkness and the cold, and to pare down to what is most essential for us, discerning what we need and what we desire, what we must do and what we want to do. The energy of fresh beginnings and possibility inherent in the new year can be tapped to propel your magickal intentions for the year. Here are some ways I've been able to tap into Winter's deep wisdom to set the course for the year ahead:

 

  • Create vision boards, collages, and altars for the things we wish to bring into our lives. Create them in sacred space and charge, make them accessible so you can return to them again.

  • Charge new calendars and day planners as well.

  • Have a calendar just for your wildest dreams and magickal goals, regardless of how practical or possible they are. Return to them monthly and notice what's happening. Take notes on what comes up

  • Divinations for the year and each month can provide guidance on the year that's about to unfold. Pull twelve Tarot cards, one for each month, or pull 4 runes, one for each season, and watch how those qualities shape the year.    

Last modified on
Tagged in: divination winter
Leni Hester is a Witch and writer from Denver, Colorado. Her work appears in the Immanion anthologies "Pop Culture Grimoire," "Women's Voices in Magick" and "Manifesting Prosperity". She is a frequent contributor to Witches and Pagans and Sagewoman Magazines.

Comments

Additional information