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Setting Daily Intentions for Health and Wellness

To embark upon lifelong well-being, you will need to bring this awareness to every day of your life. Regular health rituals will go a long way toward this becoming a daily intention. Adorn your altar with fresh flowers and candles in colors that represent healing: yellow, red, and green. Every morning for seven days, light the candles and contemplate your future self in an optimal state of health, speaking this spell:

Today I arise on this glorious day

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Silence Your Inner Critic: An Encouragement Spell

As the sun sets on a waning moon day, you can quiet the inner voices of negativity and criticism that get in the way of simple joy. When our moon ebbs, another grows forth, so this is an excellent opportunity to send away that naysayer inside of you and allow a more blissful, self-accepting side of yourself to shine through.

Gather together:

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Moonset: A Warning

Funny, the things you hear coming out of your own mouth.

Just before sunrise, looking west for traffic as I cross 31st Street, I see her, hovering there over the horizon: what seemed at the time to be just about the hugest Full Moon I'd ever seen.

My reaction surprises me.

Blessed be!” I say out loud.

It was both a reaction of surprise, and a blessing. It was, likewise, a greeting to Herself. What most delighted me about my spontaneous little ejaculation was its utterly un-self-consciousness nature.

Pagan language, when used in everyday settings, can sometimes seem a little forced, as if we're trying too hard.

But then, suddenly, there you are. You see a beautiful, big Moon where you're not expecting her, and the words gush forth like water from a spring.

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On the Brilliance of 'Blessed Be'

“'Blessed Be': that's what the Satanists say to each other,” said my friend Blaine.

It was the early 70s. Blaine and I were both in high school. Clearly, he'd seen some TV special about contemporary witchcraft which he hadn't completely understood and, just as clearly, something about the saying had caught his fancy.

“Seems like a strange thing for Satanists to be saying,” I said.

I was making a point while trying not to seem to be making a point. I already knew a thing or two on the subject, quite enough to know that it most certainly was not Satanists who were saying “Blessed Be” to one another.

It was also enough to be abundantly clear to me which side of the Hedge I stood on myself.

 

Blessed Be. (That's three syllables now, not two.) It's a blessing; it's a spell. It means many things: Hello, Good-bye, Amen. It means: I'm one, and you're one too. It means: I acknowledge you as an equal. It means: We belong to the same tribe.

It's also an allusion to deep myth and liturgy. Blessed be the feet which have brought thee in these ways, says the Horned to the Lady in the Underworld, as he tenderly kisses said feet. This story, of course, is the mythic charter for initiation, as well as for the act of liturgical adoration, the Fivefold Kiss. (“What is the Five that is Eight?” is a kind of Wiccan koan.) Blessed Be: a world of meaning in two simple words.

(When I once met the Goddess in the middle of a flowering summer meadow—but that's a tale for another night—my knowledge of this rite gave me a fitting liturgical response to a theretofore—in my experience, anyway—unprecedented situation.)

After decades in the Craft, I'll admit that “Blessed Be” had, for the most part, donned something of an invisibility cloak for me: it's so ubiquitous that I'd almost stopped consciously seeing and hearing it. “BB!” friends often write, at the end of letters or e-mails, or sometimes even say: an intimate gesture, yet by that very intimacy rendered even more mysterious and in-the-know.

Anyone who knows magic knows that this is precisely the situation in which words have their most powerful effect: when they operate largely, if not wholly, on the unconscious level.

Not all religions have their own greetings, but the Craft—insofar, at any rate, as one may consider the Craft a religion—is one of them, and it's a brilliant stroke. The phrase seems innocuous, even benevolent, as, indeed, it is.

But don't be fooled.

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March

The Spring Equinox

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