Some articles in Wiccan Rede Magazine not only excelled at the moment they were written, but kept their value over time. Most readers of Wiccan Rede Online have never been able to read these articles, which is a pity. In this category, Timeless texts, we republish this type of articles. This one was written for the Imbolc 2008 issue of Wiccan Rede, by Merlin, Silver Circle’s co-founder and long-time editor of Wiccan Rede.
Harry Potter is definitely not the first fictional character in literary history to end up at a Witch school. Schools for magic, witchcraft and wizardry have existed throughout the centuries. And not just in fiction, in reality as well! But they have also been kept hidden pretty well. Even today, with internet, they are hard to find. And the ones that you DO find on the world wide entangled web, are usually not worth attending…
First off, let me say something about the real schools for witches and wizards. Because they do exist. In reality. But they are not as fanciful and glamorous as they look in the Harry Potter films. They don’t look like schools at all. Nine out of ten they are about individual training, in a student-teacher setting. They require a lot of hard work, years of dedication, and at the end you certainly won’t be able to levitate a feather, let alone yourself. There is a vast difference between film, and real witchcraft and real magic. But for those who are earnest and dedicated seekers, there are certainly ways available to find a teacher, to study, and to join a magical lodge, an order or a coven.
These days there are also many people who don’t want the intense commitment of a proper teacher-student relationship, and who do not want to join an order or a coven. But they do have a genuine interest and want to commit themselves to some serious study; they want to discover their chosen path on their own terms, and at their own speed. It is these people who often get lured into internet “witch schools”. And as a matter of fact, they may learn some decent stuff, some interesting ideas and techniques. But to my knowledge, none of these are inspired by regular, traditional Wicca.
More importantly, if you take your own education in hand, you are trying to be your own teacher, your own examiner, and give yourself grades. And that is a technical impossibility that even a magic wand won’t solve. What many people would like to have, is some way to keep an overview over what a “good” witch education would contain. Most of them will have cottoned on that reading one popular booklet about spells is not nearly enough. On the other hand, do you have to be an expert, expert as in “a minimum of three years full time study” in twenty different fields? And which fields might these be? How do you grade yourself, where are you on the path, what is your progress, which important areas have you missed so far?
This article will focus on the question of a curriculum for your own personal witch school, with yourself as the one and only student, and the world as your teacher. And yes, you could do worse than get out your Tarot deck right now, and equate yourself at this point in time with the Fool, happily skipping through the fields with his dog and not a care in the world, wanting to become a Magician, or a High Priestess… And the other 21 cards of the Major Arcana are combined into “the World”, your chosen path, the tasks, obstacles, challenges, but also triumphs and powers, that await you…
It should be clear that you cannot be your own teacher. You cannot (technically) teach yourself things that you do not yet know, or are not able to do. Just like you cannot initiate yourself into something you are not yet part of. You must realise that even if you work solo, and are the one and only student of your own personal witch school, that your teachers are real people in a real world, out there. They may teach you via Internet, email, books, pamphlets, films, fiction, chance meetings, even the checkout girl in the supermarket can be your teacher. What defines a teacher, is the fact that you define yourself as a student! Think about that. If you are willing to learn, if you are open to being taught, if you are ready to receive information and instructions, then and only then is there room for teachers in your life.
There is a popular saying, well, it is popular in occult circles, and even there it isn’t popular because people don’t like it, even though it is true, and that is that a teacher will come to you when you are ready. That still holds true if you want to educate yourself, if you want to work solo in your own private witch school. Because the teachers are out there. You are not the teacher, you are the student. Be a student. Be ready to be a student. Accept being a student. Accept what being a student means, in terms of commitment, dedication, perseverance and so on. Even if you do this only for yourself.
Let’s translate this into a real life situation. Suppose you need a book on meditation. The author of that book, is going to be your teacher for a while. How will you find the best book of meditation? What defines the best book? Is that the best book in the field? Or is it the best book within the context of your own personality? The best book, or the best book for you?
There are rough guidelines on judging books and authors, even if you know nothing about the subject they write about yet. As there are similar guidelines on judging Internet sites. Tips on looking for indexes, who is who, references to other books, publisher and so on. Go to a good library or a good book store and ask the staff, they may actually surprise you and know their trade! Make it you business to know how to tell the corn from the chaff. It can save you loads of money, and lots of wasted time!
And if you are a true student, then the very first lesson should have become apparent by now. The reason that you are working solo, and creating your own personal witch school, most likely is because you are a know-it-all who thinks they know better than anyone else what is best for them. Well, statistically, the chance that you are wrong is very high. You probably are confusing what you want, with what you need, what is necessary for you. And bookstores are truly very safe places to learn this lesson. Because if you don’t get the lesson, you will waste your own time and your own money and possibly have to unlearn stupid things later on, but you won’t harm anyone else.
Is there a moral to this story? Yes. The moral is that even in something as mundane as trying to find the right book, the right author, to be your teacher in your witch school, there is a lesson. A lesson that relates to being a student, being open and committed, being receptive to what the gods want to give you because you need it, as opposed to wanting to follow your own fancy all the time. And don’t go overboard the other way, wait years and years until you have found the best book on meditation, and as a consequence, don’t learn any meditation at all. There is a certain foolishness in finding none of the available books good enough for you…
I could fill this entire article with tips and lessons on how to be a student. But that is not what this article is supposed to be about. So I will leave you with the previous tips and lessons to ponder for a while.
Let’s continue with the witch school curriculum. Which subjects should be part of that? Astrology, Herbalism, History of Magic, Meditation, Ritual techniques, Tarot, Healing, Egyptian God forms…
Before you know it, you have a list as long as your arm, and you will have a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that there is no way you will ever master all that in one life time. What you need, even before you start filling in any subjects and skills, is some sort of ground plan. An overview. What would be a good and rounded education that would incorporate enough of the essentials, without being impossible to complete? How much is enough, and what is essential?
We have a problem here that anybody who is trying to teach themselves, will come across. Without knowledge of the subject, of your field of study, how do you design a well-rounded course? Or how do you evaluate whether someone else’s course is well rounded?
My own answer to this conundrum is to find a model somewhere. Another word is a template or a pattern. A model that is well rounded and complete in itself. And then to “translate” that model to your field of study. By using a model, you will remember things that otherwise might be forgotten.
Which models are available? What do I mean when I say “model”? Which models are appropriate for a witch school?
Well, one model that comes out of modern witchcraft itself is the cycle of the year and the eight festivals. That certainly is well rounded and complete. Another model is the pentagram, with its five points representing the four elements, and spirit. Yet another model is the archetypal figure of the witch herself.
How would you “translate” the archetypal image of the witch into a series of subjects for a witch school, that – at least according to the model – would be a complete and rounded curriculum? Let’s have a play, since a good example is probably far more instructive than any amount of theorising.
Start with the image of the archetypal witch, and try to “translate” all that you see into study subjects. Let’s start with the cauldron. The cauldron stands for Herbalism, or health, food, potions, spells. Already you have five keywords there, and “health” could break down into any one of dozens of health-related skills. For example, you may include tai chi or aerobics or any other form of physical fitness class into your curriculum. Herbalism too could be about cooking herbs, or healing herbs, or you could make a special study of the traditional witches herbs, the poisons, hallucinogens, flying ointments, or you could become a nature watcher who studies lichens or toadstools and combine your daily exercise with that. So the single symbol of the cauldron, translates into a set of keywords, and each keyword translates into a half dozen or even a dozen of possible study subjects or activities or skills.
It may now become apparent why we have taken a model in the first place: because you might be tempted to take too many subjects for the cauldron and think that is a complete and rounded education. When it isn’t. And one further word of advice: always try to mix and match intellectual, emotional, and physical pursuits. Keep a balance between strict study and hands-on work. Studying poetry, which is more of an emotional pursuit, is perfectly OK as part of your course in spell work!
Next take a look at the witches’ hat. It consists of a big circular rim and a cone. Would the Cone of Power do as a keyword? And the Circle? No witch education would be complete without knowing your rituals, your festivals, and without being able to work with power, with energy, within a circle. So here we have section two of our curriculum. Ritual work and energy work. What are the rituals, what is their aim, why do religions have rituals, how do you write a good ritual, what is the origin of the traditional rituals, what is the point of initiations. And “where” do we work rituals – on the astral plane, where you work with imagery and energy. What is this astral plane, what are the laws that apply there, how do you create and use energy, give it direction, how do you bless or curse or consecrate?
The third attribute of the archetypal witch is the broom. Keyword: Flying. Flying has links to Herbalism and hallucinogens, just as much as links to astral work. But there are other keywords that may be important to you as well: cleaning for example. Traditionally hallucinogens were used in strict ritual settings where the body was cleansed beforehand too, for example via fasting. And what does cleaning mean to you in a spiritual sense? What does it mean to have “clean” emotions or “clean” thoughts? Does “unhygienic thinking” exist, and if so, what is it? Are Perfect Love and Perfect Trust possible if you are unclean in any way? And which important “Golden Rules” or ethical guidelines do other religions have, and which ones are important in Wicca?
Flying also implies a goal, a place to go to. Traditionally many ways have been used to commune with the gods, to reach that “place” where you can in fact commune with the gods. For some it is meditation, for others it is dance or music or trance. And once you are there, how do you communicate with the gods? As a witch you should have mastered at least one divinatory tool such as the pendulum or the tarot or the crystal ball. So there is another field of study and practice: find your own way of scrying.
The fourth archetypal feature of the witch is her pointed nose and pointed chin. In profile they combine into a semblance of the crescent waning moon. This brings you to the study of the Moon and her influence on life on Earth. This might even become a full-blown study of astrology, or it may go towards studying the influence of the moon on the growth of plants, or you may study moon goddesses and moon gods. All of course in addition to getting to know the Goddess and God of Wicca itself.
And finally, the archetypal witch as a whole can be “translated” into two major areas of study, which are fairy tales, and on the other hand, the witch hunts. Don’t think too lightly of fairy tales, again it is a key word that encompasses the cultural heritage of many different peoples, and can be expanded to ancient religions, ancient gods and rituals, but also to small snippets of folk wisdom that have been preserved for centuries. This is also the area where the traditional witches’ cat or witches’ familiar would fall under, the relationship between some people and their animals.
I took the image of the archetypal witch as a joke, as a fanciful image to show you how you can “translate” an image that comes out of the wicca or witchcraft, into a fairly rounded set of subjects to create a curriculum for a witch school. But the example itself has probably shown you that you now do have a fairly good all round template for an education! It contains plenty of theoretical subjects, and a fair amount of skills to learn. Circle work, rituals, energy work, meditation and trance work, health and Herbalism, the moon, cultural subjects and history.
But the image also has a particular bias. Which is to be expected of course, It has a bias towards the “witchy” subjects, what you may call the “craft” side of witchcraft.
The areas that are missing, unless you go out of your way to put them in, are the modern history of wicca say from the 1850’s onwards, the religious aspects of wicca, working with gods and goddesses, deva’s, entities, and “the” god and goddess of wicca, and what is also missing is pre-Christian religious studies, including European religious roots, animism, nature religions throughout the world, also in modern times, in order to better understand what wicca is.
To interrupt our work on this image for a moment: you could have chosen any of the other symbols (models, patterns) as well. The cycle of the year will give you four seasons, four elements, a dark and a light half of the year, and in each season a solar festival and an agricultural festival, that could be translated into a theoretical subject and a practical subject. You can easily “translate” this model into a list of subjects as well.
Or you could have chosen the pentagram. This too has the four elements but a higher visibility of the spiritual fifth element (you could argue that the god/dark and goddess/light halves of the year form the “spirit” or “essence” or “fifth element” in the yearly cycle of the seasons).
You could even have chosen a tree as your image. The roots are the connection with the earth, and your own roots and history as a witch. The stem gives support to the whole structure, this is the structure, your rituals. The stem is surrounded by bark, which is the conduit for the life force between roots and leaves. Communication, divination, communion with the gods. The branches and leaves are the connection with the astral plane on the one hand, but any tree also gives shelter and support to many other plants and animals, and this translates into the communal work you can do with your skills, be it Herbalism or tarot or counselling or magic.
So, depending on the symbol you choose, wou will get a slight emphasis on one thing or the other but the main aim of the symbol is not to let you loose sight of the whole picture, not to let you forget certain area’s of study and practice that are important too. Which symbol appeals to you most, is the one you should choose. Because long before you consciously know it yourself, your unconscious already knows where your personal preference lies, and how that translates to imagery. If you feel for the witchy side of witchcraft, you go for the archetypal witch. If you feel for the nature side and the connection with the divine, you go for the seasonal cycle or for the tree. If you feel more for the abstract side of things, you would go for the pentagram.
Even the witchy image can be broken down into the five elements. I personally find it handy to work with the five elements as a main checklist, even behind the archetypal witch as an image. But whether you choose any of these symbols or something else entirely, there is one rule that must not be broken and that is that the template for your study should itself come out of the field for your study. Do not attempt to use a template based on the sacred number 3 or 7 or 12. They are valid templates, but they do not belong to Wicca. Don’t use the cabbalistic Tree of Life to try and structure a Wiccan education. The Tree of Life is a valuable image, and the kabala is a worthy study subject, but it is not an integral part of Wicca itself. It was added to Wicca by Alex Sanders. A rounded study of Wicca must connect to the archetypal images that lie behind Wicca itself.
Let’s get back to our witch school curriculum. We start with the image, in our case of the archetypal witch. From there we mark four or five distinctive features. In our case the cauldron, the witches hat, the broom, the archetypal face and the image as a whole. And for each of these parts or features we choose 2 keywords.
I say choose – this is a game of limitation! Limit yourself, because the aim is to come up with a rounded education, and that means that you know a bit about a few things only. So for the cauldron your personal keywords might be “health” and “cooking”. Not too witchy, those, on the other hand, many witches are briljant cooks and delight their coven mates with sumptuous morsels ☺ There are other keywords possible too, as I showed earlier. From these keywords, translate them into one study subject each. So health could translate into wanting to learn a particular type of massage just as easily as into studying fasting or detox or going for a daily boost of endorphins in your jogging!
Remember to balance practical hands-on subjects with theoretical work. And remember that what you do purely for yourself, is just as important for those around you, as the things you study because you want to help others first. It is your education! There is no coincidence. Any choice you make at this point, will be meaningful in the future. Don’t fall into the trap of having a false sense of “I should not be so egotistical” if you choose something purely for yourself. If you better yourself, then no matter if you did it only for yourself, the people around you will benefit, don’t doubt it.
Do this for all the major elements in your image. If you have 4 or 5 major elements, such as seasons, or a broom and a hat, you will end up with 8 or 10 keywords and 8 or 10 study subjects. Some are theoretical, some are practical. For some keywords you may have to hunt round for study subjects, for example I can imagine that you wouldn’t really know where to go to study ritual work. So you may need to do some extra work here. Buy some magazines, join a forum, read one or two introductory books, in order to figure out where to go with your study plans.
Once you have your list of subjects, it is time to get down to the nitty gritty of planning a study. Your aim is a rounded education, but you are just starting on the path, so what you have before you is your first year. Call it your “introduction to wicca”. Roughly 10 subjects that you can devote one month each to. Now is the time to be practical and pragmatic. What can you do in one month? How much time do you have? Maybe you can study 2 books in a month. That is study, not read, to study means taking notes, trying to remember what you read, following up certain interesting things in libraries or Internet, maybe trying some exercises.
For another subject, maybe there are some lectures you can attend, or some workshops, or lessons or an exercise program. Not everything will be readily accessible, studying a book on the history of the witch-hunts is fairly easy to organise, but for more hands-on work on energy work it may be very difficult to find a teacher!
However, don’t forget what I wrote at the beginning of this article: teachers will come to you when you are ready. When you are prepared to be a student and to learn. You cannot plan everything, so plan for the unforseen!
Again I must stress that you should keep the keyword “rounded” in your mind. Don’t go for certain books or courses that are easily available and forget the parts of your education that are difficult to find, or where you have no real idea yet how to fill that in. Ask for help!
And finally, don’t expect miracles. Designing your own study program is not something you can do on a rainy afternoon. Take your time to select your model, and to write down your keywords. Take your time to narrow it down to the study subjects you want to pursue. This can easily take two weeks. And when you start, keep a journal. Be sure to write a small report when you complete a subject. It not only is a good record for later, but it will also give you a sense of satisfaction and completion. So that at the end of the year you can look back with a real sense of progress!
In conclusion, I hope I have shown you that it is possible to get a self-study program together, even if you don’t really know all that much about Wicca yet. Using a model and translating that into study subjects can help you to stay focussed on the whole picture, and to remember things that otherwise may be forgotten. Most important though: remember to be a student, and remember that your teachers are out there!
