Lilith helps her witches to get what they desire come hell or high water, but you have to really want it, because the process can cause you to burn. 

She is just as likely to slap you to the ground in the process of showing Her witches what she wants, but She does this out of love. She wants her witches to be worthy, so she tests them. Her lips are the softest, sweetest, most sensual that you will ever have the desire to kiss. Her hair is dark brown, long and curled, and she likes to wear red. 

Men must treat Her in the FemDom sort of way. She will use a man for Her purposes if She has need of him and toss him out thereafter. 

She came to me before. I have kissed Her and felt her desire and anger move through me. As a result, I took actions that broke my patterns of the past and I was shunned by an entire community. She taught me what I was capable of, and I will always be grateful for that. 

Of oil and water, of touch and time, anointing is of the utmost prime.

Giving, receiving, then parting, grieving, the cycle of power does not require believing.


Forget the words, be deeper than the words.
The words depart for awhile to come. 

*A witch is the woman herself, who is connected to nature and the powers that be. She basks in the glow of the sun and moon, and feels the earth beneath her. She is of energy, light and shadow.  Her heart is fully alive to know the hearts of others, whom she touches in love, acceptance or hate. The freedom of her body is known to her. Her aura expands to include others, whom she can read and influence when necessary. She is a fully participating partner in the acts of nature and the unseen world. Spirits flock to her, because they are aware that she can communicate, even at the most basic ability.  This is the core. Her actions proceed from this core, effortless, as if flowing like a stream. She doesn't need to think them over. 

*Witchcraft is the various, yet systematic, practice used to grow a witch into her power. These practices can involve men as well as women. It is the work that connects and grows auras. It depends on the guide or source of the practices as to what exactly these practices are, but there are some common elements to many of the witchcrafts, such as candle flames for example. Witchcraft is the physical action prompted by messages from nature and the powers that involve tools, given or found. These actions allow the will of the witch, nature and the powers to be worked. At first, the messages from nature and the powers may be hard to recieve. This is why a guide who can be an impartial passer-on of these messages is great to work with until these messages become loud and clear for the witch to take direction with herself. 

Witchcraft is also the continuing work of a witch who has grown magic to her core. It is the spellwork and reoccuring charging of a witch who knows her desires and who is herself now linked with the reception of messages from nature and the powers that be. She often is called to act for others as well as herself. 

*Pagan firstly denotes the various non-Judeo-Christian connected religions, such at those found in the day to day life of the Roman world two thousand years ago. Also, the term itself designates various culturally-connected religious aspects that were carried on by local societies from before their individual times of contact with Christian missionaries, whether they used magic or not. 

More recently, the term Pagan (more properly Neo-Pagan) is used to describe the belief systems of those who have used books of literature, anthropology, philosophy and history in order to attempt to recreate what they think are the religious practices of past. In many ways, this continuing process can't help but be a product of the times that the various people who study the books, and pass on what they have to offer live in. In this way, subsequently the few remnants of lingering paganic religious forms were infused by the more modern subjects of psychology (especially in the 1920's-1950's), and metaphysical philosophies of the "new age movements" during the 60's-80's.

A witch can be pagan or not. She can be of any religion or not that she doesn't feel a divide in herself during. She is not bound by forms of pagan thought, belief and practice, because she is rooted underneath thought, into the core of the mystery itself without words. Pagan practice can create a shell, a form, for the witch to live in, if she is brought into contact with it and it suits her growth. Or she can just as well throw it out and be happy with the freedoms that a life without these religious structures can provide.  The actions of witchcraft itself promote awareness of yourself and the world around you, what is seen and what is hidden. Although some books can point you in the right direction, these awarenesses are the real form of witchcraft knowledge.

Ultimately, the witch is about "being", witchcraft is about the "doing", and pagan denotes systems of "believing", tried on to see if they fit without having to "be" or "do" anything in order to do so.

My advice is to "be" and "do". Then, let knowledge form in the messages that come to you from nature and the powers themselves or from messengers connected to those powers who (as a go-between) pass messages directed specifially to you, rather than from beliefs from books. If you are meant to be of a certain religion, it will draw you to it and naturally envelope itself into your essence by the messages you recieve from the powers that be. 

Wicks touch upon light, 
flames touch upon us. 
See how they jump, how they dive, how they stare.
Feed the fires, of your desires.

Why are plain, unscented, yet colored, votive candles so scarce?

Now all who know me know that I do have a tenancy to intellectualize things, to get into my head and be aloof in that sometimes. From my perspective, when I get on these rationalities and mind explorations, building layer upon layer, its fun for me, but I really have a hard time pulling myself out of it, even to the extent of being a stress-case about it. This is the how its been, even when I realize that in reality, its leading me away from the awarenesses right in front of me. The ones that I am drawn to in being present in the world around me as it is, connecting with others and the spaces between. 

In almost every religious book you read, there is this ladder to it as something out there. I've mentally climbed the steps on these ladders so many times my knees hurt. But the sad thing is that although I have enjoyed it thoroughly, it often has lead me away from the world around me and somewhere else entirely. Although this can be good, every time I really focused on being present in the moment here, in the moments between moments, visions came, changes happened, the magic is strong. I  wonder why is it that we are supposed to seek it "out there"? Because the one's who wrote the book are men and that's the way men are programmed to experience it. It hits home now.  Its just fundamentally a difference in the way of looking at things, although I know that as women and men, we CAN choose to look at things in both ways. The men REALLY are drawn into looking at what's in the circle, and the women are REALLY being pulled out of the circle in the process. They are just the reverse of each other. 

Yesterday, I opened a book I was drawn to at the thrift shop. I opened it last night to this page where I saw these words:


     Esperanza made a silencing gesture with her hand and said, "Did you know that one of the basic differences between males and females is how they approach knowledge?"
  
     I had no idea what she meant.  Slowly and deliberately, she tore off a clean sheet from my notepad and drew two human figures.  One head she crowned with a cone and said that it was a man.  On the other head, she drew the same cone, but upside down, and said that it was a woman.

     "Men build knowledge step by step," she explained, her pencil poised on the figure crowned with a cone.  "Men reach up;  they climb toward knowledge.  Sorcerers say that men cone toward the spirit; they cone up toward knowledge.  This coning process limits men on how far they can reach."  She retraced the cone on the first figure.  "As you can see, men can only reach a certain height.  Their path toward knowledge ends up in a narrow point:  the tip of the cone."

     She looked at me sharply.  "Pay attention," she warned me and pointed her pencil to the second figure, the one with the inverted cone on its head.  "As you can see, the cone is upside down, open like a funnel.  Women are able to open themselves directly to the source, or rather, the source reaches them directly, in the broad base of the cone.  Sorcerers say that women's connection to knowledge is expansive.  On the other hand, men's connection is quite restricted.

     "Men are close to the concrete," she proceeded, "and aim at the abstract.  Women are close to the abstract and yet try to indulge themselves with the concrete."

     "Why are women, being so open to knowledge or the abstract, considered inferior?"  I interrupted her.

     Esperanza gazed at me with rapt fascination.  She rose swiftly, stretched like a cat until all her joints cracked, then sat down again.

     "That women are considered inferior, or, at the very best, that female traits are equated as complementary to the male's, has to do with the manner in which males and females approach knowledge," she explained.  "Generally speaking, women are more interested in power over themselves that over others,  a power which is clearly what males want."

     "Even among sorcerers," Nelida interjected, and the women all laughed.

     Esperanza went on to say that she believed that originally women saw no need to exploit their facility to link themselves broadly and directly to the spirit.  They saw no necessity to talk about or to intellectualize this natural capacity of theirs, for it was enough for them to put it in action and know that they had it.

     "Men's incapacity to link themselves directly to the spirit was what drove them to talk about the process of reaching knowledge,"  she stressed.  "They haven't stopped talking about it.  And it is precisely this insistence on knowing how they strive toward the spirit, this insistence on analyzing the process, that gave them the certainty that being rational is a typically male skill."

     Esperanza explained that the conceptualization of reason has been done exclusively by men, and that this has allowed men to belittle women's gifts and accomplishments.  And even worse, it has allowed men to exclude feminine traits from the formulation of the ideals of reason.

     "My now, of course, women believe what has been defined for them,"  she explained. "Women have been reared to believe that only men can be rational and coherent.  By now, men carry with them a load of unearned assets that makes them automatically superior regardless of their preparation or capacity."

     "How did women lose their direct link to knowledge?"  I asked.

     "Women haven't lost their connection,"  Esperanza corrected me.  "Women still have a direct link with the spirit.  They have only forgotten how to use it, or rather, they have copied men's condition of not having it at all.  For thousands of years, men have struggled to make sure that women forget it.  Take the Holy Inquisition, for example.  That was a systematic purge to eradicate the belief that women have a direct link to the spirit.  All organized religion is nothing but a very successful maneuver to put women in a lower place.  Religions invoke a divine law that says that women are inferior."

     I stared at her in amazement, wondering to myself how she could possibly be so erudite.

     "Men's need to dominate others and women's lack of interest in expressing or formulating what they know and how they know it has been a most nefarious alliance," Esperanza went on...

     ..."If knowledge is but a male construct, then why your insistence that I go to school?"  I asked.

     "Because you are a witch, and as such you need to know what impinges on you and how it impinges on you," she replied. "Before you refuse something, you must understand why you refuse it.

     "You see, the problem is that knowledge, in our day, is derived from purely reasoning things out. But women have a different track, never, ever taken into consideration.  That track can contribute to knowledge, but it would have to be a contribution that has nothing to do with reasoning things out." 

     "What would it deal with then?" I asked.

     "That's for you to decide, after you master the tools of reasoning and understanding."

     I was very confused.

     "What the sorcerers propose," she explained, "is that men can't have the exclusive right to reason.  They seem to have it now because the ground where they apply reason is a ground where maleness prevails. Let's then apply reason to a ground where femaleness prevails.  And that ground is, naturally, the inverted cone I described to you.  Women's connection to spirit itself."

     She tilted her head slightly to one side, considering what to say.  "That connection has to be faced with a different aspect of reasoning.  An aspect never, ever used before: the feminine side of reasoning," she said.

     "What is the feminine side of reasoning, Esperanza?"

     "Many things.  One of them is definitely dreaming."  She regarded me questioningly, but I had nothing to say.

     Her deep chuckle caught me by surprise.  "I know what you expect from sorcerers.  You want rituals, incantations.  Odd, mysterious cults.  You want to sing.  You want to be one with nature.  You want to commune with water spirits.  You want paganism.  Some romantic view of what sorcerers do.  Very Germanic.

     "To jump into the unknown," she went on, "you need guts and mind.  Only with them will you be able to explain to yourself and to others the treasures you might find."  She leaned toward me, eager, it seemed to confide something.  She scratched her head and sneezed repeatedly, five times as the caretaker had.  "You need to act on your magical side," she said.

Being in Dreaming, Florinda Donner.  Harper Colllins: 1991. pp246-250.



The practices associated with the circle have the potential to bring in this form of knowledge.

I've always been very highly attractive to spirits. At first it was accidental summoning, when I sang, read out loud in school when the teacher asked, during sex, when I let down my guard into a certain frame of mind...they would come. My head throbs often with presence, especially at night, as l lie there sleepless. Others have seen a glow around my head. I grew familiar with their presence and always mentally ask them to return when I realize that they are away for a bit until my summoning request has become a constant affair of friendship.

Recently, they went away for a few days when I needed to feel what it was like to be only myself after a certain ritual I did. I was sad and I was lonely, yet I asked them to return about a week later. I hear a buzzing in my right ear in answers to my questions of them or as confirmations of the truthfulness of statements others say in conversation. 

Now, when I am in ritual for a purpose I either ask out loud or in my head for those I work with to come. When I bring in a new witch or work certain familiar rituals they come with the pattern of the rituals at hand, bringing interesting results as others are touched by them. Sometimes when I am writing, I ask them to come and then I get all poetic or very quick and circularly prose-like in passing messages.

Its fun, but often there are side effects. Mostly they hang out at my head and can work through my hands, but when I bring them into my body, my eyes get red and bulgy, my body either vibrates or jerks wildly. I'm sure it can be disconcerting when I ask them to come with others around, but the witches and others I have worked with don't complain. Now, my husband has been with me so long these things are happening to him too because they want to share him with me.
I've found that the best summonings come when they come to befriend you or those you associate with first. The spirits check you out, accept you, and then you can call on them again and again to come.

Now, commanding spirits is an entire other level....its best to start at the beginning. And rituals formalize the bonds.
Especially with those that others have summoned into your presence.