The Witch’s Path

Are you wondering whether you are a witch? Have you felt or experienced something that led you to look at this path? Even if you do not call yourself a witch, do you connect with the magick in the world, seen and unseen?

Finding a path

Now that I look back and reflect on moments from my childhood that seem to have meaning in the larger trajectory of my life, I see that when I was very young I was able to communicate with birds and snails in my backyard. Singing to the birds and swinging on the swing set, I felt my heart swell. The songs I sang connected me to the magickal world around me. 

Of course, since I was being raised in a Christian faith I didn’t know what this meant. And as I grew up, I only knew that my path was different from what I was being guided into through the formalized religion I was growing up in.

As a teen, I encountered the idea of witchcraft through a talk at church, where I learned that it was not just a fairy tale, but that it was evil. It was devil worship, and it was dangerous and disgusting. My biggest take away from that experience was that someone was actually doing it!  I didn’t want to be evil or worship the devil, though. I was very frightened of that whole possibility.

Finding Out

When I was in high school, and very active in my church, I went on a field trip to see Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. What an eye-opening excursion this was! A piece of history was presented in the most enthralling way; I hadn’t known the power of dramatic storytelling until I saw the depth of the words, imagery and layers of symbolism in this production. I think the story of the witch trials, as told through this play, made me think about what power struggles evolve when people are motivated by fear of something they don’t understand. And I thought maybe there might be more to the question of personal spirituality than I had been taught.

Voices from the Path

I interviewed several friends about their awakening to the magick of pagan spirituality, to see how their stories might inspire anyone who is finding their own path. 

My friend Sam says “I was a teenager and I was reading a lot of books about religious traditions, trying to find something that felt like it made sense to me. I think Starhawk was the first writer I encountered who was able to put into words how I felt the world worked.” 

I also recall reading books that inspired my path. I read The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You in the 1970’s, which made me aware of what might happen if dreaming were a skill we cultivated. And this led me to reading Carlos Castaneda and later, Lynn Andrews.

A young teenager I know said that going to a solstice celebration with a relative got her interested in Wicca. She said it “felt like an open place, where I could be vulnerable and empowered.” This is such a beautiful response to a pagan spiritual experience! This is what we strive for. The collaboration and acceptance we nurture is reflected in a song from our first album, “We Are Sisters.” We are about healing and connecting to wisdom.  

How to Follow Your Path

 In their book How to Become a Witch, Amber K and Azrael Arynn K describe Wicca as an art and/or a spiritual path leading us to  “…live in harmony with nature…grow in wisdom, love and power…” My teenage friend says this power is “power over my life. It’s being intentional, reflecting on my actions and how they affect me and others.”

This is how Sam described her early experiences with paganism: “Coming out of a fear based religious tradition I remember it taking a long time for me to trust what I was feeling and doing in sacred space. I recall being very surprised at how full of light and love I felt at the end of a ritual– this was never the feeling I had at the end of a church service. In my experience of Christianity I often walked away feeling less than, with a long “to do” list of how I could do better. This isn’t to say that pagan practices don’t require me to put the time in, but that they have never made me to feel that I was intrinsically flawed.” 

The Wiccan path is a healing and inclusive path. As is described so beautifully in our piece “Circle of Healing” we know that any power we use will affect us three times as strongly as it affects any others we may come into contact with in the physical or energetic realms. 

One millennial Wiccan, Sierra, puts it like this: In Wicca, “no positive religion is bad, and all are aspects of the same experience – believing slightly differently is not a damning offense.”

When Sierra was in middle school, she wondered “If America is a country with no official religion, why do we refuse access in public-school music programs to any religious music that celebrates other than a Judeo-Christian god?”  Because she wanted to change this “tradition,” she asked for my help to learn a song that she could share at school. We chose a song of thanks for food: “Goddess We Thank You for the Gifts of Your Hands.” We worked on this song together and she sang it at a school program. Although she reports having few friends in school other than those trying to convert her to another path, she was strong enough to stand up for her beliefs. Here are the lyrics to this simple song of thanks, Spring Blessing by Cynthia Rylander Crossen:

Goddess, we thank you for the gifts of your hand
The flow’ring of springtime, the fruit of the land
When we gather together we know we are one
Let us open like flowers beneath your warm sun.
Goddess, we thank you for the gifts of your hand
The flow’ring of springtime, the fruit of the land

Your Path

If you are wondering about your spiritual path, here is some advice from my millennial friend: “While there as many different facets of Paganism as there are stars in the sky, there is no wrong way to worship Earth or the Goddess…if you feel as if you are connecting to something outside yourself, you are probably praying. If your intentions are being directed into manifesting, you’re doing magick!”

Please tell us a bit about how you are finding your own path in the comments section below.

For more from Sierra, see her blog at https://americandreamer590780143.wordpress.com/, and her  magazine can be found here:  https://issuu.com/thehudsonconnection.

An interview with Cynthia Rylander Crossen can be found here in another Pagansong blog post.

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Deb and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

Please subscribe to the Pagan Song blog, to receive our blog post each week. Don’t miss any of the musical magic!

Visit our homepage to see the full list of the musicians who write for the Pagan Song blog.

Pagan Song has a fan club on Patreon. Join for as little as $3 a month for exclusive features! Click for info.