The A.R.T. of Becoming a Witch

Welcome to Mystica Inner-Versity

At a mystic witch gathering in February, the incomparable seer Sabin Bailey, asked Our Lady if she’d like to choose a Tarot card. Our Lady chose #1 The Magician. Sabin smiled, “The Magician is the witch card.” She paused, then said, “Every prayer is a spell.” As a prayer artist, I knew something big was coming.  

The next morning at 4am, I clearly heard, “Our Lady Queen of Magicians.” Of course! What a perfect name! It’s now my favorite prayer salutation. That night, the Queen returned to tell me to create a radical setting for my upcoming prayer intensive. “Look at Hogwarts,” She commanded, “Hogwarts was a complete world.” Before I could take that in, She continued, “___________ is a complete mystical world within the world.” But she didn’t give me a name. Instead, She rapidly dictated two pages of components. Finally, She whispered the name of this world: Mystica. 

The moment I woke, I called everyone working with me on The A.R.T. of Becoming a Witch: How to Awaken, Remember, and Trust Your Body’s Natural Intuitive Senses and we gave everything we had to create Mystica Inner-Versity. Mystos the Raven arrived to help. Maybe it was he who led us to our mysterious Latin motto: song of the sleeping dragon.

What is The Witch Sequence?

When we were halfway through that intuition intensive, I began to see that activating our intuition was a critical witch skill, but it was just the first of many. Following my freshly intensified intuition, I found myself staring at 7-circuit labyrinths, especially raw ones made of stone in prehistory. Why this particular labyrinth? I reread Max Dashu’s research into the etymology of the word witch in Witches and Pagans. It means a woman expressing her sacramental gifts. She writes about dozens of gifts, but 7 grabbed my attention. Which came first, the labyrinth or the gifts? Who can say. 

Once I said yes to creating whatever wanted to be created in whatever form it wanted to be created, the floodgates opened. There are 7 spiritual witch gifts, therefore there are 7 intensives. Each one is to be called The A.R.T. of Becoming a Witch…followed by the name of the gift. We activate each gift by walking one of the 7 paths of the ancient labyrinth. And we walk for 77 days. The whole long holy labyrinth walk is called The Witch Sequence, which is, of course, a 77.

What Are Our 7 Original Sacramental Gifts?

“[T]he oldest names for witch in European languages emphasize their spiritual gifts: powers of prophecy, divination, and incantation; of healing, herbal knowledge, shapeshifting and shamanic flight…the old witch-titles honored women as cultural authorities.”
Max Dashu, Witches and Pagans

Women and witches have been silenced and controlled under patriarchy for so long, that it’s hard to remember that women were once the beating heart of matrifocal societies, revered for serving, healing, and blessing their communities with a profusion of sacred talents and gifts. There are many witch gifts, but these seven are the heart of Becoming a Witch. 

We will walk one circuit of The Path of Seven labyrinth in each prayer intensive to awaken, remember, and embody each one.

1. Intuitive Senses—Trustworthy intuition flows effortlessly when you awaken your natural ability to see what wants to be seen, hear what wants to be heard, feel what wants to be felt, know what wants to be known, and go where you are called. Witches rely on intuition.
2. Threshold Crossing—The mystical theta brainwave state is the only gateway to The Mystic, radical creativity, the presence of the past, the Imaginal Realm, morphic and Akashic Fields. Witches drop into theta around the clock.
3. Prayer—Original prayer is powerful witch medicine that infuses both the one who prays and all who are prayed for, present, past, and future, with healing, love, forgiveness, and joy. Prayer, as defined and practiced by patriarchy, is lifeless in comparison to the beauty and magic of this, our original, spell. Witches are magicians of prayer.
4. Anointing—Sacred anointing is the multi-sensory, full-body sacrament of remembering passed to us through a long lineage of witches and priestesses who served the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth. Anointing is the gift of The Magdalene. Everything and everyone is blessed when a witch anoints.
5. Divination—The original prophets and oracles were women. We connected, then and now, with cosmic, mystic, and mythic wisdom to be shared for the healing of individual hearts and the collective wasteland. Witches are all called to be oracles and seers.
6. Devotion—Long before patriarchal religions with their disembodied male gods, there was the Goddess—the Goddess in the heavens, the Goddess in the land, and the Goddess in and through the female body. We who walk the witches path honor Her and dedicate ourselves to cultivating Her Garden of Reverence.
7. Dragon—Patriarchal religions denigrated this magnificent serpent from the ultimate symbol of the Goddess to the ultimate of evil, and called her “the devil.” Every statue of St George or Archangel Michael killing the dragon and every tale about knights killing dragons are reenactments of the patriarchal command to destroy the Goddess. Witches love the Dragon and recognize that the restoration of the Dragon is essential to the healing of the wasteland and the return of the Goddess.
   

Original Sacramental Gift #2: Crossing the Threshold Between Worlds

“[W]hen the censorship of the waking consciousness is not operative, information can read the mind from almost any part or aspect of the universe.”
Ervin Laszlo Science and the Akashic Field

When we drop into theta, information, guidance, creativity, and ideas you know did not come from you flow effortlessly from unknown but clearly fertile places. This is the playground all creatives know and love.

Where does this information come from? Here are a few sources, each a vibrant field, a cosmic sea of possibility:

• Akashic Record—library of all lives and all beings throughout time
• Morphic Field—presence of the past
• Imaginal Realm—where mystics have always gathered
• Deep Memory—of the cosmos, land, nature, the body
• Mystic Family/Group Soul—those anchoring us lifetime after lifetime across the veil 
• Dream Fields—soul symbol playground
• Mythic Memory—Goddess-centric stories, songs, prayers, memories of living in reverence
• Land of the Dead—ancestors, not just biological 

How do you know you are in theta? Here are a few attributes:

• Paradox: complete emptiness overflows with possibility 
• Paradox: rare and beautiful voices that can only be heard in silence 
• Paradox: chronos time dissolves into Kairos and time ceases to keep time 
• Paradox: theta is not under your control, but you can train yourself to drop into it
• Unexpected: comes in bursts, always a surprise, leaves indelible impression 
• Presence: what wants to be heard, seen, felt, known, remembered, forgiven, healed, experienced, created…is now here 
• Personal: speaks with a unique signature in tone and physicality 
• Wild: brings radical, surprising, breathtakingly beautiful impulses, insights, connections
• Persistent: insists you explore questions you have never considered, create what wants to be created, go where you are lead, become who you came here to be
• Ecstatic: leaves you full of wonder and joy and wanting more