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Charging a gem or crystal imbues it with your intent. Upon charging your jewelry, you can use it in spell work or anytime you want to surround yourself with the magic you put into the gemstones. While picturing your truest wish and hope, and what you ultimately want to achieve through this process, anoint a candle with an essential oil that most expresses your energy. Perhaps it is rose or, as in my case, amber. Begin by lighting the candle and gazing into the flame. Then, place the piece of jewelry in front of the candle and say aloud, “Into this jewelry, I imbue my essence and the power of this blessed earth. This gem of great hue is charged until my magic is through. So mote it be!”

You can further empower the jewel by scratching your desire into the wax of the candle. Then, each time you burn the candle, place the gem before it and think upon your quest.

“What's a Darrin?” Seriously?

(Gods, what do they teach them in Witch School these days?)

It's an old Witch word. (I can't believe you've never heard it before.) It means a non-witch married to a witch.

Yes, it is an interesting word, isn't it? Got that witchy, kind of mysterious sound to it. Nobody knows where it comes from, or what it meant originally. Probably it's Anglo-Saxon, or maybe from some Celtic language, like pretty much the rest of Craft vocabulary.

(A friend of mine who's an Anglo-Saxonist suggested maybe déor-wine, “deer-friend”—that's deer-the-animal; witches, as you know, have always been a People of the Deer—but, really, who knows?)

Well, those are our roots, after all, Saxon and Celt: we've been a mixed people from the very beginning. Always have been, still are, always will be, I guess, though we've expanded the gene-pool some since those days. Hey, we're the witches: we'll take anybody, if they're our kind of folks.

My guess is, the word probably goes back to ancient times. You know witches: we've always been a clannish sort—that's clan-with-a-C, not a K: when witches wear hoods, they're not usually white ones—and in the old days there were some pretty strong strictures against marrying outside of the tribe. So it would make sense that there would be a term for someone who'd married in.

Interesting thing is, a Darrin's children are full Tribe of Witches by birth. There are no half-witches: you're either in or you're not. The old people used to joke about the "Old Blood”: one drop is enough, and all that. Usually, of course, they'd cackle as they said this.

“Witches honor,” says my friend, holding up her fingers in a V in front of her face.

She was grinning as she said this. I too laughed, as she'd intended; but I also took her at her word.

One of the sillier aspects of the 60s sit-com Bewitched—which is saying quite a bit—was the “Witch's Honor” sign, here demonstrated by the incomparable Agnes Moorehead, who played Samantha's mother Endora in the series.

(Any Boomer Era witch who tries to tell you that her decision to embrace the Craft was unaffected by watching the jet-setting witches of Bewitched as a child would be lying; but, frankly, I doubt that you could actually find anyone who would even attempt to deny it.)

In the series, paired with its accompanying hand-sign (the terminally eclectic might say mudra here), Witch's Honor in effect constituted an oath of truth-telling, and that's exactly how my friend was using it.

There's no comparable gesture of ritual affirmation in the contemporary real-life Craft. Maybe there should be; this was just one of the things that my friend's use of the TV hand-sign was saying. In a way, she was making fun of us for not having one. The cultural poverty of the Craft is something that every serious modern practitioner has to face up to (and then work her butt off to undo).

Before my friend's laughing allusion, it had never occurred to me to wonder why that particular gesture—which, quite frankly, I hadn't thought about actively in years—would be paired with the act of giving an oath.

But think about it.

V for Vow. (Or Veritas: “truth.) The point of the V frames the mouth with which I speak my vow; its horns point toward the eyes, meaning: I bear witness. One could even read it as calling the viewer to bear witness to my oath. The fact that I make this gesture with my strong hand (right for righties, left for southpaws) means: I strongly affirm.

If we're really pushing it, we could even see the V as an invocation of the Horned God, to bear witness to the fact that what I say is true.

(If ever, for even so much as a nanosecond, you doubted that the ability to Bullshit is one of the foremost Powers of the Witch, dear reader, be here roundly disabused of your foolish misapprehension. Witches put the “Bull” in Bullshit, baby.)

The non-witch husband of a witch is, of course, a darrin; everybody knows that.

Call it a Classical reference.

But what do you call a witch or pagan who is partnered with the member of a coven, but is not him- or herself a member of the same coven?

My friend and colleague Magenta Griffith raised this interesting question at a recent Full Moon. Hey, we're a youthful religion, and we're still getting our terminological ducks (so to speak) in a row.

For my coven, this is a particularly pertinent question, since we've got several such folks who regularly attend our holiday events—in some cases, for decades—but who do not themselves “belong” to the coven. (Our unofficial “No couples” policy has served us well over the course of the last 37-going-on-38 years; it's certainly at least one reason why, as a coven, we've managed to last so long.)

Well, taking darrin as a paradigm, are there any examples in the “literature” (I use the term loosely) of one witch married to another who doesn't belong to the same coven?

She's by far the most famous witch in the Bible.

So, the king is in a bind.

He has prohibited all forms of divination on pain of death, but now he needs someone to divine for him. The kingdom next door is about to invade, his long-time counselor is dead, and he needs advice.

“Find me a witch (ba'alat 'ov),” he tells his servants.

“There's one at Endor ('Eyn Dor, 'Spring [of] Dor*'),” they tell him.

So he disguises himself and goes to see her.

“Raise someone for me,” he tells her.

“What, are you trying to trap me?” she replies, cannily. “You know the king has forbidden such things.”

The voice was unmistakably that of Discworld's Nanny Ogg, in full Impart mode to a junior colleague.

Of all things, she was talking about the show Bewitched.

“Terrible programme, full of inaccuracies,” she said. “That's why we had to have it canceled.”

So it was the witches themselves that got Bewitched canceled?

“Of course it was,” says Nanny. “Not that I had anything against it myself, mind you.”

She takes a pull from her hip flask.

“As a matter of fact, it even confirmed several of my favorite biases,” she says proudly.

Preconceived ideas, we all have them and rely on them.  Certain words or names evoke a response in everyone.  Generally these are negative emotions. 

Witch is a word that does this for Pagans.  Since I consider myself an eclectic witch who is seeking, it was a title I hesitated taking on as I traveled my path through paganism.