PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

I'm in the middle of revising the first book I ever published, Ancient Spellcraft, for a second edition. In the sixteen years since it came out (good grief, has it really been that long?) I've learned a thing or two and have deepened my relationships with many of the deities the book addresses, including Amalthea, the Minoan goat-goddess. She has been with me for years, since I was a teenager, if I'm really honest, but she's one of the lesser-known Minoan goddesses. I wrote a bit about her in a blog post a while back and today I thought I'd share a working from Ancient Spellcraft that involves her.

Her horn is the cornucopia, out of which so many good things come. Here in the U.S., cornucopias spring up around Thanksgiving, but I have one on my altar all the time. Amalthea is a goddess of abundance and like the Roman goddess Fortuna, who inherited her cornucopia, she's very generous.

Blossoms

The blossom or flowers from any tree or plant can be popped into a vase to dress up your altar or dried or pressed to use in magical workings, incense blends and crafts.  Dried petals and flowers can also be pressed onto candles quite effectively or steeped in oil to create anointing oils and perfumes.

 Geriht us þat geruni.

“Teach us those runes.”

(Old Saxon Heliand, circa 850)

Writing is a magical act.

The old North Sea ancestors had two words meaning “write.”

One was to scribe. That meant “to write with pen and ink,” as the Romans did. This was the newfangled way to write, with a newfangled Latin name.

But the old word, the ancestral word, was to write. This originally meant “to carve.” The first writing that the ancestors knew was the carving ("risting") of runes into wood.

Note which method they favored.

In our hyper-literate society, in which most of us write with light rather than with ink or with lead, we tend to take writing for granted.

We shouldn't.

On Thanksgiving I began a spell to nourish family and friends, witches, pagans, and christians, neighbors and strangers through the shortest days and longest nights of a stunningly painful year careening to its end.  On Thanksgiving I began to make soup.

This post also appears at www.tarotbyhilary.com.

Once upon a time, a young foolish teenager cast a spell.

She cast a spell at one of the many power sites in the world, where all the elements meet in one place. Air, water, fire, and earth ... where the land meets the ocean. She found a pure white stone, and asked the Gods to bring to her a true love. She was tired of waiting, so she sought out a way to bring him to her. She held the stone in her left hand, and cast the love spell in the way that she was taught to cast it: without envisioning a specific person and without being unduly specific, because magic follows the path of least resistance, and magic often does not work in ways that humans understand or can anticipate. She held the stone firmly, and when she felt ready, she threw the stone out into the ocean, into the crest of a huge wave, and determined that the waves of the oceans constantly coming into shore would eventually bring love into her life.

It took three years and many relationships and coincidences for him to arrive.

How did she know that he was the one she asked the sea to bring to her?

His name means "from the sea."

I wrote this little “fairy tale” story back in 2007, when I still was with the person in question whose name meant “from the sea.” Yes, that young foolish teenager that cast the love spell was me, and yes, the story above (though flowery in language) really happened. Why am I writing about it now? That spell taught me very valuable lessons in how spell-casting really works.

In 1841, Georg Waitz discovered two magic charms in a 9-10^th century codex in the Cathedral Chapter library of Merseburg, the only surviving literary remnants of Old High German heathenry. In the second Merseburg charm, Woten heals a horse's sprain after other gods have failed.

Variants of this charm, with different gods and saints, survive all over northwestern Europe—the Germanies, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Shetland, and the Hebrides—but a similar spell preserved from Vedic India suggests that it may be ancient of origin indeed.

The charm is of the type known to scholars as a historiola: what linguist Philip A. Shaw defines as “a charm in which a narrative is employed that in some way represents or symbolises the achievement of the desired outcome of the charm” (Shaw 62). Magic-workers have been harnessing the driving power of story to propel their charms for millennia; modern spell-smiths take note!

 The Old Craft version of the charm cited below invokes, as one would expect, the god of witches in his person of Wild Rider.