Deborah Lipp

Over at Magic in These Hills, they’re ruminating about the difference between prayer and spells.

This is a topic I treat in my book The Way of Four Spellbook. Before launching into a section that teaches how to do spells, I first explore the various sources of magical power. In other words, spells use power, but how do you get it?

One way of acquiring power is from the Gods. If you acquire power only from the Gods, you are praying. If you acquire power from your body or mind, or from nature, or from supernatural beings other than deities, or from tools in which power has been previously stored, or any combination of these things, in addition to or instead of acquiring power from the Gods, then you are doing spells.

If you look to religions that forbid spellcraft, such as Christianity, you will see this is spelled out (no pun intended) pretty clearly. You may pray to achieve goals. You may not recite charms to achieve the same goals. It is not the goal that is regulated, but the means to achieve that goal.

It’s a short step from saying the only permitted source of power is prayer, to saying that the only real source of power is prayer. A lot of religions go that route, dismissing magic as superstition while praying their knees off. A lot of witches have swallowed that to such an extent that they define magic as a form of prayer. But magic is only a form of prayer if the Gods are included. They don’t have to be.

So:

• Ask the Goddess for a lover: Prayer
• Ask the Goddess for a lover while gazing into the flame of a pink candle and annointing yourself with rose oil: Prayer and magic
• Gaze into the flame of a pink candle and annointing yourself with rose oil while reciting “Lover come to me, So Mote It Be! Lover come to me, So Mote It Be!”: Magic

While in Michigan, I learned about the Tempest Smith Foundation.

Tempest Smith was twelve years old when she committed suicide. Her diary indicates that her despair arose from the bullying and harrassment she endured from classmates because she was Pagan. She was a shy girl who dressed in Goth clothing and identified as Wiccan.

Her mother, Denessa Smith, formed TSF to promote religious tolerance and education. Its main activities are speaking engagements, awareness activities (like Tie-Dye for Tolerance) and distribution of literature, as well as interfacing with other charitable organizations.

The Smith family is from Michigan, and Tempest’s suicide rocked the local Pagan community. Everyone at ConVocation seemed deeply touched by Tempest’s tragic death, and there was a great deal of activity and fundraising for TSF at the event. At the end of ConVocation, TSF was named the official charity of ConVocation.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about.

The entire time I was in Michigan, I kept myself distant from the whole TSF thing. I looked at it and thought, ‘These people all know each other, and this is for them. I don’t know anything about this.’ And y’know, that seemed reasonable. I travel all over the U.S. and the world, and every local Pagan community has their thing, and I’m an outsider. So stay an outsider, that’s cool, that’s fine.

Until the last day.

As I was exiting closing ritual, Denessa Smith grabbed me and handed me squares for the quilts that they make (to use as visual reminders in the tolerance events) and asked me to bring them home, decorate them however I liked, and mail them back to her. “Take two”, she said.

(I was really stuck. She had me by the arm. And called me “My Lady.”)

And I said, “Okay, I’ll give one to my son. He’s a teenager…”

Sobs.

Huge. Fucking. Wracking. Sobs.

I was 100% blindsided by this. I had zero emotion about Tempest Smith until I had all the emotion in my body. And with Denessa and I hugging and me still crying I realized that all my stuff about being distant and an outsider and not a part of this charity had nothing to do with anything except my need to stay away from mothers of dead children, from the notion of the hint of the possibility that a mother could lose her teenage child.

So. Yes. Arthur and I will be making quilt squares together.

Oh, and you can donate or get literature.

In honor of Brigid’s Day (that’s today), Deborah Oak (no relation) is holding a Silent Poetry Reading.

This is a poem given to me by my High Priestess, way back when. A poem I love:

A Creed

I HOLD that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise
Another mother gives him birth.
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.

Such is my own belief and trust;
This hand, this hand that holds the pen,
Has many a hundred times been dust
And turned, as dust, to dust again;
These eyes of mine have blinked and shown
In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon.

All that I rightly think or do,
Or make, or spoil, or bless, or blast,
Is curse or blessing justly due
For sloth or effort in the past.
My life’s a statement of the sum
Of vice indulged, or overcome.

I know that in my lives to be
My sorry heart will ache and burn,
And worship, unavailingly,
The woman whom I used to spurn,
And shake to see another have
The love I spurned, the love she gave.

And I shall know, in angry words,
In gibes, and mocks, and many a tear,
A carrion flock of homing-birds,
The gibes and scorns I uttered here.
The brave word that I failed to speak
Will brand me dastard on the cheek.

And as I wander on the roads
I shall be helped and healed and blessed;
Dear words shall cheer and be as goads
To urge to heights before unguessed.
My road shall be the road I made;
All that I gave shall be repaid.

So shall I fight, so shall I tread,
In this long war beneath the stars;
So shall a glory wreathe my head,
So shall I faint and show the scars,
Until this case, this clogging mould,
Be smithied all to kingly gold.

by John Masefield