The Witch's Name: Crafting Identities of Magical Power

By Storm Faerywolf

Create a Magical Identity that Resonates Deeply with Your Soul

The magical name is one of the most powerful tools in Witchcraft. Each time you use it, a spell is cast that empowers and protects you while also helping you transform into the Witch you've always wanted to be. Not just another book of monikers, this thoughtful resource will help you understand the history and mythology of spiritual names according to various cultures. Explore your strengths and reveal deeper layers of your true self with meditations, rituals, journaling, and other practical exercises. With inspiring ideas for how animals, plants, astrology, and tarot can help you form your magical persona, Storm Faerywolf provides clear steps for choosing and claiming the right name. You'll also enjoy wise words from well-known contributors like Mat Auryn, Phoenix LeFae, Gwion Raven, and Laura Tempest Zakroff. You are a unique, magical being. Your Witch name should reflect that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780738768014

Storm Faerywolf

Storm Faerywolf is a published author, experienced teacher, visionary poet, and professional warlock. He is a regular contributor to Modern Witch and is a founding teacher of Black Rose, an online school of modern folkloric witchcraft. He has written several books, including Betwixt and Between, Forbidden Mysteries of Faery Witchcraft, and The Stars Within the Earth (Mystic Dream Press, 2003). For more, visit his website at faerywolf.com.

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About the Author

Storm Faerywolf (San Francisco Bay Area) is a professional author, experienced teacher, visionary poet, and practicing warlock. He was trained and initiated into various streams of Witchcraft, most notably the Faery tradition, where he holds the Black Wand of a Master. He is a co-founder of Black Rose, an online school of modern folkloric witchcraft, a regular contributor to Modern Witch, and co-host of the Official Witches’ Sabbat, an annual event that seeks to support and honor the creative work of other Witches. He has written several books including The Stars Within the Earth, Betwixt & Between, and Forbidden Mysteries of Faery Witchcraft. For more, visit faerywolf.com.

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Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Witch’s Name: Crafting Identities of Magical Power © 2022 by Storm Faerywolf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition © 2022

E-book ISBN: 9780738768014

Book design by Samantha Peterson

Cover design by Shannon McKuhen

Editing by Laura Kurtz

Interior art by Llewellyn Art Department

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-6769-7

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to all those who would take for themselves a name other than what they were given at birth. We all may have different reasons for doing so, but in the end it’s all the same: to outwardly express our inner truth and to claim who we really are, on our own terms.

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ix

Contents

List of Exercises, Rites, and Rituals

Acknowledgments

Introduction: My Journey of Self-Naming

Part One: What’s in a Name?

Chapter One: The Essence and the Name

Chapter Two: The Power of Naming

Chapter Three: The Magical Identity

Part Two: Inspiration, Seeds, and Sources

Chapter Four: History, Myth, and Literature

Chapter Five: The Natural Earth

Chapter Six: The Stars Above

Chapter Seven: Divination, Dreaming, and Magic

xPart Three: The Choosing and the Weaving

Chapter Eight: From Seeds into Fruit

Chapter Nine: Rites of Appellation

Conclusion: The Name of Passion

Bibliography

Exercises, Rites, and Rituals

Exercise: Awakening the Spirit

Exercise: Awakening the Spirit

Exercise: Awakening the Spirit

Journal Prompt: Qualities of the Magical Self

Exercise: The Place of Power (Summoning the Magician Within)

Journal Prompt: Communicating with the Three Spirits of the Soul

Exercise: Elemental Balancing

Exercise: I Am

Divination: Nine Questions

Exercise: The Dream Journal

Exercise: Lucid Dreaming

Exercise: Seeding Dreams

Exercise: Educing a Barbarous Name (or, the Barbarous Name Generator)

Exercise: Drawing from the Inner Planes

Art Project: A Magical Self-Portrait

Spell: The Magic Bean Dream Spell

Journal Prompt: E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One

Journal Prompt: The Weaving

Journal Prompt: Feeling the Name

Journal Prompt: Public vs. Private

Ritual: The Taking of a Name

Exercise: The Witch’s Signature

Exercise: The Witch’s Emblem

Ritual: The Giving of a Name

Acknowledgments

I want to thank many people and spirits for helping make this book possible.

First, to my partners, Chas Bogan, Devin Hunter, and Mat Auryn: Thank you for putting up with me rambling on and on about different naming conventions both in and outside of Witchcraft. Thank you for stepping up and taking care of some of the more mundane activities so that I could go into my cave and write. This book exists because you took care of dishes, and yardwork, and paying bills, while I obsessively pored over books and myths and movie tropes. I appreciate you more than you know.

Second, to my friends who contributed their thoughts on magical names: Anaar, Durgadas Allon Duriel, Phoenix LeFae, Gwion Raven, Soulfire, and Laura Tempest Zakroff. You are all part of my extended spiritual family and I love and appreciate you for all that you do. Thank you for your continued support and for the work that you do to better the Craft.

Third, I want to thank the many spirits with whom I have worked over the years that have contributed to my magical work in the public sphere. Being a public warlock is not always easy, but through my spirit contacts I am doing the work I was called to do.

I also want to thank my friends, initiates, and students, as well as those who have attended my classes or workshops over the years. You have each in your own way contributed not only to this book, but to my overall worldview and perspective on the Craft.

And finally, thank you, reader, for picking up this book. Thank you for supporting me in my creative and occult endeavors. It was always a dream to be able to do this work for a living and because of you that is made possible. I live in constant gratitude.

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Introduction

My Journey of

Self-Naming

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

Erica Jong

How to Save Your Own Life

The names that we use to describe ourselves carry layers of potency and meaning. The Witch’s name is really just the outer form of an indescribable inner power; that presence of divinity within that guides us on our evolutionary journey. With meditation, rituals, journaling, and magic we will explore our own strengths and weaknesses and work to create our own magical persona, that part of our deep self from which our magical power stems and flourishes. And we will work to give a name to that persona, effectively casting a spell upon ourselves to make the presence of that name and persona manifest in our lives.

How we get our names varies from culture to culture. Some names are passed down within families and carry with them the expectations of ancestral fulfillment. Some names are given through religious practice and hold identification with particular saints, martyrs, historical figures, and spirits that have a deep and personal meaning to the individual or religious group. Or a name might simply be chosen because it sounds nice or is inspired by a great figure or celebrity. Whatever the origins of our names, they provide us a focal point when it comes to establishing and communicating identity, and allow us each to better connect, providing a window through which we may get an intimate glimpse of each other’s lives.

Though these names have their own layers of depth and meaning, there are instances in which it is beneficial to take a new one as a spiritual and psychological tool. A time-honored practice in many different religious systems, the taking of a new name is a transformative act. It acts upon the psyche in a myriad of ways, coaxing, nudging, demanding, shaping the consciousness of the one who undergoes it. It is an initiation in the truest sense and the effects are far-reaching.

A name is a house, but not always a home or place where one feels the freedom to be oneself.¹

I never felt connected to my birth name. As a child, I often toyed with the idea of changing it, as I’m sure many children do. In hindsight I realize that this desire was rooted in something a bit deeper than just vanity or a childish flight of fancy. Being originally named after my father, I never felt that my name was truly mine. Additionally, I was also almost exclusively referred to with a diminutive nickname, making my relationship to my given name somewhat fluid and changeable. My name could go from seven letters to five letters, to four (or even three!) depending on which version one wished to invoke. Fluidity aside, the definite drive I experienced early on in my quest for finding my magical name was really also about fully claiming my own identity.

What has become my everyday magical name came to me in a series of dreams over the course of my youth which became connected through personal epiphany and gnosis. It all began when I was a boy. When I was about three or four years old, perhaps inspired by the tales of Aladdin, or One Thousand and One Nights (two of my favorites of the many fairy- and folktales my mother would read to me), I had a series of recurring dreams in which I possessed a magical ring. A common theme in these dreams was my constant struggle to understand, harness, and direct its power. I would never know how the magic would manifest—if at all—but I felt that with each dream, I was learning a little bit more about the nature of the unique magic I possessed. I would completely forget about the dreams upon waking and would only remember them when I was having the next one! And then, once again upon waking, the dream was completely lost to me. This continued seemingly at random throughout my youth.

Fast-forward. When I turned seventeen, my world turned upside down. Coming out of the closet and moving out of my childhood home set the stage for a period of a couple years in which I was estranged from my family and had precious little stability, emotional, financial, or otherwise. At nineteen, I found myself literally homeless, though thankfully I did so in the company of a friend who later became a covenmate. We would couch-surf with other friends when we could, but there were many nights in which we had no place to stay and so were forced to either sleep outside or try and stay up all night to avoid the cold (not to mention the danger of other people). We slept in a field, at a bus stop, and on the concrete behind a grocery store. It was stressful. After a month or so of this, I felt it was finally getting to me. I was distraught. I felt lost. I was falling down a hole, and a large part of me didn’t even seem to care. It was during this time that I would start having visions of a faery being I came to know as Mother Wolf.

Late one night, my friend and I had no place to stay and found ourselves at a local park. Our plan was to sit in some dark corner and consume what was to be that evening’s feast: a large can of tamales and some wheat bread. We found a bench deep within the park where we would likely be left undisturbed and proceeded to unpack what was to be our dinner, when we realized that we had misplaced our can opener. With no other options before us we foolishly decided to try and force the can open with a sharp rock. Try as we might we were unable to open the can, only managing to tear open small holes from which the spicy red sauce began to seep.

After several minutes of futility, the mangled, dripping can was eventually abandoned to the garbage bin, while the red, splattered mess on the concrete took on the specter of foul play in the moonlight. We felt defeated. I sat on a bench and stared up at the night sky, silently asking the moon, in part hoping for some sort of divine guidance but mostly just feeling a sense of utter resignation. Suddenly I felt as if my awareness had split in two: one aspect of my consciousness was sitting on this park bench looking at the moon and feeling sorry for myself, while the other was sitting in the presence of what I perceived to be a powerful spirit in the form of a wolf. She was beautiful, gray-white, and seemed to emanate a silvery light like the moon, as well as a feeling of security and serenity. No words were spoken, but I felt as if she was giving me a message, telling me that I was not alone and that I would be protected. In this instant I knew that she was a spirit guide and that she was connected to my Witchcraft—I just knew. I felt that she was a great teacher and that she was telling me to hang on, and that my goals would eventually manifest. The vision eventually faded, but I felt suddenly optimistic and I discussed the experience with my friend. Sating our hunger with our slices of bread, we eventually found ourselves at an all-night diner, scraping up enough change to each nurse a cup of coffee while we waited for dawn. I would feel the presence of Mother Wolf during this period whenever we were feeling low or were lacking a sense of security. She inspired me to look beyond the temporary situation of the moment and toward the future I wished to create for myself.

Eventually my friend and I would stabilize, finding jobs and housing, which afforded us a better space in which to practice our Witchcraft both in frequency as well as in devotion. Reading everything on the Craft I could get my hands on, I was familiar with the custom of taking a magical name as a sign of dedication. Coupled with an inner calling to be a public Witch, I began to search for what would serve as a name of power. Immediately my experience with Wolf came to mind, but I initially rejected it out of what I now see was a form of vanity: there are many people in the Witchcraft and Pagan communities who have adopted (or been adopted by) the spirit of Wolf, and I wanted to be unique. Having the vision of Mother Wolf alone wasn’t enough, I decided. If the Wolf wanted to claim me, it would have to do more. I wasn’t about to just jump on the bandwagon … er, wolf pack.

At that time, I found myself heavily inspired by the writings of Starhawk, a Witch, political activist, and founding priestess of the Reclaiming tradition. Her books The Spiral Dance and Dreaming the Dark were particularly influential to me and were the initial reason I would seek out training and initiation into the Faery (Feri) tradition. She wrote a bit about finding her Craft name which incorporated a personal vision of a hawk, coupled with the Star card from the Tarot, which signifies hope. It was so simple and inspiring. I liked that her name was so very different from what one usually encounters in the mundane world.

I meditated. I burned incense. I journaled. I worked with gods and goddesses and angels and faeries and spirits of the dead. I chanted and sang and danced and invoked. In the early search for my Craft name I did many things, except follow my instincts. It seems like practically everybody in the Pagan community is either a Wolf, a Raven, or a Bear, I told myself. But did you ever notice that there are very few Marmosets?

Then I had the first of two powerful dreams that would show me the way.

A forest at night. The darkness illuminated by a brilliant full moon, the silver-blue light shining down through the trees onto the hillside. I was running … full speed, up the hill. The sheer joy of being alive! Running … running. It was a passion to be able to run this far, and to leap! It was exciting, exhilarating … but also … strange … foreign. My senses themselves seemed alien to me. I looked down and saw my paws as I continued to run up the wooded hillside on all fours, finally reaching the top where I could look down at the valley below and underneath a moon that filled the sky, I howled … and was joined with a chorus of wolf-song. I awoke feeling as if I had been touched by something special and had been changed by it.

The second of the dreams that named me brought a piece of my childhood back into my memory. Standing in a large room and looking out through the large glass doors to the vast open plains, the grey-orange featureless sky drew me outside. The world here was flat, unlike the native hilly landscape of my northern Californian home, and I felt a sense of stark longing, a mild alarm of anticipation. My dread was given reason in the form of the funnel cloud ominously approaching from the distance. Shock gave way to fear as I realized that there would be no time to