Llewellyn's 2022 Witches' Companion: A Guide to Contemporary Living

By Llewellyn

With more than two dozen enlightening and inspiring articles that explore modern Witchcraft topics and magical techniques, Llewellyn's 2022 Witches' Companion is a must-have for today's practitioners. This collection presents some of the finest writers and compelling subjects that will empower your life and improve your community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780738767628

Llewellyn

As the world's oldest and largest independent publisher of books for body, mind, and spirit, Llewellyn is dedicated to bringing our readers the very best in metaphysical books and resources. Since 1901, we've been at the forefront of holistic and metaphysical publishing and thought. We've been a source of illumination, instruction, and new perspectives on a wealth of topics, including astrology, tarot, wellness, earth-based spirituality, magic, and the paranormal. From e-books to tarot-themed iPhone apps, Llewellyn has embraced the Digital Age to continue our mission. Llewellyn also partners with Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo, as the exclusive US and Canadian distributor of their beautiful tarot and oracle decks. They also partner with Blue Angel, an Australian publisher of oracles, books, CDs, and other sidelines.

Book preview

title page

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Llewellyn’s 2022 Witches’ Companion © 2021 by Llewellyn Publications.

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.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

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 © 2021

E-book ISBN: 9780738767628

Art Director: Lynne Menturweck

Cover art © Tim Foley

Cover designer: Lynne Menturweck

Interior illustrations:

Tim Foley: 9, 23, 56, 63, 94, 129, 138, 174, 199, 212, 243

Bri Hermanson: 37, 76, 118, 153, 191, 250

Rik Olson: 331, 65, 104, 147, 181, 221

M. Kathryn Thompson: 11, 50, 86, 123, 162, 203, 232

ISBN 978-0-7387-6054-4

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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

Contents

Community Forum

Provocative Opinions on Contemporary Topics

Kate Freuler

Witchcraft & Social Media: Should You Share Your Personal Practice?

Should you share photos and videos of your altar and magical work on social media? Kate Freuler explores the pros and cons of each approach and provides suggestions for protecting your energy and magic while using social media to reach like-minded people.

James Kambos

Do You Worship the Devil? And Other Questions You Might Be Asked

James Kambos has lost track of the number of times non-magical folks have asked him questions about Paganism and Wicca such as Do you believe in God? or Can you put a spell on my boss/nosy neighbor/sleazy ex? Here are suggestions for how to respond to some of the most common comments.

Melanie Marquis

Dealing with Doubt

When hardship strikes and magickal efforts fail, how does a modern witch find the faith to keep moving forward? This article offers solutions for times when our spells just don’t do what we want them to do and we find ourselves secretly asking ourselves, What’s the point?

Rev. J. Variable x/ø

Physics, Math & Magic: Balancing Your Existential Equations

When you want to change reality, whether through magic or activism, start with a clear definition of the results you’re after, the types of forces you’ll need to apply, and the best direction in which to apply them. Rev. J. Variable x/ø explains how to apply basic scientific principles to magic.

Kerri Connor

Open Your Mind: How to Add Cannabis to Your Spiritual Practice

Cannabis can be used to relieve stress, deepen meditation, build energy, and communicate with deities. Learn how to prepare and bless cannabis for ritual use and combine herbs with cannabis to create a more personalized ritual.

Thorn Mooney

Speak Little, Listen Much: Learning from Others at Every Stage of Practice

Speak little, listen much applies to all of us, whether we’re brand-new witches or established elders with massive downlines and piles of books with our names on the spine. We all learn the most when we make space for each other and listen. So how do we ensure that we’re always doing that?

Magical Self-Care

Nurture Your Body, Mind & Spirit

A.C. Fisher Aldag

Terrific Talismans: Empower Objects to Enhance Your Personal Space

A talisman is a physical object used to hold and contain magickal power. These magickal objects can help to protect and bless a home, vehicle, or workspace. A.C. Fisher Aldag explains how to make and charge your own talismans.

Charlie Rainbow Wolf

Salt, Sage & Self-Care: A Little Magical Pampering Goes a Long Way

Self-care isn’t just doing things that make you feel better; it’s doing things to make you a better person. Learn to make your own magical foot soaks, bath salts, and other herbal concoctions to create a relaxing routine.

Emily Carlin

Cord Cutting: Ending Lingering Attachments

When we are certain a relationship is no longer beneficial, we can end it definitively by severing its energetic cord. Cord cutting will bring closure and end lingering attachments, allowing both parties to move on and become whole.

Devin Hunter

Gemstones & Minerals for Self-Improvement

For many witches, gemstones and crystals are our allies in spellcraft and our guardians against unwanted energies. Devin Hunter describes how to choose and program stones to help you manifest change and reach your goals.

Monica Crosson

Garden Guardians: Protection at the Door

Monica Crosson teaches how to use the protective energy of certain plants in magick for keeping boundaries. Discover bath salts to cleanse away bad vibes, shielding oil for highly charged situations, and tea blends to restore serenity.

Storm Faerywolf

The Well-Groomed Witch: Magical Self-Care for the Discerning Practitioner

Bathing. Cutting hair. Shaving. Trimming nails. Brushing teeth. There is the possibility for magic in everything we do, right down to our basic self-care routines. Learn how to engage in the otherwise boring daily chores of taking care of your body with a renewed sense of spiritual and magical focus.

Mat Auryn

Self-Care as Devotion to the Divine

Almost all magickal traditions teach that the self is a part of the divine, but we often ignore that part. Self-care can be a powerful act of devotion to everything beyond ourselves and give us a frame of reference for how to care for others.

Witchy Living

Day-by-Day Witchcraft

Autumn Damiana

The (Mostly) Self-Sufficient Witch: Make Your Own Tools & Supplies

Instead of buying fancy ritual supplies, repurpose the ordinary things in your home and garden for your magical workings—from metal lids and expired dried herbs to cobwebs, pet fur, egg cartons, weeds, soap ends, and candle scraps.

Jason Mankey

Sunflowers: Allies in Magick

Sunflowers are more than just ornamental flowers; they are also powerful companions in magick. Sunflowers and their seeds can be used to grow things in your life, protect your home, and charge your magickal items.

Durgadas Allon Duriel

Thinking Magically: Weaving Magic into Your Day with Affirmations

When we believe something is real on a subconscious level, it becomes real for us. Learn to design your own affirmations and use them in your magic to chip away at beliefs that don’t support your well-being and manifest your goals.

Gwion Raven

Creating a Magickal Kitchen

Discover how to transform your kitchen into a temple, a place of power. Perform a simple ritual to declare yourself a kitchen witch and manifest magick in the world through food.

Sapphire Moonbeam

Divination & Signs

Seeing signs through divination and receiving messages from the universe is available to all of us. Here are some ways to practice divination in daily life, including cartomancy, pyromancy, coins, runes, and even nature signs.

Blake Octavian Blair

Small Moments of Magic

Everyone dreams of grand elaborate rituals where a few dozen people chant around the fire under a moonlit sky. But we really need to learn to honor the small moments of magic—those times when the gods and spirits send us a little sign in our ordinary reality.

Cerridwen Iris Shea

Flexibility & Adaptability in Magical Work

There has been a great deal of hardship and loss in the world in recent years. Yet as magical people, we can dig into the resources from our training and practices to find the flexibility and adaptability we need to survive and to thrive.

Witchcraft Essentials

Practices, Rituals & Spells

Lupa

Secondhand Ritual Tools

In a throwaway culture, with the siren song of shiny new toys to entice us, it is all too easy to throw down cash for something mass-produced and ecologically unfriendly. How can the eco-mindful pagan make use of these cast-offs, effectively purifying them and bringing them into their own practice?

Diana Rajchel

Put That Out! When to Stop a Spell

The glass on your candle burned completely black or that love working you did is drawing all the wrong kinds of partners to you. Here is how to determine if a spell you cast is working against you—and how to put a stop to it.

Michelle Skye

Envisioning the Future: Practical Tips & Tricks for Vision Board Magic

A vision board is a representation of what you wish to create in your life, as expressed in pictures and color. Learn to access the power of this fun magical craft to manifest your hopes and dreams.

Estha McNevin

Family Spellcraft

From weekday routines to bedtime prayers, there is room for magick in every mundane chore. Discover how to cast daily magick with your family and make special moments together a bit more whimsical.

Najah Lightfoot

Ways to Work with the Full Moon

The power and magick of the Full Moon has always been a source of inspiration, especially for Witches and people who follow earth-based traditions. Explore ways to work with and honor the Moon’s mysterious influence.

Emyme

How to Use the Craft to Make the Decision to Retire

As Emyme faced the prospect of retiring from the work world, she leaned on her earth-based beliefs to assist her in making the decision. Here are some practices that can clarify the mind and ease the transition into the next season of life.

The Lunar Calendar

September 2021 to December 2022

Calendar with Holidays, New & Full Moons, and Lunar Phases & Ingresses

Community Forum

Provocative Opinions on

Contemporary Topics

community forum

Witchcraft & Social Media: Should You Share Your

Personal Practice?

Kate Freuler

H

ave you ever shared pictures or videos of your personal spells on social media? If so, do you feel it had an effect on the outcome of the working? Do you suspect that some of the perfect altar photos in your feed are staged just to get views and likes?

These are questions many of us are asking ourselves as we traverse a world in which the relationship between a person’s real life and their online persona has become complicated. Balancing sacred spirituality with the ever-changing, competitive world of social media can be a daunting task, and when the two worlds collide, things can get a little weird.

art

Back when I began learning about witchcraft, my biggest challenge was finding informative books. This task sounds ridiculously simple compared to the present. Nowadays there are young witches attempting to curse the moon, experienced witches behaving badly in the comments section, cancel culture, the witch aesthetic, influencer witches, and the monetization of spiritual services. There are innumerable online magick courses promising adept supreme status for a fee, and video tutorials showing how to hex your enemies. There’s more information than one person can possibly sift through, never mind finding an informative book. (And after you do finally find a book you like, you’re apt to discover a bunch of videos of witches explaining why it’s the wrong one.)

Our spirituality is usually inextricably entwined with our daily life. Therefore, to be ourselves online can mean exposing our deeply held beliefs in a way that can be either wonderful or terrible, depending on how others react to it.

For those of us who’ve made it past this onslaught of conflicting information and developed a daily practice, our spirituality is usually inextricably entwined with our daily life. Therefore, to be ourselves online can mean exposing our deeply held beliefs in a way that can be either wonderful or terrible, depending on how others react to it. This makes using social media a little different for magickal people. After all, there’s a big difference between posting a cute picture of your cat versus an intimate, emotionally charged love spell.

Everybody’s different. Some practitioners choose to keep their work completely private and never snap a single photo. Other witches are comfortable occasionally sharing their altar setup. Some witches film and broadcast every single working they do. There are even influencer witches who have completely integrated magick and media into a single formidable personality.

Despite the fact that spells and rituals are a normal, everyday part of our lives, they’re still considered strange by many outsiders, so the decision to expose them to public scrutiny needs to be considered carefully. The level of social media that people allow in their craft ranges across a broad spectrum, and so do the opinions about it. There is no way to tell another person the correct approach, because what works for one witch doesn’t necessarily work for another.

The Power of Thought

Sharing a photo of your beautiful crystal grid or a well-made spell candle can be empowering, especially when people engage through likes and positive comments. However, something that has crossed my mind, and probably yours, is to wonder if overtly broadcasting a magickal working to anyone and everyone could possibly lessen its authenticity or even weaken its power—not to mention the logistical problem of having to halt mid-spell, break your focus, and take a bunch of pictures.

Thoughts and feelings are energy. Energy impacts everything it touches. A person’s thoughts could possibly, then, impact your working, even if that person is on the other side of the world. If someone, somewhere, looks at your spell picture and feels a negative emotion toward you and it, will this interfere with your results? Every person who scrolls through your feed will see your spell and experience an emotion, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The problem is that you can’t control which way it goes, and this leaves you vulnerable in a way.

For this reason, I’m careful about what I post and I share spells only long after they are completed. I’m of the opinion that thoughts sent toward me and my workings, even if only through a picture, can interfere with them. Not everyone agrees with this opinion, and that’s okay.

Even if you don’t believe that remote thoughts will affect your magick, there’s always a chance that comments from strangers, especially negative remarks, will put a dent in your confidence. This can make you doubt yourself, which will affect the manifestation of your working.

Collective Belief

Some people choose to share every spell and ritual they partake in across all forms of social media. They feel that the more people that see the image, the more power it will gain. This is an interesting take and can be useful for groups who want to create large-scale change through magick that reaches many people. It can also be applied to empowering symbols and sigils.

The most powerful symbols are the ones that impact people immediately upon sight by invoking emotion. Popular symbols that have been around for a long time, such as a crucifix, the star of Baphomet, a pentacle, or even a skull and crossbones, have collected energy and power simply by being seen and understood for a long time. The meaning of the symbol and the emotion it triggers are imprinted on our minds. Imagine, then, what a sigil could do when passed from witch to witch, each person empowering it with the same meaning. As it’s viewed and shared repeatedly all over the world, it accumulates energetic clout, gaining power with every repost. Think about all the things we could do with that power!

In recent years, magickal practitioners have used social media to organize worldwide rituals where everyone agrees to perform a spell simultaneously at a specified time from wherever they happen to live. The idea is that when so many people communally partake in raising energy, it will have a huge impact on a global scale. This kind of large group working would have been impossible to arrange twenty-five years ago, and it’s interesting to follow along and see the results. It’s definitely one of the perks of social media for witches.

Some Positive Points

It’s tempting to approach social media with a dubious attitude, because it can be toxic and damaging. It encourages unrealistic beauty standards, triggers unhealthy comparisons between ourselves and others, and is often fake. But it also has a positive side.

For many witches, their whole community is online. They simply don’t have anyone nearby who shares their interests, so social media brings an important sense of connection. It also provides many teachers and mentors. You can learn so many things about different traditions just by following along with various social media accounts. Many witches share facts, experiences, and instructions, making learning quicker than ever (and free). If witches never went public with their practice, then none of this knowledge would be readily available.

Having online friends has become the new normal. You might find that you really click with certain people, and the next thing you know, you have a whole witchy support system. Your online witch friends will get it when you say things like, I saw a cat shape in a candle flame this morning—something big is coming my way! or I set off all the smoke alarms while cleansing my house again. That kind of friendship is priceless.

How Much Is Too Much?

If you choose to share your workings on social media, you may become well known and gain a lot of followers. This can be exciting and empowering. After all, if likes and hearts didn’t give us a boost of serotonin, none of us would be doing it. But thanks to the algorithms at play, it also creates pressure to produce content in order to build and maintain your following. When you have lots of followers or are trying to get