YESS!! I changed the intro music.. I hope you like it. I figured Episode 51 and all the changes deserved it. Well, join me this week as I’m getting into the often overlooked role of diagnosis within magical and divinatory practice. Before you cleanse, uncross, banish, reverse, protect, or start declaring war on an invisible enemy, how do you actually determine what the problem is? I talk about how different cultures and magical traditions have approached the question of finding hidden causes, from ancient Mesopotamian and Greek practices to cunning folk, Hoodoo and conjure, and more. I talk about dreams, omens, physical signs, sacred texts, eggs, candles, scrying, lots, spirit communication, and the many ways divination can become a method of investigation rather than simply a tool for prediction.

Then, of course, I have to talk about the modern witchcraft internet spiel, where apparently being tired, having a bad week, experiencing a weird dream, and losing your keys are all perfectly reasonable evidence that someone has cursed you (not). So where is the line between intuition and assumption? How do you investigate a spiritual possibility without automatically deciding that everything is supernatural? How can you use divination to gather information, cross-check what you are seeing or experiencing, learn to recognize your own biases, and figure out what you are actually dealing with before deciding what to do about it?

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This week, for a very grand Episode 50, I am diving into the witch’s relationship with the physical world and, more specifically, our bodies. I want to talk about just how deeply sensory witchcraft can be, from the things we taste, smell, touch, burn, carry and make, to the much subtler sensations we learn to recognize through spirit communication, intuition and ritual. But as I started thinking about what it means to experience witchcraft through the body, I inevitably found myself back in conversations about Christianity, religious conditioning and the ways we can be taught to understand, distrust, discipline or interpret our own physical experiences. This week we cover the embodied witch, the complicated relationship between Christianity and the body, the ways religious practice can train us physically as well as intellectually, and what happens when we leave a belief system but find that some of those old reactions are still living in us. This isn't an argument that Christianity hates the body or that witches somehow have a perfect relationship with theirs. Instead, I want to look at the similarities and differences, the wounds and the things worth keeping, and ultimately what it can mean to become familiar with yourself again.

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I really wanted to get into the fun of talking about working hot, cold, sweet, sour, and bitters into magic, and all the other ways we can change the “condition” of something through magic. This week I start with the very literal idea of heating something up and follow it through actions like boiling, and cooking, moving through the medical conditions of certain herbs and how they can be of use to us when choosing who will be the witches next top herb. I really wanted to talk on heating up, cooling down and working sweetness and sourness with spirit. We get into what it actually means to cool something down, whether we are trying to slow something down, stop it entirely, or just make it a little more manageable, and why putting something in cold water or burying it somewhere dark doesn't necessarily mean the exact same thing. Then we get into sweetening, souring and bittering, and how making something more pleasant, more disagreeable, or outright intolerable can become its own magical operation and because apparently I couldn't leave enough alone, we also get into spoiled food, fermentation, rotten things, vinegar, bitter herbs, wax, fire, water, and all the strange little physical behaviors we can steal from the world around us and put to work.

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This week we start a bit of a series going through Hekate's epithets one at a time, and we are beginning with the one everybody thinks they already know, Triformis, the triple-formed goddess. First order of business is dragging the maiden, mother, crone reading out into the light and showing how modern it actually is, before we get into what her three form was really about. We go all the way back to the Carian origins and Hesiod talking about her a share of earth and sea and sky, the animal heads and the temperaments assigned to each, and the strange fact that the graveyard witch-queen of the crossroads and the vast cosmic World-Soul of the philosophers are somehow the exact same goddess seen at two different scales. I talk about her significance of being triple bodied and tri-directional, then we get practical, the hekataion at the threshold and how she was honored there, why witches belonged to her and how you can actually work the three form yourself, across the three worlds, the three times, and your own many selves. Because she is not three ages of a woman, she is the goddess who never faces only one direction, the one who does not tell you which road to take but teaches you to stand still at the center long enough to see.

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Mirrors are one of the oldest and maybe most obscured tools in all of witchcraft and sorcery, and this week we discover the first mirror there ever was, obsidian and bronze, the Aztec god who wore a smoking mirror and saw the destinies and fates of humans, black scrying glasses and even a mention of the witches of Thessaly writing in blood and drawing down the moon. I talk about the grimoire traditions and consecrated mirrors buried at a crossroads, and the queens who kept magic mirrors to spy on their enemies.

The belief that your reflection is your soul runs deep so as fitting, the mirror may capture a piece of it. Finally, we get into scrying and how the black mirror works, moonlight and mirror work, conjuring a part of yourself for shadow work, mirror boxes and reversal magic, spirit and witch bottles, glamour and mirrors dedicated to Venus, how to dispose of a mirror and mirror hygiene for living sorcerer.

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This week we dig into intention, maybe the most misused word in modern witchcraft. It got watered down into "set your intention and hope for the best," and then a backlash swung the other way and decided intention is fluff and real magic is all cold hard technique. So we go looking at how it actually worked. The magicians of the grimoires and the PGM didn't hope, they commanded, they issued orders and even threatened the gods themselves, but always on the back of days of purification and fasting and trained will. We get into the curse tablets and their flat commanding voice, the Neoplatonic idea of cosmic sympathy that explains why the herbs and the timing and the correspondences work at all, the Orphic hymns sung to draw a god down by the accuracy of the sound, and the whole apparatus of ceremony as a machine for reaching the state where the will can actually command. I yap about what intention actually is and where it lives, the difference between attention and intention, the evil eye as proof that focused will was always felt as a real force, working with spirits versus working alone, and what it actually means to set an intention

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Today we dive into music and melody as a powerful magical medium. We go through what music actually does to us, how rhythm slips past the thinking mind and opens the door, and the relationship between us, music, and spirits, how they might use it on us and how we use it with them. There is a deep connection between music and necromantic practice as well, the keen and the funeral song, the old belief that the dead can be reached through sound when they can no longer be reached any other way. We cover a lot of ground here, from Orpheus and the underworld to Pan's pipes, the sung spells and barbarous names of the old magicians, the folk charmers who healed by voice, and the musician-spirits like the nøkken who lure and bargain at the water. We get into who tried to control music and why, from the Church and the myth of the devil's interval, then we talk all things practical like how you can actually work with sound in your own craft, spirit playlists, song as spell, and the curating of instruments.

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This week, I talk all things invisibility magic. Across the historical and folk record, invisibility was about concealment: moving unnoticed, escaping enemies, avoiding the authorities, masking yourself from spirits and curses, hiding treasure, concealing your workings, and becoming forgotten on purpose. We move from the Ring of Gyges and the question of what people do when no one can see them, through the eye-ointments of the Greek Magical Papyri, the invisibility stones of Pliny and the medieval lapidaries, and the hagstone that does the opposite and lets you see through a glamour. Then into the grimoires to talk rites on bones... lots of beans and skulls! And even the magic squares of Abramelin and of course the discussion of practical uses for invisibility, some old folk charms and much more.

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This week we are talking about horses!! Horses as threshold animals, the psychopomp, the nightmare entity, and one of the most significant and cosmologically loaded creatures to appear across nearly every magical tradition in the world. We cover the Germanic nightmare and the hag-riding tradition, the folk magic of the Horseman's Word and its direct connection to the Toadmen of East Anglia, the horse as a fertility omen and its role in Roman sacrifice, Hekate's lesser known horse epithets and what they actually offer in practice, the shamanic drum as horse and its connection to the witch's broomstick as argued by Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, hippomancy and the oracular horse traditions of the ancient world, and a full practical section on working with horse materia including horseshoes, horse skulls, horsehair charms, the Man of Might, witch knots, and the Ozark witch bullet. Whether you have never touched a horse or have worked with them your whole life, this one is for you.

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This week I wanted to explore something that has been physically surrounding me lately here on the coast, fog. But the deeper I sat with it, the more I began thinking about breath, mist, smoke, and vapor as something far more spiritual. Across countless traditions throughout history, breath has been understood as the soul itself, the animating force of life, the thing that leaves the body at death and lingers as mist, smoke, or spirit. I talk through folklore, ancient spiritual traditions, funeral customs, and magical practices surrounding breath as spirit matter, exploring everything from Greek pneuma and Hindu prana to graveyard fog, ancestor spirits, incense smoke, and the belief that spirits themselves manifest through vapor and cold air.

I also dive deeply into the witch’s breath as a magical tool, discussing breath magic, smoke divination, spirit communication through incense, working with fog water, and why foggy landscapes have so often been treated as thresholds between worlds.

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