The Alchemist Papers

You can learn every move in a dance. The choreography is great and gets you from point A to point B, but there’s a point where the steps stop being things you execute and start being something happening through you. And until that point, you’re just doing someone else’s dance.

Let’s take, for example, an initiatory tradition like Gardnerian Wicca, where practices are transmitted through coven apprenticeship and hand-copied Books of Shadows (at least this is what I’ve heard; I do not follow this tradition, so don’t come at me). The content came along with a relationship with the teacher and the experience of doing it with someone who already knew it. That mode of transmission is almost entirely gone these days. What we have now is curated content on the internet, which can give you the moves but has a much harder time giving you the rhythm.

Éliphas Lévi described what’s required as the Witch’s Pyramid: to know, to dare, to will, to be silent. Knowing is first, but Thorn Mooney’s point in The Witch’s Path is that a lot of practitioners get stuck there (we just talked about this) — accumulating enough knowledge to be thorough-looking without ever getting to the daring and willing. The Zen concept shoshin (beginner’s mind) is Mooney’s suggested corrective: intentional openness regardless of experience level, so you keep encountering the practice fresh enough to ask what it’s actually doing. You may have also heard this spoken of as a growth vs fixed mindset. We always want to keep a growth mindset in our practices, just as much in our daily lives.

I’ll be honest: I know the choreography well. I read all the books. I’m better at teaching the moves than at stopping my brain long enough to find the rhythm, but I’m working on it.

Photography by Edu Bastidas from Unsplash+

Yes, that title is about 50% click bate, but also kind of true. The media tends to romanticize witchcraft as some wild and unbridled wielding of power. And, sure, it has its moments. But on the daily, it’s actually pretty boring. What rarely makes it into your content feed? That week after the sabbat, when the energy has burned off, and the ritual tools are put away, and the intention is technically still alive but not getting any attention. You see, I have a habit of starting things well: new intentions, new practices, fresh rituals. What I’m less good at is showing up for the stuff that comes after.

I think a lot of practitioners are good at beginnings and less practiced at maintenance. Because we’re also living in a world that wants a lot from us. Those beginning moments have real energy, and that energy is always worth using. Unfortunately, content culture has trained us to document starts over maintenance, which makes the daily return to an ongoing practice the most invisible part of the whole thing.

The practice that runs because you actually need it, because you’re measurably worse without it, is the one with staying power. You won’t need to convince yourself to return to something you genuinely need. And regardless of how faith shows up in your life, it can be an incredibly powerful ally in the current world we’re in.

Viktor Frankl identified small, repeated actions as one of the genuine sources of meaning. The small consistent ways you show up have more impact than grandiose gestures. The daily return to a practice is a deed that has meaning, whether or not it feels significant in the moment.

What I’m trying to build this month isn’t a new practice. It’s a sustainable version of the one I already have. I have to remember that the tending is the practice. The sabbat and fancy holidays are just when things tend to get louder.

What’s the practice you’ve been maintaining quietly? I’m curious what this actually looks like for other people.

Photography by Getty Images fom Unsplash+