Nobody enjoys being told to wait. I did not, and I have since been the one doing the telling. This is what I wish somebody had explained to me at the start.
I came to my first meeting of the outer court in the September of 2012, with a notebook, three pens and a list of questions. I had been reading about the Craft for six years. I had kept the Sabbats by myself in a succession of rented flats. I thought that I was, in every way that mattered, ready, and that the year ahead was a formality that I would get through as quickly and as creditably as I could.
I was initiated at Candlemas 2014, which if you count is a good deal more than a year and a day. This is an account of what happened in between, written by someone who now runs the outer court herself and has watched a dozen people go through it.
What we actually do
There is no mystery about the outer court, and since nobody in it is under oath there is no reason not to describe it. We meet once a month, in the kitchen, in our ordinary clothes. There are usually three or four seekers and two or three of the coven. There is tea. There is nearly always cake.
The year is divided by the elements. From the spring equinox to midsummer is the season of air, and we study: the history of the Craft, the Wheel of the Year, the vocabulary, the weather. From midsummer to the autumn equinox is the season of fire, which is about will. Each person is asked what they actually want, and takes on some piece of work that is hard for them and sees it through. Autumn is water. People keep a record of their dreams, learn to read the cards, and are sent to visit a spring, a river and the sea. Winter is earth, and is spent on the body and the ground: on stillness, on walking the same path every week, on how to stand and move and speak in a circle.
At each Sabbat the outer court keeps the festival in its own way, a day or two before or after the coven's rite, with something made up for the purpose. Nothing from the Book is used. People are sometimes surprised by how much there is to do without it.
What it is not
It took me a long time to understand that the year and a day is not an examination. I approached it as I had approached every course I had ever taken. I did the reading. I did extra reading. I produced a chart of elemental correspondences in four colours. I waited to be told that I was doing well.
Nobody told me. Nobody told me I was doing badly either. Hesper, who had handed the coven to Elowen the year before but still came to the outer court most months, looked at my chart for some time and said that it was very clear, and asked whether I had been up the hill yet. I had not. I had been too busy.
There is no syllabus to complete, and no mark that gets you in. I have known seekers who knew far more than I did and were not offered initiation, and one who could hardly have told you the date of Lammas and was brought in after fourteen months, because it was obvious to everyone that she already belonged.
What it is for
As far as I can make out, after doing it and then helping to run it, the waiting is for four things.
It is for finding out whether you will turn up. This sounds like nothing. It is nearly everything. A coven meets twenty or more times a year, for decades. The work depends absolutely on people being there: in February, when it is sleeting, when they have a cold, when they would rather be anywhere else. A year of monthly meetings is the least in which you can discover whether a person is someone who comes. I was, as it turned out. I do not think I would have known it without being given the chance to find out.
It is for letting the glamour wear off. Everybody arrives a little in love with the idea of being a witch. I certainly did. By about the eighth month that has gone. You have seen the High Priestess in her gardening trousers. You have washed up. You have discovered that the mysteries involve a great deal of standing about waiting for someone to find the matches. What is left, when the romance has drained out, is either nothing, in which case you have been saved from a mistake, or something much quieter and more durable. That second thing is what the coven is waiting to see.
It is for the coven to get to know you, and you the coven. Initiation joins you to these particular people, more closely than most people are joined to their relations. You will stand in front of them with nothing to hide behind. It would be mad to do that with strangers, and they would be mad to let you. The year is a long, slow introduction. It runs in both directions. I tell everyone who comes to us that they are interviewing us quite as much as we are them, and that if after six months they do not like us, they should go, and we will think the better of them for it.
And it is for you to change your mind. About a third of those who start with us do. Some find that what they wanted was the Craft and not a coven, and go off to practise alone, perfectly happily. Some find another path. One became a Buddhist, and still sends a card at Yule. None of that is failure. The outer court is there so that the decision can be made with open eyes, and no is as good an answer as yes.
The day
People ask about the extra day. Why a year and a day, and not a year?
The phrase is an old one in English law and in the ballads, and there are learned explanations. I prefer the one Wystan gave me, in the last winter of his life, when I asked him. He said that a year brings you back to where you started. The same moon, the same weather, the same you. The day is the step past that. It is the first day of doing it again, knowing what it is.
I have thought about that a good deal. Anyone can do a thing for a year on curiosity. The day is for the people who come back.
To a seeker who is waiting
If you are in somebody's outer court now, and impatient, I have three things to say to you, and I say them as someone who was worse than you are.
The first is that the time is not being wasted, and you are not being kept out of the real thing. The watching of the moon, the walking of the hill, the sitting still: that is the real thing. Initiation does not replace it. Initiation gives it a home.
The second is that nobody is testing you, and so there is nothing to be gained by performing. Stop trying to be impressive. They have seen impressive. What they have not seen yet is you.
And the third is that you are allowed to enjoy it. I look back on those seventeen months as one of the happiest times of my life. I did not know anything, and I was not responsible for anything, and once a month I drove out to a house under a hill and was given tea and taken seriously. I should have liked it to go on longer. If I could tell my impatient younger self one thing, it would be to put down the notebook and have another piece of cake.