Know Thyself

Know thyself was carved at the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It is among the oldest advice in the western world, and still the hardest to take.

The Craft is a religion, and it has magic in it, and both depend on knowing oneself. A spell cast for a purpose its caster does not really want will go wherever the caster's real wishes point. A rite performed by someone who is secretly performing for an audience will be a performance. And the great hazard of every witch, and of the solitary above all, is self-deception, which is invisible from the inside. This is why our outer court gives a whole season, the season of fire, to the question of what a person actually wants, and why we do not think it is ever finished.

The four powers

The old magical teaching sums up what a practitioner needs in four verbs: to know, to will, to dare and to keep silent. They appear on the page about the elements, and each is traditionally given to one of the four. Knowing comes first, and the knowledge it means is not the knowledge of correspondences and rites but of oneself. It is impossible to will truly without knowing what one wills, to dare without knowing what one fears, or to keep silent without knowing why one wants to talk.

In the Craft's imagery, this is the domain of the Crone, the old wise woman of the waning moon, who is described on the page about Maiden, Mother and Crone. In the stories, those who meet her with fear find her terrible. Those who come honestly, prepared to hear what they would rather not, find her generous.

Some exercises in honesty

These are done on paper, in private, and nobody else ever needs to see them. They are worth doing more than once, a year or two apart, and comparing.

What you expect

Write down, as plainly as you can, what you expect of the world and of your own life. Not what you hope or fear, but what you actually expect: from work, from money, from other people, from your body, from the future. Most people find that they have been carrying assumptions they would never have admitted to, and that some of them are not theirs at all but were handed to them early by someone else.

The double ledger

Make a list of your good qualities and your bad ones, as honestly as you can, and then do something more difficult. Beside each good quality, write how it has caused trouble. Beside each bad one, write how it has served you.

The generous person finds that generosity has sometimes left nothing for themselves or for the people closest to them. The stubborn person finds that stubbornness has finished things that more biddable people abandoned. Nobody is divided into a good part and a bad part, and a quality is a virtue or a fault mostly according to its measure. The exercise teaches that, and it is much harder to forget once it has been written down in one's own hand.

The opposites

Over a week, write down every pair of opposites you notice in the world and in yourself: hot and cold, patience and haste, the need for company and the need to be alone. Then sit quietly with the list and look for the place where each pair meets. The aim is not to choose one side but to find the balance between them, which is a different place for every person and moves through a life.

What you want

This is the question of the season of fire, and it sounds the easiest. Write down what you want. Then, for each thing, ask why, and write that down. Then ask why again. By the third or fourth answer most people have arrived somewhere they did not expect, and that is usually the thing worth working for.

The balance of the elements

Most people are strong in one or two of the elements and weak in the others. The airy are full of ideas and never finish anything. The fiery start everything and quarrel with everyone. The watery feel deeply and cannot decide. The earthy are dependable and stuck. It is a crude scheme, and nobody fits it exactly, but it is surprisingly useful, and most people know at once which they are.

The work is not to become a different kind of person. It is to borrow from the elements one lacks. The airy are given practical tasks to finish, and the earthy are sent to sit by moving water. The year of our outer court is arranged so that everyone spends a season in the element they find hardest, and it is nearly always the season they talk about afterwards.

On positive thinking

A good deal of modern writing on magic, in Wicca and well outside it, teaches that we create our own reality by our beliefs and expectations, so that a person who expects good things receives them and one who expects suffering finds it. This teaching mostly descends from the American New Thought movement of the nineteenth century, and not from anything older. There is something true in it, and something false, and the false part can do harm.

The true part is that attitude matters a great deal. A person who expects to be refused tends not to ask. A person who believes they are no good at something rarely practises enough to become good at it. Expectations shape what we notice, and what we notice shapes what we do. Changing them is slow work but real work, and it changes lives. And it is true that a spell will not mend what a habit keeps breaking: the urgent trouble may be met by magic, but the long, chronic one is usually met by changing how one lives.

The false part is the claim that everything that happens to us is of our own making. It is not. Illness, poverty, cruelty and accident fall on people who expected none of them, and to tell the sick or the bereaved that they attracted their misfortune by their thinking is both untrue and unkind. We do not teach it. The Craft asks us to take responsibility for what we do, and for the spirit in which we meet what happens to us. It does not ask us to take the blame for the weather.

Habits that help

• Clear what is finished. Objects, commitments and grudges that have outlived their use take up room. Letting them go makes space for what comes next.
• Forgive. Not for the other person's sake, necessarily, but because resentment is a weight carried by the one who holds it. Where it is not possible to say so to someone's face, it can be done in meditation, and it still counts. Forgiving oneself, once a wrong has been honestly admitted, is part of the same work.
• Give thanks. Every day, for something specific. It is a small discipline with a large effect.
• Do good quietly. When you have worked for someone, with their agreement, as the page on magic requires, do not afterwards claim the credit. The result is the reward.
• Look after the body. Sleep, water, food that has not come out of a packet, and a walk out of doors. A witch who neglects the body will find that the rest of the work goes badly, and will not always guess why.
• Keep the diary. Everything on this page is easier to see in writing a year later. See the magical diary.

When it is heavy going

Honest self-examination sometimes turns up old injuries: things done to us, often long ago and often by people who loved us and meant well. It is right to name them, on paper, and to see where they came from. It is not necessary to confront anyone, or to fall out with anyone, in order to set them down. The aim is to see clearly, not to settle accounts.

If what comes up is more than you can carry, put the exercises aside and talk to someone. A good counsellor is no enemy of the Craft, and several of the best witches we know have been helped by one. The same is true of a good doctor.