Protection

Most of what frightens people who come to the Craft is nothing of the kind. But there are simple practices of protection, for a person and for a house, and every witch is taught them early.

The books of the occult revival are full of psychic attack: of hostile magicians, draining presences and curses laid at a distance. Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defence, published in 1930, is the classic of the kind, and it is a good deal more sensible than its reputation. Our own experience, over more than forty years, is that such things are very rare, and that the people most afraid of them are seldom the people they happen to. Far more often what feels like an attack turns out to be exhaustion, grief, an unhappy household or an illness that wants a doctor.

None the less, protection is a real part of the practice. It steadies the mind, it makes a house feel like a home, and the exercises that train it are some of the best training there is for the rest of the Craft.

The ordinary defences

The first protection of a witch is a steady life. Sleep, food, sober evenings, friends, fresh air and a tidy house are worth more than any charm, and a person short of them is open to every kind of trouble, magical or otherwise. Teachers of shielding generally observe that it is the first thing to fail when one is exhausted or has been drinking. That is not a coincidence.

The second is the gods. A witch who is in good standing with the Goddess and the God, who keeps the moons and the festivals and calls on them by habit, has the best protection there is, and the simplest response to any trouble of this kind is to ask for their help.

Shielding

A shield is a boundary of the will, held round oneself, that lets through what one chooses and keeps out what one does not. It is learned through visualisation, and most people find they had been doing a rough version of it all their lives, in crowds and difficult meetings, without having a name for it.

1. Ground and centre yourself, as on the page about grounding and centring.
2. Picture yourself surrounded by an egg or sphere of light, a little way out from the body. See it above the head and beneath the feet as well as all round. A ring on the floor protects nothing from above or below.
3. Let it be whatever colour it wishes to be. Many people find it blue at the edge and bright within.
4. Make it firm at the surface but not hard. It should let your own goodwill pass out, and let in what is welcome.
5. Imagine anything unwelcome that meets it sinking harmlessly through it into the earth beneath you, rather than piling up against it.
6. Hold it for a few minutes. Then let the image fade, knowing that the boundary remains.

Practised daily, this becomes quick and then automatic, and a moment's thought will strengthen it when it is needed. It is worth knowing that the circle of a coven is a different thing. As the page on the circle explains, the witches' circle is a container for power, not a fortress against spirits.

Warding a house

A ward is a shield set round a place instead of a person, and left there. The method is the same, with one difference: once the ward is built, its upkeep is handed from oneself to the earth, so that it does not draw on its maker.

1. Begin by practising on something small: a box, or a ring on the dressing table. Build the sphere round it. Then picture the strength that holds it rising out of the ground, through the floor and the table, so that the earth sustains it and not you.
2. When that is easy, do the same for the whole house: a dome above it and a bowl beneath, the earth holding it up.
3. Renew it whenever you meditate, if only for a moment. A ward that is never thought about fades.

Many witches anchor a ward to something physical: a stone by the door, a mark scratched on a beam, a bundle of rowan over the lintel. The object helps, but it is not the ward. If the image in the mind fails, the ward fails, whatever is hanging on the door.

Cleansing a house

When a house has had a bad time, after a long illness, a quarrel, unhappy previous owners or simply a hard winter, it can be cleansed. This is old housekeeping as much as magic, and it works on both levels.

1. Clean it, properly and physically, from top to bottom. Open every window.
2. Sweep it through with the besom, from the back of the house to the front door, and out.
3. Wash the floors and the doorsteps with a bucket of hot water in which four good handfuls of lavender have steeped. Fresh leaves serve as well as flowers.
4. Sprinkle salted water at every outer door and window, going round the house sunwise.
5. Ring a bell, clap, or make a cheerful noise in every room, and light a candle in the heart of the house.
6. Say aloud, in your own words, that the house is yours, that it is at peace, and that what does not belong in it is asked to go.
7. Then cook something, and have people round. A house is made a home by being lived in kindly.

The old household customs

The people of these islands protected their homes in a great many ways, and a good number of the customs survive. It was mostly against witches that they were made, which we try not to hold against them.

Rowan tree and red thread
Hold the witches all in dread.

Traditional

• Rowan. Sprigs of rowan, the mountain ash, tied in a cross with red thread, were hung over doors and in byres all over Britain. Rowans were planted by front gates, and many still stand there.
• Holed stones. Flints with a natural hole were hung by the bed or in the stable to keep off nightmares and harm to horses.
• Iron. A horseshoe over the door, points upward to keep the luck in.
• Marks. Old houses and churches across Britain have circles, daisy-wheels and interlaced letters scratched into beams and stones near doors, windows and fireplaces, where anything unwelcome might get in. They are found wherever someone looks for them.
• Bottles and shoes. Stoneware bottles filled with pins, hair and nail parings were buried under hearths and thresholds in the seventeenth century, and old shoes were walled up beside chimneys. These are history rather than practice, and we do not recommend reviving them, but a good many houses in the Marches have one somewhere.
• The bell and the broom. A bell hung by the door, and the besom kept upright by the hearth, are common in witches' houses still.

What we do not teach

Some books teach the shield that reflects whatever strikes it back to its sender, or the bolt of power flung back along the line of an attack. We do not teach either. The Rede counsels against harm, and it makes no exception for people we believe have harmed us first, who are very often people who have done nothing of the kind. A witch who spends the evenings firing at imagined enemies will soon have real ones. Let whatever comes to the shield sink into the ground, where it does no harm and is made good.

Nor do we teach protection for sale. Anyone who tells you that you are cursed and offers to lift the curse for a fee is running one of the oldest frauds in the world.

When it is not magic