Words you will meet everywhere else on the site.
- Athame
- A ritual knife, conventionally black-handled and double-edged, used to direct rather than to cut. Descended from the black-hilted knife of the Solomonic grimoires by way of Victorian ceremonial magic and 1950s Wicca.
- Banishing
- Sending something away from a place or a person — an influence, a presence, a situation. Distinct from cursing, which intends harm to someone, and from warding, which strengthens a boundary rather than moving anything.
- Besom
- A ritual broom, traditionally birch twigs on an ash or hazel stave. Used to sweep a space symbolically, above the floor rather than on it, and sometimes laid across a threshold to mark a room as closed.
- Boline
- The working knife: white-handled, often curved, used for the practical jobs — cutting herbs, carving candles, trimming cord. If you keep only one blade, this is the useful one.
- Book of Shadows
- A practitioner's own record of their craft: workings done, results, reading, correspondences and doubts. In traditional Wicca the term means something narrower — a coven's ritual text, copied by hand from an initiator's copy.
- Casting a Circle
- Marking a space and a time as set apart before working, and opening it again afterwards. Read as a threshold, a container or a boundary for the attention, depending on the practitioner. Ninety seconds is a perfectly complete version.
- Charging
- Leaving an object in a source of influence — moonlight, sunlight, earth, smoke, running water, your own attention — so that it takes on that quality. Read as asking, as transferring, or as building an association, depending on the framing.
- Cleansing
- Removing what an object or space has accumulated, before use or after difficulty. Smoke, sound, salt, water, breath and moonlight are all used. Salt corrodes metal and damages some stones, and water ruins porous ones, so check before you soak anything.
- Cone of Power
- Energy raised collectively by a group — through chanting, drumming, dancing or movement — and released together toward a purpose. Chiefly a Wiccan and modern group technique; solitaries build the same thing on a smaller scale.
- Consecration
- Declaring what a tool or space is for and setting it apart for that purpose. Usually done once, after cleansing, and often repeated if the object has drifted back into ordinary use. The words matter less than doing the same thing each time.
- Correspondence
- A claimed relationship between two things — rosemary and memory, Friday and Venus, green and money. Correspondences are inherited vocabulary, not measured fact, and sources contradict each other constantly.
- Coven
- A group who practise together, usually small and usually with some shared structure or tradition. Traditional covens initiate; many modern ones are simply friends who meet to work, with no lineage claimed.
- Cunning folk
- Local practical magic workers in Britain and Europe into the twentieth century — finding stolen goods, lifting suspected curses, selling charms and cures, for a fee. They were emphatically not witches in their own eyes: the witch was the problem they were hired to solve.
- Deosil
- Clockwise, with the apparent course of the sun in the northern hemisphere. Conventionally used for building, blessing and casting. Some southern-hemisphere practitioners reverse it, since the sun tracks the other way.
- Divination
- Any practice used to seek insight or guidance — cards, runes, pendulum, scrying, casting lots, reading tea leaves. Best understood as a way of turning a question over rather than as a forecast, and no substitute for medical, legal or financial advice.
- Eclectic
- Drawing from several traditions rather than following one. The commonest approach today. Done well it means learning each source properly and naming where things came from; done badly it means taking from traditions that have asked not to be taken from.
- Esbat
- A gathering or observance at the full moon, as distinct from a seasonal sabbat. The word is Wiccan in origin; many solitary practitioners use it loosely for any lunar working.
- Familiar
- A spirit companion, often taking animal form, attributed to witches in English trial records — where the accusation of keeping one could be evidence in itself. Modern practice usually means either a spirit ally or, more loosely, a beloved animal.
- Green witch
- A practitioner centred on plants, growing and the land: herbalism, gardening, foraging, wildcrafting. Anything intended for the body needs proper identification and a qualified opinion, since a good many plants are toxic and some closely resemble edible ones.
- Grimoire
- A book of magical procedure, usually somebody else's and usually old. Medieval and early modern grimoires routinely claim ancient authorship they do not have, which is a convention of the genre rather than simple dishonesty.
- Hedge witch
- A practitioner working alone with local plants, folk charms and the land immediately around them; the name also carries the older sense of the hedge as a boundary between this world and another, crossed in trance or spirit flight.
- Initiate
- Someone formally brought into a tradition by those already within it, usually through ceremony and often by degrees. Initiatory traditions hold that it cannot be self-conferred; non-initiatory practice is no less serious for lacking one.
- Kitchen witch
- A practitioner whose craft is centred on the home — cooking, baking, brewing, cleaning, hospitality. Simmer pots, intention stirred into a sauce, bread as an offering. Among the least equipment-dependent ways to practise.
- Moon water
- Water left where the moonlight falls, then kept for cleansing, blessing or anointing. Label it with the date and phase, keep it clean, use it within a few days, and do not drink anything you have steeped without checking first.
- Oathbound
- Material an initiate has sworn not to share outside their tradition. If someone declines to teach you something on these grounds, they are keeping a promise rather than gatekeeping, and pressing them is asking them to break their word.
- Ogham
- An early medieval Irish alphabet of notched strokes, found carved on standing stones, with each letter traditionally associated with a tree. Its use as a divination system is a modern development rather than an attested ancient practice.
- Pendulum
- A weight on a cord, held still and read by the direction of its swing, usually for yes-or-no questions. Its movement is well explained by the ideomotor effect, tiny unconscious muscle activity, which some practitioners take as a fatal objection and others as precisely the point.
- Poppet
- A small figure representing a person, used in workings for them. Widely attested in European folk magic for healing and protection as well as harm. Ethically it is the sharpest case for consent: it is aimed at someone specific.
- Runes
- The letters of the Germanic futhark alphabets, used historically for writing and inscription and today also for divination. The names and meanings come from later rune poems; the elaborate divinatory systems are largely modern reconstructions.
- Sabbat
- One of the eight seasonal festivals of the Wheel of the Year: the two solstices, the two equinoxes and the four cross-quarter days. The eightfold set is a twentieth-century arrangement, though several of the festivals in it are genuinely old.
- Scrying
- Divination by gazing into a reflective or shifting surface — dark water, a mirror, a crystal, ink, smoke, flame — until images or associations rise. Long practice and low light do most of the work.
- Sea witch
- A practitioner whose craft is built around coast and water: tides, storms, salt, shells, driftwood and the moon that moves them. A strongly regional style, shaped by whichever stretch of shore the practitioner actually knows.
- Sigil
- A symbol condensed from a statement of intent, then charged and often destroyed or forgotten so it works below conscious attention. Old in the grimoire tradition as spirit seals; the modern letter-reduction method comes from Austin Osman Spare in the early twentieth century.
- Simmer pot
- Herbs, peel, spices and water left simmering on the stove so the scent fills the house. Kitchen-witch practice at its plainest — cleansing, welcoming or settling a home, and pleasant even if you think it is only pleasant.
- Solitary
- A practitioner who works alone rather than in a coven or group. The most common way to practise today, and not a lesser one — most published beginner material assumes it.
- Tarot
- A deck of 78 cards — 22 trumps and four suits — that began as an ordinary card game in fifteenth-century Italy and was turned to divination in the eighteenth. The Egyptian origin story attached to it in the 1780s is invented.
- The Rede
- Short for the Wiccan Rede: "an it harm none, do what ye will". Rede is Old English for counsel, so it is advice rather than a commandment. First recorded in a 1964 talk by Doreen Valiente, not in antiquity, and not held by all witches.
- Warding
- Protective work placed around a person, home or object. Purely defensive, which is why it is the least contested kind of working: it does nothing to anybody else. Salt, iron, rowan and marked thresholds are traditional.
- Wheel of the Year
- The cycle of eight seasonal festivals, from Samhain round to Mabon. The eightfold arrangement was assembled in England in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner and the druid Ross Nichols; no historical people kept all eight, though several of the individual festivals are genuinely ancient.
- Widdershins
- Anticlockwise, against the apparent course of the sun. Conventionally used for banishing, releasing, unwinding and closing a circle. From a Middle Low German phrase meaning, roughly, "against the way".