Magick for healing, it must be said, is not so far removed from the prayers of conventional religions, whose positive influence is well documented. The same effect can be created whatever the focus or faith, and I know from personal experience that positive results can be achieved when a Wiccan coven sends healing light to a sick member or a friend.

For hundreds of years, angels have been invoked in magick, just as in religion, both for protection and to act as vehicles for healing or positive energies. Practitioners of white magick may focus on particular aspects of a god or goddess figure, or benign power, personified through different deities from many age and cultures.

When I began practising magick ten years ago, I found it very artificial to invoke a goddess who belonged to another time and culture. However, I have since found that such symbols do hold a great deal of power and therefore can concentrate specific energies. I have listed in Chapter 4 a number of deities that seem to be especially potent in ritual or as a focus for meditation. But if you do not find them helpful, there is no need to use them.

Most rituals are related to the basic human needs for health, love, fertility and prosperity.

In past time, the well-being of the planet was considered to be the responsibility of peasant as well as king through paying tributes and enacting age-old ceremonies to invoke the necessary energies for the Wheel of the Year to turn. So individual prosperity or fertility was attained both through private spells and charms and by sending positive energies to the Earth and the cosmos and, in a sense, receiving bounty as those beams were amplified and returned to the sender.

Folk or domestic magick was an important part of people’s everyday lives right up until the nineteenth century. In rural areas, the implements used in and around the home and garden could be easily adapted for use in magick; and for town-dwellers, flowers and herbs could be gathered on a day in the country or grown on allotments or in urban back gardens. In the days before central heating systems, the focus of the home was the family hearth. Focus is Latin for ‘hearth’ and from Ancient Rome to China, the household deities have always had their place, being offered morsels of food, nectar and flowers and consulted on family happenings.

It was believed that the ancestors as well as the living gathered around the family hearth, and so it became a natural focus for magick. The witches’ cauldron started off as the iron cooking pot that hung over the fire (such pots are still used in country regions of Europe – I saw one for sale quite recently in the market in Rouen in France).

Herbal brews were not only created to cure coughs and colds but also, with magical words spoken over them, transformed into potions to bring a desired lover, employment or an unexpected helping hand in times of sorrow. A grandmother would put any small coins she could spare into a money pot and warm it near the fire to ‘incubate’ the money into sufficient to mend the roof or buy new coats for the winter.

A young wife eager to be pregnant would secretly prick a fertilised hen’s egg with a needle on the night of the full moon immediately before making love. Such actions were quite a normal part of life, a way of tapping into the same energies that made the cattle fertile and the corn set seed.
Farmers would leave milk for the faeries that they might bring good fortune, young girls recited love charms while planting herbs in soil embedded with a would-be lover’s footprint. On Hallowe’en, housewives opened their windows and placed garlic on the window ledge so that only the good family dead might enter and take shelter from the cold.

This simple folk magick, rather than ceremonial magick, forms the basis for the majority of spells. As above, so below’, the words of the semi-divine father of magick, Hermes Trismegistos, may originally have evolved from popular magick that is practised in many different cultures around the world to this day. They are certainly as applicable today as they ever were.

Whatever the aim of your magick may be, if you look around your home, garden, workshop or even office, you have the necessary tools for the spells you require. What is more, rooted as they are in
domesticity and the daily world, these implements could not be safer: fruit, vegetables, salt, sand, seeds, flowers, coins, pots and jars, together with your crystals, candles, incense and oils, and perhaps a few coloured scarves or ribbons to tie knots. Whether your spell is small and personal, or vast and universal, whether you are working to attract love, harmony in the home, prosperity or fertility for yourself or loved ones, for people in the wider environment or the planet, these are all you need.

Gardenerian covens generally number 13. Some covens are affiliated formally or informally to specific traditions, but they increasingly unite for organisational as well as legal and political strength, particularly in Australia and parts of the USA. On-line covens are also springing up and they are an excellent way for solitary practitioners to gain support and information. Reliable, bona fide covens will offer the same safeguards as any ordinary coven, but of course the normal restraints you should show on contacting any Internet site will apply.

The beginning of the path to learning about Wicca within a formal coven is usually marked by a dedication. Initiation, after a year and a day, or a similar recognised magical period, will confer formal entry. Further different levels of knowledge and responsibility may also be involved, for example elevation to a second or third degree, so that eventually initiates can begin their own covens if they wish.

According to the rules of magick, as I said earlier, you cannot be angry, mean or cruel and then expect to say sorry to a deity and have the slate wiped clean. Magick is about taking responsibility for your own actions all the time and that is incredibly onerous. But, on the positive side, the results are equally potent, and if you can learn to tap into the source of light and life and joy, you will amaze yourself and others by what is possible. Thus will your psychic powers also spontaneously unfold and guide you in your everyday world, increasing your spiritual power and wisdom.

Magick is not like the magic a conjuror uses to bring a rabbit out of a hat: that kind of magic is just a trick, which relies merely on the art of illusion. White magick is much more than that. It is intensely exciting because it means that we can extend the boundaries of possibility, recalling the psychic powers of childhood when we could span dimensions as easily as jumping across a puddle. We can increase our personal magnetism to attract love and luck and regenerate the innate healing abilities both of the human body and the planet.