The square is a very powerful symbol of protection. Even if you work within a circle you can still designate an outer square as an additional protective enclosure. If you can’t have a permanent altar outdoors, your magick square can designate the smaller space where you regularly set up your magickal tools.

It is also very protective of the home, even more so than a circle, and is an easier shape to cast in many gardens than the circle. You can draw a square around anything outdoors with small stone markers if the site is very quiet or if you have to leave the item, building or whatever you are trying to protect alone or unoccupied for a while.

It is effective also for keeping children or animals temporarily off lawns or flower beds you are trying to grow.

You can visualize a protective square of any size, from a small one around a precious artifact to one around a sacred site where you have organized a seasonal ritual.

They are very protective around natural circles such as groves where you would not draw a circle.

Indeed, you can create a temporary square if you are working in a public spot and don’t want your magick area invaded by dogs and curious individuals. In modern times where working in isolated places may be less safe, you can visualize one around the beach or forest while you are working or around yourself (as well as your protective circle) on a deserted station platform or taxi rank.

• Stand in the center of your designated square, which may also be the center of your projected magick circle.
• Hold out your arm as far as you can with your palm upright and outwards and say:

“Enough and no more, I draw my square of protection. Preserve this space as sacred.”

• Picture a line of light forming the top horizontal (west to east). Keep turning, making next the vertical north-south line along the right east side as you face north. Speak and visualize till you have all four lines in place and can see a shimmering outline to your square of light.
• You can also walk your square from the furthest away top left-hand corner, moving clockwise and ending at the nearest, bottom left corner. Use your wand in front of you and put a small dark stone at each corner and one halfway along each line. You can align with a compass or estimate north in the middle of the top line furthest from you as you face north.
• You can assign your midpoint, the main directions, to archangels or to the lofty Landvaetir, the tall brown guardians who in Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway; Germany and eastern parts of the UK are recognized as protecting land and all who live on it. You can further protect the corners with the traditional taller dark stones if you are setting up a permanent magickal square. Bless your square as you would a circle the first time you create it.

Squares have a strong folk magick tradition; a magickal square would be marked in a field with hoes, rakes or other agricultural implements. In times of persecution squares could be consecrated as a magickal space, but were much easier to disguise as magickal working than circles. Some were undoubtedly used to mark as sacred land where a former sacred Roman temple stood, just as a circle of stones or tree stumps beneath a church or cathedral might mark a former sacred Druidic grove.

In Scandinavia, the magickal square formed the outline for a grid of nine squares, three by three. These were made by the seior, the witch seers of the Norse world who channelled wisdom from the spirit world, specifically from Helheim where the Crone Goddess Hel cared for the deceased. The seior sat on raised thrones  within the grids and travelled astrally to Helheim to talk to the ancestors and receive advice for the living. Only later did the Goddess Hel become demonized and in recent years there has been a revival of seior craft.

The water witches of the West Midlands also used a magickal square, or mill as they called it, for magick. They were people who came from the Netherlands to live and work on the Midland canals in the 1800s. They practiced an ancient form of folk magick that did not die out till the mid-1900s and there are still a few practitioners remaining. Rituals were practiced by these canal people on a square of land adjacent to the canal bank with a triple magickal square. Each square was joined by four lines and constructed from wood and was known as the Mil. Only women entered the sacred area under the leadership of a senior female water witch, through the chief male, known as the master, standing at the edge, summoned a spirit entity to assist in the ritual.

In modern Iceland, the Landvaetir or Land guardians often have particularly sacred square fields that cannot be built on, where offerings are left in order to bring protection to the homes and farms around.

Magickal squares and circles date back to prehistory. Megalithic stone circles were created from around 3,500 BCE and set out according to precise geometric and astronomical measurements. They were used for rituals of all kinds by the Neolithic tribes especially on the seasonal change points to invoke the ancestors for fertility of crops, animals and people and continued to provide the setting for magickal gatherings through the millennia.

In Sweden and Norway the sacred square grid has formed a magickal device for more than three thousand years. It was used originally on the great seasonal fire festivals, at midwinter, midsummer and harvest. Nine turf squares were etched in the earth and eight removed, leaving the middle one to form the center of the ritual fire.

The magick circle and square also have their place in modern magick. Both shapes occur naturally in forest clearings and can be drawn in sand, earth or snow, or formed out of twigs, branches, shells, flowers, or even crystals.

Both act as markers for the main directions, the circle as though on a clock face and the square halfway along each side, both giving equal segment for the elements.