Detail of “Silence”
by Johann Hein-
rich Füssli. From
Wikimedia.
I’ve been doing initiation rituals for twenty years now. I wrote one for my first college student group
when my wife was still a teenager, and later wrote one for my more eclectic coven (and a version of that is in
my first book The Witch’s Athame and is excerpted here). Even Druids are familiar with initiation rituals, John
Beckett wrote about them before he and I were ever on Patheos Pagan. Just seemed silly to me that this was
someone’s line in the sand.
But “to keep silent” has been with me for other reasons lately
too, most notably the giant Donald Trump mass-binding that took
place. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me figure out why anyone
would want to publicize such an undertaking. If you believe in your
magick I think you should just do it and not turn it into a reality
show, because alerting someone to what you are doing means they
can most likely counter it (and bounce it back towards the people do-
ing the binding). And I’m sure plenty of Christians (and even a few
Pagans) out there who like Donald Trump worked on doing exactly
that the minute this binding spell was cast. I think it would have
been more effective if it had stayed in Witch-only spaces, but that’s
not how our society works today.
If I was ever going to do a binding spell on someone I cer-
tainly wouldn’t make them aware of it, nor would I email people
Pagan Living Magazine Litha 2017
27