A Witch on a Celtic Path Celtic Triad: Three things to be avoided by the Wise: expecting the impossible, grieving over the irretrievable, fearing the inevitable. Witchcraft is often described as a new age religion, especially with the emergence of Wicca, the religious practice strongly associated with modern witchcraft, in the 20th Century. However, you only need to look as far as the nearest fairy tale anthology to realise the term witch has been with us for millennia, in many different forms. The Old English words wicce and wicca were used for female and male magical practitioners as far back as 890 CE. This shows us that witchcraft is…

When You Are Unable to See the Signs I don’t know about you, but I know this has happened to me and more than once – lay out a spread of Tarot cards or playing cards or some other divinatory devise – and nothing. Either the meanings elude you or the cards have no relation to one another or to the positions on which they landed or to the entire situation at hand. If this is just for me, I can just put it all away and wait for another day – when maybe I’ll be “seeing” a little more clearly – but if I am with a client, then…

Since we are at the time of the Spring Equinox and new growth, let’s talk about a Minor Arcana card that tells of new growth of the heart: the Three of Cups. The Three of Cups is a Minor Arcana card, so we know right away that the message offered by this card will most likely be more immediate in nature, or will most likely be connected to more day-to-day issues. The easiest way to get a decent understanding of a Minor Arcana card is to examine its number, or in the case of Court Cards, its rank, and to examine its suit. In this case, we are dealing with…

Offerings, Not Sacrifices Merry meet. People have jokingly asked me about what I sacrifice on my altar. Occasionally, the person isn’t joking. While a long involved response is not practical in a social setting, I wish to delve into the topic a bit in this column. To sacrifice means to give up. In that sense, I sacrifice money when I donate to a charity and I sacrifice sleep to spend late-night hours on the phone with a friend in need. An older meaning of sacrifice is to make sacred. When our ancestors dedicating something to the gods and goddesses during a ritual ceremony, such as a cow or a deer,…