Book of Shadows

Casting Circles and Writing Spells

Casting a circle is something you do at the beginning of every ritual. A lot of rituals just assume you know what that means, so before you get confused, I'm going to explain what it is.

Casting a circle creates your sacred space. All you really need to do is take your wand or athame and draw a circle clockwise around or in front of your altar. Yup, it's really that simple. As you cast it, state that the circle protects your sacred space from negative energies. After you cast the circle around you and your altar, don't step out of it again. If you need to, make a doorway in the circle, draw a "doorway" in the air from the floor with your wand/ athame. Say, "I cast this door to allow me to exit without allowing negative energy to enter it while I am gone." To close it again, draw the circle counterclockwise and say that you are sealing it again.

After casting the circle, most witches Call the Watchtowers, which means summoning spirits of the four elements. Turn to each of the four directions and draw a pentagram in the air with your wand, visualizing it as yellow for the East, red for the South, blue for the West, and green for the North. Start at the East, and say, "I call upon the spirits of the Air to lend their energy to my circle," or something similar. I actually have entire invocation verses posted on my walls that I sometimes read, when I'm not feeling too lazy. Turn to the South and call Fire, the West and call Water, and finish at the North to call Earth. If you want, you can invoke specific spirits at each direction, like elementals (sylphs, salamanders, undines, and gnomes, respectively), angels (Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel), dragons (yellow eyes, red eyes, blue eyes, green eyes), the great wolves (Dawn-Treader, Sun-Chaser, Night-Stalker, and Ice-Leaper), or whatever other spirits you want to welcome. When you are done with the circle, draw it counterclockwise and exclaim that you are done with it and are taking it down. Dismiss the elemental guardians in reverse order-- North, West, South, East. 

You don't have to cast a circle, but it does help seal you off from the rest of the world for the duration of your ritual.

As for spells, spells really don't have to be complicated. If you want, you can make them little rhyming phrases, Latin phrases (grammatically correct!), or entire sonnets (A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, E, F, E, F, G, G) so that it's like a poem (each pair of letters does not indicate the same line or word, it indicates two words that rhyme). But really, all you need to do is state what you want. Like I said earlier, state your desire in present tense, as if you already have it. What do you want? Prosperity, love, improvement, banishment, abundance, enlightenment? Think of which words relate to that purpose. Make sure you are specific as possible, so that everything goes your way. Then make your declaration of what you want. 

To help you cast your spell, find crystals, herbs, candle colors, and other things to represent your purpose. If you don't have anything, just whisper the spell over a candle. To actually cast the spell, channel your intention into whatever object you picked, or a sigil, or a potion, or similar. Some would say it doesn't matter exactly when you do a spell, and some would say it matters a great deal. I think that the right astrological event can definitely help increase the potency of a spell, but you don't have to wait until the stars are aligned just right to do it, especially if it's something small or relatively inconsequential. Do it on a Sabbat if it makes sense, or a certain moon (full for prosperity, waxing for enlightenment, waning for banishment, etc). I'd advise writing it all in your Book of Shadows, so you remember that you did them after you forget about it.

After you cast your spell, you can meditate or do divination, and then it's a good idea to eat something to ground yourself.