Marian Green - Wild Witch: A Guide to Earth Magic

O Holy, Blessed lady, constant comfort to humankind,
whose beneficence and kindness nourish us all, and whose
care for those in trouble is as a loving mother who cares for
all her children you are there when we call.

The Golden Ass

Apuleius

This edition first published in 2019 by

Weiser Books, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

65 Parker Street, Suite 7

Newburyport, MA 01950

www.redwheelweiser.com

First published as The Elements of Natural Magic by
Element Books in 1989

Copyright 2019 by Marian Green

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-687-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request.

Interior design by Rosamund Saunders

Cover art created by Kathryn Sky-Peck
using imagery from Shutterstock

Interior illustrations by Joe Bright

Body text set in Monotype Bell

Printed and bound by

RR Donnelley in China

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This is a brief explanation about my theory of magic instruction. I have sometimes been asked why I don't write books on more advanced magic for those who have enjoyed the earlier works. After all, they say, I have been involved in magic work for decades. I must know some advanced techniques and rituals. True enough; yet I also know full well that there are three extremely good reasons for keeping such knowledge out of the books which untrained but enthusiastic students might read. These are my reasons:

1 All magical teachers are responsible for those they teach. Anyone who has spent many years studying and practising magic is fully aware of the dangers which entering magic work can involve. To teach the basic skills is fine, for when a student has mastered those he will be able to go on to tackle more advanced things. Within a school, each student is taught, under careful supervision, the level of magic he is capable of handling so that he cannot get out of his depth. With books, there is no guarantee that the unprepared and unwary novice will not attempt, and succeed at, exercises over which he will have no control. I would not put an intelligent and keen child in charge of a fast car on a motorway. Although I might know that he could drive it safely around his garden, he would not have the strength, the awareness or the control to be safe anywhere else. I do teach magic at a higher level but only face to face with students whose abilities and desires I know.

2 If you study the books on basic magical training and perform the exercises thoroughly mastering the techniques and mental concentration required the meditations which lead to that altered state of consciousness in which magic becomes a reality will put you directly in touch with your own interior tutor. The Holy Guardian Angel or Higher Self will teach you all the magical work you can wish for, in a way that you can comprehend, and at a speed and level which is ideally suited to you. Merely copying someone else's Advanced Rite or Grade Three Initiation before you are ready will do you no good at all, and could genuinely harm you.

There are real dragons which you can encounter before you are adequately prepared to deal with them. When you can do all the basic things well that is after at least two years' work then you can ask your own contacts to teach you the higher levels of magic, or put you in touch with a school that will lead you onward. Each student can go as far as he wishes, either alone or under the direct instruction of a school, lodge, coven or other kind of group. If alone, he will first need to make a personal link with his Higher Self by hard, regular and effective practice.

3 Magical work is largely experiential. It is like swimming, riding a bike or playing a musical instrument: the more you do these things, the better you become at them, expanding your experience by actual practice. You cannot learn them just by reading the relevant books. Each person's experiences are different. As an example, take the simple act of entering the meditational state. The body is still and relaxed fine but then some feel light-headed and floating; others feel heavy; some feel hot; others feel buzzy and vibrational; some may clearly perceive pictures and hear words spoken to them inside their heads; others may see only vague shapes, or perhaps nothing at all, but they just imagine things.

The varieties of experience at this level are endless. To describe all the possible experiences that a student at a higher level of working might encounter multiplies that complexity even more. It would mean either leaving a student in the dark by saying, enter state X using key H, which wouldn't mean very much, or writing pages of descriptive text, covering as many aspects of any state or symbol as have previously been encountered. Such books would be very boring. A teacher, looking at a small group of students, can see what they are experiencing and how far they are ready to go. She can see if any of them are getting into difficulties, are frightened or seem to be lost. By using her trained inner perception, the tutor will be able to detect these reactions immediately and help the students into calmer waters.

4 You can learn magical arts by being thrown in at the deep end; but this is neither ethical, nor in the end practical, for the nervous student will back away from the magic, accusing it of being evil or mind-bending, simply because he has plunged in out of his depth, albeit often of his own choice. Although it may be over-cautious on my part, I prefer not to put those keys into the hands of unprepared novices, but to lead them along known roads until they encounter that aspect of their own inner being which can guide them safely to the stars.

Marian Green

One of the things said about modern life is that it has lost its magic. We mostly live in warm and comfortable homes, have a wide selection of things to do, plenty of different foods to eat, instant worldwide communications and technologies which would have been beyond imagination even fifty years agao, yet the sense of wonder is often missing. It is for this reason that many thinking people from all walks of life and from many lands across the world are looking for something else. One of the aspects of their quest, which in many cases is not merely on the material plane, is a new spiritual dimension, a reaching outwards for something that is hard to define, intangible and ethereal, yet fascinating for all that. In part, this feeling is caused by a longing for some kind of golden age which seems to have passed, even though history tells us that life in previous ages was hard, uncomfortable and not half as glorious as we would like to imagine. Yet, the past holds a real clue to that which is being sought.