The Shapeshifting Art of Witchcraft

There is a place of enchantment

Woven from threads of pearl and iridescent gems

The colors are not stark but blending

Violet, indigo, magenta, pink, and gold

Eaten by datura’s spiked seed pods

Tension is released through the breath

Each sinewy muscle must respond

Knots in the aura become loose

And the body opens in anticipation

The sweet smells of pleasure

The sticky honey of our souls

Spirits draw near and the dead come closer

A Faerie Queen stands stoic in the garden

While a stag’s antlers amplify into a million webs

Of mystical wanderings

Fate has brought us here, together

We are bound

Timeless within time’s illusion, marches on

The rhythms of our voice vibrating across the eons

Here we are becoming and always will be

The land of the mammoth

The ancient homestead of our hearts

Whispers of the eternal

Calling us to our sacred work

Which is neither noble nor not

The poisonous peacock mysteries

Illuminate rainbows betwixt beauty and terror

Into the Non-Linear world of Faerie

In our witchcraft we enter into a space that is neither/or. It is no-thing yet everything. It is an astral space of no time where thoughts can give rise to immediate results. We can visit here in dreams and spirit journeys, bearing witness to the strange beauty that is our reality within our waking one.

The path of a witch is anything but linear and not anywhere near neat and tidy. Things get messy for witches. We have to deal with long ordeals and deep shadows as we are working with the entities that inhabit the Earth, where the dead reside and are getting digested by roots and mycelium.

Let’s explore what the shape of a witch is, how Saturn oversees this side of our work, and why shapeshifting is vital to our craft.

What is the Shape of your Fetch?

Our craft allows us to shapeshift and encourages it! A witch’s spirit, sometimes called the Fetch, is one of our most powerful tools.

Using our fetch soul’s ‘morphability’ lends power to our practice and opens the way for us to commune with the spirits. What we shapeshift into also reveals something of the nature of our truer forms that are closer to the heart of creation.

What spirit forms have you taken in dreams? What animals, plants, or beings have you turned into or felt in communion with? And how have you become more fully yourself in your witch form in waking life?

Saturn’s Ecstatic Unbinding

Saturn is an old ally to the witch. Saturn relates to crystallization, mastery, and maturation and demands deep learning, service, and dedication. The requirements placed on witch’s who are guided by Saturn’s hand is to work hard at our craft and understand our limitations without shame.

But if everything contains within it everything else, the Saturnian boundaries and pressure we live under also requires the opposite, cathartic release. Witch’s have to find a way to move that bound up energy, to satiate that desirous hunger that eats at the souls of seekers drawn to the Craft.

One way to work with this energy of release is to work with ecstatic witchcraft practices which shifts us into non-linear states of consciousness and puts us in direct contact with our shapeshifting Fetch spirit.

Saturn in his role as the Horned God figure of European folk witchcraft symbolizes this ecstatic and sometimes erotic release to set us loose, liberating our spirit from physical restriction. As author Nigel Jackson says in his book “Masks of Misrule“,

“[He] turns the universe upside-down and inside-out in the mystical phase of ‘ritual reversal’ where in all is inverted, sent ‘backwards’ in an infinite regression to the primal source behind creation”

– Chapter 4, pg. 59 Masks of Misrule by Nigel Jackson

Getting in touch with the primal inner part of the witch’s Fetch soul is a powerful way to move into the wild parts of our being. We can feed our spirits by becoming in this state of divine madness also known as theia mania which translates to crazy wisdom.

What is on the Other Side of this Release?

The patterns of our witchcraft are constantly changing to reveal evolving curves in time and space and doorways into other worlds. In this space of shapeshifting, our soul’s ability to see and move through parallel dimensions emerge. Seemingly fantastical things are possible in this spirit space revealing Faerie beings, Unicorns, and other mystical beasts and plants through our ecstatic bliss.

During moments of lack of surety in my practice, I notice that I desperately reach for solid ground, looking to define or find comfort in doing things a particular way. Declarations are made. “I will work with these certain elements placed neatly in these four directions.”

But as soon as I have something that feels organized per my Saturnian need for control, I actually find the scene of my practice shifts to reveal something new and intriguing or even more powerful.

I believe this says something of the nature of our Feyness but also of the Fae counterparts we work with and what it means to be a witch in service with the betwixt spirits of the Good Folk. The mystery is always near and is constantly disclosing its presence to us in unique ways.

Fate works tirelessly through cycles of death and rebirth. My point here is that our witchcraft and our identities as witches will change over time and look differently depending on the currents of power we are swimming in at any given moment.

And ultimately this could be what Saturn wants for us witches, to enter, leave, and re-enter, and leave again our Underworld caves with the lessons we have gathered to go work our spiraling magic in the world.

We can release the powers of change we have encountered and allow it to shape and then reshape our environments trusting that the magic, which has its own intelligence, will find its way.

The Slippery Purpose Witches Serve?

While we rely on the shapeshifting skills of our spirits to change forms for journeying into the other realms, the archetype of shapeshifting can also illustrate the odd nature of what witches have been called here to do.

Maybe we are here to hold space for the ambiguous, the unknown that comes betwixt transitions and the potentiality that comes with it? Using our magic to usher things in and usher things out, we are holding that space in-between light and shadow, poison and medicine. The horizon space where the edge of the mountain meets the sky.

We are forever responding to the changing landscape of our lives and the world around us, and some of us feel a deep calling to take up the challenge of working for collective change and benefit.

I feel in our role as enchanters, sorcerers, and spirit workers we are here to be vessels; intentionally channeling the chaotic powers of evolution into the physical world. We can grasp these forces of creation and weave them into form; embodied in the Faerie king in witchcraft who stands at the dawn of time–always becoming, always in-between.

Of course, this will look different for every witch. Maybe some folks are working with healer spirits as energy workers or maybe some people are working with the dead and soothing restless souls. Some witches are herbalists, storytellers, teachers, writers, cooks, parents, artists, and many other things.

Within these multitudes though, there is always that extra uncanny something that is carried on the spirit of a witch. A scent of someone who has taken a drink from the specific well of the the Divine Mystery that oversees and guides witchcraft’s shapehshifting art.