The Candidate

This is the second module of Western Witchcraft I: Fundamentals and Doctrinal Basis online course  provided for free preview. Learn more about that course and how to enroll by clicking here.

VIDEO LECTURE:

DOWNLOAD LECTURE NOTES:

Click here to download the lecture notes (pdf)

WORKBOOK READING:

Chapter 1: The Candidate (pdf)

PRACTICUM:

• Read the Candidate’s Pledge of Honor and Pledge of Aspirations
• Set up what will be your altar space and veil it with your altar cloth

From the 2019 Dec. 12 Newsletter:

Chapter 1 is really where we start to get into serious study. Not just anyone can be initiated into the Mysteries, so who is a candidate for initiation? What are the prerequisite qualities to become a magus? That’s what Chapter 1 answers.

Like with Chapter 0, the Introduction, read the main text and then if there are annotations in the right margin, read those to help fill in any blanks or areas of confusion from the main text.

Levi, like many of his contemporaries, liked to cite and make reference to a whole bunch of figures from history and the Bible to make their points. Today, in 2019, not all of us are immediately familiar with those references. So I’ve tried to fill in the blanks by explaining as many of Levi’s references as I could. You’ll find them in my right-margin annotations.

You’ll see at the end of Chapter 1, there’s the candidate’s pledge and a listing of aspirations to guide your personal commitments to yourself in the course of your studies. Why this? Because Levi. He pointed out in the Intro that occult study is not something to half-ass. When you half-ass the occult, that’s when you invite trouble into your world.

Funny, he calls the occult “science” and like science, every detail matters. Think launching a rocket into space or industrial engineering. Just one calculation off and the entire bridge can collapse under its own weight. You wouldn’t want to half-ass science when building and developing stuff, so with exactly the same demanding rigor, don’t half-ass the occult.

I started developing this Fundamentals of Witchcraft course with a very heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I wasn’t going to make a skippy dippy #witchesofinstagram #witchyaesthetic kind of course. I mean. There’s enough of that already, am I right or am I right?

Also, by now most of you know my personality and you get me. I’m not really into the dance in a white dress out in nature and wave my arms around brand of spirituality. An altar full of hundreds of dollars of pretty ornamental witchy trinkets is not my aesthetic. I’m not going to clear my chakras by thinking happy thoughts (though to be clear, I am a very strong advocate of thinking happy thoughts).

Yes, witchcraft is intuitive. Yes, the farmer who doesn’t read any books but is working her bare hands deep in dirt every day and reading the clouds knows more about magic than the scholarly erudite who locks herself up in an ivory tower reading Latin and Aramaic grimoires.

I’m behind that statement 100%.

What I want to ask is, why can’t we be both the farmer who works her bare hands deep in dirt, reading the clouds, but also balances that out with time in an ivory tower studying Latin and Aramaic grimoires?

What’s so wrong with scholarship and education? Why have we become a society who looks down our noses at the learned?

It goes without saying that witchcraft, divination, and spell-crafting is intuitive, is instinctual, and comes from that part deep within that totally does not need books.

But there is also an indisputable science to it. And I want to know the science. I want to show you the path to know that science for yourself.

My mom can predict the rain because she feels it in her bones. And that’s cool. But I want to learn meteorology.

See Previous Module:

Chapter 0: Introduction

Purchase the course pack:

Witchcraft Fundamentals: Doctrinal Basis