7 minutes read time.

The transformative nature of ecstatic witchcraft is that it is a process of being completely made over in spirit. The practice of shapeshifting can be engaged with as an alchemical journey of change and personal evolution.

Shapeshifting can also be something deeper, a visceral sensation of shifting into different versions of spirit. We can experience reality from the perspective of other beings and forms of consciousness through our spirit double, sometimes called the Fetch.

Let’s explore the fascinating dimension of shapeshifting in Traditional and Faerie witchcraft.

Shaping the Fetch Soul

The Fetch can be thought of as the life-force part of the witch’s soul. This is the part of our being who gathers energy, connects to dreams, ancestral memories, and the heart of the Earth.

This part of us is malleable. It can shapeshift and take on different spiritual forms and animal characteristics in shamanic journeys, astral travels, and dreams. We can see our Fetch as most connected to our instincts, desires, and survival.

Tapping the Fetch can open our senses and support us in venturing into the Otherworld. What we shapeshift into also reveals something of the nature of our truer forms that are closer to the heart of creation.

The Fetch and Spirit Flight

The forms our Fetch takes most easily will reveal what kind of magical work we are called toward. While this is a shapeshifting part of ourselves, and therefore doesn’t have a set form, from my experience, we do tend to shift into several core forms.

These forms will be unique to you and they can be anything from hybrid humanoid mammals to insects. Take note of what you are naturally drawn towards as this will be a clue as to what kind of spirit forms you can slip into.

Dreams, spirit journeys, and visions all provide evidence of what your soul is up to this lifetime. Once we have a better handle on our Spirit Double forms, we can then turn our attention towards removing the blocks that keep us from experiencing the ecstasies of the spirit.

Breaking through into the Ecstasy of Witchcraft

Many things block the way to ecstatic spirit flight. We can be bogged down in fear, worry, shame, guilt, and many other things that keep us from the letting go needed to liberate the Fetch.

Unleashing our wildness is echoed in ancient traditions of ecstatic bliss like the Roman Saturnalia feast of role reversals and debauchery near the winter solstice. These lineages directly link us to the states of divine madness, known to the ancient Greeks as theia mania, which support the altered states of consciousness which lead to shapeshifting and soul flight.

These traditions also reveal a key figure on the ecstatic witchcraft path, the Horned God of Witches who can also appear as the Faerie King. He is a guardian of the crossroads between worlds and holds up a mirror so we can see our true selves.

He might appear as a Trickster in this role, but ultimately is showing us the way to spiritual truth, freedom, and liberation.

Author Nigel Jackson says of the Horned God 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

What Shapeshifting Reveals About the Soul

Besides giving us a glimpse into the Unseen, shapeshifting is a powerful lesson in our fluidity as spirits. While we are human and embodied, we also have the extraordinary ability to shape our perception.

In my experience, moving our consciousness into other spirit forms offers us insights into the inner workings of the universe. Perhaps it even gives us a chance to understand the nature of the human spirit with more wisdom.

It also allows us to see and know that we are not just our bodies. While we are born into a body, we grow up, age, and eventually die, some other aspect of us remains, transforms, and evolves. This is one of the lessons I have come to understand through my shapeshifting and Otherworld travels.

Working through our Fetch has given me a window into the inner dimensions, where everything shows up as more true to what it is. There are no masks there hiding the true nature of things, like we experience here in the physical world.

Why Witches Resist Fixed Identities

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 uncanny nature of what witches have been called to do.

Perhaps we are to hold space for the ambiguous? Working at the thresholds of change, transition, and potentiality?

Using our magic to usher things in and usher things out, we are holding the space in-between light and shadow, carrying both poison and medicine. This is the space where the mountains meet 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.

Delving into these mysteries can eventually grant us access to the Faerie King, a figure who can show up in visions and workings as a being who stands at the dawn of time. He can appear as always becoming, always in-between.

The visions I have had of him have unveiled something of the nature of the eternal and what it feels like to be in communion with the timeless realms of Faerie. Of course, this journey will look different for every ecstatic witch.

The Poetics of Shapeshifting

One way to work with the ineffable themes encountered through mystical experiences is to create writing, music, art, and poetry. In that spirit, I will share a poem, describing my experiences with shapeshifting in the Craft.

Where Unicorns Roam

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

Thoughts to Contemplate

The ecstatic witchcraft tradition carries the shamanic spirit of shapeshifting as a way into spirit.

What I want to leave you with is that I have found shapeshifting to be both a spiritual act and a way of experiencing reality. This existence is much more flexible than we might give it credit for, which includes us.

Witches are walkers between worlds. Through initiation into the Faerie and Underworld mysteries, we come to be stewards of these threshold powers. And ultimately, that is what makes shapeshifting such a compelling part of the nature of our practice.