6 minutes read time.

Our craft teaches us to shapeshift and encourages it!

A witch’s spirit double, sometimes called the Fetch, is one of our most powerful tools. In traditional witchcraft, this spirit double is often called the Fetch, a soul form capable of:

• shapeshifting
• spirit travel
• ecstatic communion with the spirit realm

Shaping the Fetch Soul

Using our fetch soul’s ‘morphability’ lends power to our practice and opens the way for us to commune and travel 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?

Saturn as an Ally to Witches

The domain of Saturn includes witchcraft associated with the occult, esoteric, death, timing, and poisonous plants. Saturn represents blocks on a path towards mastery and delayed gratification. With Saturn’s help, we are challenged and pushed to learn how to move past barriers to spirit liberation.

We have to find a way to move bound up energy—to satiate desire, our primal 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 magic practices which shift us into non-linear states of consciousness and puts us in direct contact with our shapeshifting Fetch spirit, which can take many spirit forms.

Witches become skilled at employing Saturn’s hard-working energy and power. We work meticulously to untangle all the blocks that get in the way of our spirit’s joyous ecstasy, like fear, worry, shame, guilt, etc. Anything that blocks us from ‘letting go’, dancing, being wild, and free. We learn the way and can share it with others.

The Ecstasy of Witchcraft

Ecstatic witchcraft is the liberating of our spirit forms from physical restriction though trance and altered states of consciousness. This is where Saturn, as a spirit who is not quite who he seems, can also be tricky. He symbolizes restriction but also the freedom from that restriction.

Like the Horned God of pagan lore, Saturn is celebrated at the Roman Saturnalia feast of role reversals and debauchery near the winter solstice.

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

This is us getting in touch with the primal, inner part of the witch’s soul, a conscious awareness of the wild parts of our being.

This can be a state of divine madness know as theia mania which translates to crazy wisdom.

What is on the Other Side of Ecstatic Bliss?

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 change form, see, and move through parallel dimensions emerge.

Seemingly fantastical things are possible in this spirit space revealing Faerie beings, ancestor spirits, gods, and other mystical beasts and plants in the realms of ecstatic bliss.

Dancing the Spaces In-Between

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, I actually find the scenes of my practice shift 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 and other spirits we work with as betwixt different states of consciousness.

The mystery is always near and is constantly disclosing its presence to us in unique ways.

Always Evolving, open to self-transforming

Fate works tirelessly through cycles of death and regeneration and renewal. Our witchcraft and our identities as witches will change over time and look differently depending on the currents of power we are engaging with.

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, finds its way.

The Slippery Nature of the Witch

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 that space in-between light and shadow, between poison and medicine. The 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.

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 helping souls cross over. Some witches are herbalists, storytellers, teachers, writers, cooks, parents, artists, and many other things.

Within these multitudes though, there is always that extra little something that is carried within the spirit of a witch. A scent of someone who has crossed into the Mystery.

Unicorn Poison

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