Faerie Witchcraft and the Underworld: Initiation, Death, & Transformation

9 minutes read time.

The Ancestors whisper your sweet fate…

The way into a Faerie initiation is through the mysteries of life and death. Traversing the Underworld is not just a metaphor but an inner-dimension of our Earth-based reality.

Here we will explore what to expect on a path of Faerie witchcraft and how contact with these Underworld powers doesn’t just change you, it transforms you on every level of your being.

Contents

Discovering the Gate: The Threshold

A Faerie initiation ultimately unfolds through contact with the ancestors, the dead, and the powers of the Underworld. But we start our journey by meeting a threshold being.

This figure will be unique to you and your path. For me and many others on the ecstatic witchcraft path, it was the Horned God of witchcraft known as the Lord of the Forest, the Hidden Witch Father, and sometimes Azazel.

The Horned God called me in a dream. Your call to the initiatory path might be different, perhaps a threshold plant ally or the witch who lives between life and death, Baba Yaga.

However you find yourself at the Gate of the Great Below, you should prepare for the journey that is about to unfold. This is a path of total transformation. Yes, there will be psychological and personality alterations, but a complete shift is also taking place at the level of the soul.

This is what creates danger on the path of witchcraft and the way into the Faerie realm. Witchcraft can be destabilizing if undertaken without adequate support, grounding, or guidance.

In my experience, people can become disoriented or lose themselves on the path. We should take care to be mindful of our limits along the way, slow down when necessary, and be aware of our mental well-being.

Touching the Underworld powers can completely transform our way of being in the world. Luckily, we will have met the threshold guardian, who will usher us into the realms of the ancestral Dead, which we will visit next.

The Ancestors: Meeting the Dead and the Underworld

It is hard to get anywhere in Faerie without first coming into a relationship with our ancestral lineages, both physical and spiritual.

From what I know, taking space to honor and care for the ancestral powers that gave us life is essential to the transformational underworld journey. Without healing around ancestral patterns, karma, and trauma, we will get bogged down or even stuck at the entrance to the Faerie realms.

While everyone’s relationships with their lineages will look different, some general practices you can put into place are the following:

Create a dedicated ancestor altar
Decorate this altar with images, items, and heirlooms
Feed the ancestors water, alcohol, coffee (make it a regular practice)
Light a candle to your dead or burn incense or herbs for them (I like to burn lavender bundles)
Call in the ancestors you want to work with, the ones who lived good lives and can share their wisdom with you. Ask them to bring healing to your ancestral lines
Pray to your ancestors to support your work

Cultivating a relationship with the ancestors will empower your practice. These connections will help protect you on your way through uncharted spiritual dimensions.

Working with the dead will give you a starting point to understand the powers of death and support you in discerning the spirits you are connecting with, whether ancestors, faeries, or other beings of the Otherworld.

Ancestral practices can also deepen your connections to the spirits that live within the earth, the roots, the soil, and mycelium, and how all of these powers work together synergistically in cycles of life and death.

While we are constructing the ancestral part of our practice and opening to the Underworld powers, a co-current phase of initiation is likely to be underway. Next we will talk about moving deeper into our descent.

The Ordeals of Initiation

Carrying the blessing of our threshold guardian and the Ancestors, the next phase is a series of what will be many underworld ordeals.

The path of Faery witchcraft comes with many challenges for the initiate. In this context, ordeals are the trials and tests one is put through to temper their spirit for this kind of Otherworld work.

While we interpret these experiences as ordeals, the spirit world likely just sees them as the necessary destruction to our becoming.

During the height of the ordeals, it might feel like your life is falling apart, and it probably will be! Transformation requires doing things differently, living differently, making different decisions, and letting go of what was. Witchcraft can teach us, and not in the most gentle way, that life comes from death.

Without removing and then changing what has been, the way to becoming a Faerie witch is incomplete. This is a powerful lesson for those of us who hang on to our past for dear life.

If you are on this path, and are dedicated to seeing it through, you must let go. And even as challenges arise, it might be comforting to know that spiritual liberation might be waiting for you on the other side.

It should be mentioned that there are ways to make the path easier. Working within an established tradition, finding experienced mentors, and cultivating other stabilizing influences can make the way smoother.

Either way, an initiate will have to let go of certain ways of being. This process can be painful depending on how long you have been carrying the weight of your stories and patterns.

Part-way through this journey, our spirits will have changed or opened up enough that we will begin to meet the powers and entities of the inner Underworld. Let’s venture there next.

Boticelli Primavera Faerie Witchcraft Faery Queen Underworld Mysteries

The Inner Earth Mysteries

The way to truly know the mysteries of Faerie is to experience them in our body. An intellectual or mental understanding will never compare to the knowing that settles into our bones.

Here we will become true dedicants to our path, recognizing what the path requires. We can start to have experiences with true power and a greater understanding of how the Faerie realms work.

This power will come through encounters with land spirits, the Fey, and Otherworld entities. In ecstatic witchcraft, these beings are not just engaged with as psychological constructs, but disembodied conscious spirits, with their own motivations, orientation to reality, and way of being.

This will be a time for coming into a deeper understanding of our place within the great magnitude and diversity that exists within the web of life. Through the transformative process we can now engage more consciously with the Faerie powers resident in the Earth.

And with the old tapestry of identity reduced to threads, now the re-weaving can begin.

deep space nebula stars galaxy night sky - spirit guides star ancestors ancient magic

The Gifts of Re-Emergence

There came a time in my initiation where I received a clear message from the spirits to “come out of the underworld.” This alerted me to the profound ordeal I had been traversing for what had been years.

While I felt the weight of all the deep-soul crushing shifts, the many iterations of the dissolution of my identity, and so many other harrowing moments, I wasn’t fully conscious I had been in the Underworld all that time.

Looking back I can see how subsumed I really was, being guided from one moment of self-undoing to another. While I had many beautiful moments during that time and many encounters of a celestial, mystical, and cosmic nature, a large part of me was ultimately in the Great Below.

I now can see with perfect clarity the exact moment I descended the stairs and the exact moment I walked myself back up the spiral staircase. This entire process from descent to re-emergence took seven years.

But a witch doesn’t entirely leave the Underworld behind, they merge with it. A witch’s melding with the powers of the Underworld is not just a passageway into Faerie. It is a complete paradigm shift in our perception of time and what it means to be connected to the ancestral streams of life and death.

This is a source of power and connection for the witch and one of the boons that comes from our dedication to the path. This is a starting point for the next phase of our work as witches, which is always evolving and changing as we grow and deepen.

An Ultimately Spirit-Guided Initiation

I am deeply blessed and eternally grateful to have met a dear friend and mentor along the way who helped me fully understand what was happening to me.

And while him and I are serving different traditions, having this mentor was exactly what I needed to not get lost in the complex world of spirit. All of his guidance would eventually lead to my spirit-led initiation into the Faerie mysteries.

Life does not suddenly shift into something new on the other side of a Faerie initiation, but a drastic change has taken place. Initiation takes years and over these years, a culling will occur, removing patterns, habits, people, and more from your life that don’t serve the deeper heart of your practice.

This alone will have created major shifts in your external and internal life. Another important change that will take place is your relationship to the spirit realm. From my experience following an initiation, the shape of my soul has been molded to more easily traverse its corridors.

Are You Being Called to Faerie Initiation?

Let’s close this topic out for now with a question. How do you know if you’re destined for a Faerie initiation?

Ultimately, that is a decision made between you and the spirits. While I cannot determine if this path is or isn’t for you, here are some things you can look out for that might indicate you’re walking the Faerie way:

Specific Faerie realm spirits have made contact with you in visions or dreams
Dreaming of the mysteries you would otherwise not have encountered anywhere else
Special contact with the Dead and the Ancestors
A deep longing and desire that this is the path meant for you
A feeling of homecoming or kinship when you encounter faerie lore and practices or in spending time around other faerie witches
A calling from Fae-realm plants like mushrooms, hawthorn, and rose

The gate will open for you when it is time. And even though the faerie initiation path is presented here in a somewhat linear way, it is by no means a straight path.