The Inner Landscape of the Witch: The Who, What, Where & Why

10 minutes read time.

What if the inner landscapes we encounter aren’t random?

The symbolism embodied in a landscape is a useful tool in witchcraft. Through shared witch narratives, stories, and folklore, we come to understand our craft in the context of the places in which it unfolds.

When it comes to our inner landscape, we are all tending our own unique spaces. From gardens and forests to temples and caves, these can all serve as symbolic elements to make sense of the kind of power we are cultivating in our witchcraft practices.

The spaces to which we are drawn, both in life and in the Other World, can tell us more about the kind of magic, mystery, and medicine we are stewarding in this life. The landscapes we work within are vast and likely to change over our lifetimes. Yet, like our fetch forms, there are usually a few that stand out as prime territory for the spirit work of witchcraft.

Contents

The Where: Your Inner Landscape

While symbolism is useful to our understanding of witchcraft, we can also go a layer deeper. Symbolism helps us understand what something means. And when we engage with a symbol as a living entity, we enter into relationship with that symbolic meaning.

Here the tangible spirit of a place emerges, revealing to us the deeper currents of power we are tasked with working through, understanding, and growing as witches.

Say your inner landscape takes the shape of a forest. When you go forth into your spirit double, astral travel, journey, or dream, you might have a tendency to find yourself in a forested landscape. This doesn’t mean you won’t experience other places, but that the forest is a regular place of your Other World ventures. And this is worth noting.

The forest is a place teeming with life, connected by mushroom mycelium networks, a canopy of trees, medicinal plants, burrowing animals, predators and prey, compost, and a multitude of creatures seen and unseen. The dominant elements are earth and water, but other elements pass through from time to time in the form of wildfires and windstorms.

But say your inner landscape takes the form of a desert or perhaps the ocean or maybe the celestial realms? How does this shift your understanding of yourself and your spiritual path?

Say, for example, you’re someone more connected to the ocean. You might feel yourself drawn towards the mysteries of the deep, the dream realms, storms, salt water, sea animals, seashells, and ingoing and outgoing tides of life and death.

Try This: Exploring Your Inner Landscape

Have you ever thought about your inner realm in this way?

Here is a quick practice you can do to take a survey of your inner world.

Gently shake out your body and close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Inhale, hold for a few seconds, and exhale. Settle your awareness deep into your body and seek within.

Ask yourself

What landscape do you repeatedly encounter?
Where do you find yourself when you dream, journey, or travel beyond ordinary awareness?
What environments feel familiar?
What places seem to call you deeper?
Who inhabits them?

Whatever place beckons you deeper into the spirit world, this is your unique portal, your personal garden, temple, and the current inner terrain of your spirit.

As your portal into the Other World, the nature of this space reveals a lot more about you than you might realize. It might be connected to your ancestry or to your spiritual lineage. Whatever form the landscape takes, it is nudging you towards the growing awareness around your patterns, allies, and power.

The Who: Your Spiritual Allies

Once you have a better understanding of what the shape of your inner landscape takes, you can further open your intuitive senses to discover who inhabits this realm.

The spirits that inhabit these spaces could be kin, familiars, or allies for you. You can tap the essence or spirit of the landscape itself and befriend the spirits of the elements, plants, beings, deities, ancestors, and deeper principles that populate this space.

For example, in some traditions unicorns are found in forests while jinn might be found in deserts. Giants are said to be connected to the deeper strata of the earth, as ancient as the rock itself and often connected to an older generation of gods.

If you are consistently being drawn to certain kinds of rocks and crystals, landforms, and plants, this can also reveal the spirits that are shaping your witch path.

Take the blue water lily (blue lotus) spirit, for example. The blue lotus has specific associations with ancient Egypt, the Nile River, and altered states of consciousness. Could your attraction to this plant be revealing something that your inner spirit already knows it belongs to?

Perhaps! And then it is up to you, the material realm version of you, to explore the depth of that desire. How deep it goes and where you take your discovery is up to you. Sometimes, your witchcraft path just requires a quick understanding of something while other times, your spirit might be calling you to delve into something for years of study, practice, and dedication.

Read your allies not just as symbols but as living entities that come with a host of meanings. These are doorways into the spiritual dimension. Everything you are drawn to relays not just a material explanation or interest but a deeper current of spiritual messaging.

This could be the key to unlocking your vocation as a witch whether enacted in this world or the Other. Pay attention to what you are, as you are both the tender and the tended.

Prehistoric cave art group of outlined handprints in reds and orange

The What: The Structures of Your Inner World

The inner realms of spirit are often filled with myriad structures: temples, libraries, markets, and more. Some of these are shared occult spaces with other souls, accessed through lucid dreaming, spirit travel, and journey work; some are the homes of the gods, and others are places you can personally construct through your magical power.

What types of buildings fill this inner world? Where are the shared meeting spaces, the nodules where you cross paths with other witches and spirits?

Are you a record keeper, writer, and researcher? You might have regular visits to libraries and archives. Certain guides and guardians might bring you to these spaces, emphasizing your job as one who articulates the messages of the Other World.

Or maybe you’ve made many visits to the marketplace? I’ve experienced Other World markets as crossroads, a meeting space where many entities and traditions intersect. You might be here for spirit work, ancestral healing, cross-cultural understanding of magical practices, or energy exchange.

If you tend to find yourself in a temple with other devotees, perhaps you are on a path of tending to the sacred through worship and relationship. You might find yourself cultivating a garden, caring for and harvesting plants, or making medicines.

There are so many forms the structures of this liminal world can take: laboratories, kitchens, spaceships, bathhouses, temples, churches, groves, cabins, and so much more. And these can all be ‘located’ in our mysterious topography within.

The Why: Landscape as Vocation

As you have probably gathered, there are as many inner landscapes as there are people. We all have our tendencies and the dominant forces that push through into our witchcraft.

These patterns and spiritual ecologies are clues as to our deeper purpose. I see being a witch as a vocation. It is a job to mediate powers between this world and the Other. The effect of this work isn’t always immediately visible, but I trust it’s unfolding.

When working the ways of witchery, we are so far outside the boundaries of time, we really can’t trace the path in a linear fashion. Anchoring our job as witches to these inner landscapes, spirits, and structures helps direct our focus.

This allows us to make sense of our role as witches and the spiritual path of ecstatic witchcraft. It deeply ties us to the soul of nature, the cosmos, and the planet. Taking note of our inner landscape can also prompt us to make changes in our material lives, going so far as to move to a location that mirrors our inner world, linking us up to the spirits of the land itself.

Our work always has a chance to grow more deeply. Therefore, understanding ourselves in the context of our craft is incredibly helpful to making sense of the complex web of life and sensing our place within it.

Night sky stars over red orange mountains desert

The Witch Who Moves

The forces that shape my practice have emphasized again and again the nomadic nature of my personal flavor of witchcraft.

After many years of trying and failing to put down deep roots, I have arrived at some kind of acceptance of my true nature.

Many of the spirits I work with are tied to the land, but through movement not place. Like the trooping faeries that move with the seasonal shifts, my spirit is connected with nomadic ancestors and beings who move from place to place across the earth.

After spending my 20s traveling the world and most of my 30s moving from state to state, I have come to appreciate the power of this feature of my craft. It is something that must move around, grow, and evolve.

While I think there is great merit that comes from cultivating the power and relationship with one specific place, I also have grown to understand the power that comes from movement.

I recognize this experience of movement in my own Jewish lineage and in the ways Jewish spiritual life has carried text, ritual, memory, and embodied practice across the diaspora, creating forms of rootedness that could travel with us.

I can apply this to my witchcraft with me as the axis point. The forces I have activated through my practice have the option to move where I move. From what I’ve gathered, spirits have free will, and some spirits appear to be inherently tied to place!

My relationship with the Eternal, the ancient powers of creation, anchors my ecstatic witchcraft. The inner landscape is the portal into the Other World, and the land or place we are practicing on becomes an extension of our magic.

Even with the option to bring my magic with me, I do want to point out that you can’t just do magic anywhere or expect the land to respond to you. I’ve found that magic works better when we work in relationship with the Earth: being respectful, honoring the spirits and practices of a place, giving offerings, and finding other opportunities to deepen our understanding.

There is a case to be made for the power that comes from highly specific and localized magic: building relationships with the genii loci and the guardians of rivers, mountains, and more.

But there is another side to this through the witch as traveler. Sometimes powers need to move or be moved, and the practitioner is the bridge to ritualizing these migrating forces.

Our element is the wind, guiding and directing us to our next destination and our inner world reveals this liminal and transitory state of being.

Closing Thoughts

Whether you are tending one powerful portal in a single location or moving the powers where you are, there is no ‘right’ way to be a witch.

The story is bigger than we are, woven with the numinous and the magical forces that shape our landscapes, seen and unseen.

Explore your path with a 1:1 session devoted to delving deeper into your spiritual path and practice.