Heather Carter on YouTube put together a series of prompts titled #31DaysofWitchcraft that she’s been working her way through since the beginning of May. I really like this idea, but I can’t handle the responsibility of any more daily posts, so I thought that for the next few weeks, I would do one (or a few at a time) for the end of week “My Pagan Perspective” posts and work through them a bit at a time.
12. Do you have a separate witchy name? Why, or why not?
My “witchy name” is the same as my online name. It’s Twist the Leaf.
This name comes from a line in a ritual that my sister and I wrote together as children.
To be fair, when I first came online, I used just “Twist” and then “Twist the Leaf” for circles and pagan events and activities. But over the years, the two have melded and I now use Twist the Leaf in most places, and “Twist” as the shortened version here and there.
As for why. My mother used to take my sister and I to a lot of Wiccan functions, and having a “witchy name” was all the rage in those circles. I chose my “witchy name” initially in order to finally get them to stop pestering me about choosing one, but over time it’s become… more than that.
I no longer go to those events and haven’t for… at least fifteen years or more. Other than my sister (and our mentor recently as she’s been living with us for a bit now), my practice is primarily solitary. But the name has stuck, and these days it seems that I’m actually more comfortable being called Twist than I am called by my birth name.
13. Do you write your own spells, use pre-written one or do a mix of both?
I write my own spellwork, or at times work on it together with my sister.
This falls back on the way we were raised. To be honest? I don’t spend a lot of time reading pagan/wiccan/witchcraft books. This isn’t how I learned my craft. Because of this? Although I knew that published books had spells in them, I didn’t realize these were actually spells people used. Like, letter for letter and word for word, used like a recipe to bake pastry. This realization that people actually do that was baffling to me.
My sister and I were taught to write our own rituals and our own spellwork. We were taught that it is a part of the process of casting a spell to do the work behind the spell, which includes doing the research to know what elements to include in the spellwork, and constructing the spell and wordwork ourselves. I guess that because of this, I assumed that the spellwork in published books was there as a “jumping off point”? You know, providing ideas and examples… but not there to be used as-is.
Thank you for sharing, love. Though is there supposed to be a question 17? I’m not seeing it?
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