Sort of like the occult equivalent of guarding the nuclear codes, many groups profess possession of knowledge so dangerous that it threatens the very safety of the world.

Mysteries take care of themselves.īut why do we even keep secrets? What purpose does it serve? Before I was initiated, I might have thought that certain secrets were kept in order to prevent the ignorant from causing harm, and indeed this reason is often cited in defense of ritual secrecy. Here we might begin to see the all-too-common conflation between mystery and secrecy the former being the indescribable experiential core of a path, while the latter covers material specific to the particular ritual, group, coven, lineage, or tradition. They might even use deliberate misdirection and outright false information to discourage non-members from learning too much too soon. It is not uncommon for some members to patrol the edges of their systems, guarding the secrets that lie therein.

Modern religious Witchcraft is sometimes described as a “mystery tradition”. And with that understanding, comes the faint possibility of being able to influence those connections in order to bring about a desired result. It is looking beyond what we can see and touch and delving deep into the inner workings and relationships between things in order to better understand how they work together. If you think about it, most of a witch’s job is discovering nature’s secrets for themselves… working to understand the hidden mechanisms behind what we think of as reality. In other stories the witch is the ultimate revealer of secrets. The witch knows how to keep silent, passing secrets down only to others of their kind, in lineages and witch-families since the beginning of time. But what exactly are they? Are they forbidden rituals opening doors to storehouses of unimaginable knowledge and power? Are they arcane words and symbols that can be used to influence outcomes, bless one’s allies, or even blight one’s enemies? Are they the secrets of which herbs and plants will lull the mind to sleep, or grant visions of true love? Maybe they are the closely guarded names of ancient spirits, bound to service through occulted machinations stretching back through a lineage of practitioners, each of whom have been entrusted with this knowledge under pain of oath? What spells and barbarous words have been painstakingly kept from public view, lest their power become diluted, corrupted, or abused? Perhaps this knowledge is best kept out of the hands of those who would seek such power for themselves and kept only by those who can fully understand their context and treat them as sacred. Witchcraft is a practice filled with secrets.

Witch it secrets