The Devil’s Dozen: Thirteen Craft Rites of the Old One

Description

The operations of magic and witchcraft deal with the hidden worlds of spirit and the powers innate within the natural world.

The “Old One”, who in folk traditions is often named “The Devil” embodies the rend in the veil between the worlds of the material and spiritual, the revealed and the hidden. It is through union with this entity that the witch awakened their powers and gained access to those residing within the hidden realms and the natural world.

In traditional folk belief, the Devil existed also as an embodiment of the chaotic forces of nature; a figure quite distinct from the Church’s “Satan”.  To the witch, he might also represent the “darker” aspects of the divine; the revealer of the mystic light, the guide of souls, and the sentinel at the threshold unto the mysteries of death and the Otherworld.

Something, it would seem, of the “elder god” and the old “spirit of the wild” has lingered through regional faery lore, the calendar of ritualistic seasonal folk-customs, and traditions attached to ancient landscape features. The themes of untamed nature; its freedom, spirits, and magic, so repugnant and threatening to the church, were grafted onto the diabolical; affording further preservation of the “Old One”.

Witch-lore records varied rites of initiatory contact, via which the worker of magic entered into a close, working union with the Old Oneand the spirit world.  Such union opened the ways unto curing ailments, excusing ill influence, attaining desire, and the destruction of the oppressive via the old arts of the circle, spirits, knotted cord, pierced candle, witch-bottle, magical image and charms; spoken, inscribed and herbal.

From the wellspring of inspiration “The Devil’s Dozen”; a modern “gramarye”, or “black book” of rites has been created and is offered by a present day initiate of the “Old Craft”. Within its pages there are to be found thirteen rites of vision, sacred compact, dedication, initiation, consecration, empowerment, protection, illumination, union, transformation and devotion.

Table of Contents

• The Man in Black
  • A Call unto the “Dark Man”
• Under The Horns
  • A Rite of Witch Initiation and Dedication
• The Witch’s Nowl
  • A Rite of Hallowing the Working Ground
• Raising the Stang
  • Hallowing, Shodding and Raising the Stang
• The Horned Castle
  • A rite of the Witch’s Compass
• The Wisht Hounds
  • A Call Unto the Wisht Hounds
  • A Rite of Turning
• The Light Betwixt
  • A Devotional Conjuration of the Witch Fire
  • A Devotional Mass for the Old Master Bucca
• All is One
  • The Rite of Union
• Skin Turning and The Wild Hunt
  • The Assumption of the Horns
  • An All Hallows’ Rite of the Wild Hunt
• The Becca Vessel
  • A Rite of the Bucca Vessel
• The Old Farmer
  • A Rite of the Green Cap

Pub Date: January 2020

160 pages, 5 x 8 inches