Celtic Tree Month Of Hazel Begins Today

The Hazel Moon was known to the Celts as Coll, which translates to "the life force inside you". This is the time of year when Hazelnuts are appearing on the trees, and are an early part of the harvest. Hazelnuts are also associated with wisdom and protection. Hazel is often associated in Celtic lore with sacred wells and magical springs containing the salmon of knowledge. This is a good month to do workings related to wisdom and knowledge, dowsing and divination, and dream journeys. If you're a creative type, such as an artist, writer, or musician, this is a good month to get your muse back, and find inspiration for your talents. Even if you normally don't do so, write a poem or song this month.

Weather Magic and Folklore (Part 1 of 2)

In many magical traditions, weather magic is a popular focus of workings. The term “weather magic” can be used to mean anything from divination and forecasting to actual control of the weather itself. When you consider that many of today’s folk magic customs are rooted in our agricultural past, it makes sense that an ability to foretell or change weather patterns might be considered a valuable skill. After all, if your family’s livelihood and life depended on the success of your crops, weather magic would be a handy thing to know.

Dowsing

Dowsing is the ability to find a water source in a previously unknown area via divination. In many parts of Europe professional dowsers were hired to locate new places to dig wells. This was typically done with the use of a forked stick, or sometimes a copper rod. The stick was held out in front of the dowser, who walked around until the stick or rod began to vibrate. The vibrations signaled the presence of water beneath the ground, and this was where villagers would dig their new well.
During the Middle Ages this was a popular technique for locating new springs to use as wells, but it later became associated with negative sorcery. By the seventeenth century, most dowsing had been outlawed because of its connection to the devil.

Harvest Predictions

In many rural and agricultural societies, fertility rituals were conducted to ensure a strong and healthy harvest. For instance, the use of the Maypole during the Beltane season often tied in to the fertility of the fields. In other cases, farmers used divination to determine whether the grain season would be successful – a few kernels of corn placed on a hot iron would pop and jump around. The behavior of the hot kernels indicated whether or not the price of grain would go up or down in the fall.

All About: Dowsing

Dowsing is purported to be a psychic method of finding hidden things, i.e. water, gold, treasure, etc.  To tell the truth, we had a little trouble when we embarked on the research for this page, because for every document that touts the wonders of Dowsing, there is another document that describes controlled studies in which dowsers basically performed very poorly.

Despite this, Dowsing has been utilized for hundreds of years, and in Europe it is still considered a valid medium for finding water, etc.  As such, we will treat it as a viable phenomena for the purposes of this page, as it does seem to work in some cases.

The use of Pendulums to answer questions is a variation on traditional Dowsing methods, and again, this is met with quite a bit of skepticism as far as the literature is concerned.  This use of Dowsing comes very close to the concept of using Ouija Boards for insight into the unknown, and quite frankly, it seems to us that a Ouija Board is much better suited for this type of inquiry.  However, we will leave that decision to the reader, and do our best to describe and report various techniques and tools used in Dowsing on these pages.

All concerned seem to agree that Dowsing is a learned art that comes with practice, and that it is probably not a spiritual entity that causes the rods or pendulums to react in the ways they do.  Rather, the results appear to come from inside the dowser himself, and indeed, some people have the innate ability to find whatever they are looking for without the use of tools of any kind.

For most of us, however, a tool of some sort is required, and on the following pages in this section, we will concentrate on how to make or acquire the proper tools for Dowsing, and how to actually utilize them for the desired results.  

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-The Crafty Witch