A solitary drawing down of the moon

An original, solitary adaptation. It is not the Gardnerian rite, and it does not require a body designated as priestess.

Drawing Down the Moon, in many Wiccan covens, is a rite in which a priestess is understood to embody or speak for a goddess, often with a priest invoking. The classic published forms grew up in the twentieth-century craft. They are not a single ancient script, even though the phrase has older poetic cousins — a Thessalian witch-story in ancient sources is not your circle’s liturgy.

What you are actually doing

You are inviting a quality you associate with the moon — lucidity, change, a light that does not explain itself — to be briefly more vivid in your own attention. You are not required to believe a goddess has vacated the sky to occupy your skull. If devotion moves you to speak as if she is close, speak that way, and remain able to stop, drink water, and know your own name.

Materials

A window, or a bowl of potable water to be a moon if the sky is clouded or you cannot go out.
One candle or a dim lamp. Not a circle of fire on the floor.
A chair, because trance that requires you to sway until you fall is bad choreography.
Optional: a round of mirror, covered when you are done. Scrying rules live on the scrying page; this rite is not an order to see pictures.

The rite

1Open the room. If other people are home, tell them you need twenty quiet minutes, or use the silent version: no spoken words, the text read with the eyes.
2Sit. Look at the moon or at the water. If you see nothing because of weather, say “weather is also a teacher” and continue. Do not wait for a perfect phase unless you want to. Any phase works; the full moon is traditional for this title and not mandatory.
3Place one hand on your chest and one on the cup or the windowsill.
4Read the words. Pause. Notice three sensations in the body that are ordinary (temperature, weight, breath). If you feel nothing mystical, you have not failed.
5Ask one question you can act on this week. Do not ask the moon to manage another person.
6Write one line in the journal, even if the line is “I was tired and the moon was a streetlamp and that was enough.”
7Cover the water or drink it only because it is ordinary drinking water you set out yourself — not because moonlight purified it. Moonlight does not disinfect water.
8Close. Hands washed. Light out.

Moon, or the idea of the moon, I do not command you down. I make a little room in my attention and you may pass through it like weather. I will not pretend to be anyone’s oracle afterward. I will keep my name. I will keep my feet on the floor. What I see, I will test in daylight.

If it feels like too much

Stop speaking. Look at a corner of the room and name its color. Eat something. Sleep. A rite that unseats you is a rite to shorten next time, not a sign that you are specially chosen. If you have a history of dissociation or psychosis, skip invocation entirely and use the journal-and-window version: look, write, close. That version is complete.

Group use

Do not surprise a friend with possession language. If two people want to try this, agree that either may say “ground” and both will stop, drink water, and end. Nobody channels a message for the person who did not ask.