By Cat Gina Cole
I have been a psychic my whole life and when I was little, my mom and grandma introduced me into our family tradition. When I began writing about psychism, I found it very difficult to write about something that was like breathing to me. To sit and draw it all out step by step was a challenge but as I did so, I realized how beneficial it was to have it all laid out so it could be identified and used instead of mystified and indescribable. My psychism became a useable tool. Then I realized there are many psychics that might benefit from this too and that is how my book, Psychic Skills for Magic and Witchcraft, came to life.
I used to think my psychism was my witchcraft and magic and since then, I have learned they are very separate things. To me, witchcraft is how I live with the world and nature and use those relationships. Magic is the actions I take to bring about a desired result by using learned correspondences. When I add psychism to the mix, I wholly become the working, not just a technician using the formula.
When I include my psychism to a working ,I can tap into energies well beyond the working at hand and let them channel through me and into the working. This increases the effectiveness of the working.
To learn this, you can begin with a simple blade of grass. Take one blade of grass in hand. Look at all of its details, then push your senses inside of it until you can see in your mind the veins inside the blade uses to acquire water and nutrients. Think about how it is a live being and all it does to live. Focus on this to the exclusion of all else. You are succeeding when you no longer notice your body, your surroundings, or anything but the blade of grass. Once you have accomplished that, sit down on the grass. Close your eyes and touch the grass around you, then focus on becoming one with that grass. Feel it, let it talk to you. Feel its spirit. Is it happy or needing water?
Now as witch, let’s do some magic for the grass and call some rain. Now that you have connected to the live spirit of the grass, you can project the request of the grass for rain to the elements and be the conduit of that energy and spirit as you invoke the elements to respond. This gives the elements an extra connection and reason to respond to our desire as well as extra power to the working. It is in these ways psychism adds to magic and witchcraft.
The above exercise is an excellent way to begin bringing your psychism into your magical workings. If you do not have grass available, you can sit with a houseplant and create the same connection to use. You can make this kind of connection with anything. Something from your dreams, a person, a city, the very atmosphere and more. There is no limit to what energies psychism can connect you to. The goal is to be able to channel those energies into your workings.
To build your psychic skill, having a regular meditation practice is key. Meditation is the basic skill needed for psychism because it conditions the mind. From there, you can practice making connections with anything you touch: a stair rail, a dog, a stone, and pick up psychic information from it that can be used in magical workings or from which you can simply divine information.
Divining a thing is like having a conversation with it, much like the grass in the above exercise. I call it “reading” because I read what the spirit of the thing is putting off. In addition to a meditation practice, if you add a practice of reading things, it will enhance your ability to make energetic connections you can use in magical workings. Being able to divine or read things around you is of great benefit to everyday life. It gives you information into which others cannot tap.
This skill ties into your intuition but goes way beyond intuition. Intuition is a nudge; divining is receiving specific information. In the spirit of reading a thing to divine information, let’s say you are about to go into an office for job interview. Before you walk in, you pause and touch the door handle for a moment and focus on seeing or feeling the person behind the desk. You listen to, or what we call “receive,” what the door handle is telling you. I have picked up the mood and energy of the person in the room that way and it can tell you much about the person doing the interview to your benefit.
Now let’s take this ability into magic. If you are in ritual and pick up a wand, that wand has a spirit and energy, a life and memories, that you can tap with psychic skills to channel into the work. Or you may find the wand does not want to do that particular working, which might lead you to a more appropriate tool to use for a working. I use my psychic senses to read the room. This tells me not only the mood and energy of folks present, but often helps me to pick up some of their ritual needs before beginning. I can then tailor the ritual towards that for them. Some call this “being in the spirit.” Either way, it is allowing yourself to be in an altered state so you can receive information.
In ritual, there is also aspecting. Aspecting is when you take on the persona and become the deity with which you are working. Now, I do not know about you, but I have been in rituals where the lead is “aspecting” and I can tell they are faking it because there is no palpable energy or persona change that you can feel. There is that sense of uncomfortable awkwardness in the group. By comparison, I have been in ritual where someone is aspecting and you know it! The energy is intense, it makes the hair raise a bit, or you may see their face change or something in their eyes or voice and you are drawn in and engaged. This is the difference psychic skills make to aspecting.
Cat Gina Cole is a Herditary Witch and author of Psychic Skills for Magic and Witchcraft (Llewellyn, 2022). She is the founder of The Coven of the Rising Phoenix and Staff Coordinator for “Green Egg Magazine.” You can reach her at www.catginacole.com.