Book summary “Year of the Witch”: summary

Introduction

You feel a persistent disconnect from the natural world because modern life traps you behind screens and inside climate-controlled buildings. You might buy commercial ritual tools and try to follow rigid neopagan calendars designed for entirely different hemispheres, leaving your practice feeling hollow and disconnected.

Temperance Alden argues that you can craft a sustainable, anti-consumerist witchcraft practice rooted in local ecology and seasonal rhythms instead of blindly following rigid neopagan calendars.

The book guides you from rebuilding your inner intuition to understanding local climate patterns and working with the spirits of your specific region. You will learn how to practice magick without buying expensive supplies and how to adapt traditional holidays to your actual environment.

• How do you develop and trust your own intuition?
• What role do local land spirits play in your daily practice?
• How can you celebrate seasonal shifts without relying on mass-produced tools?

1. Intuitive Witchcraft and Elemental Foundations

Intuition in witchcraft is not a vague supernatural gift but a developed subconscious process that can be expanded through active practice and categorized into three distinct levels.

Temperance Alden defines intuition using research from Leeds University as the brain storing, processing, and retrieving information subconsciously. She breaks intuition down into passive intuition as complete guessing, intuition as moderate awareness, and educated or active intuition. Cultivating active intuition requires treating it like a muscle through dedicated practice, documentation, and scientific-style journaling of spellwork results.

The author compares developing an intuitive ear to her early work in a 911 dispatch center, where operators eventually learn to distinguish true emergencies from non-emergency calls just by tone of voice through long-term practice.

Instinct and intuition are fundamentally different psychological responses, where instinct is a rapid biological survival reaction and intuition is a calm, effortless flow of knowledge without conscious reasoning. Instinct operates as a knee-jerk, impulsive reaction to immediate external stimuli designed to keep animals alive, such as a fear of heights or deep water. In contrast, intuition is the acquisition of knowledge without conscious thinking or reasoning, flowing like a lazy breeze without any impulse to rush or force an outcome.

You can develop practical intuition through a structured routine:

• Take aside time to engage in a calming, solitary activity like a bath, walk, or cooking.
• Go to a quiet place where you will not be disturbed and sit with your back straight and feet planted.
• Close your eyes, breathe in deeply, and exhale to release the mental clutter.
• Visualize an upcoming decision or situation and listen to the thoughts and voices speaking to you.
• Filter out high-energy, high-pitched anxious thoughts related to the ego and let them go with your breath.
• Observe the remaining thoughts that flow like a lazy river, representing the solid conviction of your intuition.

Elemental forces

Elemental magick utilizes the four physical conditions of energy alongside spirit to manifest intentions, drawing strength from the natural world through deliberate interaction.

Drawing on Richard Cavendish's alchemical perspective, the four primary elements represent states of energy where fire stands for electricity, air is gas, water is liquid, and earth is solid. Witches invoke these elements not just through ritual tools, but through everyday actions like intentional breathing, drinking water, cooking with root vegetables, and experiencing the heat of the sun.

The four base seasons embody specific elemental forces and directions that can be intentionally invoked during spellwork and ritual practice. Spring embodies the element of air and is linked to new life and breezes. Summer embodies the searing heat of fire and the sun. Fall represents the earth element, stability, and grounding at the end of the witch's year. Winter embodies water in snowy climates, acting as a purifying and dormant rest period. Spirit fills the gaps between transitions across all seasons.

You can invoke these forces through specific color associations:

• Use white, sky blue, light pink, and light yellow candles to call down air and spring.
• Use red, orange, bold yellow, brown, white, and gold candles to call down fire and summer.
• Use green, purple, brown, gray, black, yellow, and burnt orange candles to call down earth and fall.
• Use silver, gray, white, blue, light blue, purple, red, black, or green candles to call down water and winter.
• Use white candles for spirit in spring and summer, and black candles for spirit in fall and winter.

2. Cycles, Seasons, and Climate Patterns

Modern conveniences and climate-controlled environments insulate humans from natural earth rhythms. You become numb to natural elements because you naturally seek emotional and physical safety behind air-conditioning and year-round food availability. True spiritual growth requires feeling the discomfort of expanding beyond current shells. You allow yourself to flow with the energy of the earth rather than fighting against it.

Climatic shifts and astrological cycles shape human evolution and seasonal holidays.

The author shares her personal experience of stopping birth control after being diagnosed with a migraine condition. Her body went into shock because a decade of artificial hormones had stunted her natural feminine cyclical power and rhythm.

Climate cycles

Climate cycles are critical drivers of human evolution, historical events, and seasonal holiday formation. They range from short-term patterns to millennia-long orbital shifts:

• Short-term decadal cycles like El Niño and La Niña occur every 3 to 7 years.
• Intermediate ocean circulation cycles like the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age occurred between AD 1400 and 1900, with a frequency of 200 to 1,500 years.
• Long-term Milankovitch cycles are driven by earth's eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession with a frequency of 10,000 to 100,000 years.
• Earth's axial tilt, or obliquity, ranges between 22 and 24 degrees.
• Precession is a complete gravity-induced wobble cycle lasting 26,000 years.

Astrological groupings

Astrological cycles shape human personalities, social structures, and societal shifts through distinct planetary groupings with varying orbital speeds. Theresa Reed categorizes planets into three groups:

• Personal planets like the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars move quickly and influence individual personality.
• Social planets like Jupiter and Saturn symbolize social operations.
• Slow-moving outer planets like Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto represent broad societal movements.

Planetary movements follow specific orbital timelines:

• The moon travels through all twelve zodiac signs in 27.5 days.
• The sun, Mercury, and Venus orbit around the wheel in 365 days.
• Mars has an orbit time of 22 months.
• Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit.
• Saturn takes 28 years to orbit.
• Uranus requires 84 years for a complete orbit.
• Neptune takes 165 years to complete an orbit.
• Pluto takes 248 years to orbit.
• Mercury retrograde has a duration of 21 days.
• Neptune retrograde lasts for 158 days.

3. Anti-Consumerist Craft and Stewardship

Modern humans grow detached from natural cycles and rely entirely on marketplaces. You lose your historical role as shepherds of the land by living in urban, materialistic societies.

Witchcraft requires willpower and local stewardship rather than expensive commercial tools.

A stranger at a Publix supermarket in Florida remarked to the author at 19 years old that he had traded a life of meaning for a life of convenience.

COVID-19 lockdowns demonstrated a collective loss of stewardship. Forty-eight days into Wuhan's quarantine, an American named Rebecca Franks observed hearing birdsongs that were previously drowned out by traffic.

You can formalize your commitment to environmental stewardship through a structured covenant ritual:

• Sit down with a blank piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle to create two columns.
• On the left-hand side, write down the things you need to work on to be more sustainable and intentional.
• On the right-hand side, write down what you could do to change these things.
• Fold the paper three times.
• Purchase a seed or seedling that can survive outside with minimal to no help (native plants) for each item listed.
• Go to an area on your property that you feel connected to or that has been generally neglected.
• Sit on the ground and arrange your list, seeds, and a trowel in front of you.
• Place your hands directly in the soil and close your eyes, feeling the energy of the earth joining the energy of your body through your hands.
• Visualize a golden light coming through your body into the earth, and a silver light coming from the earth into your body from every point of contact.
• Open your eyes, pick up your list, and ask the spirits of the land to listen and be present with you.
• Speak your covenant to the earth, reading aloud each way that you have fallen and each way that you will make a change.
• Plant your seeds with care and tend to them each day as the physical embodiment of your covenant.

Budget folk altars

Witchcraft is inherently anti-consumerist, and beginners do not need expensive commercial tools to practice effectively. The author pushes back against the label of plastic witchcraft used by privileged practitioners to deride working-class or budget witches. True witchcraft resides in your soul and willpower, requiring nothing more than a dedicated space and a book of shadows or grimoire.

Folk altars are built intuitively and organically from available materials, adapting to seasons and needs rather than following rigid ritualistic rules. You can create travel altars, seasonal altars, or working altars.

Google Trends shows that 2010 marks a large uptick in search popularity for terms like smudging and white sage. Smoke cleansing uses burning herbs, woods, or resins to clear spaces and energy, distinct from appropriative modern uses of closed indigenous practices. You can grow and harvest your own cleansing herbs like sage, rosemary, and bay leaves rather than relying on commercialized trends.

You can clear your energy through a specific smoke cleansing practice:

• Begin by lighting a small white candle (a chime or tealight works best) in a bathroom or other uncarpeted area.
• Sit on the floor cross-legged or in a chair if you are unable to sit on the ground comfortably.
• Close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and feel where any tension or held emotions might be stored.
• Imagine a warm light traveling across your body, starting in your toes and moving up through your legs into your body, arms, and head to loosen tense areas.
• Light your incense or dried herb bundle and stand up.
• Starting from your feet, circle your body with the smoke in a clockwise motion.
• Breathe in the smoke, and as you exhale, allow the smoke to travel out, releasing any stored tension, energy, or emotion.
• Allow the incense or herbs to finish burning with the candle after circling your whole body.

4. Botanical Magick and Local Spirits

Gardening serves as a physical and spiritual metaphor for soul-weeding. You can connect deeply with the earth regardless of space limitations.

Gardening acts as a spiritual mirror, and every property features land spirits demanding respect.

Gardens require tending just like the soul's emotional landscape. You can build sanctuaries in any space from windowsills to large yards. You must carefully evaluate sunlight patterns, hardiness zones, container options versus ground planting, and elemental alignment. For ten years, the author has been gardening using these principles across thirteen zones that comprise the USDA hardiness scale ranging by temperature.

Plant correspondences

Witches can intuitively deduce the magical correspondences of any plant. You examine its biological family, physical traits, and practical uses. When standard literature lacks data on a plant's magical properties, practitioners analyze taxonomic families using a correspondence checklist.

The author analyzes cannabis noting its relation to roses, hops, and figs to link it to healing and love. She studies snapdragons noting skull-like seed pods that symbolize life and death. She reviews sponge gourds noting their inedible fibrous nature for hearth and home cleaning.

• Answer a systematic checklist for a new plant material: name, size, color, source, plant family or genus, toxicity, native status, edibility, flowering status, health, practical uses, and magical uses.

Local land spirits

Every property and natural feature has land or nature spirits that help protect the environment. Homes built on land also develop their own unique structure spirits over time. Spirits can range from forest, lake, and mountain spirits to gods or mythological creatures. People build structures without acknowledging the land or previous creatures, causing spirits to become confused or displaced. Harmonizing with these existing spirits resolves disturbances often misinterpreted as hauntings.

The author notes that her home's primary guardian spirit is a three-hundred-pound limestone boulder in her garden. She believes this boulder helped protect her home during Hurricane Irma when a large oak tree branch fell and scraped her window instead of crashing through the roof.

• Step outdoors and sit with direct skin contact to the natural ground.
• Close your eyes and visualize the property as if floating above it, looking down at buildings, trees, sun, shade, and soil health.
• Open your intuition to identify the source of the primary land spirit.
• Visualize what this spirit might look or sound like to give it an association and build a connection.

Blood magick

Blood magick is a primal and powerful tool combining spirit and flesh. It is not an inherently evil or dangerous act. It serves as a profound way to dedicate oneself to a deity or craft. Bodily fluids like blood, hair, or sneeze droplets are natural and not vulnerabilities for psychic attack. Dedicating oneself using blood involves an intentional offering to connect the physical body and spiritual calling with a chosen god or the land.

The author began practicing her craft in 2001. Eighteen years later, the author traveled to Northern Ireland and made a small cut on her finger at the Giant's Causeway. She offered her blood to her primary god, Manannán Mac Lir, reciting an incantation among the rocks.

• Assemble a sterile knife, lancet, or menstrual blood, along with a taper candle and four seven-day jar candles for land spirits, guides, ancestors, and your spirit.
• Light the candles, stare into the flame, and invoke the spirits of the land, guides, ancestors, and deities.
• Make a small incision on your hand to get a single drop of blood.
• Put the blood directly into the flame, visualize your body and spirit aligning through white light, and sequentially invoke and release the land, guides, and deities.

5. Celebrating the Wheel of the Year

Modern Western witchcraft and the Wheel of the Year draw heavily from the ceremonial magic frameworks of the late-nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the later adaptations by Gerald Gardner. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by English Freemasons, utilized Judeo-Christian mysticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, and Egyptian lore. Gerald Gardner used this structural skeleton for groupwork and revived or adapted festivals, including combining four Celtic fire festivals with solstices and equinoxes. Aidan Kelly named the four remaining solstice and equinox holidays in the 1970s.

Traditional sabbats mark agricultural transitions, but they must be adapted to local realities.

Witches are not obligated to follow the standard neopagan wheel of the year, which was created only about sixty years ago and often fails to reflect local climates and ecosystems. English Wiccans sourced their calendar holidays primarily from Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Germanic traditions, removing them from their original cultural and environmental contexts. Modern practitioners have full freedom to adapt their calendars to match their local climate, personal experiences, and ancestral backgrounds.

Temperance Alden does not celebrate Lammas on August 1 because South Florida is far too hot for a wheat harvest, choosing instead to structure her calendar around regional hurricane seasons and local fruit harvests like mango and avocado. Death Valley averages just two inches of rainfall per year, demonstrating how diverse global climates require localized spiritual practices. Subarctic Montana experiences fifty to ninety days with an average temperature of 63 degrees.

You can build a personalized calendar using a physical process:

• Make a physical mood board for your wheel of the year using pictures, paper, scissors, and glue.
• Write down your thoughts and observations for January, and proceed through all the rest of the months.
• Add spiritual elements, assign an element related to each month for spellwork, and incorporate cultural, religious, secular, or family traditions.

Samhain and Yule

Samhain marks the Witches' New Year and the transition from growth to death, characterized by a thinning veil between the living and the dead, ancestor reverence, and seasonal harvesting. Occurring between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, Samhain is the first spoke on the dark half of the wheel. It functions as a family reunion with the spirit world, allowing witches to set manifestations for the new year under the influence of the thinned veil and the Crone aspect of the Goddess.

The author shares her mother's folk rule that Samhain starts on the first harvest moon seen in October and concludes during the first week of November. Baking a butternut squash yields 4.5 cups of filling after scooping out the baked flesh.

Toxic flowering plants like the angel trumpet can be utilized as spiritual messengers to send petitions to ancestors and the spirit world during the fall season when the veil is thin. Because angel trumpet plants bloom heavily in autumn and feature downward-facing trumpet-shaped flowers, they serve as a traditional medium for petitioning the spirit world when handled carefully.

You can send petitions to the spirit world with a simple ritual:

• Pick an angel trumpet flower at dawn or dusk while wearing gloves due to its toxicity.
• Write your petition and the name of the person you are petitioning on a piece of paper.
• Fold the paper up and place it inside the flower.
• Bury the trumpet flower as the sun sets or rises.

Yule is the winter solstice festival celebrating the rebirth of light and the sun, intertwined with Germanic and Norse folklore such as the Wild Hunt and Odin. While pagan Yule focuses on the winter solstice and the victory of the Oak King over the Holly King, heathen Jól runs from December 20 to December 31 and includes acknowledgment of the dead and the Wild Hunt. The myth of the Wild Hunt features Odin riding his eight-legged steed Sleipnir with a horde of spirits, which parallels Santa Claus and his eight reindeer.

Witch balls are reflective glass ornaments filled with protective herbs and items, traditionally hung in windows or placed on altars to repel or trap negative spirits. Originating in folk traditions, witch balls attract or deflect evil spirits and the evil eye. Gemma Gary's text on Traditional Witchcraft notes that reflective glass baubles filled with protective herbs either deflect curses or trap evil spirits until morning light destroys them.

You can craft a protective ornament for your home:

• Gather clear glass ornaments, protective herbs, crystals, and small magical tools like cascarilla powder.
• Place supplies on an altar and channel the intended energy into the ball while adding ingredients.
• Melt stamp wax and dip the ornament tip over the metal parts until it touches the glass, or apply hot glue around the rim and lid.
• Attach a ribbon or string to hang the completed witch ball on a windowsill, altar, or garden.

Ostara to Mabon

Imbolc is a Celtic fire festival celebrated from January 31 to February 2 that marks the return of light, fertility, and the transition of the Goddess from Crone to Maiden. Saint Brigid was born in County Kildare, Ireland, in 450. Saint Brigid is credited in Irish tradition with founding monasteries, turning water into beer, and curing two mute sisters with her blood.

Ostara is the spring equinox marking equal day and night, symbolizing rebirth, fertility, and the final festival of the dark half of the wheel. The author explains that Ostara is tied to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre and features the return of the Horned God Pan and the Maiden aspect of the triple goddess. European traditions included giving a couple livestock to promote fertility in their union.

Beltane is a Gaelic fire festival starting the light half of the wheel, centered around fertility, creativity, and maypole celebrations. Fourteenth-century sources provide the earliest European maypole references, and sixteenth-century leaders banned them. During Oliver Cromwell's reign, people hid maypoles under the eaves of their houses to protect them from soldiers.

Litha (Midsummer) celebrates the summer solstice and the peak of the sun god, providing an optimal energetic window for floral shadow work. The author explains that shadow work is the process of meeting one's authentic self by objectively looking at hidden tender parts and undesirable traits without trying to immediately change them.

Lughnasadh (Lammas) is the first autumn wheat harvest festival dedicated to celebrating natural energetic exchange and baking ritual altar bread. Bread made up roughly 80 percent of the lower- and middle-class diet in France. In July 1789, the Bastille was stormed amidst severe grain shortages and rising prices caused by the Little Ice Age.

Mabon marks the autumn equinox and the second harvest, utilizing apples for divination, prosperity, and candle holder crafts. Queen Elizabeth I decided to eat goose every Michaelmas Day after hearing news of the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

10 Key Ideas

1. Intuition is a developed subconscious process that functions differently from rapid biological instinct and can be expanded through active practice and journaling.
2. Elemental magick utilizes the four physical states of energy alongside spirit to manifest intentions through everyday actions and seasonal correspondences.
3. Modern climatic shifts and astrological cycles drive seasonal holiday formation, requiring practitioners to align with earth's natural rhythms rather than fighting against them.
4. Witchcraft relies on willpower and local environmental stewardship rather than expensive commercial tools or mass-produced neopagan supplies.
5. Folk altars and smoke cleansing practices provide anti-consumerist alternatives to commercial trends while clearing energy safely and intentionally.
6. Garden spaces act as spiritual mirrors and require evaluating sunlight patterns and hardiness zones to build personalized sanctuaries.
7. Practitioners can systematically deduce magical plant properties by analyzing taxonomic families, biological traits, and practical uses.
8. Every property features land and structure spirits that require respect and harmonization to resolve disturbances often misinterpreted as hauntings.
9. Blood magick is a primal and powerful tool combining spirit and flesh to dedicate oneself to a deity or the land through an intentional offering.
10. Traditional sabbats mark agricultural transitions, but modern witches can customize the Wheel of the Year to reflect their local climates and ancestral backgrounds.