Sorcery 101: Shielding

Shielding is one of the most important things that witches learn. Our coven teaches it to all our beginners. As a neophyte, I thought that shielding was a way to protect yourself against people who were working magic against you, and it is, but it’s also much broader and deeper than that. Human perception and memory is extremely mutable. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate. People’s perception changes based on their own biases and the behavior of the people around them.

The very first shield I learned was the practical “mashed potato” shield. It may sound dull, but it’s the closest we can get to an invisibility cloak. Imagine that you’ve borrowed a friend’s car, and it’s a nice car. It’s a really nice car. You have to run an errand in a dodgy neighborhood. You park the car. You set the alarm. You look up and down the street for suspicious folks, and you walk away, keeping your attention and awareness on the car. The more energy you put into the car, the more visible it becomes to everyone else. The more paranoid you look about leaving it there, the more its perceived value increases to everyone around you. You’ve made it into a big screaming beacon. There is a better way. Lock the car, visualize it as a pile of steaming mashed potatoes (or whatever you consider to be totally ordinary and uneventful). Forget about the car. Walk away without a worry in the world. If you treat the car as totally ordinary, people’s eyes will tend to slide past it, to ignore it. You can put up a mashed potato shield around yourself, your kid, an ugly billboard, just don’t try it on your keys, or you will never find them again!

A fun activity to do as a coven is to have folks pair off. Have one person put up a shield, and have the other person say how they perceive the shield. They can move their hands around the shielded person and see if there’s a change in temperature, resistance, air pressure, or even just feelings. This will help everyone practice shields, and better understand how their shields make other people feel. A few to try are brick wall, mist, barbed wire, healing light, or foam that gets more resistant the closer you get to the person. One witch’s daily practice includes visualizing a pair of polarized sunglasses that let in good energy and keep out bad energy, and then she makes them bigger and bigger until they cover her whole body.

One caveat to this exercise: some people have had shields up since they were very young without realizing it. Attempting to practice shields may be extremely difficult for these people, or the shield may inadvertently fall away for a moment. This can be a traumatic experience. Make sure there is someone present who is experienced enough to ground and comfort anyone who has trouble.

The opposite of a shield (although I suppose you could call it just a different sort of shield) is a glamour. Casting a glamour changes the way that people see you. Like the wicked witch did in Snow White. Glamours cause people to perceive a witch in the way that he wants to be perceived. Some people would say that makeup is a sort of glamour. The change in appearance may be tiny, but if the person wearing it feels more beautiful, the effect can be dramatic. A glamour can be semi-permeable just like a shield, so that a certain sort of people see you as undenyably attractive, while another sort of people see you as repellent. I’ve often wondered if someone cast such a glamour on Sarah Palin…