The Festival of Torches & the Blue Moon: What is a Spell?

“It wasn’t a spell except for in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head, you couldn’t make them work at all.”

— "Wintersmith," Terry Pratchett

August's moon is called the Sturgeon Moon, Corn Moon, Barley Moon, and Ricing Moon. And because it's the fourth full moon in an astronomical season (normally we have three), it's also a Blue Moon! Since this month marks the start of harvest season, Monday's Supermoon is an excellent time to do just that – roll up our sleeves and begin reaping what we've sown. Perhaps that something is tangible – a handful of fruit or a bouquet of just-opened flowers. Or maybe your reaping is conceptual – like a dream, a decision, or a spell planted beneath moons past.

In ancient Rome, August's full moon was dedicated to Diana. Like her Greek counterpart Artemis, Diana is a huntress. She knows of cycles, wild medicines, and the push and pull of earthbound living. Diana's chariot is lunar, a silver crescent drawn by horned deer and a pack of female hunting hounds.

Much like Hecate, Diana is the Queen of Witches. In stories, she carries a quiver of golden arrows to defend our forests and freedoms. However, during Nemoralia, her three-day festival in August, Diana lays down her bow. Also known as the Hecatean Ides or the Festival of Torches, Nemoralia was an invitation to visit the goddess's wildwood.

Modern calendars place Nemoralia around the 13th-15th of August, but many insist this ritual only began when August's moon waxed full. *The reason?* Nemoralia involved a nighttime journey and required ample moonlight to light the way. Stories say beneath August's full moon, women and girls collected torches and marched to Diana's shrine at Lake Nemi. They passed through the goddess's sacred groves to reach her lakeside sanctuary, a volcanic crater nicknamed “Diana's Mirror.”

Diana's witches would shower the goddess with handmade offerings, recently harvested food, animal figurines, and prayers written on ribbons. Then, the women washed their hair in the lake and decorated themselves with flowers.

*“Diana,” Jozef Frans Ducq, 18th century*

Diana is a guardian of forests and our freedoms. Her covenmates are nymphs, bears, and deer, as well as domesticated animals like dogs and cats. She is a justice-seeker and a shapeshifter, sometimes appearing as a woman flanked by hounds or as a witch's most-loved familiar—the black cat.

As the Mother of Witchcraft, Diana is a also a spellcaster, just like you. And tonight, guided by the full moon and Diana's Festival of Torches, the sorceress emerges from her lakeside gardens with a newly-harvested question.

Merriam-Webster says that's easy: The witch's spell comes from the Germanic spel, defined by “talk, storytelling, gossip, and sermons. Spel is also a derivative of gospel, which translates to 'good tale.'”

Little Witch Books author Kristin Lisenby says a spell is a story, one that takes on new viewpoints, new voices, and new meanings as we journey across the pages of our craft.
In the book *Ecstacy of Being*, Joseph Campbell describes magic (specifically, the spell called dance) as “Poem-fragments, dance-fragments, scenery-fragments, music-fragments, charged with a continuous hypnotic

spell, phosphoresce in a sleep landscape, where mysteriously motivated personages come and go.”

A spell can be a story, a fragmented landscape, or a mirror, reflecting what we want, how we see ourselves, and the echoes we send out into the world. Word Witch Danielle Dulsky says words can enchant and believes that every spell is a prayer .

Sometimes, a spell begins as a what-if, a wondering that slips from your tongue and sows itself beneath your feet.

Occasionally, that what-if has wings, claws, or paws, and other times, it's formless.Because a spell can also be a remembering – an invitation to play, swap secrets with the inner little witch, and wrap ourselves in the folds of nostalgia.

"You might have heard witches describe their magickal journeys in a similar fashion—as lessons in remembering. This is a beautiful way to say that our roots endure, perhaps stretching wider and reaching further back in time than we ever imagined possible. Every so often, those ancient roots spiral back to the surface in the form of memories and a longing for something that was nearly (but luckily not) forgotten.

From a magickal perspective, reuniting with the things we loved as children can be a potent potion, a doorway into the creative catalyst we call nostalgia magick. There, at the altar of our remembering, our younger selves serve as creative companions, mirrors through which to scry, and unassuming alchemists, expertly taming the minotaur within the soul's labyrinth." - From the article “Nostalgia Magick: Spells for Little Witches of All Ages” via Witchology Magazine.

Spells can start as what-ifs and memories, and often, they rise up like newly awakened ghosts. And did you know that at Pointy Hat Press and Little Witch Books, some of our favorite muses are ghosts? These ghosts are the ancestors and writers and artists and magick-makers of yesteryear who survive via the vintage books and fairy tales that decorate our altars. In this sense, spells can be spectral, seen by only a select few, dutifully haunting the gardens of past, present, and future.

So. beneath this Full Blue Moon, when Diana invites us into her sanctuary and we meet her reflection - a question harvested from the moon: “What is a spell?”