Working Your Woo: Building Your Inner Temple 1.3
The importance of cleansing and purification in the Inner Worlds
Over the years, my cleansing rituals have gone from ridiculously elaborate to naively nonexistent. After several decades, I’ve reached a happy medium. I now use a bowl of Cornish sea salt after I’ve drawn a rune sigil into the grains with my finger. It’s simple, but it’s effective. I use salt for purifications because it’s easily accessible, can be added to a lot of different mediums, and the engram meaning attached to salt gives it power.
Cleansing and purification is important when you get to this part of the process. This is another area where people overcomplicate in their mission to do it “perfect”. In the case of purification or cleansing, the big problem is fear. Most people new to Woo read dire warnings about possession and psychic attacks or (almost worse) the insistence there’s no such thing as spirits. The result is either preparing for war, or preparing for nothing. Either extreme is a mistake.
Be aware the Inner Worlds aren’t always going to be safe for you, but that doesn’t mean you should cower in fear and throw salt everywhere the instant you see something (I know this is just one artist’s interpretation of what angelic beings look like, for example, but it’s pretty on point in my experience — angels are FREAKY). It also doesn’t mean you make no preparations whatsover. If you apply the same principles of cleansing and ‘talk carefully to strangers’ to the Inner Worlds, that’s a perfectly sensible way to start out.
Many belief systems include washing as an important premise before coming to worship. To cleanse yourself of sin or earthly concerns is a beautiful, easily understood practice which is already engrammed into human consciousness. Because it is such a universal practice, it’s not difficult to get to the core connection of cleansing and purifying yourself before you begin work. However, most paradigms cleanse the body when you start worship, but very rarely when you finish — the act of worship itself considered cleansing enough. In this form of practice, I strongly recommend cleansing before and after working in the Inner Worlds. When wandering the Inner World you may pick up some parasites; hitchhikers who attach themselves to you to feed off your energy, much like a leech attaching to your leg when going for a swim. Yeah, gross, but you can get the leech off if you keep calm and don’t just scream and run around in panic, and the same goes for any Inner World parasite. Salt works for leeches, and salt will work just fine for anything you might pick up in wandering the Worlds.
Cleansing practices are individual. There is no 100% “right” way to do it. My preferred way is just as I’ve described — a dish of salt in which I have put a rune into the surface of the salt, then placed my hand over it and let the energy flow until it feels charged. I put a bit of this salt into my hand soap I use to wash my hands before and after a session, or I mix salt into my body scrub to sort out any spiritual limpets. If I need something a bit stronger I add rue (either as an herb or a drop or two of oil) which I find to be a good protection and cleansing herb. I might add mugwort to my salt if I’m doing some dedicated dreamwork. Some people don’t bother with physical cleansing at all and do their cleansing in the Inner Worlds itself — by fire, or with a visualised handheld hoover (yes, really), or whatever works for them personally. Experiment, perhaps by considering what element you have an affinity with and going from there, and find something which speaks to you in a meaningful way, not just what a book tells you works. If you feel no connection to a practice or an ingredient, then there is no point in using it.
I’d like to add a word about “Craft Names”. Over time, names went from practical to ‘tabletop character name’ in a hurry when it came to choosing a name or title for doing Work. If you really want to call yourself Moonblossom Winterdragon, then no one is going to stop you, but I can’t guarantee spirits aren’t going to snicker a bit (I sure as hell will). However, there is a valid reason to not use your real name when you enter the planes. Most of us are familiar with the concept of great power in knowing someone’s name; the story of Rumplestiltskin is one famous example, and if you’ve ever watched an exorcism horror flick, priests shove demons back into hell by knowing their names. One thing I am very serious about is never giving your real name to anything in the Worlds. That’s what your Craft Name is for — to keep the power over you to yourself. Paranormal investigators who happily invite spirits to ‘take their energy’ or introduce themselves with their real names make me cringe. Sometimes you have no idea what you’re talking to; spirits are perfectly capable of lying, and some hide their real names, faces or intent. A pseudonym is just another tool in your kit to keep you safe, so the less silly it is to say, the better.
You’ll have time to adapt your purification process to something that suits you best, but for now, the next bit of Work we will do will help you establish a cleansing ritual and practice in your Temple itself.
By the time you take part in this exercise, you should be able to drop into the Inner World, sit in the circle you made for yourself, and have a firm grasp on what your surroundings look/feel/sound like. Standing in the circle you established should feel safe, and your surroundings should feel familiar enough you’ll notice if something is out of place or ‘off’. You’ve made progress if you’ve got this far. Now let’s go a bit further.
This session, I will ask you cleanse yourself before you start work. We will stick to keeping our cleansing practice in our ‘meatspace’ world for now until it becomes a more familiar practice to you. When you enter your Inner World, we’ll expand the circle, and and show you how to purify your space. Go ahead and give the whole ritual a read before you start as your decisions on what goes into the space or how you do the process is highly individual. Then, do your bathing, washing, or other cleansing ritual, and settle in for your meditation.
Concentrate on breathing, settle into your body, flexing and releasing your muscles, and then…into your Inner World and the circle. By now, this should be a pretty familiar scene. Try to bring your attention back to your breathing, inhaling, and exhaling. If you can stand in the circle, do so now, and as you inhale, envision pulling white light into your lungs. Hold it for a second, and then as you exhale the white light, push out with your arms, expanding the circle around you. When I did this step, I blew outward slowly, and the chalk on the ground shifted wider with my breath. You can inhale and push all the way around the circle, or just by standing where you are. It may seem weird to expand your circle in such a showy way rather than just drawing it manually, but I’ve found this to be a better process for someone new to this kind of work — perhaps because the space inside the circle already feels safe and yours, where drawing a new circle doesn’t feel ‘safe’ yet. Or maybe because it just looks really cool and you really do feel like you’re doing magick. Either is valid!
Nudge the circle boundary out as far as you wish it to go — I’d aim for something as big as a large detached house to start; not too large to lose track of, not too small (and potentially a problem in future). I would suggest your physically walk the edge of the circle, making sure there are no gaps or problem places. If there are gaps, fill it with more chalk, salt, or whatever you’ve been using in your Inner World to mark your space.
One of the best ways I’ve found to connect Above and Below together for my purposes comes from the work of the Gallery of Magic — a highly practical and very useful way to work which I’ve incorporated into some of my more ‘need results now’ work, as well as for Inner Work. Their visualisation of tying Above and Below in and through yourself is the best I’ve ever used, so with a nod of gratitude to those skilled Workers, I’m including my take on their process below. This is how I set up my own Inner Temple.
Walk back to the centre of your circle. Stand straight and shift your feet a bit, planting them firmly below you. Try and keep your pelvis and spine in alignment — if you’ve ever done yoga, Mountain pose is very useful for this. Stand firm, feet in touch with the ground beneath you, top of head and spine aligned. With this next step, we will bring the centre of your workspace into being, with the purification tool in the centre. This could take any shape you wish; a well, a pedestal with a basin filled with water, a table with an adorned broom, an open hearthfire with a cauldron. This will be the heart, the centre, of your Inner Temple space, so give it some thought. The centre will help cleanse your space, act as a battery for energy or power for your Work, and will be the keystone for your temple foundation. If you ever need to rebuild your space, you will do it from here. Get a general idea of what you want to bring forth at this point.
Envision a bright pinpoint of gold or yellow light (yep, this is where I struggled!), like a star, beneath your feet. Envision another pinpoint of light, silver or blue-white, above your head. Concentrate on your breathing, and then when you are ready, on your next inhale pull both pinpoints of light up through your feet and down through your head, until the light combines and centres in your solar plexus.
Keep breathing, and extend your hands out in front of you. On your next exhale, allow the light in your solar plexus to move through your hands and down. Beneath your hands, allow the light to pool and coalesce into the form you wish to represent the heart of your space: a well, a black mirror, a broom…or something that might surprise you. I’ve had wells which reflected the moon every time I looked in, or a Japanese hand-washing basin complete with bamboo fountain. In my current temple space it’s a swinging bed suspended from a massive oak tree in a forest— I was surprised, but pleasantly so; it’s nice!
Put all the energy you have taken from Above and Below into the energy flowing through your hands, and put it right into the object at the centre of your circle. Envision it linked to Above and Below independently, without needing to filter itself through you. It is purified and powerful in its own right, and you can step back a bit. Now, watch as the same white light of Above and Below energy slowly creeps across the ground, expanding outward in all directions from your centre space, until it comes right up to the edge of your circle. For some, you may want to work this manually — if you have a broom, you can use it to sweep out the ground inside your circle space, or you can pick up a burning twig from your fire and walk the perimeter. For my own work, low-lying silver mist edges out like a smoke ring. It can be as ‘showy’ or as mundane as feels right to you, just make sure it feels like it’s done the job.
Once you feel the inside of the circle in cleansed enough, I’d like for you to speak your Craft name, if you’ve chosen one. Mine isn’t flashy; two syllables, and it was given to me, I didn’t choose it. At first it seemed a bit strange, but after I thought about it, it made sense. This is the name you will be known by in the Inner Worlds. It is the name you will give you everything on these planes, and it should protect you by not being your given name in the real world. Don’t overthink it, because you may be given a name over time as well, so don’t get too attached! The purpose is just to keep your anonymous and safe.
Well done! This is a fair bit of work, and you may feel rather tired doing so. Be sure to do your cleansing practice when you come out of your Inner Temple space, and get a good bit of rest. Over the next week or two, your mission will be to visit your Inner Temple at least twice, making sure the centre of your circle has held power and form — and don’t be surprised if it’s slightly changed when you come in to see it again. As long as it doesn’t feel ‘off’, it’s fine. Visit it several times until you can see the circle and your centre of power clearly in focus, and the purifying energy moving out to the edges of your circle with ease.
In our next lesson, we will open the Ways — the beginning of establishing travel to other worlds in order to expand your power and focus on the planes.
