Re-Membering the Witch

Soul Retrieval as Healing and Praxis — Nightshade Journeys and the Witch's Night-Flight

Reflections from anthropology, Jungian depth psychology, and field notes from the temple floor—plus practices you can actually do.

Preface: Re-Membering the Witch

Soul Retrieval as Healing and Praxis using Nightshade Journeys

Nightshade Journeys is an invitation to begin—right where you are. What follows distils three living streams of practice into a workable path for the modern Witch:

1. the European lore of witch-flight and the nocturnal sabbat;

2. the practical methods of shamanic trance reintroduced to Western practitioners by Dr. Michael Harner;

3. dream work within a Jungian frame, where symbol and psyche guide the journey and bring us home.

This is not armchair theory. It is fieldwork—tested in covens and circles, refined across years of teaching and personal practice. The aim is simple and radical: to help you re-member what has been lost or exiled, and to reclaim your personal power and the Witch’s healing office through soul retrieval—the art of restoring the Witch.

You don’t need perfect conditions. You need a beginning. The pages ahead will show you why retrieval matters, how it fits the Craft, and exactly how to do it safely and well—whether you favour a quartered circle, a compass and mill, or an animist-ancestral rite. Start small, trust your experiences, and let the work prove itself in your life.

Make a start tonight

• Set aside 20 minutes and a quiet corner.

• Breathe for a count of 4 in and out for a count of 6. Do this for five minutes; hum or croon softly on the exhale.

• Write a single prompt beneath your pillow: “Show me what wants returning.”

• On waking, record one image, one feeling, one action.

When you’re ready, bring your notes to the coven Circle. Share what you found. Healing in the Craft is rarely only private; it grows richer when witnessed. Witches are stronger together. If you’re part of my WitchesWorkshop Substack community, I’d love to hear your first steps—our coven’s current strength increases every time one of us flies and returns.

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Unveiling the Significance of the Witch's Night Flight

Across European folklore, the Witch flies to sabbats, battles for the fields, or travels with familiar spirits. Read literally, it’s a marvellous supernatural vision; read as ritual magick, it’s a rite of passage, it’s a disciplined way of moving consciousness across thresholds and returning with knowledge. In anthropological terms, night-flight is a liminal technology—a socially marked crossing that suspends ordinary identity and forges communitas. In psychological terms, it is a nekyia—Jung's night-sea journey—where the ego meets the Shadow, archetypal guides, and the Self, then re-enters the day world transformed.

This article sketches that frame and then anchors it with a contemporary field note from a temple ceremony. Finally, you'll find non-pharmacological practice alternatives you can run in your coven Circle. The following guidance is offered from direct personal experiences to assist you in exploring this powerful inner work. But first, I offer a recollection from a night journey where the medicine brew was a healing catalyst.

Tim Ozpagan preparing for his first shamanic medicine journey, 2015

Field notes: A night in the temple with Raven

After a week of dietary preparation, I enter a candle-lit temple led by Raven, a curandero with decades of healing practice in medicine work. The room is purified. Candles are dimmed until only a few at the altar remain. She smokes the medicine bottles and sings ícaros (spell-songs) into them. One by one, we are called forward; a small measure of a dark, pungent brew is offered. I swallow quickly.

We sit in near-darkness. The chakapa, a bundle of leaves, hisses softly as it sweeps the air in a rhythmic beat. I have been fasting, so the current rises fast. A psychic Mexican wave begins to circle the room. Someone purges (sweat, tears, vomiting), and the hard work of healing is beginning. When it passes for them, relief spreads to all of us. The wave returns and lifts me.

My life has been threaded with psychic phenomena since my childhood, but now it is as if a pair of dark sunglasses has been removed: colours sharpen, edges clarify, the world clicks into an uncanny focus with a luminous glowing light. The wave swells into a leviathan—the serpent power, destroyer and remaker—and I am swallowed whole. In the ophidean belly I’m suspended, I’m dissolving into a felt solutio in the blackness and enter a stage of alchemical nigredo.

I surface back in the temple. Raven is at work, shaking the chakapa over a traveller. Her ícaros operate like otherworldly acupuncture, pinpointing the flow of healing. Covering her, I see a white-feathered mantle, it’s like a light-filled auric halo, an astral priestly garment, avian and protective. She returns to the altar. A queue forms for more medicine; only then do I realise in line are spirits—they are translucent, patient, and silent; several are dressed in distinctive Indigenous South American attire. A low, steady glow pools around the curandero and altar. The wave catches me again; I descend deeper.

The night brings multiple journeys; I enter the nekyia, a realm of ghosts, memory, ancestors and what feel like past-life residues are met, faced, and softened. Each cycle returns me to the Circle of the temple a little emptier of old weight. I am healing, and I feel clearer.

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Exploring the Intersection of Anthropology and Depth Psychology

Below are reflections on the above night journey using an intersection of objective anthropology and depth psychology, followed by my more subjective insight into this experience.

• Ritualisation & liminality. Flight happens in space–time that has been made special: rites of purification, the casting of the Circle, candlelight and incense, a deliberate order of invocation and sounds for healing. Such acts don’t decorate experience; they structure it. The group’s synchronised breath and rhythm guide bodies and awareness into a shared altered state, creating conditions for heightened perception and meaning.

• Collective effervescence. When a group locks into a single tempo—using song, rattle, and drum—the room can feel like a rising wave. That social electricity is not incidental; it’s a carrier for experience and healing.

• The Jungian map. Night-flight tracks classic stages of the hero’s journey, the quest and nekyia (a ritual calling and a night journey) and personal initiation:

  1. Descent into the unknown, what's known in alchemy as nigredo (blackening).

  2. Encounter with archetypal forces (serpents, feathered mantles, ancestral spirits).

  3. Instructions/ordeals are encountered in dismemberment, dissolution, and visionary teachings. A solution or a breaking apart of the status quo.

  4. The Return with a token, an image, or insights that alter understanding and future practices.

  5. Integration requires journaling, active imagination, dreamwork, and a community to witness and to earth the charge.

Interpreting the field note

• Temple craft as technology. Smoke, song (ícaro), dim light, and rhythmic pacing are not mere embellishments; they function as powerful catalysts that open perception, synchronise the room, and stabilise the healing atmosphere.

• Serpent and sea. The Leviathan is a chthonic archetype: devourer, container, and womb of renewal. Being “swallowed” is a textbook initiatory dismemberment preceding reconstitution.

• Feathered mantle. The Healer’s white cloak belongs to the upper-world or sky-pole of the imaginal axis. It signals psychopomp and guardian functions—the one who has wings can lift and shelter.

• Ícaros as performative speech. Song is both address and instruction; it shapes the field. Participants often report sensations here, a phrase or rattle injects the psyche—hence the “acupuncture” analogy.

• Communal purge as communitas. Purging redistributes affect through the group: relief radiates, compassion circulates. The body of the Circle becomes the patient.

• Ancestral queue. The orderly line of spirits implies the work exceeds the individual: night-flight as service, not spectacle.

A note on safety and respect

This field note sits within Amazonian curanderismo. It is shared to illuminate cross-cultural resonances with European witches’ flying ointments used in night-flight, not as a trip adviser or to extract from living traditions. No pharmacological advice is offered here. Tropane-bearing flying ointments and many visionary brews are medically hazardous and often illegal. There are safer ways to train in the witches’ night-flight journeys, a number of which I provide below.

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The Vinum Sabbati, the sabbat wine of the Witches.

A Practicum

Practices you can run in Circle

Facilitator cues: obtain explicit consent; offer opt-outs; have a grounded support person; screen for conditions (seizures, severe anxiety, cardiac issues); close firmly and feed the body.

1) Opening the Liminal (10–12 min)

• Cleanse (sound/smoke/water).

• Cast the Circle; state the shared intention: We cross by breath and image, we return with gifts.

• Establish coherent breath: inhale for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 6, gently hum or croon on the out-breath.

2) Breath-as-Broom (8–10 min)

• Continue 4/6 breathing; on each exhale, imagine rising a hand’s breadth above the body.

• Add a low monotone hum or electronic drone music, a deep rhythmic drum beat, or a rattle to interweave the room.

• Debrief sensations briefly (nape, crown, chest).

3) Axis & Seal (Middle-Pillar-adapted) (12–15 min)

• Standing, touch in sequence: crown → brow → throat → heart → solar plexus → navel → pelvis.

• At each point: Name–Image–Breath (a word, a picture, one long exhale).

• Visualise a mantle/cloak settling around you (feathered if you like).

4) Gateway & Fetch (20–25 min)

• With a steady drum or rattle, descend into the roots of a tree or ride a smoke-coil to a Threshold Place.

• Call to meet a guide/familiar. Ask: What direction is my flight tonight? What one token will bring me safely home?

• Keep a tactile anchor (stone, crystal or drum-beater) in your non-dominant hand. Use three knocks from the facilitator to recall everyone.

5) Two Short "Flights" (2 × 6 min + 6 min share)

• Flight A: Visit a known local landmark "as the crow flies"; return with two sensory details.

• Flight B: Ask the guide for one instruction for your current magical task.

• Pair-share with a witch-buddy for consolidation and to normalise the experiences.

6) Dream Incubation (8–10 min)

• Write a concise prompt: "Tonight, show me how to ____ in my Craft."

• Speak it thrice at bedtime; have a written prompt kept beneath your pillow. Record any dreams or insights on waking.

7) Re-entry & Ground (8–10 min)

• Box breath for two rounds (count 4 in, count 4 hold, count 4 out, and count 4 rest), then sit u[ slowly, stamp, squat, or sway.

• Break bread; thank guides; open the Circle; make journal notes of ley points for five minutes.

Seven-day integration: daily Breath-as-Broom (5 min), one more gateway journey mid-week, capture hypnagogic fragments. In group settings, close with a witness round—share one image, one lesson, or one action.

Night journeys as method

Night-flight is not about props; it's about method—breath, rhythm, image, and community structure that allow the psyche to do what it has always known how to do: cross, converse, and return. Treat the threshold with respect, keep the re-entry clean, and let the work prove itself in the changes it brings to your Craft.

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

A Witches Workshop teaching circle raising a Cone of Power in Sydney, 2019.

Treading the Circle

If you're ready to take this work deeper, the next two sections set the course: first, why soul retrieval matters; second, how to bring it alive in a coven setting. What follows is distilled from my own practice across several strands—modern Pagan Witchcraft and Wicca, the shamanic methods taught by Dr Michael Harner, and three fully guided ritual approaches you can adopt or adapt:

1. a Wiccan–Ceremonial hybrid,

2. a Traditional Sabbatic Craft compass rite, and

3. an animist–ancestral form with a Jungian-friendly integration.

This is deep work. It unfolds over months, sometimes years, and that's not a bug—it's the path doing what the path does. While member–supporters of WitchesWorkshop will receive the full sequence and ongoing guidance, I want to encourage everyone to make a beginning. Start small, keep good notes, and let the current carry you.

Two touchstones have long fuelled my passion for the Craft:

1. It's never "too late" to begin. Gerald Gardner undertook his defining work in the latter half of his life; whether you trace your practice to Wicca directly or through its influence, you stand in a lineage that welcomes late bloomers and steady apprentices alike.

2. Every night is a threshold. When we lie down, we descend into the underworld of dreams—the private landscape of psychic reality where a broom at midnight is always waiting. If initiation has a natural habitat, it is here: in the dark, imaginal temple where we rehearse the art of leaving, returning, and re-membering.

With these in mind, step into the Circle. The pages ahead explain why retrieval is central to a witch's healing Craft—and then show you exactly how to tread the road, fetch what was lost, and bring it home.