Paganism and Witchcraft Shapeshifting

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Denny Sargent, author of Werwolf Magic and the new Werwolf Pack Magick.

“Hedge witches today would do good to learn as much as they can about shapeshifting witches of the past. In Scotland, witches often shapeshifted into the hare.”
—https://otherworldlyoracle.com/shapeshifting-witches-tales/

As a Pagan and Craft Elder (Welsh Tradition), I’ve participated in shapeshifting with my brother and sister coven members for several decades. In these situations we worked on deity empowered deep trance induced shapeshifting, focusing on an agreed-upon appropriate animal, often at Samhain. Years later I continued my fascination with shapeshifting with another coven, but felt it was not enough. During a rough time, a wolf spirit began to show up in my meditations with offers of help and mentoring, so I began to really research shapeshifting and especially wolfish shifting. While digging into the history of shapeshifting, I was surprised to discover the prevalence of werewolf shapeshifting witches and covens in the Middle Ages as described in hundreds of documents and cited in my book Werwolf Magic. Today, few covens seem to do shapeshifting and/or tend to view it more as a “visualization exercise” (which is not what serious shapeshifting is at all). Through practical experimentation as well as info from the various books of shadow I own, I revived a powerful and effective method of shapeshifting for Witches and Pagans using the power of feral gods or goddesses.

Here is an outline of this technique:
Invoking Shifting involves ritually calling to an external divinity and bringing it into your spiritual and physical self in order to facilitate shapeshifting. There are two parts of “invoking shapeshifting.”

The first concerns invoking deities who help with shifting (such as Faunus, Soranus, or Hekate) through offerings, prayer and serious ritual. For example, Faunus, the Roman Pan, was invoked during Lupercalia by the Luperkal (wolf priests) who, after shapeshifting, became possessed by the wolfish god and wildly ran this drunken fertility festival! Such divinity-powered shifting has been around for thousands of years.

Another shapeshifting technique concerns invoking your astral body with the power of the deity and your will. Yet, instead of astral projection, you envelop your body in with the empowered astral form by will and by invoking the deity intensely into the form of an animal connected to the deity you are calling, be it an owl, wolf, hare, goat, eagle, or so on. Hekate helps bring the owl or hound or wolf shifting, Cernunnos aides shifting into a stag, and so on. You can power-up your astral body in this way by inflaming the fire center located in your lower belly (the solar plexus or Manipura chakra) This fills and solidifies the astral animal form you are seeking and enhances the blessing of the deity summoned. In this way the sheer physicality of the Animal body can be empowered and ridden. There is more to say, but as a Pagan or Witch, you can fill in the rest! Happy Shapeshifting!

Our thanks to Denny for his guest post! For more from Denny Sargent, read his article, “Flower Power: Werewolf Romance.”