Introduction: I’ve had to find out a lot about witches in the course of writing academic pieces about Shakespeare’s plays with witches, such as Macbeth, or in which some sort of magic occurs, like The Winter’s Tale. From my gleanings, I wrote this brief and handy instructional how-to guide for those of you who wish to meet your inner witch quickly and without extensive study. (Note: “witches” include male, female and any other gender. I’ve used “she” as the main pronoun but please feel free to take it only as a syntactic placeholder carrying no semantic information, and to change it in your mind while you read.)

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Witchery is all the rage. Witches are resurgent, witches are among us, witches are here, there and everywhere. Thus it behooves you, a mortal, to hunt for your own witch within you, not to set her on fire but to explain to her what you intend to do and to ask for her witchy advice.

Step-the-first. Contact your witch. Close your eyes and visualize a hill. See her clambering up a slope of sliding and rolling stones. As her foot steps on one stone, it gets loose in the sandy dry soil and falls or rolls away down the mountain, but your witch stays just ahead of the crumbling path, and this is how she makes progress. Thus you shall know her by her desperation and by her energy. She is unmissable. A figure on the hill, a tiny point, a speck, but you will know her, certainly, all the same.

Step-the-second. Cast a spell. It is a requirement that you cast a spell. This is for the purpose of initiation and to gain the trust of your witch. Some see spells as mere love song lyrics or just the noise of sparrows, but do not be fooled, do not be dissuaded. Stand facing the wind and the rain and imagine your seed corn is in your palm, then throw it north or south or east or west, or into a bucket of moon water*, depending on your desires and your necessities. There! Now you have done it, now you are initiated, you are one of us she will say. Welcome to the coven. You have met her face to face. Do not, I say, do not pull her ears at this point. Not yet.

• moon water is made by leaving a container of water outside under the full moon

Step-the-third. Tell your own fortune. Already you have journeyed so far along this path, you have gotten this far, so you should be able to see clearly now some of the landscape features around you, whether they are mountains, rivers, trees, daffodils, bridges, or so forth. But yet, your inner witch knows, and you know too, that some features remain hidden behind vaporous, swirling mists or voluminous flowering bushes, or they are obscured by being too distant. You can use tarot cards to see behind the bushes or through the mists. Also, two tarot cards, when rolled up cylindrically, make a fine pair of binoculars to see the distant future. But I jest. But I do not jest. Logic suggests to us that jesters never tell the truth, but witches always tell the truth. Except when they are jesting, or only when they are jesting.

Step-the-fourth. Determine your witch-name. Yes, your witch has a name and this name will patently, obviously be different from your “real” name. How to find this name? Imagine that the universe is revealing this name to you in some innocuous places: the words in songs, such as the sun, snow, fireflies, stars, walled medieval city, whiskey; or the types of birds you have seen in the skies, whether swallows or hawks or starlings; or even the colors of various extraordinary watercolor paints, such as azure, cyan, sandpaper, February pink, chestnut. Eventually, from many whisperings and mutterings and clamourings, from a chorus of many possibilities, one special word, like the sound of a bell, will emerge as the victor and claim your soul. With a mysterious smile, whisper your witch’s name while gazing out of a window at either dusk or dawn. This window and its twilight reflection will symbolize your interior perspective on your new identity as a witch named ―?––.

Step-the-fifth-and-last. Find a familiar to help you. The orbit of Venus around the sun relative to the Earth famously makes a perfect and beautiful five-pointed star, also known as a pentagram. Even the Ancients knew it. Five, the goddess’ number, is therefore the hallowed number, signifying the fifth and final step. Your goal is therefore within sight, like the five fingers on your left hand. Your familiar may already be familiar: the brooding huntsman spider on your wall, the devious moths fluttering out from your clothes drawer on the summer solstice, a shadowy black cat in your garden, a tiny ribbon snake in your tea cup. It is recommended that you look everywhere for your familiar, but do not rush. As you look, be cosmic, be circumspect, be magical, be wise, be yourself. (That’s five). Also, learn to interpret what those beautiful crow feathers mean when you see them on the road before you. And please, do buy a broom (unless you already own one), but a pointy hat is only optional.

Now you have presumably met your inner witch. You may pull her ears, or your own ears (by now they are the same), but not too hard, and only in jest.

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More by Marianne Kimura here or here or here or here or here or here. The pieces concern thoughts on Shakespeare, goddesses, ninjas and a prize winning entry for the Writers in Kyoto Competition.