The Cloak Within: A Writing Ritual from Sarah Justice
Welcome to part 4 of our series on Creative Mediumship, The Cloak Within: A Writing Ritual from Sarah Justice. In these conversations, we’re exploring the intersections of creativity, consciousness, trance, magick, and imagination. If you’re new to the Literary Coven, start at the beginning with Creative Mediumship: Spells for Spring, then head over to The Threshold: A Writing Ritual from Kate Belew, before checking out Imagination is the Medium: A Psychic Experiment for the Literary Coven. If you’re new to Pointy Hat Press, join the Literary Coven for a journey into and through the landscape of the unseen.
The Literary Coven is no stranger to the power of stories in spells. Whether we snag a little snippet from a story that inspires us or shares what we’re feeling, or use the tale’s message as inspiration for our incantations, or even read a bit of prose aloud during a spell, literature can act as a sage guide in the rickety, enchanted forests of spellwork.
For this writing ritual, we are using the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as inspiration for inner healing as adults. When we think of the tale of Little Red, we’re immersed in the story of a little girl ill-equipped to see the dangers that skulk in front of her and the anxieties that follow. For many of us as adults, there are wolven dangers skulking about in the darkness of our mental woods. These dangers may be memories and pains, fears and traumas, and these inform our everyday lives. They cause habits rooted in avoidance and fear. They cause habits that can be self-destructive. And they can, in time, find us in the sanctity of our inner cottage, where wisdom and healing and higher self live, and eat us alive. When up against these mental dangers, we can feel as tiny as our inner child, alone and left to traipse the unknown to get to safety, with nothing but a thin cloak for protection.
In the paragraph above, we’ve already re-envisioned the story’s danger to a more metaphorical, more psychological one. Now, let’s re-envision the tale itself. We can alter the ending and the cast of characters to mimic our situation a bit better. In this new tale, Red Riding Hood is a witch whose Shadow Work involves a more metaphorical cottage deep within the darkened shadows of her inner woods. The wolf, a particularly scary shadow, lurks in the tar-black mist. But Little Red knows that in order to nip the wolves, she can’t just slay them as the huntsman does. She must see them for what they are, which is much less scary. These woodland beasts are actually habits, feelings, perspectives or lapses in memory that once attempted to help us survive. They tried to make us feel better. And maybe, if we honor their role in our survival as we attempt to remove them, we can move toward healing.
In this writing ritual, we rewrite the tale to fit this concept, and what emerges is an incantation for intuition, healing, and wisdom (see below).
