Feminine Magic School is Back - Your Invitation
It's true, old school style magic is back. It's richly feminine, glamorous, wily and wise.
Feminine Magic Returns: To accept the invitation, please RSVP Here.
Let me tell you about Feminine Magic School. It is a place of lineage and paradox and skillful means. It’s a restorative way – literally, re-storying. It’s not about healing or empowerment. I won’t be telling you how to track your nervous system, or compile your trauma log. It’s rooted in an old world that’s as complex and ambivalent as earth herself. It’s about enchantment and glamour, and making the most of what you’ve got. I know for myself, I’ve got so much personal and ancestral trauma, that at this point all I’m doing is making it a cup of tea and giving it a back rub.
I’m tired of social conversations that include the kind of internal monologues that therapists charge good money to listen too. I want to know about your magic. How the ancestors made your body into a feast place for their outlandish carnivals.
I don’t want to know your truth, I want to play and revel with the masks you wear, like a cosmic fashion guru, and how you are playful and inventive and fantastical as you strut the catwalk of life. I want to indulge in high spiritual gossip with you and laugh, and put my feet up, and put the world to rights, and have a nap in cosy familiarity.
The thing about magic, you see, is that it never required that you be perfect, or healed, or fixed. Or purged of all your trauma as if the Pope had cunningly reinvented sin. In fact, magic often happened to the broken, the grieving, the foolish, the determined, the outcasts, and the ones who were full of desire and curiosity, and who were prepared to go on a journey and wonder to find that proverbial pot of gold or the forbidden love.
All the fairytales start in tragedy, when the heroine or the starlet of the tale finds herself orphaned or hurt. That’s not what defines her; it’s what she does afterwards that makes a tale fly, as she stalks her magic. No one goes into that dark forest to meet Baba Yaga to heal or perfect themselves. They go to find their magic, to be tricked and tested, and to draw upon an emergency reservoir of ancestral feminine magic, stored like a potion in their blood.
Feminine Magic School is for those of you who are ready to walk the Way of the Enchantress, and to be a mistress of elegant energy. Who have accepted their life story, and are ready to make a rosary of it, and to ask the Fairies to polish up a Toadstool so they can quantum jump inside.
This Feminine Magic is not the magic the text books and academics tell us about, or the magic that the men have practiced and molded religions around, this is an old, old magic, that lives inside your body and your genetic memories, that has been calling to you since childhood, through your dreams, through your shadows, through whispers on the wind, through a long forgotten memory, so tangible some days that you could almost touch it, and open a door and step through – into a new world, an ancient world, that’s been living alongside us all this time.
INVOCATION OF THE ENCHANTRESS
I will not live in a world without glamour. It’s that simple.
In the old world, the Queen of Faerie was called the “Mother of Glamour”.
Over my life I have been to so many places devoid of feminine magic, so many spiritual or organic places running on the fumes of poverty consciousness disguised as sustainability, worlds where the feminine is exiled and absent, in man-made alternative universes where productivity takes precedence – be it to achieve success or to reach enlightenment or so-called god, or worse still ‘goodness’. I can sniff the stench of puritanism a mile away, with its thin pursed lips, ready to ‘correct’ the feminine charms of enchantment, glamor, fascination and richness.
I will have none of the man-made ‘good’ earth who wears a corset to hold her wild abundance in safe and tidy contours. Look at her, this witchy world of earth magic, she is lush, wet, utterly charming, growing obscene wealth from every stem and pore of her being, saturated in opulence and color and glamor, pollinating herself with desire and adornments. And she can also be strict and fierce and cruel, dark as a night and cool as winter. She is also a Snow Queen and a dung heap when she is in the mood. She is changeable, paradoxical, cyclical, unknowable.
In the tales of Inanna, she hears that someone has created a garden of absolute perfect and sustainable eternal life and she is so angry she rides over and smites it. She knows. Such a place is not in the natural order of earth. It is not organic, if it does not ooze pheromones and perfume and the damp moisture of longing and the pus and putrification of decay that teems with magic wormholes into new cycles of birth and expansion.
Earth is a Grande Dame, she is made of magic. She is above all else a being of Glamour – that all the ordained books have told us is an illusion.
Glamour means to cast a magic spell of enchantment. To bring someone into that magical reality in full presence, belief and embodiment.
Glamour comes from with the word Grammar. Students of Grammar were scholar practitioners who studied the feminine arts of magic, and Gramarye were the magical black books that lineages recorded their magical workings and legacies. Finally in Scotland glamor was used to refer to a ‘magic spell’ and it’s later connotation as a false, feminine illusion was a result of the puritanical war on feminine magic.
The Witches in Scotland clearly stated they were followers of the Queen of Glamour.
But the Glamour did not die. It went underground. It breathed in darkness of soil and bone and root waiting for its day to emerge again.
THE STRUCTURAL FEMININE
In Feminine Magic School, we will convene in a secret salon to remember a specific frequency of Feminine Magic. It’s a forgotten and often forbidden energy. If there were a phrase for it, then it might be called the ‘structural feminine’ compared to the more popular and well-known ‘flowing feminine’. It’s softness has an edge.
The flowing feminine helps liberate us from outdated systems and situations, but only the structural feminine can help build new worlds.
What am I tuning into, and moving into can only be described as an ‘elegant power’. This is Feminine Magic. This is the enchantress.
We are conditioned to be ‘good girls’ – be nice, pleasing, agreeable and we lose touch with that deep feminine womb power inside.
Or we become so fluid that we flow right through life without having ever created the structure to birth our own deep destiny.
On our journey to rediscover our power, we can often see power as this hard, fierce, “f-bomb dropping” energy of the “rebel”. The fiery goddess who smites.
It has its power and place for sure. But I’m courting and stalking something else: an energy that is wise and cunning, that is an alchemized expression of love and power, which has good graces and good manners, and is fascinating, enchanting, charming, elegant, glamorous. It is cool and yin, crystalline. It calls upon the power of ice.
Now, you might have your own images of those words as ‘corseted’, but wildness is very focused. When we go deeper we see they are actually words of feminine magic.
Magical folk in England were known as “Charmers” and feminine magicians were known as enchantresses or Incantrix. Fascination and glamouring were at the heart of feminine spellcraft. Nowadays we only think of this in the negative sense, but back then to fascinate or charm or glamour referred to the ability to shape energy into a more positive and beautiful form and was at the heart of all true witchcraft as energy work.
The magical ability to structure energy is a power of the feminine sourced directly from the creative nous of the womb and the earth.
It is at the root of all ‘manifestation’ which takes a lot more than just a feeling. Structure can be very seductive, I promise :)
RETURN OF LADY SATURN
There is a missing piece in the spiritual puzzle that you need to claim. Your feminine magic demands it. I have named it as the path of Lady Saturn, the dame of structure.
Saturn was once a Goddess, and is the governess of the root. Our primordial power.
We are time-coded with initiatory gateways that help us embody this power. In Elder times, this is what rites of passage were for. We forgot. And lost our rooted power.
Our life is not one straight line, it is an evolutionary spiral that follows very structural cycles. Each cycle is a quantum jump.
The structure of these cycles brings us massive gifts if we know how to land them in our body and life.
The first portal happens, of course, at birth.
The second portal happens at 7 years old.
The third portal happens at 13 years old.
These portals build and build, until the big one emerges into your life – often with quite a bang.
Age 28 you are dramatically ushered from Maidenhood to your Womanhood. This process began when you were 13 and entered into puberty and went through menarche.
This portal at 28 does not end when you turn 29. In fact, it lives on inside us creating all the circumstances of our lives, trying to show us where we need to develop our feminine power, brimming with dazzling clues about our true destiny and essence, and the magic we need to master. We then get to repeat it aged 57 on a next octave.
But our modern world does not tell you this, in fact it does everything to disguise or hide it. In past times, our ruling paradigm did everything it could to destroy the Gramarye’s of entire dynasties of feminine magicians, who had recorded this wisdom to pass to their daughters.
Young girls no longer knew about the magic that lived inside them, and grew in cycles – not just with the Moon, but with an even more powerful teacher. They no longer received the wisdom of how to walk, on cosmic stepping stones of initiation.
They no longer studied the magical arts with the Grande Dame of Womb Magic, Lady Saturn, or understood the immense power of the structural feminine, who Shakespeare called the Dark Lady. This feminine is cool, yin, structured, elegant, powerful and utterly foundational. It is what underpins all our manifestations - or lack of. It teaches us the Art of Containment, an utterly feminine superpower of the womb.
Now the door is opening again. Feminine Magic School is returning.
BECOME A GRANDE DAME
I have been weaving this work together for the last two decades, using all my skills and resources as an artist and writer. It’s taken me to the edge, and also delivered me into unexpected places. It has terrified and fascinated me. For the last decade or so I have studied with many Grande Dame’s in their sixties or seventies, and I have apprenticed at their feet. I am utterly a devotee of lineage and transmission. And as an artist and Incantrix I have woven those experiences with my own lineage wisdom of Mam Tor and the forgotten Feminine Magicians, from Mary Magdalene to the Yorkshire Witch, to Mary Queen of Scots, and all the unknown women who have walked with Mugwort under their feet.
I remember a vivid psychic dream, when I found myself in a Salon in Paris being interviewed by a strict looking Headmistress of a Feminine Magic School, and where I had to take hard tests and be thoroughly interviewed in order to be admitted. This regal lady looked down her nose at me, studying my aptitude and ambition for feminine magic, and in the end enrolled me on the basis of a recommendation from one of my teachers. The room was saturated in an old glamor that I thought had left the world, and the scent of rare lunar flowers hung in the air like a reminder.
I have wanted to capture some of that essence in this real-world Feminine Magic School. This is a place where your magic is forged, and where you can enter into this lineage like a soft black velvet cape around your shoulders, where the feminine is unashamedly glamorous and strong. Where you are taught the feminine Grammar.
Think of it like a finishing school for feminine magicians. In a world that encourages us to be loud, busy, external, Feminine Magic School will usher you through a red curtain into an ancient and renewing world where you will learn about energetic elegance, how to have magical good manners, how to root into a deep time legacy that will nourish your creations in a collaborative energy web. You will step into rhythm with feet that have walked on ancient lands, and those who walk in the future.
This will be a practical salon for aspirants who desire to create magic on earth, and embody their full magnetic power, in a way that is supported by the womb ancestors and the spirit of earth as a glamorous, mysterious “Grande Dame”.
We will walk through Luxury, Magnetism, Manifestation, Wealth, Leadership, Relationships, Grief, Ancestral Magic and Living the Blessing of our true Legacy.
2024: The journey starts on Epiphany, January 6th 2024 - known as the old "women's Christmas" and reputedly MM's birthday and a day of feminine magic.
You can reserve your red-velvet seat here, so you can have time to prepare.
I will also be hosting a Grief Salon on 11/11 - the Old Halloween in the folk traditions (not October 31st) and also the day of the Swan Feasts. Swans are symbolic of death and soul doulas and a lineage of women who sang songs of death and grief, in order to carry souls to other dimensions and other timelines of Self. We will Swan again.
This is the lineage of Keening Women, known throughout time for Grief Magic.
The Grief Salon is a stand-alone even that anyone can register for, but if you sign up for Feminine Magic School before the event, you receive the Grief Salon for free.
Reserve your place at the Grief Salon here if you feel called to this conclave.
Note: If you studied in FMS 2023, please email through my website www.serenbertrand.com to receive a generous discount for this year.
Please share this with a friend who you sense is being called to their Feminine Magic.
I hope you make it. As Mae West might say: “Come down and see me some time.”