SNEAK PEEK: The Witch's Book of Numbers
officially on shelves this tuesday 9/27!
What’s up, swimmers? I have been quite busy the last couple weeks with travel and book events, and a big ole lesbian wedding!! (Not mine, we’re happy with our COVID elopement!) So, I cannot tell a lie—there’s no new episode of SITS coming out today.
Instead, I thought I’d give you a little taste of The Witch’s Book of Numbers, which officially comes out this Tuesday, September 27th!
photo by Allexa Crosson Photography
The entire process of this book was pretty magical: In January 2021, the very beginning of a 5 year in numerology (2+0+2+1 = 5), which rules The Hierophant in the tarot, I received an inquiry from Hierophant Publishing, asking if there might be a book project in my work. I needed to be pinched for many many reasons in that moment, but especially due to the Hierophant of it all. Just so on the nose!
Over the next couple of lunar cycles, I worked with their team to create a proposal for what would become The Witch’s Book of Numbers. It was wild to watch how it naturally unfolded—meetings and notes given on new moons, deadlines and handing over materials on full moons! After the fourth outline with accompanying sample chapters, I got the green light to start writing.
In some ways, this has been the speediest project. It’ll be less than 2 years total from the first inquiry to the finished product hitting shelves. But in many ways, it was also the longest and most isolated process of my creative career! A few trusted pals read pieces of the book along the way, but for the most part it’s stayed in the dark until now, so you can imagine how excited I am to see it in people’s hands!
This past weekend, Ruby’s Books in my hometown of Folsom, CA, was gracious enough to host me for my first ever book event! There, I introduced my book and, in many ways, myself to a group of folks who’ve seen me through many chapters of my life, and who’ve championed me through them all. I feel so incredibly grateful, my cup is so full, and I’m so ready to get this baby out there!
photo by Allexa Crosson Photography
EXCERPT FROM THE WITCH’S BOOK OF NUMBERS ✨
Introduction
Magic, or at least a belief in magic, has been around for pretty much ever, at least if the oldest artifacts of humanity are to be believed.
—Sarah Lyons
During my junior year of high school, I got into a rather heated argument with my mom over my less than satisfactory grade in Algebra II. I was struggling, which was unlike me, because I was a good student. I could’ve blamed my teacher, or the fact that the class was held out in the portable classrooms whose temperature was either freezing cold or boiling hot with no in-between, but the reality was that I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand how to calculate the right answers, and I definitely didn’t know how any of it applied to the real world. Language, music, drama, history—those subjects all made sense to me. But slap a numeral onto the hypotheticals or ask me to find the value of x and I was lost in the wilderness. “I am an artist,” I whined. “I won’t need math unless I’m in Math: The Musical!” The following week, my mother enrolled me in a remedial program at a local learning center.
While I did go on to pass Algebra II and several other math classes afterward, I can’t say that my relationship with the subject shifted all that much, which is irksome because math seems to provide concrete answers to an otherwise mysterious world. I’ve always been an inquisitive person with big questions. And growing up, some potential answers (or at least the space to ask deeper questions) were made available to me in the form of organized religion.
When I was seven, my mother became a cantor at a traditional Catholic Church. I was mesmerized by all of the ornate costumes, the theatrical rituals, and audience participation—how does everyone just know these calls and responses? But ultimately, their refusal to let me take communion led me to check out other options. Without any direction, I chose a community Bible church from the Yellow Pages and asked my dad to drop me off. Of course, there were obvious questions about the child who sat alone in the front row taking notes on the sermon, but I was welcomed with open arms.
Years later, I was cast in my first leading role in a school musical and told my pastor that I was going to have to take a break from the church youth group to prioritize rehearsals. He remarked that God was “disappointed in me,” which just felt off. There was no way that the Divine with whom I’d been communing over the years—who already didn’t match the wrathful God of the Old Testament or the “loving” rebrand of the New Testament—could possibly be so upset over a high school production of Oklahoma! I began wondering if organized religion was really the right place for me. What I received at church—music, stories, history, folklore, ideal personal and community conduct, metaphors, and thought puzzles—had to be available elsewhere from other communities with values that were a whole lot more aligned with mine. So, I dug deeper into theater, film, literature, and philosophy, anything that scratched my itch to experience mystery and awe, and continued my spiritual education.
It’s also when I started feeling drawn to witchcraft. Shortly after I graduated high school, I received my first tarot deck from the elderly witch running the lone metaphysical shop in my hometown. As she described all of the different tarot decks and their uses, I knew right away that witchcraft was a rabbit hole I could thrive in. Not long after, my mom had my numerology chart done by a sidewalk mystic in a foggy Northern California beach town, and suddenly numbers were back in my life, although reframed and taking on a whole new spiritual meaning.
The Magic of Numbers
Captivated by numerology and curious about math for the first time in my life, I began to look into this newfound divinatory tool that promised to link the digits of my nightmares with the poetic insights of my dreams. What I found was that the ancient mystics of Egypt, Greece, Babylon, and countless other cultures saw mathematics, geometry, and science as the language with which the Universe was created. Answers to life’s big questions varied according to what or whom you asked, but when the mysteries of the Universe were broken down sufficiently, what you were left with was numbers—the building blocks of all life.
Numerology is the ancient study of that cosmic language of the Universe, numbers, as well as the intuitive application of divine principles to people, places, and events. It’s both a calculated practice and a creative art that blends the spiritual and the scientific through sensory experiences, philosophical concepts, lyrical metaphors, and an abundance of synchronicities to enable you to draw meaning from them in your life. Turns out that all I needed to do to shift my relationship with math was to integrate it with all of the other subjects to which I was naturally drawn. That’s when I started finding answers.
Numerology and the magical aspects of numbers acknowledge very little separation between the practical and the spiritual. The men who studied at some of the world’s first universities trained as both scientists and priests. Room has always been left for that which could not be explained through empirical means. In fact, there’s still so much about this world that we yet do not understand. New evidence of divine intelligence is still being discovered every day. We humans— mere animals who’ve evolved to think, speak, and experience consciousness—have tried so hard to separate ourselves from nature, sometimes to our own detriment. Yet, numbers continually remind us that we are nature and we are also divine. They are our proof—the smallest sets of proof—that we are both mundane and magical, and that we are certainly all interconnected.
In mathematics, numbers are positioned in chronological order along a line, but in numerology, it may be helpful to reimagine the single-digit building-block numbers of 1 through 9 as a spiral. We’ll talk more about this shape in Chapter 11, but for now, visualize how this shape is seemingly never-ending, the ending folding into the beginning as the pattern begins again. These numbers, when seen through a numerological lens, offer us another way to be a part of the story of the Universe. They give us a way to be one with the stars above, the Earth below, and the living beings all around us. They invite us into the rhythm of life’s repeating cycles of death and rebirth. These cycles are natural and can be quite comforting once we familiarize ourselves with them. After all, consider how many times we hear the same story repeated without tiring of its basic characters and the plot twists it contains. In life, there is room for every story, and they all add up to something.
Even though numerology had firmly planted its roots in my spiritual practice, it would still be over a decade—years spent in esoteric study and playing with different modalities and crafts—before I ever called myself a witch. The term just wasn’t on my personal radar; I didn’t identify myself with it. And then one day, it felt so right on my tongue that I couldn’t believe I would dare to see myself any differently.
So, if you’re reading this and still questioning whether that word describes you—welcome! What an exciting part of your journey! May your explorations lead you into deeper connection with your unique and magical will, your truest intentions, and your most potent actions. That’s all that witchcraft requires! It entails a personal revolution and a practice that can incorporate many tokens and tools—or none at all, regardless of how hard our capitalist society tries to sell them to you. After all, there’s no right way to be a witch.
Which Witch Is Which?
Witch is a gender-neutral term that can be hard to define because, for so many years, it was used as a generally derogatory term for anyone who didn’t comply with the dominant social and religious powers of the time. The word has deep roots in anti-Semitism, with many early and sadly long-lasting physical depictions of the witch matching those of harmful Jewish stereotypes. However, those who were persecuted throughout history for being witches also included Pagans, healers, herbalists, cunning folk—my ancestors—scientists, philosophers, astrologers, mystics, and others who simply didn’t share prevailing Christian beliefs and had no interest in converting to them. As the Church rose to power and suppressed mystical thought and practice, more and more people were inaccurately labeled as witches. Even Hypatia, one of the most prominent Pagan philosophers and numerologists of Alexandria, was killed by a violent Christian mob around the time that Egypt ceased to be a diverse, intellectual Utopia.
One thing that linked those mislabeled as witches was their deep connection with the physical world. They shared a powerful curiosity about the world and a desire to know the self and to live in right relationship with and serve the community. In numerology, witch is what is known as a “27/9 word”—one that connects with the Spirit in service to the collective. Today, those interested in reclaiming the title of witch are also those who observe and ritualize the natural world in ways similar to those of more pragmatic scientists and mathematicians. They see numbers as the code with which the natural world was written and work with numbers to understand and enact physical and energetic change. Science and spirituality can thus work together as they were always meant to do.