Magical Almanac: Practical Magic for Everyday Living - Lauryn Heineman 2018

The Magic Hat by Suzanne Ress
Air Magic

When my eldest daughter was six years old, she discovered, at the back of a closet, an old hat box. Inside was a beautiful millinery creation that I had inherited from my late great aunt, a very stylish lady in her day. It was a curvy pillbox-shaped hat from the 1950s made of cream-colored velvet suede and decorated with bands of sparkling rhinestones. My daughter tried it on, and it was as if a magical crown had suddenly transformed her from a 1990s child to an ageless fairy wise woman. She wore it all weekend—helping my husband in the vegetable garden, playing dolls with her friend, riding her bicycle, eating meals.

It reminded me of my own special hat. When I was eleven and visiting my grandparents, I found a shaped black artist’s beret with an attached peacock feather amongst the clothes and accessories in my grandmother’s “dress-up” closet. I tried it on and looked in the mirror, and that settled it—I wore it everywhere for the rest of my two-week visit. It made me feel more like myself. When it was time to go home and return the hat to the closet, it was as if a part of me were missing.

Perhaps more than any other item of clothing, a hat has the power to transform who you feel you are. But just as a special hat can reinforce or change your identity, sometimes head coverings are used to do the opposite. A few years after several friends and I formed our coven, we decided we should have cloaks to wear for esbats and sabbats. I sewed each member an ankle-length white hooded cloak with cream-colored lining and silver cord ties at the neckline. It never would have occurred to me to make cloaks without hoods. If anything, I could have made hoods without cloaks! Covering our heads, necks, and hair, all of us dressed identically, proved to be an effective way of pooling our individual powers into a much larger and more potent group power for magic work. With our cloaks on and the hoods drawn up, we all look the same and can work equally toward whatever common good we choose.

Auras and Halos

What is it about our heads that, covering them, has such a marked effect on our identities?

Human head hair has long been considered a reflection of a person’s soul. Magic spells involving a specific person often call for a lock of that person’s hair to represent her. Once upon a time, lockets, tiny antique frames, and even buttons contained a lock of a loved one’s hair. It was believed that in the hair a part of the person remained.

In olden times, and even nowadays in some cultures, women were expected to keep their hair bound and covered in public. Long, flowing, uncovered hair represented psychic and sexual power, inappropriate in a world dominated by males and with a single male God. Women who refused to conform, going bareheaded and with their long hair loose, were considered dangerous and branded as witches. Condemned witches often had their heads shaved to render them powerless. On men, long flowing loose hair has long been associated with wizards and pagans in general.

The hair lies within a human’s aura, not quite a part of the outside world but not invisible and interior, either. Unlike the skin, hair can be cut away painlessly. Because it grows on the head, in the light of the aura, it seems natural that it would absorb a lot of the energy of the aura itself.

The word “aura” comes from Greek and means “breeze” or “puff of air,” which I take to mean the general feeling or energy that surrounds a person or place. When I was a child, my mother, a fan of Edgar Cayce’s work, told us she could see auras. She said each person has a different color and intensity of aura, according to their nature. We begged her to tell us what color our auras were. She said she couldn’t be rushed; she would need to meditate for a while and be in the right frame of mind. I wanted very badly to believe that people had visible auras, but deep down I was skeptical.

Finally, my mother read my aura. She stared at me with half-closed eyes for a very long time, just us two in a quiet room, and by and by she revealed to me that the aura she’d seen around my head and shoulders was pink. When I asked her what a pink aura meant, she said she didn’t know; that was just what she saw. My sister’s was blue, she said. Apparently, though, it was exhausting to read auras, for she never got around to doing my three younger siblings’.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many people over the years have told me I look best in and that they associate me with a pinkish coral color.

“Halo” also comes from Greek and means “disk of the Sun or Moon.” To my mind, auras and halos are the same thing. Individuals with very strong, deep spiritual lives are likely to present strong white or golden auras. There was a time in the past when it was perhaps not so uncommon to see auras, or halos, when they were strong. Artists from every culture regularly painted spiritually holy people with white or golden halos around their heads.

Leadership

To honor a great leader, a crown was placed on their head as a symbol of an exceptional aura and as a solar or lunar symbol. It set them apart from ordinary folk. Crowns have been used since prehistoric times to designate the leader of a tribe, group, or population. When the crown is first placed upon the individual’s head in the coronation ceremony, it is this act that symbolizes the giving of collective power to an individual, or the transfer of power from the old leader to the new one. This, too, is a prehistoric ritual. Crowns have always been made with precious or rare materials, whether gold and jewels or unusual and beautiful feathers, foliage, and fruits.

One of the Western world’s most beloved monarchs, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, wears a tiara for formal occasions; for official royal functions she wears a crown. One needn’t be a monarch to wear a tiara, but the crown’s full circle around the head represents monarchical power and leadership and can only be worn by the leader. Queen Elizabeth II, now over ninety years old, is never seen in public without a hat, and her carefully selected collection of brightly colored bucket-shaped, brimmed hats, which to me all look like magic hats, have become her personal fashion signature; these set her apart from any other woman in the crowd. In June 2017 the queen presented a Brexit-focused agenda to Parliament wearing a large bright blue hat with a circle of yellow flower centers on the front. The hat bore a striking resemblance to the European Union flag, from which Britain was taking its leave. Officially, the monarch’s political views are supposed to remain unknown, but many people believed her flag-hat to be a clear, silent statement against Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Religious leaders too wear special headgear. Popes, cardinals, and bishops wear a sort of beanie called a zucchetto (Italian for “little pumpkin”) for ordinary use, its color establishing the man’s rank in the Catholic hierarchy. For important occasions, these religious men wear a miter, which is a tall, peaked hat, something between a cone hat and a turban. It is open in the middle, so the crown of the head remains uncovered. These miters are made of white or gold cloth decorated with jewels and heraldic symbols, much like crowns.

Mongolian queens of the Middle Ages wore very tall conical hats decorated with peacock feathers called boqta. In 1420, Marco Polo brought several boqta back to Venice, and shortly thereafter, European royal women began wearing the henin, a pointed cone hat with streaming veils. These hats may have seemed original to medieval Europeans, but Mongolian queens were not the first to wear tall cone-shaped hats.

Conical hats were worn in the Bronze Age between 1400 and 800 BCE by Celtic shamans for ceremonies. These were made of thin gold sheet metal decorated with symbols denoting lunar and solar calendars. They were very tall—almost three feet from the rim to the point. Scholars studying these golden cone hats have determined that they served a dual purpose: to set the shaman apart from the ordinary people, marking him as the leader, and to determine, using the charted mathematical symbols chased into the gold, the dates of practically any astronomical event during the lunar or solar year, such as the solstices, equinoxes, and eclipses, as well as exact temporal divisions such as days, weeks, months, and years (remember, there were no clocks then).

Four of these golden cone hats have been found so far, in France, Germany, and Switzerland. The gold sheet was originally placed over a frame of organic material, willow branch perhaps, which has since rotted away. The designs, which are expertly worked in the repousse and chasing methods, include circles, disks, and eye shapes. These symbols illustrate the Metonic cycle, a complex nineteen-year cycle relating the Sun’s and Moon’s orbits to quantify time. The Metonic cycle was named for the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens (500 BCE), who supposedly discovered the accuracy of the nineteen-year cycle, but the Iron Age Celts were already using this same mathematical system to predict seasons and astronomical phenomena at least one thousand years earlier!

Because only the shaman knew how to use these symbols for calculating the best times for planting and harvesting, it was believed that he had magical powers. It was the magnificent golden hat that gave him these magical powers of prediction and seeing into the future. Major arcana card number one of the Marseilles Tarot deck, which is believed to be the first, shows the Magician wearing a round-crowned hat. The hat’s brim forms a lemniscate. In later decks, the hat disappeared, but the lemniscate, a mathematical symbol for infinity, and hence infinite knowledge, remained, floating above the magician’s head. Surely legends of the golden conical hats worn by ancient Celtic shamans were carried down into medieval times when the tarot decks were first produced, making the first card of the “great secrets,” the Magician, the master of all that followed.

Wise men and wizards were the first to wear conical hats, but Witches soon followed. For only with a magical hat could magic be performed, and the conic hat was known to be magical. The Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter series is a fictional magic conical hat that once belonged to the wizard Godric Gryffindor and is now used at Hogwarts School to sort the incoming students into appropriate houses, according to their individual abilities, talents, and character. The Norse god Odin, comparable to the Greek god Hermes, was a prototypical wizard figure who sometimes wore a conical hat and flowing cloak and performed magical spells and charms. And who hasn’t seen, or at least heard of, a modern sleight-of-hand magician’s black top hat? These fictional, legendary, and invented magic hats owe their origins to the golden cone hats of the Iron Age.

Make a Magic Hat

Following in the ancient Celtic tradition, why not make a magic cone hat for ceremonial usage? Construction of the hat can be as easy as making a card-weight paper cone and brim, glued and stapled together and covered with appropriately colored, black, or white fabric or felt. Decorations can be made with sequins, rhinestones, and small beads sewn or glued into place. If you want something more elaborate, emblems, runic writings, and pictures could be embroidered in colored and metallic threads onto the fabric layer before attaching it to the cone frame.

The frame could be more authentic, depending on how much time and skill you have. Soft willow blanches soaked in water can be bent and woven into a cone-shaped frame and left to dry that way. There are also several beautiful knitted and crocheted witch hat patterns available on the internet, if you are a knitter.

Once the hat is made to your satisfaction, add a small pocket or secret compartment inside, unknown to all but the wearer. Write magic words, incantations, or spells on a piece of grainy paper during a Full Moon ceremony and consecrate the paper. Fold it and keep it hidden in its secret pocket inside the magic hat. These are the words that will imbue the hat with power and make it magical, but only for the Witch or wizard who knows how to use them.