Salt & Sovereignty: Witchcraft, Hekate, Shadow Work & Spiritual Healing Podcast

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It's the day before Samhain, and this is the rite I wrote in a single day for my coven's first live ritual: a plate for my own dead, with names on it, for the first time. My line is unknown and it's staying that way, so this is a Samhain ritual that works whether you know your ancestors or not. I walk through what the night is actually for once you take everybody's gods out of it (the four jobs: frame the door, name and feed the dead, ask them one thing, burn what you're putting down), why "who stands at your door" replaced calling one goddess, the coven's new closing line, how the Deipnon is different, and why spells keep working for me on a screen. Then the full 12-step rite, quickly.

Chapters

0:00 Tomorrow, it's one

0:28 Housekeeping

1:01 The day before Samhain

2:18 A coven, and a rite for two

3:48 Whose gods? Who stands at your door

4:48 The four jobs of the night

5:28 A closing line: by salt we keep it

6:34 Now the names

7:48 The altar's a screen

8:53 Apollo and the honeycomb

9:36 Pressure off

10:38 The rite, step by step

12:34 The door stays open

The simple version of the rite is on the free Patreon and in the community ritual section of the app and website. The full write-up with all three versions (coven, solo digital altar, solo real table) is on the paid side of Patreon. Take all of it, or take the four jobs and build your own.

Join the conversation in the Discord (free): Salt & Sovereignty

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If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, June says proper witching only ever takes three things: the will, the words, and the way. This episode is how I actually write my own spells, through those three: listening for the feeling that lingers, finding words that feel right in your mouth (borrowed, rewritten or talked out with someone you trust), and putting it out into the world as simply as you like. Along the way: the sisters of the book, the maiden, mother and crone, why a spell doesn't need a perfect setup to count, and what spell work has done for my own voice. (Recorded while I was sick, so bear with the voice.)

Chapters

0:00 It's still your spell

0:25 The will, the words, and the way

1:09 A conversation with the red heartbeat

2:03 The sisters, and the maiden, mother and crone

4:07 Spells as small as nursery rhymes

5:04 I. The will: the feeling that lingers

6:41 The moment June's will changed

7:59 II. The words: rhyme, scraps and grimoires

8:55 Borrowing spells until they feel right

10:41 III. The way: putting it out there

11:40 It doesn't need to be a full ritual

12:19 Saying it out loud

14:09 Start with the will

If you've been wanting to write your own spells but felt like you didn't know enough, or like it had to be complicated to count: start with the will. A rhyme and a match is enough.

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If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

#witchcraft #spellwork #howtocastaspell #theonceandfuturewitches #paganism #saltandsovereignty

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I've been dry for months, and I suspect some of you have too. This is an honest look at a long quiet season in my deity work with Hekate (Hecate): why I came back to her wanting something, what happened when I tried to audit a month of results, and why a practice built to be unfalsifiable can't tell a gentle absence from a dead one. Along the way: ancient Greek religion's indifference to belief, the healing sanctuaries that carved their cures in stone and never their misses, the monthly supper rite and the one rule I've never broken, and where faith ends and stubbornness begins. (I've been a practicing witch for years; Hekate has been my patron for about a year.)

Chapters

0:00 A living relationship, or a dead one?

0:37 I've been dry for months

2:18 An introduction, then a relationship

3:25 Two questions, thirty days later

4:46 Auditing her

5:36 Unfalsifiable by design

6:35 The prediction I wrote down first

7:38 What a long dry stretch is actually like

8:38 Is it all in my head?

10:14 Right practice, not right belief

11:42 The stones that only recorded the hits

13:19 The supper, and the rule I never break

15:12 The cost of being gentle with yourself

16:53 Empty rooms, and the one piece of evidence I have

If you're in a spiritual dry spell right now: it doesn't mean you did something wrong. Keep the practice if you can, and let it go if you can't. Neither of those is a verdict. And come tell me, especially if you presumed you were the only one sitting in a quiet stretch.

Join the conversation in the Discord (free): Salt & Sovereignty

Patreon: Salt & Sovereignty (new Patreon-only show starting the week before Halloween: real paranormal stories, told in the dark, every week)

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If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

#hekate #deitywork #witchcraft #spiritualdryness #paganism #saltandsovereignty

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Most of us speak more than one language to the people we love: the careful voice we save for occasions, and the plain one that shows up at two in the morning. At the top of every ritual I write a line of ancient Greek, one of Hekate's (Hecate's) epithets, and I'm not confident I pronounce any of it right. So what is that line doing on the page?

This episode follows that question through the old Egyptian spell books and her many names (Triodītis, Enodia, Phosphoros, Chthonia, Polyōnymos, the "many-named"), the strange "words that aren't words" in those prayers, and an ancient argument that the power was never in the meaning but in the sound. Then three honest answers about what ritual words are for, the one I don't like, and what I call the emergency voice: the one that shows up when there's no time to be heard properly at all.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open

0:33 Two voices for the people we love

3:25 Talking to her like an old friend

5:17 One woman, two languages

6:09 What the oldest books say

9:07 Words that aren't words

11:31 Three answers

14:52 How do you tell which one you've been doing?

16:01 The emergency voice

17:33 Borrowed words and the workbook

19:54 The traffic between us

22:38 Something to try

24:14 What's still there when we haven't prepared

Something to try: think of who you talk to when nobody's there. Notice which voice you use, and which one comes out when something is genuinely wrong. Then come tell me which voice showed up.

Join the conversation in the Discord (free): Salt & Sovereignty

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The show is on video on Spotify and YouTube.

If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

#hekate #hecate #witchcraft #prayer #deitywork #saltandsovereignty

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Two weeks ago I walked you through a road opener spell with Hekate (Hecate) in detail. This is the honest follow-up: what happened, what didn't, and the part I skipped. I changed the rite at the altar, the birthday candles went out in their own order, and every photo I took of the working came back as an even, unbroken field of brown. Then I look at the vow I was meant to speak aloud and only thought instead: why saying something out loud is different from thinking it, the one commitment I was protecting, social anxiety, choosing versus avoiding, the stranger who reached out mid-ritual and apologized before hello, and why the cheapest road opened first.

If you're wondering how to know if your spell is working, this is what two weeks of watching one actually looked like, including the signs, the silence, and the prediction that didn't come true.

Chapters

0:00 The photo that came back brown

0:34 What I did instead

2:04 The night the roads were lit

2:40 The brown photograph

4:11 The second half: a set of commitments

5:04 The vow I thought instead of said

5:42 Why you have to say it out loud

6:40 The room I was protecting

8:11 Choosing not to, or avoiding?

10:58 Did anything move?

11:54 A stranger, before hello

14:36 The arithmetic

16:23 Two weeks in, and tonight's full moon

I recorded this on the night of the full moon, the final working of that spell, and it was time I said my vows out loud. If you've ever made a promise to yourself so softly that nobody heard it, come tell me about it.

Join the conversation in the Discord (free): Salt & Sovereignty

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If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

#hekate #roadopener #witchcraft #spellwork #hecate #deipnon #saltandsovereignty

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I spent the better part of an hour in front of an empty box, unable to type a price. It wasn't my principles that stopped me. It was a much older sentence about the kind of person I am with money.

In this episode I look at what I found when I went back to the thing I'd been building: layer after layer of extra promises, piled on so that nobody could say I was asking for too much. I've started calling it the stack. It's the favor returned in advance, the apology before the question, the explanation nobody asked for. It's everything we pile on top of a request so we never have to make it plainly. Along the way: money shame that got passed down without anyone meaning it to, the quiet rule that says being paid for spiritual work makes it less real, and why a lifetime of yeses we worked for leaves us with no clean evidence about our own worth.

Chapters

0:00 If every yes came after you'd stacked something

0:29 Beliefs that sound like principles

1:39 An hour in front of an empty box

3:47 An old sentence about money

6:43 The scaffolding I built instead

9:20 The stack

12:08 Not one clean data point

13:07 When "free" is also a hiding place

14:05 When your principles and your wounds agree

16:05 The rule nobody agreed to

17:14 I want this to be my job

21:21 Something to try

22:21 What's changing, and what isn't

23:11 A much older habit

Something to try: think of something you'd charge for if somebody else were doing it. Put an actual number on it, quietly, in your own head. Then notice what your body does, and whether you start stacking. I'd love to hear what happened. Not the number. That one's yours.

The free feed stays free, and the rite I write each month still goes out to everyone.

Join the conversation in the Discord (free): Salt & Sovereignty

Patreon: Salt & Sovereignty

Instagram & YouTube: @saltandsovereignty

If this meant something to you, following, rating and leaving a review really does help the next person who needs this find us.

Until next time, honor the truth that keeps you sovereign.

#selfworth #peoplepleasing #moneyshame #spirituality #witchcraft #paganism #saltandsovereignty

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Mabon is younger than disco. The name for the autumn equinox was coined in 1974, and Hekate never kept this holiday at all. So why does the turn of the year still feel like hers? This week, Ash goes looking for the real thread between Hekate, the autumn equinox, and the myth of Persephone's descent, and finds something she didn't expect. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter doesn't say Persephone chose the pomegranate. It says she was tricked, and it says she was forced. That distinction changes what sovereignty actually means when the thing that happened to you was never a choice, and when it's set to happen again. Ash walks through what's genuinely ancient in modern witchcraft and what isn't (the answer is less than you'd think), why the Wheel of the Year is a 20th-century invention, and the equinox ritual she built once she stopped pretending she had a receipt for any of it: two slips of paper, two torches, and a pomegranate eaten on purpose. If you've ever felt like you had to find the moment you were "in charge" of your own worst chapter before you were allowed to call yourself healed, this one's for you.

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Tomorrow I'm casting a friendship spell for me and my husband, and I'm recording this before I do it... so I have no idea yet whether it works.

On the drive home last Sunday we finally said it out loud: we don't have anybody where we live. My best friend is across the state. His is too. So I'm doing a three-night working with Hekate. A Deipnon clearing at the dark moon, three candles for three roads as the light comes back, and a sealing at the full moon.

But this one isn't really about the candles. When I sat down to write out who I was asking for, almost all of it came out as what I don't want. Not fake, not surface-level, not somebody half-assing their own life. A full page of nos. And reading it back, I found myself in it asking for a friend who's honest about money while I struggle to talk about mine, asking for someone who doesn't complain constantly while I get stuck doing exactly that.

In this episode: the history of Hekate's (Hecate's) Deipnon and why the ancient offering included the sweepings of your own house; why I'm keeping the words of the spell private; the ethics of asking for people without casting on anyone's will; and why the hardest part of a friendship working isn't magical at all.

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What happens when a relationship, a belief, or a version of yourself hasn't done anything wrong, but it's stopped adding anything to your life?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash sits with the guilt of outgrowing something you still love, the fear of becoming someone who abandons people, and the difference between fading away from a connection versus consciously closing the door on it. Drawing on Hekate as goddess of crossroads and thresholds, she talks honestly about why releasing doesn't require a villain, and why gratitude and grief can coexist in the same ending.

The episode closes with an original ritual, The Release at the Crossroads, a gentler alternative to traditional cord-cutting that works for people, practices, or old versions of yourself, and is written to adapt to any spiritual practice or none at all.

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What makes a curse unethical, and who gets to decide? In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores curses, baneful magic, consent, protection, anger, justice, and personal responsibility through the complicated lens of witchcraft ethics.

Ashley begins with something she has never tried to hide or soften: she has cursed someone before, she believed the working was justified, and she still stands by that decision. From there, the conversation moves beyond whether curses are simply “good” or “bad” and into the much harder questions underneath magical ethics.

In this episode:

• Ashley shares the story of a mirror curse she performed and why she considers it both baneful and ultimately healing
• We explore the long history of curses, bindings, and defixiones in ancient Greek and Roman magical practice
• Ashley examines the Wiccan Rede, the Threefold Law, and why “harm none” is not a universal rule of witchcraft
• We look at consent, protection, revenge, justice, return-to-sender work, and the uncomfortable overlap between them
• Ashley reflects on anger, survivorhood, spiritual darkness, and the pressure to sanitize difficult emotions
• We question whether “light” magic is automatically ethical and whether “dark” magic deserves the assumptions placed upon it

This is not an argument that curses are good, or that everyone should practice baneful magic. It is a reflection on what happens when spiritual ethics collide with real human lives, where harm, consent, protection, intention, and consequence are rarely as simple as we want them to be.

If you have ever wondered where your magical ethics came from, what responsibility means inside your practice, or whether darkness and light are really useful moral categories at all, this episode is an invitation to become curious before becoming certain.

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In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her experience beginning Reiki through Brett Bevel’s self-attunement method after years of feeling unable to afford traditional Reiki training. She reflects on spiritual accessibility, the ethics of paid spiritual education, and the difference between receiving an attunement and truly integrating an energy healing practice. Ashley also explores how Reiki is beginning to coexist with her witchcraft, devotional practice, and relationship with Mother Earth, especially through a quiet morning walk using Choku Rei. This episode is a grounded reflection on Reiki, self-attunement, embodied spirituality, and learning to move slowly enough for a practice to become real.

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What happens when fear of rejection, people pleasing, and overthinking turn every social interaction into a test someone is trying not to fail? In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash explores the constant self-monitoring underneath her long-held belief that she hates small talk, and how old survival patterns can quietly shape the way a person sees themselves.

She unpacks social anxiety, fear of abandonment, emotional perfectionism, hypervigilance, fawning, and the pressure to perform the “correct” version of yourself around other people. She also explores how the same invisible test can show up in witchcraft, intuition, and spiritual discernment, especially when someone has learned to distrust their own instincts.

This episode isn’t about forcing yourself to become more social or pretending every limitation is simply a mindset problem. It’s about questioning the identities and thought patterns we can start treating as permanent truths, and asking how much of ourselves we may have held back while trying not to get the answer wrong.

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What do we actually mean when we talk about masculine and feminine energy?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash explores a question that began with a simple conversation and quickly turned into one of the deepest spiritual rabbit holes she's encountered in years. Why do we call Hekate a goddess? What makes a deity masculine or feminine? Are divine beings gendered in the same way humans are, or are we describing something entirely different?

Together, we'll explore Hekate as a case study while unpacking some of the biggest questions surrounding the Divine Feminine, Divine Masculine, masculine and feminine energy, and modern witchcraft. Along the way, we'll examine ancient tradition, personal spiritual experience, the role of mythology, and whether concepts like intuition, strength, compassion, discipline, and wisdom truly belong to one energy over another.

This isn't an episode about proving who's right. It's an invitation to question assumptions, deepen your relationship with your spiritual practice, and explore what these ideas actually mean in your own life.

Whether you're a Hekate devotee, a practicing witch, a pagan, or simply someone interested in spirituality and consciousness, this conversation will leave you with new questions to carry into your next ritual and meditation.

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A meditation beneath a copper pyramid led Ashley into a much larger question: how often do we mistake control for safety?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores the relationship between trauma, surrender, spiritual practice, and the meaning of personal sovereignty. She reflects on the ways hypervigilance and control can begin as intelligent survival strategies, only to later limit our ability to experience joy, vulnerability, mystery, and trust.

That realization also changed the way she thinks about witchcraft and spellcraft. What if magic is not about controlling reality, but consciously participating in it? Through meditation, protection work, devotion to Hekate, and the metaphor of tending a garden, this episode examines the difference between fear-based control and intentional spiritual partnership.

She also explores why surrender is not the same as powerlessness, why healthy boundaries remain essential, and how true sovereignty may be less about domination and more about remaining rooted enough to meet whatever comes.

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Labels can help us understand our identity, find community, and name our experiences, but they can also become cages when we mistake them for the whole truth.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley reflects on labels, trauma, identity, witchcraft, ADHD, religion, and spiritual practice. Beginning with an expansive meditation experience, Ashley explores why language can point toward an experience without ever fully containing it, and why the same is true of human beings.

She shares how the ADHD label became tangled with shame and self-worth, how religious trauma shaped her nervous system’s response to Christianity, and how curiosity helped transform her mother’s understanding of witchcraft. This is not an argument against labels. It is a personal reflection on using them as guides without allowing them to become laws.

In this episode:

• How labels shape identity and self-perception
• Why trauma can turn categories into protective assumptions
• Ashley’s experience with ADHD, shame, and changing health symptoms
• Religious trauma, Christianity, and nervous system awareness
• Labels within witchcraft, including “baby witch” and black magic
• The difference between assumption and genuine discernment

Trauma may teach us to survive through labels, but healing can give us enough space to look beyond them. This episode is an invitation to remain curious about ourselves, other people, and the identities no single word could ever fully contain.

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This personal reflection explores Ashley’s evolving relationship with Hekate, from religious fear and spiritual anxiety to trust, devotion, historical curiosity, and a more sovereign spiritual practice.

When Ashley first encountered Hekate, she saw a dark and potentially dangerous goddess who might punish mistakes, demand obedience, or expose her to something unsafe. Over time, she began to recognize that many of those fears did not come from Hekate herself. They came from religious trauma, cultural portrayals of witchcraft, painful experiences with trust, and a nervous system shaped by abandonment and abuse.

Ashley also reflects on discernment, modern Hekatean practice, the Triple Goddess, Hekate’s Wheel, ancient traditions, personal signs, and the freedom to learn without treating every mistake as proof of spiritual failure.

This is not a guide to working with Hekate or a universal account of who she is. It is one person’s lived relationship with a goddess who once represented everything she feared and eventually became a source of trust, truth, protection, and belonging.

May this episode remind you that learning more does not invalidate the relationship you had before you knew more, and that tradition can ground your practice without becoming another source of fear.

Pronunciation note: Ashley did her best with the names and terms in this episode, but she may not have gotten every pronunciation quite right. Thank you for your grace!

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In this episode, Ashley shares the deeply personal story behind the Salt & Sovereignty platform, a project that began as a simple podcast website and gradually became something much bigger: a spiritual home designed to make meaningful practice more accessible for everyone.

In this reflective episode, Ashley explores how three weeks of building led to a much larger realization about accessibility, spiritual practice, and what it means to create a place where people can belong without needing perfect circumstances.

In this episode:

• Why Salt & Sovereignty began as “just a website”
• The meditation with Hekate that changed Ashley’s perspective on the podcast
• How accessibility became the guiding philosophy behind every feature
• Why digital tools aren’t meant to replace physical spiritual practice
• The vision for a Living Library, digital Book of Shadows, and spiritual community
• Why success is measured by people, not download numbers

Whether you’re new to witchcraft, devoted to Hekate, navigating chronic illness, practicing in secret, or simply searching for an authentic spiritual path, this episode is an invitation to remember that meaningful practice doesn’t require perfect circumstances.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

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In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley reflects on doomscrolling, nervous system exhaustion, emotional overwhelm, and the grief of realizing she was never broken to begin with.

After months of constantly reaching for noise, distraction, podcasts, videos, and stimulation, Ashley shares what surfaced during a recent Brainspotting therapy session and how silence began revealing deeper layers of grief, trauma, self-blame, and emotional exhaustion.

This is not a productivity conversation or a “fix yourself” episode. It’s an honest reflection on chronic overstimulation, survival mode, emotional healing, and learning how to return to yourself gently instead of performatively.

In this episode:

• Doomscrolling and emotional avoidance
• Why silence started feeling unbearable
• Nervous system exhaustion and chronic fight-or-flight
• Grieving years of believing “I’m broken”
• Trauma, self-worth, and internalized shame
• Learning to sit with yourself without trying to fix yourself

This episode is for anyone who feels emotionally overwhelmed, disconnected from themselves, exhausted by constant stimulation, or afraid of what silence might bring up.

Maybe healing is not becoming someone new. Maybe it’s learning how to stop abandoning yourself when things get hard.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In this episode, Ashley reflects on creator burnout, visibility pressure, nervous system exhaustion, and the emotional cost of turning deeply personal work into online content.

What started as an effort to improve podcast SEO and discoverability slowly became a deeper reflection on performance, consistency, emotional honesty, and the pressure to stay visible online. Ashley explores the tension between devotion and optimization, especially within trauma-informed spiritual and healing work.

In this episode:

• The emotional impact of learning SEO and content strategy
• How visibility pressure can quietly become performance
• Burnout, nervous system exhaustion, and constant output culture
• The difference between emotionally honest work and optimized vulnerability
• Trauma, productivity wounds, and performance-based worth
• Why healing work does not always fit algorithm-driven systems

This is not a productivity episode or a creator strategy guide. It’s a personal reflection on what happens when meaningful work starts colliding with systems built for constant visibility and consumption.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to constantly produce, stay visible, or turn your life into content just to feel worthy, this conversation may resonate with you.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her real-time experience navigating panic and fear when a wildfire threatened her childhood home and her best friend’s home.

As anxiety and helplessness rise, she reflects on what it means to face something you cannot control, and how returning to spiritual practice can shift you from panic into grounded response.

In this episode:

• Anxiety and panic during an emergency situation
• Feeling out of control and overwhelmed
• The nervous system response to fear and uncertainty
• Turning to spiritual practice and Hekate for grounding
• Creating a protection working as a response, not control

This is not about stopping what’s happening, but about how you choose to stand in the middle of it.