First Steps: One Lunation With Lilith

This is the introduction the keepers wish they had been given. It runs for one lunation, about twenty-nine days, from one dark moon to the next. It asks for ten to twenty minutes on most evenings and about forty minutes on the two dark moon nights. You can start at any point in the month, but if you can wait for a dark moon, do.

Before you begin

1. Read the archetype in brief and the shadow-work page, including its cautions.
2. Get a notebook. Write the date and one sentence on the first page: why you are doing this. Do not improve the sentence.
3. Decide where and when you will have privacy. If the answer is "nowhere and never," then arranging it is your first step, and it may take the whole month. That counts.

Week one: reading in the dark

From the dark moon to the first quarter. The work of this week is to meet the figure as she is in the sources, before deciding what she means to you.

• On the first night, keep a short form of the dark moon observance. If the full rite feels like too much, simply sit for ten minutes with one candle and no screen, and then write what you noticed.
• Over three evenings, read Origins and Sources, a few sections at a time. After each sitting, write two lines: what surprised you, and what you wished were different.
• Each night, answer the day's prompt in the night journal. Three sentences are enough.

Week two: naming

From the first quarter to the full moon. The work of this week is the first movement of shadow-work: plain description.

• Each night, along with the prompt, record one strong reaction you had that day to another person. Write what happened and what you felt. Do not explain it.
• Midweek, take the inventory described under Sovereignty in practice: for body, name, hours, and conscience, who is deciding?
• At the full moon, without opening the journal, list from memory the reactions that have come up more than once. The journal itself stays closed until the dark moon.

Week three: meeting

From the full moon to the last quarter. The work of this week is to look directly at one thing from that list.

• On two evenings, at least three days apart, do a session of mirror work, ten minutes the first time and no more than twenty the second.
• On the other nights, keep the journal as before. Expect the entries to get shorter and blunter. That is a good sign.
• If anything from the mirror stays with you unpleasantly the next day, take a night off and do something ordinary. The month is not a test of endurance.

Week four: refusing

From the last quarter to the dark moon. As the light goes, the work turns outward to one small, real act.

• Early in the week, choose a single refusal. Make it small and within your own jurisdiction: an obligation you never agreed to, a habit of apology, an hour you always give away.
• Midweek, perform the Rite of Refusal for it.
• Before the dark moon, carry it out in daylight life, once.
• On the dark moon, keep the full observance. Read your first-page sentence again and write beneath it whatever is now true.

Afterward

At the end of the lunation you will have a filled notebook, some experience of each practice, and one changed thing in your life, however small. What you do next is up to you, and that is the point. You might keep only the monthly observance. You might keep the journal and nothing else. You might put the whole thing down, having learned what you came for.

There is no second level, and no one to report to. If you would like company in thinking it over, the Journal is where the keepers do their own thinking in public.