⭕Module 14 — Building Your Own Wheel: A Year of Your Own Design | The Wheel of the Year & the Sabbats Course
Updated: Oct 8
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Witchcraft Series
Help us reach the people who may need this most by sharing this free course with friends, family, colleagues, online communities, social media or on your own website.
🎧 Audio – listen on the go - (coming soon)
⭕Module 14 — Building Your Own Wheel: A Year of Your Own Design
The Last Door Is a Mirror
Thirteen lessons ago you were handed a wheel that belonged to a tradition. This final lesson hands it back belonging to you. Nothing new needs memorizing here; the work of the last door is design, the deliberate shaping of your own wheel out of everything the course has built, and the telling, at the end, of the secret this course has been carrying since its first practice. You have earned both. Bring the journal, a pen, and, for the last section, something with a little ceremony in it, a candle you like, an unhurried hour.
The Spiral, Not the Circle
Begin with the truth about what happens next, because it reframes everything: you are about to discover that the wheel is not actually a circle. A circle returns you to the same point; the wheel returns you to the same festivals as a different person, which makes its true shape a spiral, the same eight doors passed at a slightly different altitude every year, and the second turning is where the wheel begins to teach in earnest. You will arrive at your second Samhain carrying the memory of your first: which photographs stood on the altar, what the silence held, what the twelve cards said and what the twelve months did. The festival stops happening in isolation and starts happening in relationship to itself, and from there the accumulation never stops. This Beltane is read against last Beltane; the cord comes down and the vow is met again; the planting register grows a second year of columns; the witch begins comparing herself not to an imagined ideal but to her own recorded turnings, which is the only comparison that ever taught anyone anything. Ten turnings in, a practitioner holds knowledge no book contains, because it was never in a book; it was in the repetition, met honestly.
Two honest features of the spiral, named now so they never surprise you. First, most witches discover one sabbat that is consistently hard for them, Mabon for some, Imbolc for others, for reasons that usually trace to their own story, and the hard festival does not become easy with the years; it becomes more honestly met, less performed and more true, which is worth more. Second, the festivals change as your life stages change, and this is the practice working, never the practice failing. The Beltane of a witch’s twenties, all bodies and bonfires and beginnings, becomes in her forties something quieter and often deeper, more aware of what generative power costs; the Samhain altar that once held two dutiful photographs of barely-remembered grandparents slowly fills, across a life, with faces she knew and misses by name, and the veil thins differently when the dead are your own people. The festival meets the witch she is at the moment she meets it. Every year, the same doors; every year, a new witch walking through them.
How Personal Traditions Are Born
Before designing anything, learn how the best parts of a personal wheel actually arrive, because they are rarely designed at all. The recipe is accident, plus repetition, plus love. A witch bakes a particular apple cake one Mabon because her grandmother’s recipe card surfaced that week, and it moves her, so she bakes it the next year, and by the fifth year it is not a recipe anymore; it is what her Mabon tastes like. Another walks to one particular tree every Samhain because she happened to the first time. Two friends read poems to each other down the phone one Imbolc and have now done it for seven years running. None of these appear in any book, and that is precisely their value: the traditions no other witch on earth shares are the ones that weave your actual biography into the wheel, until, years in, the wheel and your life become genuinely hard to separate. So the design rule for everything ahead is gentle: plant deliberately, but let things grow wild too, keep whatever the years hand you that you love, and grant yourself the matching permission to retire, with thanks, any tradition that has stopped being true. A living wheel prunes as well as plants.
Your Own Holy Days
Now the first design skill, and the one that most transforms a standard wheel into a personal one: adding your own holy days to the eight. The great festivals mark the sun’s year; your added days mark yours, and they come in three natural kinds. Days of remembrance: the anniversary of a beloved death, kept with a candle and their photograph, a private Samhain in miniature at whatever date is truly theirs. Days of joy: the sobriety date, the day the adoption cleared, the anniversary that matters, the day you survived the thing, each kept with its own small glad observance. And days of the land: drawn straight from your local wheel draft and your route’s growing records, the first-frost day, the jacaranda week, the day the ditch runs loud, the year’s first true autumn smell, holy days whose date is set not by any calendar but by the land announcing them, which makes their arrival a small annual festival of paying attention. Here is the craft of adding one:
Choose few and real. Two or three added days is a rich personal wheel; a dozen is a chore-list wearing ribbons. The test for each candidate: does this day already move you every year on its own? Consecrate what is already true rather than legislating new feelings.
Give each its entry on the wheel page: its name, in your own words, “Da’s Day,” “First Frost,” “The Day We Got the Keys”; its date, or its land-marker if the land sets it; and its observance, one line describing the small fixed act that keeps it, a candle and one story told aloud, a particular meal, a walk to a particular place, flowers bought from the same kind of shop.
Keep the observance small enough to survive every kind of year. A holy day with a ten-minute form gets kept for decades; one requiring an afternoon gets kept twice. The minimum-wheel wisdom applies to your own days doubly, because nobody else will ever remind you of them.
Designing Year One
The second design skill is the year-design sitting: one unhurried hour in which the coming turning is laid out on purpose, not as a contract but as a set of standing invitations. The distinction matters, so it goes in ink: a designed year is not a scheduled year. You are not booking eight productions; you are deciding, lightly and in advance, what each festival is invited to be, so that each one arrives already welcomed instead of ambushing you from the calendar. The sitting:
Open the wheel page and walk the eight in calendar order from wherever the year currently stands. For each coming sabbat, write exactly one line: the mode you intend (alone, shared, private, minimum) and one thing you want to try or deepen, drawn from anything this course taught. “Litha: alone; keep the full short-night vigil this time.” “Samhain: host the dumb supper for three.” One line, no more; the festival’s own lesson holds the rest.
Mark in your added holy days at their places, and then set the standing appointments this course has already planted, because they are now yours to keep: the corn dolly’s return to the earth at the spring stirring; the cord’s reading and reckoning at Beltane; the Litha herb harvest and its jars; and, first of all of them, the Year Ahead scoring at Samhain, where the twelve cards you drew at the beginning finally meet the twelve months you actually lived, the course’s oldest open thread, closing in your own hands.
Write the year’s one word at the top of the page. Not a resolution; a flavor. The word a witch chooses for a turning, “steady,” “open,” “rebuild,” “bloom,” tends to come true in ways resolutions never manage, mostly because she rereads it eight times at eight festivals, which is eight more times than any resolution gets.
The Secret Told
And now, witch, the moment this course has owed you since its first practice, when you were told the journal would quietly become something witches treasure, and that naming it early would spoil a good surprise. Take the journal in your hands and take its inventory. It holds the map of the year you had already lived before you knew the wheel’s name, grown into a phenology wheel of your own land. It holds the Sun Tracker, a full year’s pendulum of the sun recorded at your own window, both standstills and both crossings, an observation humanity once built monuments to keep. It holds your local wheel, your festival dates, your celebration records with their honest notes on what felt real and what felt awkward. It holds the Names I Carry and the stories beside them; the Year Ahead spread waiting for its reckoning; What I Planted with its verdicts; the Cord and its vow; the Dye Book; the Midsummer Shelf and its growing pantry of kept seasons; Counted by Name; The Two Equinoxes; The Route; your Between-Days; your minimum wheel, written by your strong season for your hard one; and, by the end of tonight, your own holy days and your first designed year.
Witches have a name for a book like that. A Book of Shadows is a witch’s own handwritten book of practices, records, and workings, the single most personal object in the craft, named in the modern tradition’s founding years and kept, in one form or another, for as long as there have been practitioners who could write. Yours has one further distinction: because it was built around the turning year, it is that particular treasure the old households kept, an almanac, a book of the year itself, your land’s dates and your life’s, interleaved. You were never keeping a course notebook. You have been writing your Book of Shadows since the first evening, one honest page at a time, which is the only way one has ever been written, and it is already an heirloom in the technical sense: a book that a niece, a grandchild, or a stranger-witch of the next century could open and find a year of the world, kept faithfully, in one human hand. All that remains is to tell it its name. Here is the small ceremony:
Choose the book’s name. “Book of Shadows” is traditional and yours to use; many witches name theirs personally instead, “The Turning Book,” “My Year Book,” a private name no one else will read. Sit with the candle lit until the right one surfaces; it usually comes quickly, as if it had been waiting.
Inscribe the front page, which was left blank all course precisely for tonight, whether you noticed or not: the book’s name, your own name or craft name beneath it, and the date. Decorate now or never, exactly as pleases you; plain ink has consecrated centuries of such books.
Bless it in one breath, hands flat on the cover, in your words or these:
“Book of my turnings, made of my own attention: hold what I have seen and done, keep it faithfully, and be handed on, someday, to whoever loves the year the way I have learned to. You are named, and you are mine, and we are not finished. So it is.”
The Letter
One working remains, the course’s last, and it makes the spiral tangible. Tonight, write a letter to the witch who will finish the next turning: yourself, one year from now, at this same season. Tell her where you stand as the course ends, what you hope the eight festivals ahead will hold, which sabbat you suspect will be hard, what you want her to remember about why you began. Seal it or simply fold it shut, write the opening date on the outside, one year from today, and tuck it into the back cover of the newly named book. It will wait there through the whole turning, gathering weight the way the calling list gathered it under its stone, and when the year comes round and you open it, you will be reading a letter from someone you remember being, which is the spiral experienced firsthand, and, veterans report, one of the practice’s quiet astonishments. Write her generously. She will have earned it.
Questions That Come Up
Can I really just invent holy days? You watched this course’s whole history answer that: one man invented three festival names in 1974 and the community kept them because they worked; two friends assembled the entire wheel in the 1950s from older parts. Invention, sincerity, and repetition are how every tradition on this wheel was made, and your first-frost holy day stands in that lineage the day you keep it twice.
What if my practice changes completely? Then the book records the versions, which is one of its deepest functions. Wheels are revised; the pencil rule from the fitting lesson governs your whole practice, and a Book of Shadows with crossed-out pages and changed minds is not a spoiled book but a true one. The witch of five years from now is allowed to overrule you, and you are allowed to leave her notes.
Is my Book of Shadows supposed to be secret? Historically often private, presently entirely your call. Some witches guard theirs; some share pages freely; some plan, as the old families did, to pass the book down. The only rule with any teeth is that the book answers to its keeper, and you are its keeper now.
What do I study after this? Then this course hands you to your next roads with its blessing: the moon’s own study for the rhythm between festivals, the deep crafts, herbs, candles, protection, spellwork, divination, each a country this wheel borders, and the wheel itself, turning underneath all of them forever. A witch with a working wheel has the spine every other study hangs on. Choose the next road by appetite; that is how every good witch’s library was built.
Witch Practice: The First Turning Begins
Add your holy days: two or three, entered on the wheel page by the craft above, each with its name, its date or land-marker, and its ten-minute observance.
Hold the year-design sitting in full: the eight one-line invitations, the standing appointments marked, dolly, cord, herbs, and the Samhain scoring above all, and the year’s one word written at the top.
Name the book. The full ceremony: the name chosen, the front page inscribed, the blessing spoken with your hands on the cover. Take one minute afterward to leaf back through it from the beginning, because you are the first reader of a book that did not exist fourteen lessons ago, and that minute is the course’s true final exam, passed by feeling it.
Write and seal the letter, dated to open one year from tonight, and lodge it in the back cover.
Check the Year Ahead card one last time within these pages, note that its full reckoning now waits for you at Samhain as your own standing appointment, and close the course with one sentence in your own first person: what has the wheel already changed about how I live in time? Date it. It is the book’s first entry as a named book, and the last instruction this course will ever give you.
Blessed Be the Turning
So the course ends where the wheel refuses to: at a beginning. Hear the last teachings plainly, witch, because they are short. The wheel is not a project, and it has no finish line and no expert level; the witch in her first turning and the witch in her fiftieth are doing the same thing, meeting the festival that has come with whatever they have, on the land they stand on, in the body they are in, alone or accompanied, and both are doing it completely. The wheel you now hold is also no longer anyone’s invention: seventy years of practitioners have filled it, refined it, and handed it forward, its first generation now elders and ancestors themselves, and from tonight you stand inside that stream, inheriting from the witches before you and already, page by page, preparing what the witches after you will inherit. The wheel is a vessel. You fill it with your own living.
Samhain will come again. Yule will come again, and Imbolc, and all the doors after them, next year and every year, for as long as the Earth keeps her old lean and her long orbit, which is to say: reliably. Some years you will meet every festival and some years you will miss half of them and rejoin at the next spoke, and the wheel will receive you identically either way, because it has been receiving the busy, the grieving, the joyful, and the late for as long as anyone has kept it. Your book is named. Your year is designed. Your letter is waiting in the back cover, and the next sabbat is already on its way toward you through the turning dark. The wheel turns. You turn with it. And the wheel, witch, will turn you in return, which was the whole secret all along. Blessed be your every season. It is done.
Comments