This spring, Steve and I built our first raised beds after years of planting only TX natives in the soil around our house. We made a flower cutting bed and a vegetable bed, both full of ambition and so much soil that my back still hurts from it. And about that soil… we overlooked the fact that prepping and amending the soil in a raised bed is probably one of the most critical steps to their success. Because we realized this too late, we immediately saw the roots of our plant babies begin to suffocate, and nothing was growing. No tomatoes, no zinnias, just a sad rectangle of stunted plants in the most brutal of Texas heat.

We were ready to rip it all out and compost it, pack it up until next year when we could try again. Then we noticed the bed was covered in insects, and a few weeks later, queen monarchs! The garden we had planned failed, but the one we didn't plan showed up anyway (probably as it was always intended). So we left it. Now it's July, and I'm done fighting the dirt for the season. I’m tired and happy to let what little plants we have left feed the insects and butterflies that so desperately need it right now. The sun is cooking everything that isn't shaded or watered, and the only logical response I can find is to sit down and let it.

And this is where we find the whole inspiration for the month. I’m calling July the Devil's Season, and the Devil's Season is permission to rest and want things. The shame we tend to carry from having basic desires is always the real danger, not the appetite. The work I’m sharing this month will hopefully help you push past that annoying voice in your head telling you that you shouldn’t be so greedy.

The way I’m referring to July comes from the card at the center of the spread I pulled when thinking about what content to write. The Devil is a card that most people flinch at, and rightfully so, because we’ve been programmed to do it. In How to Read Tarot, Skye Alexander writes about why we shouldn’t. She points out that the Devil doesn't represent satanic forces with evil intent at all. He's the horned god of older fertility rites, the ones the Church feared specifically because they involved the body and pleasure. When he shows up, he's asking what you've let chain you, not threatening your soul to eternal damnation.

Folk tradition takes it a step further. In New World Witchery, Cory Thomas Hutcheson tracks the Devil of American folk magic as the Man in Black at the crossroads, and the thing that surprised me is how warm this relationship is. Hutcheson compares him to a faculty member taking a student under his wing, a tutor who pushes you to get better at your craft. The witch meets him "not as a master, the way so many fearful Christians might, but as an equal." Even in the colonial nightmare version, the one in Robert Eggers' The Witch, the offer is to live deliciously. The thing we were trained to fear was never a monster; it was our own desire for autonomy and pleasure.

The name also nods in another direction: The Satanic Panic, which has been living in my headphones all summer via a podcast called The Devil You Know. Hutcheson also discusses this same moment in history and argues that the Panic was a very old story wearing a 1980s costume, aimed at the West Memphis Three and the McMartin Preschool family because they fell outside someone's idea of normal. It's the same shape as the blood-libel logic that got medieval neighbors murdered, a pattern that keeps getting reinvented rather than a single legend handed down. The Devil has never actually been the danger. The Panic that occurred from the idea of it was. More on all of this in a post coming next week, because I’m currently too obsessed with this to only talk about it briefly.

The wheel of the year, as most people know it, is rather European, and it proclaims that the end of July leading into August is all about abundance and first fruits. Ronald Hutton also documents this in The Stations of the Sun: Lammas, the loaf-mass, the feast of first fruits, with the medieval Irish calling the season "earth's sorrowing in autumn." Beautiful, but not at all the same August I experience here in Texas. My August is a literal human kiln.

Temperance Alden's take on the wheel in Year of the Witch is the one that most inspires every monthly magick post I write. She tells us to build the wheel that fits where we are, the land beneath our feet. When the climate doesn't match the calendar, the calendar is what's wrong. Alden even notes that Litha was the Anglo-Saxon word for both June AND July, July being "the latter Litha," from a root meaning mild and gentle. Central Texas in July is anything but mild and gentle. So I'm leaning into the heat instead. With that said, my posts may not align with where you are, but take it as inspiration to start building a wheel that’s entirely your own.

Anatomy of a Witch by Laura Tempest Zakroff. This is the somatic inspiration this month. Zakroff treats the body as an instrument, mapped through lungs, heart, the serpent, bones, and mind. I’m inspired by her flat refusal of body-shame: she writes that the seven deadly sins have been weaponized to vilify bodies that won't conform, and that there's no use for damnation and shame in a practice that's supposed to reconnect you to yourself. For a hot, indulgent, body-forward July, I’ll be using this as my permission slip.

Intention Obsession by Erica Feldmann. A season-by-season ritual book organized by zodiac sign, which means its Cancer and Leo chapters will be inspiring a lot of the July posts. Feldmann runs HausWitch in Salem, and I kind of love her definition of magic: a spell is a prayer with props. This month, I’ve drawn inspiration from the pleasure-garden herbalism and sun-tea glamour, highlighting an anti-gatekeeping, mutual-aid perspective. This same idea underpins the notion that wanting things isn’t the opposite of caring for your community. We are capable of multitudes, my friends.

Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn. Auryn's big contribution in these posts are from his concept of the Lower Self, the part he frames through Baphomet and the alchemical motto solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate. The shadow is something we should learn to integrate, and his glamoury chapter treats the Lower Self like an octopus that can literally change how it appears. For a month about reclaiming the demonized parts of ourselves, that reframe of the Devil-as-shadow-you-integrate is kinda perfect.

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart. I guess not technically a witch book. It's a nerdy botanist's history of the plants behind the delicious drinks you make (both alcoholic and nonalcoholic), and I’m using it to anchor the season’s sensory, indulgent flavor layer. I pulled a card about bats for this month (which is very on-brand if you know anything about Austin, TX), and while looking through her book, I came across a section on agave, which stockpiles sugar for years before it blooms once and dies, and depends on bats to pollinate it, the same bats that monoculture farming is quietly killing. There's also a Texas prickly-pear syrup in this book, the extreme magenta-pink kind, for anyone who wants July in a glass.

Since this is the first email from the new setup, a few notes: