Classes

Foundational ∙ General ∙ Advanced

Contact with the Mystery awakens your deepest and most authentic self: it reveals the purpose of your soul, the profound meaning of your presence here and now. After that, nothing will ever be the same.

Foundational Classes

The first thing magic changes is you.

The Temple of Ara’s three Foundational Classes offer deep grounding in the Tradition’s spiritual principles and essential techniques, offering wise guidance, real skills and the opportunity for magical experiences that will awaken and empower the wicce within.

These classes are open to all—you don’t have to be Wiccan, a Witch, a wicce, to benefit, just as you don’t have to be Buddhist to benefit from meditation or Hindu to practice yoga. They’re for you if you’re just curious and exploring Witchcraft for the first time, or you’re yearning for real, divine magic, you’ve practiced and given up, or you’ve been practicing for years and know it’s time to go deeper. The Foundational courses cover essential wisdom and practices missing from most books and classes.

You’ve found your way to this page, at this moment for a reason—when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

The three Foundational Classes are required if you wish to participate in the Temple of Ara’s Rites of Initiation.

Wand Magic—Entering the Circle of Connection

You will learn the essential spiritual principles and master the practices that connect you to the magic within and all around you. You’ll master active techniques to work with divine, magical energies, with Nature’s magic, the elements and with spellcasting.

  • You’ll learn:

    • The secrets of real magic and why setting an intention isn’t enough

    • Nature’s magic, Nature as spiritual teacher

    • Embodiment/instinct - your divinely encoded GPA

    • Purification and preparation for the journey ahead

    • Creating magical altars, preparing offerings

    • Casting a circle—meaning and magic including sacred space, magical containers, altering consciousness, invoking the Goddess

    • Honoring the 4 elements air, fire, water and earth

    • Working with Nature, working with the elements to restore lost parts of yourself, receive guidance, experience joy and love, and unleash powers for healing, growth and manifesting your purpose

    • Working with magical energy— breathing, grounding, chanting, raising, directing

    • Essentials of spellcasting as spiritual practice to transform your life with well-being and wonder.

    • Working with Nature’s divine currents of seasonal and lunar energies to expand your capacities to change and manifest

    This class requires spending time outside, and participation in a weekly one-hour study group. It will include spellcasting that employs the skills mastered during the class. It is offered as an intensive in-person weekend retreat or as an online class consisting of 6 2-hour lessons. It is also offered online as the first half of Phyllis Curott’s Witches’ Wisdom Masterclass.

    Check the calendar for the next offering and format.

Grail Magic—Receiving and Bestowing Blessings

You will master the Temple of Ara’s receptive techniques that open your heart, consciousness and spirit, and fill you with divine magic. You’ll master divinatory and other practices to communicate with the Sacred, receive guidance, alter your consciousness to enter realms of Spirit, and develop your ability to recognize and work with Spirit embodied by Nature, especially spirits of place.

  • You’ll learn:

    • Divination as a spiritual practice for guidance and communion

    • How to cultivate your intuition

    • Recognize and interpret cledons, signs, synchronicities, symbols, and dreams

    • Work with the Library Angel and other magical messengers

    • Shamanic journeying, securing a power animal or spirit guide

    • Journeying to meet the genius loci, the spirit of place

    • Creating magic and ritual with the spirit of place

    This class requires spending time outside. It will culminate with the creation of a ritual guided by the spirits of place. It is offered as an intensive in-person weekend retreat or as an online class consisting of 6 2-hour lessons and participation in a weekly 1 hour study group. It is also offered online as the second half of Phyllis Curott’s Witches’ Wisdom Masterclass.

    Check the calendar for the next offering and format.

Dancing with the Shadow

This Foundational Class introduces you to the Guardian at the Gate, often called your Shadow.  Standing between the life you are leading and the one you dream of living, the magic you long for and the magic you are meant to embody, the Guardian is your guide to seeing yourself with honesty, courage and compassion.

  • This class integrates the practices mastered in the previous Foundational Classes to help you recognize and transform shadow beliefs—your insecurities and self-doubts, wounds and fears, the inhibiting “dark qualities” you bury, deny or project onto others—into empowering and liberating sources of self-knowledge and healing, freedom and fulfillment. This workshop is alchemy, to help you see the gold in the dark, tapping into the magic of your heart as a source of healing and deep self-love.

    This class will work with ecstatic practices including chanting and dancing and will culminate with the creation of a ritual guided by your Guardian at the Gate. It is offered as an intensive in-person weekend retreat or as an online class consisting of 6 2-hour lessons. Check the calendar for the next offering and format.

Temple of Ara Classes & Seminars

Created by High Priestess Phyllis Curott, these classes provide a broad enrichment of your spiritual journey and are open to all. Additional classes by Temple of Ara Clergy to enhance your skills and wisdom are also offered.
Check our calendar for upcoming offerings.

The Path of the Goddess

This course is offered in person and online, dedicated to the rediscovery the mysteries and magic of the Goddess, suppressed for thousands of years by patriarchal systems but essential to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.

This course will help you rediscover Mother  Earth as a sacred, living being  and experience the interconnectedness of all life, to rediscover the Goddess who walks with us, and within us, who offers us the wisdom and ways to rebirth and to a healthy, harmonious and joyful future.

Practical Magic: Spells for Living Well

This course offers an introduction to spellcasting as a profound spiritual and natural practice and magic as the flow of the Sacred through you and into the world, rather than a mechanistic manipulation of supernatural forces for ego gratification. It offers the techniques, methods and knowledge necessary for spiritual and practical Magic with depth and effectiveness.

This course offers training for those who want to go beyond common superficial and mechanistic approaches, to explore the secret and sacred mechanisms of divine, natural Magic and to gain confidence in the creation and casting of spells.

Divination

Offered online and in person, this unique workshop explores the art of divination as a spiritual practice, a profound and yet simple means to speak to the Sacred, receive guidance and to discover that you are never alone. You’ll discover how to master the art of divination to help you see within and to discover how to create the future you long for. You’ll learn how to ask the right questions,  to navigate the vocabulary the Divine uses to speak with you and understand the natural wisdom, within symbol systems, and how to avoid the pitfalls of inaccurate interpretation. You’ll work with divination as a magic mirror to look deep within yourself, to free yourself from negative and unconscious patterns, and to discover your true purpose in life.

The Three Faces of the Goddess

This special workshop is dedicated to the three great powers of the Triple Goddess in her form as Maiden, Mother and Crone. Participants will be guided along the path of the Triple Goddess, activating and embodying the principles of the Sacred Feminine to work on health, body image, work, creativity, money, success, love, relationships, family , spirituality or the deeper purpose of your life.

Nature’s Magic and the Divine Principle of Mother Earth

This workshop introduces Priestess Phyllis Curott’s newest and most profound teaching, offered to her by Mother Earth and offered to all who wish to rediscover their sacred, life-blessing and healing place in the web of life. She will share the divine organizing principle at the heart of Nature, Nature’s magic: how all life has an innate, sacred guidance system that enables them live in health and happiness and simultaneously make the world a better place for all life. The only beings that do not live according to this wisdom are humans and so we are destroying our planet and ourselves.

The course will share five extraordinary, essential practices for you to experience Nature’s magic as your own, and to use this moral compass, to gujide you home to a Sacred world.

In a time of increasing stress and challenges, Mother Earth is calling you home—her wisdom and ways will allow you to transform your life and the future of our planet.

The Goddess Incarnate: The Mysteries of Blood

This class focuses on the meaning of living as a woman,  embodying the mysteries of the Goddess and bringing them into the world through our body and our psyche. In the culture in which we live, the deep meaning and sacredness of the Feminine have been obscured for centuries, but they are not lost or forgotten. They are inscribed in our souls, our bodies and blood , they have been an essential part of the Tradition and Temple of Ara since it’s inception and are still honored in shamanic, Indigenous traditions, in the myths of ancient cultures and in the customs of Native peoples. In this intensive work, we will rediscover the wisdom of female cyclicity and experience firsthand the sacred value of the Female Mysteries .

Advanced Seminars & Courses

These classes are open only to Dedicant Initiates and those underaking Clergy Training.

Ritual Creation

This class explores the deeper spiritual context of creating ritual. You’ll learn how to create powerful and transformative rituals that deepen and intensify your connection to the Divine , to Nature and to yourelf, and to those who participate in it, whether it’s just you, your group or a public convening. 

Among the topics that are covered include advanced techniques for creating and carrying out rituals, analysis of the deepest levels of meaning embodied in a ritual, receiving indications and guidance from sacred sources, preparing the appropriate altar, working with or without tools or words , working with or without “intent”. 

This seminar is part of the Temple of Ara Clery Training and is a necessary prerequisite to become Priestesses/Priests and teachers of Ara.

Rites of Passage

One of the most serious shortcomings of contemporary Western societies is the lack of profound and meaningful ceremonies that accompany the most important transitions in life, such as birth, death and marriage, but also menstruation, reaching adulthood, health issues, successes, failures or divorce. Rituals in the Temple of Ara tradition are not just a social convention, but rites that reverberate in the realm of the spirit , beyond space and time. During this class, the participants will learn how to create rituals suitable  these occasions, which involve the engagement of participants and their loved ones integrating, heart, mind and soul. 

This seminar is part of the Temple of Ara Clergy Training and is a necessary prerequisite to become Priestesses, Priests and teachers of Ara.

Drawing Down in the Tradition of Ara

Through the practice of Drawing Down, the Priestess or Priest becomes the vessel for the embodiment of divinity. This technique, which is perhaps the most famous and characteristic in the history of Wicca, requires solid preparation from a magical, psychological and spiritual point of view. For this reason, participation in the seminar is reserved exclusively for those in the Temple of Ara Clergy Training and is a necessary prerequisite to become Priestesses/Priests and teachers of Ara.

Healing and Advanced Shamanic Techniques

Practitioners who already have a good command of basic shamanic practices will be taken on an in-depth exploration of spiritual healing techniques .

How do physical illnesses reflect on our soul (and vice versa)? What happens when we lose parts of our soul and what can we do to get them back? How can we approach spiritual healing in an ethical way, as an accompaniment to, and not a replacement for, traditional medicine? These are some of the main topics that are covered during the seminar, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view.

This seminar is part of the Temple of Ara Clergy Training and is a necessary prerequisite to become Priestesses, Priests and teachers of Ara.