Welcome to our new monthly series for 2025 - Walking the Tides with The Sea Wych Salem. In this new series, we'll devote one post a month to diving deep into the natural magic of not just the season, but the month itself. Spend some time with me now and let's walk the tides of January together.
I'm not going to lie, my dear readers and witches. I've started, scrapped, and started this post over and again each day this past week. Looking out my windows at a frigid but barren landscape - late November in its appearance, late January at the North Pole in temperature - was uninspiring and more importantly, unnerving. As elemental witches, sea and water witches tend to be deeply attuned to not just their home bodies of water, but also to the land around them. Looking out over a snowless ground in January, in New England, feels as off-putting as finding a fingernail in your soup. Trying to feel into the seasonal tides for January is exponentially more difficult when the weather is wildly inappropriate for the season, or the month that we're in.
Yesterday however, that landscape changed again. We finally had a snow day. It snowed all day, coming down in big, fat, white flakes, intermittently heavy then light. By the time it stopped, our world here in Salem, Massachusetts looked normal once more. Not only that, it looked beautiful - a postcard perfect snowy landscape, and at last, I felt the thrum of the tides of January in the ground beneath my feet.
January is, by it's nature, a liminal month for most of the world, or at least those parts of it that use the Gregorian calendar. It's this calendar that marks the first of January as the start of each year, but just because the calendar page has turned over doesn't mean that the year we've just stepped out of is done with us quite yet. In fact, most people, whether they admit it or not, carry a lot with them into the new year, despite goal or intention setting, choosing words to mark the year to come, and generally trying their best to shed the last vestiges of the year just gone by.
For this reason, January can feel off-kilter for many, or at least the first few weeks of it can, as we try to close out business left undone. Because of this, the low tides of January can feel lower, the highs higher. Indeed, January generally gives us king tides on the coasts - the lowest lows and highest highs of the ocean - and we can feel that in our bones and spirit too.
So what is the magic of January all about? Endings and beginnings.
At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar turns from last year to this, an old Irish tradition is to open both the front and back doors - the back to let the old year out, and the front to welcome in the new. I personally sprinkle low tide water at the back threshold to help the old year be carried away to sea, and high tide water at the front to help carry in the new. If you won't be home when the bell tolls, anoint your thresholds before you leave for the evening and be sure that, when you walk in the door for the first time in the new year, you bring light and laughter with you. In my home, we also keep a pot of Menudo, a Mexican soup, ready on the stove so that when we do come home, or finish toasting the new year when we are home, there is something delicious and abundant to eat too!
The Yuletide season doesn't end until Twelfth Night (aka Epiphany) which fell on the 5th of January this year. The next day, 6 January, is the day to take down all trappings from the Yuletide season. If you had a live tree or boughs of holly, thank those spirits when you do take them out.
But then what? Now we're through the festivities of the holiday and, in the northern hemisphere, well into the part of winter that feels monochromatic, monotonous, and eternal. Or at least, that's one way to think of it. We can also look at the month in terms of high and low tide. The low tide of January is toward the start of the month, when the holidays are finally finished. This tide calls us to go within and just rest, journal, breathe out, and get caught up with things that perhaps were let go for a while (like my correspondence pile). It's dark, it's cold, and there's usually not too much calling on me socially, so what better time to make being at home magical? Pour yourself into shadow work if that calls to you, or into artistic projects you can infuse with your own magic. Perhaps you're more of a hearth or kitchen witch, passing the evenings baking and cooking with mindful intention.
I also like to use this low tide time to set my mind to learning new things for and about my practice. And cold or no, I try to get to my sacred space, to truly feel into those wintery, coastal woods. If there's snow on the ground so much the better. That's when I can bend my ear and mind's eye to the hibernating insects as they slumber, to the soft bubbling of burrowed clams, and to the quiet sighs of the native plants as they, too, rest underground, insulated by the snow.
At around mid-month, the tide seems to turn again. Now, the skies are growing lighter noticeably earlier, and staying lighter longer. It's not much, but enough to realise that under the snow covered earth, things are beginning to unfurl and to think about growing. The light is returning and there is, occasionally, a hint of spring in the arctic air. When this starts to happen, I begin to plan my magical garden. Not a garden with plants and such (I'm not really great at that), but I do start planting and watering the seeds that are my ideas and plans for a magical year. I journal. I write them out, and I begin to set wheels in motion, even if slowly at first. It is, after all, still cold and dark out - but I cannot deny the returning light and what promise of spring that brings.
So feel into the magic of January in your own way. By the end of the month, the old should be purged and cast out with the ebb tides, and new things, hopes, dreams, ideas, and plans should be visible on the horizon, being carried in with the flow tide and illuminated more each day by the slowly returning light.
I hope you enjoyed this insight into the magic of this month, and I'd love to hear whether this has changed your perspective on January at all, or how you feel in to it's magic, so feel free to drop that in the comments!
January Correspondences
Deities: Janus, the Roman god of transitions; Jana, Janus’ counterpart. She is the goddess of new beginnings, doorways, and the wheel of the year; Skadi, the Norse goddess of winter
Animals: Owl, fox
Trees: Maple, Birch
Stones: Garnet, onyx, jasper, chrysoprase, amethyst, rose quartz, green aventurine
Colours: White, blues (light and dark), reds (light and dark), silver
Flowers: Snow drop
Moon: Wolf moon
Signs: Capricorn, Aquarius
Sabbat: Imbolc (Candlemas) between 31 January and 2 February each year
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