Exploring Celestial Witchcraft: Infuse Your Halloween with Divine Energy

The concept of a "Divine Halloween celestial witch" combines elements of divinity, Halloween, and celestial magic. This unique blend creates a powerful and mystical character that is both magical and awe-inspiring. In mythology and folklore, witches are often depicted as beings with great power and knowledge of the supernatural. They are associated with magic, potions, spells, and the ability to communicate with spirits. Halloween, on the other hand, is a holiday that is celebrated on October 31st, and is associated with costumes, trick-or-treating, and spooky themes. The term "celestial" refers to the heavens or the cosmos.

you can teach primal spells academically, and it's a pretty big deal down in the south. so paizo doesn't agree with your interpretation of spell lists.

Although I think the customizability of the witch as I described would be beneficial, I don t have any illusions that it has any chance of happening it is too big of a jump. Divs could go back to being elementals, so you could have a fiend-like elemental patron, and maybe the Qlippoth finally got totally kicked out of the Abyss and became occult they are already pretty Lovecraftian aberrant , so there would be a fiend-like occult patron that has a very good reason for keeping its identity a secret from the witch.

The term "celestial" refers to the heavens or the cosmos. Celestial magic involves harnessing the energy of the celestial bodies, such as the stars and planets, to perform spells and rituals. It is believed that the alignment and movement of these celestial bodies can affect the energy of the earth and its inhabitants.

The great divine witch debate

I figured this could use its own thread, since it's sort of derailed the arcane witch is unsavory thread.

My most recent post in the thread:

See you say that like "it is possible to teach divine magic," is a completely logical conclusion to draw from "there's an ancient, ludicrously powerful occult artifact that makes you a god if you touch it." I don't follow your logic at all.

Let me be explicit then:

If an "insanely powerful artifact" can grant Divine power, then Gods are not needed to grant Divine power.

Therefore, we've established precedence already that divine power is not strictly limited to Gods that currently exist.

That already means that "gods said no" is not necessarily the case, because people (players even) can become gods.

We have absolutely no clue what the starstone even is beyond "thing that came from the stars that makes people deities," it could have been made by a god to distribute godhood freely. That god would likely have been killed by other gods for making it, so we wouldn't know. Gods are jerks like that. The point is, an odd corner case that we don't know the precise mechanism of can't be taken as the rule.

What I gather is that divine magic is either inherent(sorcerer) comes from faith in deities(cleric) or comes from faith in what the deity's get their powers from(Oracle.) It requires devotion, not study.

Sure, in the context of them, that is the case.

But that's an arbitrary distinction that is literally rooted in the lore of "gods said no" and "divine power doesn't work that way".

To my response would be: "why? Why does it functionally have to work that way?"

The answer is it doesn't. There are plenty of reasons to say something works a certain way or it doesn't, but to say that it has to in order to work at all? I would question that highly.

In pf1 the only rough equivalent to the 3.5 archivist is an inquisitor archetype that still requires faith in something.

This leads me to believe paizo wants to keep divine magic tied to faith. You are free to rail against that decision, of course.

There are plenty of polytheistic pantheons that do not follow the paradigm of divine power being inherently controlled in such a way to limit any and all access to its usage.

After all gods are dependent on domains. A domain is inherently something a god draws its powers from, because a domain does not belong to any one god, it belongs to many.

So in that sense, why can a witch not draw power from what provides the domains their power?

What makes you think something provides power to domains, rather than domains just being fundamental building blocks of the universe.

And more aptly, why can a witch not draw power from the essences that Divine Magic is derived from itself?

Because. that's the Oracle's schtick?

This is evident in Sorcerer's, Demons, Angels, Oracles, etc.

They do not devote themselves and yet they have these powers.

Oracles are either devoted to the things deities get their magic from, or something is devoted to them. Devotion is involved either way.

Who is to say a Witch can't steal the ability to use these powers by say "tapping a divine vein" or something of that nature?

Are we saying that unraveling the mystery of where divine power comes from is inherently impossible? Are there no patrons that would seek to expose this power?

Maybe they can't. Maybe there are such patrons, but tbh they would be rare. Odd corner cases that would be better served by a class archetype in the final book or elsewhere.

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And more aptly, why can a witch not draw power from the essences that Divine Magic is derived from itself?

Because. that's the Oracle's schtick?

In my honest opinion, the Oracle and Witch are 2 sides of the same coin. They should both be people who outside forces have chosen to invest with power for their own reasons. The Oracle drew the attention of Divine forces and received a curse that provides him with spells and revelations. The witch received a Familiar with spells and hexes. It's fitting that both are coming in the same book. But both should be Spontaneous casters, because power was bestowed to them, and they didn't choose to seek it out through hard study or long prayer.

i have no strong feelings one way or the other.

I see the witch as fundamentally an Arcane caster with the flexibility to push into Occult or Primal. I don’t think it makes sense to include Divine.

For my money, witch shouldn't be a multiple-list caster in the first place.

It's not exactly fair to clerics who learn to cast divine magic by channeling their god while adhering to strict religious tenets and performing continuous worship.

I personally don't think anyone should be able to just devote time and learn to cast divine magic, it waters down the whole paradigm. If Witches were supposed to gain power only through their patron, who could take it away at a whim 1. I would not like that and 2. divine casting witches would be too similar to clerics.

I think Primal, Arcane, and Occult lists are appropriate, but patrons should do MUCH more to modify those lists. If you're otherwise a somewhat normal arcane caster, but your patron grants you a bunch of unprecedented spells that they don't teach at the Wizard school, that's pretty appropriate to the whole theme. It also allows the Witch to feel like a better spellcaster than the bard, even if they do end up reducing the number of spell slots to get bard-like hex cantrips.

Personally, I'd be fine with all witches starting with the Occult spell list and Patrons granting juicy selections of bonus spells from other lists.

It seems to me that if they added a couple of divine-related greater and major lessons in the APG, a lot of the concern would go away. It may only need one that gives your familiar summon fiend and the witch a hellfire rebuke hex and one that gives some good healing options. Then the "make a deal with the devil" and the healbot "good witch" archetypes would both be supported without opening up divine witches.

Of course, for my money, the witch shouldn't be a list caster in the first place and should get all the spells from lessons which could draw from all the traditions. The big selling point would be that witch is best positioned to get a little bit from tradition A, a little bit from tradition B.

One of the reasons I started the arcane witch thread was it didn't quite make sense to me that a witch could be arcane but NOT divine. Opening up all traditions to the witch though treads too much on the sorceror's unique thing so the question of why arcane but not divine led me to suggest dropping arcane.

The flavour of each tradition as far as I understand them are:

Arcane: University Magic, PHDs and theses etc.
Divine: Magic granted by some higher power
Occult: Creepy magic
Primal: Nature magic

The Witch getting spells from a patron is kind of exactly what the Divine tradition describes. It just comes in the form of 'Lessons'.

For my personal ranking of how well each tradition fits my understanding of the theme of a witch it is

1. Tie between Occult for Halloween/Wicked Witch (both played straight and subverted), and Primal for Wiccan/Hedge magic Witch.
2. Divine 'cause I'm having a hard time distinguishing between magic granted by higher beings just because one of them is though 'Lessons'.
3. Arcane. To me the wizard school flavour of the tradition just doesn't fit with the witch theme.

In any case the issue popping up with having 3 of the 4 traditions available is that it makes the tradition left out more prominent than the 3 allowed. What's so unique about divine that Witch Patrons can't hand it out?

I don't think there's a very good flavour explanation for that considering the Oracles have no problem mysteriously accessing it w/o any obvious help while the Witch has a powerful patron to help!

Hell MONKS can get divine focus spells through kicking a lot or something. Witch Patrons can't give it to the Witch?

Of course, for my money, the witch shouldn't be a list caster in the first place and should get all the spells from lessons which could draw from all the traditions. The big selling point would be that witch is best positioned to get a little bit from tradition A, a little bit from tradition B.

I think this solution would cause major problems down the line. Having each caster operate of a single spell list as a base is really important since it means printing new spells is super easy and gives all the casters of that tradition access. If you go for this solution and print a book with an occult spell down the line, all the occult casters would get access to it. but not the witch. That would mandate printing new lessons just to give witches access to new spells, which makes the class kind of auto-bloat in a way.

Waterslethe's solution is my preferred one by a long shot, and at this rate I should probably make a longer post arguing for why I want that particular witch/list dynamic since I keep saying I want it.

The flavour of each tradition as far as I understand them are:

Arcane: University Magic, PHDs and theses etc.
Divine: Magic granted by some higher power
Occult: Creepy magic
Primal: Nature magic

The Witch getting spells from a patron is kind of exactly what the Divine tradition describes. It just comes in the form of 'Lessons'.

For my personal ranking of how well each tradition fits my understanding of the theme of a witch it is

1. Tie between Occult for Halloween/Wicked Witch (both played straight and subverted), and Primal for Wiccan/Hedge magic Witch.
2. Divine 'cause I'm having a hard time distinguishing between magic granted by higher beings just because one of them is though 'Lessons'.
3. Arcane. To me the wizard school flavour of the tradition just doesn't fit with the witch theme.

you can teach primal spells academically, and it's a pretty big deal down in the south. so paizo doesn't agree with your interpretation of spell lists.

Take a look at the intersection of magical traditions and essences (Core Rulebook 299-300). The witch in P1 was an arcane caster, so that suggests witches are tapping into primarily mind and matter. They can then access any tradition that uses one of those two essences: arcane, occult, and primal—but not divine.

Now, that's how we got where we are. If that's not where it seems like we should go, we can absolutely revisit that, and I've seen some really interesting suggestions as to why we might want to. But as far as "why was this decided?", there you go.

Of course, for my money, the witch shouldn't be a list caster in the first place and should get all the spells from lessons which could draw from all the traditions. The big selling point would be that witch is best positioned to get a little bit from tradition A, a little bit from tradition B.

I think this solution would cause major problems down the line. Having each caster operate of a single spell list as a base is really important since it means printing new spells is super easy and gives all the casters of that tradition access. If you go for this solution and print a book with an occult spell down the line, all the occult casters would get access to it. but not the witch. That would mandate printing new lessons just to give witches access to new spells, which makes the class kind of auto-bloat in a way.

Waterslethe's solution is my preferred one by a long shot, and at this rate I should probably make a longer post arguing for why I want that particular witch/list dynamic since I keep saying I want it.

Although I think the customizability of the witch as I described would be beneficial, I don't have any illusions that it has any chance of happening (it is too big of a jump). And if the next splat book has pick one (divine, occult) mediums with at least one spirit being an dead wizard who can add some arcane, but no primal because you are screwing around with the cycle of life, no one will be scandalized (which is honestly driving at least some of the divine witch desire).

PF1 had a bunch of types of fiends, most of which (I believe) haven't shown up in PF2 yet. Divs could go back to being elementals, so you could have a fiend-like elemental patron, and maybe the Qlippoth finally got totally kicked out of the Abyss and became occult (they are already pretty Lovecraftian/aberrant), so there would be a fiend-like occult patron (that has a very good reason for keeping its identity a secret from the witch).

If you wanted a good-leaning patron (for the "good witch" archetype), agathion could easily be celestial-like primal patrons, and Shedu/Lamasu could be celestial-like occult patrons (conjure entity needs some love too).

In short, it isn't impossible or even difficult for Paizo to support "make a deal with the devil" and "good witch" archetypes without opening up the class to divine casting, but I think if that is their plan, they ought to throw out a bone so it doesn't derail the playtest.

Take a look at the intersection of magical traditions and essences (Core Rulebook 299-300). The witch in P1 was an arcane caster, so that suggests witches are tapping into primarily mind and matter. They can then access any tradition that uses one of those two essences: arcane, occult, and primal—but not divine.

A "Divine Halloween celestial witch" combines all of these elements into one enchanting and powerful persona. This witch is not just a regular witch, but a divinely inspired being with a deep connection to the spiritual realm. They have a heightened sense of intuition and wisdom, and are able to tap into the cosmic energy of the universe to cast spells and perform rituals. During Halloween, this celestial witch's powers are at their peak. The thinning of the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds allows them to communicate with the spirits and ancestors. They can use this connection to gain insight, receive messages, and perform divination rituals. This divine witch may also incorporate Halloween themes into their magic. They may create potions and spells that are specific to the holiday, using ingredients such as pumpkins, candles, and herbs associated with Halloween traditions. They may also participate in rituals and festivities that honor the spirits of the dead. Overall, the concept of a "Divine Halloween celestial witch" embodies the magical and mystical aspects of witchcraft, Halloween, and celestial magic. It represents a powerful and awe-inspiring being that is in touch with both the supernatural and natural worlds. This character is a symbol of the infinite possibilities of magic and the wonders of the universe..

Reviews for "Rituals for the Divine Witch: Elevating Your Halloween Experience"

1. Sarah - 2/5 stars - I was really disappointed with "Divine Halloween Celestial Witch". The plot was slow and confusing, and I struggled to connect with any of the characters. It felt like the author was trying too hard to be unique and different, and it just didn't work for me. I found myself skipping pages just to get to the end. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book if you're looking for a captivating and engaging read.

2. John - 1/5 stars - I couldn't even finish "Divine Halloween Celestial Witch". The writing was incredibly dull and lacked any depth. The characters were one-dimensional and the dialogue was unrealistic. There were so many inconsistencies throughout the story that it became frustrating to read. I wouldn't waste my time with this book, there are much better options out there.

3. Melissa - 2/5 stars - I had high hopes for "Divine Halloween Celestial Witch" based on the synopsis, but unfortunately, it fell short for me. The concept of a witch during Halloween intrigued me, but the execution was lacking. The writing style was disjointed and the pacing was all over the place. I didn't feel a connection to any of the characters and found the world-building to be confusing. Overall, it was a disappointing read and I wouldn't recommend it.

4. Robert - 2/5 stars - "Divine Halloween Celestial Witch" promised an exciting and unique story, but it failed to deliver. The plot was predictable and lacked any real surprises. I found the protagonist to be unrelatable and the supporting characters were forgettable. The writing felt rushed and the dialogue was often cliché. Overall, it was a forgettable read and I wouldn't recommend it to others.

5. Emma - 3/5 stars - I had mixed feelings about "Divine Halloween Celestial Witch". While the concept was interesting, I felt that the execution fell flat. The pacing was inconsistent and the plot felt underdeveloped. However, there were some moments of intrigue that kept me engaged. The writing style was decent, but it didn't fully immerse me in the story. Overall, it was an okay read, but I wouldn't consider it a standout in the genre.

Embrace the Cosmic Energy: Discover Your Inner Celestial Witch this Halloween