Irisanya Moon (she/they) is an author of 10+ books, Witch, priestess, international teacher, and initiate in the Reclaiming tradition.
A devotee of Aphrodite, Hecate, the Norns, and Iris, she has practiced magick for 20+ years. They are passionate about the idea that life is, and humans are, love spells, ever experiencing a dance of desire and connection, moving in and out of the heart, always returning to love.
Her teaching/facilitation style is immersive, gracious, safe, authentic, and welcoming to inspire transformation and liberation individually and collectively.
Irisanya cultivates spaces of self-care/devotion, divine relationship (whatever that means to you), and community service as part of her heart magick and activism. She is dedicated to helping people remember and celebrate the love spells they already are.
Irisanya Moon (she/they) is an author, Witch, priestess, international teacher, poet, and initiate in the Reclaiming Witchcraft tradition
Irisanya Moon (she/they) is an author, witch, international teacher, poet, and Reclaiming initiate with 20+ years of experience in magick. She teaches classes and workshops in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, blending grounded, graceful, and radically authentic facilitation to inspire transformation and liberation at personal and collective levels.
Born in the almost-Midwest of the United States on Chippewa peoples land, Irisanya grew up with grass stains on her knees and altars to Mary covered with lilacs from her mother’s garden. She wanted to be a nun after falling in love with the rituals of the Catholic church, the smell of candles and incense, and the endless prayers of a rosary.
After leaving school uniforms behind, Irisanya began to dismantle her Christian upbringing and expanded her spiritual practice into various New Age groups before finding The Spiral Dance after high school. They began to learn more as a solitary practitioner and then a coven leader before returning to solitary practice.
A fateful move to California connected Irisanya to the Bay Area Reclaiming Witches and she went to her first California Witchcamp in 2008. Overwhelmed and curious to learn more, Irisanya took Reclaiming’s core classes and quickly began planning public rituals with North Bay Reclaiming in 2009. In 2010, she started teaching workshops, intensives, immersions, and other classes and Witchcamps worldwide, including the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.
Irisanya has co-taught Elements of Magick, Iron Pentacle, Pearl Pentacle, Rites of Passage, and Communities classes in the Reclaiming tradition. She has co-facilitated year-long priestess/priestex and ritual skills trainings, Writing Between the Worlds, Devotion Pentacle, and more. As part of her Heart Magick practice, she has created and facilitated classes on building relationships with deities, including Aphrodite, Iris, Gaia, the Norns, Circe, and more, as well as workshops on self-devotion and love spells. She teaches online and in-person around the globe.
Around 2012, Irisanya connected with Moon Books, an imprint at Collective Ink, and wrote pieces for numerous anthologies, including Naming the Goddess, Paganism 101, The Goddess in America, Seven Ages of the Goddess, Every Day Magic, Naming the God, Ancestral Healing, Pagan Planet, What is Modern Witchcraft?, Weathering the Storm, and more.
Soon after, they were invited to submit proposals for standalone books and have now completed 10+ books, two of which were reviewed by Publishers Weekly.
Pagan Portals: Reclaiming Witchcraft, Aphrodite, Iris, Norns, Artemis, Circe, Hestia, The Muses*, Hecate*, Athena*
Practically Pagan: An Alternative Guide to Health & Well-being
Earth Spirit: Honoring the Wild, Gaia
Pantheon: The Greeks*
*publication dates to be announced
She has written essays, articles, poems, and blogs for:
Witches & Pagans: “Surrounded by Deity” and “Forged in Flame: Creating a Reclaiming Beltane Ritual articles
Pagan Dawn: Practically Pagan columnist, various essays on deities
Coreopsis Journal: “Traversing the Liminal in the Liminal” essay
Moon Books: An Introduction to Alternative Guides to Living essay and more
Revelore Press: The New Aradia: A Witch’s Guide to Magical Resistance; The Gorgon’s Guide to Magical Resistance; Serpents of Circe: A Manual to Magical Resilience
Llewellyn: Elements of Magic; The Witch’s Book of Spellcraft; Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods; Magic of the Pearl Pentacle
Epona Muse Publishing: Grief: Neurodivergent Voices Series, Volume 1
Patheos Pagan: Charged by the Goddess blog and contributor to other blogs
Irisanya also self-published a book of poetry, “wrecked: the insistence of grief.”
Irisanya cultivates spaces of self-care/devotion, divine relationship (whatever that means to you), and community service as part of her heart magick and activism. She is dedicated to helping people remember and celebrate the love spells they already are.
Heart Magick
Heart Magick arrived in a hospital room during a night of unknowns where a treatment meant to stop my heart did not succeed. Magick, indeed. That moment was the catalyst for my personal development and deeper understanding of the strength that lies in fragile moments, where all seems lost or confusing or broken.
I found Reclaiming Witchcraft shortly after that experience, and a spiritual home that brought me from student to teacher to mentor to initiate to initiator and back again. My first Witchcamp placed me in a ritual where I met the eyes of a stranger and saw the divine. Iris introduced herself to me as I started to take classes. Aphrodite showed up a few years later, gazing at my forced smiles and asking me to soften. And I resisted. I resisted until life offered me places where surrender was necessary -- and unavoidable.
The sudden death of my mother hastened my unfolding. In grief, I lost myself, I lost friends, and I lost my direction in every place outside the solidity of the magickal circles. I broke into pieces and places. I didn’t know how to return, so I wrote poems and grieved out loud, more for myself than anyone else. And that grief brought me to a depth in my witchcraft that was authentic, raw, honest, and softer. Where I was missing my mom, I made space for truth. I made space for the me that couldn’t go back to pretending to be anyone or anything else.
The widening of myself opened the doors to teaching internationally and writing books about magick. And in none of those places did I feel ready. I felt like an open wound, which made me a more compassionate priestex and being. I could not ignore the pain of the world or shut it away from me. I felt everything because my heart did not stop, even when I lost more than I thought I could handle.
And I could tell more stories about death and loss and divorce and betrayal, as a life lived long enough is a life that breaks expectations, promises, and patterns. I was no longer the person some people wanted or needed. But I became the person I wanted and needed.
And Heart Magick was born from my breakdowns and breakthroughs.
Within the practice of Heart Magick are three parts:
Self-Devotion
Divine Relationship
Community Building
Self-Devotion
As an antidote to the co-opting of self-care, Self-Devotion is remembering and returning to devotion to ourselves as Divine Ones. When we remember our divinity and magick, we can hold ourselves more fully as complex, nuanced human love spells. If we can learn to show up at our altars and offer ourselves prayers, we can rewrite stories that have limited our power and courage.
Divine Relationship
While my personal and professional work often focuses on relationships with deities, divine relationships expand beyond the godds to the ocean, the trees, the stars, and more. What is important is building practices that connect you to something with a wider perspective. When we can partner with the divine, these relationships teach us about building more authentic and sustainable connections, which helps us show up better for ourselves and our communities.
Community Building
Within the human heart are structures that allow for ongoing movement, enabling blood to carry oxygen and remove waste from the body. The heart alone can not do this work, nor can we do the work of this life on our own. Together, we will learn how to build effective, aware communities that can adapt and evolve.
The tools I turn to and teach include writing practices, altar building, storytelling and rewriting, spontaneous ritual and spellwork, sacred witnessing, trance dance and embodied movement, deity relationships, working with myths, and more.