Five of Pentacles Coven
The Light is Coming From Inside the House
(and the house is your body)
A five-month coven for ex-church witches and the witch-curious.
Pay what you can (from $5/month).
Doors Open for Five Days - October 29th - November 3rd
For the past several days (probably five days, the cards are on-the-nose funny like that), I have pulled the Five of Pentacles during my daily tarot reading several times. I've come across conversations about it on Threads and Instagram, chatted about it with a few different people, and just about had a full love affair with it.
Or maybe it's more like it's stalking me. (I was raised on rom-coms from the 80s. I'm sorry, my concept of love is warped!)
I digress.
The point is, the Five of Pentacles is a fascinating card for post-religious people, in particular.
The traditional meaning is hardship: poverty, illness, loss, being left out in the cold.
(sound familiar?)
Many readers add a hopeful layer, that help is right there in the lit window, if you'd only go in and ask.
The Rider Waite Smith deck, the classic one most people would recognize, shows two figures in the snow: a person on crutches with a bell around his neck, and a barefoot person who appears to be leading him. A cathedral with a lit window looms behind them.
The idea is, go through the door and all will be well.
What about when the church hurts instead of helps?
The thing is, that imagery says something else to people like me, who were raised in high-control religion and never found much help (and probably a LOT of harm) inside the walls of the church. That finally explains the little pit in my stomach when I see that card.
For me, and probably you, the church represents conditional help. Help that's available so long as we comply and conform. They might be willing to give us a bowl of hot dog soup and a warm place to sleep, but only after we attend a chapel service. (I know this first-hand, not from lived experience of houselessness, but from volunteering as a worship leader at one such shelter in my youth and, sadly, early adulthood.)
It's a community that loves you until you disagree. They never knew you as a three-dimensional person. They knew a teammate. And when you stopped obeying, it was game over.
Only, it wasn't.
It was the beginning.
I've started to see this card as something else.
There is already help, already resources for you, in your own body.
Your body is the the temple. The place of refuge. The resource. Your body is the light behind the window.
That light is your light.
Let's be real, though. It IS hard. This card keeps showing up in my readings and clients' readings lately, and the hardship is real. Leaving can cost you community, family, belonging, sometimes your whole sense of who you are. That's exactly why you need your own body. And it's why we need each other.
You don't have to go it alone
Far from it. The bell-wearing person (it's said the bell was a warning of leprosy, now called Hansen's disease, which required people with the disease to announce their presence) and the person wrapped in a shawl are together. They give each other company, some camaraderie, in the middle of what would otherwise be punishing exile.
For anyone raised in purity culture, that bell lands hard. Being made to announce your own "uncleanness." But look again: they're walking past the window. Because everbody who’s ever watched a horror movie knows not to go inside the creepy building.
From five to six
In the tarot, the Six of Pentacles is the next card in the suit (unsurprisingly, if you know how to count). Pentacles is the suit of earth, of resources, of money, of abundance. The Six of Pentacles points to interdependence, mutual aid, giving and reciprocity.
It is the next step after receiving the help that's already present inside of you. It is recognizing your own authority in your life, reclaiming your body as your very own, and learning to inhabit it. Not just to hang out there casually, but to abide in it. To luxuriate in it. To savor and enjoy every last sensory gift. And in recognizing your own authority, you start to bring your whole self to your community and relationships.
An invitation
I've been in the strange and liminal place between the Five and Six of Pentacles for a good while now.
Maybe you have too. Maybe you've deconstructed your religious beliefs and done some healing in your mind,
and yet you still don't quite know how to be in your body. To really experience it, listen to it, understand it.
That's normal. And it's what I can help you do.
If you're ready to learn to be here, in the present, in this body, to create a life you enjoy a little more, and then a little more, and then, dare I say, all the way, you can do that. I can help you.
This is for you if you're witchy or witch-curious: interested in spirituality, OK with letting go of the old religion, and ready to uncover your own wild body, mind, and spirit.
Witch-curious means you want to learn to tap into your own power and energy, even if you're not quite ready for “full-on sorcery,” as my deconstructed friend from Christian college said.
This program is open to any gender. Dudes and enbies can be witches too. Why not? Witches are sovereign.
To be fair, humans are sovereign. We just don't usually know it yet because Religion installed an apparatus of judgement on top of our very existence.
This probably isn't for you if you're looking for more Jesus but with less hating the gays (but you are heading in the right direction!! Keep going to a church with a big ol rainbow flag on it!). That's real and valid, it's just not this room.
This is for people who are done with the church and ready to build their own altar.
From numbness to knowing
From subdued to fully alive.
Learn to feel your body, enjoy your own skin, and tap into your full sovereign power. It's not scary, it's fun!
The core of this coven is creatrix energy: your sacral and your third eye, working together. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about yet - you will soon!) That's where we'll do our most focused work, and it's powerful.
What you can expect to experience:
Feeling your emotions instead of numbing them
Understanding your desire, truly knowing what you actually want
Trusting your intuition and insight, your own knowing
Learning fluency in mythological languages and divination tools, your own spiritual meaning
Falling madly in love with the person you are free to be now
What we're doing together
A group cohort. A coven, if you will, where we work through and in the body to reclaim your sovereignty and your unique and wild spirituality.
Monthly New moon ceremony, 90 minutes on Zoom, evenings Pacific
Monthly Full moon embodiment and integration, 60 to 90 minutes, a few days after each full moon, once the energy settles: practice, Q&A, and whatever's moving in your body since the ceremony
Recordings of every call, if you can't make it live
A Telegram space between gatherings with a weekly prompt or practice and voice-note transmissions from me, so the work has somewhere to live in the in-between
Community agreements we all hold, because many of us lost community when we left, and this one is built to hold disagreement and diversity of thought and practice
Special rate for optional 1:1 sessions with me
It's not a team. You don't have to wear the jersey. It's a group of comrades figuring it out together. BYO aesthetic.
Five moons, ten gatherings
Each new moon ceremony opens a theme. A few days after the full moon, we gather again to bring it home into the body.
November 9: Who am I, and where am I from? Your chart, gender, sexuality, relationship style, and lineage: where your people come from, before empire.
December 9: Throat and root. Vocalization, rhythm, hip liberation. So powerful!
January 7: Third eye and sacral, the core of this coven. Divination and mythic language, felt in the body.
February 6: Crown and solar plexus. Your personal will meets divine will, and the authority to make meaning of your own life.
March 8: Heart. Where canopy and roots meet. Bringing it all home.
P.S. This is an experiment and we’re doing it together. A witch like me reserves the right to change this schedule up and go with what calls us when the group is formed. You get to be part of this too!
What we'll work on, and why
Religion keeps you from having a relationship with yourself. At least a positive one.
You were taught to police everything about yourself, and there was only a bad cop installed in your brain.
That's one of the many reasons people don't know who they are without the religion. Some of us don't quite believe we're allowed to be real: allowed to be offended, allowed to be angry or emotional at all.
When we are numb to our emotions, we also can't understand what we desire -
wanting comes from feeling something.
And since wanting was the core of Eve's terrible fruit-consuming transgression, we've had that weeded out of us. But it's still there. You get to reclaim alllll of this back. And more.
So we start by getting to know you. Who you are, and where you're from.
Your chart and your design natal chart and Human Design as lenses for knowing yourself
Gender, sexuality, and relationship style, as self-knowledge, not performance
Your needs, values, and desires, using the tools I'm developing for my book
The witchier stuff: ceremony, ritual, and practices that are actually yours
And under all of it, learning to trust your own knowing again, in your body, so you can choose your life on purpose.
Warning: Witchcraft is political
In my not at all humble opinion, witchcraft has to be radical and political, or it isn't worth much to anyone.
Reclaiming your body from religion is revolutionary. So is reclaiming it from the dominant culture that religion helped build. Part of this work is decolonizing ourselves: tracing back to where our people come from, before empire, and remembering their places, mythologies, and ways of knowing. If you're white, that means remembering you were indigenous somewhere, too.
Writing your own mythology is how we do it. The personal and the collective are a double helix. When one of us gets free in our body, it moves something in all of us.
And it means reclaiming what's ours instead of borrowing what isn't.
Who's holding the circle
Hi! I'm Sarai Johnso, a witch & somatic sexologist in Eugene, Oregon. Raised in Evangelical Christianity and homeschooled, I started leading Bible study at 15. Now I hold a different kind of circle.
I'm a Reiki Master, yoga teacher-trained gardener who thinks in seeds and roots, and certified in Sexology and Relationship Coaching through Sexual Health Alliance. I help people reclaim and trust their bodies, minds, and spirituality so they can cultivate their lives on purpose.
The details
Duration
5 months, November 2026 to March 2027
Investment
Pay what you can, $5 a month minimum
Why pay what you can? Because this is the move from Five - exile, loss, poverty - to Six. Giving and receiving in balance. Pay what feels right for your body and your bank account. No explanation needed.
Not sure what to pay? Small monthly circles like this usually run $35 to $75 a month. A loose guide:
$5 to $25: money's tight right now, get in here anyway!
$33 to $55: you can cover your seat.
$77 or more: you're paying it forward, so someone else can pay less.
That's the Six of Pentacles in action.
This is also a pilot. We're using established methodology, but I haven't provided it in quite this way before, for quite such a wyrd and wild group of souls. You'll be helping me shape something bigger, and I'll be asking what you want next. The energetic exchange will be partly in the money (a witch still has to eat and pay rent, tragically), and partly in your participation and feedback.
Doors open for 5 days, in honor of the Five of Pentacles
Closes November 4th
How to join
When you sign up, I'll ask a few questions:
What's your relationship with religion now?
What's pulling you toward witchcraft, spirituality, and embodiment?
What are you most curious to learn?
What do you hope to walk away with after five months?