Return To Ash

A nice cup and some clean, fresh, water on the altar can often be all you need for daily offerings

Grow a plant on your altar, use your weekly watering as a devotional act. Hermes is currently helping my peace lily grow :)

Draw their sigil on your nails and then paint over them with nail polish that matches their color correspondences.

If you can’t acquire alcohol for your deities (wine, vodka etc) because you’re too young, white vinegar also works. The quality we’re looking for is the purification aspect. White vinegar is natural, antibacterial and never goes bad. You can leave it on your altar until it evaporates if you want.

If you work with a deity involved with self love like Aphrodite, investing a little more time into your skin care and scent can be very rewarding. Nothing super boujie, it can be as simple as getting some nice smelling lotion at the dollar store.

Food and water offerings don’t have to be external, especially if you’re in the broom closet and don’t have an altar. Reserve the first bite of your meal for your deity. Savour its taste while you think about them. Pour yourself a crisp glass of cold water and guzzle it as a devotional act.

Use a washable or dry erase marker to draw sigils on your shower wall for bath rituals. It’ll come right off when you’re done.

Tea bags are just bags of dried herbs. You can use these as offerings or draw sigils on them and burn them for witchcraft. No one is ever suspicious about a little tea. Adding a tea bag to your water offerings also gives them an extra kick.

A couple dollars at the thrift store will take you a long way. I love thrifting items because they’re usually well loved. I especially like thrifting spirituality books that past practitioners have written in. Sometimes my deities communicate with me through the books that are available on any given day. If I was just talking to Leviathan about the power of water and I see a book about Hydromancy, I know that he’s sending me a sign. Like, 90% of the books Lucifer has sent me popped up at the thrift store. Most expensive one was $7.99. (and I tag swapped it for 2.99 😊 thanks, Hermes-

and on this note, literally steal. Not from small local thrift stores, but I mean this with my whole chest, steal from Value Village. If you can sneakily swap a tag and get something for cheaper literally do it. Value Village gets all their inventory for free I literally do not care. Corporate thrift stores don’t deserve rights. I steal from Value Village as a devotional act to Hermes 😊 lmao )

If you don’t have money to spend on really nice paintings and posters of your deities for your altar, start buying books about them. It’s a double win. A book about Greek religion will certainly have multiple beautiful sculptures and paintings of Aphrodite that I can cut out and put on my wall. A book about angels might have a cool painting of Lucifer. Books about Goddesses, ancient religions, anthropology, astrology etc. You get the opportunity to learn, and if it’s a book you don’t particularly care too much for, you can take it apart for imagery. People ask me all the time where I got all of my paintings and pictures from. BOOKS.

Does your deity have a kind of complicated sigil that you love but you also kinda hate redrawing every other day? Sorry Cerberus (Naberius) I love you but that sigil is so complicated babe.

Learn how to block print! It’s very simple. You get a block of linoleum (usually pretty cheap, I think mine were like $5) , some ink (~$10), and a carving tool (varies depending), and make a sigil stamp! All you gotta do is draw your sigil and carve it out nicely one time. You can still bless it and imbue it with your energy, and you can easily put it on prayers, talismans etc.

A few years ago, I was being mocked in a Discord server by someone who believed that if I was having a difficult relationship with my primary god, then that was my fault and I needed to "be better."

He's a god of Witchcraft, I tried to say. He's the Folkloric Devil. He can be an asshole. Sometimes, working with him is very difficult.

The person implied it was a phase and that they hoped I "figured it out" because the gods would ~*nEvEr*~ ever behave as complete cunts.

Sigh.

I see great posts around. "Witchcraft isn't supposed to be stressful! Witchcraft shouldn't give you anxiety! If you don't like your witchcraft, stop doing it! Change it!"

It's a great message, in general. But what if you can't? What if you shouldn't?

I see these support posts side-by-side with posts like, "where is all the advanced witchcraft? People should post more of their path!"

I hate to say it out loud and in such a boorish way, but a lot of the time, "advanced witchcraft" is tedious. It's a chore. It's making pacts that you can't back out of, that become burdensome responsibilities.

(Not trying to get into a discussion about what constitutes "advanced witchcraft" so I'm going to stop using that term)

There are a lot of people out there who are now bound to paths that they don't really like, didn't intend to become a part of, are having difficulty changing, or who are going through a phase where everything fucking sucks, but they are still dedicated to seeing it through to the end.

So, anyway. If you feel the gods have betrayed you, if you feel trapped in your practice, if you feel exhausted by the responsibilities you have taken upon yourself, if you feel like things are being taken away from you, if your Craft feels like a chore: you are not alone.

And from time to time I get really burned out on posts that seek to make witchcraft and the gods so accessible for beginners that anything that gets a tiny bit serious, or tedious, or burdensome, or scary, is erased. And called fearmongering. Or called gatekeeping.

But is not. Is like any serious hard profession. Researchers are not finding cures each second, they spend a lot of time breaking their heads, learning, failing non stop, having burnout, getting angry and tired for moments.

We are the neurosurgeons of the magical world, the metaphysician of the no physical, the quantum engineer of the beyond.

Continue writing about them, please keep saying their names. Please keep worshiping them. If you can’t find the strength within yourself to live for yourself, please try to live for them.

I know it’s getting scary. I think it’s going to get scarier. But please, if nothing else. Live.

Thousands of years, hundreds of genocides and crusades and decimation of culture, and yet somehow my Lords still have followers. Somehow I’ve found them. Somehow these names still have meaning. Through all of us they still remain.

Despite the efforts of centuries of suppression and control, My Lord is still alive, because I am alive.

In our fringe little cults, even when we must whisper because we cannot scream.

and maybe one day we’ll be free to frolic in fields or dance in forests while we chant without fear.