Do you have any advice for a nascent witch who doesn't have a lot of money to go out and buy supplies? (by not a lot of money I mean... completely broke)
The PSG Resource page has an “On a Budget” section:
Witchcraft for the Witch on a Budget
Accumulating Witchcraft on a Budget
Building an Altar on the Cheap
A Diagram on Energy Focus as an Alternative to Tools
A blog: low-budget-witches
Altars of any kind don’t need to be fancy and expensive.
A previous ask including ideas for substitutions.
I seriously can’t emphasize this enough: the only real tool you need to do witchcraft is creativity. If you have an association with an object, a color, a certain phrase, whatever, you can use it for witchcraft. (Depending on the thing, however, just be wary of cultural appropriation, racism, sexism, etc — use your critical thinking.) A fun thought experiment: pick a random object, think about the kinds of words, emotions, experiences, etc that it brings to mind, then consider how to adapt those for a spell. I picked up a brilliant red Japanese maple leaf off the street last December and thought of winter, warmth, the fire of a hearth, romantic relationships, trees against a cold sky while I curl under a warm blanket with hot chocolate, and decided that when I needed to do a spell for a peaceful home in the middle of winter, I’d use that leaf somehow. Bam. It seems that many Pagans and witches make the mistake of thinking that their power is in the pretty toys.
Remember that the long-ago people we’d nowadays call witches (though they almost never considered themselves as such) were, more often than not, poor as hell, but they still made do with what they had on hand. It’s one of the reasons folk magic will vary from place to place rather than remain true to some universal rules: you use what you’ve got, and what you’ve got is your mind, your power, and your environment. Words (including sign language, tyvm) are among the most powerful of things; it’s how God was said to have created the entirety of existence, after all.
Some paths are stricter in what you can and can’t use in magical practice, but if you’re not walking one of those, and if you’re both compassionate and critical in what you do, then go wild, you glorious witch.
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