little queer witch

‘October is a month filled with happiness, love, laughter and blessings’

Those dates you go on with your partner? They’re in public. Unmasked. Your server smiles at you. Everyone feels safe.

You can hug your friends.

You can see a movie. The people in the movie are gay people of color and they kiss and live happily ever after.

The PBW Witch Shop is a curated selection of witchcraft and magic related zines, books, pin-back buttons, tarot cards and more.

We focus on traditional and folkloric witchcraft, animism, chaos magic, secular witchcraft, magical herbs and plants, queer witchcraft, tarot & Divination, witchcraft & magic in politics, history, culture, and social & racial justice,  and aspects of non-Wiccan forms of witchcraft, magic, and paganism.

Pre-Covid the Portland Button Works primarily made custom pinback button. Selling zines and books was secondary and more of a hobby for me to share things I’d like to read. Right now our business is pivoting to focus on books and zines that people can read in the comfort and safety of their own homes. Some items are from well known witchcraft and occult publisher and some are titles from small publishers with interesting items I don’t see in other shops but I’m excited to elevate.

Not everyone has income to buy books right now, we totally understand that, but I would love it if you were able to reblog this post or share Portland Button Works and PBW Witch Shop with your friends.

If you have been looking for a book about something specific, or if you think something would be a good fit for our catalog, get in touch. We can order almost any book in print, even if it isn’t witchcraft or magic related.

With that being said, here are some categories of items we carry:

Some good books to get you started studying witchcraft:

Grovedaughter Witchery by Bree NicGarran

Making Magic by Briana Saussy

Magical Power for Beginners- How to Raise & Send Energy for Spells That Work by Deborah Lipp

Weave The Liminal by Laura Tempest Zakroff

Some creative books to help build your witch craft practice:

Spellcrafting- Strengthen the Power of your Craft by Creating and Casting Your Own Unique Spells by Arin Murphy-Hiscock

D.I.Y. Magic -a Strange & Whimsical Guide to Creativity by Anthony Alvarado

Psychic Witch- a Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick, & Manifestation by Mat Auryn

Urban Magick by Diana Rajchel

Standing and Not Falling - a Sorcerous Primer in Thirteen Moons by Lee Morgan

Tarot Books

Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow

Tarot for Troubled Times by Shaheen Miro & Theresa Reed

Modern Tarot by Michelle Tea

Tarot Decks

Next World Tarot (regular and pocket sized)

Science Tarot

Rider-Waite-Coleman Smith Regular sized and Mini sized

Crow Tarot

Modern Witch Tarot

Cat Tarot

Check out the tarot and divination books in our catalog and also check out tarot and divination decks in our catalog here.

Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine

Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman

Chaos Protocols by Gordon White

Hands on Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus 

Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll

Other books in the Chaos Magic section

Anthologies: Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels, Bringing Race to the Table: Exploring Racism in the Pagan Community, Shades of Ritual: Minority Voices in Practice

Magical Resistance: Witchcraft Activism by David Salisbury, Magic for the Resistance by Michael Hughes, Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons

Witches and Feminist Perspectives: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, Witches, Midwives and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English , Witches Sluts Feminists by Kristen J. Sollee

Pagan Anti-Capitalism: Pagan Anarchism True to the Earth: Pagain Political Thology by Kadmus, All That is Sacred is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism by Ryhd Wildermuth, A Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer

Queer Witchcraft: Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture, Sapphomanteion a Lesbian Oracle, Queering the Tarot

Check out the Witchcraft Culture and History and Witchcraft Politics and Resistance sections of our website.

Green Witchcraft: The Green Witch by Arin Murray-Hiscock, Green Witchcraft by Paige Vanderbeck

Plants and Herbs: Under the Witching Tree by Corinne Boyer, Under the Bramble Arch by Corinne Boyer

The Poison Path: Veneficuim: Magic, Witchcraft and the Poison Path by Daniel Schulke, Pharmo/Gnonsis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path by Dale Pendell , Plants of the Devil by Corinne Boyer

Witchy Crafts: Pestlework: a Book of Magical Powders and Oils by Bree NicGarran, Sew Witchy by Rachel Henderson, Sigil Witchery by Lara Tempest Zakroff

Other books in our Plants, Herbs, and Magical Crafts section

Books on Atheopaganism

Godless Paganism (anthology)

Atheopaganism by Mark Green

Other Pagan Perspectives

Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality by Lasara Firefix Allen

The Wakeful World: Anismism, Mind, and the Self in Nature by Emma Restall Orr

Circling the Star by Anthony Rella

All That Is Sacred is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism by Rhyd Wildermuth

All Other Pagan books

Traditional Witchcraft: A Cornish Book of Ways by Gemma Gary

A Deed Without A Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft by Lee Morgan

Crooked Path: An Introduction to Traditional Witchcraft by Keldon

Backwoods Witchcraft by Jake Richards

Besom Stand and Sword A Guide to Traditional Witchcraft the Six-Fold Path the Hidden Landscape by Christopher Orapello & Tara Love Maguire

Southern Cunning: Folkloric Witchcraft in the American South by Aaron Oberon

Folk Witchcraft by

The Flame in the Cauldron by Orion Foxwood

Craft of the Untamed by Roger Horne

Check out the rest of the books in our Traditional & Folkloric Witchcraft Section

What are zines? Small independently made magazine and pamphlets filled with stories and unique ideas that you won’t find from major publishers!

Some topics you will find in zines we carry are Secular Witchcraft, the fantastic Fiddler’s Green Pamphlets and lots of zine on the places where Politics, Paganism, and Witchcraft intersect.

Check out all of our witchy zines here.

Other Stuff

witchy buttons

 magnets and hand mirrors

We carry more than just witchy books.

Here are some of the other titles we carry:

You Were Born For This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance by Chani Nicholas

When Language Runs Dry: An Anthology for People with Chronic Pain and their Allies

What is Gender Nihilism?

Be Gay Do Crime by The Mary Nardini Gang

Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher

You Black Friend by Ben Passmore

Learning Good Consent an Anthology edited by Cindy Crabb

How To Talk To Your Cat about Gun Safety and Abstinence, Drugs, Satanism and Other Dangers that Threaten Their Nine Lives

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Honoring your Ancestors by Mallorie Vaudoise

Do-it-Your Self Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfucking Sad by Adam Gnade

Yes, I’m Flagging: Queer Flagging 101 by Archie Bongiovanni

Full online catalog of books, zines, buttons and more can be found at PortlandButtonWorks.com and the PBW Witch Shop can be found here.

All items are shipped from Portland, Oregon in plain packaging or United States Postal Service Flat Rate envelopes or boxes with the return address as Portland Button Works. We ship daily and most order come with small fun gifts of buttons or magnets.

The Living Altar - an oracle and spell deck for the radical witch

Witches, Witch-hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

Grimoire Journal by Paige Vanderbeck

Art of War by Sun Tzu

A Practical Guide For Witches by Ylvadroma Marzanna Radziszewski  (This is my new go-to  recommendation for new witches)

The Herbcrafter’s Tarot

New This week! 2 September 2020

Magical Writing Grimoire: Use the Word as Your Wand for Magic, Manifestation, & Ritual by Lisa Marie Basile

54 Devil: The Art and Folklore of Fortune-telling with Playing Cards by Corey hutcheson

Five Principles of Green Witchcraft by Asa West

Murder of Crows Tarot deck

Light Magic for Dark Times by Lisa Marie Basile

Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions, and Herbcraft by Dale Pendell

Enchantments by Mya Spalter

Slingshot 2021 Organizer in Small pocket sized and larger spiral bound

Notes: I know a lot of the Troy Books are currently out of stock because I can’t currently get them from the big book distributor. However! I’ve set up an account directly with their US distributor and should have them back in my next round of orders. I’m also out of a lot of the Three Hands Press books for the same reason and inquiring directly with them about how to remedy this.

For when you want everyone to just get along.

Ingredients:

Clove

Lemon Rind

Lavender

Amethyst or Selenite

Directions:

In a sachet, combine one piece of lemon rind, some lavender (dry or wet), and a piece of Amethyst or Selenite. Charge your crystal with your hope for a pleasant social event.

Keep the sachet with you if you are going to a social gathering that has the potential of fights and discomfort to ensue.

The #1 thing is look like you’re supposed to be there. Wear hi-vis, wear a big floppy sunhat, wear garden gloves, etc. Go in the middle of the day, not late at night. And leave it looking pretty. The fewer reasons people have to ask questions the better

Do it on a bit of public land or an empty/abandoned lot that looks unattended. Don’t try to grow anything on private property

And grow native plants. Invasive species don’t need your help spreading

In the days of yore, one commonly-used method of execution involved bending a pair of supple birch trees until their tops reached the ground. Each tree would then be tied to a limb on a condemned person. And then the signal would be given, the restraints would be let go, and the trees would snap back to their original position. The results were…messy. 

You can only keep an unwilling party bowed under external pressure for so long. And once they have the opportunity to stand straight again, you shouldn’t be surprised if it comes with violence.

(”What? Jes, what even is that? Is that just like… Bone Throwing? But with beads?”)

Well yes. Kind of.

The short background is that I was cleaning out some old boxes in my room and I found an old spell book from when I was 15 years old and just making witch shit up because I didn’t have access to Real Proper Witchcraft. (Flash forward to now, where Adult Jes is still making shit up and hand making everything just like Teen Jes had to, except that Adult Jes now does it voluntarily and finds it much more fulfilling than just buying Proper Witch Stuff).

Anyway.

Flipping through that old spell book, I found this little divination system that I had made up using some beads I had. I made jewelry a lot as a teen, so I just had a lot of beads around, so it made sense to use them for divination when I wasn’t able to access the Usual divination methods because of Family Reasons.

What kind of beads? Well, of course they were super mystical crystal beads!! Super pretty hand made fancy… crystal…

Yeah, bullshit. They were funky plastic beads.

Seriously.

Anyway, since these beads came in a bunch of different colors (seven, actually), I decided to pull two of each color and assign them ~*~meaning~*~*. Then I’d throw them onto a surface and interpret how they fell.

(”Yeah. Jes. That’s Bone Throwing.”)

Yes, okay, shh. Adult Jes can see that now, but Teen Jes didn’t know what bone throwing was. Hush up, this isn’t so much a ‘how-to’ guide as it is a trip down memory lane.

I actually forgot all about these until I found a page in that found spell book where I’d been journaling about some bead readings I did. And Adult Jes thought “Oh wow. This looks like it was really cool. Damn, I wish I could remember what each of those beads meant…” And then I turned a few more pages and found that Teen Jes actually HAD bothered to write down the bead meanings.

So, I guess lesson #1 of this whole thing is: Don’t dismiss anything in your craft as Too Stupid To Write About, because maybe fourteen years into your future you’ll look back and go “Wait, that was a GREAT idea!”

So anyway, I’d toss this handful of beads onto a surface, and then start interpreting how they landed. Having two of each color was key to this whole thing, because the first thing I’d do is start looking at the pairs. See how they fall.

For example… the red beads are Passion. Not like, romance-novel-passion, but like ‘powerful emotion and/or intense focus’. They’re pretty far apart in this toss. And what’s in between them? The black beads (Conflict) and the blue bead (Peace).

This is the part where the journaling would happen. Example: I haven’t been writing as much as I used to, even though it was something I was really Passionate about. I stopped after numerous conflicts with a friend (yaaaay abusive and manipulative friendships…) and it tore down my confidence. These days, I haven’t picked it up again because of Peace, but peace to the point of complacency. I’m comfortable and I don’t like rocking my own boat. Picking up a pen again would force me to face those old traumas. And I don’t want to because ugh.

More things to consider: There’s a green Wealth bead hanging out by the two Love beads, but the other Wealth bead is hanging out with both Uncertainty beads. Peace, Passion, and Spirituality are making a little wall between those two groupings.

Anyway, you get me? The main idea was to look at the pairings and see how close together they were, or if there was anything in their way. It was a lot of introspection and thought.

But like… also I found the entry in the spell book where I threw the beads for a high school friend and her boyfriend, and I couldn’t make sense of it because it definitely looked like their future had lots and lots of pain and heartbreak and that couldn’t be because they were like totally perf? And then as I was looking at it as an adult like “Oh that abusive lying psychopathic asshole got CALLED TF OUT by my FUNKY PLASTIC BEADS!”

So. Yeah. Bead throwing. Like bone throwing, but more plastic.

Beads

Bottle caps

Stones

Painted sticks

Those dollar store glass bead things you put in the bottom of vases

Crayon stubs

Folded paper stars

Dice

Coins with some bits of colored paper taped to them

The dots left from a hole punch that you’ve colored with a half dried marker

Condiment packets in various colors

Rainbow colored paperclips

Those cheap-ass day-of-the-week earrings you bought from Claire’s and never wore

So much witchcraft emphasizes how important it is to honor and work with the Earth, but then teaches us spells with ingredients we basically have to import using locations we don’t have access to. It’s rare to find an existing grimoire or guide book that actually works with where we live. We can still use them, but it doesn’t enhance our connection to our local land, which to many can feel important. Here are some tips for localizing your practice and working with the land you actually live on.

See what nature exists around you. Explore your own backyard with a critical eye. What plants can you actually go and pick yourself? What are those plants associated with? Do you have access to a creek or river? What does your local land actually have on it? If magic correspondences for your local plants haven’t been written about, you may have to do your own research.

Example: I grow several plants on my back porch which I can potentially use for magic.There are magnolia trees and rhodedendrons on the grounds of my apartment complex. My parent’s neighbors have chickens in the backyard, so I have access to some feathers when they shed. 

Check out local folklore, legends, etc. This is one of my favorite parts, but can also be the hardest. What are the stories of your area, both on a local and cultural scale. 

Example: A West Virginian may incorporate legends of the Mothman. Everyone says that one building on my old college campus is haunted (and they’re right.) People talk about that liminal-space feeling when you drive down that one road at night.

Find the magic spots. Sometimes the urban legends will tip you off to these (usually in a bad way) but other times you can find them on your own. A place where the energy is just right for some reason. A place you can go to be closer to nature, or a place you could host a ritual if needed. Sometimes it’s just a place where you can feel your mind open a little bit.

Example: The shady corner of a public park. The tunnel downtown. That weirdly-perfect circle of trees in the woods behind Wal-Mart.

Meet your land wights. Spirits of the local land. This could be the fair folk, but also house spirits, the spirits of the trees near you, the nature spirits of wherever you are. They’re there. Be good to them and they’ll be good to you! 

Note: Some spirits and wights will not be interested in working with you, and that’s okay. I generally think it’s good to at least leave a polite offering to just be on general decent terms even if you never work with them more directly beyond that. 

Quiet Seas Calming Charm

This is for those days where you can’t seem to get your anxieties or stressors down. The ocean has always been a calming thing for me and this spell just popped into my head. I figured it might help others, so I’m sharing it on here!

Seashell -  to represent the oceans heartbeat, the calming waves

Lavender - calming/peace and happiness

Chamomile - purify and calming

Sea salt - purifying

Rosemary - mental strength

Blue candle - represent the ocean itself

White candle - purifying

Grind up the herbs in a mortar and pestle. Pour the herbs into your seashell. Imagine peace and happiness as you pour.

Once done, light the white candle. Use it to light the blue. Take one in each hand. Drip and blend the waxes together onto the herbs. This should cover them and make them adhere to the shell. If you’d like to tie it to you specifically, as it is drying, make a fingerprint into the wax.

Carry with you and rub the shell or wax to call on the calming spell. To recharge, put under the full moon.

As an ADHD witch, I’ve started three different grimoires that’s didn’t work and one that did (and still does) so I compiled a list some tips if you, like me, just can’t seem to do the whole ‘grimoire’ thing the way you think you should

DONT PICK A FORMAT YOU CANT REALISTICALLY MAINTAIN.

If you can’t spend hours getting out your paint and scissors and collage supplies and glue, don’t use it. It’s a surefire way to lose interest and fall out of love with your book. It should not be a chore to work in it.

DONT PLAN EVERYTHING OUT AHEAD OF TIME.

It’s great to keep a running list of topics you want to include, but if you block off pages and spreads through the entire book, you’ll hit a rut when you don’t want to finish a page you started and you will (again) fall out of love with your book

IF YOU WANT ORGANIZATION, MAKE AN INDEX AT THE BACK.

Tables of contents are great, but can’t anticipate your writing. Put an index at the back so you have the rest of the book to play around, but maintain that organization

KEEP A SEPARATE NOTEBOOK

By keeping a separate notebook to jot down notes, sketch out page ideas, draft spells, etc, you have a space to make mistakes, but most importanly you have a place to go when you lack the motivation/the executive dysfunction is off the charts to actually Work On Your Grimoire

IGNORE THE CALL OF SOCIAL MEDIA

This is really more general than and ADHD-specific tip, but try not to think of your book in terms of “how will this look during my grimoire tour on YouTube.” That will just trip you up and make your day sad. Trust me.

REMEMBER: THINGS CHANGE

What has been the biggest help to me when I was struggling with my grimoire was the idea that your aesthetic, your beliefs, your general magical interests will change, and that’s a good thing! Give yourself room to grow in your book—it takes a lot of the pressure off, and (bonus) it makes for a wonderful little time capsule so you can see how far you’ve come

I guess “to conclude,” make sure that your book makes you happy, if nothing else. I hope you found any of these helpful, and...wash your hands + drink water.