#beginner witchcraft

🫧 sound

music, bells, pots and pans, singing

🫧 liquid

charged or blessed water, alcohol, vinegar, essential oil sprays

🫧 scents

candles, essential oils (diffused)

🫧 physical cleaning

sweep

vacuum

wipe down

*make a blend of cleansing herbs, sprinkle around your space, and either sweep it out the back door or vacuum it up and dispose of the contents

🫧 simmer pots [for the steam]

🫧 rearrange your space

🫧 open your windows

🫧 visualization + meditation

🫧 sun, moon, or starlight

🫧 rain + storms

🫧 the elements

earth - salt floor sweep

air - breath and wind

fire - heat and sunlight

water - see above

🫧 salt

place a bowl of salt in the main room of your home

🫧 crystals

place in the center or corner of the space you want to cleanse

Level-Up Your Witchcraft

Find ways to practice daily. Start small with more energy manageable spellwork, like daily tea/kitchen magic. Try out planetary magic to help plan spells and rituals ahead of time. Daily practice helps novice witches to grow their abilities to handle and manipulate energy in greater capacities.

Daily prayer. Remember, praying doesn’t always have to be directed towards spirits or deities. Praying for your own personal power is extremely empowering. Here’s a great video from one of my favorite magical mentors on the topic.

Wear a crystal or oil programed as a magical enhancer to help amplify your will while casting. This was a game changer for me.

Discover & follow your path. Many witches are encouraged to learn many casting methods and types of magic when they are beginning their journey. I considered myself an eclectic witch for eight years before realizing what speciality of witchcraft fit best with me. Once a practitioner focuses on their most suitable path, things feel like they unlock naturally and magic feels more intense.

Read witchcraft adjacent nonfiction. As you dive deeper into most practices, what’s useful won’t be a correspondence cheat sheet or a spell book, but actual history and science. Reading books on quantum physics has helped me develop my own magical theory. Historical & geological references can help witches connect with their ancestral magic. When witches open their view of magic to include everything around them, any topic can become magical exploration and information for the grimoire. Correspondences can be discovered the old fashioned way, through discernment and for yourself.

Routine spell management. Reinforce wards or cast spells routinely in whatever manner works best for you. That could be weekly, monthly, or seasonally. Are you routinely cleansing under the New Moon? Maybe your wards are cast seasonally.

Write your own spells. Everyone loves a good spell book, but if all your casting are other people’s spells, you may not be reaching your full potential.

Meditate. Fifteen minutes a day will unlock more than you ever dreamed possible. I read in a mindfulness book once that meditating eliminates resistance, allowing what you’ve been asking for to flow into your life uninhibited. It also enhances your intuition and recalibrates your mind and body.

Master a method of divination. Tarot, runes, anything! Divination allows the witch to answer their own questions regarding spellwork, better plan, and communicate with allied spirits. It’s the first thing I would tell a young witch to learn.

When looking around your yard or local biome for wild plants to harvest for your craft, there are several important things to keep in mind:

1 - Prepare for your trip ahead of time. Have some idea ahead of time where you're going, what the terrain and weather will be like, and what plants you want to look for and harvest. Make sure you wear appropriate clothing and footwear, and bring containers, supplies for labeling, and a travel-size resource for plant identification. (Pro-tip: Paper lunch bags are excellent receptacles for harvested plants.)

2 - Look for patches of plants well away from roadways and places which might be contaminated by chemical runoff or pesticides. When possible, select a large patch where your harvest won't wipe out the presence of the plant. (The exception to this is if you are removing invasive plants or weeding a prepared garden as part of your harvesting.)

3 - Make sure you properly identify plants before you harvest them, using a field guide for local plants or an identification app like Plantnet. This helps you avoid potentially harmful lookalikes. (And it couldn't hurt to look up what harmful plants exist in the area where you'll be looking.) Do not harvest endangered plants or plants growing on private property or in national parks. When in doubt, leave it alone.

4 - Take a modest amount of plant material for your stores, no more than you reasonably need, while disturbing the surrounding area as little as possible. Clearly label the container with the species and date of harvest. (Again, I'm recommending those paper lunch bags.) As an added courtesy, you can bring a bottle of water and hydrate the remaining plants to encourage regrowth.

5 - Clean and dry your plant material when you get home, if necessary. Just give them a quick rinse and gentle pat-dry with a clean kitchen towel before placing the plants into your preferred drying device. One simple solution is to cut the flaps off of wide, shallow cardboard shipping boxes and lay out the plant material in a flat layer so that most of it is touching the cardboard. (As opposed to leaving it in a big heap.) Label the sections or the side of the tray and leave your plants to dry.

6 - If you're not using an oven or a dehydrator, allow plant material to dry for at LEAST two or three weeks before breaking it up for storage in airtight jars or freezer bags. Make sure the plants are dry and brittle all the way through to avoid rot and mold in your storage containers and spoilage of the contents. Label and date the containers and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight. (If you discover mold or a bad smell in any of your containers, discard the contents and either throw away the container or sterilize it for reuse - this generally only works for glass jars.)

7 - Check back periodically! Give your wild plant patches time to regrow and you can then make additional small harvests on future visits. Also, look for different plants to emerge as the seasons change.

Familiarizing yourself with your local biome allows you to connect with the land where you live (and encourages you to care about it in the process). Also, it can garner you components for your workings for the cost of a few bags and an afternoon stroll.

But wait! What if your local wild weeds don't have magical correspondences? Not to worry - there's an exercise for that.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that divination is an extremely flexible tool, and anybody can develop their own unique methods for practicing it. There are a few common elements to all divination types which make them reliable, and they feel pretty obvious but it's still good to make it explicit. As long as your new method has these, you should be good to go.

A way to receive a message/response. Simple enough. Whether it be pictures, the movements of birds, overheard bits of conversation, or the way different symbols fall on a mat, you need to receive something to interpret. Simply asking a question to the Universe with no established way to get an answer wouldn't really be divination. It can be as abstract or nebulous as you want, but you should know what it is.

An established method of interpretation before you start. Depending on your method of choice this could be really broad, but you should have a general idea of how you'd interpret different messages going in. Deciding how to interpret the message after the fact opens itself up to bias since you can just decide what the answer means. Granted, when you're developing new methods you're inevitably going to run into messages you didn't consider, but even if it's just "good symbols=good outcome, bad symbols=bad outcome," that gives you the ability to accept messages you might not want, and that's important. If it only tells you what you want to hear, that's not reliable.

An element of randomness/something out of your control. In my opinion, this is what makes something divination to begin with. You can't control which card you draw from a blindly-shuffled deck, which plant grows faster when you treat them the same, which number a die lands on. If you have complete control over the message, then it's not going to be effective or reliable because it's too easy to manipulate.

Some random examples to show what I'm talking about:

Once I used a simple method of divination when a food company catered the summer camp I worked at for a day. The food boxes each came either an M&M cookie, regular chocolate chip cookie, or oatmeal raisin cookie. It was random which one you got because you couldn't see inside the boxes. I decided that each of these cookies meant yes/good, neutral, and no/bad respectively, then would ask a question before I selected my box.

I also really enjoy using Rory's Story Cubes for divination. You cast them on a mat and use the abstract symbols as different hints toward the message, especially how they worked together in concert with eachother to develop more complex ideas.

A local bar I enjoy has a lot of graffiti in the bathroom stall. When I go there, I let my eyes fall wherever they lay and interpret the first piece of graffiti I see as my message for whatever question is on my mind. That said, I go to this bar a lot and am getting pretty familiar with what messages are where, so I may retire this method soon.

When I first began practicing witchcraft I was utterly and completely lost, such to the point I didn’t learn the basics until I was already months in. I was busy doing candle magic and color correspondences­— following spells I found online with not a clue what I was doing. It was hard learning and adjusting to the basics after so many months of creating bad habits. Even to this day I still struggle and have to sit down and remind myself of them. People debate what qualifies as the basics, but I think fundamentally it all boils down to one clear winner— intent.

In the witchcraft circles I’ve been in, wands have seemingly fallen by the wayside or at the very least haven’t been fully recognized for what you can do with them. So I decided to make a post about wands.

So why might you want a wand? For one thing, they are incredibly versatile - they can be used to create wards, trace magical symbols or words, infuse things with intention, and much more. They're also usually easy to ethically source and they can potentially last for years if cared for. You also can replace a lot of single-use items with a wand.

Now, how wands are supposed to work depends on who you ask. Your old timey Hermetic mages believed wands had special properties from the stars, but a more popular idea today is that wands are conduits for your personal energy. One might also ask a divine being one worships to bless the wand for working magic. Being someone who doesn’t believe much in magic as a literal force (I’m more for the psychological model of magic), I’m not going to endorse any specific metaphysical opinion here. I will say that a wand has the potential to be as efficacious as anything regardless of how you personally think it works.

Wands should be sized depending on how they will be used. A wand that will be used in a large public ceremony should be big enough to be visible to attendants, so perhaps around sixteen to twenty inches. A personal wand used for things like casting protective circles should be whatever size feels good to wave around, so perhaps ten to fourteen inches. A wand used for tracing magic symbols on small items can be the size of a pen.

Wands can be made from many things, like sticks, twigs, dowels, or anything you can make a sturdy wand shape from. Paper is fine if you don’t mind your wand being fragile. (To make a paper wand, you diagonally roll a piece of paper into a tube, glue it at the end, and then decorate it however you please. You can find many tutorials by searching DuckDuckGo.)

I’m sure some people out there will object to paper wands, but I say that if paper’s good enough to put a sigil on, then it’s good enough for a wand. Besides, you can write intentions on the paper before rolling it up.

If you’re going to use wood, any kind that feels agreeable to your purposes should work fine. You can search for tree correspondences or go on your own associations. (See this post to learn more about developing your own correspondences/associations. You can decorate your wand by carving it, staining it, painting it, wrapping it in wire, fabric, or leather, or by gluing things to it. Or you can skip decoration if you don’t feel like it’s necessary. (Some sticks look fine as they are, after all.)

You should hold your wand in your dominant hand. If you’re left handed, please ignore the ignoramuses who’d have you think your left hand is secretly Miroku’s wind tunnel.

Anyway, here are some ways you can use a wand. (For those of you who aren’t good at visualizing or just don’t want to do it, you can presume instead – just suppose that the energy exists beyond your sensory perceptions, like ultraviolet light or ultrasonic sound.)

Casting a protective line or circle: Trace a line with your wand above the ground or over anything you want to place a barrier over; visualize or presume a line of protective energy being placed.

Unwanted entity removal: Point your wand at where you reckon the unwanted entity is and visualize or presume magic beams coming out of your wand. Or you can visualize/presume your wand as the hilt of an energy sword and slice the entity with it.

Cleansing a space: Visualize or presume a soft cleansing energy coming from your wand. Wave it around wherever you want to cleanse.

Bestow a blessing: As you wave the wand, recite a spell according to your intent. For example, you might wave your wand over a pen while saying “may I always write well with this pen.”

Posted early on Ko-Fi for supporters.

This is a modular banishing method that can be made more or less aggressive depending on the need. It can work to banish a person or unwanted spirits, but it can also be used to remove a curse or other baneful magics. This post assumes that the impacted party has already ruled out mundane causes for their issues and has concluded, confidently, that the culprit is a curse or spirit.

Note that this is what I consider a “standard” practice for these situations. Every curse and every haunting is unique, and no two will have the exact same solution. This is just a sort of baseline for where I start in getting rid of an unwanted presence or baneful influence.

Note also that the phrasing I’m using is specific to my practice and beliefs. You can and should adjust whatever you need to in order to make this work for you, if you’re going to use the method.

This is a three-step process: Cut, Push, and Ward.

Step One: Cut

The purpose of this first step is to sever connections between the presence/spell and the target. It’s useful to have a catalog of pain points and problems you’ve been having that are due to the unwanted presence or spell. These help to identify the spots where the presence or spell is connected to you. However, it’s not absolutely required to know exactly where you’re aiming; you can always take a blanket approach.

Depending on the source and target, you might want to do this a couple different ways.

For a curse or presence that’s directly tied to a particular person, I’d suggest an internal solution. Food makes a good spell vessel for this. A personal favorite is pickles, charmed for dissolving any hooks or knots connected to the target and consumed by the target themselves. Something like lemonade or tea would make a quick and effective option. A spicy or vinegar-forward meal might also suit the purpose. For especially severe situations, you may have to repeat this for a few days.

For something tied to a space, room, or home, I would make a bond-dissolving wash and use it anywhere the problem persists. This might look like washing doors and windows, spritzing with a spray bottle, wiping down tables, or flicking droplets with my fingers in any problem areas. Or, if you want to add whimsy to the moment, a powerful bubble bazooka works extremely well. Be thorough. Think of the spell or entity’s connection like mold: If you leave a little bit behind, it’ll just spread again, and you’ll have to do this all over.

For a presence or spell tied to something more nebulous, like a concept or spirit, or an area that’s much larger, a symbolic approach might be best. Take a length of string or twine and tie several loops into it. The number should reflect the source of the problems in some way. For example, if there are twenty rooms in a cursed building, you should tie twenty loops. Then, using a pair of scissors or a knife (carefully!), sever every single loop with much gravity. Burn the remains.

A more “standard” cord cutting with two candles and a length of twine would also work just fine. As long as it includes the concept of cutting away all connecting points between the target and source, it should work fine.

Step Two: Push

Now that you’ve severed the connections, you may sense that the entity or spell has backed off or lessened in severity. However, it may still be lingering. Given enough time and motivation, it might reattach itself. To prevent this, we must now push the source away. This is the banishing step. Be specific about what you’re pushing away, in order to prevent accidentally pushing out friendly spirits or fully scouring your space of all energy. Either create exceptions for or otherwise shield the spirits and energies you want to keep around.

For folks of the energy work persuasion, this could be as simple as creating a bubble of energy at your core and allowing it to expand to fill the space entirely. Give it a hard push. It should be strong enough to create a sort of reverb or shockwave that shoves away everything that doesn’t belong here.

I’m a fan of using the breath in the push step. Burn a blend of banishing herbs in a fire-safe dish and blow the smoke wherever needed to fill the space, expand outwards, and physically push out anything that doesn’t belong in the space.

If you’re dealing with a particularly strong or stubborn problem, you may have to choose something that’s a lot more aggressive. In this case, it’s even more important to warn your allies about your intentions; again, you don’t want your friends catching strays.

Step Three: Ward

Yes, even if you already have wards up. Either redo them completely, patch and fortify the existing ones, or create them if you don’t have any yet. Account specifically for the spell or entity that invaded in the first place. Even if you don’t think it’ll return or be recast, if it got through the first time, another of its kind could get through, too.

For a personal, portable ward, charm a piece of jewelry or a bandanna for protection in your preferred flavor. Then, wear it. It isn’t enough to just have it. Gotta wear it for it to work.

Warding a space could look like energy work to build solid walls around your work area or home. Sprinkle a bit of egg shell mixed with herbs of your choice at doors and windows to create a physical barrier. Employ or create spirits to patrol and bounce anybody and anything that doesn’t have a green light to enter.

I’m a big fan of the labyrinth-type ward. Essentially, you create a never-ending labyrinth around your chosen space, ideally with something patrolling inside minotaur-style to snap up interlopers. Anyone or anything that doesn’t know the way already will become hopelessly lost. Spells peter out within the labyrinth, wasting their energies without lasting effect.

Beware over-warding, but if you’re under active threat, I’m of the opinion that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Similarly, don’t be afraid of putting retaliatory measures in place. If someone or something tries to aggressively break your wards to harm you, you’re well within rights to bounce it back at them (three-fold, perhaps) or add a bit of bad luck. Become an unattractive target.

Bonus Step: Retaliate

In situations where the perpetrator of the curse/presence is particularly aggressive, it might be smart to cast a binding on them. Think The Craft — “I bind you from doing harm,” and so forth. The idea is to prevent them from performing a particular action. For spirits, binding them from entering your space or binding them to a specific location may do the trick.

If it’s a witch casting nasty spells at you, you could bind them from cursing or hexing. Be aware that the witch in question probably has wards of their own and may be able to tell something’s been done to them. It’s important to become the unattractive, difficult target before retaliating.

I am a notorious counter-curser. I won’t just send your curse back to you, I’ll be sending along a little extra something for the trouble. A streak of bad luck, perhaps. My personal favorite is to cause the “loss of means” to perform whatever bullshit they’re sending at me. Impotence, poor performance, a bout of illness, loss of spirit support… whatever’s easiest to target and remove. I won’t suggest that you do this, but… well, if someone’s earned it… you get the gist.

Final Thoughts:

Last year, I helped someone end a nasty haunting, which was the original inspiration for this post. I resurrected it a couple weeks ago after letting it languish in my drafts for months, because I had not one, not two, but three individuals ask me for help and advice — all within a few weeks of each other. All advice given followed this general protocol, all with extra steps according to the need.

Thus, I felt like it was time to bring this post out of the box and shake my dust off. I have a lot more to say on ending curses in particular and identifying curses (versus mundane problems). Generally, in my experience, the cut-push-ward is plenty for most situations. More extreme measures are abnormal.