#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.

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.”

Things I want to know:

How to create them

How to dispose of the contents

When to dispose of the contents

How to reuse the jars

Where do y'all get the teeny crystals for those things?

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.