#cornish witchcraft

I almost turned my nose up at it (very snobby of me) but now that some time has passed and I’ve had the chance to look into it a bit more I find the intrigue reemerging so that’s quite exciting!

In the Cornish Craft traditions, a Keppen Wand is a small stave of magically empowered wood, meant to be used as a highly innocuous and easily secreted wand. This tradition ostensibly arose out of the need for secrecy during times when Witchcraft Laws endangered those who used tools such as ritual wands. As such, very small wands that could be passed off more easily as mundane allowed a practitioner to carry their magical implement with them while maintaining deniability about the purpose of the tool. 

In the spirit of Cornish magical traditions, I felt moved to make such a wand using a small piece of wild Holly wood that spoke to me. Having harvested the wood, I went on to de-bark it and dry it (a process which can be quite tricky, given Holly's high propensity for splitting when dried without specialty equipment) before shaping and smoothing the piece. I then bored a small hole through the top of the wood and proceeded to seal it with its naturally pale color using my homemade Wisefool's Glaze (a magically empowered wood varnish made from an array of potent arboreal resins.) When the varnish was fully cured, I strung the Keppen Wand onto a length of recycled leather cord that I outfitted with a vintage resin bead, which can be slid up or down the cord to adjust the loop size for one's wrist, and then I fumigated the piece with a mixture of dried Holly Flowers and Dragon's Blood.

The wand itself measures approximately 4.75 inches / 12 centimeters in length  and the cord measures approximately 9 inches / 23 centimeters from knot to wood.