#magic resources

A good piece of advice I hear often is that you should complement your magical learning with some practical learning. From a spirit work perspective, I figure a plant spirit is much more likely to work with you when you’ve shown the good faith to learn something about it. My background in ecology has given me a good handle on working with plants, and it’s definitely improved my craft as well. I thought I’d share a few books and websites that I use extensively.

Foraging and plant identification

Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel: gives a crash course to botany, focusing on getting you familiar with key botanical features. Highly recommend to anyone, especially beginners

Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and the Southern Appalachians by David Duhl: obviously fairly specific to these areas but it's been recommended by every botanist I know. Even if you’re outside of this region, find yourself a reputable field guide for your habitat.

Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora: oh mushrooms. We all need to know more about mushrooms. This book may be more suitable for people who are already familiar with things like dichotomous keys, but it explains itself very well if you’re wanting to jump off the deep end.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center: this website has absolutely beautiful pictures. You can put in your location and they’ll give you a list of what kind of wildflowers you can find

Gardening and landscape plants

Manual of Woody Landscape Plants by Michael Dirr: pretty much all the information you’d ever need to know about trees and shrubs including what climate they prefer and what varieties you should look out for.

Herbaceous Perennial Plants by Allen Armitage: another book with an insane amount of information. More focused on things like flowers.

North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: this website has saved my ass on so many assignments lol... Describes the plants in detail, including toxicity to humans and animals! 

Herbalism

Herbalista: an organization bringing herbal community care to Atlanta. They have a free intro course that I’m currently working through, plus recipes on their website

🐌Snail shells🐌

(Sustainably harvested from the mountain forest)

(no snails are ever harmed, all shells are discards)

Magickal properties;

Chakra activation, especially of the Yin Meridian

grounding energies and earthing frequencies

protection during travel

Sanctuary and warding of homes and dwellings

The spiral symbolizes the Inward journey, personal growth, and focus upon the self

Whole snail shells are the perfect component for protection spells dedicated to your house or for traveling.

Large snails shells can be used as oracle or divination tools; by painting runes, symbols or sigils upon them, shake and scatter gently to do a shell reading.

Crushed snail shells can also be used in place of salt, clay, or eggshells in many other spells.

The powdered shells can be mixed with anointing oil and used to activate the chakras and stimulate Kundalini energy as well as the Yin Meridian

If someone needs magic and witchcraft resources, usually we just dump a book list on them and wait for them to emerge from the reading cave in 84 years. But resources are just literally anything used to teach something! And that means music! Video! Coins and postage stamps!

No seriously, anything that will teach a person through a unique experience. Coins have taught me a lot of magic this year, I just learned how to listen. The same thing happened with music early on--at some point I realized the answers were in the sound, not necessarily the words. That’s a puzzle and it makes it more difficult sometimes than just reading a book. It’s also powerful and clever in ways that a book sometimes isn’t.

We often assume that a book puts all the answers in front of us. But it just puts words in front of us. And it can’t put all the words we need in front of us at once, it has physical limitations. We assume the words are the same from person to person, and forget that the meaning of words is determined by the unique contents of a person’s brain. Words change meanings from person to person, just like the tide splashes differently on every beach even though all of that water comes from the same ocean.

Seidr actually isn’t something I’ve researched all that much yet, sorry to say. I started reading up on it and then Loki redirected me elsewhere, but I do have some resources I bookmarked back then that might be helpful:

Thanks to inspiration from this post by @achangingaltar, I decided to spend my day trying my hand at making a fauxdori. I think it’s going to be really great for notes for goddess studies, witchcraft notes, prayer books, etc. 

I had never heard of the notebook type before today, but there are apparently a bazillion tutorials online for making your own. 

It’s just a piece of leather and a whole bunch of cardstock from the scrapbooking section of the craft store, some iron-on adhesive, and some elastic. Nothing was wasted; I’ll be using the paper trimmings for spells later on, and I’ll use the leather remnants to make a passport cover. The little charms on the cover are an owl I bought at Pennsic and a plate that reads “What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?”

I'm sure were all familiar with Bean/Macaroni paintings; gluing these items to a canvas and then painting over them... I was thinking

Why not do that with a spell jar?

And now that I’m a witch, I have that capability.

I am both intrigued and wary. I mean, necromancy is one of the darkest forms of magic possible right?