#spellcrafting

this is an acronym from Laura Tempest Zakroff's book Weave the Liminal: Living Modern Traditional Witchcraft. it is applicable for rituals and spellcrafting, from low to high levels of complexity.

🪾 Roots: ancestry, origins, identity

✨ Inspiration: influences, appealing practices

🕑 Time: schedule, auspicious timings

🌳 Environment: location, landscape

🌟 Star: personal code of ethics

Doorways, hallways. gates, and thresholds are liminal spaces - the momentary place in between one room and another, between the outside and inside of a building, the passage way across a border from one space to another.

When we go through a door, our brains sense this transition on a subconscious level. Simply moving into a room or building can help to signal to your mind and spirit that you are shifting tasks or modes. This can affect your mood and body rhythms, sometimes drastically. For example, coming home at the end of a long day, and feeling the relief the moment you set foot inside your home or room. Or heading to the kitchen or laundry and finding your focus for everyday chores settle in. Heading to work or school, and settling into work mode when you enter the building.

The transition through a doorway can even affect your memory. Ever walk into a room only to find you've forgotten why you went there in the first place, or what you were saying? If this happens, try going back to the room you were just in — passing back into the previous space can help you to recall what you were thinking about.

Try incorporating doorways into spellwork for transitions, to welcome in new energies or wishes, or to close the door on things that no longer serve you. This might involve performing a spell on a threshold, walking through a doorway, or physically opening or closing a door. Or it could mean paying a little magical attention to the door itself - adding sigils or bindrunes to the doorframe and trim can offer protection or set other intentions. Hanging bells from the doorknob, or wreaths, or other door decor, can offer other opportunities to incorporate specific intentions to your space.

Maybe you can even get creative with specific kinds of doorways - open doorways without doors, double doors, dutch doors, louvered doors, screen doors, closet doors, pocket doors, the list goes on. Each kind of door might serve a different purpose - to shield and protect, to keep private, to block access but not visibility, to allow entrance... it depends on the door. It depends on if you are entering or leaving. While a closed door might represent safety and defense, an open door can be an invitation, or a vulnerability. Maybe you use double doors to encourage a sense of openness and making space for big things coming. Maybe you use storm doors in a spell to shield against turmoil. Maybe you're using a thick solid door as part of protective magic.

I've always liked the idea of collecting rain water for spells, as well as having waters attuned to specific moonphases. I know you can charge water for the lunar cycle by letting it catch moonlight for the specific phase you need, but I love the idea of collecting water directly from the rain. Of course, in practice, that means you're at the whims of what times the rain comes.

January is always very dry where I live, but we've had several rainstorms this month. I put out a container to collect some rainwater from the storm at the end of the waning moon stage, leading into the new moon. On the morning of the new moon, we had a single flash of lightning and a peal of thunder so loud it woke me from solid sleep. Then it started pouring.

Between the lightning (which lends power and protective energy), the rainstorm itself (good for purification, release, and cleansing) and the moon phase (waning, for release and banishing, and new moon, for new beginnings) I'd say this will be a pretty powerful water for spell purposes. I'll use this for the banishing and release of old things that no longer serve, while calling for new opportunities. I can also use it as an offering.

This the sort of spell ingredient that takes time and a little luck to accumulate. When rain comes, put out a bowl or vessel (wider mouthed is better; you can decant it into jars later). Label it with the date, the moon phase, anything else you think is of note. With time and patience, you'll have water for different moonphases, seasons, different kinds of storm, each with their own uses for spellwork.

This is part of @windvexer's Modern Folk Magic Challenge: Premade Supermarket Spells prompt.

I was immediately intrigued by this idea, but it's actually really far out of my wheelhouse. As a person with a lot of food restrictions, my partner and I make the vast majority of the food we eat from scratch so that we can control precisely what is in it. I don't believe that it has to be that way at all to create good kitchen magic; that's just the reality of my life.

This prompt got me thinking about spell bags, and how much I love them, but struggle to bring them with me to the places where they would be the most helpful. Which got me to thinking: my digestive track holds things really well for what, a day or two? What if I enchanted an edible spell bag and ate it right before I needed the magic?

Enter my obsession of this week, Trader Joe's new seasonal Black Sesame Mochi Ice Cream

They are tiny little packages of Black Sesame ice cream in a pouch made from sweet rice. Behold our magical spell bags!

After taking out the filler ingredients and the emulsifiers, we are left with four main ingredient types: the cream(s), the cane sugar, black sesame seeds, and sweet rice. Three of those four ingredients are directly associated with prosperity.

Now, I'll be real with you here, black sesame mochi ice cream might be an acquired taste. If it's not your thing, that's completely okay. Just don't do this spell. We want positive money-drawing work to taste amazing. Divine, even. Maybe even a little bit bougie. Black Sesame seed ice cream mochi does that for me; your experience may vary.

Now I have my ingredients, and I know what they are meant to be.

The last is to make it happen. Here, I wish to employ very simple techniques: sigilry and repetitive chanting. Choose a symbol that represents money to you; it may be a dollar sign, a euro, a sigil for prosperity, or the rune Fehu. If possible, use a sigil you've worked with before because that creates a connection point between you and it.

You are going to draw your sigil onto the top of your mochi as you hold it in your left hand. This can be done energetically, with a knife, with edible glitter, or frosting. Really feel the symbol sink into the mochi; you should be able to feel it in your hand when you are done. If you are using a rune like Fehu or another sigil that benefits from speaking its name to awaken it, do so at this time.

Then, speak a chant to bring money or prosperity over your spell packet, slowly and repetitively, 9 times. Let your words sink into your object; feel them awaken the innate properity in the sugar, the black sesame, and the rice. Load your pouch with the words.

This can be as simple as this basic money chant:

Money, Money, Money Come to Me Full of Abundance Three Times Three

Optional addition: I do this type of enchant with additional energy working where I work my energy into the energy of the pound/mochi in a figure 8 pattern, moving it into an out of the mochi and back into my own body - in this case 9 times - I might work this by using Money, money money as the motion to send the energy into the mochi, then come to me as it starts to return from the moch, then full of abundance as it enters my body and three times three as it leaves my body again. If you can't chant and do energy work like this, you can choose one or the other, or you can do them one at a time. Do what works best for you.

After you have completed your chant 9x, eat your mochi.

This spell is best cast on the day of a job interview, when you are asking for a raise, before a shift when you rely on tips, or in any other circumstance where you need to bring your prosperity with you to your work. Because your digestive system breaks down your spell pouch, this spell should be used for immediate prosperity.

See, when I first did one of my very first spells as a baby witch, I did a spell to separate myself from toxic situations because I was tired of pining after my exes.

Friends, I did not clarify what counts as toxic.

This led to a major falling out with my parents that caused me to stop living with them in a matter of days and not talking to them for nearly six years.

But, the spell technically did as I’d asked and removed me from toxic situations. It just turns out me living with my parents was toxic at that time and I was unprepared for that outcome. I can only really blame myself for that one.

In one to help break bad habits, it says to write this bad habit in a a leaf, take it to a tree and bury close to the roots. Then put an offering for the tree in the same hole, cover it up and pour some water on the spot

But couldn't this action of burying and watering, be seen as "planting" the bad habit? And if you are planting it would grow...

Another one is for love/relationship, where with a burned stick you draw two hearts interwined in a piece of paper, visualizing a satisfying relationship and then put some rose petals in the paper, fold it and burn it in a candle or fire.

He describes that as it burns the power is released

But it makes me think that burning your wish in the paper would have an opposite effect, like destroying the wish

Idk. What do you thinks of those "mechanics" of spells? Am I overthinking?

Hi! I've never read those books and I'm not a Wiccan.

So I can only comment from my own perspective, which may be the incorrect perspective to accurately interpret what Cunningham is saying.

You are not over-thinking; you have stumbled onto a very important aspect of sorcery and one that is good to think about.

How is it that sometimes, a box is used to trap and bind energies, but at other times a box can be used to coalesce and radiate helpful energies?

How is it that a candle can both open portals and close portals? How can a candle both be banishing of spirits, and an offering to spirits?

How can burying something in the earth not only be destructive or even an aspect of curses, but also be a technique of prosperity and growth?

The reality is that burying something isn't magic and it doesn't do anything. Lighting a candle isn't magic and doesn't do anything.

"Doing magic" is not taking a leaf and writing things on it and burying it. A mundane person can do these things in a mundane way and no magic will occur.

Nothing is automatically happening; burying something neither automatically causes an act of banishing, nor an act of conjuring.

As the practitioner, it is you yourself who determines what happens. This is the vital and inexorable power of 'setting intent.'

The tree does not decide what happens to your habits leaf. The earth does not decide what happens to your habits leaf. YOU decide what happens to it.

No, it isn't strictly true that burying things is always an action of generative planting. A very popular form of cursing is to turn an apple into someone and then bury them to rot. But the Earth can also gently break things down through the cycle of decay. Or it can trap things, like a cave-in.

We see all of these things occurring in nature; of course you can plant seeds to grow strong. Of course if you bury a body it will rot. Of course leafs slowly decay and their particles return to nature.

All of these things are valid.

YOU decide which one happens. This decision is germinated with intent; it is gestated with technique. YOU are the creator god. The leaf is clay in your hands, and you can decide:

You are the body of the beloved that broke my heart, as this leaf decays their joy will decay.

You are the mustard seed that returns a hundredfold harvest, mightest among trees.

You are the leaf of the forest floor, breaking down and returning to nature, just as my bad habits break down and return to source.

It is not a leaf. It is not planting. It is a spell. You create the reality of what the leaf really is, and you dictate how it must try to interact with its environment.

It must be good with you, or it is not a good spell*.

So if you personally cannot get around the idea that burying something will always be an action of generative "planting," then you shouldn't do the spell like that!

It's not an issue of "wrong belief." You may be following valid intuition. You may be at a time in your practice where the Earth calls you to plant things to grow. You may be at a time in your practice where fire whispers sweet promises of destruction to you.

Explore what's around you and what you're feeling! Change the methods if you don't think they're right for you.

But it is also untrue to say that putting things into the earth is always an act of planting. It can be many things.