Crackin' Wise

The Importance of Balance

If there's one concept that is central to my life, it's balance. (Ha.) I do firmly believe that "things", for lack of a better word, generally balance out in the end; that, if they aren't, someone or something will act to change that. In my own life, I'm pretty scrupulous about maintaining a healthy balance, including in my magical practices.

You won't see me talk about divination often, because I have another blog for that (which isn't up and running yet), but I'm going to talk a bit about it now. My practice of divination came to me when I was looking to find a working name based on my private name. I divine primarily through a connection with birds. I find this highly amusing, since I was never a bird person and still am not a birder; no life-book for me! In fact, I was always a cat person! (Next week's topic: Familiars!) This is how it began, completely out of my control, and how it has largely remained. Divination is inherently a largely reactive or passive activity. We may start the ball rolling, but what happens isn't up to us. That's largely the point. If it was all in our control, we'd call that "guessing". The whole point of divination is to take ourselves out of the picture a bit and just let the universe squeeze in sideways. We let go of control in order to let the random become orderly; it's balance.

In the same way, my magical practice is largely the opposite of my divination practice. Here is where I am in control. I make it up as I go along. I build the spells and rituals and choose when and how to perform them. I make specific goals and seek to meet them with very little randomness involved. There is a bit, in the same way that there is a bit of control in divination. I know, for example, that it's better if I can find an object already imbued with magical energy rather than try to make one, so I keep an eye out for such things to present themselves. But, once found, they are used however I feel it best to use them for the purposes I have in mind. I take the lead, pursuing the magic rather than waiting for it to come to me.

This is why I have separated the two activities. As an auspex, I am a servant of the universe, and I must maintain that sense of respect and humility. As a wise woman, I am the leader, and I am free to be assertive and even demanding at times...and irreverent.
This, of course, is one of the great balancing acts in my life, and yet another example in a long line that confirms to me the deep, fundamental importance of balance.

Building a Spell

As I mentioned in my last post, I don't believe it's generally a good idea to lift spells wholesale, even from great sources. Magic is highly personal, and spells should be, too. If it doesn't resonate, don't include it. If it does, but only a little, see if you can enhance the resonance or drop it. Only when everything in a spell resonates intensely do you really stand a chance of its working. Magic is very much a guessing game, after all!

Most spells start with a goal in mind. Now, there are exceptions, of course; my own pumpkin ritual started with a magically charged object that I kept waiting around until inspiration struck. But, generally, one starts with a goal. It's important to think about what you are aiming for and hone it down to something very specific. The more clear you can be about what you are asking for, the more concentrated your spell will be. You don't just want money, you want a hundred dollars within two months. How would you like this money to come? Do you want to sell something? What do you want to sell? Don't forget that you still have to do the advertising! You want to win it in a drawing? Well, you have to enter the drawing, then, of course! You want your rich uncle to die and leave it to you. That one's a tad ethically awkward, don't you think?! In each of these cases, the specificity shapes the spell you will ultimately use; you'll want to use correspondences and symbols for selling, good business, profit, etc, for the first, for luck, winning, controlling the random, even, for the second, and, well, you'll be wanting to do a lot of covering your karmic ass for the third! (Don't really ever do that. Even if your uncle is a rat bastard, he probably doesn't actually deserve to die, and while I don't go on about the "three-fold law", yeah, there's a certain "what goes around, comes around" that generally applies to life.

So now you've honed your goal down; you want to sell your bike for $200 in the next month. (Your bike, by the way, is actually worth that much, or at least in the ballpark! If not, you are once again risking bad karma!) The next step is research; you'll be looking up spells and correspondences and symbols that relate to money, selling, bikes, 200, dollars, the time span of a month, and anything else that seems relevant (your location, for example, or successful advertising); this can take some time, but is much faster with the handy-dandy internet and a solid magical library on hand! As you research, make note of things that occur over and over again; these are probably more powerful associations than those you only see in one or two places, although sometimes a more obscure item might simply be overlooked because it's obscure; make sure to look at everything and pay attention to whatever resonates, no matter how often you come across it.

Now, as you go about daily life with this research bubbling in your brain, keep an eye out for magically charged items that might work for this task, both ones deliberately charged and items that just (yes, I'm using this word a lot) resonate for no apparent reason. While you continue to keep an eye out, begin to build a ritual. Everyone is different; I typically find that an overall sketch of what I want to do comes to me first and then I begin filling in the specific wording. Someone else might start with the wording and build from there. Wording, of course, requires as much care as every other step; be specific, and cover yourself on as many negative contingencies as you can. Don't demand, as a general rule, but request.

This is important! Magic is like herding cats through force of will alone, or trying to control water with nothing but your hands. It's tricky business, and involves a lot of careful coaxing and very little rough handling. We are playing around with the equivalent of electricity here, more or less randomly exposing various objects to it to discover what conducts it and what doesn't. This would be why magic is so unreliable and hard to test, at least at this point in our understanding of it. If we are calm and patient, if we are thoughtful and complex, opening as many avenues as possible for the magic to flow, this is when it happens.

Recommended Reading

As you may imagine, I am pretty picky about the books in my magical library. Easily ninety percent of what's on the market doesn't make it past my first cursory examination.

There is one, yes, ONE book that I completely and heartily recommend: The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells: The Ultimate Reference Book for the Magical Arts. While I don't agree completely with the author, her views on magic are easily among the closest to my own that I've ever encountered in print. However, that's not the important thing. The important thing is the wide variety of genuine folk magic she managed to gather. People have been messing about with this whatever-it-is for centuries, and, although we don't have a clue why, certain things work often enough that they consistently get passed down. These are the most invaluable bits of information for the current practitioner, and often hard to come by.

Now, in general, I don't advise just living spells wholesale from a book, even my favorite one. Magic is an extremely personal thing, and it's very important that every aspect of a spell or ritual resonate for the person or people performing it. Books should be used as a reference source, and I have found a few more that I find useful for this purpose.

Grimoire for the Green Witch: A Complete Book of Shadows, while quite modern Wiccan, is a highly accessible collection of data. Chapters one and eight are by far the most useful.

The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic is another good, solid reference work, full of well-researched and useful practical information.

Now, plants are a huge part of magical practice; there are few easier ways to connect with the web of existence! While the previous books cover plants very well, this is an area where a practitioner really needs detailed resources. For many, the best book on this topic is Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (Cunningham's Encyclopedia Series), and, in a rare moment, I generally agree that nothing else does the job better. However, it has one flaw; those darn drawings! I find drawings of plants to be very difficult to translate when looking at actual plant life, so I also own the Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of Magical Plants; this book is full of actual photos! Yay! These two books are best used in conjunction to get a more complete view of those plants they have in common.

Now, I'm always on the lookout for a good book, so I hope that over time my magical library will expand (and I didn't cover my divination library), but, for right now, these are the books on my shelf. What's on yours?

Starting off with a ba...by.

When I decided that I was actually going to practice magic, I also decided to wait to see what presented itself. It happened to be, of all things, a pumpkin, just oozing with magical energy, that I found at a local hardware store one day in very late September. I brought it home, set it on a shelf, and waited again for inspiration to strike. It did, as it usually does for me, in one swell foop; right after my son, while playing with the pumpkin, broke the stem and I also noticed a small cut in the skin, breaking its previous perfection that had made me unwilling to cut into it, the basic outline of a fertility ritual popped into my head.

A bit of background: I have fertility problems. I started trying to have children when I was 22. I didn't have one till I was 31, and that was after two miscarriages. After my first son was born, we decided we wanted another, and, at the point I found the pumpkin, I'd already had another two miscarriages, and failed to get pregnant the way I did with my first son. A fertility ritual was certainly worth a shot!

Now, Tom, my spouse, is a pretty straight forward atheist who has only encountered the woowoo, as I like to call it, through me. He's always game for an experiment, though, and has an open mind. He was willing to take this seriously, which I think was important.

After some time letting the whole thing sink in, I picked a night that felt good; a Saturday at the beginning of October, and we began our first ritual.

I'm not big on the four(five) elements/directions thing, but, as we set up, I noticed I could set them up, so I did. We lit candles in the sconces in our living room. On another wall is a painting featuring water, on a third wall was a glitter lamp that could represent wind, and so I took my Gaia statue off her shelf on the wall with the water picture and put her on a table on the fourth wall. None of the directions matched up, but, as I said, this wasn't really an issue for me. We put on the Audio Visions XM channel (nature sounds, poetry, acoustic music); I debated doing it with no background noise, but was worried our son, Will, would pick up on the sound change and wake up. This ritual, at least, did not need perfection at all.

We laid a blanket (that Tom got for me many years ago when he was down in Mexico for a month and that was on our couch for a long time; it's nice to use things that have connections and meaning if you can) on the floor, in case it got a little messy.

It felt right to do this fertility naked, so we did. (I mentioned that the term "skyclad" has always amused me, and explained it to Tom.) Tom not being up on all this stuff, I ran through the whole thing with him, laying out the ritual and meanings and so forth. Then we started up, with a false start 'cause I forgot a bit.

We sat facing each other, the pumpkin between us. I talked about how the pumpkin represents fertility; round and firm like a pregnant belly, the flesh of the pumpkin analogous to the womb/placenta, the seed analogous to sperm. We placed our hands on the pumpkin and summoned/felt the energy. Tom cut into the pumpkin and I did the rest of the cutting of the lid; then I swallowed some seeds and Tom swallowed a piece of the flesh (washed down in both cases with water.) Then I laid down and Tom gently rubbed the lid of the pumpkin (with the dangling seeds/goo) on my abdomen. We said we wished to conceive a child. Then we said (and I really like this as ritual closing), "If it can be, let it be." He cleaned me with a towel, and we sealed the deal with a kiss. Then we cleaned up. We put the pumpkin in the 'fridge, then eventually in our garage where it ultimately rotted and eventually ended up in the trash.

Then we went and had sex, although, as I said, I didn't expect it to work necessarily that night, to which Tom replied, "Yeah, it's the Universe, not Domino's, you don't get it in 20 minutes."

Notes: I think it important that both partners be equally involved in a fertility ritual; after all, they're equally involved in the conception!
The most powerful part of the ceremony was the rubbing of the pumpkin cap on the abdomen; I think the part with the seeds and flesh could be skipped, but if I did it again, I'd probably leave it in, as it wasn't at all onerous (although apparently I should have cut a bit smaller piece of the flesh for Tom as he ate a bit of apple later to dispel the something-lodged-in-his-throat feeling) and the symbolism was good.

I LOVE "If it can be, let it be"; alternately, "if it may be, let it be" could also be used, although I would prefer "can" most times for the "if possible" sense rather than the "if allowable" sense of "may".

Nine months later, at the end of July, our second son, Finn, referred to for the whole pregnancy as "the pumpkin baby", was born. As of this writing, he is a brilliant, magic kissed (he was born with a chameleon shaped birthmark on his arm) almost-two-year-old.

So, my first attempt at magic was success. Since I had decided that if it worked, I would pursue magical practice until such time as I became convinced that it had been a coincidental fluke, I have done so. So far, my life has continued to reinforce the idea that this event was not just a coincidence, that there is something to all of this, so I am walking this path, guided completely by my intuition, moderated by my mind.

While you will see snark here, it's not actually my default. I'll tell it like I see it, and sometimes that will be funny and sometimes serious and usually somewhere in between. I hope you come along for the ride.

Book of Shadows? Oh, puh-lease.

Names are powerful things. We like to give powerful names to things that are important to us, and this is why "Book of Shadows" is so appealing. It sounds quite awe inspiring, and it's very mysterious, too! Ooh!

Clearly, I'm not into it. Look, what this book is, what it's supposed to be, is a working book. It's more akin to a cookbook than a holy book. Now, "workbook" is, I grant you, kind of lacking in grandeur, and "working book" is just awkward. So I hunted around and tracked down the etymology of grammar, which is thus:

grammar

late 12c., gramarye, from O.Fr. grammaire "learning,"... M.E. gramarye also came to mean "learning in general, knowledge peculiar to the learned classes" (early 14c.), which included astrology and magic; hence the secondary meaning of "occult knowledge" (late 15c.), which evolved in Scottish into glamor (q.v.).

Thank you, Online Etymology Dictionary.

So "grammar" works really well. Of course, I insisted on putting my own little spin on it, so I tapped my Celtic ancestry and I call my book my "gramadach". I am going to be nice enough to share quite a bit of its contents with you. This is one area where, generally, the masses and I agree; typically, your "gramarye", to give you another option, is meant to be private.

From a practical point of view, if one hands out all one's secrets to success, one does an awfully nice thing for one's competition. There is competition, btw...men and women have been making a living off of magic for a very, very long time, and it is as much a business as anything else. Ignore the Susie Specials and their cries of how magic for profit is eville. I don't know about you, but I gotta eat, and so has every witch or wizard or mage or midwife since the dawn of time. So I really am being nice in sharing from my personal stash of valuable information.

From a cautionary point of view, one doesn't want some poor novice to mess about with bits of knowledge and accidentally harm themselves or others. So here's a disclaimer; don't do stuff if you don't know what you are doing and don't blame me if it all goes horribly wrong! This applies generally to everything I ever share here, okay? Good.

Now, here's what my gramadach has to say on names, at least right now, since these books are always growing and changing, just like us!

Names

In magic, people typically acquire at least one, often two names in addition to their birth names. These names come into play so that when one is working, one designates most clearly who is being worked upon/doing the working. Your private name (sometimes called “secret”, which gives it more cachet, but also, in my experience, makes it more tempting to reveal) should come to you at some point…during meditation or just popping into your head is fine. One way to know the name is the name is whether you’d want to share it with others…if you do, it isn’t. It’s quite likely a random assemblage of letters, “meck” for example. Now, your working or coven name is often (but not always…another part of my magical information, my specific skillset, turned out to be related to my private name, for example) derived from your private name…the idea being that someone who knows you has a faint chance of deducing your secret name in case of emergency. “Meck”, for example, might derive into “Mellow Creek” or “Merry Creek”.  In working, you want to use all your names, and a working will work best on someone else if you know and use all of their names.

My working name is Wren Starling. Spiffy, isn't it? But you can just call me Jenny; it's what I answer to most often, after all...well, except for Mommy!

We begin where we begin.

Top five things you need to know about me before you read this blog:

1. I don’t call myself a witch because I’m not Wiccan and I don’t want to cause any confusion. I have many witches, Wiccan and not, in my life, including my mother, who is a solitary kitchen witch sort of witch.
(Note: My mother was a witch before being a witch was cool. She was in the broom closet for my entire childhood, which STILL pisses me off, because no one should have live in fear simply for what they believe.)
I’d call myself a wizard, but Harry Potter (which I enjoyed!) has kind of mucked that up, even if I didn’t mind dealing with the people who would insist that wizard is a male word.
So, after much internal debate and consulting with friends and family, I settled on wise woman. I like to think I’m pretty wise, generally, without being too self-satisfied about it. And I’m a woman, which is distinctly less important, but it kind of flows.

2. I practice magic. (Note: Not “magick”. I think people can grasp the difference from context, thanks, and we don’t need to be all Susie Special now, do we?) Here’s what I think magic is: the manipulation of a form of energy that we don’t really know much about yet. Like, you know, anything, really. It seems to escape our scientific efforts to find and define it, which would suggest it doesn’t exist, except that I’ve felt it and used it, so…conundrum! I’ve learned to live with this annoying departure from logic and reason, because that’s easier than denying my own senses. I try to be careful and thoughtful, as one should be when exploring something potentially very powerful that one has basically no idea how to handle safely. I’m so careful that it took me several years of thinking about it before I would go so far as to actually practice magic. I don’t actually take this lightly, even if I seem to sometimes because I’m being entertaining.

3. If I seem irreverent, here’s why: my practice of magic is no more part of my religion or spirituality than anything else in my life. My religious beliefs are actually mostly Buddhist, and this active practice of magic is actually kind of only borderline okay within that. For a long time, I thought it wasn’t okay, which prevented my practice, but I was convinced otherwise, which was very and instantly freeing. In short, if I’m not gonna be a monk in any other way, there’s no reason to be a monk in this one area. Not to mention that there are reasons why I say mostly Buddhist.

4. Divination is different. I have a whole different blog and a whole different practice for that. Divination is a calling that came to me quite abruptly and completely, and is very much an act of service. I am a receiver and interpreter of communication from the subconscious of the universe, generally through birds. I am an auspex, a long-dead profession that I’ve been led by my subconscious and/or that of the universe in general (which I don’t believe has a consciousness, btw), to revive. If you are interested in that, see wrenstarling.dreamwidth.org.

5. There is no five. Yet. UPDATE: There IS a five! Change happens. This blog has evolved beyond its initial style. You will find, as you read on, less attitude and more wisdom. I think this is a good thing.