Stay Home; Do Magick

Things in the world are...not great right now.  Here in Seattle we've just received a stay-home order and closure of non-essential businesses.  My husband and I have been working from home for going on three weeks.  The anxiety and disruption of peoples lives is the highest it's been in my lifetime.  As a witch, the best thing I can do right now is stay home and do magick.

I hope the whole "staying at home" thing requires no explanation.  If you don't understand that, then you should probably put down the candle and just go watch some YouTube.  If you're still reading this, congratulations you're not a dumb ass!   Now let's get to work.

The world needs magick more than ever and we can be part of the solution.  That doesn't mean we all need to start attempting to heal the world.  I, for one, am a shitty healer.  I can destroy things, purify, and create barriers like a champ; but whenever I attempt more than the most minor healing I end up doing more harm than good.  Thankfully, there are TONS of things we can do magickally to help ourselves and our communities in dealing with the trash fire that is 2020.

Each practitioner has their own strengths; what we need to do now is figure out how each of our individual strengths can help and then actually do so.  Here are some common magickal strengths and suggested ways of applying them:

• Protection: Create strong energetic barriers around yourself and loved ones (with permission) to help enforce social distancing and create a sense of safety.
• Cleansing and Purification: Add magickal fuel to your mundane cleaning and sanitation practices to boost their effectiveness (this is just a boost, not a replacement for soap!).  Do workings to cleanse negative energy from your home and the public spaces in your neighborhood.
• Hearth Magick: Create an energetic oasis in these anxiety riddled times.  Add love and healing energies while cooking to make your food nourish body and spirit.
• Prosperity: In this time of economic uncertainty, do workings to enhance prosperity and stability for your family and community.  If you're fortunate enough to have financial stability and the ability to make charitable donations, infuse your gift with energy to encourage others to donate as well.
• Luck: Honestly, we all need as much good luck as we can get right now.  Do all you can.
• Spirit Workings: We need all the allies we can get right now, so encourage your spirit allies to help you and those around you to stay healthy and stable, as well as helping to heal the sick.  If you work with the ancestors, this is the time to ask them to help protection our vulnerable elders and those with fragile health.
• Justice/Activist Magick:  Work on our law and policy makers to force them to put the good of the people before their pocketbooks.
• Healing: The world is an energetic open wound right now and we need all the healing we can get.  As for physical healing, unless you're an expert and feel confident working otherwise, keep your focus small and to those who explicitly reach out to you.  As always, magickal healing is a support to mundane medicine, never a replacement.

These are just a few suggestions of the many ways we can all use our strengths to help out in these troubled times.  I encourage you to get creative and use the magick you already do well to make your little corner of the world a little bit better.  Focus on the small steps you can take every day and you will be surprised at the difference you can make.

Don't forget to take time for self-care as well.  Exhausting ourselves helps no one.  We can't be positive all the time.  Allow yourself time to freak out a little (or a lot) and be gentle with yourself.  Do what you can and don't stress what you can't. 

For my part, I'm doing a lot of work with Santa Muerte to protect the vulnerable.  If you're interested, I'll be doing a public Santa Muerte Rosary online via Zoom on 4/5/2020 at 1pm pacific time (Santa Muerte Rosary Details).

Take care of yourself and stay safe out there!

Sweetening Spells

I’ve done a lot of spellwork over my magickal career, but until very recently I had never done a sweetening spell.  I think I’d skipped over them in the past because they’re often grouped with love spells, which I just don’t ever do.  However, I recently got a really fantastic bone casting and the reader told me that I should consider doing a sweetening spell to make the people at my new firm act more favorably towards me.  So, I decided to take a closer look at sweetening spells and really liked what I found.

In essence, a sweetening spell is done to make a person or situation more favorable – to make them be sweet to you.  Sweetening spells are close kin to love spells, but are a lot gentler and less coercive.  Instead of trying to force people into specific actions or emotions (e.g. make Jim love me or make my boss give me a raise), sweetening spells are aimed at making people be nicer, be more open and receptive.  Sweetening spells are the magickal equivalent of bringing someone cookies in the hopes that they’ll be more likely to do you a favor.  In fact, sweetening spells can be happily used in conjunction with bringing someone cookies ;)

While there are many different types of sweetening spells out there, the one that resonates the most with me is the honey jar.  In its simplest form all a honey jar spell needs is a small container, honey, a small piece of paper, and a pen.  You write the full name of the person or situation you want to sweeten three times on the piece of paper, then rotate the page 90 degrees and write your own full name across the other person’s name three times.  Put the piece of paper in the jar, letting some of the honey get on your fingers.  Then suck the honey off your finger saying, “As this honey is sweet so ___________ will be sweet to me.”  You can enhance the spell by adding something linked to the spell target to the jar (a photo or signature are your most hygienic options).  A bit of candle magick is often added by burning a small chime candle (of the color most appropriate to your desired outcome) on top of the jar, letting the wax drip onto the lid and jar.  In most of the sources I looked at, both tasting the honey and the candle burning should be repeated weekly as long as the situation lasts or until you’ve reached your desired outcome.

Gotta love locally sourced magick :)

For the honey jar I made, I got a small jar of local honey (purchased from a local vendor very close to where I work) and used both paper and a pen from work.  My targets for the spell were pretty much all the supervisors in my department, so rather than writing a bunch of names three times I created a sigil that represented them and wrote it three times on the paper and then crossed it with my own.  I also drew the sigil on the lid of the honey jar with a sharpie (an invaluable magickal tool).  I folded the paper nice and small and stuck it in the jar.  I then burned a small yellow candle on top of the jar, right on top of the sigil.  I’ll be doing this every Sunday in an hour of the sun for the foreseeable future.

Sigils make writing out long lines of text so very much simpler

Resources:
Hoodoo Honey and Sugar Spells: Sweet Love Magic in the Conjure Tradition http://www.luckymojo.com/honeyjar.html
https://lamplighterblues.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/honey-jar-sweetening-spell-basics/