Honestly the one piece of advice I’d give to new witches, witches trying to learn a new technique, and ones trying to improve their practice is that when you find a technique on tumblr you’re interested in google it, figure out the sources that poster is working from, and read that. No matter how thorough we try to be, we cannot encompass all the nuance and detail of a particular magickal technique in a single post so reading the sources people are working from is extremely helpful.
Find a cool poppet spell but you’ve never made a poppet before? Look up the main ingredients – what traditions use those ingredients in a poppet? Why do they use them? How do they think poppets work? Based on your research, do you understand how that spell operates? If you do you’re in a much better position to execute the spell, troubleshoot it, and design your own.
Magic is so much more than casting spells from a Book of Shadows.
Real magic means living and working in the margins, being patient and holding onto your purpose in the midst of you day-to-day life. Magic is taking baths, taking breaks, sipping tea, washing your hair, painting your nails, watching movies that make you laugh.
Magic needs time and most of all it needs your stillness. You can’t expect a spell to work if you constantly consult the oracles or check your moon cycles every minute of every second. Our ancestors cast spells and then went about their daily lives.
The most important thing I learned from magic is that you have to let it breathe.
this is a list of magical associations for every tarot card, they can be added into spells to amplify your intentions and strengthen your manifestations
Wands are connected with the Fire element and is centered around movement, direction, energy, passion
Swords deal with thinking, communication, perception, and issues dealing with truth, connected to the air element
Cups are connected with water, and the full spectrum of emotions. every emotion imaginable is covered in the cup’s suit.
Pentacles are connected with Earth and are symbolic of manifestation, rewards, material wealth and material abundance.
The Fool creates new beginnings and can be paired with other cards. ex: the fool + the lovers for new romance, the fool + pentacles for new opportunities, etc.
The Magician increases your power and capability on all levels, willpower, emotional security, balance within yourself, etc.
The High Priestess increases your psychic abilities, mediumship abilities, and intuition
The Empress will help you with creativity and creative endeavors
The Emperor establishes order, structure, and command
The Hierophant can be used in a lot of ways, my favorites are 1. Pairing it with the fool to attract a new mentor, 2. Using it to summon a spirit guide or ascended master
The Lovers help invoke and attract love, partnership, mutual relationships, and passion
The Chariot is amazing for success, and triumph. I always use this in success spells for exams, tests, and projects. The Chariot will help the best possible outcome for a situation to arise
Strength will help you master your emotions
The Hermit is good for rituals and meditations based going within and gaining a better understanding of your own self, and life purpose.
The Wheel of Fortune can be used for luck, change, and getting a desired situation moving
Justice is great for truth, legal matters, and justice
The Hanged Man buys you time for a situation you aren’t ready to face, delays events
The Death card works well for ending situations, closing doors, gaining closure, and new beginnings
Temperance will restore balance and serenity to any situation
The Tower is best used for hexing and cursing, brings misfortune, unhappiness and chaos
The Star card is good for when you are casting spells focused on gaining something, The Star card is centered around healing, openness, and hope
The Moon helps develops intuitive abilities and can be used to send bad dreams
The Sun is used in spells for summoning happiness, success, and health
Judgement will help clear confusion and help you with understanding your life mission similar to the Hermit in that aspect
The World invokes wholeness and completion
Page of Wands: works with communication, messages, action, and passion
Page of Cups: boosts creativity, taps into your spiritual nature to bring out new creativity
Page of Swords: amplifies ingenuity and creativity, helps deliver messages from one person to another, can be used to attract someone’s attention to yourself
Page of Pentacles: good for grounding and centering spell work
Knight of Wands: speeds up any workings involving passion, love, and creativity
Knight of Cups: speeds up workings dealing with emotions, psychic development, inner strength
Knight of Swords: speeds up workings involving communication, balance, and thinking
Knight of Pentacles: speeds up workings dealing with manifesting abundance, material wealth, prosperity, and creativity
King of Wands: associated with leadership, command, can help you gain authority
King of Cups: associated with personal feelings, can help you resolve personal conflicts and inner turmoil
King of Swords: aids in strengthening your communication and speaking skills
King of Pentacles: invokes luxury, great card for business success
Queen of Wands: establishes a sense of self security and sufficiency
Queen of Cups: develops your psychic abilities, also helps with understanding/controlling your emotions
Queen of Swords: helps you develop stronger focus
Queen of Pentacles: abundance, creativity, fertility
Aces: used for new beginnings based on the energy represented in that suit
Two of Wands: positive progress in any situation whether it be romance, health, career, etc.
Three of Wands: business prosperity
Four of Wands: strengthens any type of relationship
Five of Wands: used in hexes and curses to invoke conflict, and arguments
Six of Wands: manifests recognition, success,
Seven of Wands: use this card when you’re in a tough situation, it will help you succeed and come out of it stronger
Eight of Wands: directs energy and intentions towards a specific goal or purpose, helps to speed up workings
Nine of Wands: use this card when you come face to face with a difficult task, this card will keep you brave and strong
Ten of Wands: can either be used to achieve something great, or it can be used in a hex or curse to manifest burdens
Two of Cups: union, strengthens romantic relationships
Three of Cups: strengthens a friendship
Four of Cups: dissatisfaction with surroundings
Five of Cups: causes despair and sadness
Six of Cups: lifts your mood when you’re feeling down
Seven of Cups: illusions and deceptions
Eight of Cups: used to help you move on from the past
Nine of Cups: make a wish and use this card’s power to grant your wish, invokes happiness
Ten of Cups: brings happiness to relationships of all kinds, friends, family, romantic, etc.
Two of Swords: used in curses and hexes to cause someone to have a limiting mindset
Three of Swords: heartbreak and emotional strife
Four of Swords: used in healing spells, sleeping aid
Five of Swords: manifests conflict, and failed success
Six of Swords: this card will aid you when you face a difficult change, helps you to move on and move forward
Seven of Swords: causes betrayal
Eight of Swords: powerful energy that causes isolation
Nine of Swords: sends nightmares and anxieties
Ten of Swords: defeat and betrayal
Two of Pentacles: brings balance
Three of Pentacles: strengthens business connections
Four of Pentacles: manifests financial stability
Five of Pentacles: financial problem
Six of Pentacles: prosperity
Seven of Pentacles: material abundance
Eight of Pentacles: if you’ve worked hard this card ensures you that your efforts will be rewarded
Nine of Pentacles: success, luxury, accomplishment
Ten of Pentacles: success, wealth
Negative aspects of the cards can be used for hexing and cursing
There’s plenty of resources out there available to you on Tumblr, you need only look. I’m sure there are plenty of energy work tags on plenty of blogs out there. The very basics of energy work is to learn how to ground, cleanse, and to sense it. I learned to ground from an old book for Wicca years ago. LOL
What is Energy Work?
To put it simply, energy work is working with unseen forces that’s generally labeled as energy. The concept of energy can take on many forms in both the physical and intangible. An object at rest can store up kinetic energy while the sun can emit solar energy. You have two sides to energy and that’s the scientific and then there’s energy work in witchcraft. Most practices utilizes some form of energy work guided by intention by the worker.
Centering yourself is the act of calming your mind and your emotions. It’s a kind of meditative state where you begin to feel more within and around you. The best way to learn to center is to learn to meditate. Meditation is the basic of most practices. You can reach a meditative state while walking, exercising, in the shower, reading, etc. You tend to focus your mind to the point where the rest of the world fades into the background. Active meditation aids you in keeping your body focused on a task that tends to be repetitive for your mind to become still. There are plenty of guided meditations you can try and search for on YouTube.
The basic idea was to sit down with your legs crossed and begin to meditate. You imagine yourself as a tree and set down roots where the base of your spine would be and the trunk being your spine, the sprouts above your head. The intention was to connect with the earth and then push out all your ‘bad’ energies into the earth and take within its energies to hold within yourself. Then release it and slowly come out of the meditative state by withdrawing your roots. I used this grounding method while starting out and it was a very common one to use. It didn’t work as well for me as my cosmic grounding method that I adjusted for the solar grounding within my post.
Typically, you should feel rejuvenated and relaxed when you ground. There’s plenty of guided meditation methods you can try. I even covered a few fire and solar grounding techniques within the post you commented on if you’d like to try those. Here’s plenty of links I have on hand with various grounding methods:
I learned to ground before I learned how to sense energy. Sensing energy involves a lot of patience, practice, and being patient with yourself. You don’t instantly become amazing at energy work. It takes you taking the time to repeatedly practice and push yourself. A good exercise to begin with is to start with your hands. Find a quiet place for yourself so you won’t be disturbed. Hold your hands, palms facing each other together. Now close your eyes and take deep breaths. (You don’t have to close your eyes yet I recommend it for the first time because removing the visual sense heightens your other senses.) Focus on the feel between your hands and gather your energy there. They should feel warm already just from having your hands together even before going into this with the intention of gathering energy from your body heat.
Next, slowly pull them apart and back together, not quite touching to focus on the feel against your palms. You should feel a slight push or pull. You can jiggle your hands a little side to side to get a feel for that sensation. The next step is to create a greater distance between your hands to work on sensing that energy between them. It can get weaker the further apart they are yet you’ll get better at it the more you play around with this. I used to play with this as a kid in school to make energy balls in my hands.
The next step up from working with your own energy is to work with plants. You hold your hands on either side of the plant with your palms pointing inward to each other. You concentrate on feeling for the plant’s energy, that slight push pulls against your hands. It’s important to take notes and keep track of how things feel for you because energy work will become subjective to you on your techniques over time. This method to feel a plant’s energy can be applied to rocks, objects, spirits, etc. Go nuts. I moved onto candles after plants when I started. You can figure out what energy you can feel and not feel.
Shielding is the act of using your energy or an outside source to create a protective shield around you. You can apply this as a personal shield around your body, an object, yourself, etc. This can range from protective wards to stopping others from intruding into your space. You can get creative as you’d like yet you’d have to tie the protective measure to an energy source to draw its power from. The most common forms of energy source to work with while beginning are the four basic elements (earth, air, fire, water), the moon, and the sun. You generally want to avoid using yourself as a source well as you have a finite amount of energy to provide and can tap yourself out by overworking yourself. There are physical objects you can use as protective measures or working with spirits yet I’m going to stick with the energy work focused for the purposes of this post.
The act of charging is using energy to fill up an object. It’s most commonly used with crystals. You often hear of people leaving various crystals or objects out in the sun or moon for awhile. This usually is to be filled with solar or lunar energies while at the same time become cleansed. You could charge water, candles, etc.
Programming is a continuation of charging and that is to give the object a purpose set through intention, sigils, spells, etc. The object itself has its own energy yet you can program it to act a certain way by specifying what for while charging the object. You can charge an object with your own energy, solar, lunar, fire, water, earth, air, whatever other energy sources you find or can think of. Setting the intention of the charging would create it’s programming which can be further enforced over using this object for its intended purpose. Repeatedly using it as such will cement in this programming.
Energy work isn’t a difficult thing to research at all. Before I discovered Tumblr, I learned everything from books and later Google when it was invented and computers became more mainstream. All it takes is for you to go out and look for the information because not everything is going to be handed to you. There’s so many 101 posts out there on Tumblr and now I’ve given you just one more to add to your arsenal.
Confession time. Apart from the odd twenty-minute practise here and there, Miss ‘I love yoga, you should try yoga, omg yoga yoGA YOGAA’, didn’t practise yoga for the best part of last year (spiritual plateau, if you were curious). I watched new yogis pop up on Instagram, re-read the benefits, knew how necessary on a personal level it would be to get my energy/prana/chi flowing and noted how much better I felt after one of those twenty-minute flows. But the cba hurdle (means ‘can’t be arsed’ if that’s unfamiliar) I had to get over to start each practise always had me torn between two mindsets – if you want it, make it happen (à la Liz Gilbert walking around her house saying random words to get that creative energy flowing) and waiting to feel like doing it… and I usually favoured the latter. However, sometimes, when I felt I had no time, when I’d been on my feet all day and only wanted to binge Netflix, when I was mentally drained, when I felt way too vulnerable to unfurl myself or when all I felt like doing was lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling – well, there’s a pose for that, that’s when a down-dog could’ve really come in handy. Yoga, with its’ push for self-awareness and acceptance, is so much more than just a physical practise after all. Of course, sometimes it’s best to trust your instincts and not force yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing, it’s just, in times like I described, monkey mind was often drowning out whatever my instincts may have been saying.
If you too are figuring out the balance between flow and force, the following basic poses and gentle stretches will get you tapped back in to help you determine how much to push yourself.
And look, you don’t even have to leave your bed to do it!
1. Sit in a comfortable position, where you won’t be disturbed and relax your shoulders (rolling them up back and down will help this or even just lifting your shoulders towards your ears and just dropping them). Inhale for 4 counts, hold your breath for 7, then exhale for 8. Repeat this 4-7-8 pattern three or four times. This count will really help slow down your breathing and focus your mind to the present. As this won’t take much more than a minute, it’s great to do whenever you feel you need grounding. If you’ve more time or you feel you want to continue, some gentle seated twists would be great to massage your lower organs and stretch your abdominal muscles, often where stress is held. Place your left hand on your right knee, and your right hand behind you. Sit up taller on an inhale, then twist gently to your right on an exhale. Do this a couple more times before repeating on the other side.
2. Heart openers help with tightness in the chest and opening your heart chakra, helping release emotions. Start on your belly and extend your left arm to the side. Slowly roll over it so that you feel a stretch in your chest and use your right arm for stability in front of you (or if it’s comfortable, rest your hand on your lower back). Stay here for about five breaths before rolling back onto your belly and repeating on the other side. If you want to kick things up a notch, some other chest openers you could try, include cat-cow, camel pose, fish pose, sphinx pose or bow pose.
3. Legs up the wall is such a simple pose, yet the benefits feel so pronounced! Just move your hips as close to the wall as possible and walk your legs up. Let your arms rest gently to the side. In this position, gravity will help with circulation in your upper body and brain, you will feel a stretch in the back of your legs and your lower back gets some yummy relief. Fantastic if you’ve been on your feet all day and great coming off a flight if your legs or feet have swollen.
4. The physical nature of child’s pose is looking in, it is a physical representation of reflection. Aside from opening your hips, stretching your back and being fab for your digestion, this restorative pose offers relief, comfort and grounding, relaxing your entire body and slowing your mind as you curl into yourself. Start on your hands and knees, bring your big toes together and open your knees as wide as feels comfortable. Move your hips towards your heels and extend your arms out in front of you, letting your head rest on the floor (or bed) or a block. Stay here for at least five deep breaths.
I just wanted to say, that of course, yoga is not the be all and end all, it doesn’t solve everything and the way in which something works for one person won’t be the same for someone else. Finding what feels good (a phrase coined by Yoga with Adriene) for you, is always key.
Namaste!
[Next lesson: Yoga For Your Chakras: Muladhara/Root]
The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is a ritual devised by the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Divine Names of God are intoned (or “vibrated”) in specific order with particular gestures. For more information, consult Crowley’s Liber O.
Open Hand Magick (OHM) is the exercise of parapsychical abilities without the use of physical tools or paraphernalia apart from the body and mind. Anomalous psycho-physical states and processes explored to this end may include but are not limited to: ideomotor phenomena, glossolalia, assumptive imagination, trance, flow, samadhi, hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, astral projection, thoughtforms, and mediumship. OHM theory draws heavily from contemporary western occultism and the field of parapsychology, while generally resting upon the speculations that: [1] Reality is fundamentally nonlocal, [2] parapsychical abilities are innate in all human beings, and [3] parapsychical abilities may be cultivated and enhanced. Fundamentals are developed primarily through yogic meditative disciplines.
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic – the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
Occult Aspects 