Tip - Tumblr Posts
Tips for writing spells:
If you want to keep something close, bury it in your back yard. If you want to attract something, bury it under the front door step If you want to destroy its influence, burn it. If you want it to move away and sink, throw it in running water If you want to disperse it to a distance, throw it into a crossroads If you want to fix its influence, inter it in a five-spot pattern If you want it to work by means of spirits, bury it in a graveyard If you want to hide its point of origin, conceal it in a tree If you want it to work in secret, give it in food or drink If you want it to work by stealth, hide it in clothing or on objects If you want its influence to begin or strengthen, throw it East If you want its influence to end or weaken, throw it West If you want its influence to rise and fall cyclicly, float it in a tidal estuary
Hello, I've was raised without religion but always felt a very strong spiritual connection to the Earth. I've been trying to figure out if witchcraft is for me but I don't know a good place to start. Do you know of any books that outline spells, crystals, herbs, and/or rituals and deities. Basically, where did you start?
@lil-honey-bun
The biggest source of information that is freely available to you is the internet! I know that’s a cliché and seemingly unhelpful answer, but that’s where pretty much everyone starts!
The biggest ticket is to read as much as you can and find the middle ground. There are a lot of wildly varied beliefs, and also some that aren’t so great, like culturally appropriating practices or downright racist/sexist/bigoted beliefs about what type of person should do what (pro tip - ignore anyone who implies that only white women can be witches!!!)
Beyond that, if you are wanting to do some hardback research, I always highly recommend Skye Alexander. Also, the encyclopedia collection by Judika Illes, and Scott Cunningham. Also, I know the new print pretty books are very attractive, but a lot of books I find helpful are not quite so pretty, like my old copy of Earth Magic and The Pagan Book of Days.
I would also suggest, since you’re on Tumblr where the witchcraft community is so strong and thriving, to use those of us willing to share our experiences as a resource! We’ve all been there, and we’ve all experienced the confusion and curiosity that comes with being a fledgling witch!
If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
Green )O(
What to use when in Witchcraft -
Ok so I am gonna say this is my personal reference, its mainly through associations. You might TOTALLY disagree and thats chill!
Its more something to think about and a guideline of what I use myself…
Candle Magic:
Carve a candle when…. the candle represents the target, in sympathetic magic. When, essentially, the candle is a poppet and lighting it is a symbol of destruction or empowerment to the target.
Place something under the candle or before it when… you are doing general candle magic, when the candle represents empowering a wish, idea or concept.
Anoint the candle when… doing work with spirits and gods, when you mark the candle for a special purpose, when doing high magic.
Herbs and plant work:
Use dry herbs when… it is convienent to do so, when the herbs are out of season or when you need to store them in a jar or bottle for a long time.
Use fresh herbs when… the spell is very earth orientated, when doing magic on behalf of another or when the magic is sympathetic so that the herbs represent the target, within kitchen witchery.
Use flowers when… when the spell concerns love and sex, or perhaps fertility and attraction, due to flowers being the reproductive parts of the plant.
Use fruit when when… working with children as a target, or with children practising. When you work with fertility and abundance spells.
Use wood and twigs when… when the spell is for protection or binding, for hardiness.
Burn herbs (recaning/incense) when… you wish to cleanse or banish, or invoke an atmosphere - that being, for divination using herbs that are said to open up your perceptions, when banishing, burning acrid or pungent herbs.
Use oil infusions when… you wish to anoint something, when you wish to mark something permanently.
Use floral waters (rose water etc) when… dealing with spirits and gods, for glamour as it has a long history of being used to beautify.
Crystals:
Use metals (haematite, copper, ores etc..) when… you work in protection, when you do energy work due to the conductive properties of metal.
Use shell, pearl, coral and such when… you work in sea magic, when you work within emotional magic due to the element of water.
Use points when… you wish to direct magic to a target.
Use tumble stones when… you wish the magic to be gentle or manifest at a certain place on the body on a target.
Use geodes when… you work in protection, when you work with glamour aimed to obscure and hide.
Knot magic:
Use cotton when… it is convenient.
Use silk when… doing spells that benefit the target.
Use ribbons when… love spells and wealth spells, as well as confidence and beauty spells. Spells to ensure victory.
Use rope when… doing spells that aim to hurt or weaken the target, binding especially.
Poppets:
Use cloth when… the spell aims to benefit who the poppet represents, use particular care when sewing or cutting, choose colours that are appropriate to them.
Use wax when… you wish to manipulate the target.
Use clay when… wish to create fetches or servitors, when you wish to create permanency.
Use twigs when… you wish to bury or throw the poppet out, when you want the poppet to be easily destroyed by breaking or setting on fire.
Sigils:
Use an alphabet grid or circle when… you wish the sigil to be more random and less attached to you.
Combine the shapes of letters from a sentence… when your sigil is very specific and a short term goal.
Use your own personal symbols when… you want the magic to be connected to you, when it is personal.
Morning Routine for a Busy Witch
A lot of people have asked me for tips on how to incorporate witchcraft into daily life. How you incorporate it depends on your schedule, your habits, and your tools on hand. However, I’ll list my ideal morning routine in order to give you some ideas.
After I wake up, I add some cinnamon to the coffee grounds before brewing*. Cinnamon increases luck and energy, so I like starting off my day with that little boost.
*The reason I add cinnamon to the grounds and not the finished coffee is because powdered cinnamon can’t actually dissolve; it’ll just sink or sit at the top. By adding cinnamon to the grounds, you’re able to infuse the cinnamon into the flavor and charge the spell. .
If you don’t drink coffee, you may want to brew some tea.
Black tea (like most chais, earl grey and breakfast teas) aid alertness and energy, their caffeine helping to dispel negative premonitions of the day.
Green tea (like jasmine, senchas, and matcha) can help detoxify your energy and clear your conscious mind.
White and herbal teas help with clarity, serenity and wisdom (though this largely depends on the ingredients in the tea).
If you don’t want coffee or tea, drink some lemon water. The water will hydrate you, and the lemon will cleanse your energy and invigorate you.
For an easy boost, place a crystal next to your coffee pot, tea pot or cup to charge the drink.
Clear quartz boosts clarity.
Rose quartz increases chance of love and attractiveness.
Obsidian, bloodstone and onyx stabilize and ground you.
Opal and lapis intensify awareness and spiritual powers.
Tiger’s eye increases courage.
I won’t list all crystals here because that would take forever, but those are a couple ideas.
While the drinks are brewing/charging, I take some time to ground. I like to do yoga, but some people will meditate during this time, or practice energy techniques. You only have to do this for as long as the drink is charging (so like literally five minutes, trust me it makes a difference).
If you eat breakfast, give a piece of your breakfast as an offering. If you don’t, give some of the drink you made as an offering. I’m the kind of person who works with multiple deities and spirits at a time, so I like to give an offering to one of them and then rotate. This helps mindset and motivation, because if you have low spoons or a down day, at least you’ve completed something.
While you’re getting dressed/doing makeup, light a candle. I like to start my day off with a little light; it acts as a positive omen and can wake you up more.
Candle color ideas: white (purity and beginnings); red (courage and strength); green (healing, luck and prosperity); blue (calming and spiritual awareness); purple (psychic powers and control); yellow (positivity and attractiveness); pink (beauty, serenity and positivity); orange (stimulation and energy).
Scent ideas for the candle: floral (healing and cheeriness); citrus (purity, energy, and focus); sweet (happiness, kindness and patience); spicy (passion, motivation and magic); subtle (grounding and calm).
Do your makeup in the morning? I recommend placing some sea glass or rose quartz next to your makeup supplies as you use them. It’s a simple tactic that’ll really up your look for the day.
This morning routine takes about twenty minutes, and includes six witchcraft spells. That’s a lot of productivity that’ll help wake you up and motivate you for the day!
Other ideas that I don’t personally do, but others do:
Turn your morning shower into a cleansing ritual not that i don’t take showers, I just don’t take them in the morning.
Color-coordinate your outfit for your day’s intent.
or your makeup/accessories
Make some fruit-infused water to carry with you throughout the day for an energy boost.
Carry an appropriate crystal in your pocket to help calm, stabilize or motivate you.
Add an herb to your eggs (or other breakfast food) that’ll help your intent for the day
Say a prayer while you’re still in bed, before you get up in the morning. That’ll count as a simple offering.
Feel free to add some more ideas, especially for the late-sleepers and spoonie witches out there! Have a beautiful morning (ᗒᗨᗕ) /
Positive Tense Affirmations 💫
Using Sigils and activating it in the fire of the candle. "I am Strong and Magical"⭐🦋
Very easy spells for affirmations for everyday life to keep moving forward with strength and knowledge.
~♡with much love
Disposing of Spell Materials
sometimes after performing a spell, you find yourself wondering, hmm, what do i do with these ingredients? the way you clean up or put away your materials can be its own step in the ritual, and affect the spell. here are some suggestions for the different ways to end rituals or properly dispose of the materials
consider first:
📦keep it - consider if the spell seems like something you could ever possible need to reverse later. that love-attraction jar may invite people you don’t like, and need to be ended, but it’s more difficult without the original materials. keep the ingredients in a jar, box, or something, (maybe label it too) so you can easily nullify the spell if you need to.
✉wrap it up - in a jar or a pouch, if it is a spell you want to last a long time, gather the ingredients you won’t be reusing and keep them in a place you
🏺jar spells - just keep the materials in the sealed jar. this is the sort of spell that can be reused simply by shaking the jar, lighting a new candle for it or recharging its energy.
🔔cleanse and reuse - obviously you don’t want to throw your crystals or jars out after a single spell. separate the materials used and cleanse them individually, cutting the ties to the spell.
now what do i do with it?
🔥it’s been burned to ash - for banishing place it on the back doorstep and sweep it out into the wind. for releasing its energies and inviting influence, release the ashes into running water, given it is safe to return to nature (non glass, nonplastic nontoxic, biodegradable etc)
🕸bound objects - bury or keep in a box somewhere, burial for spells you will never remove, hiding for things you may undo one day.
🛡protective spells - best hung up or hidden in a corner of the house, or place over the front door of the residence.
☣non-biodegradable materials - if its something you can’t safely return to nature, and it can’t be reused because it was burned or broken, use the acting of burning or breaking to move the spell’s energies into the world. properly throw out or recycle the objects.
Just a quick tip to artists
If you’re an artist who likes to work really close, (like me), do yourself a favor and put up two views. You can do this by clicking View–> New on your toolbar.
There’s nothing worse than finally zooming out and realizing what you were doing was very wrong. This saved me a lot of grief tbh. I’m sure everyone knows this already but ._.;; I arrived quite late to that party.
not gonna lie if you are like me and suck at coming up with poses using vintage sewing patterns for inspirations is so helpful for interesting poses that still display the character in a seeable way here are some examples of my favorites
because they are literally drawn in a way to show off their outfit but still be interesting and not boring
ao3 search guide for the real good stuff
aka: kudos or hits don’t mean shit on their own but they make a good first step to find the actual content you’re looking for and could never find in the main tag. tldr: the goal is to find authors that you like.
1) Go to the main series tag/pairing you like and search by Kudos
I recommend Kudos because more chapter fices get inherently more hits as they are usually uploaded spread out over the time, and plenty people use Bookmarks as a sub for mark for later. Also private bookmarks are not counted. While people can technically leave up to 3 kudos, it’s usually just one per person, regardless of the fic’s lenght or chapter count.
2) Open up like the first 10 fics that appeal to you
It can be page one to three, doesnt matter, kudos dont mean anything when all’s said and done.
You got ten fics open now. Start reading them one by one. You are 2 sentences into one and and dont like it? Close. A style or a characterisation makes you cringe? Close. Close. You have maybe like 5 left you really liked if you’re lucky and here comes the most imortant step:
3) You like a fic a lot? CHECK OUT THE AUTHOR.
That’s it, this is what you’ve been looking for. if you really liked someone’s work there’s a good chance you’ll love their other stuff too, which can mean anything form 5 to 20. 5 to 20 stories you absolutely love!! What the fuck.
You can repeat this step with all the fics you liked that you found by kudos. It can mean anything from 2 to even 15 and if every author has another 5? You already got almost more content you can deal with. (Don’t forget to comment and kudo them!)
4) Check the author’s bookmarks and gift fics
You feel like an author is speaking right right from your soul? Would trust them with anything, including your firstborn? Excellent. Now all you need are these bad boys on their page:
Bookmarks: if they deemed something worthy enough to bookmark it ought to be good too, right? This is how you REALLY find the most obscure gems you’d never discover outherwise.
Gifts by them: chances are, their friend is a writer too and since birds of feather flock together and all that, they probably have similar taste and writing too. Check the giftee out!
Gifts for them: also their friends probably or other people who loved their writing enough to give them a gift. Good taste squad either way.
This is what to look for:
+ the Bookmarks and Gifts sidebars on the left
This is an infinite loop methold, you can rinse and repeat, jump from author to gifts to bookmarks, and you’ll never run out of content catered to your tastes. If you still do? You intial search by kudos page is still open, time to start again.
5) Other tips:
Be specific in your search, as in tag/pairings and you can shorten this process.
Use that exclude button! Kill crossovers to avoid infinite fandom drabbles. I’d avoid searching for Completed only though, since your initial goal is to find authors you like and they can have WIPs.
DONT use it for pairings if you like a dynamic plationicall but not shipped. A lot of authors tag it as ship for more exposure.
Fic rec lists are a GREAT start for all of this! Search for fandom faves and lists on tumblr. Ask your followers if you have many of one fandom. Aks your friends and people whose taste you trust, hell, go over their bookmarks too.
Tumblr is your friend here. You follow X author and see her interact with Y or Z a lot? Chances are they write too, or just have good, or at least similar taste. Go ham on their ao3 too if they have it.
Generaly speaking, there’s always people who’s been in the fandom for longer and has already some gems they dug out of the dirt with blood, sweat, dedication and tears. Use their hard work!
Is it an older fandom? Don’t be afraid to use fanfiction.net. Chances are most of the old content from its prime time is still there, not on ao3. Keep it in mind that fandom terminology changes, so even if something tagged as “yaoi” is usually a big red flag in 2019, it was the norm in 2009. If it got cross-posted on ao3 too later? Great, now can check out the author there.
Generally speaking, kudos/hits/whatever have almost no relation to a fics’s quality or the level of joy it sparks in you, so don’t be afraid to click on ones with small numbers! I never check any of the stats, hell, even most of the tags before I click.
Look out for quote-type summaries! Since you can immediately see the wring you can tell if you like it. If you find one that grabs you attention it might be worth a click even if you dont like the tags/pariring, since you 1) found an author whose style you like and they might have wrote for the pairing you look for 2) they can open your eyes to a ship or concept you never considered or liked before.
You dont have to do all of this at once. You start on a trail, leave the rest of the pages open on mobile. You dont have the time? It’s okay, I’ve had an authors profile I know I’ll love open for like a week and will get back to it when I have.
It’s a long but a very thorough methold and you’ll probably end up being the friend who has the best recs.
The worst the average fic quality in a fandom is, the more useful this way of searching is.
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I got a request to make a post on how to create Study Guides:
To make a study guide for a particular class, you are going to want to look at power points and information in your textbook and then condense the information to smaller summaries. This can be done with simple post-it notes that provide a “cover-up” system so that you’re not copying down the information in the textbook word for word.
You want to make these summaries easy to understand, and try to find a way to connect them to something important to you, so that you don’t forget the information.
Whether or not you type or write your study guide is completely up to you, but for study guides I tend to type them up since you can make clean a precise structures to outline each chapter and head them with bullet points. I tend to use Microsoft Word to type up my information.
If you’re a visual learner like me, you may want to draw some pictures or associate words with certain colors so that you can always remember what ever it is you are studying.
In Microsoft Office or whatever program you want to use to type in, you should use headings to differentiate each chapter, and all of the sub-sections that you are going to be tested on.
You want to make this study guide 2 weeks in advance before your test, because you should not be cramming. If you need to learn how I would effectively cram for a test (that’s a separate post someone can request) but for now let’s say you’re not cramming. If you use a binder or a folder with a 3-ring prong in the middle then that’s perfect, hole punch your study guide, and slip it right in this way whenever you open your binder/folder you’ll see it. You need to go over this study guide each day, and on test day you should refresh your brain by reviewing it before the test.
A little more detail:
* The purpose for condensing the information is because your brain only stores a certain amount of the text that you read, and if you condense it and find ways to make it stick…you’re more likely to remember it during your test.
Preparing these study guides ahead of time are very beneficial because you can talk with your teacher/professor and get clarification on topics you still don’t understand before it’s too late, also your teacher can recommend new information for you to easily pencil in on your study guide*
If you’ve gotten this far, I hope it sincerely helps you during Midterms, Finals, or any Exam.
Feel free to {message me} if you have questions, comments, concerns or want to request a new post that I make.
Some concentration study tips for my peers who just got back to school 🖤
types of study breaks for every situation
if you realize you’ve been studying for hours: grab a snack to refuel your body and watch a sitcom to refuel your brain. then back to the books.
if you’re feeling stressed out: take some deep breaths, text your friends, maybe stare at a wall for a few minutes. gather yourself.
if you can’t seem to focus: get moving and get outside. take out the garbage, check your mail box, maybe walk your dog. just get moving and get fresh air. it’ll help bring you back.
if there’s something else going on in your life and you can’t get it off your mind: write down what’s going through your head, sort of like a diary entry. it’ll help you work things out.
if you’re just mentally and physically exhausted: set a timer for 25-30 minutes and take a nap. any longer and you’ll hit REM and you’ll wake up feeling just as tired. once you wake up, get some caffeine in you.
if the material is boring as hell: find another way to study. see if there’s a crash course video online about it or draw out what you’re trying to learn in diagrams and pictures to make it fun.
if people around you won’t shut up: listen to some music. soundtrack and classical music is always good because they won’t absorb you as much as music with lyrics. white noise (like ocean waves, rain sounds, etc.) also works.
if you only half understand a concept: call/message a friend who’s not in the class and try to teach the material to them. this will help you mentally work through the material and will help you remember it as well.