Nervous on the Road Spell
Whether you've had bad experiences and have thus developed fear or whether you possess inexplicable phobias about driving, apples can help you overcome your fear, making driving a calmer, if not necessarily more pleasurable, experience.
Eat apples as much as possible, in any form: fresh apples, baked apples, apple pastry or whatever you can conceive.
Drive with a bag of apples beside you in the car
Eventually your fear will pass
(p. 974, The Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells, Judika Illes)
I have so many things to talk about so it's hard to choose in what order to talk about them in. So let's talk about the genre of spell first.
This is what I would classify as a non-traditional health and protection spell based off of a specific need that wouldn't be something that you would see in older, more classical spellwork. The fear of driving especially after an accident is not something that would be something that would be found in shit from like Agrippa's books simply because it's a modern problem. Now there may be things dealing with fear, but ultimately this is a very specific niche spell.
Now why do I bring this up? There is an attitude in a lot of spell casting circles that spells which are modern based aren't worth much. They aren't interesting, and they aren't "powerful" (whatever that means to the person reading). So I wanted to call this out that spellwork like this is about solving a problem that's existing to you current day. Maybe you've never driven before, maybe you've never had an accident. But there's a lot of trauma, sadness, fear, a lot of emotions that happen after an accident. Sometimes there's physical and legal consequences out of a driving accident.
I would never turn a spell like this away from myself because it's so specific and I feel like we don't have enough conversation about how driven to a result this spell is. This one is not about making us all powerful, spiritual, or becoming something ultimate. It's really about that adjustment to recovery.
This is a recovery spell.
Apples - classically in my experience in spell reading (lol, classically I'm joking here in case that's not clear) - have been associated with beauty. There's a reason for that (and a mythos for that). So I tend to see them less in protection / health spells. They also have love again for the same reason. I do see in googling a bit further there are some elements of "protection" in apples in spellwork, but this protection feels more in the space of like other fruits, abundance, fertility, etc. Rather than a healing, "giving you space" type of protection which is what this is doing I'd argue.
So it's very nice to see this particular kind of protection be pulled here and using apples as that protective element or quality. A specific empty space, leading to more healthy outcomes. And I mean healthy as in recovery, not as in physical health. It's a encouragement or courage driver. It's a patient time will pass item.
And in these cases, we aren't using the apple in the stance of bobbing for apples or peeling them. We are consuming them - which is in a lot of more interesting spellwork about food and eating and prophecy for me. A lot of the spellwork that I have done regarding eating things for spellwork purposes have been prophecy based. Forcing an internal change for an external result. And this is exactly the same.
So there's this transformation element that's happening here. I am moving through time, eating to recover, to heal, to transform, and then coming to allowing myself the stability of being here.
This may be my time to say "it's not about the apples" and it's about the reasoning for the eating of the apples - because people could ultimately react to this spell on a shallow level. Meaning "apples aren't going to fix me" / "apple a day doctor away type shit" in directing their dislike of this kind of charm or spell. Sometimes spellwork is a little deeper than the surface level. There's not a specific direct link between an apple and recovery, especially fear recovery. You're not going to solve for that in terms of understanding your spell casting by coming to it from that shallow perspective.
So there could be other fruits or veggies you could replace with apples here, because the purpose of them is about recovery. So if there are other things that you can have to eat, and you can focus on recovery, then it should be the exact same.
Now we also have a talismanic element to that recovery or an amulet of that recovery in the bag of apples. Which means either two things, one we could literally use the apple as it is, or we could also use the symbol of the apple (physical apple charms, physical apple shape, etc) - and specifically the /whole/ form of the apple. Not the cut form. And multiples of those apples - to potentially fill that void.
I would even go a step further and say it would be worth it to make this charm yourself, out of some kind of material which would be consistently survive in the car or put on your keys on a key chain. However you want to build that out yourself, clay, bead work, knitted, etc. And build into those structures the recovery and comfort (and maybe that's a little bit of that protection I was saying, leading to comfort).
Now personally, I don't like apple smells or apple smelling products. So I hear you with you screaming about apple scents or spraying your car down with like apple infused water, etc.
It's not about the "reminders" of the apple which is giving you the courage and space for recovery. It's the literally presence and consumption of the /whole/ form of the apple. So just like a slice or a cut or a half of an apple as a symbol would not be sufficient here, I would argue the smells would be the same.
Also again, I really fucking hate the smells of apple products. (.. also is that double entendre?)
If we want the full effect, you must have the whole apple. To become. Whole.
Now of course, according to my Flora's Dictionary, Apple means "temptation" and apple blossom means "preference" - so these are completely divorced from the conversation we are having here. I just wanted to bring them up that I looked into it, in case yall were out here screaming at this post like apple means something in the flora dictionary blah blah. It's not relevant to the discussion we are having but I looked it up.
And yes, with time, wounds heal. So there's an ask for patience, preservation, and bidding that time filling it with space where things could be placed. This is very common for folks to need that time to recover and heal after an accident or something going on. Sometimes things like this can linger.
So having a focal point in spellwork on waiting through that time and consistently working towards that magical result is a very common method for spell casting. Time is an important element to this spell, and I don't want us to overlook it in the conversation when thinking holistically (because it's about the whole here).
Recovery is a time based item. This spell aids in that recovery. Would you recover in time without this spell? More than likely. Does having something like this help? I would argue yes. There's a fundamental charm about this particular spell, easing the dealing with time.
Sec, does that mean I could apply something like this to other forms of recovery? I would argue you could and if you are struggling, should add these elements. There's people who suggest things like mottos, sayings, prayers, etc. Right? Recovery as alone versus Recovery with a focal point. So this spell fits to me in the same space. Instead of using something ephemeral as words or prayers, we are using a physical focal point to drive that transformation.
Apples are naturally growing. They come from trees - which for me are already part of a level of purification in my particular spell practice. So there's a natural harmony between these things.
So if there's a natural harmony for your spellcasting with a focal point for recovery, that should be how you focus on your spellwork.
