This is also why I don't know how to recommend spells to people because to me most spells are just:
Find a Guy who's really good at the thing (probably other people talk about how good he is)
Ask him to do the thing for you
Provide auxiliary support to make his job easier (and say please and thank you!)
And one Guy can often do a lot of things. Like, Rosemary can help with memory problems, sleep, cleansing, protection, healing, and nightmares.
So you can show up and say, "Rosemary, when I drink this tea of you, please infuse me with good memory so I can remember important details of this upcoming conversation."
Or, "Rosemary, when I hang up this sachet of you, please stand as a sentinel of my sleep and guard against bad dreams."
Or, "Rosemary, when I place your pot by the front door, please cleanse the air of all sickness that may enter, and keep the home healthy."
(And yeah, there are Techniques to this, but that's not what this post is about)
But the problem is that sometimes, the Guy might not be that helpful until you get to know him a little more and things get chill between you two. Or he might show you hidden aspects to himself that are not common and not talked about by other people.
So you can get into a situation where you've been hanging with Rosemary for a while and have a really weird dream and all of the sudden, Rosemary can make other people tell you the truth.
That's not a Rosemary correspondence and it's probably not something that other people can do with Rosemary.
But it's something you can do with Rosemary because you've gotten to know each other on a friend level.
A missing factor for me, and maybe for other people, was treating spellwork like a potion-making game where you just gather X amount of Y-aligned correspondence and if you mix enough of them you get a Potion of Y.
Like if you need protection, you just go to a correspondence list and find enough Protection-aligned plants (regardless of how they work or their personalities or attributes) and put them together in a bag and saying an unrelated charm or prayer that you say no matter which plants you put in the bag.
Which is how people end up with 50 little jars of dead plants that stay dead because they have no connection to them, still looking up what ingredients to use in which spells.
Which is fine, but it's also like... not necessarily what everyone is looking for.
So my point is that if correspondences are reduced to 4-5 purposes on a chart, then you get the correspondence brainrot which is like "which kitchen herb is a gentle cleanser, and which kitchen herb is a strong cleanser," when the reality is that if a guy can Cleanse he can show up gently or strongly in his own unique way,
And it all makes more sense by just treating him like a Guy and asking him to do what you need to do.
I genuinely think that if a practitioner is looking for something deeper and more relational in their practice, a really good way is to scale everything back and start using like one activated (evoked, prayed over, petitioned, etc.) Ally in each spell and just asking if he, as a Guy, can or wants to do something for you.
Like if you go absolutely bonkers over a good cup of Chamomile tea, what's the harm in asking Chamomile to cleanse for you? What's the harm in asking Chamomile to protect your home, or bless your sleep?
At the very least you're going to begin learning a lot about Chamomile in an interpersonal way, where you can begin understanding the "correspondence" for yourself. And you can also learn some fucking cool stuff, like, isn't it weird that when I ask Chamomile to protect my home, we all started finding little bits of cash we had lost?
Idk. Magic is just easier when more things are Guys.
