This is a sigil meant to help enhance the perception of you as more masculine to others. This was specifically made for an FTM Trans Man who has trouble passing as a man and seeks to be perceived as more masculine. The best place to hang this would be near a mirror that you use every day, or the closet, or where your clothes are. You can draw it on your body in makeup, lotion, sunscreen (after an even covering), or just with your finger on the skin.
WITCH SEASON IV
Not just of Spooks and Bumps, but our witchy season also has Sweet Delights.
After all, love and affection are always something valuable to share without any fear.
I hope you enjoy them, my Dear Ones! 🧡✨
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(If you Like my ArtWork, Please do consider to supporting me at my patreon.com/beyondjupiter)
Set up an altar for Pride month and included my grandfather and his partner of 37 years, plus some queer community ancestors.
It never hurts to have a little extra love, devotion, and protection in June. Whether you celebrate at the big rainbow-festooned events, at home in your own private way, or through acts of protest as pride month is rooted, may you be safe, and happy, and healthy.
just to preface that i am a BEGINNER in baneful magic. i've become quite knowledgeable on benevolent magic after several years of practicing it, so while i do have foundational knowledge of the materials and techniques, the execution is often very different. this post is as much for me as it is for you (whoever you may be). it is not meant to be a comprehensive introduction, nor a complete guide, but if you have any questions i will absolutely do my best to answer them :)
special thanks to @trash-bin-witch for all their help assisting my introduction to baneful magic, as they're a lot more experienced with all this than me.
INTRODUCTION
my thought process for baneful magic revolves a lot around chaos magic. chaos magic, to put it simply, is that what you believe to be will be. if you can believe in it, then it exists (or will exist). this is a very simplified way of thinking about it, but that's how i sum it up.
this is different from benevolent magic, which revolves a lot around action which merely guided by spell work. it involves manifestation too, but only to a certain extent. with benevolent magic there is little to no way to get things done without putting work in yourself. with baneful magic, it's more like creating the spell and letting it do the work. this is, i believe, because baneful magic almost always has an inciting incident. think of it as if your ex cheats on you. them cheating, your emotions, your "belief" is the action needed to get the spell to work. this is why curses, hexes, jinxes, etc. will work on relatively good people. if the witch believes the person to be bad, or believes they wronged them, then the spell has power.
again, that's how i think about it, not necessarily how it concretely is or must be.
baneful spells can be created yourself just as much as benevolent spells can, and this post is intended to give you the foundational materials to do that.
WARDING
warding yourself, your space, and those vulnerable around you is, in my opinion, the most important first step to take before embarking on baneful magic.
to make a simple ward there are two things i would include: protective herbs or crystals and your taglocks. a taglock would include hair/fur, blood, nail clippings, anything that is biologically from you or your subject (even a photo would work). for example: if i wanted to create a protective spell jar for my cat i might include some whiskers (DO NOT REMOVE THEM YOURSELF, THEY DROP NATURALLY), some fur, some tiger's eye and/or cat's eye quartz, a picture or drawing of them, and some herbs from the list below.
WARDING/PROTECTIVE HERBS:
Angelica
Anise
Basil
Bay Leaves
Black Cohosh
Black Pepper
Boneset
Cedar
Cinnamon
Frankincense and Myrrh
Garlic
Ginseng
Mandrake Root
Mistletoe
Rosemary
Valerian
Vervain
Witch Hazel
Wormwood
CURSES, HEXES, JINXES
before we start, lets define some things:
1) CURSES: long term effects, sometimes lifelong or multigenerational. often invoked with rituals
2) HEXES: have long term effects, but often not lifelong. more generic effects like "bad luck" or "desolation"
3) JINXES: invokes a specific bad event to happen
now, i don't do much work with jinxes, and i've never had a reason to do a full on curse, so my work primarily takes the shape of hexes right now. if you'd like to do any of these types of spells, down below are some herbs you can use.
also practice extreme caution when handling these, and acquire nontoxic variants or parts as available! some herbs are DEADLY toxic just through touch and should be respected!!
Asphodel: invoking spirits (which can assist in spells)
Belladonna: toxic, madness, invoking spirits
Black Mustard: confusion, failure, bad luck
Blackthorn: revenge, binding
Blue Cohosh: breaking up relationships
Boneset: exorcism, boundaries
Celandine: binding, madness
Dragon's Blood: power, banishment
Jasmine: love related issues
Larkspur: banishment
Mandrake Root: toxic, exorcism
Mugwort: dreams and nightmares, insomnia, madness
Mullein: invoking spirits
Nettle: irritation, retribution
Oleander: toxic, bad luck, revealing true self
Poke Root: cord cutting
Pomegranate: binding, love and fertility
Rue: retribution, reversing spells
Thistle: retribution, reversing spells
Wormwood: bad luck, sorrow, bitterness
Yarrow: invoking spirits
OTHER USEFUL MATERIALS:
the general framework for good hex ingredients include things that are visually disgusting or is smelly, sharp, painful, or toxic things, and objects that symbolically represent the harm you want to inflict. to be specific you can use:
salt: consecration, i use it as the base for my jars
rosemary: cleansing, protection
pine needles: spiky, also good for protection
thorns of plants trees or flowers
spicy things (peppers, seasoning, etc.)
sharp things (needles, broken glass, etc.)
food (especially rotten)
railroad ties/other iron objects: exorcisms and banishment
other metals like aluminum cans: can be used for sigils
hand mirrors: for "reflecting" energy
jars, bottles, boxes
cards: using face cards to represent people
small candles
trash: cause it's gross
money
ash/charcoal: protection, enhancing or sealing spells
bones: can be broken to invoke injury, or as a makeshift taglock
expired makeup: to make them feel ugly
vinegar/bleach
receipts/mail ads: monetary issues
dead bugs: cause they're gross
dirt (graveyard, four corners of your property, etc.): invoking spirits or setting a target area
thread: to ensnare or paralyse
note that you can also freeze or burn things for their symbolic effects
RECOMMENDED READING:
"Of Blood and Bone: Working with Shadow Magick & the Dark Moon" by Kate Freuler (just ignore her divine feminine shit)
for information on sigils i recommend "Sigil Craft" by Lia Taylor
"The Spell Book of a Wicked Witch" by Thalia Thorne
Wind Chimes, Witch Ladders / the Evil in Stillness
A folk grimoire of destagnation.
Those of us with European parents are undoubtedly familiar with the feeling of coming home from some trip, where your parents urge you to run through the house and open all the windows: "air out the house!" You speed around, kicking up dust, moving the air, slowly washing away the strange feeling of stillness that has contaminated your home. Air out the house. "Don't catch the draft," your parent yells up the stairs at you. The draft, of course, is never explicitly acknowledged to contain some ill-wishing spirit that will give you the flu, but everybody knows it does. And the same can be said for that stagnant air in the house, the silence permeating the walls.
The Evil in Stillness
Stillness is not good. Stillness has never been good - we have feared it since before we knew how to make fire. The land going silent, going motionless, going truly still; that spells disaster. Even now, with flashlights and the safety of our home, we are not spared the fear of stillness. None of us are comfortable in quiet forests. But even under our own roof we are not safe: when all is dark and everybody is motionless in their beds, ill-wishes, scary spirits and night-mares roam. And it would seem we can invite them into our homes, purely by leaving it unattended for long enough.
The stillness that comes about a home when it has been without inhabitants for long enough can only be solved by one thing: the return of the living. Whether that is people or animals coming by, or the house falling into decay and plants finding their way in. This seems inherent human knowledge - we feel more comfortable in houses that are or were recently occupied. Abandoned houses covered in ivy or inhabited by rodents are far less eerie than abandoned urban structures still perfectly as they were when they were left. Horror movies show little creatures scuttling about in still places when they want to give us a break from the terror.
So, it seems we all know the terrible feeling of stuffy air, stagnant energy, stillness, however you may know it. We all know the vulnerability of being motionless in the dark. To some of us it may seem more relevant than others: those of us who get goosebumps from silence, those of us who experience the fear of stillness in our cultures every day. But we all feel it. To those who fear it as much as I, I dedicate the following magic to alleviate and prevent stillness.
Preventing Stillness / Keeping the Evil at Bay
The universal key to life in a house seems to be moving air. Airing out the house is a great remedy, but it can also be your preventative measure - if safe, keep a window cracked and let the air flow through your house while you are gone. However, sometimes the air moving is just not possible. Sometimes you have to close up the whole house, and trap all the air inside of it. What then?
A popular method that appears across cultures is to have charms in and around the house that are very prone to moving. The movement would scare off the evils and spirits, because it would disrupt the stillness they are trying to inhabit. And the kicker about these charms is that they do not need air to move when they're being used against stillness, because the spirits who come to inhabit the stillness will also make the charms move as they invite themselves in. Silly trolls.
One charm I personally very much enjoy is an adaptation of the Cornish witch ladder. I like to make them as is traditional, but with only feathers going in opposite directions, no stones.
In my home region of Low Saxony it was also common to use both snail shells and egg shells, which are light but associated with magic and protection, in charms. Whether you used them on a string, made a garland, or any other type of charm that moves easy and can be suspended from the ceiling.
Other materials that would lend themselves incredibly well to such charms, the type you hang from the ceiling and let sway in the wind, would be sea shells, small twigs, hollowed sticks and straw, origami pieces, paper spirit crafts, sea sponge, dried flowers, etc.
Houseplants and flowers are another excellent method to keep some of the living present. Especially plants that move throughout the day: those that follow the sun, or whose flowers open and close depending on the light. But any living plants will really do. They will not completely spare you from the stuffy air, but they will certainly lessen the effects of stillness.
A different way to cut through stagnant air is sound. Something that is always producing sound (or only silent when you're not there to see it being silent... supposedly...) is a great way to stop the spirits of silence creeping into your dwelling. That is where a wind chime of any sort may often come in, but there are different ways to do this, such as pipes fastened to catch the wind, so that they howl, or even always leaving the radio softly playing in the background, set to a classical station, like was often done by the richer families I knew in my childhood. This sort of precaution, an auditory one, lends itself extremely well to being outside the house, where the wind enables them to be in near perpetual function. A house that has music coming from it, that appears almost as though it were truly fully alive of its own right, independent of having residents, will always scare away the stillness.
Remedying the Stillness / Scaring Away the Evil
For the most part, chasing away the scary things in the stillness comes naturally to us. We even chase it away, though less effectively, purely by coming home and making our house our own again. But if you are sensitive to it, you don't like it, and you want to get rid of that stagnant feeling as fast as possible, here's some effective methods, to combine or use separately.
Open all the windows, or enough windows/doors to allow air to flow through your house effectively. Both doors on opposite ends of the house are a great option, but so are more-or-less opposite windows, or windows that are directly connected through hallways and open doors.
Play sounds, out loud. Not necessarily loudly, but loud enough that it carries through the house and makes it feel alive again. Music from a speaker, the TV, a laptop with a YouTube video. Even just your own voice singing or talking. If you have no neighbors to annoy you can even bang pots or play an instrument.
Run around, dance, frolic. Visit every room, see how it's doing, move some things around. Shake up pillows and duvets. Fill all the spaces with your presence again.
Make a meal. Cooking will fill the air with the busyness of food preparation and the smell of inhabitants and labor.
Light incense or smoke cleanse your house. Smoke always moves through the air and gives it life back. Smoke is also a great indicator of stagnant air, as in rooms with stagnant air, smoke hangs around, suspended almost motionlessly.
Clean. Sweeping, especially, is a very effective manner of removing stagnation. Some people also like to sprinkle salt and then sweep that from the furthest point of the door, going toward the door, until they have swept all the salt out. A common folk spell to chase spirits off and not have them come back is to sweep toward the door, making sure to get every room, and when you have swept a room and are in the door, say: 'shoo! I'm cleaning here, out of my way! And you had better not track dirt in here!'
There are also those things that you may want to do for safety. Some houses with less modern running water should have the faucets on for a while so the stagnant water is out of the system before you consume it. Things like that often also double as great ways to bring some life back.
However you do it, the life will always come back to a place as long as there are people there. And let us never learn to loathe the stillness: as scary as it is, we can also learn a lot from the spirits contained in it. For some people, a completely still space may be just what they need to talk to spirits, to do divination, to decompress for just a bit. Eerie does not mean inherently bad; 'eerie' is only a symptom of our survival instinct.
I hope you feel inspired to think about the spirits around you, and the role they play both when you can sense them and when you cannot.
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I can wax poetic all day about how much I love simmer pots. They're one of my fave lower effort workings, and they just feel so witchy just on the merit of throwing herbs and such into it.
This particular one just uses two ingredients and is great for a little productivity magic when you feel stuck.
Cinnamon stick
Bay leaves
I know bay is more used for manifestation, which I apply here to mean manifestation of energy and willpower to do what needs to be done.
Simmer a pot of water. Add 2-3 cinnamon sticks and 3 bay leaves. Reduce the heat.
As always, you can easily spruce this up by adding your own touches.
Wanna add some extra herbs? Hell yeah. Do it.
Incorporate some candle magic? I like lighting an orange candle with a productivity sigil carved into it.
Crystals? Pass a carnelian stone through the steam and carry it with you while you do your tasks.
This is one I really like. I used to keep a small bowl at the ready (refreshed weekly), though I now just make smaller bowls whenever the need strikes.
This is one I crafted for those days when my insecurities are a little too heavy. I am definitely my biggest critic and my own worst enemy some days. So, for when those negative thoughts are loud.
Materials
Small bowl
Salt
Crushed rosemary
Pinch of black pepper
Combine salt, rosemary, and pepper in a bowl.
Dip your fingers in the mixture, then flick it away from you and say, "Not mine to carry."
You may want to rest your fingers in the salt first, taking a moment to let those negative thoughts and feelings be absorbed. As you flick the salt away, visualize your insecurities being flung away.
Follow up with any self-care activity that feels right to you. Personally, I'm fond of having a cup of rose or lavender tea.