In the witchcraft circles I’ve been in, wands have seemingly fallen by the wayside or at the very least haven’t been fully recognized for what you can do with them. So I decided to make a post about wands.
So why might you want a wand? For one thing, they are incredibly versatile - they can be used to create wards, trace magical symbols or words, infuse things with intention, and much more. They're also usually easy to ethically source and they can potentially last for years if cared for. You also can replace a lot of single-use items with a wand.
Now, how wands are supposed to work depends on who you ask. Your old timey Hermetic mages believed wands had special properties from the stars, but a more popular idea today is that wands are conduits for your personal energy. One might also ask a divine being one worships to bless the wand for working magic. Being someone who doesn’t believe much in magic as a literal force (I’m more for the psychological model of magic), I’m not going to endorse any specific metaphysical opinion here. I will say that a wand has the potential to be as efficacious as anything regardless of how you personally think it works.
Wands should be sized depending on how they will be used. A wand that will be used in a large public ceremony should be big enough to be visible to attendants, so perhaps around sixteen to twenty inches. A personal wand used for things like casting protective circles should be whatever size feels good to wave around, so perhaps ten to fourteen inches. A wand used for tracing magic symbols on small items can be the size of a pen.
Wands can be made from many things, like sticks, twigs, dowels, or anything you can make a sturdy wand shape from. Paper is fine if you don’t mind your wand being fragile. (To make a paper wand, you diagonally roll a piece of paper into a tube, glue it at the end, and then decorate it however you please. You can find many tutorials by searching DuckDuckGo.)
I’m sure some people out there will object to paper wands, but I say that if paper’s good enough to put a sigil on, then it’s good enough for a wand. Besides, you can write intentions on the paper before rolling it up.
If you’re going to use wood, any kind that feels agreeable to your purposes should work fine. You can search for tree correspondences or go on your own associations. (See this post to learn more about developing your own correspondences/associations. You can decorate your wand by carving it, staining it, painting it, wrapping it in wire, fabric, or leather, or by gluing things to it. Or you can skip decoration if you don’t feel like it’s necessary. (Some sticks look fine as they are, after all.)
You should hold your wand in your dominant hand. If you’re left handed, please ignore the ignoramuses who’d have you think your left hand is secretly Miroku’s wind tunnel.
Anyway, here are some ways you can use a wand. (For those of you who aren’t good at visualizing or just don’t want to do it, you can presume instead – just suppose that the energy exists beyond your sensory perceptions, like ultraviolet light or ultrasonic sound.)
Casting a protective line or circle: Trace a line with your wand above the ground or over anything you want to place a barrier over; visualize or presume a line of protective energy being placed.
Unwanted entity removal: Point your wand at where you reckon the unwanted entity is and visualize or presume magic beams coming out of your wand. Or you can visualize/presume your wand as the hilt of an energy sword and slice the entity with it.
Cleansing a space: Visualize or presume a soft cleansing energy coming from your wand. Wave it around wherever you want to cleanse.
Bestow a blessing: As you wave the wand, recite a spell according to your intent. For example, you might wave your wand over a pen while saying “may I always write well with this pen.”
I’m sure you can think of more uses yourself from here! Happy witchin'!
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