Crossroads & Candle

[stsathyre]

A witchy reminder

Doing frivolous magic keeps you in shape for doing important magic.

[another-witchblog]

*boredly makes energy balls nyoom around the room all the time*

[darkbookworm13-deactivated20240]

*inhaling energy particles to feel your throat tickle like the bubbles in soda*

[theopaquemindpalace]

Would love some examples/ideas…

[godswalkwithher]

Well… There were 2 examples right there… But also: small glamours extra energy boosts in coffee whipping up tiny bursts of breeze on still days pretty much anything else that’s just for fun

[stsathyre]

@theopaquemindpalace

Randomly charging items around the house for specific purposes such as protection, luck, tranquility, strength.

Charging and un-charging things while you sit around.

It’s so important to have practice un-charging, de-charging, or blowing energy off/out of objects and spaces. I think people really don’t understand how sometimes what a situation needs is the absence of energy and not more energy … hmm. post …

Throwing in a little magic into your microwave snack, attempting to use the numbers for correspondence.

Attempting to discover new methods of divination while riding the bus.

Thinking up tiny incantations for random reasons … like getting stop lights to change or finding a good parking spot.

Dream magic-ing just because

Playing card games with friends and attempting to battle luck. <– My family does this a lot.

Attempting to see beyond the veil while chilling in a waiting room. (If you’re not easily creeped out/squeamish).

You can also make yourself a chore list. I keep a maintenance chore list for wards, upcoming social obligations, work and career issues, family maintenance.

I do a lot of aura work just for kicks.

Most people are not keen on doing magic on/for other people. I’m … not one of those folks. But, 80% of the energy around you is people when you’re in a congested place. Sometimes I will try to get people to remember something they forgot and get out of the grocery line. I pay for it by forgetting to get something myself. I try to get babies to stop crying or anxious folks to calm down (mostly out of self defense. They make me anxious). Use your own moral code on that one.

I hope that helps. There’s a whole world of magic that can be done and almost none of it has to actually serve a purpose. But when it comes time to do magic with a purpose it’ll be easier and pack more of a punch, because you’ll know your gauge.

[reverie-and-thunder]

This is super helpful. By “battle luck” do you mean pulling luck to be on your side when it wasn’t? I’m slightly confused and always curious

[stsathyre]

Battling luck is when you get a bunch of people together who know how much their personal luck weighs and you play a game of chance and probability to see if you can out-luck the other people. It’s an exercise to see if you can increase your luck on the fly, or de-stabilize someone else’s luck on the fly. Sometimes we would do pre-game rituals to increase our luck and then have at it.

It, like everything, is just an exercise. It allows you to know yourself and your abilities a little better.

[solitary-woman]

I call stuff like this ‘Magickal busywork’ as a kind of joke.

[trust-me-i-just-get-weirder]

Sometimes I’ll go into the mind space for like 5 minutes to like relax or pass the time or pretend I don’t have a test in a half hour, and I can get in there a lot faster now because of it. Magical busywork, it keeps your spiritual muscles strong!

[ozarkhealingtraditions]

Day 212: Healing with Stumpwater

Stumpwater, that is water that has collected in the hollow bowl of a tree stump, is an interesting part of folk materia medica. Its use can be found throughout the Ozarks and the Appalachians, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other cultures were to use the mystical substance as well. Stumpwater is mostly connected to the healing of certain dermatological issues like warts, rashes, and sometimes even freckles. But the water has also been used in the making of herbal infusions. The idea being that the stumpwater has more power than regular water because it is elevated above the rest of the land.

Vance Randolph mentions stumpwater several times in his “Ozark Magic and Folklore,” here are a few quotes:

“The skin disease called tetter is treated with spunk water or stump water simply rain water which happens to be retained in a hollow stump.”

“When a hillman tries to remove warts by applying stump water he repeats this formula: Stump water, stump water, Kill these — warts! The dash represents the number of warts that the patient has, and it is essential to state this number correctly. If a man says six when he has only five warts, the warts will not be cured, and another one will appear in a few days.”

“Most of the old-timers believe that a woman should never be bathed ‘all over,’ or her bedding completely changed, for nine days after the child is born. Some say that the palms of a child’s hands should not be washed until the child is three days old to do so washes away the infant’s luck, particularly in financial matters. It is always best to bathe a new baby’s head with stump water; if ordinary water is used, the child is likely to be prematurely bald when it grows up.”

One can say that most of the lore behind stumpwater likely came into the Ozarks from the Appalachian people. A similar wart-cure can be found in the book “A Tennessee Folklore Sampler” by Ted Olson and Anthony P. Cavender:

“To remove a wart go to an old hollow stump that contains water and wash the hands or warts in the stump water. After doing this, walk home without looking back and the wart will go away.”

A few more Appalachian uses of stumpwater come from the wonderful book “Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia” by Anthony Cavender:

“To treat and prevent pimples and blackheads, the face was washed with buttermilk, a solution of Epsom salts or soda, human urine, stumpwater (water collected in a tree cavity or stump, also called ‘spunkwater’), a decoction made from witch hazel or ratsbane leaves, or dew of the first day in May.”

“Stumpwater, buttermilk, dew of the first fay in May, and a cow manure facial also were used to remove freckles.”

“Southern Appalachian folk medicine is abundant with beliefs about contracting and removing warts. Some of the more frequently mentioned naturalistic remedies were rubbing warts with castor oil, a chicken gizzard, a slice of Irish potato, bean leaves, or stumpwater and inserting a hot needle into the warts.”

In my last post on the interactions between white and Native medicines I mentioned the use of stumpwater as a practice shared by both the white and Cherokee communities. Who gave the practice to whom is still debatable, but the fact remains that both communities considered stumpwater as an important part of the materia medica. Frans M. Olbrechts, in “The Swimmer Manuscript” mentions a Cherokee medicine man who only used water in healing:

“Spencer Bird, an old medicine man, now dead, used to rely on the sole purifying power of water. The informant who told me this vaguely hinted at the probability of the water being some ‘special water,’ such as that scooped out of a stump (‘stump water’) or even out of the stump of a lightning-struck tree.”

The use of stumpwater bears some semblance to other folk medicines such as the use of certain “flying” plants, meaning plants that are growing out of trees, or rock faces, that have never touched the ground. The power here is that the “flying” plant has some mystical connection to the sky, and is therefore given an added potency as a medicine or magical item. A common example of this idea is the mistletoe plant, which has been considered a mystical or magical plat partially because it hangs in the air without touching the ground. There’s a tradition throughout the Ozarks and Appalachians (and one can see the original belief throughout Europe) that the mistletoe will only be effective in protecting the home when it is cut and never allowed to touch the ground. We can see the same concept with the stumpwater, the idea here being that the water fell from the sky and hangs in the air, not touching the ground. The power of the stumpwater then isn’t in the chemical makeup of the water itself, but in the fact that it has been given a magical quality by being set apart from other puddles, creeks, and water sources.