physicsandwitchcraft

[physicsandwitchcraft]

On making one’s own magical tools

I read recently an impassioned essay by the Skeptical Occultist titled What a wizard must know. Please go read it. It argues passionately for constant learning, and for the acquisition of deep and comprehensive knowledge about everything, as an essential pursuit for any serious practitioner of magic.

The starting point of that essay was the idea, common in older magical writings, that "the practicing wizard had to make most, if not all, of the tools and implements in their practice." But it seems to me that nowhere in that essay was the question actually answered of why this is so.

Of course, knowing everything that can be known about the phenomena one wants to influence, and the properties and inner workings of one's equipment, means that the magician knows exactly what she needs in order to accomplish a particular task. Such knowledge is important for the effectiveness of any technical endeavour, including magic.

So naturally, it is important to know how one's magical tools are made, and why they are made that particular way, down to the smallest detail; but knowing and making are two different things, and I don't feel that the argument was ever made as to why the magician must actually craft her own tools with her own hands, as much from scratch as possible. So I will try to make that argument, albeit with certain practical limitations.

Based on my own experiences as a Wiccan (priestess and witch), I see three reasons why creating one's own ritual tools is valuable.

1) The ability to create exactly what you need, as opposed to settling for what happens to be available. Knowing exactly what you need is the reason you have to have the knowledge -- like a doctor knowing what treatment to prescribe. But a doctor doesn't have to compound all her own drugs: we have drug companies for that.

Likewise, in today's world, we have magical specialists: people who can make things that otherwise would not get made. These people serve others as a specialist or professional. Passionate about herbs? Become an herbalist! Not so passionate about herbs? Find yourself an herbalist that you trust, and go to her for help! Similarly, in today's world one can often get the tools one needs made to spec. So why is it still important that the magician make her own tools herself?

2) Focus, will, and intent. This is the heart of magic, and it goes beyond the physical tools. By making a tool from scratch, or modifying a pre-made object to personalize it, the process of creation provides a conduit for the magician's focus, will, and intent. Knowledge is key here because it informs the design -- each design choice is made deliberately and with the ultimate purpose of the tool in mind -- but it is the act of making or modifying in which the focus, will, and intent are actually applied. This is how a mundane object becomes a magical object.

"Making" now becomes a matter of degree: one can anoint a candle with scented oil and carve a sigil into it; or one can grow cotton and keep bees, spin and braid one's own wick, harvest beeswax, melt it, and hand-dip one's own candle, with the particular working in mind all the way from day one.

This latter approach can be rather impractical if a magical need arises on short notice; in that case, making one's own generic magical candles can still be more powerful than buying them in the shop, but less powerful than creating them from the first step with a particular magical purpose in mind.

3) The reaction of spirits to implements made by the magician herself. This surprised me when I noticed it about half a year ago, and I am still trying to understand the phenomenon. It seems that some spirits (my experience is with elementals) are fond of, and fascinated by, things that I have made myself. I think there's a connection here to the concept of offerings -- it's not the physical object that matters so much, but rather the personal time and energy that the magician has put into the object that actually constitutes the offering.

And here's a fourth, for those working in groups.

4) Collectively creating the coven's magical tools strengthens the group mind and creates a unique identity for the coven itself, composed of the individual identities of the group members. Whenever those tools are used, the essence of the maker(s) can be consciously pulled into the working. This is the situation in which I think making one's (group's) own magical tools becomes most valuable.

The bottom line? Try it. Try making a tool, or modifying a tool. Use it and see what effect it has on your magic. Then decide for yourself what you need to do to be effective in your own practice.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Hi! What Stiches did you use for the lavender/mugwort satches? Thank you!

I just used an ordinary running stitch.  I sewed two of the three open sides with the wrong side facing, then turned it inside out, stuffed it, folded in the edges of the last open side, and top-stitched the last side again with a running stitch.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

I'm teaching electrostatics right now, and was struck again by the parallels in terminology between electrical and magical "phenomena". We charge a plastic comb by rubbing it. We ground it to get rid of excess charge. The old word for a capacitor was a condenser, and this term is still used in magic when we talk about "fluid condensers" for elemental energies. And before we knew about electrons and ions, electric charge used to be thought of as consisting of positive and negative electrical fluids that could be in and flow in material objects. But electromagnetism itself is essentially magic, isn't it. Never mind that our word electricity comes from the Greek elektron, meaning amber, which has the same property as plastic of collecting a static electric charge when rubbed. Amber has a certain significance in initiatory Wicca.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

My first foray into wax-carving!

This is a beeswax disk, about 3.5 cm across, with a triangle design carved in -- my first attempt at wax-carving. The actual carving was done with the point of the large tapestry needle shown in the picture. Beeswax is fairly soft, and so it's easy to remove material just by gouging it out.

Tricks, tips, and some things that I learned:

The wax came from the stub of a beeswax candle. To get it soft enough to shape into a disk, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and dipped it into a pot of simmering water. The plastic wrap kept the beeswax from getting wet and, more importantly, kept me from getting melted beeswax all over the inside of my saucepan! I flattened it out by pressing both sides on a table and working it with my thumbs, and rolling it on its edge on a flat surface to make the sides nice and even. Next time I'll probably put down some waxed paper or something to avoid getting beeswax residue on my work surface.

To transfer a design onto the wax, a great trick is to copy it onto tracing paper, lay it on top of the wax, and then prick through the tracing paper with a pin or needle to mark the lines for the design. I did this initially with a very ornate triangular Celtic knotwork design, the same size as the triangle I wound up doing here, and pin-pricked the lines all the way around, but then when I went to carve it in I found that beeswax is too soft for a tiny intricate design like that to work. The lesson here is to match your design to your materials.

I wound up marking just the three vertices of the triangular design and carving out a plain triangle. I removed wax (with the tip of the needle) to lower the area between the triangle and the circular border. Then to increase the visual contrast I scratched tiny parallel lines in the lowered areas.

I'm pretty pleased with this. Ultimately I want to use this approach to carve designs into candles. Part of the challenge for me will be coming up with suitable designs in the first place. This is part of a challenge for me to be more crafty and artistic.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Updated! I whitened the moons using a zinc oxide sunscreen (22.5% zinc oxide, SPF 35 Badger brand). The remaining ingredients are sunflower oil, beeswax, jojoba oil, and vitamin E. The contrast is a bit more subtle than it looks in the photo. I like it. We'll see how it holds up over time.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Triple-moon plaque with runes. The runes were my first foray into pyrography and I'm super pleased about how they came out! :) I'm thinking about painting in the moons silver and the background black, but I have no experience painting on wood. Any advice?

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Cernunnos. At the Musee de Cluny - Musee National du Moyen Age in Paris. Photo by me, June 2016.

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Little lavender/mugwort sachets for relaxation and sleep -- Yule gifts for the coven and guests. Thanks to my mom for teaching me how to sew as a kid!

[physicsandwitchcraft]

Yesterday's lesson: the Goldstone Boson Equivalence Theorem.

Most useful when calculating an amplitude involving an energetic, longitudinally-polarized external W or Z boson. The GBET doesn't give you the exact tree-level amplitude, but it's a great way to get insight into the high-energy behaviour of the process.

Some examples:

Top quark decay. The GBET gets you the leading mt^3/mW^2 dependence of the top quark width.

Higgs boson decay (if the Standard Model Higgs boson were heavy compared to 2 mW): Again the GBET gets you the leading mH^3/mW^2 behaviour of the Higgs width.

It's also used in the famous Lee, Quigg & Thacker (1977) papers to make the calculation of the Higgs mass upper bound from longitudinal gauge boson scattering more intuitive.