#pandasmagicalgetaway

[lazywitchling]

Hi I'm quite new to Tumblr and I stumbled into your blog which I find quite interesting. I am really into the idea of making little objects, and I like how you seem to tie spells to them. I have accumulated a substantial digital library on most esoteric subjects but the books I found on witchery always tie it to Catholic practice, which I would rather avoid. Is there a way you could share a few parcels of your knowledge or how you got it ?

OKAY FIRST OFF: That is a great question, and a very very good way to ask it. You gave me context, gave me reason you’re asking me in particular, asked about my own personal practice, and did not talk to me like I’m an encyclopedia or Google. THAT IS VERY GOOD, AND I LOVE YOU FOR IT.

Anyway, to actually answer your question...

Oh yes, I also avoid the Catholic and Christian tie-ins. It’s not my jam, and I don’t want it in my practice. A really really really basic explanation: You’ll find a lot of those tie-ins in folk magic, and less in newer magic. (That’s a big generalization, but it should at least give you a direction. Older esoteric books are more likely to rely on biblical stuff, while newer ones are more likely to rely on Wicca.)

Now, neither of those things are my cup of tea, and I found my home in witchcraft once I discovered secular witchcraft. You said you want to avoid Catholic tie-ins, but I don’t know if you mean you want NO religion, or if you just don’t want that specific one. So here’s a few blogs to check out...

@asksecularwitch and @upthewitchypunx are both secular witches and have built their own practices from scratch. They’re both my biggest influences, not necessarily in terms of *how* to practice, but in terms of *how to build* a practice. These days, neither of them post much info for beginners, and you won’t find a whole lot of step-by-step stuff from them. But they’ve both been around this website for a while, and combing through their tags will give you a lot of good stuff to look through. Mostly, keep an eye on how they talk about their practice, what questions they ask themselves, what they’re pondering about or experimenting with. You won’t learn how to do what they do, but you’ll learn how they’ve come to do what they do, yaknow?

If Wicca is your thing, @traegorn is a good one to check out. @torque-witch is a Norse polytheist (I think? Correct me if I’m wrong?)

But honestly, the best way I’ve found to navigate Witchblr is to stay out of the tags, to just follow blogs who post things you’re interested in, pay attention who they’re reblogging from, and follow those people. See a post you like? Go check out the person who posted it and see if they have more content you want to look through. It tends to be a pretty good way to stay out of the drama.

What am I talking about. Hi. I got off track somewhere. (Hint: It’s the ADHDemon. I am incapable of giving short answers)

AS FOR HOW I BUILT MY OWN PRACTICE.

It basically went like this:

I started off reading and reblogging all witchblr content I could find, regardless of whether it applied to me or not. Basically consuming all the information I could. When I did spells, I hunted through the internet until I found one that did what I needed, and then I followed that exactly as it was written.

 I started getting more of an idea of what worked for me and what didn’t. As I did spells, I learned from their results, I learned about the “moving parts” of the spells, how they were structured, and started to get my own ideas on how they worked. I was able to modify spells to tailor them to what I needed. I still worked from a base spell that someone else had written, but I knew enough to be able to say “That’s good, but I will change this one thing to make it better for me.”

Modifying spells gave me even more insight into how they worked for me. At this point I started to write my own spells from scratch, but still worked from existing correspondence lists. I still needed to look at the lists to learn what magical properties of each crystal, herb, color, oil, etc. did, but then I was able to put them together into a spell on my own.

This helped me “build a relationship” with the things I was working with, until I was no longer looking at lists to help me. I knew what ingredients did what, because I had worked with them before. This solidified their meanings in my mind. Basil meant money, not because a list told me so, but because every time I did a spell for money, basil is what I reached for until Basil and Money became linked in my brain. At this point, I wasn’t researching correspondences anymore, but just reaching for things, knowing that they would be exactly what I needed.

And here’s where I am now. I started wondering why things worked the way they did, how magic worked at all, what is the Stuff that makes my spells Go. I’m in the process of building that idea fully, and it’s very complicated to explain in a blog post, but has a lot to do with the link between Chance and Narrative. These days, the ingredients and moving parts are getting even less important. Or... not that they’re not important, but they’re maybe a lot less systematic. I might use a screw in a spell not because screws are good for what I need, but because this particular screw is what I need.

My “making-objects-and-tying-spells-into-them” happened... somewhere up there in that list. I have always been a crafty person, even before practicing witchcraft. And I wanna say... somewhere around step 2 or 3 is where I started to play with the idea that there was magic in my handcrafting. So I was applying what I was learning to something that I was already doing, and then expanding from there.

Anyway, I have absolutely TALKED YOUR POOR EAR OFF. But that’s it. That’s how I’ve come to build a practice (that I am, in fact, still building). Happy to expand on anything else if you have follow up questions! Just uh... keep in mind that I cannot do short answers 😂 Bless you if you actually read all of that.