The Scent of a Witchy Woman

Think about which of your senses you use most. Maybe you're a visual person. Or maybe you're like me and you focus on sounds more than sights. And of course touch is a huge source of information for our brains to process.

Unlike sight, hearing, touch, and taste, smell is subtle. If you're breathing through your nose, you're smelling something. Thing is, you don't always consciously think about what you're smelling, but even then, smell is having a subconscious effect on your mood. This subtlety makes scent a neat component to use in workings.

I'm not saying that you can't do magic without incense or candles or oils. Not even close. But I will say that not having control over the scent of your work area makes it very hard to focus. If you don't believe me, try working in a small room with a gassy dog.

I've found that meditating on a perfume and charging it with the trait I want it to enhance is a simple but powerful way to put a little magic in my day. For example, I have one perfume that reminds me of a wedding bouquet. I charged it with thoughts of sweetness and serenity. I use it for family gatherings and any time someone needs comfort or encouragement.

In theory, it'd be stronger if I mixed the scents myself, but I much prefer to let designers do the work for me. Good perfume isn't just a few scents splashed together. That shit is complicated. Rollerball containers are the way to go: a dab'll do you, so even though they're small, you're getting enough to last you for a while, especially if you aren't wearing it every day. And honestly, don't worry about traditional correspondences. What matters is what emotions and associations the scent has for you.

So go forth and let your nose add some magic to your life.

Grim-whaaaa?

Some people remember everything they hear. Some of us need a little extra help, so we write everything down. And a decent chunk of humanity has been that way at least since the early modern period, when culture shifted from being primarily aural. Grimoires are the result of magic practitioners not being able to remember shit without writing it down. Plus it sounds so metal.

(Am I the only one who hears "grimoire" and thinks of Guitar Grimoire? Yes? Moving on.)

Historical grimoires are available online. I've skimmed the contents, but honestly, they're not my cup of tea. Using someone else's sigils seems like a copout, especially when creating my own will have that much more of my energy put into it. Also, a number of them are based on Christian demonology. I'd rather not summon malevolent entities. Even if you don't believe in demons from a Christian point of view, calling up negative shit is, to me, asking to have something go wrong. No thank you. I spent more than enough time in Sunday School worrying about demons without inviting them into my house.

A lot of Wiccans recommend keeping a Book of Shadows, which is like a grimoire and journal combined. (Awesome for those of us who wouldn't remember our heads if they weren't attached!) Magic and mundane are more connected than we realize, I think, so it makes sense to have not only the spells and rituals but notes about the experience of conducting them. Especially if something backfires: you'd better be able to trace it back to the source so you can avoid fucking up again.

What makes the Book of Shadows vastly preferable to a grimoire is the fact that it's personalized. Yes, it's important to learn from other people's successes and failures, but why copy a stranger's rituals? As a beginner, it's fine, but I think that as you learn and grow as a witch, you really ought to be able to hammer out your own. And based on the Kindle Store's selection of books on earth-based religion, the spells I want to perform are not what most folks are interested in. Love? Pshaw. I just want to learn how not to kill every herb I try to grow. Yes, it's bad enough that I need magical intervention.

At the end of the day, I suppose the Book of Shadows is just the postmodern version of the grimoire, a natural progression as society has become more individualistic. If anyone has actually been successful working with a grimoire, though, especially 17th century or earlier, I'd like to hear more about it. Does it feel like you're traveling back in time, as I imagine it would? And does anyone use their Book of Shadows as a work-in-progress type thing, like a lab notebook for rituals, or do you just wait to get something down pat before you add it? That sounds like a dumb question, but I'm really curious, because based on what I've read it could go either way.