taken from Jane's Magical Herbs Branch Lesson workbook
Well, I’ve made my Medicine bag , consecrated it, given it a good dose of Spirit-welcoming incense and slept with it under my pillow. Now for its food.
For my magic powder, I have chosen to make a blend called ‘Other Realms’. It’s the powder equivalent of flying ointment. Communicating with Spirit isn’t just about sitting in the safety of a room or a circle of like-minds and letting it all come to me; sometimes I need to be brave and venture out to meet it. Astral travel is something I need to learn and practise. I tried it once, got distracted and ended up being thrown back so violently into my body in the here and now, it made me realise I need proper tuition with it, and that will happen.
Another aspect of journeying to or communicating with Spirit is that it’s not all sweetness and light. Sometimes it is necessary to descend to the Underworld to face something and work through it, such as in shadow work, so I’ve factored that into my ingredients and intent.
I wanted to choose my ingredients intuitively, same as I did with the Medicine bag, so I’ve chosen them before referring to any books. Luckily I’ve been interested in flying ointment for some time, so the correspondences are familiar to me.
My ingredients are:
Sandalwood powder – this is one of my base powders, so I’ve used a lot of it, and the intent is to
open up lines of spiritual communication.
Salt of Dark Earth – this is my other base powder, my own version of black salt, and it’s made of finely sieved home-made garden compost, charcoal powder and salt. The intent when adding this is largely for grounding, hence the Earth element, but also to represent the aspect of going down into the Underworld, but with protection.
Grave dirt - a nice big worm cast from the family plot to connect me with our ancestors.
Mugwort (Artemisia) – for its help with psychic work, lucid and prophetic dreams and, hopefully, astral projection.
Mandrake – I used this in two forms, crushed dried root and a generous sloosh of oil. Mandrake is poisonous but it also protects us from demons and evil spirits. I know this is supposed to be powder, but there was enough dry stuff to make the oil mix in without wetting it.
Belladonna (Nightshade) – I’ve only got this in oil form, but again, a big sloosh of it was easily absorbed into the dry ingredients. It is poisonous, but the intent again was to help with the general business of seeing and sensing, and hopefully with astral projection.
Purple Glitter – Initially I thought of putting green glitter in as a homage to Harry Potter’s ‘floo powder’, but I decided on purple simply because of its colour correspondence. The intent here was simply to take me to a safe destination in the realms of Spirit, without having to grab a wire coat hanger and jump into the fire of course!
I mixed everything in a glass bowl, being careful not to touch it or spill any, since I was getting a lot of unwelcome ‘help’ from one my cats at the time. I imagine this mixture could be rather dangerous if ingested by a cat.
Then I put the mixture into a little jar, cleaned the table and washed up before any powder could transfer itself to Coleen.
I undid the hanky parcel in the bag and gave it a little snack of Other Realms powder before doing it up and putting it under my pillow, and last night I had one of those dreams where I’m living in the perfect witchy house, with witchy friends doing witchy things. Our mutual friend, Maria, was in the dream. Luckily I haven’t held on to the details, or I’d be very dissatisfied with my real home.
If having dreams where I go somewhere nice and do witchy things is a result of putting the bag under my pillow, then bring it on! It will most certainly accompany me to circle meetings and moots from now on.