I’ve recently returned from the magical city of New Orleans. From Roman Catholicism to Haitian Voodoo to haunted condos the place is lousy with spirits. Not to mention the booze variety.
Category: spells
Lock Love Away or Keep a Secret
If you keep your eyes peeled, you can find examples of everyday transcendence from our physical reality on a street corner, down an alleyway, or through a door left open which has previously to now, always been found closed. By instinct we are drawn to examples of sympathetic magic, where objects found or created form…
Liquid Poe-try: The Tell-Tale Heart
I recently had the pleasure of visiting a surprising (to me, at least) NYC historic treasure, Poe Cottage in the Bronx, Edgar Allan Poe’s last residence. While I had known that Poe had perished in Baltimore, I was unaware that he called the Bronx home for the last three years of his life. He wrote several…
Embrace your Inner Lunatic – Making Moonwater
“She wants you to get pregnant”, my friend said with a smirk when I told her my mother gave me a bottle of moon water. The moon is good for women, governing everything from the tides to our very emotions, and especially good for witches. The bottle my mother gave me looked like a…
Sunshine Superfan (I’m just mad about saffron…)
I’ve just returned from a trip to Los Angeles, land of relentless sunshine. In the past, I’ve found the aggressive solar aspects of LA to be oppressive and uncomfortable, but I had a much different experience this time. I was ready to open up to the sun as a symbol of optimism, vitality and enlightenment.
Fizzy Flip for Luonnotar the Water Mother
Today is the feast day of Luonnotar or Ilmatar the Finnish creator-goddess, who inspired the tone-poem by Sibelius. According to Finnish legend, in the beginning, there was only the Goddess Luonnotar. Tone poem There was no world then, only the chaos of the Dream Time. She was becoming bored of being alone in the void…
Blues vs. Lavender
“Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine” – Thomas Aquinas (Philosopher, theologian, Catholic saint & priest b.1225-d.1274) How true that is, Doctor Angelicus – but why not take this a step further and involve lavender at each stage? With the power to relax and uplift simultaneously, it can…
Bee-Witched! The Sweetest Sting
It’s summertime in New York City and I’ve been bee-witched. In the park there are bushes alive with busy bumblebees every morning. I’ve fallen under the spell of their nectar-intoxicated dance; their ingredient-gathering ritual that results in the magical miracle of honey.
Passion Potion
Witches have been famous for supplying aids to seduction throughout the ages. A lot of these included revolting or hard-to-find ingredients like mandrake, powdered cats eyes, or that tired old “aphrodisiac” Spanish Fly. Spanish Fly is an irritant, that’s all, and can sometimes produce an uncomfortable stiffening effect on the male. It doesn’t affect women…
Cool as a Cucumber with Sage Advice
After the recent and ongoing panic and upheaval in Europe, now is a good time to cool down and cleanse, for which we can use mainly cucumbers and sage. Anybody behind you in the supermarket queue will be impressed by your basketful of vegetables, herbs and yoghurts as you gather some of Mother Nature’s Little…
The New City Witches Cocktail Coven 