lenyberry

 
Neeeewww books! I’ve given them both a flip-through and I think they’re both going to end up being quite useful for me.

I wrote up reviews but did A Stupid in trying to format and accidentally deleted them, and don’t have brainpower for rewriting the whole thing. The TL;DR was basically Pestlework is fab and I uncritically recommend it to anyone who wants to make magical powders to boost their spellwork, beginner or advanced practitioners alike (though the oils section feels a bit like an afterthought and is much less thoroughly-explained, the powders section justifies the cost of the book on its own). Magical Oils is… sorta ok, but contains multiple uses of “g*psy” as well as kiiinda being culturally-appropriative in places (voodoo & chakras). The recipes aren’t as easy to follow nor as well-explained in purpose, but there are a lot of them and if you like having a ton of options like I do, that’s a major plus. I probably wouldn’t particularly recommend it for new beginners just because I feel like it would be unnecessarily confusing with both the strange way they’ve done they recipes and the lack of explanation of each formula, and I can’t recommend it uncritically for more advanced practitioners either due to the casual slurs and appropriation, but if you can read it with discernment it’s quite likely you can find a decent amount of valuable information nonetheless. I’ll definitely use it as a reference but I suspect I’m probably gonna mostly use it for concept-inspiration rather than following the recipes exactly.

We all love our correspondence lists! But what do you do when you want to work with ingredients not on the usual lists? Or when you want to fine-tune your understanding beyond the basics given in a book? You can always use your intuition of course, but that can mislead if you aren’t good at discerning intuitive impressions from random leaps of thought, and can leave gaps, and sometimes it's just too easy to doubt yourself. There are other methods as well; one such is pendulum dowsing which I want to talk about today. This is a bit different from standard pendulum technique, but shouldn’t be too hard to pick up once you’ve got the hang of that.

You will need: a pendulum, a bit of the substance you want to learn about the possible uses of, and a list of purposes you want to see if it would be useful for. 

Hold your pendulum over the substance (if using a pendulum with a chamber, put your substance inside it) and go down your list of possible correspondences, asking if each in turn is a good use for that substance. 

Take notes of how the pendulum responds for each. A ‘yes’ answer means that the substance is magically useful for that intention, and the strength of the answer indicates if it’s particularly good or only functional and perhaps not ideal if you can get something better. The pendulum won’t respond if there’s no association and will simply hang still. A ‘no’ response indicates that the substance is actively contrary to that intention and should not be used in any spells for that purpose even if its other associations may be desirable, though it may be useful for spells for an opposite intention, in baneful spells to strip a good thing from a target, or to counter that association in another ingredient in a spell for another purpose – for instance, if one wished to do a friendship spell using yellow roses, but wanted to be sure it would not manifest any romantic feelings, one might include an ingredient that’s contrary to romance but not to friendship, so that only the friendship aspect of the yellow roses will be effective. A 'maybe' response indicates that there might be issues in specific cases under the umbrella of the broad correspondence asked about -- for instance if I asked "would this be good for love spells" and got a maybe, it might tell me that it would depend on the specific kind of love spell I want to do, and that I should ask more specific questions such as "would this be good for self-love" "would this be good for romantic love" "would this create strong compulsions in a love spell that might be undesirable" etc. to clarify where it would and wouldn't be an appropriate spell component. 

Concept: a mind-control spell meant to be performed on oneself.

Imagine the possibilities. The ability to keep a mental illness under control by conscious will – to literally decide to be happy and thus defeat a depression spiral (yes, the general retort to the depressed about “have you tried not being depressed” is obnoxious. But what if you could make it actually that easy for yourself). Being able to fall asleep when you want to regardless of insomnia or jetlag or a mis-judged intake of caffeine too late in the day, or stay awake when you want to without requiring stimulants to function. If the control extends to the autonomous nervous system, cure your hiccups with a thought and never shoot juice out your nose from an ill-timed laugh or cough again.

And no one can argue that it’s immoral to mind-control yourself.

I haven’t much of an idea how this would actually work, but it’s a concept with some potential if it can be pulled off, at the very least.

This is a spread I came up with some years ago. I’ve found it very useful for myself, and figured it might be worth sharing.

1-4: The foundation – why the current situation is able to exist (these should be read as a sentence, in combination)
5: The catalyst – what sparked the development of the situation
6: The obstacle – what stands in the way of progress
7 & 8: Supporting pillars – where does help to overcome the obstacle come from and/or what helps the situation progress in spite of it
9 & 10: The choice – two options that are available to you
11: Capstone – what’s most likely to develop if you take the easy choice or the one that’s most natural for you