The Magic of Flowers: A Guide to Their Metaphysical Uses & Properties - Tess Whitehurst 2013

Rose
The Flowers

Dubbed “Queen of the Flowers” by the poet Sappho, it’s been said that the rose has the purest and most positive vibration of any living thing. Simply gazing at a rose blossom and inhaling her sweet, clean, and heart chakra—opening fragrance can lift your spirits, clear your mind, and align you with your truest and most divine self.

A highly cultivated flower, her origins go back to at least 3,000 years ago in Iran.

Magical Uses

Abundance

To fortify your wealth and draw even more of it, offer pink, red, and yellow roses or rose petals to the prosperity goddess Lakshmi as an expression of your gratitude and devotion. You might create an altar to her and light candles for her while expressing thanks for what you already have and respectfully requesting what you desire.

Beauty

Roses and beauty are all but synonymous. For a very simple beauty tonic to enhance your beauty and charm, lightly rub your face with a fresh pink or white rose petal. To maintain a youthful appearance, collect dew from a rose blossom at sunrise on your birthday and bathe your face in it. Remembering to do it every year it will enhance the effect.

Also, have you ever noticed that when someone deeply believes in and revels in her own beauty, you feel captivated by her charms? For this reason—and also because they will help open your heart—any of the suggestions in the “self-love” section below will also enhance your inner and outer beauty and overall attractiveness.

Clearing and Blessing

Simply misting yourself with rose water can immediately clear and uplift your aura/energy field, make you more radiant and magnetic, and shift your vibration in a way that will align you with positive emotions and desirable conditions. Similarly, you can mist your home or any indoor space to clear and bless the energy.

Dreams

Sleep with the petals of a red rose under your pillow to dream of your true love and to help draw him or her into your life.

Sleep with the petals of a white rose under your pillow to prevent nightmares.

Emotional Healing

White, pink, or lavender-colored roses can be incorporated into magical workings that involve healing from any form of grief or heartbreak. Rose water, essential oil of rose, rose absolute, and rose flower essence can also be employed for this purpose.

Friendship

Pink roses are excellent gifts for friends, as they are expressions of the sweetness and openhearted energy that is at the core of all cherished and lasting friendships.

Pink roses are also very useful in rituals and spells to draw new friendships or deepen and fortify existing ones. For example, the following ritual would be great to perform when you’ve recently moved to a new town or any other time you feel ready to branch out a bit and make some new friends.

FRIENDSHIP RITUAL

Carve the word friendship into a pink candle, place it on a plate, and light. Spread the petals of two pink roses around the candle on the plate. Gaze at the flame as you say:

I am surrounded by the sweet light of friendship,

I am supported by the sweet light of friendship,

I radiate the sweet light of friendship.

I am blessed with an abundance of sweet and lovely friends, and for this I give thanks!

Allow the candle to continue to burn until it burns out, or extinguish and relight it at intervals. Then bury the petals and remains of the candle near the base of a blossoming tree.

Protection

Because of their pure and positive vibration, roses operate on the law of similars (“like attracts like”) to preserve and protect their environs with pure intentions and positive energy. So consider employing rose water, rose incense, rose essence, rose absolute, or actual roses in protective blessings or rituals.

Similarly, the Romans scattered rose petals at banquets to protect against excess drunkenness and the negativity associated with it.

Purification

White roses purify and heal. Bless your house with a bouquet of white roses to bring a clear, fresh, positive vibration to a space and to support any sort of physical or emotional purification. For example, to purify the face of acne, perform this ritual during the waning moon.

ACNE PURIFICATION RITUAL

Boil a pot of water. Remove it from heat and float forty white rose petals on top. Cover your head with a towel, hold your face about a foot above the water, and bathe your clean face in the steam for eight minutes, coming up for fresh air when necessary. After the ritual, be sure to follow any inner guidance you may have about changes to your diet and skin regimen.

To clear the energy of your bed after a breakup or any other time you feel it’s absorbed old energy that you’d like to be rid of, perform this ritual during the waning moon.

BED PURIFICATION RITUAL

Remove all the sheets and linens and wash them thoroughly. Mist the mattress lightly with rose water, and allow it to dry. Replace the clean linens, make the bed, and place the petals from forty white roses on top of the bed. Leave them overnight. (Sorry, but you can’t sleep there for a night. Maybe camp out in the living room?) In the morning, remove them and place them at the base of a tree.

Romantic Love

Consider this: even the least magically minded person you’ve ever met knows that the gift of a bouquet of red roses or a single red rose is a very clear and potent expression of romantic regard. It’s a knowing that spans seasons and generations and never seems to go out of style.

Needless to say, red roses are excellent for any form of love magic. For example:

ROMANCE MAGNETISM BATH

Light a red candle, draw a warm bath, and place the petals from one red rose in the water. Soak for at least forty minutes to surround and infuse yourself with the energy of romance and to help magnetize ideal romantic conditions.

ROSE PETAL IMMERSION

Completely immerse a picture of you and your partner in fresh red rose petals to increase passion and turn up the romance quotient in your relationship.

Pink roses also fall into the “romantic love” category, but they are less suggestive of sexuality and more evocative of the friendship side of romantic love. This is why you can use pink and red roses together in your magical endeavors (and with any of the suggestions in the previous “romantic love” section) for a well-rounded expression of romantic love. You might use just pink roses if you’re in the earlier stages of a romance or if your relationship is in a stage when you’d like to concentrate more on sweetness and friendly connection and less on passion and physical attraction. Pink roses can also be helpful for increasing the harmony and warmth in a relationship.

Secrecy

In ceremonial magic circles, roses often symbolize secrecy, perhaps because they so elegantly and thoroughly hide what resides at their center. For example, the Rosicrucians have been known to hang a single red rose from the ceiling during their meetings to symbolize and seal the secrecy of all that goes on beneath it.

Self-Love

In truth, a human life is a flood of magical gifts from the Divine. And the key to the floodgates is self-love. In other words, the more we love ourselves, the more magic we experience in our lives. With that in mind, since roses can magically help us increase our self-love quotient, roses can magically help us with everything.

Simply surrounding yourself with any color of fresh roses—in your garden, in a vase, or in a bathtub filled with rose petals—can help you to forgive yourself, approve of yourself, cut yourself a little slack, let yourself off the proverbial hook, and generally love yourself more.

Misting yourself with rose water can have a similar effect, and it’s a little more portable! You can carry a small mister in your purse or pocket for an emergency self-love boost.

The countless additional ways to receive the self-loving benefits of roses include:

✵ wearing essential oil of rose or rose absolute as a perfume

✵ taking a few drops of rose essence under the tongue or in water

✵ putting a bit of rose water in your drinking water to taste

✵ drinking tea made from dried rose petals

Spirituality

Because their vibration is so pure and positive, roses are wonderful altar additions and offerings to divine beings. Simply being near a rose or bouquet of roses can enhance one’s meditation or yoga practice, since it clears the mind and aligns us so closely with the energy of the Divine. Rose water, essential oil of rose, rose absolute, and rose flower essence can all have similar effects. Additionally, the rose may be unsurpassed when it comes to enhancing your garden with a spiritual vibe.

In Sufism, roses represent the desire for what transcends this plane of reality—in other words, the part of us that craves connection with the realm of pure spirituality.

Magical Correspondences

Element: Water

Gender: Female

Planet: Venus