The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
Spoken Magic
Herbs, Crafts, and Other Hearth-Related Magic Work
There is power in words. A spoken word moves air and creates the physical effect of sound waves hitting the eardrum. In this way spoken words bring ideas from the mental realm into the physical world, an excellent example of manifesting your will.
An incantation is a fancy word for a spoken piece of magic or the words that accompany a magical act. Other forms are charms, prayers, hymns, and so forth. “Magic words” are used in almost every culture’s form of magic and also in worship.
Incorporating spoken magic into a daily spiritual practice isn’t difficult at all. Spoken magic is a very common kind of practice. Think of saying, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, [name] wants to play” or “Star light, star bright” when first seeing a star. This kind of folk wisdom, speaking things in response to an event or occurrence, is rarely seen as a kind of magic. More often it’s seen as averting bad fortune in some way or simply as habit.
Also known as “country sayings” or children’s rhymes or even superstition, these bits of folk wisdom are sometimes rooted in actual historical events (such as the “Rain, rain” rhyme, which dates from Elizabethan times and is said to have originated from the storm during which the Spanish Armada was turned back from England’s shores). They also can have a fortune-telling aspect, such as the “One for sorrow, two for joy” rhyme that can be applied to the number of crows or ravens seen in a flock or even to sneezes.
Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica is a collection of prayers, blessings, charms, and incantations from the Highlands of Scotland, gathered between 1855 and 1910.
Spoken magic is one of the easiest ways to incorporate spiritual or magical practice into your everyday routine. Choose certain times or events and compose short sayings or words to speak when they occur. Doing so offers you an opportunity to consciously reconnect with the spirituality of the day.
Keep your sayings and incantations simple. When you look at traditional sayings, they often have a beat or rhythm to them. Doing this with your own sayings facilitates the mnemonic. They don’t absolutely need to rhyme, but a regular rhythm or beat does help. Keep the phrases short, so that you won’t lose the rhythm of what you’re doing and so they’re easier to speak and remember. You don’t have to declaim them; murmuring or whispering them under your breath is fine.
Here is a list of suggested times or events to initiate spoken magic. You don’t have to use them all; these are suggestions only. Find a few that work for you.
✵ Turning on a stone element or oven
✵ Adding salt to a pot
✵ Stirring a pot
✵ Setting the table
✵ Serving food
✵ Sitting down to a meal (yes, saying grace!)
✵ Opening the kitchen door
✵ Sweeping
✵ Washing the dishes
✵ Wiping the counter
✵ Turning off the light at the end of the day
Here are some examples of phrases to help you create your own sayings:
✵ While stirring a pot: “May my life be as cared for as my cooking.”
✵ While serving food: “May the food about to be eaten nourish my family in both body and soul.”
✵ While sweeping: “May all negative and non-supportive energy be removed from this place.”
✵ When turning off the kitchen light at night: “Bless this kitchen and keep those of us who use it safe and in health through the night.”
✵ When opening the door: “May only health, love, and joy come through this door into this house.”
Traditional incantations and charms tend to invoke a deity of some kind. As this book is not specifically linked to any one deity in any particular spiritual or religious practice, there are no deity-linked sayings included here. However, people often like to link their sayings to their deity of choice, and I encourage you to do the same if you feel drawn to doing so. It can be as simple as saying, “In the name of [deity]” before the rest of the incantation.