On Vessels, Consecration, and Six Ways
I just finished a read-through of Six Ways by Aidan Wachter, which is hands-down my favorite book on magic ever written. Though it purports to be a book on “sorcery”, which is usually held as a fairly self-focussed practice, I find it deeply resonant as a spiritworker because it’s loudly animist, coming from a deeply animist place of building relationship with spirits. I still find new things to pull out of it whenever I read it.
It’s not perfect, of course. As a results-oriented, “sorcery”-focussed book, sometimes it will suggest to do something as a sequence of steps, without grounding it in a place that makes sense to me. This came up particularly for me this time when Wachter wrote about magic vessels, and talismans more broadly. By vessels he means things like honey jars, bag spells, and money-drawing boxes; you place things that symbolically represent a desire together, maybe add some stuff to link them to the target, do ritual actions to charge them up, etc.
What struck me is how, from a animist context, those things are self-evidently meant to be spirit-homes, to attract (or create?) a being that will hang around and do what you want. Wachter gives a nod to this in the very last paragraph of the chapter, which made it even funnier to me that it wasn’t set up as part of the theory in the very beginning. The next chapter doubles down, talking about talisman-creation more broadly, which in Wachter’s terms can be any sort of crafting that one does with focus, toward a magical end. At least by strong implication, this is meant to be spirit-connection, but at least for me, not leading with that makes the whole thing feel a bit backwards.
This is not at all an indictment of the book, to be clear, more a reflection on, perhaps, the difference between the sorceror’s perspective and the spiritworker’s perspective, even when going toward the same ends. In a way, I sometimes have the opposite issue; I have abounding theory about animism, spirit-bonds, divine connections, and the like, but I tend to be slow to put it into practice. It helps, I suppose, to have someone coming in talking all about power and results to remind me that I too can do that.
I’ll close out today with a tip that also happens example of something that Wachter does to an end that has helped me in my practice as well. Hw calls it “consecration” and talks about it as a first step toward using any material in a magical working. As fancy (and religious-sounding!) as the word is, the practice is simple. When you work with something you talk to it, name it, tell it what it means to you and what you want it to do. “Creature of wax,” one might say when dressing a candle, “lift this message up to the heavens.” Or, “creatures of smoke and herb, cleanse me and bring me into balance.” I started doing just this with my tools, like my divination set and my daily-wear jewelry and just this, those simple words, worked better to remind me that I’m part of a network of spirit relationships than any sort of mantras ever did.
There’s a lot in my head lately of how to talk about, and work with, these connections. It’s really exciting stuff, these thoughts are just the beginning of it, and I hope to share more in coming weeks.