Today is Thursday, August 19. The moon is waxing gibbous in Capricorn, and we will see the full moon on the 22nd. Just a few more days to get those manifestations in order, if you’re a witch who really pays attention to the moon phases when you’re making magical plans. Not every witch does, you know. That’s ok. We all follow a different path, and every path is valid. That’s why witchcraft is the coolest.
I have a daughter who just a few weeks ago mentioned that it doesn’t always come naturally for her to align her craft with the moon phases, it doesn’t always feel right, she doesn’t always feel like it gives her magic the extra sauce she’s hoping for. And it kind of dawned on me. She’s a Leo, and her personality is incredibly powerful and bright and bold. So I was like, duh. Use the sun! Charge your water and crystals and sigils and amulets in the sunlight if you don’t feel like the moon is quite doing it for you.
Well that was a tangent. And it has jack shit to do with the topic I wanted to explore today. This episode is the first of a four-part series I’m doing on elemental magick. Earth, air, fire and water are the four elements that we witches most often work with. And I thought I would start us off with Air Magick. I know that air magic is probably the least sexy kind of magick that we do, because of the correspondences of the other elements.
We connect fire with creativity and passion, we connect water with emotions, intuition, and psychic ability, and earth magic is associated with wealth and abundance and overall physical health. But what about air??
Well, air magick is most closely aligned with workings having to do with logic, reason, and communication, and that is all very boring. But it’s also why I think that air magic can really boost all those other kinds of elemental magic. If you’re doing a spell to sweeten your relationship with a friend, family member, partner or someone you’ve got a romantic interest in, then incorporating air magic into that working is going to enhance and strengthen the lines of communication and cooperation with that person.
If you’re feeling a lack of creative spark and you want to do some fire magick to breathe some new life into a creative project, air magic can help clear out the cobwebs so to speak, and inspire new ways of looking at things, it can give you more freedom of thought, and uninhibited thinking.
For wealth and abundance spells, consider incorporating air magic to open opportunities for maybe a new job or a promotion, especially something that might include travel.
One of my favorite reasons to use Air magick is for Ancestor and Spirit work. Our ancestors and our spirits exist in an ethereal realm. It can be helpful, especially if you’re having difficulty connecting to them, if we try and meet them on their own turf, so to speak.
Before you start writing your emails, I understand that ancestors and spirit guides are always with us everywhere, and that we don’t really need to do any special, extravagant workings to speak and commune with them. But if someone is having trouble making that initial connection, or if they just want to deepen an existing connection, air magic is the way to go.
Air magic is sort of the unsung hero in elemental magick, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a Libra.
So now that I’ve bored you with all the reasons you should be doing more Air magick, let’s talk about what that means and what it looks like.
Air magic is performed in a lot of different ways. I think that after blowing on dandelions, the most well-known kinds of air magick are incense and smoke cleansing or smudging, if that’s part of your practice. Meditation, spell powders, breath work, and wishing papers are also forms of air magic.
So let’s break them down:
Incense and smoke cleansing are pretty self-explanatory. Burning incense is used for purification and cleansing, it’s used to sanctify and cleanse altar tools, spell jars and other vessels, it can cleanse and clear physical spaces. Oftentimes, incense can be used to create a circle for spell work, in the event that you can’t or don’t wish to use salt or something like that to cast a circle, incense and smoke can create the same kind of sacred space without having to be vacuumed up later or without having to worry about dumping salt on the earth. Which, please don’t do that.
The cool thing about incense is that it comes in about a million different scents and varieties. You can use specific kinds of incense to align with the spell work you’re doing as well, so for example if you’re doing a money manifestation, you can use a cinnamon incense for some extra power to the spell, or you can buy a specially made prosperity blend or money drawing incense.
Another one of the great things about incense is that it’s easy to find, and it’s inexpensive. You can also make your own incense, but this can be dangerous sometimes.Not every herb is safe to inhale when it’s burning. Which brings me to another important caveat: when you’re burning incense, sage, palo santo, cedar, rosemary, whatever. Always open your windows. Don’t burn shit with those windows closed. You’re going to give yourself an asthma attack or set off the smoke detectors and don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise you, this warning comes from experience.
Smudging is not the same as smoke cleansing and it’s generally associated with indigenous practices and it isn’t something I personally do, so I can’t really speak too intelligently on the matter.
Meditation and breathwork are also air magick. We all know how important it is to practice meditation and how difficult it can be to quiet our minds and work on visualization or connecting with our guides and ancestors, it can really be useful for manifestation, lucid dreaming, and it goes on and on. And it’s all air magick, baby.
Breathwork is of course closely associated with meditation, but it’s also a convenient way to cleanse when you’re out and about and don’t have access to a bowl of salt or a stick of incense. If you’re like working with tarot and the energy of the cards feels a little stale, try blowing on the cards, or giving the deck a few knocks with your knuckles. Kind of dusting off any janky energy that’s hanging around them.
Spell powders are something that I don’t really see a lot of information about. And I think it’s a shame, because they’re easy to use, they’re portable, and they’re really effective. A spell powder is basically a powder made of your own special blend of ingredients that you’ve personally sourced and ground up to use for your own purpose.
So if you’re traveling, and you’re going to be staying in like a hotel room, well before you leave for your trip, you might make combine like, dill, lavender and cascarilla in your mortar and pestle or in a spice grinder and make a fine powder that can be sprinkled across thresholds and windowsills for protection.
You can make powders for any purpose, just like you would make them for any other kinds of spellwork, and release the powders into the air to carry your manifestations out into the world rather than burning them or however else you might typically use them. The cool thing about them is that they’re portable and discreet. You can take a spell powder to a body of water (assuming you’re not putting anything noxious or toxic in your blend), you can take it to a forest or a park or a mountain top. All kinds of places that might be difficult to do spells at otherwise.
You can create a powder for manifesting a job at a place you want to work and then distribute your powder directly at the site. The uses for spell powders go on and on, and I don’t think it gets enough attention.
Lastly, I want to talk about wishing papers. These are specially made papers that you can find online or at your favorite occult shop, I get mine from the enchanted cottage, you can find them online. You simply write your spell, or sigil or manifestation or whatever on the paper, you roll it into sort of a tube shape, and you light it. It doesn’t burn, it sort of smolders, and when the paper finally smolders down to the base, it just floats away and disappears. It’s the coolest thing. And you don’t have to worry about sparking a wildfire, because wishing papers are meant to be used indoors. I love wishing paper. It’s really fun for kids too, to write out their wishes and then watch them float into the ether.
Well I hope I’ve convinced you to incorporate more air magick into your practice. Again, I know it isn’t the most exiting kind of work, but I firmly believe that it can enhance and enrich and sort of fortify other work that you do. If you do try some of these methods, please drop me a line to tell me how it goes for you, even if it’s just to be like, Hey Eli, I tried your shitty air magick and it SUCKED. I still want to hear about it.
Next week is part 2 of this series and we will delve into the much sexier elemental magick: fire magick!
So until then, keep those cauldrons burning. My name is Eli, and this has been the Middle aged witch podcast.
