🍝 Cooking Magick 🍝

To the menstruating anon, try raspberry leaf, rosehips, and hops (individually) or together in herbal infusion! (Fairly sure there a little to no medical implications to these herbs) ♡

Witchy teas~ Thank you for the tips ^^

(Also, because I forgot about this earlier, be sure to double and triple check any herbs and their effects on the body / hormones / mind / what have you before ingesting!)

SAMHAIN SOUL CAKES RECIPE

Souls cakes are small round cakes which is traditionally made for Halloween. Originally the poor would knock on doors of wealthier families begging for leftover soul cakes, in turn for a prayer. And thus the trick or treating tradition began! A great offering for the dead, and your family at that matter.

Ingredients:

3 ½ cup flour

½ cup white sugar

½ cup brown sugar

1 cup cold butter

A pinch of salt

Splash of vanilla

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp cinnamon 

2 tsp all-spice

A pinch of ground cloves

1 tsp baking powder

2 eggs 

Dried cranberries/currents/raisins

Candied Orange Peel

A spoon full of honey

3 tbsp almond milk

¼ cup chopped hazelnuts 

For a simple frosting:

3 tbsp softened butter

3 tbsp cream

1 tsp vanila extract

Red or orange food dye

¼ cup powdered sugar

¼ cup almond milk/alternative milk

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. 

In a large bowl combine flour, spices, salt, and baking powder. In a smaller ball, rehydrate your dried fruit with apple cider vinegar (sounds weird, but trust me it soften the tart bite of dried fruit).

Cut cold butter into the flour mixture until it becomes evenly crumbly. Mix in sugar and eggs. Once completely combined, add your almond milk, dried fruit and candied orange peel. Add in hazelnuts and honey. 

Kneed dough until it becomes solid, if you think it’s too liquidy, add in more flour. If it’s too dry, add in more almond milk. 

Once you’ve got your dough, plastic wrap it, and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes. Kneed the dough out, roll it, and cut them into circles. I personally use a biscuit cutter, and that works fine ~ Although you can use a knife or a cookie cutter as well!

Place them on baking sheets and with the flat end of a knife, make crosses that come to look like plus signs. Not too deep to cut the cookie in half, but not to shallow or else it will fade away while baking.

Place them in the oven for 25 minutes, or until done. While baking, combine your frosting ingredients and beat with a fork. Shovel into piping bag with a thin tip.

Once the cookies are out of the oven, let them cool to room temperature before frosting. Now with your festive orange or red or even black frosting, pipe along the cross to define it. You could also skip the frosting all together if your not a frosting person - but I suggest it since these cakes are not overly sweet.

\ Garnish to your liking and serve for a tasty Samhain! \

~ Blessed be, Angel….

🍂     SAGE    🍂

Sage is a very versatile plant; it’s not only used for cooking. This kitchen witch likes to make incenses from it or just plant it for decorative reasons in her garden. In my childhood however, I mainly knew the herb as a medical plant. Especially in summer, when I fell asleep with the windows still  open, I often awoke with a sore throat. Of course, my mom and her mother before her had a wonderful recipe for that - didn`t I mention that sage is a great natural remedy for a sore throat? Let’s brew some SAGE TEA! There’s a good reason, why the herb’s name is based on the Latin word “salvare” – healing - after all.

GROWING SAGE  🌱

Sage is a low maintenance, sun loving ancient Mediterranean herb. Basically it can survive mild winters outside and therefore can be harvested all year long. (I’ve had some on my balcony and now in my garden for years and it only happened once, that it didn’t make it through the dark season.) To keep the sage healthy you should cut it from springtime to late summer without removing the wooden stalks. ~~~

STORING SAGE  🌱

Drying the leaves is pretty easy. Harvest the upper parts of the stalks and pluck the leaves off, put them on a flat plate or a piece of baking paper. Don’t expose the sage to direct sunlight! Once the leaves are completely dry, just crumble them and put them into a nice glass jar. Store it at a dark and dry place. The jar above is actually the one I took from my grandmas kitchen after she had passed away. It still got her handwriting on it. ~~~

SAGE TEA  🌱

To brew one cup (1/4l) only one tablespoon of the dried or fresh leaves are required. The tea should then cool down a little before using it for curing a sore throat. From now on you should gargle three times a day (preferably after eating). Other uses for the, in this case still warm tea are to prevent night sweats and stomach ache. ~~~

More on this amazing herb later on  🍃

disclaimer: no household remedy will ever replace a visit to the doctor!

Sage series 1/?

The Harvest.

a tarot spread for lammas.

1. The Reaper.

What part of your life do you need to let go of?

2. The Crop.

Where in your life do you need to continue to grow?

3. The Harvest.

Where in your life can you expect to see a reward?

✨🌿 Green Witch’s Comfort Spell Jar 🌲

In a small jar with a cork top, layer:

Basil

Lemongrass or Lemon Balm

Rosemary

Tree Bark (I used White Oak)

Cinnamon

Fennel Seeds

Ginger Root

Mint

Pine Needles

Let it charge in the sun for an afternoon near your houseplants, in the garden, or even under a favorite tree in the woods. For an extra boost, charge it near a moss agate stone too! Later, seal it with green or white wax and recite:

“Support me and guide me, Spirits of Nature. As a Green Witch, I thank you for your many blessings. I take a little piece of the Forest with me as I walk my path. Blessed be, and so mote it be.” 🌿

You can now take your little piece of the Forest inside your spell jar with you wherever you go as a reminder of your Green Witch oath and path. It’s great to keep in your bag, purse, or travel altar! Blessed be, lovelies! 💖🌿

So earlier I made a post about doing a video tutorial on creating your own sculpture of your diety well.... I'm going to being doing it and making it friendly to those in our community who aren't out in the open about their practice. It's going to take a little bit for some of the supplies to come in but it's happening.

Really excited about this.

I'm going to be doing a goddess for the video.

Reblog and let me know who your most interested in seeing created. I'll do sketches of the top 3 and then vote again on which one of those will be the final choice.

Bridgit

Danu

Morrighan

Artemis

Persephone

Athena

Hestia

Hekate

Ishtar

Lammas - a festival to mark the annual wheat harvest, and is the first harvest festival of the year

Spell Jar Series: Healing

~Cinnamon

~Garlic skin

~Mint

~Rosemary

~Ivy

~Cedar

~Thyme

~Lavender

(The Label got covered in the wax I used…oops)

I charged this jar with lots and lots of green crystals (Jade, Moss Agate, and Green Onyx primarily) with plenty of sunlight and near clean, cool water. I hang this jar on my bed whenever I’m sick or hurt, and often carry it around with me when I’m having bad mental health days as well, but when it’s not on my person for use it’s stored in my first aid kit! I charge it up regularly so it can pass its energy onto all my band-aids, painkillers, antiseptic pastes and other medical supplies. If you want to pair it with a cleansing shower or bath, check out my witchy soaps post!

✨ How To Wake Witchblr ✨

We’ve all seen the hashtag #wakingwitchblr or the term itself at one point. Still, I found that there’s a lack of info on what you can actually do to make witchblr more active. 

So I took it upon myself to create a list of things that anyone can do to revive our amazing community! Enjoy !

1) Don’t Like, Reblog instead 📣

There’s nothing inherently wrong with liking a post, it’s just that due to how Tumblr works, liking a post does virtually nothing. Reblogging, however, lets that post be seen by more and more people. The surefire way to revive witchblr is by reblogging as many witchy posts as you can. 

But what if some posts just doesn’t fit into your blog’s theme, even though you want to support it? Well, you have a couple options:

Reblog anyway. Diversifying your posts actually makes your blog more interesting. You can always tag it as ‘off-topic’ if the different theme bothers you that much.

Create a reblog/spam account! I have one and it is so simple. The post may not gain as much traction compared to if you RB-ed in your main blog, but trust me when I say a single reblog goes a long way.

Share it on other social media. See that arrow-like button down there? Click it and you can share the post anywhere. Send it to your witchy discord servers or your insta groupchat !

 2) Get off the ‘Top’ page. Go to ‘Recent’ 💌

AKA reblog from lesser-known bloggers.

Not only will you support fellow witches creating content, this also give you a chance to talk to them and find your place within Witchblr! Which brings me to my next point…

3) Interact with The Community 💬

If I’m a witch who wants to move away from Tumblr, there will be only one thing that can stop me, and that’s the friends and connections that I’ve made here.

Join online covens and discord servers, ask your witchstagram and witchtok friends for their tumblr url, and just have fun together. 

Interacting with other witches, making friends, even just giving compliments or advices. This is what makes us a community. It’s what makes us stay here. If we don’t interact with each other, than we’re just a bunch of people who likes the same thing without any connection. That’s not witchblr.

4) Diversify Your Tags 🎪

There is a kind of… exclusivity, when you look through the hashtags of witchy posts. Witches only ever tag with “witchblr”, “witchcraft”, and “magick”.

This creates an accurate, non-spammy post, but it is also a post that will only show up on other witches’ dashboard and no one else’s. The community will never grow in this way because there will be no new people finding the community. It’s just an echo chamber.

Instead, diversify your tags. I’m not telling you to tag your ritual oil with ‘cars for sale’, but if you made a travel altar yourself, there’s nothing wrong in tagging it #crafting, #diy, #handmade, etc. 

Non-witches will then find the post and potentially become interested in the community, thus making it grow.

5) Make Original Content 🔮

Original content is the backbone of any community, and witchblr is dying because we’re not producing any. So if you want to revive witchblr, make content of your own.

No, it doesn’t have to be well thought-out. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be good. Original content can be anything! It can be you posting about a witchy thing that happened. It can be your drawing, or a picture you took. It could even be memes???

Or it could be a ‘how to wake witchblr’ post that you wrote because you have a script due 3 weeks ago and somehow this is your idea of procrastination

The point is: just click that ‘Make a Post’ button, and make a freaking post !

6) Share This, and Add Your Own Tips! 🖤

Now that you know these, it’s time to let other people know too ! I put a lot of thoughts into this post, but I have to admit that these tips will only work if everyone in the community is doing it. 

If you have other tips or ways to make Witchblr more active, feel free to reblog with your own addition too.

I love this community, and if you’re reading this post I’m sure you do as well. It’s not gonna happen overnight, but I know that we can be as active as we used to be. We’ve got the heart, we just need the action.

Herb of the Day

#HOTD

Echinacea

Binomial nomenclature:

Echinacea purpurea

Echinacea augustifolia

Echinacea is a genus, or group, of herbaceous flowering plants in the daisy family. The Echinacea genus has nine species, which are commonly called coneflowers. They are found only in eastern and central North America, where they are found growing in moist to dry prairies and open wooded areas.

Today we will deal with my two favoured species, augustifolia and purpurea.

Echinacea angustifolia, the narrow-leaved purple coneflower or blacksamson echinacea, is a North American plantspecies in sunflower family. It is widespread across much of the Great Plains of central Canada and the central United States.

Echinacea angustifolia is a perennial herb up to 40 to 70 centimetres (16 to 28 in) tall with spindle-shaped taproots that are often branched. The stems and leaves are moderately to densely hairy. The plant produces flower heads one per side branch, each at the end of a long peduncle. Each head contains 8-21 pink or purple ray florets plus 200-300 purple disc florets.

Echinacea angustifolia blooms late spring to mid summer. It is found growing in dry prairies and barrens with rocky to sandy-clay soils.There are two subspecies:

Echinacea angustifolia subsp. angustifolia is native to central Canada and the central United States from Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the north to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana in the southEchinacea angustifolia subsp. strigosa has a more limited range in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana.

Obviously I grow and wildcraft the southern variety, but I find them both here sometimes.

Many Native American groups used this plant for a variety of medicinal purposes, including pain relief and relief of colds and toothaches.

Echinacea purpurea is an herbaceousperennial up to 120 cm (47 in) tall by 25 cm (10 in) wide at maturity. Depending on the climate, it blooms throughout spring to late summer. Its cone-shaped flowering heads are usually, but not always, purple in the wild. Its individual flowers (florets) within the flower head are hermaphroditic, having both male and female organs in each flower. It is pollinated by butterflies and bees. Its habitats include dry open woods, prairies and barrens, as well as in cultivated beds.

I grow this Echinacea in the garden, as I find it’s leaves more potent than the western and northern varieties.

Echinacea contains multiple substances, such as polysaccharides, caffeic acid derivatives (including cichoric acid), alkylamides, and glycoproteins.

Traditional herbal medicine

In indigenous medicine of the native American Indians, the plant was used externally for wounds, burns, and insect bites, chewing of roots for toothache and throat infections; internal application was used for pain, cough, stomach cramps, and snake bites.

The plant is important economically, to the pharmaceutical trade. It is purported that all parts of the purple coneflower stimulate the immune system.

Side effects include gastrointestinal effects and allergic reactions, including rashes, increased asthma, and life-threatening anaphylaxis. But I’ve never seen this happen. Side effects of allergy are usually similar to hay fever.

WebMD says

Echinacea seems to activate chemicals in the body that decrease inflammation, which might reduce cold and flu symptoms.

Laboratory research suggests that echinacea can stimulate the body’s immune system, but there is no evidence that this occurs in people.

Echinacea also seems to contain some chemicals that can attack yeast and other kinds of fungi directly.

Magickal uses:

Echinacea is used quite extensively to stregthen and boost spellcraft.

It is used in Defensive Magick, Healing Magick and in various forms of Protection Magick.

If anyone knows any correspondence for Echinacea, please comment. I don’t have it in any book I can find.

As always, I will try to answer any question that you can think of.

Brightest Blessings

Eye Harvester