As promised in last month’s post-this month I have set out to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about magic and spell work. Whether you are a professional magical worker, a talented amateur, a novice, adept, or someone who just wants to understand how magic actually works-once you start working with rituals and spells these are the questions that consistently come up.
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I recently read an online post about Japanese food in which the author’s grandmother advised her to chew her first bite of rice eighty-eight times. The process of taking rice from seed to tongue apparently takes eight-eight steps, including the agricultural growing process, harvesting, processing, cooking, and so forth. Chewing eighty-eight times is a way, then, of showing respect to the rice, the farmers, the cooks, and so forth.
I have long been interested in what author Margaret Visser calls “the rituals of dinner” in the book of the same title. Visser has penned several tomes on the anthropological construction of mealtimes, including the aforementioned Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner, and she dives into everything from good table manners (children pack their mouths with food because as infants they had taste sensors in their cheeks, for example) to utensil choice to throwing dinner parties to deciding to prepare food oneself or to have it prepared (and take the chance that someone might intentionally poison it). Perhaps my favorite chapter in Rituals, however, is “Dinner is Served,” in which she looks at hand-washing, dinner bells, the role of “tasters” (to avoid those pesky poisons), and most importantly, noticing the food, the host or hostess, the other diners, and other atmospheric elements. Such notice, and the natural expressions of appreciation which accompany it, have become the traditions of saying “grace” or “thanks” for the meal before eating.
...So you’ve got a crush on an acquaintance, and you’d like to try and stir up some passionate-lusty feelings between the two of you. Or you’re facing a real crisis and need to shake some sense into your nice-but-oblivious boss so they’ll grant the favor you’ve asked of them in time to meet your deadline.
There are plenty of situations where you may want to sweeten a person to you in a certain context, and where the circumstances can also stand for some well-intentioned agitation to get things moving and break through some inertia that is hampering your progress.
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