PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Candelabras are an excellent addition to your altar to hold your ritual candles as well as to set the mood. Both elegant and romantic, with molten wax flowing down the sides, they can be nothing less than splendid. While you can always buy a candelabra, it is much better to make them yourself and place your imprimatur and your own special kind of magic in them. The following are the steps I learned from the one and only Aurelio Voltaire, who is a writer, musician, animator, graphic novelist, comic, and all-around Renaissance man.

Supplies:

To enhance the magic of your ritual candles, you can create your own, filling them with your energy and intentions! You can adorn them with big sequins, curio crosses, symbols such as the Egyptian ankh, faux pearls, or anything lovely and suitably glittery that can be added to the sides of the candles to create a “stained glass” appearance. Another technique is to mix in your magical objects, stirring them into the melted wax inside a mold. An even easier way to do this is to take a soft beeswax pillar candle and “stud” the sides and the candle top with tiny crystal pieces that cost just pennies per pound. You can save them after melting the candles down and reuse them again and again. Nowadays, candle-making classes abound, and you can get leftover or “recycled” wax to use, melt, and pour into glass votives for your own uniquely magical candle creations.

Traditionally, these oils are considered to have emotional healing properties as well as simply smelling marvelous on your skin and in your home. Just burning candles scented with these oils will be magical! Cedarwood oil has a woody and pleasant aroma and can also act as a natural sedative. Studies indicate it stimulates the production of melatonin, regulates sleep patterns, and brings a sense of serenity. A pre-sleep massage with cedarwood oil is truly therapeutic and will allow you to rest deeply and awaken refreshed and ready for anything.

Clary sage essential oil not only has a splendid smell, but has been shown in studies to positively influence the levels of the happiness-stimulating chemical dopamine in the brain. Perfect for uplifting the mood, clary sage helps to ease feelings of anxiety by calming the mind while boosting confidence and self-esteem.

Making massage candles is very similar to making any other type of potted candle. I recommend using soy wax as it is so gentle on the skin. Soy is also nice and soft, so it melts easily and stays together in a puddle after melting and can be reused by thrifty crafters. It won’t irritate your skin unless you have a soy allergy; if you have an allergy to soy, you can use beeswax instead, which is widely used. (For example, beeswax is in nearly every single Burt’s Bees product.) The addition of the oils prevents it from hardening again and enables your skin to absorb it. Essential oils or cosmetic-grade fragrance oils are also added to create a soothing atmosphere. All soap-making fragrances, which are also soy candle safe, are perfect choices for scenting your massage candles. Try the basic directions below to make your first candle. For every three ounces of wax, you’ll add one ounce of liquid oil and one-quarter ounce of fragrance. I suggest making two candles in four-ounce metal tins while you master this craft.

You will need these elements:

Food can be foreplay, a wonderful prelude to a night of love. I recommend consuming these aphrodisiacs for your pleasure:

• Almonds, or erotically shaped marzipan

Did you know that your cornea – the transparent front part of the eye that covers the iris, pupil and anterior chamber – is about 78% water? That means we are constantly looking through a very thin layer of, essentially, water. If water is all one, and holds and remembers everything like a record, that means this record sits right over our eyes at all times.

I have seen very strange and interesting things when I close my eyes, and I don’t mean visualizing them in my mind. I mean what looks like completely real, moving 3D images right in front of my eyes, like a hallucination, in glowing greens against a smoky black background. It looked only what I can describe as trippy.

For a long time now I have been playing with the strange and intriguing idea of “eye scrying”, which is just what it sounds like. No tools, no mirrors, no bowl of water, just your own closed eyes, intuition and all the strange shapes and colors that unfold there behind your eyelids.

You see things like the typical floaters, you see what is probably a tiny pulsing blood vessel. But if you focus, yet also at the same time sort of unfocus, if you set the intention and just look at the backs of your eyelids. It sounds strange, but I think there is a lot that can be seen and learned when scrying into the darkness and the water of your own eyes. If we scry into pools and bowls of water and the like, why not scry into our own eyes? There is no magic that can be worked with tools and bells and whistles that can’t be worked with the human body.

Imagine the liquid and the delicate, glassy cornea being encoded with the same visions and experiences of your ancestors. Their memories are in your DNA and their vision is now your vision. You’re really looking beyond the watery cornea, beyond the backs of your eyelids. The eye or the cornea create a kind of portal into quite literally seeing very differently, potentially into other dimensions.

We shouldn’t underestimate our own abilities and bodies and parts that are actually very mystical if you think about it, such as eyes. Eyes are an amazing organ and the amount of water that makes them up is intriguing to me. Doing this exercise in a watery environment enhances the experience. The more water, the more there is to be heard, felt and seen, I have found. It is also best to cover the eyes or otherwise block out as much light as possible.

Give it a try, see what you see. Have you ever done this or experienced anything similar? Have you now tried it and had any results?

Once we dwelt in the fertile plains. Beef was our food, the milk of cows our drink.

Then we were driven out.

Into the rocky, unfertile hills we fled, which cannot sustain a cow.

We became a people of the goat, for whom the Horned wears caprine horns and hide.

Like goats, we witches are survivors.

That's why it can't help but seem to me something of a moral failing that I don't like goat's milk.

Oh, I've tried. “This chèvre has a nice, lemony tang to it,” I say hopefully.

But in my heart, I understand that it's really myself that I'm trying to talk around.

Maybe it's just a matter of what I'm used to.

Maybe I'm secretly longing for those fat days of our onetime freedom.