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The best magickal tool is the one you have on hand when you need it.  I own wands, swords, athames, censers, candles, and all the other accoutrement one might expect of a witch, but what is the tool I use most often?  My phone.  Why?  Because I always have it on me, unlike the vast array of traditional tools that live at home on my altar.  Here are my top five most frequently used magickal apps, in no particular order.

1. Kindle.  Thanks to cloud based storage I have access to my entire digital library anytime, anywhere I have cell signal.  I frequently use my Kindle app to look up references from spell books, herbal formularies, and field guides.  If you’re out and about in the world and need to look up correspondences, herbal contraindications, or who’s who in the witchy world then this app is invaluable.  Unfortunately, a lot of the best magickal books aren’t available digitally yet, so it’s no substitute for a proper library.

This post also appears at www.tarotbyhilary.com.

Once upon a time, a young foolish teenager cast a spell.

She cast a spell at one of the many power sites in the world, where all the elements meet in one place. Air, water, fire, and earth ... where the land meets the ocean. She found a pure white stone, and asked the Gods to bring to her a true love. She was tired of waiting, so she sought out a way to bring him to her. She held the stone in her left hand, and cast the love spell in the way that she was taught to cast it: without envisioning a specific person and without being unduly specific, because magic follows the path of least resistance, and magic often does not work in ways that humans understand or can anticipate. She held the stone firmly, and when she felt ready, she threw the stone out into the ocean, into the crest of a huge wave, and determined that the waves of the oceans constantly coming into shore would eventually bring love into her life.

It took three years and many relationships and coincidences for him to arrive.

How did she know that he was the one she asked the sea to bring to her?

His name means "from the sea."

I wrote this little “fairy tale” story back in 2007, when I still was with the person in question whose name meant “from the sea.” Yes, that young foolish teenager that cast the love spell was me, and yes, the story above (though flowery in language) really happened. Why am I writing about it now? That spell taught me very valuable lessons in how spell-casting really works.

Who wants to win a Mini Silver Boyer Charming Oracle? It comes in a sparkly snowflake bag and includes twenty silver charms (it was one of my beta sets I used to test our oracle).

You may have saw me mention our shiny charms and how they can be used for meditation, ritual, vision boards, altars, creative writing and divination. Now, you can have a chance to win a mini-set to see how this particular tool can work for you.

In his brilliant comic novel, The Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), Lucius Apuleius (ca. 124-ca. 170 CE) spies on a witch getting ready for her evening jaunt. She schmeers herself with ointment, turns into an owl, and flies off. Apuleius thinks this looks like fun, and tries the ointment himself.

Silly cowan.

He's transformed (you can't say he didn't deserve it) into a jackass. In this form he is bought by some galli, the itinerant priests of the Syrian Goddess who, whenever they're not taking up collections or screwing as many guys as they can manage to wrap their legs around, tour the countryside going into trances and giving fake oracles.

Eventually the galli get tired of having to come up with new oracles all the time, so they hit on a solution: the foolproof answer to all questions.

Yoke the oxen, plow the land:

tall the golden grain will stand.

This particular blog is focused on divination, and on giving readings, but the idea of developing habits that support good practice can be generalized to many other situations.

I'm always on the lookout for symbols, stringing them together like mystical pearls--or, perhaps, like magical mala beads inscribed with sacred prayers, spiritual insight and everyday wisdom--begging for me to decode and apply their particular meaning for my life. 

If you think about it, everything we tell ourselves is a story--including the way we decode symbols.

The moon has not come up yet, and my neighborhood is dark and cold. It strikes me how very dark it is tonight, compared with just a few weeks ago. The holiday lights are gone. The hills behind my house are dark as pitch, but less than a month ago I could have easily made out street after street in sharp detail, because the stringed lights were so bright and covered so many houses and trees. Tonight is very dark, but clear so the stars are very bright. It is biting cold out, with a sharp breeze out of the North. Nothing is stirring out there. The trees are bare and hard as wire, there is no hint of a bud anywhere. It is Winter, deep and austere.

Once the glitter of the holiday season all gets put away, and we settle into Winter's deep freeze and stillness, we might feeled challenged or distracted. For many of us, Winter means increased expense, work and worry. Snow is beautiful indeed, til the fifteenth time you've had to shovel inches of it off your driveway, and then join a white-knuckled, treacherous commute. It's wearying, carrying extra layers, taking cautious steps. Everything seems to take longer. We feel less vital, cooped up, perhaps depressed by the cold weather and dark skies. While there can be so much beauty and revelry in Winter, it is for many people the hardest, least joyful time of the year.