The Manifestor’s Guide to Magick, or: How I Wound Up Spending Six Hours Grinding Herbs for a Spell
- Jun 20
- 7 min read
About a month and a half ago, I received a call from a friend of Mine. She knew that I had played around with some esoteric practices before, that I enjoyed divination through tarot, and that I had written a few spells for Myself.
She was having difficulty sleeping due to medical issues and hadn't been able to get a proper night's rest in almost five months, rarely if ever getting more than six hours, oftentimes four. She asked Me if I was willing to come up with something for her, a spell of some kind to help her sleep. I immediately agreed, even though I had never yet crafted a spell for someone other than Myself, and even those spells were mostly abstract and vibes-centered, not direct-results oriented.
So...
I sat down to write the spell.
Now, crafting a spell... It's both exactly what you'd expect, and at the same time, it's nothing like what you'd think.
See, you might be imagining a witch hunched over a grimoire, fingers dancing over the pages as they murmur under their breath about eye of newt being too expensive these days.
When, in reality, I was skimming through My compiled list of herbs and gemstones on Google Sheets, comparing it to the books I'd purchased with information about the history of magickal uses and correspondences for each herb/gem. Oh, and eye of newt? It's just an archaic folk name for mustard seed.
Before I go into what the spells I've crafted were meant to do, I should explain what spells as a whole are.
Spells are, at the heart of it, metaphors. Spells are metaphors with intention.
When I sat down to craft My first spell, I had no idea what I was doing, and no clue where to start. I had only the tarot cards I bought as a digital set on Etsy, printed and hand-cut to the same size. I knew, though, that deep down at My center, there wasn't anything daunting about Magick. Not really.
At a certain point I found two books that are now part of My "grimoire" collection (aka two books I bought off of Amazon and a few Google Docs/Sheets with My own notes), but at the start, I just went with scouring the web for "comprehensive list of magickal herbs and gems", or similarly worded search queries. I found some websites that resonated, some that didn't, some that were obviously selling something, and some that were simply there for educational purposes. I sifted through everything and I selected the ingredients that jumped out at Me for My intention for this first spell: Self-love and acceptance of the self into the magickal space.
I didn't have much, but I had a small witchcraft kit by that point in time, and I was using whatever ingredients I had that matched what My intention was.
Rose petals (self-love) were one main ingredient, as were some lavender (centering on the psychic energy) and some sage (cleansing past pain and the space).
When I chose the rose petals, for example, I chose according to how it made Me feel.
A rose is a symbol of a specific type of love. I don't mean romantic love... Though in the social colloquialism it is easy to boil it down to that.
What I mean by a rose being a symbol of a specific type of love is that feeling.
That feeling you get when you look at a rose. It doesn't happen all of the time, of course.
But there was at least one time that you looked at a rose that you either received or saw being given, and went: "Oh." You went. "Oh, that's love."
A rose doesn't mean love because people give roses to their partners on Valentine's Day...
People give roses to their partners on Valentine's Day because a rose somehow holds the embodied archetype of a certain kind of "love".
Carl Jung, who was integral to shaping the modern-day understanding of the term, described Archetypes as blueprints innate to the human mind, simply because the personal unconscious and collective unconscious hold these concepts as universal.
He argued against the pre-existing assumption of the psyche starting as a "tabula rasa", a largely prevalent understanding of the human mind and psyche at the time, which assumed that each human mind comes into its consciousness as a "tabula rasa", or a "clean slate".
Aristotle nearly coined the phrase with this excerpt from Book Three of De Anima (translated as "On the Soul").
"...we said that [the] mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought[.] What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind."
"The mind," Aristotle claimed, "can be anything at all it conceives of. However, it isn't anything until it's begun to think." He compared it to an empty tablet, ready for words but blank as its nature.
But Jung... Jung suggested otherwise.
When Aristotle saw a rose, he probably simply saw a flower. He probably believed that everything he knew about that flower - even the understanding that it was a flower and what a flower as a group classification was - was told to him and taught to him and learned after his consciousness was brought into being.
When Jung saw a rose, on the other hand, he would likely have seen something that may represent a connection to the archetype of a certain type of love.
A metaphor, if you will.
The rose, a flower that has been used for not centuries but millennia as a symbol of love.
It holds a space in the collective unconscious as something that can be recognized all the way back to potentially 100 BC, when Bion of Smyrna, a poet whose body of work has largely been lost to the passage of time, wrote Lament to Adonis.
In this myth shared by Bion, we learn of the love between Adonis and Aphrodite.
Within this 98-line poem, we learn of the Greco-mythological beliefs of the origins of red roses: When Adonis was dying, and as Aphrodite wept for her dying love, his blood, upon hitting the ground, bloomed into beautiful roses, encapsulating their love.
Whether the rose was chosen in this specific story because it was already known as having a connection as a metaphor for love, or whether it was chosen and then the tie-in became the wider sense of the flower...
Either way, the symbol and the association and the metaphor exist and persist.
When I picked out the ingredients for My friend's sleep spell, I chose ingredients that I felt resonated with the intention I was bringing into the space... other than the obvious "sleep": healing, cleansing, purification, protection, softness, and rest.
I wanted to be sure I was approaching this correctly. My friend wasn't asking Me to magickally chloroform her into a sleep that just fulfilled the requirements of "sleep" and nothing more. She was in need of a night of rest, not just sleep.
I had most of the ingredients I needed, and it was only a day or two later that I sat down with My mortar and pestle, a few empty sachets, and the assortment of eight ingredients in front of Me.
I ground the herbs, combined them in a bowl, and filled up the tea bags. When I finally was able to hand off the spell to My friend, she started using them that very night, and a week later (after she had used all of the sachets in steam baths each night), she told Me she had had multiple nights of eight hours. That was early March, and while she has told Me that the insomnia has crept back into her life, she also has told Me that her sleep is still greatly improved from what it had been before.
It kind of blew Me away with how effective it was.
It took Me about three or four weeks, but I finally sat down to write Myself a spell.
I wanted this spell to be more than a spell... I wanted it to be a story. It wound up turning into a 55-part woven tapestry of metaphor to symbolize the coming months that I am manifesting. I wound up sitting down with My craft for six hours.
I started the planning just as I had with My friend's sleep spell, but this time I added many more ingredients. See, I wasn't trying to manifest just one "solid" goal. I was trying to manifest an abundance of energy flowing through My life from now on. I was trying to write a story.
I added Vervain for healing and holding, I set aside Dandelion for wishes and calling spirits. I had basil for wealth, and I even added a couple of cotton pads to the bowl to symbolize softness and grounding.
Some of the ingredients, like barley (used to symbolize my whole-hearted embracing of Myself and My past, even the painful and hurtful parts), were added whole, after being held for a moment in meditation. Others, like the lavender or rose petals, or like the orange peels I'd dried... Those were crushed as I thought about the metaphor behind each ingredient. Each archetype I was trying to "call" with this spell. I wanted to bring in abundance... So I used a potato.
Yes. A potato. Potatoes are such a perfect metaphor for abundance, considering how you can just divide it and cut it, plant it, and get even more potatoes you can then divide from and multiply into an abundance of root vegetables.
Items in magick don't need to be a golden flower from the highest point of the Himalayas.
It's just metaphor. It's all just metaphor with intention. So as long as you feel the meaning behind the object you are using...
As long as your spell is intentional and deeply felt... As long as you let yourself tap in...
All you need to do in order to practice magick is to show up and be.
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