The Wandsmith. The Magick of Wood BLOG PT1

The Wandsmith. The Magick of Wood BLOG PT1

As previously mentioned, I got into witchcraft and the occult at a tender age… Drawing my first tarot deck myself… Making black candles by melting down white household candles and coloring them with soot… I saved the wages from my newspaper paperboy round back in the 1980s to mail order the original hand printed early version of Liber Null, an essential work on Chaos magick, from the famous UK occult bookstore “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Leeds (sadly long closed)… SO FIFTY YEARS before opening our specialized pagan supplies online store I was spellcasting with sigils and candle magick rituals…

And somewhere along the road I got my first pocket knife, and learned to whittle and carve, like you do,,,, I was always useless as an artist… My stickmen are embarrassing… But for some reason I have always been able to work in 3D. SO long before I swung hammers and became a smith of a famous witchcraft supplies store, I was a wood waster – a carver…

I grew up in the ancient woodlands of Kent in southeast England… The so called “Garden Of England”. And in those woods we held seances among other shenanigans.

I loved those woods, and learned the native trees of Celtic England, the woods of the Celtic Ogham… Hazel was In abundance… Obviously one of the most important woods for magickal ritual tools for witchcraft and the occult. English Hazel is a liminal tree, which is why it is sacred to Mercury… It dwells on the edges of things… Clearings, paths, the edge of woods and forests… Neither one place or the other… Just like hedgeriding… Hazel is found in the “in-between” places… Many if not most of the old world woods of the Celtic Ogham can be found in the Americas… But often they are very different sub-species… Hazel is no exception… In the USA it is more of a shrub, a glorified bush that produces few nuts… English Hazel is a tree and grows about 30-40 foot tall and puts up multiple “withies” instead of a central trunk… Withies or Wythies are long high canes… These fibrous flexible canes have been sought after since prehistoric times by humans for basket making, canes, screen making and so on….

This mercurial liminal nature is in fact why the old grimoires and black books of witchcraft insist on VIRGIN hazel cut at sun rise on midsummer as the PERFECT wand for witchcraft and ceremonial magick… So what is virgin hazel? We do not know for sure, but there are clues… Some say it is a tree or branch / wythie that is not yet a year old… Others say it is a young tree that has yet to bear fruit/nuts… I believe the most likely explanation is that it meant an UNCUT tree…. Why? As I said, Hazel trees were VERY useful throughout human history… SO Hazel trees near human settlements would have been cut over and over to harvest the useful withies… eventually you would have to have gone a long way into the wilderness to find a hazel tree that no one else had cut for any reason… And tools from the old grimoire were SUPPOSED to be hard to find – its part of the magick – something that is hard to get is therefore special and requires much work to acquire.

My personal wand to this day is wythie of hazel that I cut from a virgin tree one midsummer morning at sunrise in Kent… These days it is much easier to find virgin trees as no one bothers to craft with wildcrafted hazel anymore…

I followed instructions (mostly) and cut the wythie at dawn and cut it to measure from my elbow to the tip of my index finger. I was not a blacksmith in those days so I did not forge a special sword JUST for cutting the wand. I used a machete instead, but did manage to cut it in a single stroke as per the instructions in the Key Of Solomon The King.

(one of Paul's hand carved English Hazel wands from our witchcraft supplies online store)

After letting it season for 6 months I lightly carved it to vaguely resemble a phallus and sanded it finely… And of course oiled it with anointing oil. Being very much a ceremonial magician in those days I used Abramelin Oil, which is a fiery blend of cinnamon, myrrh, and calamus or galangal. We sell our own blend of Abramelin Oil on our witchcraft supplies online store!

I also consecrated the wand in a ritual using incense of the element of fire.

Let’s talk about that… Many if not most occult and witchcraft traditions consider the wand the principle ritual weapon of the element of FIRE. But some branches of Wicca swap the elements of the dagger and wand and have the dagger as fire and the wand as air…. I’m not a gatekeeper… So I will not say that identifying the wand with air is wrong…. But my preference is that it is of the element of fire… My reasoning is that if we go back to ancient Greece the Thyruss wand of Dionysus is basically a pinecone on a stick and obviously represents the phallus, the generative forces of the male. The sword or dagger has two edges and represents decisions and justice and therefore the element of air. Much modern witchcraft borrows heavily from ceremonial magick, and the Hermetic order of the golden dawn has the wand as FIRE, it is painted RED and again its shaped like a phallus… I would argue the dagger makes a very bad phallus for obvious reasons which is why it does not work for me as being of the element of fire. I believe the confusion is thanks to Gerald Gardner and his system of wicca… He was a student of Aleister Crowley and used Crowley’s rituals extensively. One of Crowley’s most famous rituals is The Gnostic Mass… And Gerald Gardner quoted chunks of it verbatim in his “Great Rite” – the 3^rd degree wiccan initiation ritual. Gardners Great Rite is an obvious re-write of Crowley’s gnostic mass with a little more added paganism and the ceremonial magick toned down a little. In the Gnostic Mass the priestess bares the two feminine elemental weapons – the chalice and disk/plate and the priest bears a spear – which is a combination of the staff (wand) and dagger (air). At the “climax” of the ritual the priest puts a small part of the ritual cake/cookie on the tip of the spear and it dips the whole into the chalice… Therefore representing ritually sex magick – the combination of the male and female elements… I believe Gardner got confused, thought the spear a too big and unwieldly ritual weapon, and used the dagger instead as a smaller version. Cakes and wine – the part of wicca pagan ritual is therefore directly taken from the gnostic mass. But there is a problem… If the dagger is the phallus and is dipped into the chalice to represent sexual union (again , ewww, the dagger is not a phallus) then that is air and water combined… And then the dagger is again used to consecrate the cookies (earth)… So WHERE IS THE FIRE??? Our coven uses the WAND (fire) to consecrate the cookies (earth) and the Dagger (air) to consecrate the chalice (water). These are also opposite/opposing elements, and this works much better I think than Gardners method.

Gnostic Mass Priestess Baring The Chalice And Platter horizontally.

The gnostic Mass Priest baring the composite weapon of the spear vertically with its Staff/wand and dagger/tip.

I think that’s enough for part 1, I have customers to serve in our witchcraft supplies store… We discussed English Hazel as one of the most important of the old Celtic Ogham holy woods… We will look at some other notable Ogham woods in the next blog and more wandlore.

Here are our current inventory of Paul’s hand carved woods, including English hazel and others on our witchcraft store online! Paul's Hand Carved Wood Witchcraft Wands

Witchcraft supplies & wicca supplies online from one of the USA's BEST pagan Witchcraft Store Online!! RATED in the top 10 Witchcraft Stores online for our exclusive Witchcraft Supplies

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