Our food is one of the most important ways of working majick for ourselves and for others, and we often forget that fact. Our food comes from nature, and like all things, there are natural
correspondences to each ingredient that goes into our food and drink. A wise Witch will know how to use those qualities to make every meal an act of majick. While we can call it Kitchen Witchcraft today, it’s part of the overall craft of the Witch, as food is a major part of our lives and sustains our life force.
The foundation of food majick is build upon the application of elemental and astrological
correspondences and the correct use of intention. When you are preparing food, ask yourself, what does this item represent to me? What powers and forces is it aligned to? What am I adding to it? You then start to get an idea of what kind of majick you can do with the food before you. Think about how you would charge the food, with what intentions, and how you would present it and consciously eat it. Along with the food itself, think about your utensils and tools. All utensils should be neutralized and charged with intention for your majick, just like any other altar tool or ritual item. Your knives, spoons, pots, pans, and everything else should be infused with majick.
With your tools in hand, both kitchen tools and ritual tools, you should create sacred space around you when preparing a majickal meal. Cast a circle around the kitchen with light. While you can use your wand, you can also use a wooden kitchen spoon as your kitchen wand. It doesn’t matter if your kitchen is oddly shaped in a way that does not easily accommodate the image of a circle. The bounds of the circle can go through walls. You can visualize a circle around you, even in a square kitchen. The important thing is being in a sacred space, being between the worlds, when preparing a spell through a meal. Just as your other spells are more effective in a majick circle, your food majick will be more effective.
While in your sacred space, with your prepared tools and ingredients to be used, charge each
ingredient. Just like working with crystals, herbs, or even sending healing, get into an alpha state and unite your energy and aura with the energy of the ingredient you are using. Charge it with your
intention. Do this before you do anything further to the food. Do it before you chop it, cook it, or add it to anything else. Fix the intention by simply stating the energy is fixed in the food item and will not dissipate. Each ingredient might have a different intention, and together, they can have an overall purpose, so focus on the individual ingredient intentions as you prepare each ingredient, and the larger overarching intention towards the end of the process once everything has been added.
If you are preparing something with a blade, a kitchen knife, you have charged the knife to act as a focus for you majick, just like a wand. It will catalyze your thoughts and intentions as you chop and cut, so keep focused on your intention for the spell and the work of that specific ingredient. Your energy and intent will flow from you through the blade and into the food. For this reason, many
Witches have a special knife that no one else in the kitchen can use, because it’s a powerful majickal tool.
As you add each ingredient, the stirring is an act of majick. When you add something with intention, stir it in three times, clockwise, to blend it together and amplify its power. Even your normal stirring for a dish can add power to it. Like the knife, the spoon acts as a conduit for your energy.
The power of fire, of heat, will help ignite the spell. Just as petitions are read in a circle and burned to release their majick, or the enchanting of a candle spell begun when the wick is lit, the cooking of
the food ignites the spell and begins the process. Before you put anything into the oven, make sure you’ve majickally prepared the food and fixed the energy. The cooking or baking will activate it, and all who ingest the food will get the benefits of the majick.
The two most popular intentions for food majick are love and healing. Love meals are a great way to share your majick and rituals with your partner, even if they are not actively involved in majick. Some consider it manipulative, but we do so much to set the stage for love in other areas—how we dress, the perfume we wear—that food majick is simply enhancing a wonderful date. When having a lover or potential love over for a meal, charge the entire atmosphere with your intention. Start with a red tablecloth, red candles, and romantic flowers, all charged. Enchant all the food for love, using herbs and spices associated with Venus and Mars. Have a little incense in the background and play appropriate music to set the mood.
Healing meals are using the majick of the food, as well as its nutritional properties, to increase healing. Much of our traditional healing majick was a basic understanding of herbalism with
intention. Knowing which herbs settled the stomach, such as fennel seeds, and which ones burned out an infection, like garlic, can seem like a greater form of majick to those without the same knowledge, but the use of intention and sacred space combined with this knowledge really empowers a spell. Traditionally ingredients ruled by the Sun, for overall health, and Mercury, for improving the communication and flow in the body systems, are used in healing food majick.
A Witch friend who was having a big family dinner decided to do a little majick through her food. She had some questions about the family history, and generally folks were pretty tight lipped around her. So she did a truth spell in the entire meal. Everything she cooked was chosen to release truthful information. While you might have a vision of something strange or hilarious happening, as if it were a movie or television sitcom, it wasn’t quite like that. They were simply a family sharing stories and history of what happened to them and their loved ones, but everything was truthful. By the end of the meal, they were all hysterically laughing at the tales that were revealed around that table. She got a better understanding of her family, and they all enjoyed doing it.
For more traditionalists, resources such as the classic Culpeper’s Herbal by Nicholas Culpeper list a wide variety of foods, as well as herbs, with their astrological, if not purely majickal, virtues. The work of Scott Cunningham, including his Magic of Food and Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, is also quite helpful in picking the appropriate associations with foods and seasoning.
Apple – Apple is a fruit tree associated with Venus, bringing love and harmony, as well as an herb of
the faery realm, and the majick of Avalon. The seeds form a pentacle, making the apple a sacred symbol of the Witch. Drinking apple juice can be a form of a love potion, for self-love as well as to attract a lover that is right for you.
Carrots – Carrots are a plant of mercury, used for healing of all kinds. Carrots are rich in minerals,
and like the old folk tradition, are excellent for the eyes.
Cinnamon – Use in pies, cookies, and other pastries for a great money spell. Cinnamon can be added
to your coffee or tea to create a money potion to ingest. Ruled by Jupiter, it increases your status and wealth.
in the traditional Yuletide pagan drink, wassail.
Juice – Fruit and vegetable juices are a way to subtly add majick of various ingredients to other
dishes. Juices can be used as a base to flavor various foods naturally, and add some power to the meal. They can be used as a part of dressings for salad.
Leafy Greens – Most leafy greens, and in fact, all green plants, have associations with the planets
Venus and the Earth, for love, sensuality, and grounding. Many dark greens have a high iron content, and since iron is the metal of Mars, they will carry those associations as well.
Lemon – Ruled by the Sun and Moon, lemons are a great cleanser of the body and energy and are
also rich with antioxidants. They are also for success, having that lemon yellow color connected with the gold of the Sun. I use a lot of lemons in my food majick. Lemon can tenderize all meats when freshly squeezed.
Millet – Millet is ruled by the Sun and, as a grain, by the Earth. Used for overall health and well-
being.
Mustard – Ruled by the Sun and Mars, mustard is used for success and well being.
Orange – Oranges are ruled by both the Sun and Mercury, making them a food of healing and
success. They are very empowering.
Parsley – Parsley is ruled by Mars and is an excellent cleansing herb for the kidneys. It bring the
beneficial aspects of the planet Mars.
Red Peppers – Red peppers of all kinds are used for majick involving a little spice, passion, love,
and creativity.
Root Vegetables – All root vegetables help ground, center and balance. They help you be present in
your body, and they ground excess and unhealthy energies. They are a great food for those who are flighty and never fully present in day-to-day life.
Strawberries – Ruled by Venus and Mars, strawberries bring love and passion, along with a
sweetness that makes them particularly good for romantic majick.
Meat is a tricky subject for many Witches, due to concerns about the environment and inhumane farming practices. Some Witches are carnivores, and some are not. Some feel they must eat meat for issues of health, while others strongly believe that for health and moral reasons, it is imperative to not eat any meat. While I still choose to eat meat, my own daughter, Penny, does not.
In an interview for The Astrarium, an online spirituality site, Penny said:
“I feel that our plants have a higher understanding of the community, and I feel like the plant world also understands the breakdown of matter to make a larger connection to universal mind. So as much as I feel like plants feel and have souls, I also feel like their purpose is of a much wider spectrum of universal unity. I personally would be happier if nothing had to die in order for us to
live, but when you look at the true order of nature, you begin to understand its components, and how water and plant life feed the universal energies through natural life cycles, like a heartbeat. They put out impulses of light waves and knowledge like a migration, and feeding the human bodies is part of that migration.
“I feel like thanking the animal and honoring them should always be done, being grateful from your heart for what you have received, and if you must eat animals, I would hope that you would grieve just the same for the loss of that live. I don’t expect everyone to just stop killing animals, although it would be nice to see in my lifetime. I personally don’t think there is a good enough reason to kill our animals for food at all. In my view, vegetarianism does not deny the cycle of life; in fact, I think by eating green living food, you are embracing it even closer. When you drink a glass of water, no organism died to feed you, so there can be no denial of the cycle of life.”
Animals can have a very different evolutionary consciousness, and Witches need to be aware of that. Honoring the animals is one reason why many Witches will use bones and skulls in their majick, honoring the fallen spirit, though we usually find such items while wildcrafting in the woods and never harvest them. The animal fur used in our rituals is from live and shedding animals. While we would not use them today, our ancestors used human skulls for the same reason, to honor and
commune with those who had fallen. Today we use skull depictions through art, statuary, and carvings, for it’s is not socially acceptable to connect with our ancestors in that way.
Food can be neutralized and charged as soon as you get it home from the supermarket. Today our food comes from a thousand different places, and it travels quite far to get us. Who knows that kind of energies and intentions it has been exposed to on its travels? It’s not that any of these locations are inherently bad, but we simply don’t know the journey. It is far better to be safe that sorry by using our majick to clear it. In particular I always clear and charge poultry, meat, and fish. While it is
wonderful to eat a fully organic diet, with any meats coming from free-range sources, it’s not always possible for many of us. We live on fixed incomes and have to support our families on wages that do not always allow for it.
Make a ritual out of putting away the groceries by blessing all the food. Blessing our food has been a ritual passed on for centuries, and we’ve tended to forget it, or purposely not use it, thinking of
“saying grace” as a Christian tradition. But Pagan cultures across the world for centuries have been giving thanks for the exchange of life for life. They give thanks to the animals, plants, and all the people who got it to the table. In today’s age of fast food, no one gives thanks to the cow when going through the drive through. They try to not even think about the cow. We need to give thanks and go even further, particularly in our home. It doesn’t take a lot of time or energy, and the patterns we establish today will continue in our lifetime if we set the intention of blessing and thanks.