Diana Rajchel
T here are few things as gratifying to a Witch with a project as an occult shop. The books that you drool over, the wafting incense, the shine of the crystals, the fascinating knickknacks and herbs to delight any Witch’s inner magpie … Nothing will ever replace the blessed shop. Yet for the determined magician, any place can be an occult supplier if you have the know-how, attention, and imagination. Dollar stores, craft stores, city sidewalks, bowling alleys, coffee shops—they all have potential for the Witch on a mission. But today—today is all about the hardware store.
Most Witches have found themselves in this situation at some point: You’re short on time because you have three errands to run, two of which place you across town from your preferred botanica half an hour before it closes. You could run across town for that charm you need, but that would leave you with very little breathing room. Better to look for supplies where you are: near a big box hardware store. Walk in and acknowledge that sea of drill bits and mysterious items called Craftsman. What you really see, on the crowded shelves of seemingly random objects, is an ocean of infinite possibilities. The first tool of Witchcraft is imagination—and yes, you can bring it with you to Home Depot.
Your purposes may vary: love or money, a bug trap for a pesky, untranquil spirit, or maybe something to bring fairies to your garden. The following are just a few of the many, many things a hardware store has to offer a Witch.
Screws and Nails
While coffin nails hold a special place in the hearts of Hoodoo practitioners, and rusty nails are preferred for the ever-useful Witch bottle, they aren’t required. Nails can rust just fine after you put them in the bottle, and coffin nails are just nails that happened to be used in or intended for a coffin. The magical use of nails and screws can extend to all sorts of workings: nails also come in handy when etching symbols on a candle or into clay (did you know you can make your own clay?), and the iron makes them an effective protection charm against evil, especially when you shape two of them into a cross and bind them together with twine or wire.
Screws, while able to do most of what a nail can, have added symbolism due to their spiral shape, their use as a means of facilitating movement between joints, and their ability to hold heavy objects in place longer than a nail might. You can use the spiral of a screw to imbue the land around a property with a specific emotional state, “pressing” a sense of peace or vitality into the land itself. You can even use the screw to “infect” the walls it touches with that specific mood, as you drive the spiral in and imagine the mood spreading throughout your home. The twisting action may also “twist” negative intentions sent your way, warping them into something that serves your highest good.
Mirrors
If you have watched any iteration of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you are familiar with magic mirrors. While they are the most popular (and affordable) tool for scrying, they also offer a host of other possibilities as sources of reflection and manifestation. While a mirror is often used as either a divination tool or a means of defense, its place in manifestation work cannot be ignored. Painting a sigil or doing an image transfer of what you want onto a surface can act as a psychic 3-D printer.
You need not limit yourself to actual mirrors; any reflective surface bears the metaphysical qualities of a mirror. Hardware stores sell hoards of such items, including tape, metal pipes, wires, and metal sheeting. Adapt the intention of the mirror to the shape of its surface. For example, a round mirror might serve as a shield that bounces back negative energy. A reflective surface in narrow form, such as a metal tube or pipe, might represent a work pipeline, and a path you wish to reverse or change.
Tile
Many chain hardware stores have free tile sample displays so customers can take a piece home and compare it with fabric swatches and paint samples. A single ceramic tile comes in handy for use as a heatproof stand for a small cast-iron cauldron, as a place for charcoal incense, or as the spot on which to rest a pillar candle burning for a specific purpose. Some practitioners might paint a sigil on one of these tiles and use it for daily meditation until a goal is accomplished. Ceremonial magic workers can arrange tiles into flashing colors for shifting consciousness and color energy workings.
A single ceramic tile comes in handy for use as a heatproof stand for a small cast-iron cauldron, as a place for charcoal incense, or as the spot on which to rest a pillar candle burning for a specific purpose.
Houseplants and Seeds
Most hardware stores also have a garden section. Since plants form the roots of most Witchcraft practices, even the mechanically disinclined may venture into hardware stores for these offerings. Witch-friendly plants that are common in hardware stores include ferns, date palms, and ivy. While we often associate these plants with office spaces seeking a barrier against the existential dread induced by fluorescent lighting and gray-brown cubicle walls, they also act as fabulous air filters. Each plant also has an association/purpose related to Witchcraft. Ferns ward off trouble; their seeds are used to promote invisibility and have powerful associations with Midsummer/St. John’s Eve. Ivy has a long tradition as a protective plant, both inside and outside the home. Date palms are especially potent; not only can they enhance male sexuality, but the leaves also drive off astral nasties.
Most hardware stores carry seeds on a seasonal basis, and almost any plant is popular among the witchy set. Basil, fennel, tomato, hyssop, and rosemary are often among the standard seed packets available, all of which have rich herbal folklore behind them. While most people buy seeds with the intention to plant them, the seeds themselves are useful in potions and incenses, especially those intended to release potential.
Soil
Those with the funds to travel may enjoy collecting different types of soil from around the world for different purposes. Sometimes, however, you need to bury a poppet, you have no car, and that strip of trees at the edge of the mall parking lot always has a security vehicle right there. On those occasions, just use potting soil. You can bury that poppet, put your energetically buzzing ritual jewelry into a flowerpot to ground, or use a soil-filled flowerpot as a spot to cool your cauldron—a peat-based soil is best for this last purpose.
Grow Lights
Most people think of grow lights as fancy tables and tubes meant to hover over gigantic trays of plants, usually of dubious legality. Yet grow lights come in forms much more affordable than those used by gardeners dedicated to growing exotic crops. A simple grow bulb costs less than ten dollars and can fit in a basic desk lamp. A devoted herbalist can use this year round to grow herb greens and small crops (such as cat grass) and to give belabored plants a boost in cold weather. For the more symbolic thinker, point a lamp with a grow bulb at a sigil drawn on a piece of paper to add a little heat to your purpose or to encourage growth—all the better if the sigil is placed on top of some potting soil for this process.
Colored Lightbulbs
Fans of color magic will love colored lightbulbs, but it’s important to pay attention to some surprising safety warnings. Blue light requires special attention and careful use. While it can boost one’s mood and is associated with reducing suicide attempts on train lines, excessive exposure to it causes the body to produce less melatonin and the short wavelength can cause migraines in those prone to neurological conditions. Limit exposure to blue lights to no more than an hour a day, especially in winter.
Significant studies have not been done on the effects of lights of other colors. But for safety’s sake, when you use them, assume you will need a timer. You can purchase light timers at hardware stores as well, and their application can add some wonderful ebb-and-flow effects to the energy you apply to a given purpose.
For the most part, the colors of lightbulbs follow the common symbolic associations of a given color. There is another consideration here, however: every person has a different neurological response to color. This means that most people will have a strong color preference, along with possible color aversions. If you have a color aversion, don’t use the corresponding colored lightbulb—your distaste for the color will, on an energy level, read as an aversion to whatever it is that color represents.
Here are some basic color references.
Blue: mood shifts, happiness, calm, focus, peace (but use this color sparingly)
Red: passion, intense focus, stimulation, strength
Green: healing, personal growth, opening the heart, emotional connection
Yellow: success, vitality, happiness, brightening, solar energy
Wires
Wires are a great aid to crystal gridding. You can wrap wire around each crystal and form connections between the crystals of your choice, then set items within the grid that you wish to charge.
Just as wires conduct electricity, they also conduct magical energy. Crafty Witches like to use them for wire-wrap jewelry, although traditionally this material comes from a jewelry or crafting supplier that produces wire for the express purpose of adornment. Wires are a great aid to crystal gridding. You can wrap wire around each crystal and form connections between the crystals of your choice, then set items within the grid that you wish to charge. You may want to use point-to-point energy transference, for instance, connecting citrine and quartz on either side of a CPU for a better processing charge. You can also use wires as a way of binding a lucky charm to yourself or to a business card.
Copper Wire
Copper deserves a special mention of its own because of its cleansing and protective properties. It costs more than most other types of wire, because heavy mining has made it an increasingly less common substance. An ankle bracelet made of copper wire wicks negative energy right off you and grounds it immediately. Gridding a rose quartz, amethyst, citrine, and clear quartz with copper creates a peaceful, protected space that can enhance focus and clear negative energy from almost any object. In addition, there are anecdotes about copper jewelry relieving arthritis pain and improving circulation.
Doors and Gates
Thresholds form the most powerful anchors of protective magic. It may seem a little strange to discuss using an actual door as a magical tool, but it is a way to add the benefits of threshold magic to a rented home. For some reason, owning the house to which a threshold belongs packs more of an energetic wallop than renting it. This may be because properties with owners on site tend to have less traffic or because of the centuries upon centuries of cultural importance placed on land ownership. If you can get a door—just so you own a door—it’s worth considering. If space is a problem but you still want something to place house protection charms under, a gate can also work.
So what on earth does having a stray door do? It creates a threshold that you yourself own, no matter what. This forms a magical anchor that you can use in several ways, whether to create ritual drama by walking in and out of that particular door or to add storage or a display space for artwork and hanging knickknacks. Creating an altar around the door, and keeping it clean and dusted, adds a level of magical protection to your home that few renters typically enjoy.
To create that threshold safety, cleanse and bless the door as you would any other magical object. Smudge it, wash it, and anoint it with oil and tell it about its intended purpose in your home. Since it is a door, make it clear what you would like it to allow in—and what you would like it to keep out. You may want to go ahead and hang a protective talisman on it, such as a pentacle or an evil eye charm. An added advantage is that you need not bury ritual leftovers under any doorstep—you can simply place them in plant pots at the base of this particular door inside your home. You may also incorporate the door into your home as a means of storage, display, or concealment.
Hardwood
While marching out into the woods and befriending a tree is the most environmentally friendly way of accessing tree power, sometimes a slice of a board at a hardware store is preferable to braving a blizzard. Square tiles can serve as altar bases, and wood dust makes a fabulous rolled incense base. Hardwood dowel rods are a great foundation for wands, especially when combined with wire wrap or glue in order to connect crystals or other symbols.
Keys
While fancy skeleton keys get all the witchy cred, a plain old mass-produced house key or house key blank works just as well. Sometimes it works even better, because no one suspects the boring key.
Keys traditionally open things and protect them. Just as the athame can harm or heal, the key can close or open. This is both its purpose and its warning—be careful to think about what you open to, and think as much about what you lock out. You may want to assign certain keys to certain doors (whether or not those doors lock) as a way of accessing threshold magic.
Toolboxes
An eternal problem faced by practicing Witches is where to store the materials of the Craft. Since no one has, as of yet, opened a container store catering to Witches, we are forced to improvise. Fortunately, storage sheds, toolboxes, and cabinets work just as well for Witches as they do for plumbers—and really well for Witches who are plumbers! Those boxes with thirty tiny drawers can house small charms, herbs, or buttons. The larger boxes can hold smudges, ritual tools, and larger containers of herbs and powders. Cabinets can hold everything—and all the better if they hold everything well enough that you can read the labels with ease!
Witchcraft is ultimately a discipline. To some, it is a religion. To all, it is a state of mind. While there is much to love about that state of mind when in a bookshop filled with wafting incense and shiny jewelry, sometimes a Witch’s life takes us elsewhere. When that happens, it’s important to remember that magic is everywhere and everything has an innate energy. Whether you’re at a dollar store or a hardware store, looking at everything around you with your intent in mind and a good understanding of folk logic will unwrap a world of magical possibility. Your imagination is your most important tool of practice. Always bring it with you to the hardware store.
Sources and Notes
Cunningham, Scott. Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1985.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1890. Reprint, New York: Dover, 2002.
McKean, Cameron Allan. “How Blue Lights on Train Platforms Combat Tokyo’s Suicide Epidemic.” Next City. March 20, 2014. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-blue-lights-on-train-platforms-combat-tokyos-suicide-epidemic.
“What Are the Effects of Blue Light Exposure on Our Health?” Blue Light Exposed. www.bluelightexposed.com/#what-are-the-effects-of-blue-light-exposure-on-our-health.
Diana Rajchel is a Witch, psychic reader, and practitioner of the dark arts of community building. She has practiced Witchcraft for twenty years and cohosts the Youtube show Psychic Witch Talk. She is the author of Divorcing a Real Witch and a forthcoming Llewellyn title on urban magic. She lives in San Francisco, CA. You can find out more at http://dianarajchel.com.
Illustrator: Jennifer Hewitson