Tag: water

Neodruidry, Witchcraft

Rainwater Folklore and Magical Uses

J.

As we get closer to summer, my area experiences more and more thunderstorms. Honestly, even though rain gives me terrible headaches, I kind of love it. I’ve always been very into the energy of loud crashes of thunder and bright flashes of lightning. Now, I always set out containers to catch some to save and use later.

Rainwater is said to have special properties depending on the season and conditions. (I’m also including dew under this category for practical reasons, even though it doesn’t come from the sky.)

Rainwater Magical Properties and Folklore

Dew, specifically the dew gathered on the first of May, is said to preserve youth and enhance beauty.

According to Lexa Roséan’s The Encyclopedia of Magickal Ingredients: A Wiccan Guide to Spellcasting, storm water is useful for increasing one’s personal charisma. Each season’s rain helps with a specific aspect here:

  • Spring storm water is for sensuality and attractiveness to romantic partners.
  • Summer storm water is for is for magnetism and raw sex appeal.
  • Autumn storm water is to make oneself develop an irresistible, Rapsutin-like appeal.
  • Winter storm water is for endurance, and is said to make one a formidable foe against business or political competitors.

Of all of these, winter storm water is the hardest to come by, while autumn storm water is said to be the darkest and most dangerous.

Rain falling on pavement.

I usually use storm water to cleanse and charge things, including myself. I’ll usually gather the water one day, then, on the next clear day, placed a closed container of it with crystals, flower essences, etc. in a sunny or moonlit spot. After that, I use it to asperge or mist myself. I even charged some under the Tau Herculids meteor shower!

Dip a sprig of rosemary or fresh vervain in storm water, and use it to asperge altars, tools, or sacred spaces before working. This will cleanse and energize them.

After about *mumblemumble* years, I haven’t noticed any difference in the water’s properties based on the intensity of the storm. Weaker storms just produce weaker water. While this may be helpful if you’re looking for gentler energy, like for sleep magic, you may be better off just using moonlight-charged water to begin with rather than fussing with storm water.

Some practitioners assign elemental properties to rainwater based on the conditions during which it was collected. Lightning storms produce rainwater aligned with the element of Fire. Windstorms (like hurricanes or tornados) produce rainwater aligned with Air. Rain collected as drips from trees or other tall plants is aligned with Earth. Personally, I would caution against collecting storm water during a windstorm — wind borne debris cause the majority of damage during these storms, and any container you put out can easily become a dangerous projectile.

Some also assign astrological properties to stormwater based on the time of its collection. A waxing moon brings increase, and a waning moon brings decrease. Every day of the week, even every hour, is ruled by a planet. The moon also passes through the various signs of the zodiac. Storm water collected on a Friday, during a Venus hour, when the full moon is in Taurus would, therefore, be a powerful tool for attracting love. (You’d also be catching stormwater in November in that case, which Roséan says will enhance your Rasputin-like qualities, so maybe bear that in mind too!)

From my own experience, and most sources I’ve read, stormwater shouldn’t be kept indefinitely. It’s best used within the first month or so after you’ve collected it. Keeping it in the refrigerator can help slow down the proliferation of algae and other organisms.

In my tradition, sacred water is water gathered from three natural sources, and is used in every formal ritual. I often catch rainwater to serve as one of these, and combine it with sea and stream water.

Using Rainwater

Please check the laws about gathering rainwater in your area. In some places, it’s illegal to do so. This is to protect the environment — a lot of times, it isn’t the mere fact that you’re collecting the water, but the amount. You might be able to get away with a small container, or a single rain barrel’s worth, but laws against collecting rain exist to stop people who end up diverting that water from places that need it.

To use water from rain or storms, put out a container. You’ll probably want a wide bowl, or some other vessel that’s much wider than it is deep. It’ll be easier to catch water that way.

When the storm ends, the container’s full, or you feel like you have enough water, bring it inside.

Run it through a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth to clear out any bits of grass, twigs, leaves, mulch, dirt, bugs, or dust that might’ve been blown into it.

Pour the filtered water into a container, preferably one with a lid.

I don’t recommend consuming rainwater of any type without thorough boiling or some other form of treatment. While it’s (usually) clean when it comes out of the clouds, it can collect all kinds of pesticides and others -cides as it drips off of leaves. It can also pick up bacteria, viruses, and parasites from the soil (or worse — dog, cat, bird, rodent, or insect feces) if it splashes off of the ground or outdoor furniture. I’m not even going to get into what gets into it if you have to collect it near a road. While I won’t deny that there’s a certain faerielike, cottage core appeal to sipping fresh rainwater, there are also many reasons why people regularly dropped dead before water treatment became a thing.

If you do need to drink storm water for your purposes, consider setting out a covered bottle or jar of clean water during the storm rather than collecting the rainwater itself. Much like you can charge water with sunlight or moonlight, you can also charge it with some of the power of thunder and lightning. (And you won’t turn into a summer camp for amoebas.)

A little storm water, placed in a dark, solid-colored bowl, is wonderful for scrying.

You can also use storm water as a base for door washes, floor washes, or ritual baths. Steep some herbs in it or infuse it with crystals (I like to use sunlight and a special glass jar for this), then pour it into your bath or wash water.

Here ’til Niagara falls,
j.

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Environment, life, Neodruidry

Silvering the Well

J.

One practice that’s part of my tradition involves “silvering the well.” This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — making an offering of silver to the well.

The well, in this case, is a vessel of water (taken from three different natural sources). Outside of a ritual, it’s just a bowl. During a ritual, it becomes something more. It’s a representation of the primordial waters. It’s the healing cauldron, the sacred spring, and the sea of Manannán mac Lir. It’s representative of Water as an element, and the past from which we all spring.

The thing is, silvering the well is more complex than it seems. To people who’re used to ceremonial magic, it probably looks pretty simple. You have a vessel to serve as your well, and you make an offering to it. Silver goes in, boom.

There are also multiple different approaches to making this offering. One involves purchasing (or upcycling) small silver or silver-plated beads, which are then offered to the Earth once the ritual is concluded. Another uses a dedicated silver object which is designated as the offering anew each time, then taken out, dried off, and saved for the next ritual.

I spent a lot of time teasing out what this part of the process means for me. I’ve always understood the word “offering” to be a kind of euphemism for “sacrifice.” When you offer something, you no longer have it. Even if you don’t necessarily get rid of it (like dedicating an altar sculpture to a deity), it isn’t for you to use anymore. In this context, it makes sense to use small offerings of pieces of silver, requiring you to sacrifice the time, money, and energy it takes for you to get more when you run out.

On the other hand, international supply chains make the ethics of buying literally anything incredibly dubious. (I mean, a hobby store got caught trafficking antiquities, for crying out loud.) Even if it wasn’t, making an offering of small pieces of new silver involves mining silver (and possibly other base metals, for silver-plated objects) and then offering them to a place they didn’t come from. In less confusing words, you’re taking valuable material from one part of the Earth, and putting it somewhere else. Sure, silver isn’t exactly blood diamonds, but it’s still something that stuck in my mind like a fishhook. How do I know that the material for these “disposable” pieces of silver didn’t come from child labor, or a mine that dumps poison into the waters of the very people who have to work there? Could I justify offering something to the primordial waters, knowing that it might be poisoning the water?

(The environmental chemistry nerd in me isn’t even going to get into rainwater, leachates, and their effect on the soil, or I will be here all night.)

Eventually, I managed a compromise. I found a coin collector who had a stash of silver Mercury dimes. They weren’t suitable for collecting, since they’d been heavily circulated and were worn nearly smooth by time. I bought one, and this is my offering. I give it to the well, and the letter of the ritual has been fulfilled. The well is silvered.

Fulfilling the spirit of offering comes afterward. The coin itself is almost collateral — it’s a token of a promise, the symbol of an offering rather than the offering itself. Once the coin has been removed from the well and dried off, I make the sacrifice. Each ritual costs a monetary donation to a water charity — from the Water Protector Legal Collective, to Ocean Conservancy, to Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, to one of the many other organizations working to protect people’s access to clean drinking water, remediate water pollution, or preserve vital wetlands. Failing that, it costs an afternoon of cleaning a beach or the banks of one of the smaller local waterways.

What does this mean for other people? Probably nothing. It’s just something that sat in my mind for a while, and a practice that I put in place years ago. Maybe it’ll have value for others, maybe not. Either way, I thought it might be worth writing down.

life, Neodruidry

Water you mean?

J.

I’m not really big into dream dictionaries. Symbolism is so subjective, it’s hard to really get usable information from a guide compiled for nobody in particular. That said, if you have recurring images you can’t really get a bead on, you could probably do worse than looking them up.

All of this is to say that I’ve been dutifully making note of my dreams, and have come to the realization that, holy crap, fully 99% of them are water-based.

The funny thing is, I used to live on an island. Going to the beach was a regular thing. When things got too intense at home, I’d sometimes hop on my bike and ride for hours — often ending up at one beach or another. I never dreamed of water then.

I don’t mean that I dream of drowning (because then I’d be signing up for a sleep study to make sure I don’t have apnea). I mean that I’m almost always either navigating around, traveling on, adjacent to, or in the ocean. The character of the water varies — sometimes it’s eerily, glassily smooth. Others, it’s pouring in and threatening to tear down everything in its path. In either case, I never actually feel threatened by it. I might have to work around the threat of an imminent flood, but, no matter how dangerous the waves may seem, they never cross into nightmare territory.

(If I have nightmares, they’re usually about crossing suspension bridges or trying to keep out zombie hordes using doors that are inexplicably too small and keep falling off the hinges, but that’s another story.)

Dream Moods mentions the usual stuff about ocean symbolism, it’s tied to the state of your emotions, rough seas mean turmoil, yada yada yada. (They do have one oddly specific bit about kissing the ocean floor, though.) Looking up “sea” yields pretty much the same.

I know water is emotion, but I haven’t really identified anything in particular that it might be referring to. The roughness of the sea doesn’t correspond to anything, it’s seemingly random. One resource offered up a bunch of prophetic meanings to sea imagery, but, if that’s the case, oh boy do I have a whole lot of very contradictory stuff coming my way. These also don’t “feel” like prophetic dreams that I’ve had. Another resource pretty much describes ocean dreams as a land of contrasts.

I have been considering choosing a patron/matron deity, but I don’t know who and haven’t fully committed to the idea.

Maybe the choice is being made for me.