Free A Witch's World of Magick by Melanie Marquis Page A

mini-ocean of a cup of salted water.
    Infiltration through insertion can also be used to bring about change and transformation. For instance, if you wanted to get some toxic coworkers to chill out, you might empower a piece of sage with a peaceful, diplomatic energy, and use this to sympathetically infiltrate an image representative of the violent regime. Want more confidence in your dealings with others? Charge up a ball of clay to represent yourself, then anoint a citrine crystal, jade stone, or oak twig with a confidence-inducing oil such as frankincense or cinnamon. Insert this into the clay to infuse your daily actions with confidence.
    Sticking It to the Man Curse
    Through the magickal act of puncturing, you can really “stick it to the man,” so to speak. Not just for undoing personal enemies, puncturing is a technique useful for taking on larger foes, as well. Whatever your political persuasion, there are a few things we can likely agree on. Hunger sucks. Oppression sucks. Needless violence against the weak sucks. The continued destruction of the environment sucks. We might not agree on a single political solution to these problems, but as witches, we can agree that using our magick to fight such ills could help. Give it a go—cast a traditional curse upon one of the major banes of humanity and see if it works. With the puncturing technique, the process is simple and straightforward. Create an image (a clay doll, a drawing, etc.) to represent the thing you wish to get rid of, be it poverty, hate, HIV, domestic violence, or whatever other evil you want destroyed. Choose a sharp nail, a piece of iron, or an especially wicked-looking thorn to do the dirty work—stick it into the image deep, affirming that just as the barb pokes holes in the image, so too will the evil that image represents begin to break down and fall apart.

Six
Naming Names:
Identification in
the Magickal Arts
    O ne tool for magickal accuracy that we seem to be losing in our practices is the art of naming the target. In magickal practices of the past in cultures far and wide, the importance placed on effectively identifying the point of focus in a spell is apparent. A name, a mother’s name, a place of origin, an energetic signature provided in the form of hair or nail clippings—these are the tricks up the sleeve that can give a magician power and sway over gods and enemies alike. While these techniques can certainly be applied toward dark ends, the same methods can be easily adapted to help the modern spellcaster achieve magickal success for aims in line with personal ethics. Understanding and using magickal identification is an asset to the witch, whatever his or her dark or light persuasions may be. It makes spellwork more precise by telling the magick exactly where to go, who or what to affect. The magickal “target” or focus of a spell need not be a specific person. It can be a place, a thing, an idea, an ill of society. By learning some tricks for making a more precise, specific, and magickally effective identification of just where a spell should go, the magician is able to give their chances for accuracy a boost. In this chapter, we’ll examine some of the tried-and-true techniques used to effectively identify the target of a spell, and you’ll discover how using such methods can help ensure the success of the magick.

Magickal Identification Around the World
    One way spell workers around the world have identified their magickal targets is through the very straightforward approach of incorporating the name of the person, place, or thing to be affected into the magick. Curse tablets, we have seen, often listed the name of the victim, with some early tablets consisting of nothing more than a list of names. 79 In Celtic culture also, knowing the name of the spell target was an important aspect of magickal procedure. In The Religion of the Ancient Celts by John Arnott MacCulloch, the following account of a curse-casting method