Lunacy

maddiviner

The term “potion,” I must frankly admit, is mostly used in fantasy stories that feature magick, such as Harry Potter and The Dresden Files. In the fictional universes of those stories, the term means a variety of things, but in general it refers to some sort of liquid designed to have a magical effect. Most famously, in Harry Potter in particular, potions and Harry’s study of them in school plays a major role in the plot, and fantastic concoctions with names such as “Drought of Living Death” show up. Many witches, magicians and alchemists scoff at using the term “potion” to refer to something they make in real life just due to it’s sheer association with fiction these days. I guess the thought is that, while saying you made a “spelled tea” or “infusion” might be well and good, saying “I created a potion today!” will bring out naysayers ready to point out that Harry Potter isn’t real in the snarkiest voice imaginable.

Obviously, I disagree. The word “potion” is useful, having been used for centuries to refer to the liquid creations of witchcraft and magick. It comes from a Latin term, potio, which simply meant “drink.” Actual practitioners have been creating potions far longer than Harry and Snape, and thus I think we’ve got as much of a right to use the term as those who parlay magick into fiction. It’s a very convenient word, allowing us to describe a whole genre of magical practice.

I use the word “potion” to conveniently refer to all liquids imbued with magical intent and having a magical purpose beyond their physical effects. This means that, when I say “potion,” I am referring to a wide variety of things, ranging from simple magical teas to tinctures, oil blends, and even alchemical spagyrics. The physical basis of each of these differs, and most, if not strictly all, potions somehow involve elemental water, if only by virtue of being liquids. There are those who would argue that concoctions with an oil or alcohol basis might find their primary elemental association elsewhere, but I hold that a liquid will always have a watery essence, insofar as elemental water includes all liquids, just as earth includes all solids to a degree.

It is important to note that while I tag most of my posts that involve potions under a general alchemy heading, and many books refer to potioncraft simply as “alchemy” or “herbal alchemy,” the vast majority of potions that witches make are not true alchemical formulas, though they may have been developed using alchemical theories and correspondences.

When I use the phrase “true alchemy,” I largely refer to the practice of creating what some call spagyrics and similar, related concoctions, and I admit my understanding of it is currently a bit limited compared to some. If you’re interested in learning about the practice of true alchemy in a present-day context, I suggest reading Robert Allen Bartlett’s excellent book on the subject, Real Alchemy, or checking out Spagyrics, by Manfred M. Junius.

While I am writing this article as part of my series for beginner witches, and many beginners do create potions, it’s worth noting that potioneering, and in particular certain kinds, isn’t a very accessible part of witchcraft. Why? Well, many books tell you that you don’t need expensive tools and ingredients to do magick. While this is true in most cases, when it comes to potions, unless you’re very creative, you’ll have to invest a bit of funds and effort into just gathering the supplies. As I’ll hopefully show, these supplies needn’t be particularly pricy, and improvisation gets you a long way, but still, potioneering requires quite a bit more materials than most forms of witchcraft.

Another reason potion-making isn’t as accessible to a beginner as (for example) sigils or candle magick rests in the fact that many of the ingredients traditionally used in potion-making have physiological and psychological effects on human beings, making it risky to use them without doing a great deal of research, which can be daunting at best. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss what herb or such is or isn’t poisonous and what can be consumed in which quantities, but many existing books and websites are full of that information. At the end of this essay, I’ll provide links to some potions I’ve developed that use highly innocuous ingredients, but everyone reacts differently chemically, and even with something like chamomile, be sure to do your research. I’m not trying to discourage anyone here, but if you choose to take up potion-making, do be mindful of your budget and research ingredients very carefully.

If you want to make potions, I suggest choosing a focus. There are many different types of potions, and alluded to earlier, ranging from simple to concoct teas to complex configurations of essential oils. Most witches work a lot with oil or water-based potions, and plenty also make tinctures and other potions with an alcohol base. I would recommend choosing one medium/basis to focus on - do you want to make drinkable potions and teas, tinctures, or oils?

Regardless of what sort you want to make, you will probably have to buy or find some equipment and ingredients, unfortunately. As I’ve said, most witchcraft requires little investment besides emotional commitment, but potioneering does involve equipment and ingredients I personally have built up a large collection of supplies for compounding potions and brews, and while not everyone’s going to want or need to do this, my advice to those who are looking to create a large laboratory-like setup is to start small. Below is an image of my current supply cabinet, with all my potion-making supplies visible, as well as some charm bottles and other things.

For the most part, herbs, flowers, and other plants make up the bulk of what is used in potions today. Choosing which herbs to purchase can be pretty overwhelming, but I always found it useful to buy herbs on an as-needed basis, slowly building up a collection over the course of a few months. Even if you cannot afford a lot of fancy ingredients, much can be done with simple household herbs and spices, like mint, basil, oregano and black tea. Many of the potions I make take the form of a tea-like infusion that may or may not contain actual tea leaves (often, it’s just herbs).

For creating these, I find my porcelain mortar and pestle helpful, which I got from Amazon.com rather cheaply. I use it to grind up particularly difficult roots and herbs, and to bruise flowers such as lavender in order to better release their taste/scent into the mixtures I make. I also have a small scale, of the sort commonly sold in head shops, but I only really have this because some of the potions I make actually contain (legal) psychoactives and I’ve got to be careful about dosage.

Whether you need any of this or not really depends on what your plans are. If you intend to work with so-called “baneful” ingredients or anything that has a strong physiological or psychological effect on the human body, a scale might be a good safety precaution, as it helps you calculate dosage. If you plan on mostly working with things like mint and thyme, which are culinary and safe for most people, it might not be necessary or worth the investment. Similarly, while a mortar and pestle allows you to grind and mix ingredients rather easily and adds a level of effort (and therefore power) to the process, not everyone’s going to want or need one plenty of herbs don’t require grinding.

If you’re mostly going to be working with oils and making magical perfumes/scents, dried (or even fresh) herbs won’t be as useful as pure essential oils, though. These compounds are called such because they contain the chemical essence of the plant - basically the active ingredients of whatever herb or plant they come from. While essential oils, for the most part, aren’t consumable or meant to be ingested, they capture much of a plant’s properties, both magical and chemical, and often have an extremely strong scent, making them useful for perfumes and anointing oils.

Above is a photo of some of my oil and perfume-making supplies. I personally use essential oils rather extensively, mostly to make custom magical perfumes and scents, to create anointing formulas for candle magick, and also for use in cleaning (both in a non-magical and magical sense). Because essential oils are chemically as well as magically powerfully, I also use them in a therapeutic fashion - for example, I add a few drops of rosemary essential oil to my shampoo to improve my hair texture.

You can go into many stores and buy “aromatherapy oils” or “fragrance oils,” but in most cases, these aren’t actually essential oils and are instead synthetic forms of the scent, or just the essential oil diluted into a carrier oil. For example, if you buy a vial of rose oil perfume, it’s highly unlikely to contain any rose essential oil, and is probably a synthetic imitation of rose scent mixed into a carrier oil. Fragrance oils like this can indeed be used in magick if their smell is evocative enough, but keep in mind that synthetic rose oil perfume won’t have any of the chemical benefits (for example, clarifying the skin) that actual rose oil might give, and might actually do damage if you try to use it in that way. Once again, it’s really beyond the scope of this article to give a lot of safety and usage information, so please do your research. If you want actual essential oils, most health food stores will have them, and they’re available online quite affordably, even on Amazon.

For the most part, if you buy herbs online or elsewhere, they’ll be packaged in some form of plastic bag. Even Mountain Rose Herbs does this, but their bag’s rather thick and is vaccum-sealed. Either way, I recommend moving herbs from their original plastic bags into jars, which should be as airtight as you can find. I personally got a bunch of random jars at craft stores and places like Target, and store my herbs there, as well as in containers I just saved along the way, such as jars that used to hold instant coffee or peanut butter. If you’re potioneering plans involve making anything that you’ll save for later (an oil for later use, a salve, etc), you will need to have storage for it, too. I keep a small selection of bottles for this purpose, mostly purchased from the same herb stores where I get my essential oils and raw herbs.

One note about that, though - while some of the jars I use to store my loose herbs have corks, I would never use a corked vial or bottle to store a finished tincture, salve, or other concoction, as most of the bottles you get that have corks are unlikely to be watertight and simply invite spoiling. Pretty much anything you make, though, will spoil eventually. There are methods (such as adding Vitamin E or buying a carrier oil that already has it in it) that will halt the process a bit, but nothing really has an indefinite shelf life. In particular, don’t expect to be able to keep a tea-like brew in your fridge for more than a few days without it going bad.

I personally recommend Mountain Rose Herbs for both dry herbs (in bulk) and essential oils, as well as carrier oils and many other products you might need for creating potions. Of course, there’s plenty to be had at most health food stores and even grocery stores, too. One thing I want to say about shopping for herbs is that it’s almost always best to buy loose herbs (say, mint, etc), instead of herbs already portioned into tea bags and labeled as a herbal tea. It’s much less expensive and generally gives you better quality because the herbs are fresher and, again, there’s less overhead.

With loose herbs, you’re not paying for the cost of them being slapped into tea bags. I recommend getting some sort of tea ball or strainer if you want to do teas, and avoiding the cost of commercially-prepared tea bags. This is much more cost-effective in the long run. I cannot, obviously, cite prices everywhere, but as an example, here in Poland, a box of mint tea is roughly 9zl, whereas a slightly-greater amount of the actual herb, loose and without bags, is only 2.50zl. In the image below, you can see the strainer I currently use. I actually have a larger one for making teas for the household, but this one works very well for making strong brews for myself. I prefer strainers that allow the herbs to spread out in the water, so I rarely use things like tea balls.

When you’re ready to take the plunge and make your first potion, ask yourself what effect you would want it to have. I am a firm believer that, in witchcraft, form has a complex interdependent relationship with function, but that the latter should be considered first and foremost. While almost any form of potion can be designed to have any number of effects, I’ve personally found that certain forms are more suitable (from my perspective) for certain tasks. Oils, when used to anoint the body, go a long way towards changing how the user is perceived, and thus I tend to use them to help me put my best foot forward. Teas and concoctions that are consumed are great for altering your mindset and deep internal changes. The creation of waters, floor washes, and similar products are obviously best-suited to spells designed to affect an entire area, household, or everyone who will encounter the formula. These are just some general rules I use in my practice - you might experiment and find things work differently for you, but I thought I’d mention them nonetheless.

Regardless of what form your potion will take, please keep safety in mind at all times. You might read in some old manuscript that a certain herb helps with a certain purpose, but if we now, here in the 21st century, know that herb to be poisonous, you probably shouldn’t use it, or at least exercise extreme caution! Safety first at all times. Choose ingredients based on the magical associations you personally have for them, first and foremost, which may or may not be based on whatever tradition you’re working within.

With the added safety precautions required of something to be consumed, worn, or doused about, the advice I give in my article on bottle spells for choosing ingredients mostly applies here, too, but there’s other issues to be considered, as well. If you’ve decided your spell will be a tea, you must concern yourself with how it will taste, and if the taste of the finished product lends itself to the goal in question. With an oil, you don’t want it spelling foul in most cases, so the harmony of scents, as well, must be considered. There’s actually a really good book out there, called Mixing Essential Oils for Magic, by Sandra Kynes, that, while also giving excellent traditional information on the correspondences of various flowers and herbs, also explains the theory behind perfumery and how to make blends that smell delicious.

Basically, when choosing ingredients for a potion of any sort, many factors should be bouncing around in your brain, and these include:

Safety (first and foremost!)
Scent/taste
Appearance
Traditional correspondences.
Personal correspondences
Safety (of utmost importance!)

Usually, when I’m making any sort of potion, I start by listing ingredients that are safe, appropriate to the form I’ve chosen, and associated in my mind with my goal or purpose. I then experiment a bit with them, mixing and matching until I’ve got something that works and fits with what I’m trying to do. For example, if I’m making a perfume oil for prosperity, I might begin by just setting out all the essential oils and herbs I currently have that I associate with prosperity, then make tiny batches mixing and matching until I get something that works scent-wise and in terms of general association, at which point, I’d make a larger batch.

For teas, once you’ve factored in and taken proper safety precautions, a lot of it is simple trial and error. Some of my recipes are modifications of tea recipes I found online, having worked out the correspondences. Others are just things I’ve tried and found delicious and workable. I admit to using my fiancé to taste-test some of my infusions, too! This isn’t really an exact science, though there are aspects of science to it. If you’re being safe, don’t feel bad if you end up a few times with a concoction or scent you hate - just dust yourself off and try, try again. It took me forever, for example, to find that I hate the taste of lavender unless it’s combined with mint, and that, while I love eucalyptus as a scent, it lingers too much and is ill-suited to my preferences in terms of a floorwash or area cleanser.

One thing that bears mentioning, though, is that magick is not about following a recipe or even creating one, and in my experience, a tea or perfume will be just that (i.e., not a potion) until it is in some way magically empowered or enchanted. I’ve written an article about this, too, which you might want to read. Most witches realize the importance of intent and that strange factor that seems to separate the magical from the everyday, and I personally do go about enchanting each ingredient, whether it’s an oil or herb, that I add to a potion. I also, as I mentioned doing for spell bottles, add a final bit of enchantment to the finished product before using it, and with some things (oils, etc.,) I continually empower them with each use. This is one of those things that’s incredibly difficult to explain, though most people who do magick have a way of doing this that works for them, I’ve found.

Here, at the end of this very brief introduction, I’ll include links to potion recipes I’ve written and posted here. I’ll admit there’s only a few, and not all of them are meant for human consumption. As usual, use caution and do research before mixing up something from an online recipe. Also, I’d like to include a link here to @honeycoyote, a Tumblr user who’s blog features a wide array of tasty, tea-like potion recipes - check them out here. I’ve made quite a few of those and enjoyed them! Here’s my own small list of potion recipes I’ve posted:

I also want to recommend the following books for those looking to learn more about potioneering and herbal alchemy! The following is just relevant bits posted from my masterpost of book recommendations, specifically the books focused on potioneering and alchemy, but they’re really quite useful.

The Herbal Alchemist’s Handbook, by Karen Harrison. I cannot praise this book enough for its concise and well-formulated approach to astrology, herbs, and magick as a whole.
The Weiser Concise Guide to Herbal Magick, by Judith Hawkins-Tillirson. This is excellent for anyone who’s interested in any kind of magick. Yes, the focus is generally herbs, but there’s a lot to be learned here about Kabbalah and other correspondence systems, as well.
Real Alchemy, by Robert Allen Bartlett. Excellent book, lots of history and detail. There’s a strong focus on tradition within the text, yet the author is quite accommodating of his audience and describes alternate methods that work better in a modern context.
Spagyrics, by Manfred M. Junius. With a highly-developed academic tone and attention to detail, this book is a meaty look at traditional alchemy. I recommend this more for intermediate practitioners due to the sheer density of information.
Mixing Essential Oils for Magic, by Sandra Kynes. Fills a very difficult gap in published knowledge regarding the use of essential oils by discussing, in great detail, how scents interact with each other and how to create a formula that’s not only palatable, but evocative.

I hope this article was useful and interesting. It’s meant to just be a short introduction to the concept of potions rather than a full guide. I’ve got plans for more potion-related articles and writing, and if there’s something in particular you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to contact me. Also, if you enjoy my work, consider offering support to help fund future endeavors. Thanks for reading!

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.