The issue with realizing the problems and pitfalls of a pre-written correspondence list is that the next step is often to create your own correspondence tables. This activity can range from confusing and unapproachable to time-consuming and impractical.
While there are great guides out there on the matter, many rely on skills you may not have, such as advanced energy sensing, spirit communication, or meditation. There’s a lotto be gained from spending a year in trance communication with the spirit of your intended plant or wand, but sometimes you just need to get shit done, and now.
Hopefully these steps will be a helpful guide in getting started creating your own personal associations. This is just one way, though, and it isn’t set in stone — feel free to go in whatever order you like, taking whichever steps apply and appeal to you.
This applies as “How is it used?” and “How does it act?” as well. A chicken egg holds life and potential. It protects the unborn chick. It feeds the hungry. It breaks as life emerges from within. I could go on!
For this post, however, we’ll focus on three things: A lightbulb, a magnifying glass, and a hypothetical plant.
Light bulbs illuminate. Some even provide warmth or extend growing periods for plants. If you turn on a light in a dark room, you reveal what may have otherwise been hidden.
Magnifying glasses help you see clearer, make out details, and give you a closer look at things you may otherwise miss. Very obviously speaking, they will magnify the appearance of whatever is in front of them.
Now for our hypothetical plant. It’s extremely invasive, but its flowers are fragrant and draw beneficial insects. The berries are poisonous to people when unripe, along with the raw leaves, but ripe berries are edible — delicious and sweet — and a tisane from the leaves will settle and calm an upset stomach.
It’s a bit Doctrine of Signatures-y but the appearance of a thing can help you define correspondence for it, and I don’t just mean the colours.
The hypothetical plant, for example. Let’s say that it has pink and red blossoms. The ripe berries are vaguely heart shaped, as are the leaves (perhaps more prominently so).
The light bulb, depending on the shape, may resemble a human head, a ball, a planet, a star or tear drop. When it’s on, you may think it looks like the sun.
What about magnifying glasses? I’ve always thought that they look like mirrors or portals. Maybe to you it looks like a pool of water. I’m assuming a round glass here, by the way, so perhaps its very shape is worth considering. There’s a lot of meaning put into circles, after all.
- What is its lore or background?
What are the stories behind it? You might take into consideration the circumstances the thing was created under, or with something like an animal or plants, what led to their creation or introduction to your area (Was it meant to eradicate a pest? Was it bred as a gift for a loved one? Is there a particular quality they tried to emphasize?).
Say that in a story, someone uses your hypothetical plant to charm a king.
Or what about Sherlock Holmes and his magnifying glass?
The light bulb is popularly associated with a “bright idea”.
- Your Personal Symbolism and associations
Come on, y’all knew I was going to bring up Personal Symbolism at some point.
Magnifying glasses remind me of my grandmother. The woman has owned at least 100 in my lifetime, and once even brought one with her to a computer class in order to get a better look at her monitor.
Light bulbs remind me of the years I spent as a child fighting for environmental protections and rights. Conservation (and later, efficiency) was a HUGE part of my fight and the light bulb reminds me of the time I spent in debate and conversation.
Since my plant is imaginary, I don’t have any real memories or associations for it, but hey, that’s okay. Like I said, you don’t have to hit everything on this list.
Now think sideways.
I don’t think this is what Holly Lisle had in mind when she came up with
How to Think Sideways, but I’m gonna borrow her term for a bit.
It isn’t that much of a stretch to look at the improved vision a magnifying glass gives you and apply that to psychic vision, right?
Or to take the toxic berries from an invasive and noxious plant and use them to completely wreck someone.
(But maybe you want to take the beneficial tea from the heart shaped leaves to completely soak somebody’s life with an all-consuming, all-soothing love that will totally bind this person to you…or both! Know your love or know pain. Wow man, that’s cold. :|)
Speaking of manipulating people, a head shaped light bulb that has been turned into a glass poppet to fill someone’s mind with the thoughts you want them to have (thoughts that will come to them as though it were an epiphany — their very own Bright Idea!) may sound like a good time to you. Or maybe you’ll use it to scry their clever thoughts right out of their head to use as your own.
So by the end of it all, you may have a list like this:
Magnifying Glass
- Vision (including psychic vision)
- Details
- Portals
- Finding things
- The illusion of plenty
Light Bulbs
- Cleverness
- Ideas
- Revelation
- The Sun
Hypothetical Plant
- Curseworking
- Rapid growth
- Obsessive Love
- Calming down a situation
- Completely fucking up a situation
And those lists can get longer as time/your imagination goes on! The length isn’t really important though. What matters is that what you put on the list has meaning to you and works for you.