Writing your own spells is a skill that I feel every witch should at least attempt to cultivate. Often, the spells I create myself are the ones that work the best for me.
The process of writing a spell is not particularly difficult, it simply demands that you have a decent knowledge base to work with. If you’ve worked with a variety of spells and techniques writing your own spells will be that much easier.
A few Pros of writing your own spells:
- You’re never missing materials
- You can tailor every spell for the spirits you work with
- Spells can be as involved or simple as you like
- Experimentation! (I count this as a pro because it’s fun)
- You get complete creative license with your magic
A few Cons:
- You don’t really get a good idea of what works until you’ve been writing for a while
- Sometimes it’s too time consuming to write your own spell
- Some people can’t write well (not really a problem in my mind but I suppose it might be for some people)
So! On to the actual process of writing a spell.
The first thing you need to do is clearly define the purpose of the spell or your objective. A good beginners rule is to start with guidelines that are similar to those of making sigils.
- Phrase it as though it’s presently true
- Make it absolute
- Make sure it’s descriptive and phrased in such a way that doesn’t leave a lot of loopholes for mishaps (i.e. I am ten pounds lighter could lead to you getting food poisoning and dropping ten pounds, not so fun)
These rules aren’t so hard and fast for spell writing as they are for sigils however. Play around with these guidelines and find what works for you! I prefer working more abstractly, working with the natural flow of events instead of shaping them overly much. If you work with a deity phrasing it as a request instead of an absolute may work a bit better.
For our purposes lets say our objective is to attract a lover. Now, we don’t have anyone specific in mind, we simply want to open up the channels that can allow love into our lives. The objective could be phrased a number of ways, “I am open to love and draw healthy relationships to my life” would work, as would “Love enters my life freely”.
Next it’s time to figure up what kind of spell you’d like to use. This is largely going to depend on what materials you have available to you and what kind of magic you’re comfortable working with. If you can’t cook you probably don’t want to be making food-based spells and if you don’t have jars that jar curse probably isn’t getting far. This is a fun place to get creative though. Have you ever wondered if you could use something in a spell? Now is the time to try it! (In all likelihood the answer is yes)
Our love spell could be done any number of ways, for example you could use:
- A love attracting knot bracelet
- A candle spell
- A charged object that you keep near your bed
- A leaf spell
- You could bake magic food that you give to others (not to make them fall in love with you but simply to put your willingness to accept love into the universe via their energies)
- Some combination of techniques
These are just the tiniest glimpse of the ways you could do this one spell but I’m sure you guys get the idea :)
From this point it’s all tweaking, you have your bases covered, you just need to assemble the pieces. This includes your “standards” like any kind of circle that you cast for working, calling deities and other entities, invoking elements, etc. This would also be a good time to figure out if you like working with words. Most of my spells are wordless but I know there are many witches who like to supplement their power with incantations, rhymes and sometimes songs or chants. Writing these yourself is an excellent way to just funnel that much more energy into your spell.
If you try a new spell that you’ve written and it doesn’t work, tweak it and try it again. Writing spells is like any kind of creative process, you’re likely to find a dozen methods that don’t work for you before you find even one that does.