Plant Spirit Ally

Exploring a Plant Spirit Ally using the 'Meet the Spirit Technique'

Many people have heard the term 'Plant Spirit Ally' but perhaps don't really understand what is meant by it, or how working with them can potentially boost your magical practice.

I'll try to give away a few practical tips and techniques which seem to work well for a lot of people I've taught over the years, however much of it will require a reasonable degree of psychic ability and visualization skills. If this is a weak area for you, then you should really start working on developing more in that area, and for those who don't know where to start with that and don't want 1-2-1 mentoring from someone at the 'Thoth Mystery School' then you could do worse than giving the Online Tarot Course a go, which you can find through the Thoth App or on the website I believe.

Everything Is Alive!

The word Animism is often used to refer to the belief or idea that physical thing has a soul and is actually alive in some way.

This is one of those things which is best discovered for yourself, and you can have a lot of fun and learn a lot trying to explore the concepts of both individual Plant Spirits, but also greater Plant Spirits (more on that later.)

Ultimately in order to save time I will just give you a brief overview of ideas related to Animism which you yourself are going to have to explore.

As a teacher it's difficult sometimes to workout what's best to just come out with and explain in theory vs what should be held back in order for the student to discover for themselves. It's even more difficult when you don't know the student, so writing something like this for a bunch of random people on the internet could end terribly (one of the reasons I often say magical books are terrible at teaching practical magic.)

If you Google Animism then you would probably get a definition like;

the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.

When I first started out on the magical path, I understood that all things must have a soul, given that my definition of a soul is the energetic (none physical) parts of a person, object or thing. Working with non-physical intelligence's however, was a little different. Truth be told most of the spirits I tended to find didn't really seem to have my best intentions at heart and most were troublesome manipulative little shits, but that was probably down to my environment at the time, as the say Like Attracts Like and all that.

I've never really been all that interested in pets and animals in general (apart from fish) however the spirits of plants are easy to navigate for the most part. Choosing things that grow near you will give you an opportunity to work with a spirit with something in common with you, and one which you can directly impact both positively or negatively, which makes striking up a mutually beneficial deal easy, after all local plants have a lot more power than the average mundane person realizes, and just because people see them as not being able to walk and talk doesn't mean they don't have something to offer on an energetic level. It also means that you potentially have a lot which you can offer them.

I could talk about the times I've successfully using living plants within herbal medicine to heal, and/or general spell work. The times I've used plants to suck in disease or even money, but I'm trying to stick to the main points here and not go off on a tangent with stories.

Little Plant, Big Plant

You may hear magical practitioners talk about working with the 'Big Spirit' 'Great Spirit' or 'Mother / Father spirit' of a particular species of plant, and although I'm going to try not to give too much away so you can explore this yourself, the simple gist of the idea is that, each individual plant or object has a spirit part and that then plugs into / is attached to a greater spirit.

This concept can get complex very quickly, but can also be useful practically if true. so if you think about the individual Oak tree as having energetic components and maybe even an intelligence or personality, and then go deeper, then does the forest that the individual Oak tree is part of have a spirit, intelligence or soul? Is there such a thing as a 'Great Spirit of the Oak' which governs all Oak trees everywhere, much like the Higher Self of the Oak Tree?

These are all questions you as magical practitioners should be naturally asking, and more to the point, be creating quests, workings and rituals to actually try to answer questions such as this!

Practically speaking attaching magic to individual plants can be useful of course for smaller magics, choosing to use a weed which spreads in order to magically spread information about someone or something (gossip magic) can be a very fast acting spell indeed.

Attempting to interfere with other peoples magics by forming a relationship with the 'Great Spirit' of a particular ingredient an enemy has used in a spell against you could give you a spy or saboteur on the inside ;)

Putting the herbal medicine books down (not getting rid of the completely) and bonding with the individual plants that you use in your herbal remedies could mean you learn the hidden language of the plant kingdom, and that they may whisper to you with suggestions of things to add to a formula to make it more potent, although caution and common sense should be used for this of course (common sense being something lacking these days on the internet.)

Meet the Spirit Technique

If your wondering just where to start with all this then, the usual go to piece of advice given is to spend a year investigating and getting to know the plants which live near you, and spend the time looking and observing them physically and energetically, possibly even on a psychic level, through all stages of it's growth / life cycle.

I'll admit that this is great, but it takes bloody ages and, if your wanting to start doing magic now, then you probably don't have a full year. This is exactly why I developed and teach what I call the 'Meet the Spirit Technique' to get the ball rolling.

The idea of what we are trying to do is simple, we want to meet and build someway of summoning and communicating with the spirit of an individual plant that we have, or which is growing nearby (although this technique will work for most things). I have frequently told people to use this technique to try and build relationships with the herbs they use in cooking (don't underestimate how useful this can be in many different ways.)

Simply grab a plant or touch it, or even just handle some dried herb and close your eyes and ask the spirit to show itself to you. You want to ask it to appear to you and show you it's true form.

At this stage you will probably get some kind of visualization happen in your head, which often wont make a huge amount of sense, but you want to pay special attention to whatever appears in front of you, as whatever you are visualizing is what your unconscious mind is trying to translate that spirit to be.

There will be something which you can class as the main spirit and some kind of background, none of which needs to make sense.. for example if you are asking to meet the Spirit of Rosemary, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will see a Rosemary bush in a garden, you might see something very different.

When you have something in your minds eye then you want to identify and approach the thing which is in the foreground as that usually what the spirit is trying to represent itself as.

The reason this technique often consistently works well is because it works very much with human psychology, and our annoying lack of ability to hold the abundant amount of information that a spirit is in it's entirety.

The human mind sees the universe though signs and symbols and as the old saying goes ... Symbology is the Language of the Universe ... or something like that anyway. This technique allows the human to focus on the important part, the spirit and it's spirit form and separate what the human mind can understand and what it struggles to.

All of the stuff that we as humans might struggle to understand tends to get conjured up and displayed also, but this tends to be pushed to the background, which we can ignore for now and over analyse and overthink about later.

This means that this thing or aspect of the plant spirit we can work with and potentially understand more will come to the foreground. It also means that the spirit will take a form that can in someway move and interact with us. The next logical step would be to try and see if we can develop a common language, so we might negotiate and work together, but be careful as we can't always trust everything or everyone ... As Above, So Below ... there are useless liars and Fuckwits in the mundane world, and there are also some in the other worlds too.

Establishing a Language

Once you have identified the spirit, we now have to see if it understands and responds to you. I'm going to tell you right hear and know, that not every plant or spirit will like you, and you might never know why it doesn't although it's always interesting. The aim will be to find things which want to work with you.

In order to establish the spirit understands you and is willing to co-operate, then we need to ask it to do something. The most simple thing you can get it to do is to move or change it's form in some way. It doesn't need to do it the same way someone or something would in the physical realm, when I asked a the spirit of Salt which came in the form of a large rock on a beach to move to the left, I would expect it to roll, but it instead, levitated and turned around to the left. This probably wouldn't happen in the physical realm (although stranger things have happened).

Asking a spirit to do something such as "move to the left" is simple, but there are a number of things that it can reveal; for a start it understands the language you just used, it knows it's right from it's left (something many humans struggle with) and of course most importantly it is willing to do what you say.

I have met many people who work with the same dried herb which comes from the same plant, and some get on with it, some it doesn't like, and some people don't like it (they get a bad feeling).

Once you have some way of communication or common language with the spirit, then you can start asking it questions. "Oh spirit of Rosemary, is it true you can help me pass my exams?"

Some people who work with spirits get audible answers in plain English and others don't so this is very difficult for me to know just how easy a process this will be for you, but the most important thing is that you put the ground work in now and then test the spirit.

Another Level of Spell-casting

Now you have a technique you can start using to get to know spirits of plants and such, you really need to work on developing a relationship with these spirits just like you would a person. Many will say it's rude to just ask, ask, ask, and take, take, take, never giving anything back, and some magical practitioners tend to primarily work with spirits they themselves have grown, who's entire life is often in the hands of the practitioner who shelters. feeds and waters the plant in exchange for it to do 'work' for them (some would call this slavery.)

The morals and ethics of working with spirits of any kind and how you wish to treat them and the deals, pacts and contracts you may wish to make or break is none of my business, but there is far more to this subject than I have time or the enthusiasm to write about today. I did however record a 'No Holds Barred Occult Ramblings' podcast episode on the subject which will be released in Series Two.

However I will just state that mastering the art of communicating with the individual ingredients in a spell, such as herbs, makes it a hell of a lot more potent, Simply adding rose petals to a love spell isn't going to do anything other than make it look pretty (and it arguably doesn't when you hate pink and red). You need to do the magical work, and not just the physical stuff. If you add something to a spell and that things hates you then do you really think it's going to work for you?

If that Rosemary is more loyal to me than to you and your working a spell on me that apparently requires rosemary according the shit Witchcraft Spell Book you bought from Amazon, do you think that the Rosemary is going to do it's job? Perhaps it will be your undoing as it comes to me to snitch on you and tell me what your upto.

For the would be magical practitioner who also follows the Herbalists path, do you not think that actually having a conversation with the herb your using as the base for your healing salve will no benefit you. I have met many people who the spirit itself has given the method it should be used in order to help with an aliment. When Saint Johns Wort tells you not to dry it then bloody listen and do some mundane research.

Many herbs I have approached to help me design recipes and formulas have actually pointed me in more potent directions and have said "I'm not up for this, you need ____ instead as he is stronger than I."

Some herbs hate other herbs like certain people hate other and so will not work well in a team, and some how people expect to put them both in a formula and it to work well?

Do the groundwork and work with the spirits, then do the Mundane Research and bring the Scientific, Physical and Mundane world, to work with the Etheric, Energetic and Magical world just like we used to in Ancient Times. If we are to be great magical practitioners who are worthy to stand on the shoulders of the Giants that came before us then we must learn to embrace the philosophy we used to know, and innovate more.

(Ancient Wisdom + Magic) + Modern Science = Modern Magic