A new tool arrives wrapped in tissue paper and smelling faintly of the workshop that made it.
The blade is bright. The handle is unmarked. Nothing has happened to it yet.
Set it on a dark cloth by candlelight and there is a kind of politeness between the two of you. It is a handsome object. It is not, yet, yours.
Consecration is the hour in which that changes.
A Thing That Is Not Yet Yours
Every tool arrives carrying something that is not you.
A new blade carries machine oil and the hands of whoever ground its edge. A cup from a shop carries the shelf, the carton, the counter. A dish lifted from a market table carries the road it travelled and every palm that turned it over in the cold.
None of this is sinister. It is only history, and history clings to objects the way woodsmoke clings to wool.
Consecration sets that history down and begins another one.
What Consecration Does, and What It Does Not
A consecrated tool is not a battery. It is not charged, stored and spent.
What the rite does is narrower and stranger than that. It takes an object out of ordinary use and marks it for one purpose, and it fixes that purpose in your own memory as much as in the wood or the metal.
From that evening onward the cup is not a cup that could hold orange juice. The knife is not a knife that could open a parcel.
That is the whole of it, and it is enough.
No rite makes a tool work on your behalf, and no tool has ever done the work in your place. The consecration is a promise made over an object, and promises are kept by the one who made them.
Cleaning Comes Before Cleansing
Before any smoke or salt, wash the thing with warm water and a little soap, and dry it completely.
This sounds unromantic. It is the most useful ten minutes in the whole practice.
New metal carries a film of oil from the factory. Second-hand wood carries dust in its grain and grease in its finish. A brass bowl found in a cellar carries verdigris, and old cloth carries whatever it sat beside for years.
Clean steel, wipe it dry and give it a thin film of oil so it does not rust. Wax the wood if it is thirsty. Let porous stone and unglazed pottery dry through and through before anything else touches them, because damp trapped under a lid turns to mould in a fortnight.
Only then is the object ready to be spoken to.
Clearing What Came Before
Most practitioners clear a tool before dedicating it, and the methods are quiet and old.
Cold running water, held under the tap until the hands ache. A night in a dish of dry salt, the salt afterwards thrown out rather than eaten. A night on bare earth or in a pot of soil. Moonlight through a window on a clear night. Breath, drawn slow and released along the length of the thing.
Smoke cleansing is the fourth of these. Dried rosemary, bay, garden sage, mugwort or lavender, lit and blown out so the stems only smoulder, and the object passed through the grey ribbon that rises.
Name the plant you are burning and know where the practice you are borrowing comes from. Some traditions of smoke and their plants are closed, and belong to the people who keep them; the difference is set out in open and closed practices.
If you burn loose resin or herb on a charcoal disc, open a window and keep the room ventilated. Charcoal produces carbon monoxide, which cannot be smelled. Never burn it in a closed room, never sleep beside it, and keep it far from birds, who are exceptionally vulnerable to smoke and fumes. Self-igniting discs spit sparks when first lit, so set them on sand or ash in a heatproof dish.
Stones and mineral objects are a separate question with rules of their own, and the water and salt methods will ruin some of them outright. That work belongs to cleansing and charging a stone.
A Consecration by the Four Elements
This rite is used when you wish to take an object out of ordinary use and set it apart for the Craft. It borrows its shape from the quarters of the circle, so that the tool is shown to each of the four elements in turn.
You will need:
- The tool, cleaned and dry
- A small dish of salt
- A bowl of water
- A candle in a steady holder
- Incense, or a smouldering sprig of dried rosemary
- A dark cloth to work on
Work at night if you can, with the ordinary lights off. Cast a circle first if that is your habit; the rite does not require one.
- Sit with the tool in your two hands until your breathing slows and the room settles around you.
- Touch the tool to the salt, or sprinkle a few grains along it, and say that you give it to the steadiness of Earth.
- Pass it through the incense smoke, and give it to the clarity of Air.
- Pass it swiftly above the flame, high enough that nothing scorches, and give it to the will of Fire.
- Touch it to the water, or flick a drop along it, and give it to the deep places of Water. Wipe metal dry at once.
- Hold it against your breastbone and say what it is for, plainly and out loud.
- Set it down on the cloth. Let the candle burn out, or snuff it, and leave the tool where it lies until morning.
Do not pass a wooden handle, a cord or anything painted through the flame. Show it to the fire from a hand’s width away instead.
The Words, the Name and the First Use
The words matter less than the fact that you spoke them.
Say what the thing is, what it is for, and what it is no longer for. This is my cup. It holds what is drunk in rite, and nothing else. Short sentences hold better in the memory than long ones, and you want to remember this in a year.
Some practitioners give a tool a name, spoken once and afterwards kept private. Some never do. Neither habit is more correct, though a named thing is harder to leave in a drawer and forget.
Use the tool soon afterwards, within a few days, in some small working of no great consequence. A tool that sits unused after its consecration stays a stranger. The bond is made by handling, by the wear of your thumb in one particular place, by the sound the cup makes when it is set down on your own table.
Oil, and the Care Oil Asks For
Anointing is optional, and it is the step that most often goes wrong.
A drop of oil is drawn along the blade, around the rim, or across the flat of the disc. Blending and charging the oil itself belongs to anointing oils, and the care it asks for is ordinary care, not therapy.
Dilute essential oils in a carrier such as sweet almond or jojoba before they meet skin. Patch test on the inside of the wrist and wait a day. Keep them away from the eyes and from any mucous membrane. Citrus oils can make skin far more sensitive to sunlight. Cats and dogs are harmed by oils that seem mild to you, so keep bottles closed and hands washed. Nothing here is ever swallowed.
Oil darkens unsealed wood and softens some finishes, and it turns rancid on a shelf. Use little, wipe the excess, and let the tool dry on the cloth.
Tools That Come Second Hand
A cup from a junk shop is a different creature from a cup in a box.
It has a life behind it that you will never know. Someone chose it, used it, tired of it or died. The tarnish in the hollow of the stem was put there by another hand.
This is not a warning. Old tools take a dedication beautifully, and many practitioners prefer them precisely because they arrive already worn into the world.
Clear it more thoroughly than you would clear something new. Salt overnight, water, smoke, then a full night on earth or on a windowsill under the moon, and only then the rite. Handle it for a week before deciding what it is for. Old objects often suggest their own use.
Where an old vessel will hold anything drunk, the material is a practical question and not a magical one. Unlined copper and brass, and antique pewter, are not suitable for drink, particularly anything acidic; the details belong to the chalice. Old painted or lacquered ware is best kept for dry offerings.
Gifts, Inheritances and Tools You Did Not Choose
Some tools arrive without being sought.
A friend brings a wand cut from her own hedge. A grandmother’s ring comes down in a envelope of soft paper. A cauldron appears at a market stall for a price that makes no sense.
A gift is not less yours for having been given, but it does carry the giver, and the giver may be someone you have complicated feelings about. Consecrate it anyway, and say aloud whose hands it came from. Naming the history is what stops the history from working underneath.
If the feeling never lifts, the object may simply not be for you. Pass it on kindly and without ceremony.
When a Tool Never Settles
Occasionally a properly cleared, properly dedicated tool remains cold in the hand.
It is the wrong weight. The grip pinches. The cup is a little too wide for your mouth. You reach past it every time, and reach for the chipped saucer instead.
This is worth taking seriously and worth taking plainly. It is almost always the body objecting rather than the spirit, and the body is a sound judge. Nothing is wrong with you, and nothing is haunting the drawer.
Retire it, or re-dedicate it to a smaller purpose, and let the chipped saucer be the tool it clearly already is.
Repair, Wear and the Marks of Work
A working tool acquires a face.
The wand goes dark where the fingers close. Wax runs down the candlestick and is never quite scraped clean. The pentacle wears bright in the centre where the salt dish stands.
None of this undoes the consecration. Wear is the proof of it.
Repair freely. Glue the handle, re-whip the cord, sand and re-oil the wood. A repaired tool does not usually need the whole rite again, though many practitioners speak a few words over it when it comes back into service, the way you might greet someone home from hospital.
If a tool breaks in two, that is a different matter, and it belongs to the last section but one.
Retiring a Tool
Tools end. The practice outlives them.
A blade rusts through. A cup cracks in the wash. A path changes and the whole shelf of a former practice becomes a museum of somebody you used to be.
When a tool is finished with, take back what you gave. Hold it, thank it, and say plainly that its work is over and that it is an ordinary object again. Speak this as clearly as you spoke the dedication. A tool released is a tool that may be sold, given away or thrown out without unease.
What follows is a matter of material and of common sense.
- Wood, cord and cloth may be burned in a safe outdoor fire, or buried.
- Metal and glass are best passed on, or put out with the recycling once released.
- Broken things that cut are wrapped in thick paper before they go anywhere near a bin.
If you bury something, bury it on ground you own or have permission to use, and check what is permitted where you live. Nothing plastic, nothing that will leach, nothing left in a wild place for someone else to find.
A tool passed to another practitioner should go with its history spoken aloud. Tell them what it was used for. Let them clear it and dedicate it in their own way, and do not ask afterwards what became of it.
Keeping the Record
Write it down the same night, while the candle smoke is still in the room.
What the tool is, where it came from, what you paid, the date you dedicated it, the words you used, the weather, the moon if you noticed it. Years later that page will be the only place the evening survives.
Your book of shadows is the natural home for this, though a single ruled notebook kept in the drawer with the tools serves as well.
Objects forget nothing and say nothing.
The remembering is your part of the work.