There is a moment before a rite when the room has already changed and nothing at all has been done.
The candle stands unlit. The cloth lies straight. Your hands are still cold from the tap, and dust turns slowly through the last of the window light.
Then you unstop a small dark bottle, and the air stops being ordinary air.
Rosemary, sharp and green. Frankincense gone faintly sweet with keeping. Something resinous that settles at the back of the throat and stays there long after the stopper is pressed back into the glass.
Oil is the quietest material on the altar and the most insistent. It makes no sound. It leaves no ash. It only touches — and afterwards the place it touched remembers.
What an Anointing Oil Is
An anointing oil is a scented oil made to be worn, or laid along the length of a candle, pressed into a cord, wiped across a stone, drawn on a doorframe with the pad of a thumb.
It is not perfume, though it may be lovely.
It is not medicine, and nothing on this page is offered as medicine.
What it is, is a mark. You set it on the skin where you wish your own attention to gather. You set it on an object to lift that object out of the company of the ordinary things in the drawer.
The gesture is old and very widely scattered. Kings have been anointed, and the dead, and the sick, and the newly named, in cultures that never once met each other. The Craft inherited the gesture rather than inventing it. Some initiatory traditions use oil inside their degree rites, and what happens in those rooms belongs to those rooms.
The Carrier: The Body of the Blend
Every anointing oil is two things wearing one name.
There is the carrier, which is the body — the bland golden liquid that holds everything else and delivers it to the skin without harm. And there is the scent, which is the voice.
Blending is nothing more mysterious than deciding how loud a voice may speak inside that body.
- Sweet almond. Pale gold, faintly nutty, kind to skin, cheap enough to make your early mistakes in. It is a nut oil, so it stays well away from anyone with a nut allergy.
- Jojoba. Not truly an oil but a liquid wax, which is why it outlasts nearly everything else on the shelf. Light, almost scentless, forgiving.
- Fractionated coconut. Clear as tap water, thin, long-lived, with no smell of its own to argue with your herbs.
- Olive. Heavy, green, unmistakable. Its own scent walks uninvited into every blend. Better on candles, tools and thresholds than on the wrist.
- Sunflower or grapeseed. Light, inexpensive, and quick to turn. Make a little and use it.
Buy the smallest bottle that will serve you. Oil is a living thing in slow decline from the day it is pressed.
Choosing What Goes In
Rosemary for memory and for clean edges. Lavender for the loosening of a clenched evening. Frankincense for the smell of a room gone solemn. Rose for the slow, patient work of the heart. Bay for the voice that must carry.
You may work from a table of magical correspondences, or from the plant that grows by your own back step, or from the single smell that has meant something to you since childhood. All three are honest starting places.
Choose few. Three plants speaking clearly are worth more than nine muttering over one another in the dark.
Infusing a Plant Into Oil
An infusion is the slow method. The plant stands in the carrier for days or hours, and the oil comes away holding its colour and its breath.
You will need:
- A small glass jar with a tight lid, washed and completely dry
- Dried plant material — never fresh
- Your chosen carrier oil
- Muslin, a fine sieve, or a clean coffee filter
- A dark glass bottle to finish in
The warm sill.
- Fill the jar loosely with the dried plant. Do not pack it down.
- Pour the carrier over until the plant is covered by a finger’s depth of oil.
- Slide a clean skewer down the side to release the trapped air, and top up if the level drops.
- Cap it. Write on the label what is inside, which carrier you used, and the day you began.
- Stand it on a warm windowsill for two to four weeks, turning the jar in your hands each time you pass it.
- Strain through muslin and squeeze the last of it out. Let the oil stand an hour, then pour it off the fine sediment at the bottom.
- Bottle in dark glass, out of the light.
Gentle heat, for when the working will not wait.
- Set the jar of oil and dried plant into a pan holding an inch of water.
- Keep the water hot but never boiling, for two to three hours. The oil must never sizzle, darken or smoke.
- Lift out, cool, strain and bottle exactly as above.
Two rules hold both methods together, and they are ordinary kitchen sense rather than lore. Use dried plant only — water left inside oil breeds spoilage, and fresh material such as garlic standing in oil at room temperature can grow bacteria producing a genuinely dangerous toxin. And keep everything bone dry: the jar, the spoon, your hands.
If a finished oil ever turns cloudy, fizzes, grows fur on a floating leaf or smells sour, it goes in the bin. There is no charm that redeems a spoiled oil.
For the cutting, drying and keeping of the plants themselves, see gathering by the season. If you gather anything wild, check what is permitted where you live before you take it.
Blending With Essential Oils
An essential oil is the plant distilled or pressed down to something ferocious. A single drop may be the wrung-out ghost of a whole armful of blossom. It is never worn neat.
A common guide for skin is one to three drops of essential oil to each teaspoon of carrier. That is a small number, and it is enough. More scent does not make more magic; it only makes more scent, and a hot red patch on your wrist besides.
- Pour the carrier into the dark bottle first.
- Add the essential oils one drop at a time, counting aloud if it helps you keep the count.
- Cap it and roll the bottle slowly between your palms until the warmth of your hands has gone into it.
- Let it rest three or four days in the dark before you judge it. A blend that seems shrill on the first evening often settles into something rounder.
Know also what you are buying. A fragrance oil is a made scent, sometimes synthetic, and it may smell glorious — but it is not the plant, and no correspondence table was written about it.
Ordinary Care With a Concentrated Oil
None of this is fussiness. It is the same care you would give a hot pan.
- Always dilute. Essential oils do not go neat onto skin.
- Patch test a new blend on the inside of the forearm and leave it a day before you wear it anywhere else.
- Keep it away from eyes, lips, nostrils and every other mucous membrane, and off broken or irritated skin.
- Several citrus oils, bergamot most of all, make skin burn more readily in sunlight. Wear them at dusk, under sleeves, or not at all.
- Some oils are simply hot — cinnamon bark, clove, oregano, thyme. They belong in candle and tool work far more comfortably than on a wrist.
- Never swallow any of it, and keep every bottle out of reach of children.
- Cats and dogs. A number of essential oils are hazardous to them, by contact and in the air of a closed room alike. Ask a veterinarian before you scent a house that an animal shares.
- If you are pregnant or nursing, live with a health condition, or take any medicine, ask a doctor or pharmacist first. A scented oil is not a treatment and never stands in place of one.
- Oil burns. Keep the bottle away from the flame and wipe your fingers before you strike the match. More on this in working safely in spellcraft.
Bottling, Labelling and Keeping
Dark glass, always — amber or cobalt, small, with a good closure. Light and air are the two thieves.
Glass rather than plastic. Some of these oils will eat a cheap plastic cap from the inside and leave you with a spoiled blend and a ruined shelf.
Write the label the day you make the bottle: the plants, the carrier, the date. Six months on, the little unnamed bottle at the back is a stranger, and a stranger goes in the bin.
Keep them cool, dark and upright — a closed box in a cupboard, not a sunny altar shelf.
Waking the Oil
The blend is finished. Now it waits.
Charging is the moment you tell the oil what it is for. Some hold the bottle between both palms and breathe over it until the glass is warm. Some set it under moonlight, or beneath a stone, or beside a lit candle for the length of the burn.
Some wait for a chosen hour or day — the planetary hours are a good frame for this, and the waiting itself does a quiet kind of work on the one who waits.
Say plainly what the oil is for. One sentence, spoken aloud, is worth a page of silent intention.
This is not the same as consecrating a tool. That is a longer and more formal rite, and it is set out in making a tool yours.
Where the Oil Is Worn
A very little. A smear, a fingerprint, a single warm line.
The inner wrists, where the pulse comes near the surface. The hollow at the base of the throat. Behind the ears. The centre of the breastbone. The middle of the brow. The crown, under the hair. The palms, if you are about to work with your hands.
Some draw a symbol rather than a smear — a small figure traced with the thumb where no one else will see it. A charged mark drawn this way sits close to the practice of sigils, and it fades from the skin in the same hour it fades from the front of your mind.
Nowhere near the eyes. Ever.
Candles, Tools and Doorframes
Oil is how a plain candle becomes a particular candle. The rules for which way to draw it and what herbs to roll it in belong to dressing a candle; keep the oil off the wick and off the rim, and let the wax dry before you light it.
A drop goes on the underside of a chalice, the handle of a knife, the seam of a pouch, the top corner of a doorframe where no visitor will ever look.
Wood drinks oil and holds it for years. Porous stone does the same, and does not give it back — think before you anoint a stone you may want plain again.
Named Oils and Whose They Are
You will see bottles with names on them: oils for opening a road, for drawing money, for turning something back on its sender.
Many of those named formulas come out of Hoodoo, an African American tradition with its own history, its own teachers and its own understanding of who may work it. That is not a Wiccan inheritance, and buying a bottle does not confer it. The whole question is taken up in whose gods are these.
Nothing prevents you from making an oil for prosperity or for protection. Make it in your own words, from plants you can name.
When an Oil Turns
You will smell it before you see it. Rancid oil goes waxy and stale, like old crayons, like a nut left in a coat pocket through a winter.
Cloudiness, sediment that was not there before, specks of fuzz on a floating fragment of leaf — all of these end the bottle’s life.
Wipe the oil into paper and put it in the household bin rather than down the sink, which will not thank you. Wash the bottle in hot water and let it dry entirely upside down before it is used again.
A First Blend, Plain and Serviceable
This is a general-purpose anointing oil, used when you wish to set a working apart from the ordinary hours around it.
You will need:
- Two tablespoons of jojoba or sweet almond oil
- Four drops of lavender essential oil
- Three drops of frankincense essential oil
- Two drops of rosemary essential oil
- A small dark glass bottle
- Pour the carrier into the bottle at a time when the house is quiet.
- Add the lavender, then the frankincense, then the rosemary, counting each drop.
- Cap the bottle and roll it slowly between your palms.
- Say what it is for, aloud, in one plain sentence.
- Stand it in the dark for three days before the first wearing.
- Patch test on the inner forearm before it goes anywhere else.
What the Oil Does Not Do
It does not compel anyone. It does not act on a person who never agreed to it.
It does not treat, ease or cure any illness of the body or the mind. If you are unwell, the one to speak to is a doctor, and no bottle on any shelf changes that.
And it does not rescue a working that was never clear to begin with. Oil sharpens a thing that already has an edge.
What it does is smaller and stranger than any of that.
You touch two fingers to the glass, then to your wrist, and something in you that had been wandering the day comes back into the room and stands still.
Hours later the scent has almost gone. You catch it turning your hand over in lamplight — thin, warm, resinous — and the whole evening returns with it.
That is the work. That is what the oil is for.