Water

The local Wiccan circle had a meditation last night on water.  I find myself in the unusual position of being able to speak with some authority on the subject.

The main correspondences are clear to anyone who's studied for a decent amount of time.  The Moon, Venus, Neptune.  Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.  Moonstone, aquamarine, opal, obsidian, silver and quicksilver.  Willow, yew, rosemary, lilies of all kinds.  Animals that live on or near the water: that's a pretty wide variety from dolphins to dragonflies.  Ocean magick, river magick, wishing wells and mirrors.

What could water magick be used for, though?

I start turning my thoughts to the ways in which water manifests.  The ocean is obvious to most people: it's beautiful, but deceptive.  It hides its power well in its sheer size, and its power is that of life itself in both its creation and in its continuance - and, if we continue to abuse the mighty oceans, perhaps in its destruction as well.  People love to go hang out at the beach for the day and enjoy the sun and the waves and the beauty of the Great Lights reflecting.  Some look out to that endlessly-receding horizon with terror, some with awe, some with the need to go explore.  Some don't come back.

Life, fertility, motion and e-motion, subtle power.  Treasure - much of the world's gold is dissolved in seawater.  Beauty and joy and travel.  But the dark side also - weather magick, storms both physical and mental, terror, grief, loss, death.  Water can be used to address all of these.

Rivers: they provide life along their entire courses even when they run through desert.  Stop up their flow, however, and consequences ensue.  Construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt has led to the encroachment of both salt and desert sand into once-fertile land.  The Three Gorges Dam in China, touted as a great engineering achievement to tame China's Yellow Sorrow, threatens to destabilize the several earthquake faults in the region with the weight of the water trapped behind - and has already cost the nation dearly in terms of historical knowledge and villages inhabited for hundreds of years, lost forever to the rising waters.

History, reflection, the study of hidden knowledge and past lives.  But trapped without motion in liquid form, it becomes stagnation, putrefaction... death again.  Scorpio acknowledges this: there is no accident in the fact that the Fixed Water sign rules when the Veil between life and death is at its thinnest, nor in the fact that the moon that falls during Scorpio is the Blood Moon, or that Halloween began as the harvest of blood (as opposed to the harvests of grain and fruit before - the culling of the herds for the weak/unfit, their meat salted or smoked and put away for the long, cold nights ahead in hopes of staving off a miserable death when everything else was dead or sleeping already). 

Ancestral magick, even necromancy for those so inclined (and ancestral magick may well cross that line in some cases), are suited to Water work.  Pregnancy feels like nothing so much as an odd combination of Earth and Water, like quicksand - yet every last one human grows in their mother's womb, surrounded by a perfect sea of dark, salty water.  Life-that-was, life-that-is, and life-to-come.

Water is patient, if somewhat lazy (always taking the easiest path downhill), and each molecule of water prepares the way for the molecule behind it.  Mighty Niagara has had to be tamed in order to preserve its flow in its current location and even so, it has retreated several feet up the river in just a couple of centuries.

Death comes in many forms with water: drowning, in its overabundance.  Dehydration, in its absence.  Without regulation of its temperature, it might boil or it might freeze.  Water can bring cool refreshment to parched tissues, cook nutritious food, or it can bring diseases from its pollution or by the animals that live in it: this goes for the waters of the body and of the mind as well.  Even a perfectly healthy mist can cause great danger: how many ships have run aground on reefs they cold not see, or massive auto pileups occurred because of dense fogbanks? 

Anger, fear, jealousy, depression, hate: these are poisonous emotions that pollute the mind, fog up the clear thoughts, and are capable of great destruction - and yet they cannot, must not, be dammed up.  They have to be acknowledged and released in order to relieve the damage they will do.

Then again, the flip side of putrefaction is preservation, and some amazing discoveries of anthropology, botany and geology have been made through the records preserved in ice.  Again - history, the past.  /how far back might it reach?  As far as Water itself.  And the flip side of the mist is - again - life and beauty, and the acknowledgement of diversity.  Can any painter's brush truly do justice to the rainbow that arches over the base of a waterfall?  But the rainbow is not truly there - it is an illusion, a pretty mirage, a dream of what might be.

Water flows by nature: it MUST flow, even locked in ice.  Ice is trapped in glacier form (for now), and in bergs and growlers: one of those bergs, unseen until it was too late, sank "The Unsinkable" Titanic.  Stealth, then, and again the knowledge of that which might otherwise be hidden (occulted).  Glaciers have carved out vast and magnificent valleys and lakes: Yosemite has a waiting list years-long to see it, the Great Lakes are the largest freshwater seas in the world.  The geological record holds traces of powerful flash floods unleashed by what could only have been the collapse of natural ice dams.  Patience, and the ability to hold for long periods.

Change, irrevocable whether it comes by the slow grinding action of centuries of ice on stone or in the inexorable rise of the global sea level or in the swiftness of a flash flood, is characteristic of Water.  It is all of the Trimurti, and it is the Triple Goddess as well.  It is Autumn's first warning frost and Winter's icy blast, and the trickling icemelt and gentle rains of Spring that coalesce into a mighty flood in many areas.  It is Summer as well in its absence, ruled by Cancer even when the rains refuse to come and Fixed Fire brings in the arid Dog Days. 

It is Isa - patient Ice.  It is Hagall - the feared Hail than can demolish a season's crop in ten minutes and drop the value of an entire car lot by hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But it is also Berkana - nurturing.

Please don't remain silent here - I am reviewing what I know as I write this, but I welcome further comments.  I am always looking to learn.