So. A year ago (or so) I made myself a careers-and-cash-specific honey pot. And it’s been working pretty damn well, particularly considering that I don’t feed it all that often.
However, I’m looking at updating the “instructions” that are part of the pot in order to focus it a little more firmly on work I enjoy and would like to be able to rely on more heavily for income. Work like figure modeling, outreach, crafting, and writing (poetry, story-porn, blogging, and non-fiction essays, just to name a few of the options I want to cover).
Normally (I gather from Miss Sugar), one doesn’t change out bits of a honey pot but, rather, makes a new one from scratch and starts again. Personally – waste not, want not; but also because the pot is working fine, I just want to fine-tune the instructions a little – I think it’s fine to change out the page in the pot. However I don’t think that just adding a new page while leaving the old one in there is a good idea. That could, I think, lead to some confusion and crossed wires, and I’d like to avoid that if I can.
The other trick is that I’ve included a lot of “inspiration for” entries on my sheet. And, yes, they’re inspiration for writing and crafting that are intended to generate income through Etsy, crowd-funded subscriptions, and publication in anthologies or as books in their own right. And, yes, they’re inspiration (at least when it comes to the writing) for, frequently, stuff that has to do with sex and/or kink (erotic fiction and poetry, essays on kink and power exchange, poetry about sex work, etc) and so they’re appropriate to the deity whose altar my honey-pot lives on (she’s a goddess of sex, money, and courage, among other things). However, because many of these things also deal with creativity and artistry, I feel like they should also be set up on the alter that belongs to my goddess of writing, art, creativity (and gender, and queerness, no less) because they fit her job-description as well.
To that end, I think I’m going to do a second honey pot for my arts-and-creativity altar which would include “Come hither” ingredients, but also a lot of creativity items and such like. I think I will go with:
Honey – come hither
Magnets – come hither
Citrine chips (beads) – creativity
Hematite beads – willpower and confidence
A long, coiled willow whip – inspiration, inspired writing, creativity, (fertility)
A few drops of myrrh – enhances magic (also goddess power)
A sprinkling each: allspice, basil, and ginger – determination; creativity, luck, protection; enhances spells
A loose handful of barley – creativity, money
Moonstone beads (chips, balls, or similar) – women’s power, goddess power, lunar energy (intuition, creativity, Maia – my Lunar Lady)
This should get me a good mix of “extras[1]” while keeping the focus on creativity, inspiration, and getting it done.
For honey pots – and for pretty much any spell-work that involves candles – I tend to use tea lights.
Part of this is because I can make them myself (not that, lately, I’ve been doing that, but because it’s nice to be able to add that little bit of extra will power and elbow-deep involvement to the process); partly because they’re easy and multi-purpose (who doesn’t love a simple, neutral-coloured candle, with a broad surface and it’s own holder?); and partly because they’re short. Yes, short. Particularly when it comes to slow-release magic like what you have going on in a honey-pot, the kind where you have to feed the spell regularly in order to get it to keep doing its thing, using a small candle as a means of feeding energy (heat and light) into your spell allows you to both (a) let the spell eat the whole candle and act on that energy[2] in fairly short order, and (b) requires you to refresh your spell’s food-source on the regular, which means you pay more attention to it and make it feel special and acknowledged (always a good thing with spells that are semi – if not actively – alive).
Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now.
Got any thoughts on spell-crafting? Honey-pots? Come-hither magic? Drop me a comment and let me know. 🙂
Cheers,
Meliad the Birch Maiden
[1] I always like to cover my bases a little bit by including ingredients that have multiple useful correspondences. I figure it’s a bit like permaculture (everything in the System has to serve multiple purposes). The primary purpose may be “up the creative output” but the secondary purposes (financial income, safety, pleasure) will have an effect on how that creative output contributes to my life in various ways. That’s the idea, anyway.
[2] You know that old caveat about not using a foot-high pillar candle for your “I need cash fast” spell, due to the candle needing to burn all the way down before the spell will get active? It’s like that.
Urban Meliad 