The tortoise and its smaller water-dwelling cousin, the turtle, has appeared in myth and legend for ages, in numerous cultures and societies. These relics of the prehistoric era are often found in creation stories, but can be associated with a variety of other magical and folkloric aspects. Before we get started, let’s take a quick look at the differences between the tortoise and the turtle.
Both the tortoise and the turtle are reptiles, and part of the family Testudines. The tortoise lives on land, gets fairly large – some species regularly weigh in at hundreds of pounds - and has a pretty long lifespan. It’s not uncommon for a tortoise to live over a hundred years, and many records reveal tortoises in captivity that have reached nearly two hundred years of age. By contrast, turtles are much smaller, and generally live in or near water. Turtles typically live from twenty to forty years, although some species of sea turtles have been documented at nearly seventy years of age.
Because of their slow, meandering ways and their long lifespans, turtles and tortoises often appear as symbols of longevity, stability, and wisdom. Let’s look at some of the ways that tortoises and turtles have appeared in myth, magic and legend, throughout the centuries.
In China, tortoise shells, which represent unchangeability, were used as a method of divination. In Chinese legend, the turtle is strongly associated with the element of water, for obvious reasons, and in many tales symbolizes both order, and the creation of the universe.
A number of Native American tribes include the tortoise in their creation stories. The Mohawk people tell of a World Turtle, who carries the earth on her back – and when the earth shakes and moves, it’s because the World Turtle is stretching underneath the weight of all she carries on her shell. Both the Lenape and Iroquois have similar legends, in which the Great Spirit placed all of creation on top of the shell of a giant tortoise.
Turtles appear in folk magic as well. Folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt, who wrote numerous volumes about the magical culture of the southern United States, says it was common knowledge in some rural areas that carrying a turtle bone in your pocket would bring good fortune your way. In some traditions of hoodoo and rootwork, a turtle’s shell can be used in certain lunar-related spellwork, because the shell is often divided into thirteen sections – the same number as there are lunar months in a calendar year.
The shell of the tortoise also appears in African diasporic religions. The turtle’s shell can be used in rattles or fetishes, and the tortoise appears in several Yoruban folktales as a trickster and troublemaker. The turtle is also sometimes offered as a sacrifice to the gods in Santeria and other Afro-Caribbean religious practice.
Here are some ways you can incorporate the magic of the turtle and tortoise into your life:
- In Feng Shui principles, the turtle has several important meanings. Placed at the north of your home, a black turtle will help attract smooth energies in matters of business. At your back door, a turtle represents strength, and offers protection.
- Carry the bone of a turtle in your pocket or wear it as an amulet for good fortune.
- Use an empty turtle shell for divination purposes – you can fill it with water and use it for scrying, or use it as a catching bowl for bone or stone divination.
- Do you have a pet turtle? They symbolize the strength and stability of your home – keep your turtle happy for a long and healthy life, and he’ll watch over your house and keep you secure.
- If you’re out and about, enjoying nature, keep an eye out for tortoises and turtles. They’re associated with our need for purpose and focus, perhaps because of their slow, deliberate pace. If you see a tortoise or turtle, follow it for a while to see where it goes – and as you do, think about all of the places you need to go yourself.
- Wear turtle earrings or a necklace to bring security and stability into your life.
- If you find a turtle shell that’s no longer inhabited by its original occupant, bring it home and place it near your front door for protection of the house and those who live within.
Spring is the season of new life, and as the ground warms, one of the first denizens of the animal kingdom we begin to notice emerging is the serpent. While a lot of people are afraid of snakes, it's important to remember that in many cultures, serpent mythology is strongly tied to the cycle of life, death and rebirth.
In Scotland, Highlanders had a tradition of pounding the ground with a stick until the serpent emerged. The snake's behavior gave them a good idea of how much frost was left in the season. Folklorist Alexander Carmichael points out in the Carmina Gadelica that there's actually a poem in honor of the serpent emerging from its burrow to predict spring-like weather on "the brown day of Bride".
The serpent will come from the hole
on the brown day of Bride (Brighid)
though there may be three feet of snow
on the surface of the ground.
In some forms of American folk magic and hoodoo, the snake can be used as an instrument of harm. In Hoodoo and Voodoo, Jim Haskins relays the custom of using the serpent's blood to introduce snakes into the human body. According to this hoodoo traditions, one must "extract the blood from a snake by puncturing an artery… feed the liquid blood to the victim in food or drink, and snakes will grow inside him."
A South Carolina rootworker who asked to be identified only as Jasper says his father and grandfather, both rootworkers, kept snakes on hand to use in magic. He says, "If you wanted someone to get sick and die, you used a snake that you tied a piece of their hair around. Then you kill the snake, and bury it in the person's yard, and the person gets sicker and sicker each day. Because of the hair, the person is tied to the snake."
Ohio is the home of the best-known serpent effigy mound in North America. Although no one is certain why the Serpent Mound was created, it's possible that it was in homage to the great serpent of legend. The Serpent Mound is about 1300 feet in length, and at the serpent's head, it appears to be swallowing an egg. The serpent's head aligns to the sunset on the day of the summer solstice. The coils and the tail may also point to sunrise on the days of the winter solstice and the equinoxes.
In the Ozarks, there is a story about a connection between snakes and babies, according to author Vance Randolph. In his book Ozark Magic and Folklore, he describes a tale in which a small child goes outside to play and takes along with him a piece of bread and his cup of milk. In the story, the mother hears the child chattering and assumes he's talking to himself, but when she goes outside finds him feeding his milk and bread to a poisonous snake -- typically either a rattlesnake or a copperhead. The old timers of the area warn that killing the snake would be a mistake -- that somehow the child's life is magically connected to that of the snake, and that "if the reptile is killed the baby will pine away and die a few weeks later."
The serpent is instrumental in the Egyptian myth cycle. After Ra created all things, Isis, the goddess of magic, tricked him by creating a serpent which ambushed Ra on his daily journey across the heavens. The serpent bit Ra, who was powerless to undo the poison. Isis announced that she could heal Ra from the poison and destroy the serpent, but would only do so if Ra revealed his True Name as payment. By learning his True Name, Isis was able to gain power over Ra. For Cleopatra, a serpent was an instrument of death.
In Ireland, St. Patrick is famous because he drove the snakes out of the country, and was even credited with a miracle for this. What many people don't realize is that the serpent was actually a metaphor for the early Pagan faiths of Ireland. St. Patrick brought Christianity to the Emerald Isle, and did such a good job of it that he practically eliminated Paganism from the country.
When it comes to symbolism in general, the snake has a lot of different meanings. Watch a snake shed his skin, and you'll think of transformation. Because snakes are silent and move stealthily before attacking, some people associate them with cunning and treachery. Still others see them as representative of fertility, masculine power, or protection.
via about.com
The use of bones for divination, sometimes called osteomancy, has been performed by cultures the world over for thousands of years. While there are a number of different methods, the purpose is typically the same - to foretell the future utilizing the messages displayed in the bones.
Is this something that modern Pagans can do? Certainly, although it’s sometimes hard to come by animal bones, particularly if you live in a suburban area or city. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find some - it just means you have to look harder to find them. Animal bones can be found on the ground in their natural environment any time of the year, if you know where to look. If you don’t live in an area where finding your own bones is a practical task, then make friends with people who live in rural areas, call up your cousin who hunts, become buddies with that taxidermist who has a shop out by the highway.
If you have moral or ethical objections to the use of animal bones in magic, then do not use them.
You may also want to read about Using Animal Parts in Magic.
Pictures in the Flames
In some societies, bones were burned, and shamans or priests would use the results for scrying. Called pyro-osteomancy, this method involved using the bones of a freshly slaughtered animal. In parts of China during the Shang dynasty, the scapula (shoulderblade) of a large ox was used. Questions were inscribed upon the bone, it was placed in a fire, and the resultant cracks from the heat gave seers and diviners the answers to their questions.
According to our About.com Archaeology Expert, Kris Hirst, “Oracle bones were used to practice of a form of divination, fortune-telling, known as pyro-osteomancy. Pyro-osteomancy is when seers tell the future based on the cracks in an animal bone or turtle shell either in their natural state or after having been burned. The cracks were then used to determine the future. The earliest pyro-osteomancy in China included the bones of sheep, deer, cattle, and pigs, in addition to turtle plastrons (shells). Pyro-osteomancy is known from prehistoric east and northeast Asia, and from North American and Eurasian ethnographic reports.”
It is believed the Celts used a similar method, using the shoulder bone of a fox or sheep. Once the fire reached a hot enough temperature, cracks would form on the bone, and these revealed hidden messages to those who had been trained in their reading. In some cases, the bones were boiled prior to burning, to soften them up.
Marked Bones
Much like we see on Runes or Ogham staves, inscriptions or markings on bones have been used as a way of seeing the future. In some folk magic traditions, small bones are marked with symbols, placed in a bag or bowl, and then withdrawn one at a time so that the symbols can be analyzed. For this method, smaller bones are typically used, such as carpal or tarsal bones.
In some Mongolian tribes, a set of several four-sided bones are cast all at once, with each bone having different markings on its sides. This creates a wide variety of end results which can be interpreted in different ways.
If you’d like to make a set of simple marked bones of your own to use, you follow use the guidelines at Divination By Stones as a template to make thirteen bones for divinatory purposes. Another option is to create a set of symbols that are the most meaningful to you and your personal magical tradition.
The Bone Basket
Often, bones are mixed in with other items - shells, stones, coins, feathers, etc. - and placed in a basket, bowl or pouch. They are then shaken out onto a mat or into a delineated circle, and the images are read. This is a practice found in some American Hoodoo traditions, as well as in African and Asian magical systems. Like all divination, a lot of this process is intuitive, and has to do with reading the messages from the universe or from the divine that your mind presents to you, rather than from something you’ve got marked down on a chart.
Mechon is a folk magic practitioner in North Carolina who touches on her African roots and local traditions to create her own method of bone basket reading. “I use chicken bones, and each one has a different meaning, like the wish bone is for good fortune, a wing means travel, that sort of thing. Also, there are shells in there that I picked up on a beach in Jamaica, because they appealed to me, and some stones called Fairy Stones that you can find in some of the mountains around here. When I shake them out of the basket, the way they land, they way they’re turned, what’s next to what -- all of that helps me understand what the message is. And it’s not something I can explain - it’s something I just know.”
All in all, there are a number of ways to incorporate the use of bones into your magical divination methods. Try a few different ones, and discover which one works best for you.
Mention graveyard dirt in a magical context, and chances are good you'll get a lot of strange looks or questions. After all, it sounds a bit creepy, right? Who in their right mind goes around scooping up soil out of cemeteries?
Well, believe it or not, a lot of people. The use of graveyard dirt isn't all that odd in many magical traditions. In some forms of folk magic, for example, the magical connection of the dirt is more significant than just being from a grave. What's more important is the person who's inside the grave.
Dirt from the grave of someone you loved could be used in love magic, while dirt from the burial site of a very wicked person might be incorporated into malevolent workings or curses. In other words, the dirt from the grave is a physical object that corresponds with the traits of the person buried beneath it.
How does one obtain graveyard dirt? It would be easy to just meander into the local cemetery with a trowel and a bag and start scooping, but it's better to be more respectful than this. First and foremost, it's important to choose a gravesite correctly. The best choice is to use dirt from the grave of someone you knew in life -- a family member or friend who has passed. If the person is someone you cared very much about, and who had a positive impact on your life, dirt from this grave could be used in any number of positive magical workings.
The second option would be to use dirt from the grave of someone who you may not have known personally, but who is known to you. For example, soil from a famous writer's grave could be used to inspire a creative spark. Earth from the grave of a wealthy person might be incorporated into a working for prosperity.
No matter whose grave you choose to collect dirt from, it's important that you do so in a respectful and honorable manner. Ask permission first -- and if you begin to feel uneasy, as thought the person buried beneath you is unhappy with what you're doing, then stop. It's also a good idea to leave an offering or small token of appreciation. Only take a small amount of dirt -- no more than a handful.
Finally, be sure to say thank you when you're finished.
For specific examples of how to use graveyard dirt in a ritual or working from a Hoodoo perspective, read Cat Yronwoode's essay over at Luckymojo: Graveyard Dirt.
-The Crafty Witch
