A correspondence is a link of likeness: one thing that stands for another because it shares something of its character. Witches use them to gather a working's purpose into things that can be seen, touched, lit and smelled.
A spell for courage might be worked on a Tuesday, the day of Mars, with a red candle, at the waxing moon. Each of those choices corresponds to the purpose, and each adds a little weight to it in the mind of the one who works. The more of them are gathered together, and the better they are understood, the more fully the purpose is held. That is the whole theory, and it does not need to be more mysterious than that to be useful.
A filing system
The tables of correspondences that fill so many books of magic are best thought of as a filing system: a way of sorting the world under a small number of headings, so that a thing filed under one heading calls to mind everything else filed there. The headings most used are the four elements, the seven planets of the old astronomy, and the signs of the zodiac.
The system is old in its parts and fairly young as a whole. The elements go back to the Greeks. The planets and their days were known to the Romans. The great tables in which everything from metals to angels was assigned to a planet were built up in the Renaissance, most famously by Henry Cornelius Agrippa in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533, and enlarged by the magical orders of the late nineteenth century and by Aleister Crowley, whose book of tables appeared in 1909. Wicca took over a simplified version.
Like every filing system, it reflects the minds of the people who made it, and the tables disagree with one another more than their confident layouts suggest. The question of whether the wand belongs to air or to fire has been argued in the Craft since the 1950s. A table is a place to start, not a law.
The days of the week
Each day of the week belongs to one of the seven planets of the old astronomy, which included the sun and the moon. English hides this behind the names of Anglo-Saxon gods, Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frige, who were matched with Roman ones long ago. Welsh, the other language of our border, keeps the Roman planets in plain view, and we give both.
| Day | Planet | In Welsh | Traditionally good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | The sun | Dydd Sul | Health, vitality, success, confidence |
| Monday | The moon | Dydd Llun | Dreams, intuition, the home, journeys over water |
| Tuesday | Mars | Dydd Mawrth | Courage, strength, protection, facing a conflict |
| Wednesday | Mercury | Dydd Mercher | Study, speech, writing, travel, trade |
| Thursday | Jupiter | Dydd Iau | Growth, prosperity, generosity, justice |
| Friday | Venus | Dydd Gwener | Love, friendship, beauty, the arts, reconciliation |
| Saturday | Saturn | Dydd Sadwrn | Endings, binding, boundaries, patience, the old |
Colours
Colour is the correspondence most used, because it is the easiest to bring into a working: a candle, a cord, a cloth. The meanings below are common in British and American Wicca, and none of them is fixed.
| Colour | Commonly used for |
|---|---|
| White | Any purpose. Purity, blessing, the moon. A white candle will stand in for any other. |
| Silver | The moon and the Goddess. Dreams and intuition. |
| Gold | The sun and the God. Success and vitality. |
| Red | Courage, strength, passion, the blood of life. Fire. |
| Orange | Encouragement, energy, celebration. Harvest and Samhain. |
| Yellow | Thought, study, speech, cheerfulness. Air. |
| Green | Growth, gardens, fertility, money matters, the land. Venus. |
| Blue | Healing, calm, peace, truth. Water. |
| Purple | Spirit, dignity, wisdom. Jupiter. |
| Pink | Affection, friendship, kindness. |
| Brown | Earth, animals, the home, steadiness. |
| Black | Endings, banishing, binding, rest. Saturn and the dark of the moon. |
A meaning that matters to you outweighs any table. Blue is the usual colour for healing. But if you are working for a friend in hospital whose favourite colour is yellow, and you have a yellow candle and no blue one, the yellow candle is the better choice, because it will make you think of her. All of it is symbolic, and symbols work through the mind of the person using them.
Plants
Herbs, trees and flowers have the oldest and richest correspondences of all, because people have lived with them longest. These are a few that a British witch is likely to meet, most of them grown in an ordinary garden.
- Lavender
- Calm, sleep, cleansing. The great herb of the clean house. The leaves serve as well as the flowers, and a plant in a pot by the door is worth a shelf of bought sachets.
- Rosemary
- Remembrance, as Ophelia says, and protection. Carried at weddings and funerals alike for centuries.
- Sage
- Wisdom and cleansing. Ordinary garden sage does everything that the white sage bundles sold in shops are bought for, and does not come from a wild plant that others hold sacred and that is being stripped from its hillsides.
- Bay
- Victory, clarity and protection. A leaf can be written on and burned.
- Rowan
- Protection above all, in every part of these islands. See the page on protection.
- Vervain
- An old sacred herb of the Romans and of the medieval herbalists, used for consecration and for blessing.
- Mugwort
- Dreams and journeys. Laid under the pillow, never brewed in pregnancy.
- Yarrow
- Divination, love, and the healing of wounds, from which it has its old name of soldier's woundwort.
- Elder
- A tree with a great deal of folklore, much of it about the danger of cutting or burning it without asking leave first.
- Frankincense
- Not a British plant but a resin, and the incense most used for consecration. With cinnamon and clove, it is the smell of Yule.
Plants are medicines and poisons
Never eat, drink or burn a plant on the strength of a table of correspondences. Some of the herbs most associated with witches, foxglove, rue, henbane and others, are poisonous. Some common ones are unsafe in pregnancy, and St John's wort interferes with a great many medicines, including the contraceptive pill. Essential oils are concentrated, should be diluted before they touch the skin, and can harm pets. Burning dried plants indoors fills the room with smoke. If you mean to use a herb as a medicine, learn it from a qualified herbalist and tell your doctor.
Stones
We admit to some reserve about crystals. A stone can be a fine focus for the mind, but it is no substitute for the work, and a good many of the stones sold in shops come from mines whose conditions are worth asking about before buying. But stones have been carried for luck and protection for as long as there are records, and a few are worth knowing.
- A stone from your own place. A pebble from the river you walk by, or from the top of your own hill, is worth more on a household altar than anything that has been posted from the other side of the world.
- Holed stones. Flints with a natural hole through them, called hag stones or adder stones, were hung in houses and byres all over Britain to keep harm away. They are still found on beaches and in ploughed fields, and still hung up.
- Clear quartz. The all-purpose stone, associated with the moon and with clear sight.
- Jet. The black fossil wood of the Yorkshire coast, worn in mourning by the Victorians and long before them as a protection.
- Amber. Fossil resin, warm to the touch, worn for health and luck.
- Tiger's eye. Commonly carried for protection and steadiness.
Making your own
The correspondences that work best are the ones a witch has made their own. A good exercise, and one we set in the outer court, is to keep a page of the diary for each purpose you are likely to work for, healing, courage, protection, peace, and to add to it over a year everything that seems to belong there: colours, plants, days, places, animals, words, pieces of music, people. In a year you will have your own table, and you will know why every entry is in it.
A correspondence you have tested is worth ten you have copied. The candle is a good place to begin testing them.