By Ellie Patrick
I have a book of folk magic from the Ozarks (Ozark Mountain Spell Book: Folk Magic & Healing by Brandon Weston). It’s one of my favorite magic books so far, and it’s a great reference for spell components. One of the things it talks about is Places of Power, which it describes as usually secret, grand natural spots which hold innate power that can be harnessed for spells. I love this idea. It immediately brought to mind Connemara in Ireland, which was by far the most awe-inspiring landscape I’ve ever seen, and even though I was there long before I consciously began my journey into magic, I knew that it was powerful.
Unfortunately, Ireland is a long way from here, so isn’t a practical option for spell work.
But then I thought about other places that carried a certain power with them. At my school, on the outskirts of campus, there is a parking lot. It isn’t used much, and it’s largely unpaved, just packed dirt and gravel. There’s a single street light that gives some illumination, but for the most part the only light up there at night is the headlight of the car we came in and the moon above.
To most people, this is just a disused parking lot, but to me, there is a particular feeling to the place, that’s not quite like anywhere else. It’s also a practical location – no prying eyes and nothing but gravel makes an excellent place to burn spell components, something hard to find on a college campus. And so it was that I found myself driving some friends up there late one night, to burn Chinese spirit money for a late friend of one of my friends (I never got to meet them, but my college experience would have been a lot worse without the work they did). This was again before I started exploring magic on my own, but I knew the place and I believed in the spirit money. In hindsight, I believe that the spell was likely empowered by the location, at least to some degree.
I went back to that spot once more, about a year later, to burn the name of a demon, to release its hold on my boyfriend, but that whole ritual is a story for another time.
Then the other day, a conversation about places of power led to me realizing that one of my earliest magical rituals was something even more mundane.
Starting back in High School, when I would be coming home from something late at night, and needed somewhere to eat, I would often stop at Wendy’s. They were usually the only place still open in the middle of the night, and they had the best fast food anyway. I would always order the exact same thing (a Dave’s Double with no onions, no mayo, with the all-natural lemonade), and then I would sit either there or in my car in the parking lot, depending on whether the dining room was still open, and I would stay there for a while, often sitting for a bit after I finished eating to collect my thoughts and process emotions. I did this even more often in college, when I had more independence and more income. A mostly empty Wendy’s always had a sort of transitional, liminal feel to me, and I reinforced that by regularly stopping there, either on the way to or from school, or on the way home from visiting my partner. In all of those cases, I was often left with many emotions, and this sort of ritual that I had helped me process that. It became a sort of real-life checkpoint in a way. What I realized the other day is that Wendy’s had become a place of power to me. Unfortunately, I’ve recently developed allergies that prevent me from eating my usual meal there, so I’ve kind of lost access to that sort of checkpoint for the time being.
The concept of places of power fascinates me, but I feel that restricting it to natural places is an unhelpful limitation. I think it’s important to find these places of power in the areas you frequent, no matter where that might be. They can lend a lot of power to your magic, but only if you actually go there.