An added way to give your rituals and spell working a more personal, and therefore more powerful touch, is to make and use your own correspondence tables. It’s a fairly easy process, especially if you’ve already spent some time studying the various correspondences magical items have. Color is probably the easiest and it’s the one we’ll be looking at here. The same techniques can then be applied to whatever else you wish.

First, decide which colors you want to include in your chart. Just to give you an idea, the correspondence table in my personal book of shadows lists twelve colors: black, blue, brown, gold, green, orange, pink, purple, red, silver, white, and yellow. You could easily focus on just primary colors, the main colors of the rainbow spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), or maybe break the list down into even more specific classifications. The choice is entirely yours.

The second step is to gather all the information you have on the various colors and write them down. Go collect up all those books and internet printouts you’ve got sitting around the house. If you’re feeling energetic, take a trip to the library for books on decorating and color theory. See why we’re starting with colors? Herbs would be overwhelming for a first try!

Thirdly, you need to go through all of your source material and write down what each color represents. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll include a particular attribute just yet. That comes in the next step. This step is important because it gets everything organized in one place. It also gets your brain thinking more about the various colors and what they mean to you.

Now for the fourth step. Start going through the listing of attributes and selecting the ones you feel that color does indeed represent. Ask yourself if you might possibly use that color and representation in a ritual or spell. Don’t worry. It’s not sacrilege to toss an attribute that simply doesn’t resonate with you just because someone else says that’s what it means. However, using a color representation that you don’t feel comfortable with, or that doesn’t really mean anything to you is going to leave you’re work lacking.

That’s all there is too it. You now have you first personally made color correspondence chart. The same technique can be used for herbs, stones, you name it. Since the sheer number of herbs or gemstones can be overwhelming, I’d narrow it done using some arbitrary method beforehand. For example, you might decide what attributes you want herbal representations for and how many herbs for each attribute. You might also decide just to use the herbs you have on hand, or those that you can buy or grow easily. The same thing for gemstones or whatever else you might want tables for.

Back to the Shadows?
Back to the Thief's Lair?

Originally composed 27 January, 2001.
Copyright Laurel Reufner, 1996. Comments? Email me!