Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Wicca in the Kitchen

Encyclopedia of Wicca in the Kitchen, by Scott Cunningham. Virtually any item in your pantry can be used for personal transformation.

From artichokes to kidney beans to grape jelly, food contains specific magical energies you can harness for positive results. This encyclopedia of food magic offers twenty seven of Scott Cunningham's favorite recipes.

Magical menus for more than ten desired goals including love, protection, health, money, and psychic awareness are provided as well.

The practice of folk magic utilizes a variety of tools to empower simple rituals. These tools include visualization, candles, colors, words, affirmations, herbs, essential oils, stones, and metals. Other tools, fashioned by our hands, are also used, but these are merely power directors. They contain little energy save that which is provided by the magician.

Another magical tool is at our disposal, a tool that contains specific energies which we can use to create great changes in our lives. This tool is all around us. We encounter it every day without realizing the potential for change that exists within it; without knowing that, with a few simple actions and a visualization or two, this tool can be as powerful as the rarest stone or the costliest sword.

What is this untapped source of power? Food that is the right food. The oatmeal you had for breakfast, your salad-and-seafood lunch, even the chocolate ice cream that topped off your evening meal, are all potent magical tools. This is not a new idea. From antiquity, humans have honored food as the sustainer of all life, a gift from the unseen deities who graciously provided it. Food played an important role in religious rituals for most cultures of the Earth as they entered the earliest stages of civilization. Its essence was offered up to the deities that watched overhead, while its physical portion, if not burned, was shared by the priestesses and priests. Food became connected with rites of passage such as birth, puberty, initiation into mystical and social groups, marriage, childbirth, maturity, and death. Not only was food linked with all early religions; it was also understood to possess a nonphysical energy. Different types of food were known to contain different types of energy. Certain foods were eaten for physical strength, for success in battle, for easy childbirth, for health, sex, prosperity, and fertility.

Though food magic was born in an earlier age, it hasn't died out. Foods are used in magic in both the East and West, though the rationale for including them may have changed.

Birthday cakes are an example. Most birthday cakes contain iced wishes of good luck. Why should we eat words? Originally, the words were thought to contain the energies associated with them. So the birthday celebrant was believed to enjoy both the cake and the energy of the words. Birthday cakes are a contemporary form of food magic, whether or not those who perpetuate this ritual are aware of it.

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