A Shamanic View

Spiritual Tools

I have a store that sells ritual tools. I have a lot of conversations around ritual tools. Which kinds are “right” for this ritual, what is “best” for this practice? How to pick them? How to consecrate them? Does one even need to?

For the kitchen witch, the athame that was in the kitchen drawer (and perhaps will be again) might be just fine. For someone wanting to do high ceremonial magic, something fancier might make more sense.

But I don’t want to go on about tools. That’s not really my point.

Perhaps a better discussion example would be tarot decks. Every now and then someone will talk about how powerful their particular deck is, or that they encountered one with so much “power.” Except there isn’t any power in the deck. Except when there is, which I’ll get back to.

So, from a shamanic view, what is a tarot deck? It’s a divinatory tool. Tool is a handy keyword here. Tools don’t do the work. They make the work easier. Hammers can’t build houses. But, ever tried to build a house without one? The TV doesn’t make what you are watching. It receives the signals and translates them into a picture you can see.

Similarly, the tarot deck doesn’t *give* you any information. That information is coming (let’s say “from the universe” so we don’t get hung up on specifics) all the time. The tarot deck gives you a way to focus that information into an image you can make sense of. So there isn’t power, per se, in the deck. That’s not to say that one deck won’t be more effective than another. The ability to decipher the information comes in part from your relationship to that deck. Other people looking at the same card spread aren’t necessarily going to get the same information out of it. (I’m probably going to come back to this part more next month.)

Now, from a shamanic view, the tarot deck is alive. It has a spirit of its own. There is an additional relationship there to nurture. And this is, in essence, where a deck having “power” comes from–from the strength of that relationship. That relationship turns it into a bigger hammer, so to speak.

The same goes for our other tools. So how we treat our tools speaks to the relationship we have with them. How do we treat the tools on our altars, or the drums and rattles or wands or whatever we use in ceremony or ritual or any kind of magic? What does that say about our relationship with them?

More and more I am seeing life as being about the relationships we have. Relationships with each other, with Spirit, with the land or the Earth, with ourselves. I can’t tell you which athame is perfect for you, assuming you use one. But I can tell you that how you treat it, how you build and nurture relationship with it, will probably matter more than whether it’s “pretty” or not. Find the things you connect with, and build those connections. And that goes for so much more than just the tools we work with….