About ritual candle-making (I)

Beeswax candles produced by immersion

This is a time of the year when streghe make candles. Candle-making is an important part of Italian witchcraft, and candles rarely lack on the working space of the Italian practitioner. Although today books of magic and witchcraft may propose a huge variations of choice in terms of candle colours and shape, Italian witches tend to favour a simpler approach. I will try to explain on what this is based and how it works. Of course, as everything in this blog, this is my take on it.
Colours in candles are a powerful way of approaching elemental and planetary correspondences. A blue candle, for example, may represent Jupiter and the element of water, a red one Mars and the element of fire, a yellow one Mercury and the element of air and so on. However, candle-enthusiasts often tend to neglect the fact that those candles are first, made of petroleum-derivative substances like paraphyn. This isn't good for your health, it won't do any good to your magic. If you are practising a folklore based form of natural magic, you want to use materials that come directly from nature - and which will not slowly kill you while burning. Let's look into the alternative materials available, and then we'll look into colours.

Animal Grease
Wipe out those faces of disgust, this is the way it has been done for centuries. Candles were in poor, rural households a valued good and so were porks. Pork grease was kept, stored and moulded into candles at need. Pork fat makes smelly candles that can burn very fast. Many contemporary witches (like myself) do not like pork fat, for its cruel animal nature (and the way pigs are kept in modern day animal factories). Moreover, these candles are really smelly and quite inconvenient to work with - although for some they are more easily manageable that the next alternative, beeswax.

Beeswax
Beeswax is an incredible, powerful and all-natural material that makes perfect candles. Naturally, beeswax comes from the glands in the worker bees to protect the infants and food. It is made of animal fats, but its purpose it is to sustain life - it does not come from murder. Witches who live in urban settings may find difficult to obtain it, but if you get in touch with a bee-keeper than you're on the right way to a good deal. Many small bee-keepers prefer to sale the wax remaining from their work to individuals, rather than to the few companies that use it to make candles and other stuff, for doing which they purify and bleach the wax, sometimes using chemicals that have the same negative properties you want to avoid. You want to buy the raw wax from the bee-keeper, which is the pure product as it came out of the bee. In Italy, small bee-keepers may sell a kilo of beeswax for anything from 12 to 20 euros.

According to how the honey is extracted, beeswax can be sold in two forms. First, foils. Foils are produced when bees are arranged in honeycomb foundations. These foils are normally clean and highly manageable, and one can either warm them up (with an hair-drier, for example) and just roll them into candles or completely liquefy them and use stamps. Second, loaves. Beeswax loaves are

This is pretty much how a loaf looks like

my favourite, they usually come in one or two kilo sizes and are a mass of raw beeswax with sometimes dead bees and pockets of honey in them. They are hard to break, better use a warm blade, but, oh boy, they are marvellous. The wax liquefies in hot pot immersed in another bigger pot with boiling water. Once liquefied, you can choose to filter it to get rid of impurities, or tu is it as it is. Candles may be created with stamps, or through the 'immersion' technique, which I will talk about in another post.

Beeswax candles have a pleasant light-yellow colour, and they burn like hell. However, the fact that beeswax is very flammable (caution when you handle it!) does not mean it is only good for candles. On the contrary, it makes also an excellent base for ointments. It should never lack in the witch's cupboard, in my opinion. Of course beeswax can be coloured, but I'll write about that in a another post.