Over the last couple years, my partner Aradia and I have found it necessary to develop a recipe for a cleansing spiritual bath. It’s the sort of thing we need a little too often to buy pre-packaged (and we’re pretty intense DiY types, anyway), but we couldn’t find a recipe we liked online. Plus, most of the recipes we didn’t like were all attached to places selling something and/or choked with popup ads. So, surprising no-one, we made our own.
Almost all of my herbalism and plant magic, I learned from Aradia. She is, as I may have mentioned before, a huge fan of the practice of recipes based on 3, 7, or 13 ingredients, with a strong preference for 13 on the basis of “more is better”. I initially wrote a 7 ingredient recipe, and when the time came for the next round, she had six more things to add. Together, we combined of what (few and partial) traditional recipes we could find online and supplemented them with Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (we grew up in the 90s). The final recipe (below) leans heavily on things that we like to keep in the house, regardless, so you’ll probably have many of them already on hand, as well. The measurements are idealized and more useful when making big batches, but they give you somewhere to start. A volume of each equal to a teabag or a cigarette will do the trick.
Ingredients:
- black salt – 5 grams
- fennel – 3 grams
- basil – 1 gram
- rue – 1 gram
- lavender – 1 gram
- thyme – 1 gram
- benzoin – 1 gram
- copal – 1 gram
- bayleaf – 1 leaf
- tobacco – 1 cigarette
- anise – 1 star
- peppermint – 1 tea bag
- chamomile – 1 tea bag
Instructions:
Measure the ingredients into a reusable teabag for use or storage.
When making multiple doses simultaneously, you’ll find it convenient to put the single-unit ingredients (cigarette, teabag, anise star, bayleaf) directly into the bag, then mix the remaining ingredients together in a bowl or mortar for consistent distribution and texture.
Store the baggies in a cool dry place if you’re not using them immediately. (I store mine in the same tote where I store the raw ingredients.)
When used, place bag of ingredients in a heat resistant container – a pyrex measuring cup, a metal pot or bowl, or whatever other vessel seems appropriate – with a mouth big enough to ladle the liquid back out of. Pour boiling water over the bag of ingredients and steep until no longer scalding but still warm.
Ritual:
This is my ritual. Yours will necessarily be your own.
I assemble the ingredients in the kitchen or my workroom.
When I am ready to use them, I bring them and a large bowl and a kettle of boiling water to my altar, where I make offerings of incense and candles and pray over them, asking my gods and familiar spirits to bless and consecrate the materials that they may cleans and purify me. Then I pour the boiling water over the ingredients and let them steep for 20-40 minutes, depending on where my heat sensitivity is at that particular day. This produces about a half gallon of bath.
When the bath is cooled enough, it take it in to my shower with me. I ladle the bath over my head, down my back, down my chest, down each arm, down each leg, and repeat until I have used the whole volume. As I do so, I pray extemporaneously to be washed clean and purified.
Once I have poured the bath over myself, one ladle full at a time, I sleuce it off of my body, always away from my head/heart. Then I take a mundane shower, again always scrubbing down my body and limbs, away from my head/heart. (This last step is an idiosyncrasy and a favor to the people I live with who have a sense of smell.)
If I am feeling particularly benighted, I will spend the steeping time in prayer and/or meditation, including performing the Stele of Jeu. If I am feeling well and truly fucked, I may follow up the bath with another Stele of Jeu and/or an application of uncrossing oil or even a full uncrossing candle ritual.
Use:
While I’m usually a big proponent of Chaos Magick and the benefits of fucking around in order to find out, after many years of finding out I have come down firmly on the side of “traditionalists are not wrong about maintaining a regular purification practice”. It is no more world-hating or puritanical to tell you to take your spiritual hygiene seriously than it is to tell you to wash your dick and your asshole. (Because we all know that it’s cismen who are the problem here, right?) Days or weeks of vegetarianism and/or sexual abstinence? I remain unconvinced. Regular baths, fumigations, or other spiritual purification rituals? I’ve switched teams and am now a full advocate.
So, in a more ideal world, I would be doing some version of this ritual somewhere between “every time the Moon is New” to “every Saturday” and following up with a sound-cleansing and fumigation of the house.
In the real world, I struggle to maintain the parts of my ritual practice between “daily offerings” and “enchantment as needed”. So in practice I end up doing cleansing baths in batches as I’m crawling out of depression holes and then maybe regularly for a week or three after. In fact, even as I write this I am winding up just such binge of spiritual purification. As such, I tend to make the baths in big batches, reducing the barrier of entry from “find where I hid the ingredients from myself” to “boil water and grab the bag”.