Herbal Preparations: Salves

The simplest of salves can be made by gently warming sesame or olive oil along with your herbs of choice. Use a very low heat in the stove and simmer for at least one hour if using fresh herbs. Dried herbs or seeds should simmer for two hours. Hard materials such as barks and roots should simmer for three hours or more.

And what about using a combination of hard, fresh, and dried material? This is quite easy, actually. Simmer the oil, add the hard materials, and let simmer for an hour. Add the dried materials and let simmer for another hour. Finally add the fresh materials and let the salve simmer for a final hour. The trick is timing, so pay attention and perhaps use a timer.

The product at this stage is not a salve yet. Strain the material through a good quality cheesecloth, making sure to get all the plant material out. You want no plant material in your salve. When this is done, you'll need to add melted beeswax. A mix of no more than 2 ounces of beeswax per pint of oil mixture is typically ideal. Stir thoroughly and consider adding a teaspoon of benzoin tincture as a preservative. If you're going to refrigerate the salve and use it often, a preservative isn't necessary.

Pour the mixture into a container of your choice, one that seals well, and store in the fridge if you haven't added a preservative. If you have, you can store the salve in a cool, dry place. If you've made a salve for your lips (such as a chap stick), consider pouring it into an empty chap stick container. You'll still need to refrigerate if you haven't added a preservative, but your chap stick will survive a few hours at room temperature. You can refrigerate overnight and carry the stick with you during the day.

Your salve can be applied directly to the area you need to treat. The exact ingredients in the salve will determine what it can be used for.

Herbal Preparations: Poultices

A poultice of red clover on a rash on my own leg.

You might think poultices aren't used very often in the modern world, perhaps because you haven't heard the word used in common conversation, but you'd be wrong. If you've ever put a little bit of ointment, perhaps some Polysporin, on a bandage and applied it to a wound, you yourself have used a poultice. They're also used frequently in hospitals for a variety of purposes, though they are more likely to call them applications.

Simply put, a poultice is just a sterile cloth (such as a bandage or even a sterile piece of cheesecloth) that is used to keep some for of medicine in place. This medicine might be a paste, it might be an ointment, or it might even be actual loose herbs. In general, if you do use loose herbs, you'd place a single layer of bandage or cheesecloth on the wound first, then place the loose herbs, then bandage the wound. This practice is sometimes used with pastes and ointments as well, depending on the ingredients. The poultice is often heated, but be careful of applying an overheated poultice to bare flesh. Burns can and have resulted.

Back before we knew much about infections and such, a piece of bread or other similar food product might have been used instead of the sterile cloth. I distinctly remember my grandmother applying a poultice of mustard and a few other ingredient to a piece of bread and strapping it to my spider bite. It worked and I didn't get an infection, but today it would be better to use sterile cloth. We don't always have to be stuck in the past, after all.

Herbal Preparations: Oils

Oils have been used by many cultures around the world for thousands of years. A great deal is known about them because of their extensive use. When used for magical or medicinal purposes, you will almost always dilute your oils. There are some notable exceptions, such as lavender, but most essential oils are far too concentrated to use without dilution. Some oils are actually dangerous if they come in contact with your skin or mucous membranes before they are diluted. Because of this, if you are going to prepare your own oil mixtures you will have to know how to delete them yourself using a carrier or base oil.

There are many base oils to choose from. you might consider almond, apricot kernel, avocado, coconut, grapeseed, hazelnut, olive, palm, peanut (if you're not allergic), sesame, or sunflower. To decide which one best suits your purpose, do a little research. Look up the properties of sesame or sunflower and decide if any of those properties make sense for your purposes. Or you could simply use jojoba oil as your base or carrier. This oil is good for almost any purpose and it has the added benefit of not going rancid. All other oils, including the ever-popular olive, will eventually become rancid and unusable. You can, of course, use a preservative such as wheat germ oil or rosemary oil extract, but I prefer to simply use jojoba and avoid the problem altogether.

When creating your oil preparations, you'll have to take into account your own personal sensitivities. Some people, for example, can place certain oils almost undiluted on their skin. Others may find that the oil in question must be diluted significantly before it can be applied. For this reason, you may have to add more or less carrier oil to your final mixture before use. Also remember your own allergies. If you're allergic to cinnamon, you probably cannot place its oil upon your skin no matter how much you dilute it. In general, however, it is best to start off with a ratio of 20 to 25 drops of pure essential oil to approximately 2 ounces a base or carrier oil. You can then make this mixture stronger or weaker depending on your own preferences and needs.

At first, you will probably want to stick with proven recipes when creating herbal mixtures. In time, however, you will certainly want to experiment a bit. When doing so, look back at the proven recipes and see what you can tweak to better suit your own personality and style. As long as your oils are not too concentrated and you're not using anything you're actually allergic to, there is little harm in this type of herbal preparation. Just keep most herbal mixtures away from your mucous membranes and out of your eyes and you should be fine.

Remember that all of the above assumes you are working with pure essential oils. Fragrance oils have no place in magical or medicinal practice. They might smell good, but they are otherwise useless.

Herbal Preparations: Incense

If you need is to release the scent of herbs, incense is a time-honored way to do so. Incenses, in one form or another, have been used as long as spirituality has existed. There are two basic forms of incense: self-igniting and non-self-igniting. Both have their benefits, though one definitely has more drawbacks than the other.

The best and most effective incense will always be the non-self-igniting type. This kind of incense is most easily prepared by simply grinding the herbs you need in a mortar and pestle. After mixing the herbs in accordance with your needs and perhaps the recipe you're following, you simply burn the resulting mixture on charcoal disks. This is the most effective type of incense and is certainly worth a little time grinding up herbs. Charcoal disks are fairly inexpensive, so this method can be cost effective as well.

You can, if you like, use a pure wood powder as a base and add essential oils and other extractions. This works much like the non-self-igniting incense in that it has to be burned atop charcoal disks. I don't generally recommend this type of incense because it is much harder to prepare, but it is certainly an option.

Self-igniting incense is another story entirely. Fair warning: I really do not like self-igniting incense. Most of it is little better than scented sawdust and saltpeter. It burns all right, but because it uses very little actual herb, it has no real medicinal or magickal value. Even if you can manage to create an incense that is mostly herb and saltpeter, the saltpeter interferes with the scent of the herbs, thereby making it less effective than non-self-igniting incense. And most certainly you should not use self-igniting incense you find in stores. Smells great, yes, but it's worthless. If you want self-igniting incense, experiment with saltpeter and herbs until you find a mixture you like.

Then we come to the matter of incense sticks. Though sticks are convenient, NEVER buy them from a store. Almost without exception these sticks are made of resin and fragrance oils (at least in North America and most of Europe). Since fragrance oils do not have the properties of essential oils (which comes from the natural herb), they are useless for your magickal or medicinal work. Now if they made them from essential oils...but this is rarely done because the cost would be astronomical. If you can buy the incense sticks for a quarter a piece, they're certainly made with fragrance oils no matter what the sales person says.

So what about making them yourself? Well, it's possible. I have had some success dipping my own incense sticks in a mixture of resin and essential oils. I've used both wooden sticks and charcoal sticks, and both have their benefits. The wooden sticks are cleaner, but the charcoal sticks produce a superior scent (but they do make a mess). So you can certainly make your own stick incense that will work for your purposes, but be aware that this is a time consuming process. Finished sticks will have to dry for a few days (don't try to quicken this process in an oven) so you won't be able to use them immediately. Still, the process can be a fun craft if you're in to that sort of thing.

The best way to make incense is simply to grind the herbs and burn them (even by throwing them into a fire instead of using charcoal disks). There are other methods, obviously, but in this case, simple is best. Experiment, if you like, but don't skip over the easiest and most effective method for preparing incense.