Stubbed Out: An Ode to Ugly Candles
Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
I'll be the first to admit that I love witchy aesthetic. I own three cauldron mugs, a large percentage of my closet has witches block printed onto it, and I developed my own Practical Magic themed margarita recipe with a rosemary salt rim and lavender simple syrup.
I love that fucking Stevie Nicks song and I will never stop singing it. I wear a lot of woo-ish jewelry.
But the trouble with witchy aesthetic and how it mingles with marketing, branding, advertising, and (let's face it) capitalism, is that is does the thing we have been doing since Plato - equating beauty with goodness.
I have a soft spot for ugly things. I love clashing colors, distracting patterns, distinct shapes. I am a strange looking thing, I have a body that I have gotten a lot of flack for, made visual choices that people have side-eyed, and I'm a general misfit. I feel camaraderie with the tacky and unusual.
Scholars far above my intellectual weightlifting have talked about the way that beauty has been defined to be morally good from the Greeks to the medieval Christians to the modern era, but I specifically want to talk about ugly spell ingredients.
Namely, ugly candles.
We've all got 'em. Half burned tea lights with a milky residue where the color and the wax start to separate, votives left in a hot car and now misshapen, and whole pillars that just...look shitty. Could be color, could be wax quality, could be that it's a horrific novelty shape, but it's ugly and taking up space in whatever closet you've buried it in.
A lot of spellwork instruction veers into the direction of purity. The right candle (with a lot of pontificating about materials). The right resin. The right cloth. The right way to acquire materials (mostly hanging by the phone hopping a Tarot deck will call). The framing of beauty is there is ease and acceptability in it. We envy it because it doesn't have to try hard. All public facing magic becomes a lifestyle blog. But ugly candles are great magical tools. And they won't look good online. They will not reassure you with their beauty that you are right and your spell is good and will work.
You just have to believe it.
Got some boring votives from a wedding and the couple just announced their split? Now you have a banishing candle. Gifted a jar candle that smells like whatever "seashells" is supposed to be but has hints of wet dog? Cleaning and clearing magic.
My favorite use of ugly candles are for problem solving spellwork. Road opening, victory spells, or something where I'm really trying to get my way. Here's why, think of what you desire as inside a castle. There's lots of ways in. A more aesthetic spell, relying on its beauty and goodness, uses the front with the main gate and the drawbridge. And maybe she gets turned away. A swift "no thanks" and is shown the door. But the ugly candle? If she gets turned away from the main gate, she finds the laundry shoot, bribes the bread delivery driver, or figures out how to belay down the chimney. If beauty is inherently good, ugly is inherently crafty. Look at how witches are framed, cunning shapeshifters tricking trust out of people who see one thing when there is another. You're committing a heist with your spellwork, let's get the boys back together.
Currently I have an ugly candle I used for my inspiration working. I give it a little oil and light it whenever I'm working on something, because I don't want inspiration to be beautiful and proper; I want her to break in.
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