• Rulers: Oshun, Ra, Vishnu, Krishna, Aphrodite
• Element: Water, Earth
• Gender: Feminine
• Number: Six
• Sacred Geometry: Hexagon
• Type: Food
• Magickal Form: Any type
• Qualities: Sweetening, Binding, Happiness, Healing, Love, Prosperity, Passion, Spirituality, Faerie

Honey – the glorious nectar of the bees is one of the oldest foods known to man…and woman. Honey’s history is extensive. A 8,000 year-old cave painting in Valencia, Spain depicts humans hunting for honey. Honeybees were sacred to numerous ancient civilizations including ancient Greece and Egypt. Our ancient ancestors knew that honey isn’t JUST good to eat, it also has multiple medicinal benefits.

The oldest honey ever found comes from an Egyptian pyramid – it’s three thousand years old and still perfectly edible! Microbes don’t grow on honey, moreover preservation lasts for thousands of years!

The Egyptians held the honeybee in high regard and used honey in their mummification process. Therefore honey was a sacred substance and sacred to any gods and goddesses of the underworld and the dead: i.e. Anubis and Osiris. In Ancient Greece, the high priestess of Aphrodite was “Melissa” which translates to “bee”. She tended to the sacred beehives at Aphrodite’s temple on Mount Eryx.

Honey has a number of magickal proprieties, uses  and distinct energies. the energies vary depending on which strain of honey you are working with. but overall I would describe them as positive, cleansing, gentle, soothing and warming. its great for spells, offerings and brews.

Honey can be added to any spell work or any culinary recipe to sweeten someone’s mood or disposition. Honey works well for happiness, love, prosperity and healing, it can also add a bit of zing to your love life too.

• Honey makes an acceptable offering for deities.
•  It can be kept on your altar (I keep some on my altar to remind me that amongst the seemingly overwhelming bitterness of everyday life that sweetness can be found).
• Can be used in spells having to do with love, lust or sexuality.
• Purification (works great in bath scrubs).
• Health and healing.
• Community or communication.
• Abundance and prosperity.
• Spirituality.
• Candle magic (for anointing  or beeswax candles).
• Honey can be used to represent wisdom, because gathering honey from hives can be difficult and painful if done incorrectly so it became a metaphor for obtaining knowledge through pain.

Honey is used to make mead which is absolutely delicious and wonderful to use in ritual and offerings…half a glass and I am away with the faeries…who actually like a drop of mead or honey as well…

Because of its sticky properties, honey can be used in magick to hold two things together. Some magical traditions use honey to bind a couple that has a shaky relationship. If you want to do a honey binding on a couple – or even on two friends who are struggling with their friendship – you can use poppets with a layer of honey between them, and then wrapped with a cord. Because honey does not solidify, you can always separate the two poppets later with minimal disruption. It’s good for binding spells because it can be undone fairly easily.

Use honey to sweeten a situation: angry co-workers or boss, court cases, family quarrels, divorces, etc. In addition, binding things or people together and keeping things flowing steadily. Healing and cleansing rituals include honey.

Use this sweet and sticky substance to attract good fortune, fertility, and love.

• For wealth, create an altar with coins drizzled with honey.
• For a conception spell, cover a pumpkin with honey and offer to a river.
• For love, bathe in warm water and honey.
• Add a drop of honey to incense blends to sweeten the mood.
• Add a spoon of honey to a bath  to cleanse and sweeten your aura.
• Drip small drops of honey onto or around candles for love and prosperity spells.
• Leave on outside altars to attract faeries.
• Use to summon angels and light beings.
• Anoint your third eye with magical honey to dream of your future love.

If you do any kitchen magick, honey can come in very handy. Use it in dishes to bring about sweetness, fertility, or prosperity. You can use honey in rituals as an offering to deity–many goddesses and gods seem to appreciate it. You can also use a blend of milk and honey to asperge a sacred space if you’re holding ritual outdoors. Add some into a bath scrub for a ritual bath prior to working for love or romance, or anoint a candle with it when you’re doing candle magick.

Some ancient cultures used honey in embalming procedures. It’s always appropriate to leave offerings of honey at a gravesite. In addition, the folklore of a number of societies indicates that a blend of honey and milk is an acceptable offering to a deity. Honey makes an excellent offering to the gods, the spirits and the Faerie world.

Poured into the ocean and river, honey is an appropriate offering to sea and river goddesses like Oshun and Yemaya. Keep on the altar as a link to ancient bee priestesses and honeybee spirit guides.

In particular, honey is sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. This is also a favorite offering for other love goddesses. An assassination attempt was once made on the African love goddess, Oshun. The plot was to poison her with honey. In remembrance of this, always taste the honey first before offering libations to any goddess.

In Hindu texts, honey is described as one of the five sacred elixirs of immortality. The Buddhist faith celebrates Madhu Purnima, which honors the day that Buddha made peace among his disciples – and honey is given as a gift to monks in his honor.

Honey Jars

These jars are also known as “sweetening jars,” and can actually contain almost any kind of pure sweetener, such as brown or white sugar, molasses, or syrup. You can make jars for each person you want to sweeten if you’re working more elaborate spells on them, or keep one jar with lots of names in it for general sweetening.

In some forms of Hoodoo and folk magick, honey is used to sweeten someone’s feelings towards you. In one traditional spell, honey is poured into a jar or saucer on top of a slip of paper containing the person’s name. A candle is placed in the saucer and burned until it goes out on its own. In another variation, the candle itself is dressed with honey.

Herbal Infused Honey

Honey comes in many forms and from many places all over the world. It varies in color, sweetness, and flavor depending on the region and plants. Some people enjoy infusing herbs and flowers directly into the honey itself. Depending on the herb or flower infused, it will alter the honey magic properties and can be further used for those purposes. For example:

• Lemon balm infused honey: soothes nerves and anxiety and aids in falling asleep; also invokes joy.
• Lavender honey: has honey magic properties of relaxation, love, beauty and purification.
• Rosemary honey: purification, money, love, healing, mental clarity.
• Mint honey: money, prosperity, cleansing, and love properties; plus mint aids digestion.
• Thyme honey: the PERFECT offering for attracting the faery folk to your garden! Thyme is a favorite of fairies as well as honey.
• Rose honey: love, healing, protection, long life.

Medicinal Properties

During the late summer and early fall, honey is a staple crop in many parts of the world. This deliciously sweet and sticky gift from the bee population is considered a health food – it will protect you against allergies if you eat just a teaspoon of locally sourced honey each day – and also has a number of magickal properties.

Honey is incredibly beneficial medicinally but also brings a good dollop of happiness with it. Honey is great for cold and flu treatment. Raw and organic honey is preferable as it is an antibacterial and is high in antioxidants. It can be used in an ointment for treating wounds, burns and cold sores. Honey is also an excellent hangover remedy.

Honey will help in muscle building; a teaspoon of raw organic honey after a workout can induce an insulin spike, allowing your muscles to get the most out of the workout. It can be used as a weight loss aid. Honey can cause changes to the metabolism that will help curb sugar cravings.

The healing power of honey has been known throughout the ages. Honey was used as a traditional Ayurvedic medicine, where it was thought to be effective at treating imbalances in the body. In pre-Ancient Egyptian times, it was used to treat wounds. The Prophet Mohammad glorified the healing powers of honey, and the Quran praised its healing ability.

Sacred Geometry of the Honeycomb

At the heart of our seasonal reverence, there is always light. In the dim light of midwinter we gather around a fire. My children tell me their own creation story of winter’s sleepy sun. It is her time to rest and the small brave fire remains beside us, a comfort in our sun’s absence…

We know winter happens because of the tilt of the earth, and we seek the fire because it warms us. Our winter fires provide one small spark of the sun’s fire. And the light of the sun not only gives us warmth, but color. We are cool blue in winter like the twilight that edges our days and we dream of the season that will fill our world with yellow particles of light like the pollen of the sun.

Many of us hold a glowing beeswax candle on special days during a festival or to create a ritual space. In his bee lecture, Rudolph Steiner compares beeswax to the material of our human body, the worker bees of the hive to the blood coursing through us, and the hexagonal shapes of the honeycomb to our cells. Structures of living organisms are mirrored throughout the natural world and beeswax reminds us of our relationship to the earth. The sweet smell of it when we light a candle is a hint of the warm comfort a bee might find in her small sacred capsule.

Each cell of the honeycomb is a hexagon. It is the perfect shape, the one that holds together in strength and efficiency. There is no waste in a system of cells that fit together at perfect angles, a necessary consideration when a honeybee must consume about eight ounces of honey to create one ounce of wax. The worker bees create their city of hexagons in tandem, each bee following her inherent plan of geometric repetition.

Each cell of the honeycomb may hold the golden honey, converted nectar from meadow flowers; or the precious life that will someday gather more honey, the bee’s larva. So the worker bee creates these small spaces as vessels of life, whether she is aware of this significant purpose or not. We can watch the honey bee create these small sanctuaries, her working body warming the cell as she forms it. This is her part in the circle of life and she puts her heart into her work.

If you wish to draw the honey bee’s symmetrical hexagon shape, you may start with the hexagram, the star that is made by overlapping two equilateral triangles. Connect the points of that perfect star to make the most precise hexagon. The star inside the hexagon holds the poetry of the honey bee’s sacred forms and their relationship to the spiritual body of our human world.

The hexagram, the six-pointed star, is the shape associated with Anahata, the heart chakra. It is the Star of David, it is associated with the Kabbalistic tree of life, and it is one symbol associated with the Christian Son of God. The hexagram is significant in Tibetan Buddhism, in astrology, in occult magic and Wicca practices. Here, once again, is nature’s pattern of repetition through time and space and meaning.

The honey bee sings while she works and we hear her spirit song. Her hum is spun into the fiber of summer so that we associate this vibrational sound with brilliant rays of sunlight that make us stop and close our eyes and feel the sun on our faces. It is no wonder the wildflowers turn their faces toward the sun and are graced by the light healing touch of the gentle honey bee.

The Bee Connection

Bees are incredibly magickal and are often said to be messengers from the Gods and the spirit world.

Tell it to the bees…they are great listeners…when a beekeeper died folklore says that the survivors must tell the bees of their keeper’s death and persuade them to stay rather than follow their keeper to the otherworld.

Anything important should be told to the bees such as marriages, births and other important events but make sure you whisper politely.

Bees are also considered to be an image of the human soul, perhaps due to their natural ability to find their way home from great distances.

 Save the Bees!

Humans have relied on the honeybees’ magical work for thousands of years. Not just for honey and its unique magick, but also because honeybees are one of our biggest pollinators! They help us make food by pollinating many of our fruits and vegetables. But sadly, the honeybee populations are dwindling worldwide.

Particularly in the U.S. where there’s a link between pesticides and honeybee disease/death. If all of the honeybees die out, we lose a large portion of our food source. So how do we support the honeybee population and health? Here’s some ways you can help:

• DON’T use pesticides in your lawn or garden and encourage your friends, family and neighbors to do the same
• Plant NATIVE flowers, trees, and shrubs. Native flowers and plants aid your local honeybee and other pollinator populations by providing a natural nectar source
• Put a bee bath in your garden for the bees to bathe and drink
• Support your local organic beekeepers, farmers and gardeners in their efforts to save the honeybees
• Instead of having a honeybee hive destroyed – have someone come out and remove it and re-locate it
• Stop cutting down trees that don’t need to be cut down! Bees and other pollinators and wild life need trees too!
  Learn more about how to save the bees here! Help The Bees

Important Note

There is a MAJOR difference between natural raw unpasteurized honey, and processed filtered honey. Most commercial honey has no traces of pollen and lacks beneficial vitamins and enzymes among a host of other natural constituents which are removed due to pasteurization and processing.

Most golden honey you see at your local grocery is dead and far from the health promoting powerhouse of its raw unpasteurized counterpart. Processed honey is not honey at all, and if you desire any kind of health benefits, you must stick to the real stuff.

Sources:

• Magickal Ingredients
• Honey in magick and Folklore
• Vaya’s Witchcraft and Spiritual
• A Kitchen Witch’s World of Magical Food
• Honey Coyote
• Otherworldly Oracle
• Wanderlust
• Shelley Giordano