🧙♀️Module 9: Correspondences, the Language of Magic | Modern Witchcraft
Updated: Sep 20
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🧙♀️Module 9: Correspondences, the Language of Magic
The Vocabulary Arrives
Module 4 planted the seed and Module 8 grew the root: once like-affects-like is accepted, every tradition begins mapping which things carry which qualities, and those organized maps are called correspondences. A correspondence is a settled association between a material or a timing and an intention: red corresponds to passion, rosemary to protection and cleansing, Friday to love, the waxing moon to growth. Together the maps form the working vocabulary of practical magic, the reason a witch reaches for one candle rather than another, casts on Tuesday rather than Thursday, or waits three days for the moon to turn.
This module hands over the vocabulary in usable form: colors, days and their planets, the moon’s own calendar taught in full, a working orientation to the witch’s year, a starter shelf of herbs and stones, and the numbers. Then it teaches the two skills that turn vocabulary into fluency: how to compose with correspondences, layering them into a working, and how to build a personal reference the witch will use for the rest of her practice. Nothing here requires buying anything. Most of this language is already in the kitchen, the calendar, and the sky.
Two Truths to Hold at Once
First truth: correspondences are not arbitrary. Nearly every entry in the old tables has logic underneath. Red is the color of blood and arousal, which is why it belongs to passion and to fire. Rose is the flower half the world’s poetry hands to love. Friday is named for Venus in the Romance languages and for the Norse love-goddess Frigg in English, so Friday carries love either way you trace it. Silver answers the moon by color and shine. Salt preserves and purifies in the kitchen, so it protects and cleanses on the altar. The witch who learns the logic learns far more than the table, because logic lets her reason her way to an answer she has not memorized.
Second truth: correspondences are guides, not law. Any student who compares two books will find the tables disagree at the edges, because each is one tradition’s map, exactly as Module 2 taught to expect. The craft’s own working rule, printed in the correspondence books themselves: if an entry makes no sense to the witch, she does not use it, and if her own tested association points elsewhere, the Module 7 lean applies, tradition first while learning, personal correspondence once it has earned its record. A witch whose grandmother’s kitchen smelled of cinnamon may find cinnamon means home and safety to her far more than it means the money the books assign it, and her working built on that lived association will be the stronger spell. The tables are the inherited language. Fluency includes a personal accent.
Color
Color is the first correspondence system most witches learn, because it costs nothing and applies everywhere: the candle chosen, the cloth on the altar, the ink in the journal, the clothes worn to the hard meeting. The core map, with its logic showing:
Red: passion, courage, strength, lust, fire itself. Blood and heat, which is the whole argument.
Pink: affection, self-love, friendship, gentleness: red with the force turned down and the tenderness turned up.
Orange: creativity, confidence, momentum, success: fire in its warm and social register.
Yellow: intellect, communication, joy, and air’s whole portfolio: the color of dawn and of paying attention.
Green: money, growth, abundance, healing, and earth: the color of everything that grows, which is why it means both gardens and dollars.
Blue: peace, healing, truth, communication in its calm register, and water: deep water and open sky agree on this one.
Purple: psychic work, wisdom, spiritual power, ambition: the old royal color, dyed rare and expensive for centuries, which is exactly how it earned its meanings.
White: cleansing, blessing, peace, and all-purpose work. The craft’s standing rule, worth its own sentence: a white candle can substitute for any color, which means no working ever waits on a shopping trip.
Black: protection, banishing, absorbing harm, endings. Not evil, as Module 2’s color-label teaching already settled: black is the color that takes things in and closes things down, which protection and endings require.
Brown: home, stability, animals, practical earth matters. Silver: the moon, intuition, dreams. Gold: the sun, success, vitality, wealth in its shining register.
The Days and Their Planets
The week is a correspondence table hiding in plain sight: each day is named, in English or in the Romance languages, for one of the seven classical planets and its god, and each day carries that planet’s business. The classical planets are the seven wandering lights the ancient world could see, sun and moon included, and their qualities have run through Western magic since Babylon. The map:
Monday, the Moon’s day: intuition, dreams, psychic work, emotions, home and family matters. The gentle opener of the week.
Tuesday, Mars’s day: courage, conflict, competition, strength, protection with teeth. The day for the working that has to fight for something.
Wednesday, Mercury’s day: communication, study, writing, travel, business dealings, cleverness. Exams, emails, and negotiations live here.
Thursday, Jupiter’s day: abundance, expansion, prosperity, luck, legal matters, big generous growth. The classic day for money work.
Friday, Venus’s day: love, beauty, pleasure, friendship, the arts, and self-worth. The most requested day in witchcraft, for obvious human reasons.
Saturday, Saturn’s day: boundaries, banishing, binding, endings, discipline, and cleaning house in every sense. The stern old planet does the craft’s janitorial and judicial work, and witches love it for that.
Sunday, the Sun’s day: success, vitality, healing, blessing, new beginnings, and general radiance. When in doubt, the sun’s day, like the white candle, serves nearly anything.
Timing by day is the gentlest form of magical timing: nothing is ruined by casting a love working on a Tuesday, and the craft’s universal footnote applies here first: need always outranks timing. An urgent working is done when it is needed, and the correspondence is a boost, never a permission slip. Deeper timing systems exist beyond the days, planetary hours divide each day among the seven planets for fine-grained work, and the cosmic witches of Module 2 time by the whole sky. Both are real studies for later years; the days are the entry every witch actually uses.
The Moon’s Calendar
Now the timing system witches use most, promised since Module 2’s lunar path: the moon’s own month. The cycle runs roughly twenty-nine and a half days, and its logic is the simplest and oldest in magic: as the light grows, work for growth; as the light shrinks, work for release. The phases and their work:
New moon, the dark sliver of beginning: intentions set, seeds planted, new projects opened, fresh starts of every kind. Many witches write their intentions, Module 4 style, at each new moon as a standing practice.
Waxing moon, the light growing night by night: building, attracting, increasing. Work for growth of money, love, skill, strength, anything meant to get bigger, belongs to the waxing half.
Full moon, the peak: power, completion, celebration, charging, and any working that wants maximum push behind it. The full moon is the craft’s great all-purpose amplifier; tradition holds it lends force to nearly anything, and its light is the classic charge for tools and water. The two or three nights around exact fullness all count, which relieves every witch with a Tuesday-night full moon and a Wednesday job.
Waning moon, the light shrinking: releasing, banishing, breaking habits, ending what needs ending, shrinking what needs to shrink, debt, conflict, a bad pattern. The waning half is when the craft does its letting go.
Dark moon, the night or two of no visible moon just before the new: deep rest, divination, shadow-facing, banishing at full strength, and honest reflection. Some witches work the dark moon deliberately; many simply rest, which the craft counts as a practice and not an absence.
Two calendar guests worth recognizing: a blue moon, the second full moon in a calendar month, treated as a bonus of amplified full-moon power, and a black moon, a second new moon in one month, treated as a doubled fresh start. Neither requires anything; both are fun to know when the group chat lights up. And the same footnote as the days, doubled in size because beginners genuinely worry about this: no working is forbidden by the phase. A witch who needs protection during the waxing moon casts protection during the waxing moon, and can always frame the work with the tide she has: growth of safety on the waxing light, shrinking of danger on the waning. Framing with the phase is itself a correspondence skill, and a satisfying one.
Moon Water
The moon’s calendar comes with the craft’s most beloved beginner recipe, and it belongs to this module because it is timing made drinkable. Moon water is water charged under the full moon, kept for use in workings, cleansing, anointing, or simply drinking with intention. The making of it:
On a full moon night, a clean jar or bottle is filled with drinkable water and capped or covered.
Intention is set over the jar, hands around it, a line spoken: “Moon, fill this water with your light. Let it carry your power into my work.”
The jar sits in moonlight overnight, outdoors or, completely validly, on an indoor windowsill; the moon is not stopped by glass, and neither is the working.
Morning: the jar is brought in, labeled with the date, and stored. Witches use moon water within about a month, in cleansing washes, offered to plants, added to a ritual bath, sipped before divination, or set on the altar. Plain sense travels with it: water for drinking stays covered and fresh, and moon water is still water.
The Witch’s Year: An Orientation
Alongside the moon’s month runs a solar year of witch holidays the student will meet everywhere: the Wheel of the Year, introduced in Module 2 as Wicca’s eight-festival calendar. Because it is Wiccan-built rather than universal, and because this course serves every path on the map, the Wheel is taught here as orientation, enough to read any book and join any conversation, rather than as required observance. The eight, wheeling from autumn: Samhain at October’s end, the feast of the dead and the witch’s most famous night, widely treated as the year’s turning; Yule at midwinter solstice, the sun’s rebirth in the longest dark; Imbolc at the start of February, first stirrings and new lambs under the snow; Ostara at spring equinox, balance tipping toward light; Beltane at May’s opening, fertility, fire, and full spring; Litha at midsummer solstice, the sun’s height; Lughnasadh, also called Lammas, at August’s start, first harvest and first bread; and Mabon at autumn equinox, second harvest and thanksgiving. Four of these sit on the sun’s actual turning points, solstices and equinoxes, and four on the old cross-quarter days between them.
What a non-Wiccan witch does with this calendar is entirely her choice, and every choice is common: celebrate all eight, keep only the ones that speak to her, Samhain and Yule being the crowd favorites, follow her own tradition’s calendar instead, or simply mark the solstices and equinoxes the way humans have since standing stones. The correspondence lesson underneath is the durable part: the year has seasons of energy just as the month has phases, planting seasons and harvest seasons, opening halves and closing halves, and a witch who times her larger life-workings to the year’s tides, new ventures with spring, gratitude and release with autumn, is speaking the same language at a larger scale.
The Kitchen Shelf: A Starter Herbal
Herbs are the correspondence system with the deepest folk roots, and the honest secret of the herbal craft is that the grocery store carries a complete starter kit. Module 6’s standing safety rule governs everything here, checked against allergies, health, and pregnancy before any herb is used on the body. The starter shelf, with each herb’s traditional portfolio:
Rosemary: protection, cleansing, memory, and general blessing: the craft’s universal herb, and the old saying holds that rosemary can substitute for nearly any herb the way white substitutes for any candle.
Basil: money, luck, love, and peace in the home: the prosperity herb that also makes dinner.
Cinnamon: success, money, passion, and fast luck: fire in stick form, beloved for drawing good things quickly.
Bay leaves: victory, wishes, and protection: the leaf of ancient champions, and the craft’s classic wish-paper, written on and burned when spellwork arrives in Module 13.
Lavender: peace, sleep, calm, and gentle love: the herb for everything that needs soothing.
Mint: money, freshness, travel, and lively protection: quick energy in leaf form.
Thyme: courage and purification, carried by soldiers and burned in sickrooms across centuries.
Chamomile: calm, luck, and abundance: the gambler’s washing-herb in folk tradition and the gentlest tea on the shelf.
Garlic and onion: fierce old protection and banishing: the kitchen’s bouncers, hung at doors across half the world’s folk traditions.
Salt: not an herb and belongs on this shelf anyway: purification, protection, and grounding, the craft’s most universal mineral, already met in Modules 6 and 8.
Ten entries is a working vocabulary, not a limit; the herbal world is enormous and a witch adds entries for life. The skill to carry from this shelf: read any new herb’s folklore and its logic, kitchen use, medicinal history, scent, and let the logic seat the meaning in memory.
The Stone Pouch: A Starter Set
Stones carry correspondences the same way, and six cover a beginner’s whole practice. The Module 7 habit applies first: feel a stone before reading its entry, and let the felt sense and the book’s sense meet.
Clear quartz: the all-purpose amplifier, the white candle of the stone world: it strengthens any intention set into it and substitutes for nearly any stone.
Rose quartz: love in every register, romantic, familial, and self-directed, and gentleness generally.
Amethyst: intuition, calm, psychic work, and clear-headedness: the traditional stone of sober judgment, which is literally what its Greek name means.
Black tourmaline or hematite: protection and grounding, already met as Module 5’s pocket anchors: the stones that absorb and steady.
Citrine: abundance, confidence, and sunlight in mineral form: the merchant’s stone of folk use.
Moonstone: the moon’s own stone: intuition, cycles, and new beginnings, the natural companion to everything in this module’s lunar section.
Two pieces of practical stone-craft that honest teaching includes. First, not every stone tolerates water: selenite softens and dissolves, and several stones are unwise to soak, so the safe cleansing defaults for any stone are moonlight, sound, or a bowl of salt beside rather than touching it, with water reserved for the sturdy quartz family. Second, the crystal market includes dyed, heated, and outright fake stones, and glittering names invented last decade; a witch buys from sellers who name what a stone is plainly, treats bargain miracle-stones with Module 3’s five-questions skepticism, and remembers that a pebble from a meaningful place, carrying Module 4’s law of contact, can outwork a purchased crystal anyway.
The Numbers
Last, the smallest system: numbers, which mostly govern repetition and quantity in workings, how many knots, how many candles, how many days. Three carries completion and power, beginning, middle, end, and is the craft’s favorite working number; a thing spoken three times is a thing meant. Seven carries luck, mystery, and the classical planets. Nine, three times three, carries culmination and finality, the number for the working that must land. Thirteen, the moons in a year, carries the witches’ own luck, worn proudly against the world’s suspicion of it. When a spell in a book says tie nine knots or repeat for seven nights, this system is what is speaking, and now the student can read it.
The Skill: Composing with Correspondences
Vocabulary becomes language when it is composed, and composition in this craft is layering:
stacking correspondences that all point at the same intention, so every part of the working says one thing. Module 4 taught that materials amplify and carry intention; correspondences are how the amplifiers get chosen. The method, step by step:
Start from the finished intention, built by Module 4’s five steps. The intention chooses everything after it, never the reverse; a working is not designed around a pretty candle.
Name the element. Module 8’s grammar sorts the intention into its register: courage is fire, clear speech is air, money is earth with fire’s push, grieving is water. The element immediately narrows every later choice.
Choose the timing, day and moon phase, as available: the best-fitting day of the seven, and the moon’s growing or shrinking half by whether the working builds or releases. Available is the operative word; need outranks timing, always.
Choose the materials, one or two per system at most: a candle color, an herb, a stone. Three well-chosen materials all saying the same word beat ten materials mumbling different ones; layering is coherence, not accumulation.
Read the stack back. The final check, one sentence aloud: does every chosen thing point at the same intention? If anything points elsewhere, it comes off the list. The working should rhyme with itself.
A worked example makes it concrete. The intention, five-stepped and honest: courage and presence for a job interview next Thursday morning. The element: fire, with air’s clear speech assisting. The timing: the interview fixes the deadline, so the working is done Tuesday, Mars’s courage day, during a conveniently waxing moon, growth of confidence. The materials: a red or orange candle, fire; rosemary from the kitchen shelf, memory and confidence; a pocket stone, citrine’s confidence or plain quartz amplifying, to carry into the interview itself, the law of contact doing quiet work in a blazer pocket. Read back: Tuesday, waxing, red, rosemary, citrine, courage, courage, courage, courage, courage. The stack rhymes. What the witch actually does with that stack, the words, the lighting, the sequence, is spell construction, and it begins in Module 12; this module’s job was choosing the stack, and the job is done.
A Witch Practice: The Reference and the Sky
Three parts, and the first builds something the witch will physically use for years.
Part One: The Quick Reference
Four fresh notebook pages, titled Colors, Days, Moon, and Shelf and Pouch, each filled in the witch’s own hand from this module: the color map, the seven days, the phases and their work, the ten herbs and six stones. Copying by hand is not busywork; it is how vocabulary moves into memory, every tradition’s students have done it, and the pages become the fast reference consulted mid-working forever after. A fifth page, titled Mine, stays nearly blank on purpose: it collects personal correspondences as they prove themselves, the cinnamon that means home, the song that means courage, and over the years it quietly becomes the most powerful page in the notebook.
Part Two: One Cycle of the Moon
Beginning tonight, whatever the phase, one line per night for a full cycle: the moon’s phase, found by sky or by any moon app without shame, and one word for the day’s own energy. Lunar-pulled students of Module 2 did a version of this as noticing; this round adds the craft: at each phase change, the notebook gets one line on what that phase is for, from this module’s map. By cycle’s end the witch has lived one complete lap of the calendar she will time workings by for the rest of her practice, and the moon has stopped being scenery.
Part Three: First Moon Water
At the cycle’s full moon, the moon water recipe, start to finish: jar, words, windowsill, label. The first use is prescribed, to close the loop on Module 6: a splash added to a floor wash or a cleansing, so the first correspondence the witch ever bottles is spent on the practice she already owns. The rest of the jar waits for the workings ahead, which are now very close.
Fluent Enough to Begin
Count what the witch now holds: the two laws, the elemental grammar, and a working vocabulary of colors, days, phases, herbs, stones, and numbers, plus the composing skill that stacks them into a coherent voice. She can look at any spell in any book and read it, why this candle, why this day, why nine knots, and she can compose a stack of her own from a bare intention. That is fluency’s beginning, and it arrived without a single purchase.
What the language still lacks is a place to be spoken. The craft’s workspace is the altar, and its instruments are the tools the last several modules kept deferring: the pentacle, the chalice, the wand, the athame and their whole famous company, what each is, what each is for, how they are chosen, cleansed, and consecrated, and how a real altar gets built in a real home, including a small apartment, including a broom-closet life. All of it is Module 10. The witch can speak. Time to build the room where the speaking happens.
Disclaimer: Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. The courses in the Witchcraft & Folk Magic Series explore witchcraft, folk magic, and related spiritual and cultural practices for educational and personal-interest purposes only. Nothing in them guarantees any particular result, and no ritual, spell, correspondence, or practice is offered as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice. Practices that involve fire, candles, herbs, plants, or other physical materials carry real risks such as burns, allergic reaction, or toxicity, and any practice is undertaken at your own discretion and risk. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨 If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
A few calls I made you should sign off on:
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