The new moon shows no face at all — a coin turned to its blank side, a field before the sowing. This is the hour to plant what you wish to grow.
This jar is a garden for fortune, sown in the dark and left to quicken where no eye can watch it. What you seal on the blind moon takes root through the lean nights and breaks ground as she returns to fullness. It is patient work, and patience is both its price and its power.
The Working
- On the night the moon is dark, fill a bowl with clean water and set your empty jar beside it, along with a small clear crystal, a coin of silver, and a few grains of wheat or barley.
- On a slip of paper write the fortune you would grow, in the present tense, as though it already stands.
- Fold the paper toward yourself three times and lay it at the bottom of the jar.
- Add the silver, then the grain, then the crystal, naming each as seed, soil, and sun.
- Pour in the bowl of water until all is covered, and cast a pinch of salt across the surface to ward the working from souring.
- Cap the jar, bind the lid, and set it in a dark cupboard where it will not be moved.
- Leave it sealed until the moon comes full, then open it at midnight, pour the water at your threshold, and keep the crystal as a token of the fortune now quickened.
The Incantation
Dark moon, blind moon, keeper of the seed,
take what I bury against the day of need.
Silver for soil and grain for the green,
water to wake what no eye has seen.
Sleep in the shadow and swell with the light,
grow while I wait through the lengthening night.
When you come round full and silver and whole,
give back my fortune made ripe and made whole.
Open nothing early, for a seed uncovered dies. When the moon is full again the jar will have done its slow, sure work.