Egg magic

I've used eggs magically for a couple of different things, from Sabbat rituals to magical chalk, and I was thinking about it again today, had a couple of ideas and went digging for more information.

Most of what I find when I look up egg magic (you have to add folklore to your search or all you get is magic tricks to make eggs float or disappear!), is about using the egg as an aid to removing the evil eye. It is a popular method in Mexican folk medicine, where the egg is moved over the body to absorb negative energy. The egg (raw) is then broken into a glass of water and the shapes it makes are read as divination.

I read about another method where a raw egg was kept by the bed for seven days to absorb negative energy. It was then taken to a source of running water and broken so that the egg was carried away from the home. Alternatively it could be disposed of by burying it in the earth. The smell was thought to represent the evil it absorbed!

Thai healers would use eggs to gather up 'lost' soul bits and then feed the egg to a patient to help them become more centered and grounded. A neat twist on this is to create your own 'medicine' egg, decorating and charging it with the qualities you wish to recover or gain and then eating it.

When I was saving eggshells to make chalk with, I used some in part of a home protection ritual, calling upon the nature of the shell as a protective force.

Another very common association with eggs is of course with fertility. Colored eggs were dropped into women's laps to promote pregnancy. An egg might be broken over a farm implement to promote fertility in the field that was worked on with the tool.

In some European countries, decorated eggs were placed on grave sites, as a symbol of new life coming from death.

To take a lighter twist, I read about Surprise Eggs, taking a plastic egg (like you find at any store for Easter), filling it with glitter, a small charm or trinket, or any number of fun things, and leaving it in some public place as a nice surprise for a stranger.

I've also been thinking lately that there are some interesting possibilities with the egg membrane. If you have ever rinsed out an eggshell for any reason, you will know there is a kind of elastic membrane between the egg and the shell (several layers of membrane actually). It reminds me of the caul, and I'm sure there are a million uses for it as such. I'll have to fiddle with drying some (I think that if you wash all the egg liquid off of it that it would dry fairly scentless).

As I mentioned earlier, I save eggshells (well washed, and then dried and then ground up) for chalk, although I think there are a lot of other uses for keeping eggshells on hand. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, you could even take the chalk mixture, and instead of rolling it into logs to make chalk sticks (for writing with) you could form it into other shapes and end up with little statues, or relief art work. I know you can make neat mosaics with eggshells.

You can also make a hole on either end of a raw egg and carefully blow out the inside (depending on how clean your holes are, you can save the egg for eating or for some other purpose). When cleaned, this becomes a great egg for decorating and keeping. In the Ozark area, a tree covered with these cleaned out eggs was actually used as a charm for keeping witches at bay. If you carefully widen one of the holes, you can fill your egg with herbs, small stones or charms and then seal up the ends, either as a permanent charm to be kept somewhere safe, or as a temporary one to be destroyed at an appropriate moment.

There are a lot of neat ways to dye eggs with natural ingredients, and some breathtaking ways of decorating them. But you can also dye the eggs magically instead of ascetically. Making an herb wash to soak your egg in might not impart much color, but it has so much potential for imparting different essences to your egg.

You can do egg divination by drawing a variety of symbols on different undyed eggs in white crayon or wax, and then choosing one at random, dying it and seeing what symbol you get (if you then eat the egg, you can take that energy into yourself even more).