Category: products

14 Holy Helpers Oil + 15% off Blessing/Healing formulas, 2 days only

The Fourteen Holy Helpers are saints or holy figures who were petitioned in medieval Europe during the terror of the Black Death. Also known as the “auxiliary saints,” they were called on as a group for protection from a variety of illnesses and troubles that would strike both people and animals. Their popularity continues to this day.

While you will occasionally see variations in a few of the names depending on region, the “standard” 14 Holy Helpers and their particular areas of specialty are as follows:

  • Agathius – headache, agonizing pain
  • Barbara – fever, sudden death, fire
  • Blaise – illnesses of the throat and protection for domestic animals
  • Catherine of Alexandria – sudden death, diseases of tongue
  • Christopher – plague, sudden death, and temptations while traveling
  • Cyriacus – temptation on one’s death bed, eye disease, possession
  • Denis – headache, demonic possession
  • Erasmus (aka St. Elmo) – intestinal and stomach troubles
  • Eustace – family discord and strife, fire
  • George – domestic animals, boils, lesions
  • Giles – plague, for good confessions, for the maimed and beggars, epilepsy, mental illness, nightmares, panic
  • Margaret of Antioch – childbirth, protection from devils, headache, backache
  • Pantaleon – physicians, midwives, against cancer and TB
  • Vitus (aka St. Guy)- epilepsy, lightning and storms, protection for animals and from animal bites

I released this oil years ago as part of an expanded line of blessing, uncrossing, and protection formulas, having no idea at the time that we’d one day be facing a sort of modern plague of our own. So I figured now’s a good time to make another batch of this stuff.

One of those multi-use spiritual oils that’s worth keeping in the supply cupboard because one little bottle does so much.

Enjoy 15% off tangibles in the Blessing, Healing, Protection, Uncrossing, Spiritual Cleansing, and Saints/Spirits categories on any order totaling $20 or more, at Seraphin Station or at Etsy. Offer good now through midnight CST on Monday the 17th. Discount is automatic – no coupon code necessary.

Read more or order now at Seraphin Station.

N.B. Not a medicine and not a substitute for proper medical treatment by a qualified medical practitioner.

New single-herb sampler packs, herb blends with price breaks for bundles

I think I finally, finally found a way to be able to afford to sell small packets of powder and small packets of herbs. I had to try out five different potential solutions, but I think the one I’ve got now will work. You’ll see a little widget on the page telling you about price breaks you get at certain tiers, like so:

The issue:

Listing, site, and processing/transaction fees are breathtaking, and many of them are a flat fee per transaction plus a percentage. 50 cents plus 3.5% plus 2% off the top of every transaction is maybe not such a big deal if everything you stock starts at $20 or something, but if you want to offer an array of things under $5, you cannot actually afford to do it sometimes (and this isn’t even considering what it costs per item to list something, or per month to have the shop to list things in). But most people do not want or need 3 ounces of Cut & Clear powder, and they want to be able to get just one candle or just one pinch of something without having to buy a whole box or a whole ounce or whatever.

The amount you have to charge for a single item in this scenario is a little painful. But then if somebody orders multiples in a single transaction, they really get screwed paying the single-packet price for all of them.

So hopefully this allows me to offer sub-$5 items — without losing money in doing so — while also passing on the savings to folks who place orders with a variety of items in them.

This is currently turned on for hoodoo powders and herb sampler packs, so you can mix and match. I will probably be trying to come up with a way to make this work for at least some curios, too. Please feel free to make suggestions if you think I should tweak anything about this setup, and let me know if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing!

Newly listed:

Herb blends:

Currently available herb sampler packets:

  • Agrimony
  • Althaea leaves
  • Bayberry berries, leaves, bark
  • Blackberry leaves
  • Black walnut shells, hulls, bark
  • Blueberry leaves
  • Butterfly weed
  • Calendula
  • Camphor bark, leaves
  • Cedar chips
  • Clover, red
  • Clover, white
  • Dittany of Crete
  • Elder berries, leaves, roots
  • Fern
  • Fig leaves
  • Grains of Paradise
  • Grape vine, leaves (muscadine)
  • Honeysuckle
  • Hydrangea leaves, flowers, root
  • Joe Pye Weed leaves, flowers
  • Lavender
  • Lemon balm
  • Lemon bark, thorns, fruit peel
  • Magnolia leaves
  • Manglier
  • Marjoram
  • Master of the Woods
  • Mint
  • Mojo Beans
  • Mustard seed, black
  • Mustard seed, white
  • Oak bark
  • Orange bark, thorns, fruit peel
  • Oregano
  • Passionflower
  • Pine needles, bark
  • Poke leaves, root
  • Raspberry leaves
  • Rosemary
  • Rose petals
  • Rue
  • Sage, lyreleaf
  • Sage, pineapple
  • Sage, scarlet
  • Sampson Snake Root
  • Smilax
  • Sweetgum bark, leaves, seedpods
  • Vetiver
  • Violet leaves
  • Wintergreen leaves
  • Yarrow

About Our Herbs

While this is far too small of an operation to be certified organic or any of that stuff, we do not engage in large-scale, resource-heavy, monoculture farming practices here. So we try not to deplete the soil, use water irresponsibly, encourage lack of genome and biome diversity, deprive animals and insects of their habitations or migration paths, or generally act like assholes and bad stewards.

That means we do not spray our herbs or fertilize them with industrial chemicals – we use only organic fertilizers and natural biological pesticides on our land (stuff like natural neem oil or insecticidal soap that I also put on my food crops and that pose no risk for human contact). 

However, these are not prepared in a commercial kitchen and are not packaged/sold as food items. My herbs are intended for spiritual use in incenses, oils, altar work, etc., not for human consumption.

New at website

Started a page listing out all my formulas by name. Who knows how long it will take me to get everything posted and pretty, but at least folks wondering about such and such formula can get an idea about whether I even make it or not.

Still no individual listings on every bath crystal, but you can get at least one option in most categories now, and you can get a full selection of bath crystals in the categories Money & Luck or Love & Lust.

And finally got a few candles listed, including some of my not-always-quite-reverent designs for vigil candles with vintage and antique holy card and emblem art on them.

Er, this one still needs some work.

I’ll be putting up individual listings for these explaining what they mean/are for eventually.

Flash Bonus Rewards Points + New Stuff

Earn 2X rewards on all purchases made through midnight. Read more.

Recently Added:

Chuparosa – Hummingbird Oil

Chuparosa formulas made their way into hoodoo from south of the border, and this delightful oil is named for the hummingbird as a symbol of serious, committed, faithful love. The hummingbird has long history in Mexican folk magic, one that once involved using actual hummingbirds. The hummingbirds didn’t come out the other side of this intact. Read more.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help tinwork altar ornament

This handmade ornament is intended to evoke the Blessed Mother’s elegance and grace but without removing all the rough edges and scuff marks that are part of this icon’s history and that characterize the fabric of her devotees’ genuine lived lives. Read more.

A few of these things available.
I hate the new block editor in WordPress. It took me a whole 24 hours to get this post finished. It keeps eating my captions when I adjust images, and i have no idea how to get things where I want them. The things i want are always grayed out or don’t work. Yes, I read the freakin’ instructions. Right now this caption is twice the width of the image, which I cannot move or adjust for some reason. Not a fan.

Algiers Luck Oil

Algiers is a regionally-specific old New Orleans style hoodoo formula designed to bring luck in both love and money. It was particularly favored by gamblers who planned to spend the night out getting lucky – in more ways than one.

It still has an element of “fast” in it, ingredients-wise, but if Red Fast Luck clocks in at about 90 mph, Algiers comes in at a perhaps more dignified 70 or so. But when we want fast results, we can’t always expect deep and long-lasting ones, and when we want luck that sticks around for a while, we can’t always expect fast. And that relationship holds true here, as well – if Algiers shows up to the party a few minutes later than Red Fast Luck, well, it sticks around a little longer, too.

It’s quite likely neither will still be there in the morning, of course. But where Red Fast Luck invariably pulls the Irish goodbye, you just might, if you’re attentive, see Algiers’ half-grin and tip of the hat on his way out the door.

(Honestly, I’m just having a bit of fun. There’s not a lot of difference between these two oils in terms of how they work. If you already have one, I can’t imagine why you’d need the other as well. But if you have neither and you’re trying to pick one, I guess the biggest difference is really probably scent, and still, it’s not a big difference. Algiers smells just ever so slightly less like candy than Red Fast Luck. Neither one is particularly dignified, but they know how to have a good time. Algiers might be the slightly older Creole cousin who’s got just a little more experience – maybe five months older, tops 🙂 Oh, and Algiers is purple.)

Half-ounce bottle.

perfumes, colognes, waters, product testing

Ok, where all y’all at who *didn’t* come up mixing up the exotic essential oils and hand blended stuff but in your house, y’all use Kolonia 1800 and M & L Rue Cologne and if it was bright orange or the color of antifreeze, that meant it was legit? Who can tell the difference between Crusellas and Murray & Lanman smelling it blindfolded? ‘Cause I need some of y’all to volunteer to get some free shit in the mail from me and give me some feedback on it 

I’ve spent *weeks* now reworking some of my formulas in light of half a dozen different things, and there’s a real question to be asked, I think, of whether it’s even worth making some of this stuff given how much more it’s always gonna cost for somebody like me to make it vs. some company that can wholesale and store 500 gallons of ingredients at a time. It needs to be worth making for some other reason. And it occurs to me that I don’t need to keep asking only the people who always go with the handmade option. I need to also be asking the people who often do *not* go with the handmade option, I’m thinking.

In any case, product testing is afoot, and if you’re willing to be a guinea pig, holler. But this batch of stuff has all been very expensive, so I’m gonna be salty if I send you free shit and I don’t get feedback – fair warning! Some of these decisions are going to have to do with laws and chemistry and plant profiles, too, so if you aren’t sure you’d have much to say besides “it smells good,” maybe sit this one out. There will definitely be more product testing later where “it smells good” will be quite valuable feedback, but this isn’t that batch of products lol

ETA: You can now sign up to be a product tester using this form. 

St. Martha, from Gospel Figure to Medieval Legend to La Dominadora: Sources, Resources, and FAQs

St. Martha in Scripture

st martha woodcut
Woodcut by Jacobus de Man, haven’t tracked down the specific publication yet, but it’s late 1600s, early 1700s and public domain. [1]

“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”
– John 11:5

The Gospel of Luke tells us how Martha invited Jesus to her home in Bethany. She cooked and cleaned and catered while her sister Mary sat at Christ’s feet and listened to him speak. Martha pointed out that Mary wasn’t pitching in.

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41, NIV)

Christ’s point is that in the grand scheme of things, your eternal soul is more important than social conventions and what people think about your housekeeping. But we need to understand this in context. It’s not that Martha had no imagination or faith or respect or that she was too small-minded to want to sit at Christ’s feet, too.

In Martha’s mind and in her culture, these were her duties, and her performance of them comprised her reputation, value, and trustworthiness as a member of her culture — in a society that valued hospitality quite highly, that in fact didn’t even work as a society without hospitality as a huge part of the glue that held it together.

She wasn’t saying nobody should value hearing him teach. She also wanted to hear him speak; she was also his disciple and believed in him. She was just pointing out that people needed to eat and wash and sit, and somebody’s efforts had to make that happen. (You can imagine that Jesus was accompanied by an entourage, too, all of whom also needed to eat and wash and sit.) She was determined to do her duties well for such an esteemed guest as Jesus, but she wasn’t a doormat. She was pointing out that she was not the only one who could be doing these things, that she *could* be sitting at Christ’s feet right now, too, if she just gave off doing the less glamorous stuff. But somebody has to do it. Dramatic events are unfolding, but somebody has to make the setting they’re unfolding in happen.

In John 12, Christ is in Bethany again before Passover at a dinner in his honor. Lazarus is reclined at the table with him. Word of his resurrection has spread like wildfire; Jesus’ followers are increasing and so are the machinations against his life. Mary makes a spectacle of herself pouring half of liter of precious perfume on Christ’s feet – worth a year’s wages – and wiping them with her hair. Christ is constantly, increasingly aware of the massive cosmic drama he’s part of and what’s right around the corner, his every action and word heavily symbolic. Every step he takes is under the weight of prophecy and its fulfillment, is part of a massive dramatic ritual. In this play, Christ has simultaneously the perspective of the main character and the omniscience of the author. The drama in John’s portrayal is thick indeed.

Martha during all of this? John writes only, “Martha served” (John 12:2).

Continue reading “St. Martha, from Gospel Figure to Medieval Legend to La Dominadora: Sources, Resources, and FAQs” →

Coffee at Midnight available again; shipping info

Several of you have asked about Coffee at Midnight, and I have made a batch. I had to tweak the recipe slightly because some of the ingredients have *quadrupled* in price (or worse) since I last made this in 2015, and I just plain cannot afford to use one of the absolutes I used to include in this formula. But I have tried to make up for it elsewhere in the formula so that’s nothing lost either in the overall scent or in the formula’s spiritual attributions. Y’all will have to let me know what you think.

Here’s the formula description from the Seraphin Station storefront:

This listing is for a half-ounce bottle of Coffee at Midnight, a specialty condition oil containing rare, precious, and fragrant essential oils, essential oil absolutes, and herbs, including coffee bean, vanilla, cocoa, and cardamom, among others.

I modeled this specialty love/lust/sex appeal oil on a really excellent chocolate-infused specialty tea that I loved and used to “prescribe” to clients who were going the “tea and bath” route (the “inside and outside” treatment, which is really good for spiritual cleansing, protection, and attraction work especially). It’s got love/affection elements, but definitely a strong lust element.

Redolent with vanilla and coffee absolutes (and thus rich and expensive), it does all the good attracting work of a “foodie” sort of oil (the whole “vanilla and cookies” thing) but with more depth, spice, and earth than those sticky-sweet blends, and it’s not soporific or sickly. It is, after all, caffeinated 🙂

This blend is a richer, earthier alternative to oils like Kaliprix that do the passion, attraction, glamour, and sex appeal thing, but without the strong floral notes that some folks (including me) are not looking for in an oil.

Don’t get me wrong – this is sweet – but it’s “expensive coffee” sweet and not “two pumps of cheap hazelnut syrup that kind of tastes like perfume” sweet.

Can be used by anyone of any gender or orientation. Herbal/oil correspondences are in line with conjure tradition even though no old-school conjure formulas that I ever encountered smelled anything like this.

I’ve had dozens and dozens of customers tell me this oil really does smell good enough to eat. It is not, however, intended for consumption or internal use. Do not eat or drink this oil!

Generally I make my oils as fresh as possible, but this one actually gets better as it sits in the bottle. So I am going to make it in tiny batches like I do all my oils, so it will last as long as possible when you get it, but it will only improve with age. One of the ingredients is patchouli, and the very best patchouli is older, aged patchouli. It gets deeper and more interesting with time.

This formula also contains benzoin, which smells wonderful but also has the side effect of acting as a preservative, so this oil could well have a longer shelf life than your typical hoodoo oil formula.

 

And I’ve updated the Shipping info page with a few little tidbits that might help you save a few dollars. The pertinent section of that page now reads as follows:

 

Shipping Costs

The cart is set to charge shipping based on item weight, zone, and selected service. USPS First Class is the default, and they’re the most cost-effective option for 85% of orders.

First Class is only available for packages under a pound, though.

Once you have four or five bottles of oil, the USPS options are going to shrink to Priority Mail because the package weighs more than a pound. I can’t get the system to offer a Flat Rate Priority option, so I’ve gone in an added it manually as one of my rates.

If you only have a few bottles of oil or a few bath crystals or glass vials and you are only seeing USPS Priority options for $8 and up, click the radio button for USPS Small Flat Rate Priority Mail box. It should show $7.65 for priority shipping.

Don’t pay more than $7.65 if your items will fit in a Small Flat Rate Priority Mail box. Small Flat Rate boxes are approximately 8x5x1. They will hold about 8 or 10 bottles of oil or combinations of oil bottles, small bath crystal packets, small packets of powder, and/or glass vials and still have room for packing material.

If you choose Small Flat Rate but everything in your order will NOT fit in a small flat rate box, we will send you an invoice for the difference. We may not be able to start prepping your order until we receive any balances due, so please do ask questions before checking out if you’re not sure what will fit in that flat rate box.

If it will all fit in a shoebox, roughly, and it weighs less than 20 pounds, I can use a third-party service to ship it anywhere in the Continental US for $10.00. This is in a 10x8x4 box. Just about anything except a couple of very large candles, or full-size glass altar pakets will fit in the 10x8x4 box.

Outside of Continental US, it will depend on a few factors. USPS First Class Mail International is available for packages up to four pounds and is the most economical option. But if you don’t like what you’re seeing with that option in the cart, please message me and I’ll be happy to find the best possible shipping rate for you. Just please message me before checking out and paying.