The Sacredness of "Salt" ~ Part Three ~ Folklore, Mythology and Magick

[1]Magickally, salt is used as an element of protection. It is also use as a cleansing tool and conductor of energy. But is salt truly an element? Scientifically speaking, salt is a compound sodium chloride, but for our purposes we refer to it as an essential element of our magickal practice. 
In show business, it is said one is a triple threat if one can sing, act, and dance. Salt is a triple threat of the magicakal world, crossing over all three areas of culinary, medicinal, and magicakal realms.

From the Roman Catholic rite of preparing holy water to the native Indian customs of using salt to draw away harmful spirits, many belief systems, world over, have used salt both as a purifier and to repel evil. In some traditions and practices, it is used on the altar to represent the element of earth and in other practices it is thought to represent the water element because of its origins in the sea.

Looking into the mythology of salt, from Finland, we learn that Ukko, the mighty god of the sky, struck fire in the heavens, a spark from which descending was received by the waves and became salt.  The Chinese honor an idol, Phelo, a mythological personage whom they believe to have been the one to discover salt and the originator of its use. From the Mexican Nahuas we have the Goddess of salt, Huixtocihuatl, whose brothers the rain gods are said to have driven her into the sea after a quarrel. She is said to have invented the art of making salt.

Here are a few resources to help further the study (and practice) of "Salt" and the sacred uses of it. 

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Mythology and Folklore:

*Book: The Magic of the Horseshoe (R.M. Lawrence, 1898)-pdf

*Book: Ozark Magic and Folklore (Vance Randolph, 1947)-pdf
Originally wrote and published under the title, "Ozark Superstitions"



Magick: 


*Book: New Salt Magick Rites (Jason Pike) -pdf
                                  ~Rites and Spells~

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[1] reference from article written by Najah Lightfoot

The Sacredness of "Salt" ~Part Two~ Rites and Covenants

The Covenant of Salt

(By: Henry Clay Trumbull, 1899) 

Click the title link above for a very in depth and enlightening studying of primitive rituals and covenant rites of "Salt."

From the book: 

Among the varied forms of primitive covenanting, perhaps none is more widely known and honored, or less understood, the world over, than a covenant of Salt, or a salt covenant. It is evident that the true symbolism and sanctity of salt as the nexus of a covenant lie deeper than is admitted, or than has been formally stated by any scholar.

"Covenant" as an English word, simply means, according to its etymological significations, "a coming together." At times the word is used interchangeably with such words as, "an agreement, a league, a treaty, a compact, an arrangement, an obligation or a promise." Only by its context and connections are we shown in special cases that a covenant bond has peculiar or pre-eminent sacredness and perpetuity. This truth is, however shown in many an instance, especially in translation from earlier languages.

Even in our use of the  English word "covenant" we have to recognize, at times, its meaning as a sacred and indissoluble joining together of two parties covenanting, as distinct from any ordinary agreement or compact. And  when we go back, as in our English bible, to the Greek and Hebrew words rendered "covenant" or "testament" or "oath," in a sworn bond, we find this distinction more strongly emphasized. 

 The very idea of a "covenant" in primitive thought is a union of being, or of persons, in a common life, with the approval of God, or of the gods. This was primarily a sharing of blood, which is life, between two persons, through a rite which had the sanction of whom is the source of all life. In this sense "blood brotherhood" and the "threshold covenant" are but different forms of one and the same covenant. 

The blood of animals shared in common sacrifice is counted as the blood which makes two one in a sacred covenant. Wine as "the blood of the grape" stands for the blood which is the life of all flesh; hence the sharing of wine stands for the sharing of blood life. So, again, salt represents blood, or life, and the covenant of salt is simply another form of the one "blood covenant".

The Sacredness of "Salt" ~Part One~ History

The Significance of Salt Throughout History

(By: Dorothy K. Moore, PhD) 

Although historians and archaeologists seldom mention the importance of salt to ancient or contemporary civilizations, salt has always been an influential commodity required by a people in their development as a civilized society.

Below is a quick snapshot of the significant role salt has played in the history of the world.

During the Stone Age, the red meat the people hunted contained enough salt that they didn’t need to look elsewhere for this important mineral.

By 10,000 BC, however, people began to farm the land. By cultivating rice, wheat, barley, millet, they reduced their red meat intake. The cows and sheep they kept on their farms needed salt too. Not only did the people need salt in their diets, but they needed it as a food preservative too. Bacon, ham, salted fish, and pickles are all examples of food that is preserved using salt.

During the Neolithic Age settlements grew around salt springs and caravans transported salt across the desert trading salt for gold – ounce for ounce!

It was around 6,000 BC at Northern China’s Lake YunCheng that we see evidence of people first harvesting and producing salt.

In 3,000 BC the Ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were preserving meat and fish with salt. They also used salt to preserve mummies. The Egyptians obtained their salt by evaporating water from the Mediterranean Sea water and by buying it from nearby Libya, Sfax Tunisia, and Nubia.

2700 BC the ancient Chinese wrote of the 40 different kinds of salt they knew.

By 800 BC the Chinese were able to produce salt by filling clay jars with ocean water and boiling the water until only the salt remained. During the Eastern Chou dynasty about one or two hundred years later, they learned how to make iron from West Asia, and so started boiling the salt water from iron pans.

Others who used evaporation to produce salt included the Etruscans of Italy, the early Romans, and the Carthaginians in North Africa.

During this same period (700 BC) the Indo-Europeans Celts were mining salt underground in what is now Austria, Hungary, South Germany, and Poland. They sold their salt to other people including the Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, and possibly the Phoenicians. The Celts also sold salami, ham, and bacon in exchange for glass and pottery.

The Ancient Greeks sold their slaves in exchange for salt.

Roman soldiers were paid a salarium in salt. We are now paid salaries.

A salt tax was one of the factors contributing to the French Revolution.

As Napoleon was retreating from Moscow, many of his troops died for lack of salt.

The first Europeans in America experienced great commercial success when they learned to salt the fish they caught in order to transport it to their home markets.

As early as 1654 Onondaga Indians near Syracuse, New York, were accessing underground salt deposits and boiling the saline water.

Access to salt often directed the migration of early pioneer migration west.

During the Civil War the North blockaded the Atlantic coast so that precious salt supplies could not reach the South, including the Confederate Army. For four years the Southerners relentlessly struggled to get enough salt into their diet, a situation aggravated by the flourishing black market.

The Erie Canal in the United States was built primarily to transport salt.

India’s struggle for Independence from colonial Britain reached a climax when Mahatma Ghandi’s trekked to the sea to make his own (untaxed) salt.

Familiar, Ancestral and Imp Spirits

While magic or witchcraft does not necessitate the worship of deities, it does place importance on the reverence of familiar and ancestral spirits for gaining help, insight and illumination. Before the gods and goddess' were conceived, deceased ancestors were invoke, evoked and petitioned for help in knowledge of the unseen, insight into the future and powers for manifestation and healing.

Spirit ancestry is not limited to just genetics and birth lineage, it can include those that were adopted by blood, bone, salt or marriage covenant oaths. Also in more modern beliefs it is extended to include those of whom have walked the same spiritual path (adoption by baptism). For a more in depth study into the primitive ancient blood rituals as a physical representation of bonding and mingling the essence of life force, I would recommend Henry Clay Trumbull's classic,  "The Blood Covenant."


The witch's familiar or attending spirit, though more modern teachings say this applies to pets or animals, historically that has not been the case, as the teaching is that the attending spirit is humanoid and has been thought to be the counter opposite gender of the witch. Animals were used as helpers and took on the spirits of imps, while the familiar or spirit lover/spouse took on a humanoid spirit image that transcends humankind and gender. It is the symbolic marriage of the witch's (or human) spirit and his or her higher spirit counter part, a form of Hieros gamos, spiritual marriage of two being or becoming one. The attending spirits have often been depicted as having human and animal qualities and features combined to denote that they are beyond human, containing all genders and all kinds (human, animal and plant life force essence) within themselves. The witch and attending spirit are one and the same, the most intimate of all relations that no two physically manifested beings can ever achieve together. The relation transcends sexual union and even that of a child in a mother's womb. It is the mercurial existences, the alchemical union, the balance of male and female, female and male.

   imps

Attending Spirit