Chapter 2: Physical Characteristics of Plants

with faith and gratitude for the charms that nature offers us and can be used in your daily rituals, helping you to discover your personal purpose and transform the reality around you.

Perhaps you’ve read or heard all of this before. Perhaps you’ve even taken the first steps in some tradition of natural magic. What most people don’t know—and those who know usually don’t tell—is that each herb has within it several different powers. Precisely for that reason, there are techniques and fundamentals one should learn to awaken the desired potential of a plant, determining your magical success in every ritual.

When I first realized that everything around us is made of pure energy and that it is possible to access this energy to vibrate together with it in pursuit of my biggest and best goals, I discovered the biggest secret of all: the gods and goddesses live within us and within every living being, animal or plant. More than that: each one of us is a sleeping deity waiting to wake up.

That was the real turning point in my life, and as you experience the teachings in this book, I sincerely hope it becomes yours too!

In Sacred Leaves we will learn how to identify and classify plants and leaves using their magical characteristics: shape, smell, color, vibration, and the ruling Orisha of each one. By understanding how and for what each of them works, we will learn to combine their powers with the elements of nature, the days of the week, the vibration of the planets, and the phases of the moon to enhance the results of your rituals. Along with this, we will learn in detail how to do the sacred harvest of the ingredients for magical rituals, entering the realm of Ossain, the Orisha’s healer, and then, returning to the city, we will learn how to create a magical garden at home and how to sing to enchant and awaken the inner secrets of the leaves by using words of power.

Like a leafy tree that slowly germinates and grows to great heights, each of these lessons will be a new step on your journey to explore the herbal witchcraft of the Orishas. All of this, however, is often done without knowing it—after all, the magic is in everything and everyone around us! Therefore, in the second half of the first part of the book, we will cross the oceans between African and Asian traditions to unveil the mysteries of magic in day-to-day life.

From there, you will discover how the wisdom of feng shui and Roma magic can be combined with African witchcraft to create pots of power with the most diverse goals, such as love and success. In addition, the mysteries of aromatherapy and magical cookery will also be part of our journey, and we will discover that even small things that seem to have no importance— such as growing a pot at the entrance of our home or on our porch, flavoring food when cooking, and choosing the right perfume for a date or work meeting, for example—can become true and powerful rituals.

At the end of our journey, we will have traveled around the world and experienced a little of the magical traditions of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Therefore, the second half of the book brings you a collection of 365 plant species, classified in detail by their powers and their characteristics for magical combination through their ruling Orishas, like a true dictionary of herbal witchcraft. With this, you will have at your disposal the tools you need to substitute some exotic ingredients with others that can be easily found anywhere in the world.

To conclude, at the end of the book you will find an herbal grimoire with recipes for magical bathing; instructions for fumigations, or making aromatic and purifying smoke; directions for making the traditional powders and soaps of the Orishas, power