I hang out in a number of online Witchcraft groups. There are a lot of great reasons to do that, but one that keeps me sticking around when the groups are not catering to my particular variety of Witch is that I simply like having my finger on the pulse of mainstream Witchcraft trends. Recently there has been a major increase in Witchcraft practitioners of a more New Age, "Stay Wild Moon Child" type bent, and while there are a lot of problems with viewing things through a New Age lens, it's interesting to see what trends proliferate in these communities, how, and why. One month everybody's making simmer pots, the next month it's like simmer pots never existed and they're all doing cord cutting ceremonies, they're typically extremely simple, easy-to-perform magical techniques. If I'm honest, sometimes I use these ideas myself.
The discussions of these things are also really interesting, because there's a bit of an ideological conflict going on that I don't think people are consciously noticing, which is the spectrum between believing in the inherent magical properties of the tools and ingredients we use, and believing these ingredients and tools don't literally matter and are just focus tools for our personal intentions.
I'm going to start off by just letting you know: I'm mostly in that first camp. It's not that I don't believe intention matters, I certainly do, but I view doing magic as similar to preparing a recipe. Anybody can write a recipe, anybody follow a recipe somebody else wrote, anybody can modify a recipe to suit their personal needs... but you can't just set an intention to create something and expect your recipe to work if you aren't using the right ingredients to make the thing you want to make. If I have a recipe for a taco, I might be able to modify it to make a different kind of taco, but no amount of setting intentions is going to create a hot dog from a taco recipe.
It probably sounds like I'm setting things up to talk about how you have to use super special esoteric ingredients and if you do magic accessibly you're doing it wrong, huh? Absolutely not. To continue my taco analogy here, you can use cheap hard yellow corn shells from the grocery store, you can make corn tortillas yourself at home using prepared masa, or you can purchase expensive tortillas made of a rare heirloom variety of organic blue corn, and there will be a lot of differences, sure, but they're all perfectly acceptable taco ingredients. Which is better than the others is entirely a personal preference, but nonetheless, they are not hot dogs. Ultimately what a lot of people are arguing nowadays is not just that there are a lot of ways to do the same thing in magic, but that the ingredients are just focus tools that don't matter at all... that you can make a hot dog using exclusively taco ingredients and that it is definitively still a hot dog.
I do not do it this way, and while I have and desire no authority over Witchdom, I strongly discourage people from practicing Witchcraft this way. There should be no point at which you are consciously telling yourself that the ingredients and tools of Witchcraft are only tools to focus energy.
First off, if you look at how any magic-user behaves, it becomes evident that almost none of us really believe that the ingredients and tools we use don't matter. If we truthfully saw these as just focus tools, there wouldn't be so much bickering over things like white sage and palo santo... there is a lot of good advice out there about different things that can be used in smoke cleansing that are less problematic and aren't as potentially appropriative, but almost nobody is arguing that you can go tie together any damn woodland leaves and do a smoke cleansing with it. In fact, one of the reasons so many people insist on using white sage and palo santo instead of abundant alternatives that are not culturally appropriative is because they intuitively understand that intent is not the only factor in whether or not magic works. A commonly counterfeited crystal that new age folks really love because of its rarity and history is moldavite... why would people even worry about counterfeits or cheap alternatives made of things like glass if they really only saw these items as tools to focus your intention?
Again, I know it may sound like I'm saying you need to go out of your way to get "the right thing" for each magical working you do, and I absolutely am not. There are accessible and cross-cultural substitutes for any plant, rock, or other magical ingredient you can think of. And what's more, there are cases where this idea that intention is the only thing that matters in magic results in kind of the opposite, in which people are basically told that some serendipitous magic they've encountered isn't valid because they didn't intend for it to happen.
And this is where I start talking about Moon Water.
Full moon water has been a thing for a really long time, but the New Age, "Stay Wild Moon Child" set in particular really loves it, because it's easy to make, it's versatile, and it involves the moon, which they really like. Every month, around the time of the full moon, these forums wind up with a bunch of weird questions and comments about moon water that sometimes turn into little spats about when, exactly, water turns into moon water. A couple completely real examples:
That third one was not really that controversial at all... people pretty much immediately answered "there's nothing wrong with doing that, but it's not moon water, it's something else." And I agree: It's not obviously not moon water and I'm not sure why this person even thought it could be.
The first two, though, were very divided. A lot of people argued "yes," because it is water that was outside soaking up the moon's rays during the full moon, so of course it's moon water. But a lot of people also argued "no," because the person did not set the water out with intention, and without that intention, it doesn't become moon water for some reason. Leaving things out by accident or water just being out in nature would not qualify.
I would argue that, yes, leaving water outside during the full moon on accident makes it moon water, and any open body of water also becomes moon water when the moon is full. If you go outside in the early morning after the night of the full moon and collect the dew from the grass outside, that's moon water. If it's raining during a full moon and you collect it from a clear puddle that happened to form, that's moon water. Your intentions are great, but they aren't what make it moon water, what makes it moon water is exposure to the light of the full moon.
And honestly? It's baffling to me that so many people would argue that it's not due to intention, because if intention is really the important thing, why did absolutely everybody other than the original poster agree that leaving water out during a storm when the moon isn't out is not moon water, even though that person set it out with the full intention to make moon water? Because they intuitively understand that what matters is the exposure to the moon, not the intention of making moon water. You can't just set an intention to make moon water without doing the main thing that makes it moon water and have it be moon water.
Also, when you understand magic to be a natural process that is going to happen regardless of your intentions, you have the opportunity to enlist serendipity in your magic. Realizing that you accidentally acquired a meaningful magical ingredient by accidentally leaving a bottle of water outside? That's serendipitous, and it's meaningful in its own way.
On a more cautionary note, I think it's also worth recognizing that our ancestors developed a lot of the magical techniques they did with the understanding that magic just is a thing that happens, regardless of intent. A good example of this is the evil eye... this is a concept that is found all over the world, and it basically means that somebody can potentially cast a curse on you by giving you an envious or vindictive glance. The evil eye is not inherently somebody setting an intention to harm you, it's simply an ability that people have that they can accidentally use to harm you, so they have come up with magical techniques to prevent that harm from happening.
And when it comes to intentional magic, there is a reason people learn these traditions through written and oral culture rather than simply doing whatever the fuck they feel like doing... because our spiritual ancestors already did a lot of the trial and error work to figure out what ingredients work for what purposes. Again, this doesn't mean that you can't use your own personal experiences, or try things that aren't historical, or innovate new magical techniques, tools, and ingredients, but doing this under the impression none of it actually matters, simply put, ain't it.
Finally, I want you to really think about the repercussions of the "intent-only" model of magic. Let's say intent actually were the main or only thing that mattered to practicing effective magic. This relies on one of two potential premises, but my final thought experiment is the same for both:
In both of these potential cases, the last thing you want to do is consciously make yourself aware of it. The whole point of a placebo is that you are not supposed to be aware it is a placebo. If the point of magical ingredients and tools is to get you into the headspace to pull magic from inside yourself, it makes no sense to consciously think about it that way. You are still supposed to believe that the magic works on its own. Telling yourself "this is all in my head" or "I don't actually need to be picky about the herbs I use as long as they're herbs because it's all just my own energy anyway" is a great way to completely kick yourself out of the headspace required to do magic effectively in almost any of these contexts. So even if these are the reality behind magic, it still makes sense to understand magic as if the actions, the ingredients, and the tools do matter.
With all that said, again, no, I'm not saying you need to go out of your way to get expensive or rare items (although we all could stand to put more thought into buying high-quality magical tools instead of mass-produced cheap ones). But for magic to be effective, I feel it's really important to let it be magic, and trust the process, rather than just assume you'll get to where you want to go by faith alone.
Happy Trails,
Wolfpeach