A Staff is a symbol for the Self, and for the Element of Fire. It is like a Wand, but bigger. I will keep calling it a Staff for awhile, then revert to calling it a Stick. It’s a symbol of the Self with the right combo of humbleness and grandiosity.
The Wood of the Staff can be sought out as a certain kind from a certain place at a certain time, or it can be a piece that makes itself ‘special’ to us in some other way. I have seen an urban Pagan use a large dowel from the hardware store as a staff. I don’t know what his intention was with that, but as long as HE knows, there is nothing wrong with that.
Some of us will make staffs like we have seen in films and games, the best we can, and others will need to make a Departure from that, if it’s going to be about Us.
At Arcadia we have over 80 acres of woods, reaching up to a mountain peak. You can have your own ‘Quest’ to go and find the sapling you want to make your staff out of. Or you can pick a sapling and carve a rune or sigil in it in the warm season, and wait for it to naturally darken before harvest, charging up power from the Mountain in the meantime. You can do Both these things, if you want to. The more effort and energy we put into it, and the more deliberate our plan, the better. Or, sometimes, we find a sapling already dead, and just know it’s meant to be our Staff.
I seem to work best with a combination of planning general outlines, and then improvising in the moment. And my Stick reveals that kind of energy, faintly chaotic. I am OK with that. The Stick I have now was meant to be a ‘Practice Stick,’ and i was going to come back later and do a ‘Serious Stick,’ a Stick with real Power. It was the top of a Hickory tree I cut down to clear the Circle for our first Beltane celebration here at Arcadia, in 97. I also dug up the stump of that tree, and used it as a ritual for rooting out old Trauma and such. (We generally try to make a Ritual of any real work we have to do, because it makes it more Interesting.) And i found the ‘Practice Stick was so … Special I am not sure I can do something ‘better’ with the energy more ‘under control.’ I am not sure that would BE Better. Maybe part of the Strength of my Stick is how it is ready to deal with Chaos, and multi-leveled reality. I am so ‘mature’ now I am not sure I could catch it as well. And Hickory is … Hickory. It’s a wood that means business. Hoe and shovel handles are made of hickory. It seems to be the Strongest wood that can still be worked (while it is green.)
It does not matter what the story is behind our Stick, but there should be one.
Nuts and Bolts
When the stick is cut, it’s usually pretty easy to strip the bark off by getting it started with a knife, and then peeling off strips of bark with our hands.
Then the wood is kind of wet, and it’s soft. If there is carving to do, sigils, runes, animals, anything, it should be done while wood is still wet. As it dries it will harden. Sanding should wait till it is almost dry, and i recommend wet sanding with mineral oil. Mineral oil can have scent added to it, or Altar oil, or whatever to make it ‘magic.’
A half-round ‘bastard’ file seems to be best for carving lines and shapes into the curved surface of the stick, but know that most lines will extend longer than you want, and then shorten again if you hit it with a belt sander or wood shaping tool. Best thing about a file is we don’t hurt ourselves with it. When we are holding wood with one hand, and pushing a chisel or a knife against it with the other, we often cut ourselves. So we don’t do that. The Dremmel-type rotary tool with various bits is another tool we use, and I mentioned the belt sander. The Belt sander is what I used to make the tongue of the spider out of a branch that was coming out there. It’s hard to find a stick that is really straight, but finding that configuration with a smaller branch coming out of a big branch seems easier, if you like how mine does.
About this time, you can hold your stick in a fire, if you want to dry it out faster, darken the color, or put more energy into it. The bottom half of my stick is brown from fire. I think I got more of it brown, and then came back with a belt sander and lightened it up again, also undoing some of the carving.
I usually prefer the big-end-up with Sticks, which is upside-down from how the tree grows. I put a Quartz Crystal on mine, which if you want to do, you should find the crystal in advance, so you can carve the wood to fit it while the wood is still green. With hardwood, it just burns with a shaping tool after it’s dry.
When Hickory started burning and breaking my tools, I took that as the sign the Stick was Finished, and there was nothing but putting stuff on it. The Crystal was obvious, and I bought a cheap Eyeball Ring for the Eyeball, and affixed a pendant I had been wearing, where I later added the Meteorite Iron I bought at Stone and Bone.