Menstrual Blood Magic – 13 Ways to Use Your Period In Spells
Menstrual blood magic needs to be talked about more. There are many ways to use menstrual blood in magic, both light and dark. Give free reign to your intuition. It’s all about period positivity as part of your ritual work and spellcraft!
The realm of blood magic is so vast that it deserves to be talked about in depth, but menstrual blood magic is a much overlooked genre.
When we get our periods, we may feel an ebbing of physical energy. We’re conditioned to think that our change of pace, emotions and mood are somehow at fault. Yet, when the body expels menstrual blood, we head into a different phase of internal power. Using menstrual blood magic, we can give birth to that which lies within the spirit, not the body.
Those who menstruate will know how deeply they are tied to the pumping rhythms of ebb and flow, passivity and power, at various times of the cycle. As the moon waxes and wanes, so too does the menstrual cycle.
Menstruation is a time for self-knowledge, reflection, divination and “pull” power
Is menstrual blood magic safe? Is it dark magic?
Period blood magic and ritual requires no sacrifice, as it can be taken freely and safely from your own body. If you think it’s dangerous, it is no more or less dangerous than a hammer, a fire or a pen wielded by a lover of words.
Menstrual blood has all the power of blood, and is deeply personal to you. What is more, it has taboo associated with it. Like witchcraft through the ages, menstrual blood is shunned, shamed, hidden away. But, if you menstruate, it is YOUR power.
It is not for us to tell you how to use the power of your period to work spells and rituals. You have your own moral compass. You can use menstrual blood for both light and dark magic, such as binding another to your will. We’ll talk a little about that later.
But there are certainly many intriguing ways in which it can be used.
Typical uses for menstrual blood in magic
Menstrual blood is often used for spellwork related to sexual attraction, love, domination and fertility. It is often linked with the force of pull, rather than the force of push. The pull of the tides, the tidal flow, and gravity. That’s why it serves as a powerful tool for attraction. It can be put to other uses, too. Internal uses, which benefit you and have nothing to do with other people.
1. Prepare yourself for moonflow magic when you get your period
- During the first two days of flow, ensure your body is physically comfortable. Rest. Keep yourself warm, with a focus on your lower back, feet and abdomen. Your body may not feel at full physical strength, but it is still part of you and is sending messages to you to change your pace and focus to match the rhythms of your flow.
- Have an early night if you are drawn to have one, are able to sleep and it feels right. If you cannot, allow yourself to snooze when you want.
- Spend time in nature, or looking at the natural world (which may be as small and perfect as a plant in your room).
- Take time to meditate (here are some ways to try meditation if you live in a busy world). If nothing else, find a time to stop what you are doing and breathe. Try breathing in for a count of four, holding for four, and exhaling for four. Try breathing like this four times – not forced, but noticing the gentle flow of air through your nostrils and how it fills your body and is carried to each part of you. Breathing is a gentle yet immediate and powerful way to get in touch with your inner body, and link it with your spirit.
- If you are drawn to physical activities, consider how they might reflect on your inner activity. Sometimes you may notice a desire to organise the space around you, your biological cleansing echoed through mundane cleansing on a material level. Or, while washing up, you may feel an urge to keep your hand under the running tap and play with the water. Yes, the material world will still have its demands and expectations, but you work to different rhythms right now. Welcome and explore these urges when you can.
2. Keep a Moonflow Diary as part of your Book of Shadows
Your period is a time for drawing your energy inwards. Your intuition, creativity and spiritual energy are growing even as your physical energy is on the wane. Menstrual blood magic is often especially effective during the first two days of menstruation, when you can rest, reflect, record dreams and work magic.
If you have a Book of Shadows, use it to record:
- Moonflow insights
- Reflections
- Dreams (ah yes, period dreams…)
- Menstrual blood magic rituals and workings
If you have no BoS, try keeping a Moonflow diary to record these things. Make a note of flow dates, insights and the moon’s position.
3. Dry and store your menstrual blood for future spells and rituals
You can use menstrual blood in magic even when you’re not on your period. Collect your menstrual blood in a vial or jar. If you use a Mooncup or any form of menstrual cup, that is a really easy way to collect your blood, and you can then transfer it to a storage container to use fresh, which you must then keep in a fridge.
Your blood will take weeks to dry in a stoppered or sealed container. It will dry more quickly if exposed to the air. If you wish to dry a large amount of menstrual blood, you can spread it very thinly on a saucer which has a wide surface area and will bring more of the blood into contact with the air.
You can also create dry blood flakes when storing fresh blood. Simply smear a little of the blood on the slide of the container when you put it in the fridge, and it will dry into blood flakes which you can later use in potions or spell bags, or keep as a useful ingredient in your portable altar, if you have one.
Once it is dry, scrape it away and grind it to a fine powder using a mortar and pestle or grinder of your choice. Now your blood is ready to use when desired.
4. Use menstrual blood to empower magical tools and objects
You can use your blood to dress candles, or work into the haft of an athame, or work a sigil on the base of your cauldron, or daub a pentacle. This use of menstrual blood can be used for your own benefit, and need not affect another person in any way.
You can also dress personal objects with menstrual blood, such as your Book of Shadows.
Menstrual ‘tattoo’ designs: In much the same way as ink can be tattooed into the flesh with a pin, you can use a pin to pinprick designs into the cover of your Book of Shadows, using menstrual blood as ink. It is neat, it is minimal, and the pressing in of the pin helps to further seal in your intent. You can also refresh the designs each time you menstruate, building their power over time.
5. Bake a cake of light
A Cake of Light is a round wafer or edible item that represents your union with the universe. Aleister Crowley, who invented Thelema, gave what are widely believed to be instructions for making a Cake of Light in The Book of the Law:
“For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.”
The shape of the circle is important as it represents your union with the Eternal. Crowley believed that your union would strengthen every time you baked and consumed a Cake of Light. He also said it cooked be baked as a cake or dried as a perfume.
NOTES: Use rye or wholeweat flour for ‘meal’, or some other form of dark flour, and consider dropping the herbed oil of Abramelin (unless you have the grimoire instructions for its making to hand). Alternatively, you may prefer to use white flour if you are drawn to the alchemic nature of the red and the white. Your key ingredient here is your menstrual blood and your intent.
6. Work menstrual blood magic more than once to build its power
Menstrual magic can and arguably should be worked and reworked if you want to retain the effect. It has its own cycle and rhythm, so don’t expect it to last forever! But if you need that “pull” factor in a particular situation, or you want something that works with your own rhythms, coming into play in its own time, then menstrual blood can be a useful tool in your work.
7. If you negatively associate menstrual blood with an empty vessel, *use* that
All magic-workers have their own deeply felt opinions, and some feel that menstrual blood has no value because it is the body rejecting something it doesn’t need any more. But think of the potential of an empty vessel, especially one which has its own “pull” power.
Menstrual blood in magic is particularly valuable when you are creating a space to not only allow but “pull” something into your life. You are ready for this. You are drawing your desired result to you with all the gravitational force of a black hole.
Your menstrual rituals can release the not-needed, create space, and pull what you desire into your life.
Let go. Connect.
8. Perform a menstrual blood magic ritual to let go of beliefs and attitudes you don’t need anymore
Working menstrual magic on yourself? Want to let go of something, like the fear that you’re “not good enough”? Perform a ritual to flush those unneeded thoughts away.
Mookychick Moonflow Bath Ritual
First, hold a spiritual bath. Arrange your bathing space with crystals, candles and essential oils evoking tranquility, spiritual openness to the new, and letting go. Anoint a pebble with your blood – these is the old belief system that is weighing you down and holding you back. If you use tampons during your period, consider not using them during the bath. Let the blood go. If you see rosettes and feathery streams form in the water, use your intuition. What do the shapes make you think of? How does that reflect on yourself, your goals?
When your spiritual bath is complete, hold the pebble to an anointed candle or effigy of the spirit or deity of your choice. Thank the old belief system for doing its best to protect you, but explain that you have changed and you don’t need it anymore.
Wash the pebble clean in the bath so that the blood flows away, symbolising the old. Pass the pebble over an open flame, symbolising purification and a readiness for the new.
Rise up, and let the water drain as you have a final spritzing shower, letting it wash everything away.
Blood divination releases your intuition
9. Use menstrual blood for divination
You are no doubt familiar with reading tea leaves or coffee grounds.
A quick recap on tea divination
Make a cup of loose leaf tea or fresh coffee with the grounds in there, and drink it to leave a very small amount of liquid in the bottom. Silently ask for guidance, or a sign. Swirl your cup three times widdershins (counter-clockwise) and invert the cup onto a saucer. Wait for a few moments for the liquid to drain away, then quiet your mind and study the patterns left by the leaves or grounds to shed light on your situation.
Menstrual divination
You can perform a similar act of divination with your menstrual blood. First, it needs to be collected – this is most easily done if you have use a menstrual cup during your period. Next, pour the blood into a cup or a chalice, if you have one. Swirl widdershins three times, and invert the cup onto a saucer. The time of menses is a time of great intuition, reflection and evaluation. Your inner world may be much closer to you than the outer one, but you will be aware of what lies inside. You may feel like you have less life-force, but you have great energy when it comes to non-energetic, non-worldly and material matters.
Consider your blood, and use your intuition to form patterns, make connections. Do not discount your first fleeting impressions of what you see in the blood. Take time to reflect further, and let no thought seem too impossible. Connect with your intuition and use your blood to explore through symbols and a loose connection of thoughts.
Divination is a useful way to use menstrual “pull” magic for yourself, rather than to influence another. Study your blood, let loose your internal creativity and let intuition pull ideas towards you that may reveal new insights.
You may wish to use divination to discover what you need, which might be support from others, or space to grow.
Many folklore and magic traditions use menstrual blood in love spells
10. Attraction blood magic – add menstrual blood to food and drink
Attraction magic often requires the person you to desire to ingest the blood in one form or another.
You don’t have to apply a huge amount to someone’s food or drink. Some dark, red foodstuffs and liquids will mask the blood’s colour, such as red wine or recipes using tomato sauce. Food containing iron can help to mask the metallic taste of menstrual blood. Red meat is an obvious example, but a vegan spellworker could consider a stew containing beans and leafy vegetables like spinach and kale, all which contain iron.
We’ll say this – we’ve never partaken of magic bending another to our will here at Mookychick, and particularly not for reasons of lust. It’s our choice, for what we hold to be ethical, pragmatic and spiritual reasons. But… there is light magic, and there is also dark magic. And there is in-between magic. We encourage you to walk your path.
In hoodoo there are a number of ways to use menstrual blood in attraction spells, and the practice of binding another to you through putting blood in their food is common all over the world, e.g. in Sicilian folk magic.
Coffee to quicken…
As an example of hoodoo practice, you could put chicory coffee beans in a sealed bag with holes and store them up your vagina for a few hours while you are menstruating, then grind the beans and serve the coffee to the one you desire. Chicory is said to quicken and stir the spirit. Hopefully it doesn’t need to be said, but please do not store anything up your vagina for longer than several hours.
Tea to calm…
Alternatively, if you wish to calm another (let’s say you’ve had a fight and need to create a neutral atmosphere), then making them a cup of tea with a tiny amount of your menstrual blood can help to calm their energy towards you by pulling them into your personal sphere.
Binding in plain sight…
If it works for your partner, you can also feed them a drop of your menstrual blood from your finger. This is direct, open communication, mutual magic, done with their full knowledge. You are tacitly saying you want them enough to bind them to you, and by agreeing to ingest the menstrual blood from your finger, they are saying they want to accept the binding and add a magical depth to the relationship.
11. Attraction blood magic – make a honey jar with menstrual blood
Honey, bees and magic through the ages
Bees are the greatest alchemists of all. Honey has long been used for its magical properties. Aphrodite and Pan are just two of the many deities associated with bees and honey. In Celtic mythology, bees are associated with wisdom, and act as messengers between our world and the spirit realm. Bees and their honey have been used to treat every ailment under the sun in folklore around the world, and as they pollinate plants, bees are associated with growth.
Who wouldn’t want to perform magic associated with growth, the pollination of an idea or goal, with sending messages to the spirit world via a trusted messenger?
How to make a honey jar to attract positive forces
Add honey to a jar, and add also a drop or two of your menstrual blood (or dried blood flakes, if you prefer). Take a piece of paper and draw a petalled flower. In its centre, write a word to symbolise your intent. This is the force or goal you wish to attract into your life with sweet, sweet honey.
In each petal of the flower, write a word or phrase that relates to that goal. If you wish, you can lock your intent in even further by shaping your paper into an origami flower, ready for the spirit world’s messenger bees to pollinate.
Now seal the honey jar, and store it where you wish. Use it as part of your rituals as you wish. You can open it every month to add a fresh drop of your menstrual blood to add strength to the honey jar’s cumulative magic.
12. Use menstrual blood as a libation
Menstrual blood is a deep and powerful part of you, filled with life energy. What spirit, entity or god wouldn’t appreciate such a generous and thoughtful gift? Use your menstrual blood as an offering, and you can also use it to libate the ground as a nature offering.
13. Use menstrual blood as a magickal ink to explore sigil magic and automatic drawing
Writing is magic. Sigils and signs are magic. If you have an interest in making your own magickal inks and oils, menstrual blood is a powerful ink to be used in any manner. You can paint with a fine paintbrush to create more fluid work, or dip the tip of a pencil into your collected blood to write words and phrases. For working in a more primal way you may choose to daub with your fingers, especially if you are working on larger surfaces like large stones or trees. In addition, you can use a pin to pinprick your menstrual blood into pointillism magical designs, as suggested for your Book of Shadows earlier.
You can use your menstrual blood to trace the signs of your choice on candles – a moon sign might be fitting for the work you do.
You can also use menstrual blood to perform powerful results-based sigil magic.
Automatic drawing with menstrual blood
Working with a paintbrush or your fingers, try automatic drawing with your menstrual blood. Allow your intuition and creativity to connect and flow. Use the results for art or divination… but you don’t have to. The everyday world always urges you to seek provable results, to do tangible work. You can also draw with your blood simply to play, with no thought of final outcome. Automatic drawing in this way can be a powerful method to build inner as opposed to outer energy. To really access your intuitive side, try drawing with your non-dominant hand, or drawing with your eyes close.
Menstrual blood magic Do’s and Don’ts
- If you have a disease which is transferred by blood you MUST NOT use menstrual blood to work magic on another.
- If you are storing fresh menstrual blood, you MUST keep it in a fridge.
- You ONLY need to use a drop or two for menstrual blood magic.
To use menstrual blood in magic is an act of personal power. Never think of menstrual blood as dirty. It is an important part of you.