I first heard about wards in an epic fantasy novel by Melanie Rawn. She described wards as spells which were tied to a certain place and protected the area through magickal suggestion. Other people have argued with me on this view, saying that wards are protective spells that make people uncomfortable or repel them from entering an area — but isn’t that the same thing as a magickal suggestion? Why do wards have to be ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’? Why can’t they be ‘Oh My God, I Left The Stove On’ or ‘Crap, I Really Need To Pee’? Distraction can be just as effective as dread when you’re cooking up protections.
Creating A Ward
Like all spells, the bulk of the work in setting wards is in planning and preparation. Before you can build a ward, especially a self-sustaining ward, you need to know what it’s supposed to be doing, how it’s supposed to be doing it, and how you want to empower it to do that job. Ask yourself whether the protection is short-term or long-term. If short-term, it can sustain itself through the energy you build up in an area for a few days to a week. If long-term, it will need a sustaining power source such as a tree or an area of land or moving water.
Another major consideration in setting a ward is camouflage. Does whatever magickal suggestion you’re creating fit with the area? ‘Vicious Dog Prowling Nearby’ works wonderfully for a house, not so much for an apartment. ‘Wrong Address’ is very effective — but make sure you set exceptions for food delivery people or your pizza guy will drive right past you.
To create a ward, first ground and center. Then stretch out your senses to the edges of the area where you want the ward to be set. Feel the energies there. Take time to simply exist among them. Then ask permission to use the energies to weave or braid (or whatever energy-collecting visualization works for you) a boundary. As you visualize the energies forming a braided/woven/grown-together hedgerow, reinforce the visualization with a chant that continues until you’ve finished setting up the boundary. It can be playful or serious; I’ve used ‘One, Two, Three, Four, No One’s Getting Through My Door’ — based on a cartoon episode from my childhood — for years with good results.
As you weave the ward, remember to link the ground beneath you and the sky above you until you’ve got a hemispherical basket-like boundary of energy. Then gather the energies within that boundary and condense it so that the area closer to the edge is like a fine mist of suggestion and the area closer to the center of the ward’s area is like a thick fog of command. In the case of my go-away ward, when people come to the edge of it, they feel like they’re having second thoughts. If they persist in entering the area, the second thoughts become an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety and doubt. Only those who have the key to the ward can pass through the area without feeling this way.
Because you’re using the ambient energies of an area to create the ward, it’s got a natural connection to that area. For short-term wards, this is sufficient to power it for a little while. However, if you want to fix the ward to an area for a longer period of time, you can ask the established trees or shrubs in that area to make the ward part of their energetic network, connecting to their root systems and their ways of communicating with other plants in the area to the ward. This is one way you can make the ward more or less self-sustaining. You can also strengthen the boundaries by turning the area into a large crystal grid. Just remember where you put the crystals when the time comes to dissipate the ward!
Tying A Ward to Your Psychic Senses
The other feature of a ward, besides its quality of suggestion, is its real-time connection to the person who set it up. This happens naturally as you weave the magick into the ward, but the connection can be strengthened by having a key that opens your awareness to the entire area the ward covers. I like crystals for this purpose, but there’s no reason it can’t be another object or even a symbol, such as a bindrune or sigil. The advantage to this is that you can check in on the ward at any time, shore up any weaknesses in your defenses even if you aren’t at that location physically, and check if the ward has been triggered in any way.
To make a key to go along with your ward, simply weave that object’s energy into the energy you’re already manipulating to create the ward. My suggestion is to have a key word to go with the key so that it will only activate for you (or whoever else has the key word). Like a passcode on your phone, it protects the information about the ward from people who have no business messing with it.