The Crafty Witch's Guide to Cord Magic: The Art of Braiding and Knotting Spell Cords

by Loren Morris

A detailed guide that combines ancient wisdom and modern practice, teaching readers how to craft their own powerful and personalized spell cords.
 
Venture into many metaphysical and witchcraft shops, and you will often see long, braided cords, typically hanging from high surfaces. Beads, shells, amulets, and other magical materials may be braided into the cords. These cords may resemble decoration or ornamentation, but actually they are a form of magic. Using textiles, knots, and the crafter’s intention, they form a physical manifestation of a spell.
 
Whether called cord magic, braid magic, or knot magic, this type of spell has ancient roots. Witches were once accused of controlling weather through the use of knotted cords, unleashing or calming storm winds by releasing or tightening knots. A photograph of the Witch’s Ladder, one of the most famous types of knot magic, may be found in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica book Witchcraft.
 
The Crafty Witch’s Guide to Cord Magic includes detailed instructions on how to craft specific cords for diverse intentions, as well as photographs taken by the author that show finished cords as well as cords in progress. Author and artist Loren Morris, owner of the Primitive Witchery store, is a master of braid magic, and her work is on display in the movie Hocus Pocus 2.
 
This is a complete guide that combines ancient wisdom and modern practice, teaching readers how to craft their own powerful and personalized spell cords. Loren shows the reader how to turn the act of braiding into a tool for manifesting intentions and deepening one’s own magical practice, with comprehensive instructions and spiritual insight.

Genres: Nonfiction, Witchcraft

176 pages, Paperback

Published July 6, 2026

Reviews

[Jaclyn Cherie]

There are books about Witchcraft that teach you a technique.

There are books that remind you that the technique was never just a technique.

Loren Morris' The Crafty Witch’s Guide to Cord Magic: The Art of Braiding & Knotting Spell Cords is very much the latter.

This book gives you every tip, trick, lesson, and bit of practical knowledge you need to begin creating your own spell cords, but what I love most is that Morris never makes cord Magick feel like a set of mechanical instructions to follow.

There is craft here, certainly, but there is also relationship. Symbolism. Intention. History. Observation. And that particular kind of Witchcraft that asks you to actually know why you are doing what you are doing.

The book feels both whimsical and grounded, which is a difficult balance to strike. Morris writes in a way that is incredibly easy to understand without ever watering anything down. There is no condescension. No assumption that the reader needs everything reduced to the simplest possible version.

Instead, she opens the door and trusts you to walk through it.

And her love and respect for the natural world is felt throughout these pages.

Birds. Symbols. Herbs. Materials. The little things that become anything but little once you begin paying attention.

That is one of the things I appreciate most about this book. Morris doesn't simply tell you what something means and hand you a predetermined correspondence chart to memorize. There is an invitation here to develop your own relationship with the materials and symbols you work with. To observe, question, experiment, and discover.

That is Traditional Witchcraft at its best.

The warnings.
The nuance.
The permission.

Permission to experiment.
Permission to develop your own methods.
Permission to listen to your own Craft.
Permission to understand that Witchcraft isn't always about finding the One Correct Way™ to do something.

There is wisdom in knowing the traditions, but there is also wisdom in knowing when to listen to the land, the materials, your intuition, and the Witch you are becoming.

And Morris understands that beautifully.

There is something almost uncanny about the way she writes about her Craft. At times, I genuinely felt as though I wasn't simply learning from another modern Practitioner, but sitting across from an Ancient, Sacred Völva - someone who has spent a lifetime watching the threads, learning the signs, listening to what the natural world whispers when everyone else is too busy talking.

There is something old in these pages.
Not archaic.
Ancient.

The kind of Ancient that still has dirt beneath its fingernails.
The kind that understands that a cord is not merely string.
It can become intention made tangible.

A prayer you can hold.
A spell you can wear.
A story braided strand by strand.
A promise tied into a knot.
A piece of will carried from the invisible world into the physical one.

And that is where this book truly shines for me.

Morris takes something wonderfully tactile and accessible and reminds us that our hands are instruments of Magick. We don't always need elaborate tools or complicated rituals.

Sometimes we need thread, fiber, color, herbs, symbols, intention, and the willingness to sit down and make something with our own hands.

There is intimacy in that.
There is power in that.
There is Witchcraft in that.

If you're interested in cord Magick, this book is an obvious addition to your library. But I think it will also speak to anyone who is drawn toward Traditional Witchcraft, folk practices, symbolism, animism, natural magic, or the Old Ways of making the mundane Sacred.

Because this isn't simply a book about braiding and knotting.
It is a book about remembering that making can be Magick.
That our hands can carry intention.
That symbols can speak.
That nature is not merely scenery.
And that sometimes the oldest spells begin with nothing more than a strand between your fingers.

A beautiful, practical, deeply respectful exploration of cord Magick, and one that feels, somehow, like being taught an old Craft by someone who remembers.

[David]

I received a review copy of this book.
My full review will be published at Facing North:
https://facingnorth.net