Wands of Horus
So I got these:
They’re called Wands of Horus. Left one is zinc (-), right one is copper (+). They contain quartz granules. You hold them in your hands, and it grounds you and/or improves your conductivity and/or that sort of thing.
I don’t know how I knew I needed these when they were recommended to me, but that’s how it goes these days. I could tell they were going to help me with… something. Energy. There was something I needed help with having to do with energy, and these would help. So I got them.
To be honest, I was a little skeptical they were going to “do anything.” So I decided to test them out a little, put them down, move them, and then draw Tarot cards to go in each of their spots.
That went well, as you can see (5 “sad” in the - spot, 3 “happy” in the + spot):
That was good enough for me, so I tried holding them and standing and breathing for five minutes.
Yowza.
Bingo bango.
Holy guacamole.
I intuitively started “scanning” my body/head with them, turning in circles, etc, and could feel them perfectly, precise as a laser beam.
The literature says they’re useful in meditation, so I considered how to fit them into my daily practice. The answer came swiftly: do the standing thing for 20 breaths right after qigong, before zazen. So I’ve been doing that for a couple mornings, plus breaks throughout the day.
Here is the effect I noticed the first time, which wizard friends confirm as them working as intended:
The qigong spins up a lot of energy, and zazen afterwards is great for feeling it. However, it’s pretty surge-y, peaking and dropping, wild ride.
The wand thing “normalizes” the field. It lets me feel the elevated qi more smoothly across “moments” of experience.
This is super helpful during my fairly intense practice. It keeps me from blowing a gasket, which has happened sometimes. But as you might imagine, it’s also a lifesaver in the midst of a stressful day, or even just to chill out at the end of a normal day.
But why are they interesting to write about? I am exploring something about my own language here. I am unable to talk about the Wands of Horus without diminishing them or myself as weirdo stuff.
As I have mentioned, this way of describing or understanding my embodied experience is not native to me — though obviously there’s nothing MORE native to me than the sensations of living as this body. But without the right words, it’s harder to have the right relationship.
I have been able to transmute the novelty of all this — and my native skepticism about it — into an advantage, though. There have been many instances in my life where spiritual stuff used my doubt to prove its efficacy to me. Big moments. The Tarot reading above is a good example.
My constellation of practices has been built up so slowly, over… I guess 20 years? The things that have stuck — and that fit together — all share the unshakeable sense-memory of that confirmation experience. In the past couple years, I’ve been zeroing in on “energy,” though.
Zeroing in in the sense that I’ve become familiar with bodily energy as a through-line connecting somewhat disparate practices together, and understanding that dynamic and its continuous flow has allowed me to shed other stuff that wasn’t contributing to that cultivation.
Even though it might look like I’m in an expansive (expensive) period of adding stuff, it’s actually a process of distilling things down. The closer I get to a radically personal practice of energy regulation, the more the entire religions that got me here step back and watch.
Are these Wands of Horus made of zinc and copper and quartz actually having some measurable electrical effect I couldn’t get with other objects? I have no idea. I’ll try it. But it is unquestionable to me that there is a “physical” body/world interaction taking place here.
Updates:
After some searching around, my currently recommended wand-maker is WitEngineerProducts on Etsy. They are both nicer and DRAMATICALLY less expensive than the pioneers who tried to corner the online market on this.
I also got a pair of his mini-wands for bringing out and about, and I rigged up a little carrying case for them out of a strangely perfect hipster internet wallet I had lying around:
Bedtime Usage Update, October 2022:
I thought the wands had already made their impact, but the real life-changing use case is in bed, last thing before going to sleep. I just hold them and meditate until I can tell I’m about to fall asleep, which happens quickly, and then I put them down, close my eyes, and I’m out.
The “literature” did not set me up to expect that the most profound effect of the wands would be as a sleep aid, but on a trans-literary symbolic level, it tracks perfectly.
