What tools do I need as a beginner in the Craft?

What tools do I need as a beginner in the Craft?

The most important magickal tool you will ever own is you (and that is a loaner). If you learn to focus your mind, work with not against your body, infuse your life with your own unique spirit, you will always have magick. Always. If you want to know your own knowing it will take time and effort, and those are the only tools you need. Oh except a pocket knife those things are handy!

 In terms of what to read it depends on what "speaks" to you. If you are academic then the older more difficult books are a good place to start. Those would include The Golden Bough, the White Goddess, and Gardener's Book of Shadows. If native traditions speak to you read folklore and stories by medicine men and women, like Entering the Circle, or Black Elk Speaks. Rad Culpepper or Hoffman about herbs. Read old books about palmistry or ghost stories, spirit stories. 

Take a dance class (belly-dance is especially good) and feel the rhythm move you. Enjoy your body. Swim. Take up fire-walking or fire poi. Be in the world but not of it. Make music. Scuba dive. Fly kites. Feed birds. Dig a garden. These are all deeply, soulfully connective spiritual practice.

At the beginning of your path there is little point buying or making ritual tools if you do not know what you will need. If you are going into the wilds you will need different things than if you are heading to the library. That is not to say you can not be both or do both. I am a bibliophile who loves camping so it is not either or.

Practically, a decent pocket knife, a weather proof coat (preferably with deep pockets), walking boots, a notebook and pencil/pen, are my MUST HAVE'S. Barefoot sounds wonderful until you turn your ankle on tree root. Naked sounds great (it is great) but there is always "man with dog" and in some cases "owl watching group". Deep pockets can collect all kinds of treasures you find, horse hair, lambs wool, thorns, a pretty rock, a small guide book (flowers, birds, rocks).  If you need to poke something, move something, cut something, leave a mark for some reason, a knife is essential. You can even use it as a temporary athame if you needed to.