The first thing most people buy when they decide to take witchcraft seriously is too much. A box of thirteen coloured candles, four kinds of crystal, a mortar and pestle, a jar of something expensive and powdered that will sit unopened for three years. Then they go looking for a spell to cast and find that the one they actually want calls for a white candle, a pinch of salt, and a piece of paper.
So we counted. Every one of the 192 spells the grimoire held at the time lists its materials, and reading all of them at once makes the pattern obvious: a very small number of things carry almost the whole library, and almost everything else shows up once or twice. This is the list of what earns its place.
What the Count Actually Measured
Every spell page in the grimoire names its materials before the ritual itself begins, so this is not an estimate. All 192 that existed when this was written were read, and the names were grouped where they describe the same thing: a white candle, a small white candle and a white taper are one item, not three.
Two kinds of thing were left out. The first is what you already own. Pen and paper appear in 108 of the 192 spells, a bowl or dish in 109, water in 80, and matches in 18, but nobody needs a shopping list for those. The second is what cannot be bought at all: a quiet room, a bathtub, a photograph of someone, your own sigil. Counting those would have put stationery above rosemary and told you nothing useful.
Start With What Is Already in the House
Before anything else, notice how far an ordinary kitchen gets you. A bowl, a glass of water, a pen, a scrap of paper, and something to make a flame will carry you through a surprising amount of the grimoire. If you have never cast anything before, how to cast your first spell walks through a working that needs nothing you would have to go out and find.
The kit below is what you add to that. It is ordered by how many spells call for each thing, which means the first two items matter more than the other eighteen put together.
Candles, and Which Colours
160 of 192 spells use a candle. Eighty-three percent. No other material comes close, and if you buy nothing else, buy these.
The colours are not evenly spread. Across the whole grimoire the count runs: white in 87 spells, black in 43, gold or yellow in 16, green in 15, pink in 10, red in 8, purple in 8, blue in 7, and brown in only 2. Twenty spells simply say "a candle" and leave the colour to you. White and black between them cover the large majority of everything you will want to cast, which makes the shopping decision easy: buy white in quantity, black in a smaller quantity, and add the rest only when a particular spell asks.
Form matters far less than colour. Of the 180 places a candle is named in the grimoire, only eight specify a taper, a pillar, beeswax or a seven day jar candle. Plain household candles are fine for almost everything. Two details are worth knowing before you buy: 119 spells need only one candle, but 29 need two at once, and six need seven of a matching kind, including the Seven Day Candle Manifestation. If a seven day working is what drew you in, count that out before you shop.
For what the colours mean and how to dress and carve a candle before you light it, candle magic for beginners covers the groundwork.
Salt, in 109 Spells
Salt is in 57 percent of the grimoire, which makes it the only other material in the same league as candles. It cleanses, it holds a boundary, and it turns up as a quiet supporting ingredient in spells that are nominally about something else entirely.
Almost every spell that calls for it says "sea salt or table salt," so one kind covers you. Coarse sea salt is the most useful single purchase: it works anywhere plain salt is asked for, it photographs better, and it is cheap in a large box. Salt magic goes into warding, boundaries and cleansing in full, and the Salt and Smoke Ward is the usual place to start.
Three Herbs Before Twelve
Herb shelves grow without anyone deciding to grow them. The counts suggest a much smaller starting point. Rosemary appears in 37 spells, cinnamon in 32, and lavender in 26. Those three carry more of the grimoire than every other herb and spice combined.
Rosemary is the workhorse, turning up in cleansing, protection, healing, love and divination alike, from the Four Corners Blessing to the Dream Pillow Oracle. Cinnamon lives almost entirely in money, luck and love work. Lavender belongs to rest, grief and dreaming.
After those three the numbers drop sharply: basil in 12 spells, bay leaves in 11, thyme in 11, sage in 10, chamomile in 8. Worth having eventually, not worth a first trip. Bay leaves are the exception if you like a quick working, because the Bay Leaf Wish Burning takes about four minutes and needs almost nothing else; the magic of bay leaves explains why that one leaf does so much. For the wider shelf, herbs every witch should know is the fuller guide.
Containers, Cords, and Somewhere Safe to Burn
This is the group beginners underbuy, and it is larger than the herb shelf.
Cloth pouches or sachets appear in 41 spells, more than any herb. They are also consumed: a charm sewn shut and carried does not come back to be reused, so buy a pack rather than one. String, cord or ribbon appears in 31, and red and black cover most of what is asked for. Knot work is a whole branch of practice on its own, which knot magic and cord spells covers, and the Cord Cutting Ceremony is the one most people arrive looking for.
A fireproof dish or candle holder appears in 30 spells and is the one item on this list that is a safety requirement rather than a magical one. Small glass jars with lids appear in 23, and like pouches they are consumed, because a jar spell stays sealed. The Healing Heart Jar and the Reconciliation Honey Jar both keep their jar permanently.
The Five That Surprise People
Four items in the top twenty are not what anyone expects to need, and one is already in the cupboard.
A small mirror, in 31 spells. Mirrors appear in every single category the grimoire has, from the Mirror of Radiance to reversal and protection work. One cheap hand mirror covers almost all of it.
Olive oil, in 27 spells. Not a specialist anointing oil. Twenty-seven spells say olive oil, cooking oil or vegetable oil, which means the bottle beside your stove is the correct ingredient. The Purifying Salt Scrub uses it exactly that way.
Coins, in 22 spells. Any denomination, almost always. You have these.
Honey, in 19 spells. Sweetening work is one of the oldest and gentlest branches of folk magic, and honey jar spells explains why so much of it runs through one sticky jar.
White vinegar, in 16 spells. The counterpart to honey: where honey sweetens, vinegar sours and strips. It also does ordinary cleansing work, as in the Black Salt Purge, and shows up in money work like the Debt Breaking Rite.
The Twenty, In Order
How many of the 192 spells name each item:
- Candles — 160 spells
- Salt, sea or table — 109
- Cloth pouches or sachets — 41
- Dried rosemary — 37
- Cinnamon — 32
- A small mirror — 31
- String, cord or ribbon — 31
- A fireproof dish or candle holder — 30
- Olive oil — 27
- Dried lavender — 26
- Small glass jars with lids — 23
- Coins — 22
- Honey — 19
- Pins, needles or nails — 16
- White vinegar — 16
- Stones or crystals — 14
- Dried basil — 12
- Bay leaves — 11
- Rose petals — 11
- Dried thyme — 11
Why Twenty and Not Ten
Here is the part that is genuinely surprising, and the reason this list is twenty items long rather than a tidy ten.
A ten item kit, the ten most common things in the grimoire, lets you cast 48 of the 192 spells start to finish without a single trip to a shop. That is a quarter of the library, which sounds respectable until you see what the next ten do. Adding items eleven through twenty takes you to 105 spells. Fifty-five percent. Ten more items, and you more than double what you can actually cast tonight.
The reason is that the back half of the kit is full of items that are not common in themselves but are the last missing piece of a spell whose other ingredients you already have. Jars, coins and honey each sit in roughly twenty spells, but they unblock far more than their own count, because a honey jar spell needs honey and a jar and almost nothing else unusual.
The practical version: buy the first two items properly, in quantity. Then buy breadth rather than depth. One jar of six herbs beats six jars of one.
What to Add Twenty-First
If the kit above is in place, these are the single items that open up the most additional spells, each one being the only thing standing between you and several more workings:
- Uncooked rice completes 6 more spells
- Mugwort, 5 more, almost all dream and divination work
- Dried chamomile, 5 more
- An iron object or an old key, 5 more
- Rose water, 4 more
- Black pepper, 4 more
Rice is the best value on that list and costs almost nothing. Mugwort is the one to buy if divination is where you are heading, and scrying for beginners is a good next read if so.
A Kit Is Not a Practice
None of this is a requirement. Witchcraft has never been gated behind equipment, and the oldest workings in the grimoire are the ones that ask for a candle, a pinch of something, and your full attention for ten minutes. A shelf of supplies does not make anyone a better witch, and an empty shelf has never stopped one.
What a kit buys you is not power. It is the absence of friction: the ability to open the grimoire on a Tuesday evening, find a spell that suits what you are carrying, and begin, without the working being deferred to whenever you next pass a shop. Half the grimoire, for twenty ordinary things, most of which fit in one box.
When the box is full, setting up an altar is where it usually goes next, and the full grimoire is waiting whenever you are.