Florida Water

Storm Water Florida Water

This is the version that came down to me, no spirits in the bottle, just what the sky and the pantry provided. Gather your storm water with intention while the rain is still falling if you can, it wants to be caught, not collected after the fact.

• 2 cups storm water, collected with intention
• 1 cup black coffee, for grounding and protection
• Peel from 1 orange
• Peel from 1 lemon
• 1–2 cinnamon sticks
• A handful of herbs, rosemary, lavender, or rose petals
• A handful of whole cloves

Combine everything in a clean glass jar and seal it tight. Set it somewhere dark for a few days, giving it a shake each time you pass and saying over it whatever you need said. Strain the solids out through cheesecloth, bottle the liquid, and keep it in the refrigerator. Because there is no alcohol to preserve it, make it in small batches and use it up rather than let it sit for months.

The Traditional Roads

If you want a bottle that keeps for years and can travel with you, the alcohol-based methods below are the ones most practitioners reach for. Either road gets you there.

What Florida Water Is For

Ask ten practitioners what they use it for and you will get ten answers, and every one of them will be right. Grandma used it for just about anything you could think of, though her furniture polish recipe involving kerosene oil is a tradition I am letting die with her.

The Truth About the Name

Here is a fact I want on the record, since I have seen it repeated wrong more than once, myself included in an earlier post I am retiring along with this one. Florida Water has no old Spanish or ancient folk origin, and it was never named for the state.

It was invented in 1808 by a New York City perfumer named Robert I. Murray, who later partnered with David T. Lanman to form Murray and Lanman, the same company that still bottles the original formula today. The name comes from the mythical Fountain of Youth, long rumored to be somewhere in Florida, not from any water drawn there.

Through the Victorian era it was sold as a unisex cologne and a household cure-all, splashed on for headaches, added to laundry water, and kept behind every barbershop counter. Enslaved African Americans in the South, forbidden from practicing their own religions openly, took this ordinary commercial bottle and folded it into hoodoo practice, where it became a stand-in holy water. From there it spread into Vodou, Santeria, and Espiritismo, and eventually into the wider world of modern witchcraft.

So much of what gets passed around as ancient mystery started out as a product on a drugstore shelf. That does not make it less powerful in a practitioners hands. It just means the mystery was never in the bottle. It was always in the intention behind it.