Material
Water left out under the moon — a young practice, popular for good reasons, and honest company for a beginner.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
The method is as simple as anything in the craft. A clean glass jar of water, covered, set where moonlight can reach it — usually across a full moon — and brought in before the sun is up. Practitioners differ on whether cloud matters. Most say it does not, on the grounds that the moon is up regardless, which quietly makes the practice about timing rather than light.
It is worth being straight about the age of this one. Moon water as a named, standardised preparation appears in print and online mostly from the later twentieth century, and spread very widely in the 2010s. Older lunar water customs do exist — midsummer dew gathered before dawn, water drawn at particular hours — but they are not this, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. A practice can be twenty years old and still be a practice.
Two cautions. It is not drinking water: a jar of water left out overnight is a culture medium, and moonlight sterilises nothing. And do not soak crystals in water you intend to handle or use — several common minerals dissolve, flake, or shed metals you would rather not have in a bath.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
A jar out on the sill for one night a month, used for anointing and for wiping down tools. Practitioners who like it tend to say the value is in having a fixed monthly appointment with their own practice.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer records dew gathered before sunrise on May and midsummer mornings, washed in for beauty or health, and notes the recurring insistence that it be collected in silence and used the same day. The older customs are about a particular morning rather than a particular phase — a real difference from the modern jar.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.