Material
What the fire leaves — and, in a great deal of European custom, the part that was actually kept.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Frazer's fire-festival chapters are full of ashes, and it is easy to miss how central they are. Raked out of the Beltane and midsummer bonfires, scattered on the fields, mixed into fodder, carried home in handfuls and kept against lightning, sickness and witchcraft. The fire was the spectacle. The ash was the part that went home with people, and the part they were still doing something with in June.
Practice today keeps the same shape without the hillside. Ash is used for marking, for blending into black salt, for burying the residue of a working, and for closing something out — a petition burnt and its ashes buried, scattered at a crossroads, or tipped into running water depending on which tradition the practitioner learned from.
Handle it properly. Only burn clean untreated wood or dried herbs; painted, glued or manufactured timber leaves whatever was in it behind. Wood ash is alkaline and will irritate skin, eyes and lungs, so keep it out of the air. And never seal warm ash into a container — it holds heat for far longer than it looks like it should.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer notes how consistently the ashes of the great fires were treated as the useful residue — strewn on the fields to make them fruitful, mixed with seed corn, or kept in the house against lightning. Where the fire was communal, the ash was the portion each household could take away, and he treats that as the reason the custom lasted.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
The ashes of a burnt petition buried, scattered at a crossroads, or put into running water, chosen according to whether the thing is meant to settle, to disperse, or to go away entirely. Practitioners are usually firm that you should decide which before you light it.
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.