Protection amulet for dispelling demons

Ngakpa Dawa Ngödrüp

Creating amulets is a Tibetan Vajrayana ritual practice. Their purpose can be for healing or protection, or to help effectuate any beneficial intent. In the thangka painting above, Ngakpa Dawa Ngödrüp, who was a herbalist at the Aro Gar in Tibet in the 1900s, is shown wearing many amulets.

Ngakma Nor’dzin is producing a set of three videos explaining a method of creating a protection amulet. In the Aro gTer Lineage, amulets are woven in the five elemental colours: yellow/earth, white/water, red/fire, green/air, and blue/space. Some amulets only use two or three colours, but they will still be a combination taken from the five elemental colours.

The protection amulet in the tutorial will be woven as a single ‘sky’. This means one of each of the elemental colours in their order moving from earth to space. Green will be the focus in the centre, so the cycle of the five colours will be green, followed by blue, then yellow, white and finally red as the outer colour. The reason for placing green—the air element—in the centre, is that the Covid 19 pandemic has been causing people to experience anxiety, and this arrangement of the elements is a manifestation of an intent to reduce anxiety, the neurotic emotional response of the air element.

The outer design of the amulet is in fact the binding to contain and seal the intention of the hidden charm inside it. Ngakma Nor’dzin will be using the Tibetan woodblock print of the demon-destroying scorpion as the active ingredient on the folded paper, around which the threads are woven. The photograph below was taken of this amulet charm by Ngakma Nor’dzin in Bhutan, where it was on a personal shrine.

If you wish to follow the video tutorials, and join in with creating a protection amulet, you can download the demon-dispelling scorpion for printing using this link: scorpion image.

The image below shows a group of embroidery threads that are a good combination of colours.The white and yellow are both Anchor perle cotton, numbers 1 and 298. The red, green and blue are DMC perle cotton, numbers 666, 699 and 796.

The materials and equipment you will need to create a protection amulet are as follows:

• a print-out of the demon-dispelling scorpion 
• a 30 cm ruler
• a pencil
• a pair of scissors
• a skein of thread in each of the five colours
• a long needle with a large eye and a blunt point

Please see the first video on Aro Ling Cardiff’s YouTube channel.