Magick, Explained and Made Easy

[User1265455]

“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”

― Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice

There's a lot of talk about what Crowley was talking about here - and most of it boils down to the idea of "True Will." Thelemites will often quote: "Love is the law, love under will." Love in this case means union between a point-of-view (you) and one of infinite possibilities in Experience. It is your will that brings this love to fruition.

So when people talk about true will, they often mean something outside our consciousness, enforcing things. The idea of "highest good," "true purpose," "higher self," all suggest that there is something outside your conscious self that decides and controls your fate and your power. The true will is not something external, some mystical thing that you have to reach to achieve, though. Crowley literally meant that your will is truth. You decide, and you unite your view that it is so with the universe of infinite possibilities, and thus, it is so.(edited)

There are four pillars to magick. To know, to dare, to will, and to keep silent.

In order to cast a spell, you need to know: who you are, what you want to cast for, what tools you will need, what results you desire, and how to put all that together into something that works - and you also need to know that when you do this, it WILL work.

To dare means you have to be willing to make those changes. It's more than just wanting something to change, you have to be daring enough to decide that your version of desired reality is important enough to out-reality everyone else.

Then you need to put your will behind that. To will something to change, or to come into being - it's more than just wishing for something. Wishing implies lack. Willing implies that because you have decided something is to be, or not to be, then it becomes as you will.

And finally, to keep silent is important because if you keep talking about what you're changing, clearly you're reinforcing that it exists in its unchanged form. So once you have the knowledge, the daring, the will power... then you have to accept that things have changed, and what was is no more.

Most witchcraft uses "sympathetic" magick - basically, magick that is like the result. So, you want to bind someone, you take a ribbon and tie their picture up in knots. You want it to rain, you sprinkle water on the ground, or dance in a way that sounds like rain, or you use a rainstick.

This sympathy goes deeper though, it goes into symbolism. Plants, animals, stones, colors, all have associations based on sympathy. Most witches use these tools to help them focus their energy and their will. Part of the magickal act involves researching what to use, and the other part of that act will be "empowering" those objects to work in tandem to bring about your goal. These are tools to enable that focus and that gathering of power and will.

However, there are two adages that every witch should know by heart. One: you are born a witch, and at your birth, you came with every tool you will ever need; and two, the energy you need is within you and all around you, and as a witch, you are taking willing control of that energy to direct it, and you have the right to do this by accepting that you are a power that can.

So while these tools are HELPFUL (especially when you first begin), they are not NECESSARY. Your finger is a wand and athame. Your blood, saliva, sexual fluids and other bodily emissions are all offerings and methods of empowering items. Your body is a conductor, and your mind the tool you meld all this together in. You need no herbs, no rocks, no candles, to achieve what you desire, as long as you know how to raise power.

To raise power, you first have to know what power is, so...

Here's where we get practical. I'm going to post you a link, and I want you to read it very carefully, and follow every step. By the end, you will know what your power feels like, and how to use it.

https://selqetkitty.wordpress.com/2012/ ... making-it/

People always have this idea that somehow they don't deserve things they get using magick, or that somehow there will be a hidden price to it that will kick them when they're not looking.

I was 8 years old, and had dead straight hair, and people kept telling me how much better I'd look if I had a perm... so one morning before I went to school, I wet a hair brush, and used it to curl my hair. I'm 42, and my hair is now so curly that when it's longer than two inches, I get ringlets.

Magick is NATURAL, is what I'm getting at here.

I mean, yeah, there were consequences to me curling my hair - the consequence being that if you have curly hair, you have to deal with having curly hair...

But there wasn't a PRICE TAG. There is no price tag on deciding what you want and making that happen.

If you decide on a specific car in the lot, and you work, and you save, and then you buy the car... you have committed a magickal act. You decided what you wanted, you decided what you needed to do to make that happen, you dared to act - to change your behavior, so you could achieve your goal, and then you went and bought your car.

After all that work, do you feel like you don't deserve the car?

And if you added a bit of magick to support your goal of getting a car, does this somehow lessen the achievement?

Magick takes the same kind of effort, honestly. And that effort is the price. The longer you practice, the more effective you get, so the cheaper things seem... but that's the same with anything else. The longer you paint, the better you get. The longer you work at the same job, the better you are at it, the more likely you are to get a promotion for that effort, the more money you'll make, the cheaper your life becomes.

The idea, for example, that using magick to improve your looks instead of makeup and a curling iron is somehow something you don't deserve...

I mean... makeup and a curling iron wash off in the evenings. Weight lifting doesn't go away quite so fast, but it still requires maintenance. You learn the art of makeup and hair. You learn the art of body sculpting. Using magick to achieve the same thing is definitely not wrong.

Magick... tips the scales in your favor. Sometimes it outright reorders the world, tbh but you have to be pretty practiced for that to start happening.

I have a chair in my library that is proof that eventually everyone gets to the point where they just tell the universe, "This belongs here." and the universe says, "yeah, ok, it does," and poof, something exists that wasn't there before...

I have a very tiny nook in my house, and it really serves no purpose. It's one of those weird architectural oddities - we live on the second floor, and on the first floor, the front door of the apartment below us is on the opposite end of the apartment... so where their door is, I have a nook.

For lack of a better use, I shoved all my bookcases in it. But then I had a library and no seating.

So I looked at the space, and told the universe I needed a chair. I was more specific than that, but...

I immediately knew where to go - and so my husband and I drove two towns away, and at the store I knew it was going to be at, it was. They were a bit weird... they didn't know where the chair had come from.

But it did take me 40 years to get to that point. just like it takes 20 years to become a heart surgeon.

Also, magickal workings can be very permanent. I've never needed to maintain anything to keep my hair curly, so... yeah. Once you make a change to the universe or yourself with magick, it's there.

But... you also have to understand that an 8yo's belief 100% trumps an adult's skepticism... and that dropping doubt out of the equation is part of truly successful magick. I knew that chair existed, and so it did. I had no doubt, just as I had no doubt about a wet brush giving me curly hair...

But getting your doubting self out of the way is hard - and so most of magickal practice is done specifically to get that out of the way. It's easier to believe a crystal can do something than it is to believe YOU can do something, you know?

So, like, Ramaris is right now using magick to sculpt his own body to his liking... and when he's finished, it will stay that way.

It's easier if you start with something already - so if you want muscles, it's harder than if you want BIGGER muscles, you know? Because of that doubt thing. For adults just learning magick, just starting out, it helps to pin those magickal intentions onto something physical. That's why a lot of the books say that if you cast a job spell, then you need to start putting out applications. If you want to build muscles, and you do a spell, it's easier for that spell to work to achieve your goal if you also weigh lift - BUT... it will take you less effort for more results than it would if you didn't do the spell.

Once you open yourself to the possibility of magick doing something, shit gets weird.

Effort is a tool to expand your belief.

[SerenitySpells]

I would love to carry on this conversation, but the truth is you have nailed it. Your description is how I see things, and whether you like Crowley or not (disclosure I was a 93/93) you have to admit his description and the idea of Love is the Law, Love under will, really makes a lot of sense.

What I find is a shame is how the world via social, internal, parental, education system etc etc prefers sheeple and the reduction of the individual. Once they have taken you away you are easier to rule over as you do not ask questions and those that do become labeled as trouble makers, instigators etc etc

You must always explore, never settle for what you are being told, research, practice and believe. Believe in yourself and your decision making processes.

Being skeptical is not the same as questioning. Questioning makes you challenge and stretch yourself, skeptical makes you turn inwards and lose belief, bring mistrust (and not in a good way) etc I find the skeptical adult is liked by those in power - they end up becoming the status quo as they do not know what to believe and end up jaded.

I suppose this takes us into shadow work which is also an essential part of magick.

[User1265455]

I definitely agree that shadow work is a huge part of magick - it goes back to the adage "Know Thyself." Successful magick requires knowing yourself well enough to mitigate.

When I was MUCH younger (and dumber) I cast a few love spells. Nothing on a specific person, but just those general "bring me a partner/soulmate" ones.

They all went really, REALLY wrong. The problem I had was my subconscious beliefs about myself and what I deserved in a relationship. That influenced my magick... and until I did the work to discover myself, and the healing shadow work on the issues I had, they continued to go wrong.

Similarly, my money spells also went wrong - because I had problematic beliefs, again, with what I deserved financially. (I will NEVER forget the money spell I did where I asked for $500 and got it... in monopoly money on the sidewalk...) It wasn't until I started to really understand my subconscious beliefs about wealth and prosperity, and started working on the shame I felt about just asking for the most basic of necessity, that I started to see positive effects from any prosperity spells



Your comments about the complex system of ruling powers in our lives is actually something I've been thinking pretty seriously about recently. With what's happening politically in the US, I find I'm having a lot of thoughts about the media, our government, our religious and legal institutions.

In LA, after a particularly bad school shooting, the LA police were given grenade launchers and military hum-v's. They've since given up their grenade launchers, but not the vehicles. It was easier to arm the police because people were afraid for their children. And it's easier for the government to heavily arm the police and let the gun lovers keep their toys. Now, we have a militant police body... and the gun lovers who swore they needed those guns to protect all of us are nowhere to be found. The media is reframing peaceful protests as riots, sometimes even using old footage. They're also carefully editing footage of antifa protests. There's one in particular that sticks out - the one where the alt-right brought hammers to the protest and attacked antifa protesters, and when the AP took the hammers away, the press took a photo and framed it as antifa attacking every-day people.



Magick is important. It has ALWAYS been a tool for the little people to get justice for themselves and others. Using magick is a revolutionary act - you are taking up the power to make the world over into what you want it to be. It's heretical, it's anti-establishment. It's a universal balancer.