This Sunday Morning, let's have a little 9th house (Joy of the Sun) chat about magic and what it actually does.
Some people approach magic as the cure-all for their problems in life. This is a pretty damaging misconception that leads to disappointment and sometimes disavowal.
It's more appropriate and useful to look at magic as a way of giving yourself an advantage.
Let's say you wanted to run a marathon. A strong application of magic could give you a 20% speed advantage.
But that doesn't mean you can just sit back and do nothing.
You should still train and hone your marathon running skills. And then you'll still need to actually run the marathon. Magic gives us an advantage, opens doors, holds space... But we STILL HAVE TO DO THE WORK.
You can be given a gorgeous fire, built and running hot... but if you do not tend the embers and add more fuel, it will die. Magic is cosmic fire we must learn to tend and to wield with stewardship and healthy expectations.
(There's more to this that I plan to talk about in the coming days as we approach the Winter Solstice.)
If you have a recurring problem that crops up again and again, there are 3 factors here to consider.
A) Is it viable to solve this problem with magic?
B) Am I doing the mundane work with the magical space created for me?
C) Did I think a one-and-done working was enough?
A) VIABILITY
Big magical events that supersede the immense inertia of an existing situation are RARE. There are often variables you cannot control or even see. It's better to break these down into smaller doable chunks or be more realistic.
I've used this example before regarding viability: You want to do a love spell.
- Do you know this person?
- Do you have some sort of contact or communication?
- Do they know who you are?
If you target a celebrity you've never met and who doesn't know you exist, good luck.
But if you do a working to woo your best friend to fall in love with you, it has a higher chance of happening. You talk regularly, they know who you are, and they already like you to a pretty deep extent. This is very viable.
This is about working with existing inertia whenever it is possible. When you move against existing inertia, expect that the magic will take longer--sometimes even years.
I have a few peers who have done huge acts of financial magic--it took them 2-3 years to get the results they were looking for, because they were going from one state of being to another state altogether. If you want to go from making $100,000 a year to being a millionaire without having to add to your existing mundane job workload, expect that it will take time because you're really trying to jump several steps.
If you find that whatever you are trying to do is not immediately viable, try to break it down into smaller chunks. What is closest to you? Focus on that first. Repeat until you reach your goal.
B) DOING YOUR PART
Okay so you start the working.
What can you mundanely do with that space?
Maybe invite your best friend to dinner. Write them a letter that hints at your feelings to open a dialogue about a romantic relationship. Capitalize on what makes you attractive.
Don't just sit around waiting for them to confess their feelings. Open the door a little. Make it readily apparent that you're open to them flirting or taking you out. Respond when they make a move. DO YOUR PART.
Damien and I had a client who was dealing with a nasty custody situation. The ex-partner was betrayal bonding with the teenage kids and turning them against their mom. When she'd try to take him to court and produce evidence, he always seemed calm, rational, kind.
So the court never took her complaints seriously. We did a magical working to find the cracks in this man's very well constructed mask. He had a mental breakdown so bad that his kids called their mom and begged her to pick them up.
She immediately grabbed them, and went to court THAT DAY to file evidence. She didn't wait. They immediately called her ex in, and did a drug test because he was acting so wild. Turns out he was using heroin. Worse than that, HE WAS GIVING IT TO THEIR CHILDREN.
That day she was awarded full custody and the ability to remove her kids from the country to a safe haven at her parents vacation home in another country. She didn't hesitate. She was ready to jump the minute she had a window.
If she had not DONE HER MUNDANE PART PROACTIVELY none of the magic would have mattered. There were a lot of legal reasons she could have hesitated to pick her kids up or wait to see if her ex was hospitalized. But she didn't sit on her hands. She ran with the advantage.
If you expect magic to just do it all for you, you'll be gravely disappointed. I've seen this happen over and over. People who think that they can magic themselves out of/into something, without doing anything to help themselves in a practical way.
Then when it barely works, works temporarily, or does not work at all, these people feel disillusioned. They often decide magic does not work and then swear it off.
This has nothing to do with the magic failing. It has to do with misunderstanding of how it works at all.
C) WORK UNTIL IT WORKS
This is perhaps the most irritating thing for me personally, when I see modern contemporary Western magical practitioners doing workings. Most magic requires dedication and repetition.
The bigger the working, the more diligence is required.
Yes, ESPECIALLY when you work with spirits, entities, and deities.
I'd argue we're all doing this whether we truly believe we are or not, but that's a separate discussion. When I make a petition to St. Expedite, I repeat it daily until it is fulfilled.
There's a reason Catholic rosary novenas create miracles: that infusion of desire and trust builds momentum until something is bound to happen. This is a form of folk magic, the deity being Mary, Saints, Angels, or God himself.
It's no different in any other type of magic.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and magical change also takes time. Sometimes (rarely) you can do a big working in one go and it immediately works.
But I'd also argue that's a result of accumulated months of spirit relationship-building to get there.
For example, we had an insane neighbor situation in 2018. Well before that happened, I had been building a deep relationship with the land, plant, animal, elemental spirits, and fair folk of our local neighborhood.
When these neighbors became destructively, callously unbearable my girlfriend and I were able to do an all day working calling on those spirit relationships, explaining why these neighbors would be disrespectful to those spirits, and why they should help.
It worked instantaneously, and the neighbors were evicted 48 hours later.
I doubt it would have worked that fast if we did not have a long term ongoing relationship with our local spirits.
One that I personally invested in for more than a year (closer to 2 years) BEFORE asking for anything at all. That was months of diligent up-front work.
It was also highly viable (neighbors were destroying the house and were clearly going to get evicted at some point), and there was something in it for the spirits (peace and ceasing of destruction to their sacred home).
All of these factors made for fast magic.
MAGIC ENHANCES LIFE, IT DOES NOT REPLACE IT
I still work with spirits to successfully do all my magic, but not all workings have the right "recipe" for immediate & miraculous effect. Most magic does not work that way.
Diligence is key. Do the magical AND mundane work until it works. Make sure it's viable.
More importantly, we also need to do the mundane stuff to solve our problems. The minute we think magic can do it all, it's disrespectful to our spirit companions, and it is giving our agency away.
Magic is a boost, not a cure all. You can't avoid life and being an adult.