Tag Archives: spellwork

Occultism and Esoterism

How To Know The Witch You Hired Isn’t Good

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I had a chat with a reader of this blog about her experience ordering a spell on Etsy and being disappointed by the results. She asked me what are some pointers to follow in choosing a witch and how to know if he or she is good or lying, etc. Here are some red flags:

Their Mouth Is Moving

This may sound harsh, but by and large, actual magical practitioners who accept commissions from others don’t waste their time on social media blabbering about their own prowess. Blabbering is a marketing strategy, and as we’ll see in the next point, magic cannot have a market in the same way that toilet paper or grilled cheese can.

Actual magical practitioners may very well choose to record their experiences online, and you may even find the occasional one who offers some kind of magical service, but you’ll not find them screeching at others on socials or competing with zeal in the attention economy.

The practice of occultism, whether it is folk occultism or “high” occultism (and I don’t believe in this distinction) changes people. If they are clearly worse than you would be if you were in their position, they haven’t changed, so they don’t practice magic.

Taking Orders Like A Pizza Place

Magic is a preindustrial, pre-assembly line thing. A magical work is a complex convergence of personal and cosmic aspects and it cannot be done over and over with no end in sight. Finding ads that say something to the effect of “Make him come back to you, last 5 spells available” is an immediate red flag. An actual practitioner cannot seriously follow more than a very small handful of operations at a given time.

Of all parts of occultism and magic, divination is probably the more marketable, because one can perform it more freely and continuously, but even divination has its limits: if the diviner is not feeling at peace or concentrated, or if their are feeling tired, it is perfectly futile to fan out the cards. If something goes wrong during the reading, it is best to postpone the session. This may inconvenience the modern customer who expects results, but it is what it is.

There’s No Good And Evil, Harry

This is an exceedingly fashionable belief, because it fulfills a wish, on many people’s part, to believe that it is possible to obtain the results of evil actions while remaining neutral and respectable.

There is no need to be an old-fashioned, moralistic curmudgeon in order to understand that good and evil very much exist. Good is what fosters life and growth, evil is what stands in their way. In astrology, Saturn is not evil because he is satanic in the 80s satanic panic sense, but because he stunts, corrupts, breaks down, makes suffer, stands between us and our will, and no amount of whitewashing it as “the planet of working out karma” can change this fact. Jupiter is not good because he is the astrological equivalent of Santa, but because he nourishes and protects.

Many in the magical community choose to believe that everything is what you make of it and it all depends on your intention. This is the inheritance of the excesses of Crowleyanism.

In reality, the difference between white and dark magic is quite obvious: dark magic is a magic of command. As such, it is almost always illusory, in that the recoil for it makes it always clear that no true command over the summoned force is possible. And there HAS to be a recoil (although it is possible to discharge it on someone else). But dark magic gives very quick results when worked properly.

White magic doesn’t work by command but by petition, which is an esoteric extension of prayer, it is slower, safer and less spectacular in its action, because it doesn’t subvert the order of things, but rather harmonizes the target with it so that the best that can be obtained by a situation is obtained. But the best that can be obtained is not always what the target wants. Sometimes all that can be obtained is peace of mind. And that’s not nothing.

Furthermore, white magic doesn’t bend another’s will. You can petition an angel or a God-name to get you back with your ex all you want, that force will not intervene, and if you do get back with your ex it’s because it was on your path already. Dark magic is always a perversion of the natural path, which is what originates the imbalance that causes the recoil. It is also what gets you the quick hit.

Light and Love

This has to be the most ironic part of it. You always see fake magical practitioners spewing platitudes about light, positive vibes, manifesting abundance and all that nonsense, when what they want is often to bend other people’s autonomy, either directly (“let him come back to me”) or indirectly (“let the product I’m selling explode on the market”, which means forcing other people to like it), and this is the opposite of light and love.

Magic is made of light and love. It is also made of shit and blood and broken bones. And it is also made of all the very mundane experiences that sit on the continuum between light and love on one end and shit and blood on the other. Talking about just one side of the experience is intellectually dishonest, especially since it is aimed at winning over customers.

Witchy Aesthetics

This is the last point I’m going to talk about, but it alone would be enough to bury 99% of magical practitioners found online. Actual magic is not pleasing to the eye. It doesn’t have the aesthetic kick that the average girlypop found on TikTok or Tumblr is looking for to fuel the fantasy of being not-like-other-girls. It is not a bunch of symbols thrown together with endless amounts of colored candles, pentagrams and store-bought incense. Broadly speaking, the more the pictures you find look like what you would expect magic to look based on movies, the more you can be sure it isn’t going to have any effect.

MQS

astrology, Card Reading, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Occultism and Esoterism, Playing Cards, Reading Example

Checking Talismans with Playing Cards

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In one of my recent posts I discussed how playing cards can detect curses (of course, it’s not just playing cards that can do it). Today I wanted to add to this subject by discussing the esoteric use of Playing Cards to check if a spell (in this case, a talisman) is a good idea or has been successfully created and is working.

I should perhaps first explain that there is a modicum of belief in magic involved in all this. The modern worldview tends to react to the idea of magic in two ways: the skeptical way (“it’s not really true”) and the new age way (“it’s not really true, but I would really love for it to be true, so I’ll play make belief and tailor everything to my preconceptions”)

Either way, magic is reduced to the acceptable role of cathartic theater or psychological tool (unfortunately, even great minds within the occult scene, like William Gray, have partly fallen for this approach, or at least considered it viable). From here it has even found its way even into the corporate sphere (a friend of mine working for Google told me she was forced to attend a “magical” day with a psychic who talked to them about tarot and Wicca). You know something is crap when pandering megacorporations appropriate it.

At least since Aleister Crowley (but there are predecessors) magic has been understood as the way of the will. Granted, Crowley’s understanding of the word “Will” is not the same as how we understand it in our everyday life, which would rather be “whim“. His view resembles more closely Nietzsche’s view of the will, so it does have some nobility.

But this doesn’t detract from the fact that most people whose view of magic has been colored by Crowley’s (and that’s almost everyone today, whether they know it or not) don’t REALLY believe in magic. Instead, they tend to see it as, again, little more than a placebo. It’s true if you believe in it. It’s true if you want it to be true.

Still, it’s my experience that belief in magic is not really required for magic to work. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any trace of the concept of the magician’s will in the traditional Western approach to magic (or in the Eastern approach, for that matter).

Because just believing in it was usually not considered a prerequisite for success, the use of divination to check the efficacy of magical workings has been advocated a long time. Besides, if belief is not enough, other, more objective factors must be checked. *

The Arab mages of old, for instance, invited people to do a horary reading to see if the use of planetary magic was warranted. Agrippa probably used geomancy for the same purpose. We don’t know about Abano, but it is not a stretch to think he would have consulted a geomantic shield to check how his spellwork was doing.

In general, all forms of divination take the reality of magic for granted within the worldview that informs their language. After all, why would divination work, but not magic? ** This is true for playing cards as well. Here is an example.

Last year while the Sun was in Leo I was working on a Sun talisman. I’m not going to disclose the aim of the talisman. It was nothing untoward, but I’d rather keep it to myself. After the creation of the talisman I set out to consecrate it. The number of days varies.

On the first day, after the first consecration, I got the following spread:

A♠ – 6♣ – 5♠

Definitely a bad start. And I wouldn’t have expected anything less. The majority is Spades, which is bad for anything but black magic.

6♣ – 8♣ – 10♣

Second day of consecration. A mash of clubs is not positive. It shows difficulties and toil without success. Still, Spades have abandoned the spread, which is a positive.

6♣ – A♦ – 3♠

This is the third day. Close but no banana. It is still a negative spread. It has the Six of Clubs in common with the previous spread, and it closes with an unpromising Three of Spades, which bring Spades and large obstacles back into the equation. Note that this is the third day in a row I get the Six of Clubs. But the Ace of Diamonds has appeared, which indicates success, talismans and even the Sun.

A♦ – 9♦ – 10♦

Fourth day. This is the sign I was waiting for. The Ace of Diamonds is back. This time it is well-placed. The Nine of Diamonds and Ten of Diamonds together just mean “it works”, whether we are talking about an object, a business plan or a spell.

MQS

* This is not to say that the old magi wanted you to do your homeworks half-heartedly. Marsilio Ficino talks about the importance putting your heart in your spellwork.

** this would lead us off into an interesting discussion of all those that practice divination without believing it to actually work (“it’s just a brainstorming method” being the most common rationalization)