Monday, Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Once again, it's technically Monday now -- past midnight Eastern time -- and here I am on Dreamwidth, so it's time for another Magic Monday.  Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all.

With that said, have at it!

This Magic Monday is now closed to new questions. See you next week! 

Comments

Backing away from successful spells

[(Anonymous)]

Hello John.

Last week on the main blog, you wrote this:

"As far as getting cold feet and trying to back away from the results of a successful spell because you’ve changed your mind, what that does is lock up a bunch of your will and your magical energy in a self-canceling loop, and any aspect of your life too close to the subject of the spell will be drawn into the same loop and get stuck. Say you do a love spell, and it works, and then you decide that you’re tired of the person the spell brought into your life — sorry, you did the spell, you own the results. Even if you manage to get that person to leave you alone, a string of people with similar personal qualities (very much including the ones that irritate you most) will keep on falling in love with you, and you’ll keep on getting drawn into relationships with them; what’s more, your attempts to get a relationship going with anybody else will most likely go nowhere. Around and around you go!"

I was wondering:

1. If something like this happens, is there no way to break the cycle? No ritual you can do, no technique that will help, no spirit or God you can petition?
2. Would using talismanic magic be a way to avoid something like this from happening in the first place? For example, you create a talisman to attract a certain kind of person into your life. But then you get tired of them, so you deconsecrate and destroy the talisman.

Thank you!

Re: Backing away from successful spells

[ecosophia]

Think of it this way. If you get stupid at the age of eighteen, wrap your car around a telephone pole, and end up in a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury, is there a way to get out of that? Nope. The universe is not set up to guarantee us escape hatches from our own bad decisions. This is why it's of the highest importance to think, hard, about any magical working you do before you do it, and use divination as well.

No, using talismans won't prevent magic from having blowback, either. You can neutralize the effect of the talisman by deconsecrating and destroying it, but you can't neutralize the movement of the will that brought the talisman into being, and so you still own it. If you want to prevent something like that from happening, be punctilious about magical ethics, don't do magic aimed at anyone else that you'd object to having done at you, and always, always, cast a divination before doing a working, and if it tells you not to do it, then don't do it.

Re: Backing away from successful spells

[(Anonymous)]

Good analogy. Lives can really be ruined in a few moments of stupidity. That said, I would never even dream of trying to magically influence a specific person. I was thinking more along the lines of a spell to attract a certain kind of person into my life.

Are you at all familiar with the writings of Jason Miller, also known as Inominandum? He’s been doing Sorcery for about 30 years. As he has written in his latest book, The Elements of Spellcrafting, his life plans include Sorcery from the get-go.

Now, I haven’t read every single word he has every written, but I’ve never seen him warn against something like this. In fact, I don’t remember reading about this particular occult danger from anyone, ever. Am I so woefully ignorant of occult literature, or are you one of the first magicians to have noticed this?

Re: Backing away from successful spells

[(Anonymous)]

I read one of Jason Miller’s books, too, and don’t recall him cautioning as strongly as John does.

—Fuzzy

Re: Backing away from successful spells

[ecosophia]

It's certainly not new to me; I was cautioned about this repeatedly in my training, by individual teachers and also by the lessons I studied from my first correspondence school.

I'm not familiar with Miller's writings except very casually -- they aren't the kind of magic that interests me -- and I don't propose to second guess what he does and doesn't teach. I also don't happen to know if he was trained in traditional occult philosophy or not.

With regard to attracting a particular kind of person into your life, as long as you're sure you want that kind of person in your life (and will still have that same desire decades from now), that's certainly a choice you can make. To quote from one of the dusty old occult lessons I prefer: "The old tradition that one must always pay full price without haggling for any magical object is a reflection of a much deeper truth. What you desire, that you shall attain, and for good or ill, you will pay the price for it down to the last farthing."