How Not To Do Magic, Revisited

[ecosophia]

Regular readers of this journal may recall that some weeks ago, as part of a broader project of magical instruction, I critiqued a loudly publicized attempt to attack Donald Trump and his followers with malevolent magic. (You can find my earlier journal entry here, and the original announcement here.)  Michael Hughes, who launched the working in question and continues to champion it, belatedly found out about my critique, and posted a lively (if, to my mind, woefully inadequate) defense of his project in the comments to that entry. The internet being what it is, resuming the conversation in a current journal entry struck us both as a good idea.

Since much of what follows will involve serious disagreements about the nature of magic—and, more importantly, the nature of effective magic—it’s probably worth taking a moment to talk a bit about my qualifications to speak on that subject. I started magical training as a teenager in the mid-1970s, when good practical guides to Golden Dawn magic first became widely available, and have kept at it ever since. Over the years I’ve completed the full courses of magical training and initiation offered by four Hermetic and three Druid orders, as well as receiving extensive training and certification in Renaissance astrological magic and traditional Southern conjure. 

Of my more than fifty published books, just over half are on the subject of magic and occultism, and these include such standard reference works as The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I’ve translated, co-translated, and/or edited such magical classics as the Picatrix, Eliphas Levi’s Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn. I also served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). All this is to say that I’ve studied and practiced a lot of magic, in a lot of different traditions, and know my way around the subject pretty thoroughly. Neither I nor anyone else knows everything there is to know about magic, to be sure, but I do know something of what I’m talking about.

One of the main things I’ve learned from all this is that magic isn’t whatever you want it to be. It’s easy and, these days, popular to slap together various notions extracted from a grab-bag of disparate systems wrenched out of their cultural and philosophical contexts, on the basis of the latest pop-culture fashions, and insist that the result is just as valid and meaningful as anything else. The resulting postmodern pablum is no doubt comforting to those who like to think that the past has nothing to teach them, but the results of such magic are generally far from impressive. Thus I tend to rely on those teachings and systems that have proven themselves over decades or centuries, even—or especially—when they contradict current pop-culture fads.

Two other points are worth making before we proceed.  First, there’s quite a bit to be said about the moral dimension of malevolent magic, but I don’t propose to say it here. It so happens that these days, a great many people like to insist, in effect, that whatever they want is justifiable because they want it, and such issues as the blowback from malevolent magic only apply to those who believe in them. This is a little like insisting that drinking Drano is only bad for your digestion if you think it is, but I don’t propose to pursue that argument here. What I propose to discuss, rather, are the reasons why the working we’re discussing isn’t going to accomplish anything—other, that is, than meeting certain emotional needs on the part of its participants.

The second point I want to make is that the moral character or political significance of Donald Trump and his followers are not the issues here. If your cure is ineffective, it doesn’t matter how bad you think the disease is.  In the same way, insisting that Trump is the evilest evil that ever eviled does not prove that a given working directed against him is going to work. The powers behind magic do not care what you think about Donald Trump, and the sense of cosmic entitlement that leads some people to believe that something has to strike down a politician they hate, just because they hate him, does not make for competent magical theory—or practice.

With that in mind, I’ll proceed to my four criticisms of the working we’re discussing.

First of all, the intention is badly chosen. In crafting a magical working, it’s crucial to have a clear, tautly focused intention; it’s even more important to make sure that the intention will actually bring you what you want.  Thus the first requirement of effective magic is to be very sure about what you want to accomplish, and to choose an intention with this in mind.

There’s an old story along these lines, much told in traditional occult schools, about a guy who wanted to get rich via magic. To do this, he did a working that involved visualized himself handling stacks and stacks of money. He promptly lost his well-paying job, and the only job he could find was in a bank, where he made a low wage counting stacks and stacks of other people’s money. He got what he asked for, in other words, rather than what he actually wanted.

That’s the first level of failure hardwired into this working. It focuses on binding and harming Donald Trump and his followers, rather than revitalizing American democracy, leading the country in some new and better direction, or even helping the Democratic Party pull itself together and win back the voters it lost in 2016. If the working succeeds—it won’t, for reasons I’ll discuss further on, but we’ll let that pass for now—there’s no reason to assume that the results would do anything at all to benefit the people and causes who have been getting hurt since Trump’s inauguration. If Trump falls, after all, the interests and demographics backing him can easily find another figurehead for their cause. What’s more, it’s entirely possible that the next one would be even worse than Trump.

The working does nothing to forestall that, where a working with a positive focus of the kind I just indicated would counter that neatly. That being the case, the fixation on malevolent magic is really rather odd—though it’s a familiar oddity. For decades now, people on the leftward end of the political spectrum, when they think of doing political magic, have tended to default immediately to malevolent workings even in situations when benevolent workings would be far more useful. The return of the repressed clearly has a lot to do with it, and so does the old but by no means outworn occult maxim: “What you hate, you imitate.” 

Michael, in our earlier interchange, I asked you whether you’d considered doing a benevolent working to strengthen American democracy or revitalize the Democratic Party. You didn’t answer. I’m going to ask it again, and I’d like you to answer it. It’s one thing to do a malevolent working when that really is the only option; it’s quite another to do one when there are many other options that will do more good for the causes you claim to support. The fixation on curses and bindings really does make it look as though the point of this working is to feed your hatred and rage toward a politician and a demographic sector you don’t like, rather than doing anything to help a democracy in terminal crisis.

Let’s go on to the next point:  the ritual is incoherent. An effective magical ritual combines carefully chosen symbols to produce an effect exactly in tune with the intention. If you want to do a love spell, you don’t use symbolism that evokes solitude and cold reason; if you want to do a prosperity spell, you don’t use symbols of loss and letting go. More precisely, if you do, you’re not going to get results from your working, because your intention and your symbolism are at odds with each other.

This working is so good an example of what not to do that I’m planning on using it in the future in teaching students about ritual design. The intention of the working is to bind Trump and his followers, but one of the core symbols of the working is the Tarot trump XVI, The Tower. Not only is this not a symbol of binding, it’s exactly the opposite, a symbol of the shattering of bindings. To use it in a binding spell is rather like trying to put out a fire by dumping gasoline on it, or knotting your shoelaces while cutting them with a knife. 

The incoherent nature of the symbolism is bad enough in itself, but it has another, far more serious downside. The working we’re discussing, after all, is not unopposed. There are plenty of people in the US who support the Trump administration, and a significant number of them know at least as much about magic as do the people who hate Trump and all his works. Using an incoherent ritual, one that includes its own antithesis in its symbolism, gives the other side an immense advantage in their countering magic.

One simple way to make the working ineffective would be to gather at the same time the working is being done, and redirect the symbolism of The Tower onto the working itself. That could be done in a simple way—say, by visualizing the lightning bolt striking the tower and bursting the bindings. It could also be done in a much more potent and effective way—say, by tying ten loops of thread onto a card of The Tower, linking them magically to the bindings the working is trying to place, invoking the ten spheres of the Tree of Life in the order of the Lightning Flash, and with each invocation, cutting one of the loops of thread with a consecrated working tool. There are other ways to exploit the incoherence in the ritual, too, and some of them are considerably more potent than the ones I’ve just described.

The powers behind magic, as noted earlier, do not care what anybody thinks about Donald Trump. They won’t make an incoherent ritual work anyway just because somebody happens to want that. Nor, crucially, will they take sides in a magical donnybrook between one set of mages that hates Trump and another set that supports him. That leads us to the next point.

The public nature of the working guarantees that it will fail. This isn’t just a matter of magical philosophy, though of course Eliphas Levi discussed it at some length in his writings. It’s a matter of basic common sense. If you were a member of the French Resistance in the Second World War, let’s say, would you go out of your way to make sure that the Nazis knew your plans? If you’re playing poker, would you show the other players the cards in your hand? Not if you wanted to win, you wouldn’t.

Michael, when I raised this point in my original journal entry, your sole response was to claim that you laugh at the mages of the alt-Right. No doubt you do, but they’re also laughing at you, and with considerably better reason. By publishing the details of your intention, ritual, and timing all over the internet, you’ve guaranteed that all the people who want to mess with your working have everything they need to do so, while you have no knowledge of what they’re doing and so are at a huge disadvantage if you want to counter it. Dismissing that possibility out of hand really makes me wonder how seriously you take this project of yours.

Finally, rituals of this kind consistently don’t work, and this one isn’t working either.  This is hardly the first time a few thousand Neopagans have gotten together online and organized a coordinated mass working, using a specific spell, to try to make something happen. In my original post, I mentioned one of the largest of these, the attempt to cure the late Isaac Bonewits of cancer by performing massed magical workings. It was a total failure. There have been plenty of other examples of the same kind of working, and the vast majority of them have been equally abject flops. Thus experience simply doesn’t support the claim that rituals of this kind are an effective means of causing change through magic.

Michael, you claimed in your earlier comment that the resignations of White House staff, the Mueller investigation, and the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer show that your working really is doing something. To my mind, that’s handwaving, as the gyrations you’ve cited have occupied plenty of space in the media, and distracted many of Trump’s opponents from the hard work of building a political coalition that could defeat him in 2020, without actually doing anything to inconvenience Trump or keep him from pursuing his agenda.

The reality is quite the contrary.  Over the period that you and the other participants have been doing your working, Trump has gutted Obamacare by abolishing the individual mandate, begun deportations of undocumented aliens, breached the global free trade system by imposing massive tariffs on China, repealed thousands of federal regulations, and scored a massive foreign-policy coup by bringing North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un to the negotiating table. What’s more, according to recent news stories, his approval ratings are higher now than Obama’s were at the equivalent point in the latter’s presidency. So what exactly has your binding stopped him from doing?

I take a wry amusement in the fact that people who pursue mass workings of this sort nearly always dodge such questions, and insist that they’re succeeding even when the evidence contradicts that claim. I tend to see that as a tacit admission that what’s going on, down at the root, isn’t about magic—it’s about virtue signaling. While this working won’t do anything to inconvenience Donald Trump or his administration, it’s a great way to proclaim one’s identity as one of the “good people”—and of course it’s also one heck of a lot easier to spend twenty minutes or so once a month pouring out hate at a politician you happen to despise than it is to roll up your sleeves and get to work helping to rebuild the tattered remnants of American democracy from the ground up. 

Comments

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[michaelmhughes]

RE: blowback

Sure, it exists. No one can ever be absolutely sure their magic won't have unintended consequences. And I do buy into the raspberry jam rule to some extent, especially when working magic to cause harm. Which is why I do not work magic to harm individuals, and discourage it. It's simply not my style or within my ethical beliefs, except in extremely rare cases of self-defense or in defense of my loved ones.

But the Trump binding spell was created to minimize that possibility. It is defensive magic, not malevolent, and explicitly binds Trump (and those who abet him) from doing *harm.*

I would ask you where, exactly, in the following text of the ritual, anyone is subject to harm:

--

I call upon you
To bind
Donald J. Trump
So that his malignant works may fail utterly
That he may do no harm
To any human soul
Nor any tree
Animal
Rock
Stream
or Sea

Bind him so that he shall not break our polity
Usurp our liberty
Or fill our minds with hate, confusion, fear, or despair

And bind, too,
All those who enable his wickedness
And those whose mouths speak his poisonous lies

I beseech thee, spirits, bind all of them
As with chains of iron
Bind their malicious tongues
Strike down their towers of vanity

I beseech thee in my name
In the name of all who walk
Crawl, swim, or fly
Of all the trees, the forests,
Streams, deserts,
Rivers and seas

In the name of Justice
And Liberty
And Love
And Equality
And Peace

Bind them in chains
Bind their tongues
Bind their works
Bind their wickedness

--

Please explain to me why that is likely to cause blowback, or why it is any different than a focused prayer to remove a harmful president and to protect immigrants, minorities, the environment, the rule of law, civil discourse, etc.

And, luck you, here is an excerpt from my upcoming book on the subject:

Binding is the magical equivalent of a cease-and-desist order, a straightjacket, or putting a toddler into time-out. Its goal is to restrain someone from particular actions to others or to themselves. In the Hellenistic world, binding was one of the most common uses of magic, as evidenced by the abundant curse tablets (defixiones) uncovered by archaeologists. The binding spell would be written on a piece of lead, folded, then pierced with a nail or other sharp object, before being buried (often in a graveyard) or thrown into a well or pool (please do not do this because lead poisoning is a thing). Human figures made of clay were frequently used as well, sometimes pierced with pins or nails.

If you do a binding spell, it is important to bind only the negative or harmful behaviors of your target, otherwise you are verging on more harmful magic with greater potential to generate psychic or karmic blowback. Many witches and magicians believe that malevolent magic is “sticky,” meaning it can leave unpleasant residue on the caster. Therefore, your binding should be very specific about the behaviors it targets. Let’s look at some of the language in the Trump binding spell, for example:

So that his malignant works may fail utterly
That he may do no harm
To any human soul
Nor any tree
Animal
Rock
Stream
or Sea

Note the careful language: not that his works may fail utterly, but his malignant works. If his policies turned out to be beneficial to citizens, the environment, liberty, the political system, and truth, the spell would have no effect. Aim for the same specificity in your bindings.

Just as importantly, always incorporate the ideals you are working for. Again, from the Trump binding spell:

In the name of Justice
And Liberty
And Love
And Equality
And Peace

Calling upon the highest ideals that drive your spell adds further focus, energy, and serves as a safety valve to guard against any “sticky” negative residue. You are, after all, doing your magic in service to important ideals and for the greater good. Be sure to always integrate that into any binding or hexing.
Another safeguard is to add a prayer to your preferred deity(s) before and after the working. Pray that your actions manifest the highest good, for all those concerned, and trust that divinity will bring the required balance and justice.



We cannot possibly know the ultimate outcomes of our actions, or potential unintended consequences. But inaction has its consequences, too. Those who fail to vote allow crooked politicians to rise to power and enact dangerous legislation. Those who failed to act as the Nazis rose to power enabled the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust.

Magic has always been the tool of the oppressed, the downtrodden, and the persecuted. African American hoodoo, rootwork, and conjure are prime examples. They grew from enslaved people who had little agency in their daily lives and no recourse to justice. Their magic required curses, jinxing, and tying (binding) to fight injustice in their communities and to resist the oppressive slaver class. It arose from necessity.

White light magic is fine. Some people are naturally resistant to doing anything that could be seen as harmful or negative, and they should heed their instincts. Binding makes up a very small part of my magical practice. But refusing to use magic in self-defense or in the defense of the voiceless, marginalized, and oppressed because of a law invented by Gerald Gardner in the last century seems extremely foolish to me.

Magic is a tool for healing, and for defense against injustice.

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[jenniferkobernik]

In light of what you are saying here about binding (I don't entirely agree, but setting that aside), are you willing to comment on your "hex the NRA" post? It seems odd to me, since the NRA are not actually killing anyone directly (and, although I am not their biggest fan, I do believe that some of their goals are worthy and much of their membership are decent), and hexing is something of a nuclear option. Why not a binding on the NRA that they will not profit from violence, or on potential shooters against them doing harm, rather than hexing a political organization? If your goal is that not one more child should die from gun violence, why not just do a working based on that intention, and why hex and encourage other (possibly less informed) people to hex when other less problematic spells seem more to the point anyway?

(Thank you, by the way, for being willing to engage in this dialogue! I appreciate and respect that.)

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[tunesmyth]

Michael, I'm quite interested to know as well. Several people have asked about this but you haven't yet offered an answer-- you've either ignored them, or focused on some other tangential issue and addressed only that.

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[tunesmyth]

Michael, thank you for the reply.

You ask me how this binding spell could cause [negative] blowback on someone who performs it. I will share my thoughts on the matter. I am not an experienced magician like you and JMG, so feel free to tell me where I am right or wrong. JMG, and anyone else listening, I of course invite you to do the same.

First of all, as well as calling on heavenly hosts (who presumably have the maturity to interpret your words as you mean them), you call on elemental spirits (which in many cases have a reputation for boneheaded literalness), spirits of "the ancestors" (who may or may not be down with the working depending on who they are, exactly), and demons of the infernal realms (who have a reputation for following instructions while searching for as many loopholes to exploit as they can think of). That last one especially, I would think, opens the floodgates for all kinds of negative blowback.

As for the language of the binding, the "malignant works" line is of interest to me, in part because you say that's where you're using careful language, yet when I go back to check on your spell as it's printed on your website, you didn't use those words at all. I quote: "I call upon you/ To bind Donald J. Trump/ So that he may fail utterly". So, basically, just: "bind the sucker." The blowback on that would be miserable.

Even if we insert the "malignant works" part from the version you gave in the comment above, it's still problematic. What does "malignant works" mean? It's very different depending on the eye of the beholder. What will the spirits judge as malignant? Probably not the same as what you do. Even if we take the following words as direct guidelines about the things you are calling malignant: "That he may do no harm/ To any human soul/ Nor any tree/ Animal/ Rock/ Stream/ or Sea." That seems far too broad to me. I live a fairly ecological lifestyle by modern standards-- no car, haven't flown outside of my country in nearly ten years now, etc-- but I'm not sure I've ever gone a day in my life without harming any human soul, tree, animal, rock, stream, or sea. Maybe on a day when I fast and just sit in my room. If I was truly bound from causing harm in any of those ways, it means I would likely be imprisoned, gravely ill, or dead.

Later in the spell, you say "And bind, too,/ All those who enable his wickedness/ And those whose mouths speak his poisonous lies." This also seems dangerous if intentionally interpreted in an uncharitable fashion by demonic forces. What if you yourself tell your friends some of the crazy things Trump has said lately, in order to make fun of him? On the one hand, you have just enabled his wickedness, by helping him keep the national conversation fixated on more meaningless nonsense to work as cover for other business. On the other hand, your mouth has just spoken his poisonous lies. Either way: boom, more opportunity for blowback.

"Strike down their towers of vanity." Don't we all have towers of vanity in our lives, to various degrees? Unless you're a mystic living in the mountain or something. Not all vanity is intrinsically bad. It helps motivate us to look presentable and is a fuel that sometimes gives necessary energy to social relations. Certainly some may have smaller towers of vanity than others, but I still don't want my own tower knocked down unless it's something necessary in my life. That would probably put one in quite a dispiriting state. I'd rather avoid that blowback, too.

So. Michael, you asked me where I could see possible blowback in your ritual as constructed. Those are the ones I have considered so far. Michael, JMG, others, do feel free to check my work and tell me why if you think I've got the wrong (or right) idea about something there.

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[(Anonymous)]

As a Trump supporting mage, I also want to add that the blowback is likely to be nastier because a lot of us have looked at this spell, found various flaws, and are exploiting it.

And quite a few of them look a lot like what you're saying here. There are others, but I don't want to reveal too much to someone I'm engaged in magical combat with ;)

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[ecosophia]

Well, of course not. One of the things that baffles me about the way that people on the left approach magic is that they don't seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that they're facing opposition -- not just some sort of caricatured Lord Moldywarp figure who will cackle on cue and then slink off to an inevitable defeat, but competent, committed opponents who will exploit every single option they can find. It's as though they think that all they have to do is cast a spell, and the universe is obligated to give them whatever they happen to want...

Oh dear gods. The penny finally dropped.

They're approaching magic in exactly the same way that Hillary Clinton approached campaigning for president -- as though all they have to do is go through the motions, and then make plans for the victory party.

I wonder what's behind so breathtakingly counterproductive an attitude...

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's over determined: the myth of progress (of course they're on the right side of history), the insistence that their world view is so obvious anyone who disagrees is an idiot (thus everyone on the other side is by definition an idiot), an over reliance on machines (which can't help but do what they're told), leaving them unable to relate to anything else.

There's also another one: I think part of this is self-sabotage. I don't think a lot of people actually want to win. If they do, then they have to test their ideas in the real world, and I think a lot of people are horrified by the idea that perhaps the real world won't do what they want it to, and will do whatever they have to in order to make sure that they never find out if it will.

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[kayr]

Isn't that the sign of the times? Doesn't the universe owe everyone what they want? I don't see how those involved in this ritual are any different from anyone else blinded by their own sense of entitlement.

Re: Replying to Michael's comment on the old thread

[ecosophia]

You may both be right...but there's something about this whole business that strikes me as very, very strange. Hmm, and again hmm.