It seems like many times when I personally meet some people, get friendly, and spend some time with them, at least one of them gets into this conversation with me:

Let’s do some magick!

“Great,” I say! “I’d love to do magick with you. What shall we do the magick for?”

Uhh…

And a few times this brief conversation has resulted in that person not wanting to talk with me any more.

—   —   —

Once, while I participating on a very active online forum, a young man—a self-professed practitioner of Chaos Magick—proudly explained, “The really great thing about chaos magick is that it doesn’t matter if you get your goal. All that matters is that you do it.”

“If it doesn’t matter if you get your goal, you could do nothing and have the same result. So why bother to do magick at all,” I asked?

If there had been sound, I think I could have heard crickets chirping in the silence. After a few minutes of him saying nothing, I added, “You DO realize that an early name for what is now called ‘Chaos Magick’ was ‘Results Magick,’ don’t you?”

More crickets.

Finally, he responded, writing, “You just don’t get it so I can’t talk to you any more.” He refused to respond to anything I posted.

Two Aspects to Magick

Although I had been teaching it for a long time, when people read “Magick isn’t something you do, magick is something you are” in the first edition of my Modern Magick, it was somewhat revolutionary. Magick was presented in my book as being a way of acting, thinking, and being, not just simply something you do. Performing a magickal ritual was an outgrowth of an attitude toward life and the universe. If you want to achieve a goal, it’s important to use all of your skills—including magickal ones—to achieve it. If you have no external “goal of achievement,” you might perform magick with a “goal of maintenance,” such as keeping intact your relationship to the deities or the elements or the seasons.

As long as we think of magick as simply something to do, we can create and perform rituals for no purpose at all. This practice becomes as much of a time waster as a game of Angry Birds (confession: I’ve never downloaded or played it).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with time wasters. On many occasions we need a chance to move away from being goal directed. We need periods of “down time,” and time wasters—as long as we acknowledge them as such—can be valuable breaks from intense focus giving us a chance to relax, refresh and renew. They’re only a problem when we use them as a means to prevent us from achieving our goals.

So the first aspect of magick I’d like to mention is that magick, by its very nature, is goal directed. Every ritual you perform, every spell you chant, should have a purpose, even if that purpose is just to practice. Every bit of magick you perform should have a goal. If you want to learn how to create effective magickal goals, see my post at this LINK.

I absolutely love performing magick of virtually any type: natural magick, ceremonial magick, spells, mental magick, sex magick, chaos magick, you name it. If you and I get to know each other personally, before you even ask, yes, I’d love to do some magick with you. But before asking, have your magickal goal in mind, so when I ask, What shall we do the magick for?” you’ll have a great answer.

Aspect Two

The second aspect is accepting magick as a way of thinking and being. We are magickal people. Things around us are magickal. We see and understand how magick works and the underlying reality that others may not see or comprehend.

As part of being magicians, we know that the way to achieve goals is through the harnessing of all our skills, talents, energy, desire, and drive. One of the ways to accomplish this on non-physical levels is through the physical (or mental) performance of magickal ritual. In other words, don’t plan to do a rite and then try to figure out what you want to do it for. Instead, first determine what the goal is. This should automatically and organically lead to the most effective ritual or method for achieving the goal. If you need to write a book report for school, the best magickal method may be to read the book and report on it rather than planning a spell. If you need a new job, working with the planetary energies of Jupiter will assist you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also do job searches in the newspaper, online, and through other forms of networking. If you need skills for a new job, working with the planetary energies of Mercury will help. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also take training or classes.

Magick is everywhere. By that I don’t mean the concept of, “Oooh. A sunrise. That’s so magickal!” Rather, I mean that magickal people understand a set of principles that are the forces behind the phenomena of the world, and have means of working with those forces in little-known ways, resulting in more easily achieving our desired goals. Performing a ritual, rite, spell, etc. becomes an automatic outgrowth of magick being something we know, we breathe, we feel, we understand, we are. Sometimes all we’ll need to do is a ritual. Sometimes we’ll need to do a ritual and then also do other work to achieve a goal. Sometimes, we won’t do a ritual at all.

When you reach the level where magick is something you are, you’ll know which of these approaches to use and how to use them.

As a result, achieving your goals will come to you more naturally, easily, and elegantly.

And that’s real magick.

Thank You!

Thanks to all the people who listened to Raven Grimassi and Stephanie Taylor-Grimassi interviewing me on their Season of the Witch internet program. A recording of it was made and you can listen in at your leisure by going to this LINK. Due to some technical difficulties, there may be some silent space at the beginning, but just hang in there and you can hear the entire thing.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

I have two, live, worldwide webinars upcoming and you can participate. This first one, on July 28, is on Tarot & Magic. The second, on August 18, will be on Magickal Self-Defense. For details, see this LINK.