Everything Is Connected
to Everything Else
In the previous chapter, I told you that one of the ways that magic works is through interconnection. Fortunately, everything is connected to everything else. (I say “fortunately” because it makes magical interconnection so much easier to find!)
This is a spiritual truth that we all know deep down. As much as we may feel isolated and alone at times, we also sense somehow that we are connected. From the Zen master talking about being “one with everything” to philosopher Martin Buber talking about “I and thou,” religion and philosophy, in the East and West, are replete with this paradox that we are isolated, yet we are all a part of one another.
Western monotheistic religions might argue that God is the connector, that we are apart from one another except through God. Pagan religions tend more toward pantheism, the belief that everything is God and there is no difference between God and the universe, or panentheism, the belief that God, or the gods, or some divine force, interpenetrates everything in the universe (but is not identical to it). Any of these could be termed a form of monism, the belief in the essential unity of all things.
Experiencing Connection
As a general rule, most of us don’t experience our connection to the universe, to God or the gods, or to one another as a day-to-day thing. We feel like singular individuals, and sometimes painfully so. Often, our primary partnership (if we have one) is our one place of deep connection, and even there, we can feel the vast distance that separates us from another human being. If we are single, then we may attach fantasies of connection to the hope for love—blending the romantic and the spiritual.
Some of us deepen our feelings of connection through prayer, or ritual, or through time spent in nature. Some of us meditate. Feeling our connection to other human beings, to other living animals, to plants and nature in general, to the universe, to the mysterious, can make us happier, more content, and more at peace.
The philosophically oriented might say this is magic. In a way, they’d be right. It’s certainly a form of “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”
If we are seeking to understand and experience interconnection, we can’t expect to just turn that experience on like a switch. We can meditate on it, and meditation is a helpful magical tool—one that will be discussed in chapter four. We can also explore specific ways in which we can find connection.
Why are romance and spirituality intertwined? Simply put, it’s because when we experience oneness with one other human being, we experience the potential for a vaster oneness. Either oneness is impossible or it’s possible, and the moment we experience that extraordinary “click” with a partner, we know that it’s possible. It becomes possible, then, with everyone. Most of us have felt that—falling in love and then suddenly loving the neighbor, the bus driver, the sky … everything. Because suddenly we’re connected.
Love, in other words, is a way of experiencing connection. The Hindus would call this bhakti yoga—the yoga of love. Bhakti yoga teaches that a single love (for a spouse, for a child, for a parent or friend) can be used to lead us to the love of God and therefore to higher consciousness—in other words, to oneness.
The Road Map of Interconnection
This is a practical, how-to sort of book, but our brief foray into the spiritual and philosophical has yielded a powerful lesson. A single connection can lead us to more and more connection. Feeling a part of one human being can make us feel a part of all humankind.
Although we can see that the universe is all one, it’s not an undifferentiated glop. At some deep level, everything connects, but in our day-to-day lives, we exist in a world in which things are different from other things, in which cars are not bunnies and toasters are not fireflies. How, then, can connection be perceived?
Interconnections can be seen between all manner of disparate things, like a road map—tangled routes and byways, odd little paths and massive superhighways. Eventually we can find the route between any two things. Like the game of “six degrees of separation” (or “six degrees of Kevin Bacon”), we can find a path through which any two (or more) things, beings, people, states of mind, goals, events, and natural forces connect.
In magic, we will then travel those paths.
The reason that any of this matters, for the purposes of this book, is because magic leverages interconnection to bring you and your target together. Interconnection is one piece of magic—if you recall from the previous chapter, I identified four components: (1) interconnection, (2) transcending space and time, (3) intention, and (4) power.
Let’s assume that you want to do magic to make me rich. I’d love that! But you can’t just decide to make me rich. You have to find a way to connect to me. You have to figure out the path from you to me.
On a road map as entangled as The Whole Universe, there are many routes between any two points. Your task is to figure out one or more routes, to connect us as deeply as possible.
I said one or more. That’s where our road-map analogy breaks down, because we don’t want just the one fastest route from you to me. It’s not a road. When we connect to the subject of our magic, it’s more like sewing—more threads make for stronger fabric, and each connection is a thread.
Physical Connection
The simplest way to form a connection is physically. I am connected to that which I touch.
In a traditional Wiccan consecration, part of consecrating something is to touch it to an already consecrated thing of the same type. Use a consecrated athame (a Witch’s blade) to consecrate a new blade. Use a consecrated wand to consecrate a new wand—and make sure they touch. In general, there’s much more to a consecration than just the touch, but the touch is an important part. Touching the new wand to the old wand connects it to consecrated “wandness.”
The laying on of hands is a form of magic that utilizes touch. You magically heal a person by physically touching that person. With some forms of magical in-person healing, the practitioner does not touch the patient’s body—the hands may rest a few inches from the patient’s skin. However, the practitioner is “touching” the patient’s aura—the invisible field that is an extension of the physical body. You could almost say this is trans-physical touch and is a form of physical connection.
Touching is one kind of physical connection. Presence is another—if we’re in the same house, we’re connected. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the subject of transcending time. For now, though, let’s assume that we can sometimes set aside time when we talk about physical presence. If you and I have been in the same house at different times, that’s a connection. Connecting through presence and outside of time is one way that people sense ghosts or presences—people who were in the same place in the past may leave a resonance of themselves behind, even if they’re not actually haunting the place. More mundanely, if you come to my apartment and sit in my favorite chair, you may get a feeling of “me-ness” even if I’m not home.
Concrete remnants, mementos, and components are a form of physical connection. In The Way of Four Spellbook, I describe a spell I did to get a home. I picked up a stone from the place where I wanted to live, and worked my spell using that stone. The stone was a physical part of the property I was targeting and therefore was connected to the whole. A lock of hair, given as a romantic gift, is a way of saying, “Here is a physical connection to me. I am present with you through it.” Hair, nail clippings, pieces of jewelry, or articles of clothing worn by the target are often used in magic directed at a person.
As we delineate things that form connections, you can start to see that connections can be direct or indirect. You can touch me (directly) or you can touch something I touched (an indirect connection). Once you see that indirect connections are effective, you can understand those old spellbooks that call for the dust of someone’s footprint and the like. The dust of my footprint is only one degree of separation from me, so it’s way ahead of Kevin Bacon!
Magical Contagion
One of the basic principles of magic is that connection is contagious. Put a child with chickenpox in a classroom and you’ll end up with twenty cases of chickenpox. Diseases are contagious through the air, through touch, or through fluid exchange, depending upon the disease.
Magic is considered to be contagious by touch, so magical contagion is a subset of physical connection.
“Magical contagion” means that anything that was once in contact with someone or something is still connected to that person or thing. This is what we’ve been talking about with physical connection—my footprint was once in contact with me and thus, through contagion, is still connected to me.
Magical Transmission
Another important idea is that energetic charge spreads from the magical to the adjacent and similar non-magical. This could also be called “contagion,” but the word is already in use.
Suppose you charge up a batch of tea so that when you drink it you are better able to study. That’s a neat spell for a student. You can mix in a small amount of your magical tea with a large batch of regular tea and now you have a large batch of magical tea! The regular tea was adjacent (touching, mixed in with) and similar (they’re both tea).
The concept of magical transmission allows you to do magic that would otherwise be impractical. You could, for example, magically empower the fertilizer you’re using in your garden, but a large quantity of manure might not be something you would want to bring to an indoor altar. A pinch, though, could be charged up and brought out to the garden, then mixed in with the rest of the stinky but potent blend.
Human Connections
Human beings have a unique set of interconnections that come from the “stuff” of being human, the community, family, and culture of humanity.
We are connected to our families, first of all. Since this is a “blood” connection, or, more accurately, a DNA connection, we could group it with the physical, but family has a human and cultural meaning as well.
In general, humans are connected by affiliations, and family tends to be among the most meaningful. Members of a coven are connected through that membership and often can easily work magic for one another by accessing that tie. Affiliation can be through the company you work for, the type of work you do, the sports teams you root for, or the place you’re from. Have you ever been far from home and met someone from your hometown? The sense of instant friendship may be fleeting, but it’s real—you feel like you’re part of something through that other person. At my day job, my home office is in Texas, and the only other person from the Northeast and I became buddies for no other reason than we related to each other as Easterners (and yet I married a Southerner!). I have a relative who has formed lifelong friendships with a group of people who follow the same band, and it’s certainly not unusual for fandom of some kind or another to be a tie.
People are connected through religion, ethnicity, age, orientation, and the school they went to. When you go on a date and you discover that you both love the same music, eat the same foods, and quote the same movies, your commonality isn’t particularly meaningful, it’s just a recognition that you are touching another soul. You’re saying, Look, here and here and here we are touching one another.
In magic, it’s not so much “let’s touch each other” as it is “how can I touch you?” If you are making me rich, or healing me, or using magic to inspire me, then you have to find a way to make me present in your magic.
Many books of spells suggest forming a connection through the astrological element or sign of the subject. My sun sign is Taurus, which is an earth sign. Keeping in mind the concept that many threads create a stronger fabric, it’s pretty clear that “earth sign” is a single thread, but “Taurus” adds another, stronger thread. And if I add my Moon and Ascendant to the Taurus Sun, the connection will be stronger still.
Synchronous Connections
A synchronous connection is one based on a space-time connection. If a group of people are in the same place together, they can form a “group mind” or a “mob mentality”—they can merge based on the synchronous connection, for good or ill. A concert audience is a positive example—people can feel like they’re a single being when the music connects them.
In discussing physical connections, I touched on the idea that you might be in a physical space once shared by other beings. You may establish the connection through the object—the house you live in, the piece of jewelry you own—or you may establish the connection through the path you share—intersecting at that house, with that piece of jewelry.
People who were born at the same time or in the same place share such an intersection, as do people who happen to witness the same event. When you ask someone their memories of, for example, 9/11, they may have been a thousand miles away from where you were that day, but you both remember it (if you’re old enough) and share the memory, the moment, and the emotion. You are being there together.
Symbolic Connection
Understanding that a connection can be symbolic is extremely useful for magic. If you can’t connect directly to a person, you can connect to them symbolically.
For example, if you know that I am a Taurus, you can use an astrological glyph (
) or a bull (a picture, a toy, or a figurine). These connect to me symbolically.
You know I’m a writer. Any book that I’ve written connects to me directly—it’s mine, it has my name on it, and it’s a part of me, just as a painting is a part of the painter or a wood carving is a part of the carver. But paper and pen connect to me symbolically—without being my writing, they are symbols of writing.
Sometimes we’re not doing magic where the target is a person, or a known person. Suppose you’re doing magic to get a job, for example. You’re targeting the hiring manager of a particular company, but you don’t know that person. Maybe you’ve managed to find out the person’s name, or maybe not, but you can’t get a picture, a footprint, or a location. You don’t know the hiring manager’s birthday. At this point, you can get creative in determining what symbolizes “hiring manager” as well as what might symbolize the company or your line of work.
When doing elemental magic, any symbol of an element connects to that element. So a candle connects to any magic that relates to fire and a seashell connects to any magic that relates to water, just as a feather symbolizes air and salt symbolizes earth. Of course, these are just four examples of a dozen or more potential such symbols.
Similarly, if you’re doing planetary magic, then symbols, glyphs, and colors of the planet could be incorporated into your magic. For Mars magic, for example, the planetary symbol (g), the color red, or a piece of iron could all be used.
Numbers can be worked into a spell in a variety of ways in order to access numerological sympathy: the number of ingredients in an incense or oil, the number of candles, the number of words in a chant or spoken charm, the number of repetitions of that spoken charm or of a behavior, etc. Because there is a variety here, you can make a spell resonate with two different numbers—perhaps four ingredients and four candles with five repetitions of five words.
In appendix A, I’ve provided several tables of correspondences useful in magic, including elements, planets, and numbers.
Sympathetic Magic
This is the right time to introduce a crucial principle for any magical working: sympathetic magic. The principle of sympathetic magic is this:
That which is like a thing is the thing.
Here is the crux of all these different forms of interconnection. If you can bring to your spell something similar to or connected to the subject of your magic, then you are bringing the subject to the spell.
If that which is like a thing (or a person, or an idea) is the thing, then, for purposes of magic, a picture of me is me. A piece of me (a lock of hair, a drop of blood) is me. Something intimately connected with me (a book I’ve written, a check I’ve signed, an article of my clothing) is me.
So if you’re doing a spell to make me rich, then having any of these things on your altar as you work will be like you’re working on me right there.
Layering
Layering sympathetic objects and other connections is a way of increasing the power of sympathy—of making the fabric stronger with more threads.
In other words, once you’ve got a picture of me, there is no need to stop. The picture plus the book plus a candle in my astrological color would also work.
A magical object can be created with this layering effect. Having a pile of different things on the altar might confuse your focus, but bringing the sympathetic threads together in a single object can be powerful. For example, take the picture of me and paint the astrological symbols on the back. Then take a lock of my hair or a page from one of my books, and wrap the picture around it.
Finally, don’t dismiss personal connection. If you’re working in a group, then the person who knows me best is the one best able to connect to me. In this case, the powerful object you’ve created shouldn’t be considered a substitute for that personal connection, nor should the personal connection preclude creating the object. Do both.
Imitative Magic
When I was first learning about magic, I was taught that the three most important concepts were sympathetic magic, imitative magic, and magical contagion. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that imitative magic and magical contagion are subsets of sympathy.
You can look at imitative magic as sympathy by doing. Imitative magic is performing an action that imitates the desired result of the spell. The most frequently cited references in folk magic are fertility spells—in which, for example, you would have sex in a field at the beginning of spring in order to “teach” the field to be fertile—and jumping spells—also for springtime, in which you would ride a pole or hobbyhorse and jump through the fields, thereby instructing the crops to “jump high” (grow tall).
Here is a fairly common spell that I’ve seen in two or three books (at least). The purpose of the spell is to reunite a couple who are experiencing a rift. Take two objects to represent the two people—such as candles, each in the color of the person’s astrological sign (for sympathy). Perform the spell over a period of days, and each day move the two objects closer together until, on the final day, they are touching.
The imitative magic in this spell is obvious: the objects are imitating the behavior the lovers are meant to emulate. Just as the lovers are intended to come back together, the objects are coming closer and finally touching.
When my son was sixteen, he had a long illness that was difficult to diagnose. It was very scary, as over a period of weeks he saw six different doctors and went for at least that many tests at different locations. One of his primary symptoms was dizziness.
Early in the illness, before we knew how long-lasting or serious it was, we (our Pagan group, of which he was a member) did a spell to help control the dizziness. We focused on grounding and on feeling weighted down to the earth.
During power raising, with Arthur seated in the circle, as each of us was moved, we got up and put something on him: a drum, a statue from the main altar, a stone from the earth altar in the north, the offering bowl. By the time we finished, he was weighed down under a fairly large pile of stuff.
Again, it’s not hard to discern the imitation here. By grounding him under objects, we were working to teach his body how to be grounded and solid on the earth. (The illness required two more spells, focused on different areas, before we were successful.)
On another occasion, my group did almost the exact opposite. During a spell to get someone a job, we started to perceive that our unemployed friend was depressed and finding it very hard to get moving. He felt really stuck. So we got up and started walking around, moving our own bodies to create imitative magic around the idea of moving and not being stuck.
As you can see, all of these imitative spells are active and physical. All of them imitate a desired behavior or quality. With imitative magic, you’re not imitating the subject of the magic, you’re imitating the goal.
For example, the subjects of these spells were newly planted fields (two spells), lovers, my dizzy son, and an unemployed person.
The fields were not imitated; the desired end result was. The lovers were imitated inasmuch as they started out separately, but soon the spell imitated the goal instead. Dizziness was never imitated, nor was stuckness.
Since imitation is usually active, it is often used as a part of power raising, and imitation can easily be combined with other types of sympathy. For example, in the “lovers reunite” spell, you can have the two objects have sympathetic ties to the lovers. I used astrological colors as an example, but they could be pictures or figurines, or you could carve names into the candles—any of these would be sympathetic connectors above and beyond the imitation.
The Purpose of Sympathy
Why are interconnection and sympathy so important to magic? In part, it is because of intention. We’ll talk more about that later, but for now it’s enough to know that it’s hard to really intensely want something, and focus on it, if you aren’t connected to it. This is why, for example, personal stories matter so much in politics. You can read all the statistics in the world, but when you hear a story about an individual affected by an issue, you connect, you care, and you pay attention. It is the same in magic: you have to care, so you have to connect.
On a much simpler level, your magic has to go somewhere. Many people “send energy” without any clarity about where they’re sending that energy. This is like sending mail without an address. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the letter will somehow get where it’s going, but is that likely? When I was getting married, I had a bunch of invitations to mail. I had to track down a lot of snail-mail addresses to make sure each invitation arrived. The address was the means by which the “energy” (invitation) I sent arrived at its destination. It was the connection.
When creating magic, raising power is vitally important, but sending power is equally important. You cannot successfully do magic without both. And to send, you must first find some kind of “address.”
Bringing someone or something forth so they are present in your magical work is one way of transcending space, and that leads us directly into the next chapter.
Most chapters have exercises to help you apply and build upon what you’ve learned. Don’t skip the exercises, because they’ll help make magic real for you, and give you some practical skills.
Do you have a friend who lives far away? Someone you can’t easily connect to by seeing them in the flesh?
Map out all the ways you can connect to your friend using the information in this chapter about interconnection. Make a list, draw a chart, or create a diagram.
Exercise 2: A Sympathetic Object
Take some of the connections from exercise 1 and create a magical object representing your friend. The section “Layering” in this chapter should give you some ideas. You can keep the object on your altar to send warm feelings to your distant friend.
Come up with a list of symbols that connect to the industry in which you work or would like to work. Could those symbols work to help you create a sympathetic object?