This is a book about magic. It’s about how to plan, construct, and perform magic, which is to say, how to do spells.
Some people say that magick with a “k” distinguishes occult magic(k) from the kind of magic done on stage with rabbits and saws and scarves. Maybe I’m a writer first and an occultist second, because I don’t like purposely misspelling words to make a point. If you’re flipping through this book to learn card tricks, let the bookstore owner or librarian know it’s misshelved, and move along.
This book emphasizes how to raise and send power. These ideas, raising power and sending power, make up the bulk of the pages that follow—they’re two of the necessary features of a spell. They’re the features often missing from fictionalized magic, such as you’ll see in a thousand movies and television shows. In fiction, all you need is magic words (which we’ll discuss) and/or a magical object (which we’ll discuss) and/or steps performed in the proper order (which we’ll discuss). But rarely does fiction address the idea that you can have all these ingredients and there’s still something missing.
Honestly, I think that omission is not so much a mistake as a potent fantasy. Make-believe magic is practically effortless, unlike real magic. In fiction, either some people are born Witches and others aren’t (that’s right, Harry Potter, I’m talking to you), or the same spells work for everyone and the only trick is in finding the spell and its ingredients.
In real life, though, magic requires effort, energy, and skill. Magic without power is a fancy car with no gas—it’s really cool but it gets you nowhere.
In the pages that follow, we’re going to talk about all the components of a spell, and that will include things like rhyming spells and other magic words, natural ingredients such as crystals and herbs, as well as spookier objects like wands and swords. But we’re going to spend quite a lot of time on the parts of magic that don’t appear on TV, things like altering consciousness, using rhythm, and the importance of focus.
I hope I didn’t scare you away. I don’t happen to believe that magic is hard work; in fact, I think it’s a lot of fun. Magic is a craft, and like any craft, you get better when you work at it, whether you’re creating beaded jewelry or throwing pottery or casting spells. But if I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it, and I hope to convey to you the pleasure as well as the skill of casting spells.
How This Book Came About
About ten years ago, I wrote a book called The Way of Four Spellbook. That book is about elemental magic and elemental spells. It focuses on fire, water, air, and earth, and how to use them in magic. The book is 267 pages long, of which about thirty pages are devoted to spellcraft fundamentals—what is magic, what is power, what is a spell.
Now, one of the things I do is teach at various venues—Pagan festivals, bookstores, Pagan Pride Day events, and so on. Naturally, I’ve developed classes based on each of the books I’ve written. As it turns out, almost all of the teaching I’ve done related to The Way of Four Spellbook comes from those thirty pages of fundamentals. In fact, I offer a full-day intensive on spellcasting that is derived from that material.
So when I finished my last book, Tarot Interactions, and asked myself, “What’s next?” I started thinking about my spellcasting material. What if I took those thirty pages and expanded them? What if I took that all-day intensive and made it into a book? That book is Magical Power For Beginners.
In truth, I’m rather frustrated with the dearth of magical knowledge I see among Pagans and Witches. With so much interesting stuff available online and in print, you would think that practitioners would have an encyclopedic knowledge of any subject that interests them, but I haven’t found this to be the case. Rather, I see a tremendous need for the kind of information that’s in Magical Power For Beginners. Incorporated into these pages are many of the questions I’ve been asked over the years, and many of the struggles I’ve witnessed are addressed. I’ve worked with an awful lot of magical people, exploring, in the course of workshops together, the spells they’ve cast that have succeeded, those that have failed, and those they are trying to figure out how to perform. All of that has made its way into this volume.
Ritual and Magic
Throughout this book, I will refer to your “ritual space,” “altar,” and so on. I have practiced Wicca for over thirty years, and the language of Wicca is a comfortable way for me to describe magic. However, there’s nothing particularly Wiccan about this book or the magic we’re discussing.
“Ritual space” can be wherever you practice magic. It is not necessary to magically create your space, or to do so in any particular way or as a part of any particular tradition. You can certainly do magic without doing ritual preparation of your space—I do so often—but there are advantages to preparing space ritually.
I see ritual as an act of magic. In chapter one, I’ll talk about “theurgy” as a kind of magic—magical working for or with God or gods. Regardless of whether your magic circle, temple, triangle, orb, or what have you is sacred or secular, the act of creating such a space from nothing is inherently an act of magic.
When I use ritually created space, I use a circle and think of it as sacred space. I’ll say I “consecrate” the space, but you may prefer a less theistic word, such as “charge,” “energize,” or “create.”
When I talk about an “altar,” similarly I just mean a space at which you do magic. Maybe it’s a religious and magical space. Maybe it’s a table. Maybe you’re working outdoors and you’ve wrapped whatever tools you need in a small cloth, and when you get to the place where you’re doing your magic, you lay out the cloth and voilà! Altar!
At home, I practice magic in several different ways. Often I do so with my Wiccan group—my coven. Often I do so alone, or with my spouse. My altar might be the ritual altar used in coven meetings, but for a solitary spell it might be a square mirror I have set aside on a dresser for just such purposes. Or I might create a special altar just for a single spell, particularly if the spell needs to be set up and left there for a while.
Whatever works for you, in other words, is almost certainly going to work within the context of this book.
What’s in This Book?
Before we get into the how-to portion, we’ll explore some of the basics. What is magic? What do we mean when we use that word? How does magic work?
One of the things that makes magic work is power, but what else is there? Once we’ve covered that, we’ll circle back to power and talk about all the various ways of raising power and then of sending power.
From there we’ll talk about spell construction. What is a spell? What are the necessary ingredients of a spell? How do you incorporate all of this power you’ve been reading about into a spell?
Finally, we’ll explore putting it all together. We’ll talk about fine-tuning a spell to make it work in real life, and we’ll talk about brainstorming the particulars of doing a spell. There are several real spells given as examples, including two spells presented side by side with the principles of spell construction, so you can look at the abstract and the practical together and see how one is informed by the other.
All of this is meant to empower you as well as your spells. For creating magic, it’s all about you and your creativity. It’s my hope that you’ll feel free to experiment and give yourself permission to make mistakes—I’ve made plenty.
My son, Arthur, is a tap dancer. Once a year, my son’s dance studio used to invite parents to come in and observe a class. In one such class, the teacher was showing the students how to do a step called a “shiggy bop.” My son kept landing on his butt, but no one else was falling. The teacher said that Arthur was the only one who was doing the step right. The shiggy bop is that close to falling, and the only way to learn it is to land on your ass. The reason the other students weren’t falling is because they weren’t pushing their feet back far enough, they weren’t pushing their balance off enough. It was only by taking the risk, letting yourself feel unbalanced, and falling, that you could learn the step.
To me, it was a great life lesson. Magic, like so many, many things, is a shiggy bop. You learn to succeed only by being willing to fall on your ass. Then, like the song says, you pick yourself up and try again.
Happy falling, reader!