Excerpt from this week’s Magick Monday Newsletter from Jason Miller:
A couple months ago I encountered a few people that claimed magic is like science and if its real magic it ALWAYS works. To these folks it was a particular strain of grimoire purism that qualified as real, so I asked them to physically fly over to Vermont and pay me a visit. Or perhaps turn physically invisible. Or have a demon instruct them directly in sciences in some impressive way… The backpedaling immediately started. “Those things aren’t meant literally….. “
Yeah.
If you are going to claim that your magic is better than everyone else’s, and that it always works, I think you should be able to put up or shut up. As for Strategic Sorcery, I don’t claim it works better than anyone else’s system. I leave that for the online Musashis’.
I just do the things that I have gained success with a lot, and keep working at things to increase success. I will be the first person to admit that shit does not always pan out. Anyone who claims a 100% success rate is either lying or not trying to enchant anything worthwhile. Yet, if magic is real, it must work all the time right? Otherwise, what are we doing?
I have seen all manner of crazy explanations that try to reconcile the idea that “magic always works” with the reality of a piece of sorcery not achieving its desired result. Some of my favorites:
- “You didn’t REALLY want it to work”
- “It will manifest eventually, you just have to wait”
- “It was not the will of the gods”
- “Your Higher Self is stopping you from doing something that will block your growth”
- “You just haven’t earned it yet baby”
- “It worked on the Astral!”
These are not acceptable to me, because:
- Yes, I fucking did.
- If I have to wait till I no longer want to need, then what good is that
- Take your Calvinism and shove it, this is magic dammit.
- Why does my Higher Self only stop me from doing stupid things with MAGIC? Where was my higher self when I bought a house right before the market crash?
- Shut up Morrissey
- What the fuck does that even mean?
So here is the truth as near as I have been able to ascertain over the last 30 years: Magic does indeed work every time just like mundane methods, but just like mundane methods it may not be enough given the situation.
If you take a pencil and use it as a lever to move a baseball, you exert force and the ball moves. If you use that pencil to move a Buick, you still exert force, not not enough to move the car. In fact your pencil will probably break.
That’s it kids. That’s why your spell didn’t work: the force applied, the angle of approach, the gravity of what you tried to move, the size and strength of your lever. It’s not your higher self, its physics. If you do a ritual to win mega millions maybe you can manage to improve your chances tenfold. The magic worked, but you chances only went from 1 in 302 million to one in 30 million. Not exactly what you want to hang your future on.
So what can you do to improve things? This is the work of a lifetime…
- Improve your force: devotional work, energy work, psychic development, purification. A
- Improve your lever: make connections with spirits and develop strong relationships. Experiment with rituals and spells and constantly keep perfecting your art.
- Improve your angle: most problems can be approached different ways. If the court case candle doesn’t get you acquitted, maybe the confusion spell on the prosecutor will, and if that doesnt do it maybe the blessing on your defense attorney will… you get the idea.
- Learn what can be moved and what can’t. Divination can help with this, but honestly you start to develop a sense for enchantability over time.
- Be ok with things not panning out. If your magic is not occasionally falling short of the mark, you aren’t reaching far enough. Go for the unlikely, unusual, and improbable. Why bother with magic at all if you don’t? Just realize that the road to greatness involves a lot of falling short of the mark on the way.
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