As I am teaching some people who are new to magic, I need to flick through some of the basic books from which I originally learned some of my practice. I observe a number of books come with a few rules of magic or rules of witchcraft. The thing about these rules is well, some of them are utter rubbish, many are inconsistent with other books, and even the ones which make sense, don’t necessarily help with the practice of magic. So I wonder why they are included.
Some of these strange rules are about how magic supposedly works, some of them are about what one should and shouldn’t do with magic and some of them seem wildly off subject, they’re about how magic should and shouldn’t be represented to the outside world. Frankly, how magic works is conjecture and it becomes apparent to any practitioner. What you should and shouldn’t do with magic is down to the practitioner, I respect them enough to not have to give them morals, they should have their own. Also you do not need to represent magic to the outside world. Magic is not something for Tiktok and Twitter. In fact it abhors this. Also men, and some women, like to mansplain, so as soon as you say something wrong on a public forum you will have them jump upon you like a lioness on a gazelle with supposed corrections to something that might have been right in the first place, but needed not be said any way.
I remember when someone got all worried about my black mirror in a hotel room being visible from the hotel room’s mirror. There were rules for them which said that two mirrors which could see each other were very dangerous and could trap spiritual activity. The whole thing was very strange because to begin with my black mirror isn’t actually a mirror just some black glass. Also, there’s a large number of places, which have mirrors that face each other and they do not exactly end up with hauntings. Also in Feng Shui, it is a common practice to place two mirrors facing each other to reflect spiritual energy. It does not trap energy. So why would it be helpful to teach that mirrors that are visible to each other could trap spiritual energy. As a rule, it simply creates fear, like a superstition. It does not help any spiritual practice and also it does not reflect reality. It really makes me wonder about these things. Then I know a few witches of many years of experience who have no experience of such a thing.
So I conclude that there are weird rules, which are inconsistent. People talk about them frequently as if they are set in stone and something for people to be scared of. Often they’re not set in stone though people talk about them like that. While wisdom of the ages should be respected, if something is true it will quickly become apparent to any practitioner so there’s little need to teach hard and fast rules about how magic works. Especially something that was made up in the 20th/21st century and not needed for any practice or based on any ancient doctrine. Some rules exist which are simply a mindset to have when doing a certain practice. To understand the symbolism while you’re doing a rite.
Some witches DO worship the Devil
One rule I came across was that Witches do not worship the devil. I understand such a book is referring to Americans practicing Traditional Witchcraft, but it totally invalidates Theistic Satanists who practice witchcraft. I mean I am not one and personally feel no need to worship Satan at this time, but I respect them and their practices so long as they actually practice. They are still Witches even though they are Satanists. So this rule is dumb and does not always apply.
Rule of Three has no historical basis
The Rule of Three is a common rule, mentioned by many books, which suggests that when you do any kind of magic or willful action, then whether you do good or evil, you receive that much good and evil in return with 3 times the amount or strength. Frankly, this was something entirely made up by Gerald Gardner. Gardner was very concerned by how Witchcraft, which had always had negative connotations, would be accepted as a modern religion. “Isn’t it evil?” people would say. So suddenly he came up with this concept of the rule of three. It has this mystical number 3 and a reason that made witches seem harmless to the average folk. They can’t put a spell on you because it would come back to bite them in the arse. But Witchcraft had existed for thousands of years with loads of books about curses and no mention of a rule of three.
A witch does not need to act morally. I mean if you want friends then it helps! Few people are friends with dickheads and those that are friends with dickheads, well in my opinion they shouldn’t be they deserve better. For thousands of years the term, “witch” was used to describe people who would curse and put spells on people. Now we attempt to rehabilitate the word. We try to make sure a modern witch wouldn’t do bad stuff, but it DID mean someone who acted, as far as outsiders saw it, immorally / amorally. Yes, much of this was slander and demonization, but that’s what we identify with. The word that was only ever used in a negative context until the 20th century. The words are “Do what thou wilt be the WHOLE of the law” not “do what thou wilt, so long as it is moral”. “And it harm none” were words simply added to pander to the mass fear of witches. The leader who added it attempted to sacrifice our freedom for what others wanted and it didn’t work. We spend soooo long denying ourselves wrath, sexual proclivity, jealousy, laziness, sadness, weakness, femininity, vanity, pride, power-hungriness, selfishness and many passions / obsessions that these aspects of the self get denied and pushed into what Jung would call our shadow self. We lose half of our being denying it. It needs to be recognised and to exist. We need to accept that these immoral aspects of ourself, while not pretty, they are part of who we are and to grow we actually need to accept them rather than repress them.
I am not saying do evil. Please don’t. And please don’t do evil on me. But there’s no hard fast rule. Negativity might spread, it often does, but it won’t reflect at you. It’s only the witch who believes they will receive her spells back threefold that ever experiences that backlash. To be honest you could literally just cast spells on people to make them win a third of the lottery and hope that bounces back. The only times I have ever cursed a person, I sought their betterment and justice to be the result not revenge, but I did not get it back three fold because I do not believe that will happen. This is not a hard rule. It is worth noting that if you put negativity out there for someone in your circle… well if they are experiencing negativity, they might be more negative and lets say they snap at your mutual friend Julie and she is then down and cancels on meeting you, well your own negativity did impact you and it will certainly impact the people around your target even if it does not come back to you. But this is not a hard rule and is not set in stone.
Love spells work and they are allowed in witchcraft
Contrary to popular opinion love spells are the most common type of spell in ancient books. Often sorcery was considered evil and those that would use it are ostracised, so in order to risk being ostracised you need to have a pressing reason. Unrequited love or loneliness was often a reason to turn to magic or witch for help. Other than love other common spells are curses and seeking treasure. If they didn’t work at all why do they fill our ancient spell books? If they were not allowed why even bother to keep recipes? Also who is it they think is not allowing them? This is clear evidence that love spells are not as unusual as many authors would have you think. Although the use of magic for love does not show the appropriate attitude to receive love. If you truly love your partner, I would say psychologically you would respect their right to choose.
Magic is Real
Some books will tell you “magic is real” as a rule. I don’t feel like the need to even say this. I mean why would a person pick up a book on magic if they did not think it was real? Also, I never ask people to believe. They would hopefully come to this conclusion after a short while of practice on seeing evidence of their spells and rituals taking effect. Also, we must remain grounded in objective reality, with other people. So taking a skeptical approach to magic is very useful and healthy. It will allow us to communicate well with skeptics, not take ourselves too seriously and remind us we still need to go to work, do the laundry and clean.
You don’t always need to know yourself
One book suggests a rule of magic is to “know yourself”. In order to practice magic you supposedly must know youself before you do any spell. But the truth is this is not a blanket rule. It IS recommended, but not a “rule”. Many paradigms of magic do not require that we know ourselves necessarily. So many forms of magic work on psychological levels. Hermetics is one such practice and Yoga is another. In such practices to know oneself is soooo important in the practice. Psychological constructs and anxieties can have worrying effects on spells and rituals. Sending the energy completely astray. By having an awareness of the self, you are able to navigate and alleviate such issues. However practices such as Goetia (by which I mean classical Greek sorcery), folk magic, and some paradigms of evocation do not require the same clarity of psychology because they often involve external forces, at least theoretically. Working with deities and spirit guides depends on the will of the entity summoned. Even where some people would postulate that the entity summoned is a reflection of the psychology of the summoner, its ability to speak allows it an opportunity to warn the practitioner of any hidden beliefs or anxieties that would pervert the practice. Many tantrikas need a complete disregard for purity as a form of transgressive ritual action. Impurity of mind and hidden knowledge of self better reflect the truth of reality, than the Vedic ideas of purity. So it’s a good idea, but not a rule.
Question Authority sometimes
I don’t know why “Question Authority” this is a hard rule of magic. It’s an okay way to live your life. We should have the self-power to stand up to authority if authority misuses its power. It is distinctly unhelpful when you are trying to manage an office and everyone wants to question authority all the time and you have to stand and debate the best course of action at every turn. It is very draining and prevents you being able to complete your job. Sometimes it is better to just recognise your role and go with it. Questioning all the time does take energy form both. Some people are drawn to be servants in life. They should be able to accept that role if they prefer it. Not everyone needs to be a hero all the time. Some people are born to be slaves (especially in a sexual context) and allowing them to be slaves and obey authority gives them immense pleasure. We spend forever damning people in this role, but actually it is something they can be proud of. Thoroughly enjoying their role in society and the intense stress relief it gives them.
The “question authority rule” encourages the individual to be very “athame” mentality, not very “chalice” mentality. Always active and never passive, but is this not an imbalance? Does it make one more active in ones life, but perhaps being passive in ones life is also important. Causing change in conformity with will sounds very active so are we practicing for when we want to perform magic? We do need to be receptive to the nature of the universe as well though. This comment comes from me, someone who is always way too active and never passive enough when it comes ot the universe and I recognise my own weakness in that part. I need to keep practicing passivity, which is not something that comes naturally.
Magic is an Art or a Science, but not always both
Again I don’t know why this needs to b a rule of magic. It does not control how magic works or whatever. The author who wrote this Oberon Zell Ravenhart says that “authors share what works for them” and “you can experiment” to find what works for you. This seems a really odd way to describe it because if you have a formula shared with you, then sticking to it is the scientific way and deviating from it is the artistic way. In his description of deviating he uses the word “experimenting” which makes it sound like a science to deviate from formula.
It can be an art, but not always. This is a bit of a bugbear with me. Some forms of magic are intended to be an expression of the culture and individuality of the practitioner which should always been an art, but some are intended to achieve something else. The important thing is the intention of the magical work: to express or to achieve.
Most of the magic practitioner community is soooo artistic they learn something and they immediately change it before they have even tried it in its current format. But how did they know what it was supposed to feel like? How do they know what the actual result should be like? This is not scientific. In science we follow a previous scientists actions to prove the result they achieved. Then we deviate, but we try to only change a single parameter at a time to determine what affect that parameter had on it.
I hear soooo many people tell me “oh this did not work for me” about everything from angel summoning and qabalah to energy work and mediation. I often challenge them about this and I ask them why or how it didn’t work. I ask what their expectation was and I find out they completely changed the formula!
“Oh, I didn’t like the Judaic god-names so I didn’t use those…”
You didn’t use Judaic godnames when summoning Judaic angels?
“I didn’t want to command the demon so I tried working with it, instead of controlling it”
Ummm okay, so it was not under your control and didn’t do what you wanted and you blame the ritual rather than the way you did it?
“I find it hard to blank out my mind so I visualise stuff instead”
So you deny yourself the training ground of the very thing you struggle with?
Well, you have been presented with a formula and you did not stick to it, you changed it and then you came to a conclusion based on your changed forumla and assumed the result reflected the original formula as well. That’s if this practitioner that said “it doesn’t work for me”, even bothered to do the ritual in the first place. So many of these students of magic did not even do the ritual because they did not like the sound of it, but they expect to receive validation and respect for their subjective opinion, despite skipping huge chunks of their potential magical learning and the opportunity to get magical experience. I am sorry, but I am done with being polite. I am done being expected to show respect for people who don’t bother. They expect to be able to offer advice and theorise with the rest of us who spend a chunk of our lives rising on spiritual planes, forming friendships with spirits and making talismans. They end up the Armchair occultists that are the backseat drivers of the occult world.
I can make a spell work with the Daedra Azura made up for the Elder Scrolls video games. I can have success praying to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, if I can make something work with something entirely made up, then any competent magic practitioner should have no issue making something work with angels that have been written about for about 2000 years and believed in by thousands and these days millions. Magic is much more of a science then we give it credit for. This was certainly the view of Aleister Crowley who’s methods of Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi have objective and undeniable affects on the human brain. For this to not impact your brain in the same way there are two possibilities, one: you’re not doing it right or two: you have a brain so severely different to other humans that it has an entirely different chemical makeup. I have known people to take one or more of acid, ADHD medication and anti-depressants, none of which did not prevent them from achieving at least a basic dharana and I can only conclude that the difficulty attaining Dhyana prevented them obtaining not the different medical state. So when I say chemically different, I mean severe brain alteration not slightly altered. Aleister Crowley subtitled his work the aim of religion, but the method of science. For him it was a science.
Alternatively, a lot of magical ritual is to recognise and express the space YOU are in right now, YOUR mindset, YOUR culture, YOUR relationship with deity and following a formula does not do that! This is where magic IS an art. The issue is that the intention is very different here. You’re not trying to achieve a specific mindset and you’re not trying to summong an entity.
Magic is like a cake recipe. If you take out the flour you will probably end up with some kind of pudding, but it won’t be a cake. If you take out the sugar the results will be more like bread. If you take out the baking powder / bicarb of soda then you will end up with something more like a biscuit. But if you have never done the receipe correctly you might convince yourself that this bread / biscuit / pudding is exactly what the recipe was for in the first place. It’s not. The recipe is for cake and if you have never made cake before then you won’t know what a cake should be like. That’s okay because we do not all need cake and variation is the spice of life. If you don’t want to make a cake, you don’t need follow a cake receipe. That is the art, but the conversion of the ingredients into dessert is science. Magic is science that can be used to express art, but it is not the nature of magic to be art, it simply can be used to express art like air-drying paint and a paint brush.
Magic is sometimes a science and sometimes an art, but it is rarely both. This really depends on what the ritual is for and what the paradigm the practitioner is working with. The rule that Magic is an Art and a Science and you should change rituals to “make them work better” is not a rule. You do not know what better is supposed to be like. I remember when I started working a lot with earth and it felt like nothing was happening, but that was what earth was meant to feel like for me. Earth’s very nature is non-moving, non-happening, a stillness that nourishes and much more. If I had assumed it was not working and switched to something that felt more moving then I might convince myself it was “better”, but it was not what I was trying to work on. Remember a child will rarely choose salad and chicken breast when they can have chocolate and marshmellows. If you just do whatever you want, you might end up missing the point and feeding yourself a poor spiritual diet. This should not be a hard rule.
Sometimes you need to invoke what you can’t banish
One book begin with don’t invoke what you can’t banish. Great advice… seems obvious right? It’s your first ritual. You have never banished anything before, how do you know what you can’t banish? It also uses the word invoke. Invoke is mostly commonly used with deities. Thanks to Christianity many Wiccans just assumed pagan deities would be the pinacle of morality and friendly. In fact many of them are examples of the failings of humanity. But many a Wiccan priestess will tell you, you can invoke various goddesses even though you would not have the power to banish them, but invoking a goddess is considered harmless for some reason. Before I continue, trust me the goddess is not harmless! If you never invoke or evoke what, you don’t already know that you can banish, then you will never summon anything or anyone you have not summoned before. You will never learn to summon something new. So umm tell me how this is a hard-fast rule of magic? We often have to summon something we have never banished before. It’s the way of things when learning stuff in magic. I will recommend however that you avoid summoning Lovecraftian stuff as I understand it is difficult to banish and I never saw a benefit in summoning it in the first place so I can’t recommend it. But I will conclude “don’t invoke what you cannot banish” is very limiting in terms of your growth. Bare it in mind, go steady, but sooner or later you will need to try something that will push you.
Sometimes you can think about spells
Many people say you should not think about or speak about spells after doing them for at least 24 hours. This is not necessarily a hard fast rule, but it can help. This is down to how magic works and it is very easy to conclude we know how magic works, but frankly we do not know. In many paradigms magic is manipulated by intention and mind set. If we do a quick spell then there is the intention to get what we want and then if every 10 mins we question has it worked yet? will it work? With all these questions our focus and intention is all over the place and so we could well end up undoing our work many times over. Alternative one theory posits that when we have the intention and do a spell we create something that goes off to do our spell and we no longer affect that thing. So this is not a hard fast rule that works for all theories of magic however it is something to be aware of.
Be careful when mixing systems
Some people would tell you that different systems of magic should never be mixed. You cannot use part of one system of magic with another. Now the important thing is that frankly we do not always know what all the parts of the system are for. It takes many years of study and usually you will never find out exactly why a grimoire included something or didn’t. If I go back to the magic rituals are like a cake recipes then you know you can substitute flour for gluten free flour and for the most part you will get mostly the same kind of cake. There will be some differences. But gluten free flour was made knowing that flour provided the bulking ingredient in cake and so, it is able to fulfill most of its purpose. However in many cases we do not. You cannot just take out some god names and put in others, they could be associated with a completely different plane. That might not be the side of that deity which is conducive to evocation. This has worked as a system for over 200-700 years so respect that, however, it had to have been created once. There’s no reason that ritual structure was sooo fluid then and now it is fixed, but I question whether the repeated practice for hundreds of years has not only lent it validity, but also carved the shape of an egregore. So you can mix systems. It is possible. Sometimes it works, but be careful.
You don’t always understand the ritual
In Ceremonial Magic by Lisiewski, the author feels that every aspect of ritual needs to be understood. However it really does not. In fact I have known people who had difficulty because the universe was responding to the ritual action rather than their understanding of it and when they took the wrong ritual action the whole thing went funky. Anyone saying this as a rule has not done much magic at all. So much the Papyri Graecae Magicae are full of barbaric names of evocation that have lost all meaning at this point. So many of the grimoires and alchemy do not make a whole lot of sense so we end up having to work with our best guess. Are we going to say that no-one can do those rituals? No! I have friends who did the Liber Samekh without a full understanding of the ritual and they had some success, even I wondered for many years at the origin of the great elemental kings over the governers (such as Tahaoeloj), but it did not stop me from having incredible success at using the ritual. You do not always need to understand the ritual, but be aware if you do not understand stuff that you could be doing stuff that is damaging without knowing. This is where the author makes a good point. But so many paradigms of the working of magic, suggest that the result is from the ritual action not from the understanding in the practitioners mind and I sometimes see evidence of this in my own work. So again NOT a hard fast rule. This is the sort of gatekeeping bullshit that people say to keep other people down. We as a community should be helping each other up, but too often we are saying you don’t a right to do this ritual if you do not 100% understand every part of it. I was doing the LBRP regularly for about 12 years before I understood it as fully as I understand it now and there is probably still more to learn about it. Sometimes you need to do a ritual that you do not fully understand yet.
The Chaos of Reality
I am going to leave it there. I have loads of magical and mundane work to get on with and can’t keep looking through books for more silly rules. The take from this really should be that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Our understanding of reality is very often a mere model based on the small piece of our world that we have experienced so far and with magic we seek to expand that model. But it is just that, a model. To assume we know the magic and spiritual world is to be a fool. Worse to pass on our assumptions is to not only to be fool and reveal to others that we are fools, but it is to make fools of others as well. In Chaos Magic it is taught that belief controls and manipulates experience. Belief can then be used as a tool to control our experience. Here we discussed many “rules” about magic. The thing is, these are beliefs that are meant to be unchanging and therefore we cannot use them as tools. We are stuck with them. So often, they are useless to us.
- They do not tell us how the world works, only applying to a few paradigms,
- they do not help us practice,
- they can hold us back,
- they sometimes convey ideals which are exclusive to the author and not applicable to everyone,
- they are sometimes too concerned with how magic looks to an outsider, so seek to skew magic and make magic pretend it is something else, and
- sometimes they are just there to ban practices that the author doesn’t like. What do they know?
Drop the rules. They don’t help you. Still be a moral person, please, for my sake. Remember magic doesn’t follow rules. Try to record your own rules when you notice them, if any, but test them. If you think magic always works that way, try a different kind of magic and test it to destruction. Write your own rules, but let them be bendable not hard and fast and don’t believe in them unless it helps you!