Full Moon: A theory of spellcraft

It's Friday, and I am looking out at the lush green of mid-July under an overcast sky as band after band of rain progresses over the landscape this week. Hello.

After such an enormous newsletter installment as what I had to send for the Moon's last phase, I neither can nor should write anything quite so involving today. However, thinking about what I wrote then, I've felt the need to write a postscript of sorts on another subject for which I achieved new understanding last year as I began trying in earnest to conceive. Despite that specific context, this subject has many broader implications for how someone reading Salt for the Eclipse may choose to classify my ritual — or more precisely magical — practices in comparison to numerous other perspectives you will find when surveying attitudes to magic among (neo)pagans, occultists, and all the rest.

I don't necessarily seek to set myself apart from others in this regard, but over the last year or so I've felt as if on the one hand my beliefs about magic have evolved into a view that much more closely resembles what you'll find in standard-issue post-Crowley ceremonial magic than what I understood before, and on the other hand these beliefs have also grown more doggedly resistant to trite, (c)overtly colonized semantic framings, most of all in their commercial incarnations. While I don't have it in me yet to write a comprehensive analysis of all types of magic I'm aware of, partly because I would have to become more familiar with them, I know I remain fairly iconoclastic about my "primary" magical specialty of divination — and while I've written about that before, now I also feel confident setting down a brief foundational theory of spellcraft. What does it actually mean to cast a spell, what are a spell's limitations, and when is it probably worth casting one? Here are my thoughts, likely as a prelude to future posts.

What conceptually qualifies as a spell

My very first disclaimer must be that I am not yet a seasoned spellcaster by any stretch of the imagination, for reasons that I'll elucidate later in this post. I will not write about spells to instruct anyone in how to perform them, and I take a skeptical stance toward most casual "how-to" spellcasting guides, again for reasons that should soon become clear. For the moment, I'm approaching spellcraft through metaphysical reflection that works through previously unwritten ideas I've developed. I'm increasingly trying to put those ideas into practice as well, expanding the scope of what it is I do as a witch, but these are the thoughts of a student and not a teacher.

With that aside, I can begin my theory of spellcraft by envisioning types of magic[1] on a spectrum where one pole is marked as "receptive" and the other pole is marked as "transitive." In my opinion, all magic requires at least one conscious agent to make it occur; otherwise, a spontaneously occurring beyond-the-mundane event is not so much magical as it is simply divine or sacred. Even with that requirement of an agent-participant, however, many magical activities largely center around the practitioner opening the way for something to pass through them, versus the magical activities that actually involve creating something or causing something to happen. Lots of magic lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, too.

When it comes to highly receptive magical activities, one example might be pure clairvoyance; someone simply has The Sight, as they call it, and visions come to them without solicitation. A different example that involves a little more transitive action but that's still fairly receptive is divination; the diviner must use certain tools, substances, or procedures in order to perceive information, and given the purpose that I believe divination serves I'd add the diviner is also performing an interpretive role, yet on the whole the diviner is not causing anything so much as bearing witness. Somewhere in the middle we might have a technique like herbal healing, wherein the herbalist's power is ultimately subservient to the healing properties of the plants that are selected, but the herbalist may say or do particular things in preparing the plants for use that might heighten some of their effects.[2] Further to the transitive end from this we could then find the creation of enchanted objects, either from scratch or through imbuing existing objects with enchanted qualities; a talisman, amulet, ward, etc. may not guarantee an event will come to pass, but the person who performed the enchantment is trying to improve or reduce the chances something for whoever uses the object. And then at the very far, highly transitive end, we reach spellcraft, which may sometimes incorporate enchanted objects as ingredients for or outcomes from particular spells but also goes much further.

Many, many, many people these days will define a spell in words that mimic Aleister Crowley's: a spell is anything that "causes Change to occur in conformity with Will."[3] For a raw, operational starting point, I think this is decent. I would perhaps expand on it by suggesting that in the pan-Mediterranean esoteric tradition, which reaches back at least as far as ancient Egypt and survived today in modern ceremonial magic, spells can be structurally described as tending to include a series of words, movements, and/or tools that when used in the right order (and sometimes restricted to the right setting) are supposed to mandate an intentional outcome to a situation outside of the spellcasting space. As far as I'm aware, these features of spells are also common to other magical traditions from other cultural spheres. And whether the intentional outcome then occurs as a total non sequitur or after a series of commonsense events that linked together to produce it, the "root cause" within the spell does not hold any direct relation other than the fact the spell projected someone's desires. In other words, if someone performs a rather symbolic activity with the hope that it will stop an annoying person from contacting them anymore, this can probably be regarded as a spell; if someone blocks that annoying person's phone number, social media accounts, and so forth, this is not a spell, just a mundane intervention.

So far, so good. Perhaps. I think all of this works for understanding the place that spellcraft occupies when we speak about magic in an utterly abstract way. But understanding what a spell conceptually is does not address whether a spell — any spell — can accomplish what it's supposed to, or why that could be the case. And this is where I grow very dissatisfied by rote definitions and in turn by the spellcasting ethos of the people who offer those. I love fantasy storytelling where spells effectively become a supernatural means of "programming" reality, because there are many interesting lessons to explore there; but in my daily life as a witch and animist, ever seeking decolonial, anti-commercial, self-evidently authentic, and equally scientific and intuitive methods of encountering the divine, sacred, and magical alike, I find that reality itself resists programming as such. Spellcraft strikes me as very serious business regardless, but not because of symbolic causes inherently producing concrete effects. The actual situation is much fuzzier, and that's where the perils truly lie.

Magic has no "if/then" logic: how a spell doesn't work

For years and years I couldn't bring myself to cast a spell. Not when I shed my skeptical atheist upbringing, and not even when I started calling myself a witch. It always seemed very clear to me that most spells would be a waste of time and resources, because I could easily refute the if/then logic behind the vast majority of amateur or even "expert" statements about spellcraft. Why would lighting a candle, performing a few gestures, and reciting a convenient little rhyme produce any particular result other than the fact that I had just done those things? I smelled bullshit in that notion, just as I smelled it in Christian claims about the power of prayer or the prosperity gospel. I could understand highly receptive forms of magic as things that the practitioner experiences in a completely psychic mode, like using tarot as a sensemaking technique, but the more transitive the magic the less that I trusted it. The way anyone around me ever talked in earnest about spells, it just came across like New Thought's law of attraction — the stuff of charlatans. I knew as I still know that just wanting something enough will not "manifest" it, and O, what an abominably overused word manifesting has become.

As I began to refine my witchcraft and write my household's grimoire, I reassessed things slightly because I had grown more conscious of the ways that positive or negative thought patterns can form feedback loops with positive or negative behaviors for whoever has those thoughts. Likewise I knew more about how psychological stress interplays with physical symptoms, and I had started performing enough rituals to understand that sometimes we must simply ritualize our desires because it refreshes our emotional capacity to pursue them. So in the grimoire's section on magic I found myself instinctively developing and adding a few spells, such as a spell to throw off another person's emotional hold, given that it can be hard to resist an abusive or controlling personality without formal commitment; I also wrote out a spell to glamour oneself in the sense of boosting confidence about one's appearance, given that projected confidence is an enormous factor in charisma. Outside of little examples like those, I could have envisioned (and still would) things like healing spells in the sense of relieving emotionally-modulated components to disease or chronic conditions, without outright curing them.

Nevertheless, this was still not programming reality, because it was still not about saying if I perform this spell then there will be a definite outcome beyond whatever perception my own mind is capable of sustaining. Spells like these rely on shaping thought itself and increasing the likelihood of an outcome that the reshaped thought allows for — but not assuring anything. And I believe it's a profound mistake to use spells with the presumption that any one result is assured. It's even a mistake on multiple levels.

• In the most empirical sense, which I do think it's vital for ritualists to recognize despite knowing reality goes beyond the laws of physics, there are lots of spells that simply do not produce their desired outcome, evidenced by the spell being performed and then nothing like that outcome ever happening. One could claim that the spell just wasn't performed correctly, or the caster didn't put enough energy[4] behind it, but even accepting such claims this means there are some spells that nobody can perform correctly and nobody has enough energy for. I prefer to take the Occam's razor approach and propose that there is no magical means to influence the universe into giving you wealth and fame on command.
• Corollary to the above: it would be quite entropic and destructive for anyone to have that ability, so if an empirical argument against it sounds boringly rationalist, I think it can also be convincingly argued from a spiritual angle that spells shouldn't be so powerful and therefore the cosmos blessedly inhibits them.
• Even for spells that operate within empirically realistic parameters, no single person is uniquely equipped to serve as the sole influence on what is going to happen in the world. There will always be some combination of other human wills, separate entities, and material forces that have their own effects. It's absolute hubris to pretend otherwise.
• Supposing it actually were possible to program reality in a very exact manner, this would then make the phrasing of any words or focused thoughts in a spell become critical. It would become the very stuff of our cautionary folklore, where some poor wording creates a dreadfully ironic result or a bizarre loophole. I don't think this is genuinely a risk in spellcraft, but I raise it because encouraging people to think of spells as having programmatic effects seems like a prime method to cause someone undue psychological distress when they don't formulate a spell "perfectly." Why engender that kind of mindset?

The above is why I still can almost never bring myself to agree with the way that many other people in ritualist spaces casually assert basic spellcasting principles. Likewise, I can almost never bring myself to try performing "sample" spells that other people have invented, especially in mass-marketed form. Much of a spell's power is lost, I suspect, when it is not directly transmitted from one person to another person in a close relational framework, because then the spell is decontextualized. And even if I felt like I could apply some personal context to the spell that would still make its components work for me, I would still largely feel as though I were conducting the spell in bad faith, too cynical about the circumstances of its invention.

But despite these limitations, over the last year I think I've achieved an understanding of spells that goes beyond these problems, and this has been a good, necessary development. Yes, it's important to resist the reality programming model of spells to in turn resist selfish wish-fulfillment, Christian-adjacent ideology, and Euro-colonial mechanistic views of the universe. Simultaneously, it's significant that people who cast spells (or seek others to cast them) so frequently do crave very challenging outcomes in love, wealth, health, fortune, other weighty areas of life, and sometimes the very land and sky; and before my sudden realization, I had started to puzzle over how I could take animist belief systems so seriously while continuing to dismiss spellcraft or most other forms of transitive magic as mere superstition. How might I disentangle New Thought, New Age bullshit from spellcraft practices that millions upon millions of people have authentically managed for the whole of human history?

Reconsidering spells as psychotechnology

Truth be told, the answer I've arrived at does not come from any formal scholarship around anthropology or religion, nor does it come from any sudden initiation into a magical system that wasn't already my own. With the latter possibility, the closest I've gotten is to start slowly delving into a still rather "Western" practice, namely chaos magic, since my earlier layperson's awareness of chaos magic happened to inform how some of my own magic has crystallized over time. But late last summer I still discovered a broad and deeply practical function for spellcraft through an exploration of my own mental health. Whether this function served as the precursor for millennia of animist spellcraft, I could not tell you, yet it's become a good enough reason for me to start taking the practice much more seriously than I ever did before.

Not all of my mental illness[5] can be summarized as anxiety, but a good portion can. Some other time I should write about how abysmally mild-sounding a word anxiety is for the full-bodied nightmare that the condition really constitutes. For the moment, I need to explain just one aspect of that nightmare, which maybe some readers can relate to if their brains work in similar ways. Here is the anxiety problem:

While I can rationally dismiss the New Thought idea that thinking negatively will "invite" negative outcomes, my anxiety in fact believes this very intuitively. Throughout much of my adult life, I keep harboring this sharp internal (and sometimes external) reaction to anyone expressing pessimism about something, whether they mean it or not. It's almost the worst if they're joking. Don't joke that the sky will fall tomorrow or the sky actually will fall tomorrow! Accordingly, I don't usually let myself predict something negative unless I feel very sure that it's unavoidable, otherwise the gut instinct emerges that I've now cursed the situation to become exactly that bad. Much as my anxiety sends me ruminating and worrying over all kinds of things that could go wrong, I'm largely fretting because of the sense that I'm not prepared for dealing with the potential consequences. Outright assuming a bad outcome is usually a bridge too far, especially where my health is concerned; the headache that "could" be a brain tumor[6] seems more likely to become one if I let myself have an utterly doomed attitude about my body and allow depression to fuel worse stress, worse inflammation, worse cancer risk.

But if the power of positive thinking were a reliable counter-thought to all of this, my anxiety could also not let that be further from the truth. Because my anxiety is equally convinced that pride cometh before a fall, it also seems like the height of folly to constantly think or declare that everything in my life is going to turn out well. The instant that someone says it's fine, it won't be. Too much positivity becomes a kind of accidental curse.

I thought about all of this abundantly last year on the brink of my first IVF cycle. In my most anxious moments, I was equally sure that expecting the worst would promise it, and that expecting the best would produce the opposite result. And once I became aware of this, I spent a few days all but smacking myself in the face. What preposterous logic. How could total pessimism and total optimism lead to the same terrible outcome?

I had been harboring profound cognitive dissonance for ages, and I knew I needed to do something about it or my anxiety would never stand a chance of improving any further than it previously had. I reasoned that one approach would be to try expecting the best possible and worst possible outcomes together, but that was just another way of playing the same game with myself, tearing myself apart inside. The more mature approach would be to expect nothing at all, and to make peace with the uncertainty. And to a certain extent, this is what I was already trying to do in a therapeutic and ritual context before having such a realization, and I have since deepened that process; but it's difficult to expect nothing when one's psyche has trained itself to assume that thought itself can produce a specific outcome.

And so I thought about spells. I thought about creating change in accordance with will. What if, I wondered, casual mental reflections do not shape future events, but when placed in a ritualized compartment our intentions have an exclusive chance to do so? Or more accurately — what if a spell is a means of focusing intention into a safe realm for it, and thus neutralizing any intention outside the spellcasting space?

None of this might be true in any material sense, but I discovered this was an excellent way of calming down racing thoughts about any uncertain situation. Whatever I expected or did not expect, I at least didn't have to worry about inadvertently causing anything. My thoughts could only control the uncontrollable if I were actually performing a spell.

I then did wind up performing a fertility spell, which I have since repeated several times, in hope of relieving whatever part of my mind needs that sense of control over IVF outcomes. It has profoundly helped me to let optimism or pessimism move me in equal measure, or not at all, about how any given reproductive procedure will turn out. And because of the way these fertility spells are scripted, I have still made sure not to assure myself of a guaranteed outcome, since I think that would remain a dreadful mistake; instead, when I cast the spell I am simply encouraging the outcome I want, and when it is over I am able to step back and say the thing to myself that is so hard to say when anxiety reigns:

I have now done everything I can.

So with fertility work, spells have become a new psychotechnology for me, training my brain toward more valuable perspectives on a given situation. And I could see this applying to other types of spells that I would once have turned up my nose at. This doesn't mean I will take a TikTok instructional video for a spell with anything more than the tiniest granule of salt; and I remain so very wary of anything that looks like reality programming. But I think I have found a new way that spellcraft makes sense to me, and I am desperately curious whether the logic that led me there is the same that's led many other people to develop the practice.

A spell is not a closed system

From what I've laid out so far, I think there are many implications that must now be examined, and I haven't done enough of this work to write anything useful in most of those cases. So consider this section my conclusion.

But before wrapping up completely, I want to be sure that I don't leave anyone with the impression that I view a spell as a purely psychic activity that stays in a purely psychic container. For I have also long thought that some things do change if someone has chosen to conduct a spell, compared to if they choose not to. A spell is an open system; once it is cast, effects spill out for whoever cast it and for whoever knows they cast it.

I will first use the example of a love spell. A lot of practitioners are in agreement that you cannot make someone be attracted to you who is not ever likely to consent to getting involved with you. I would also agree with this idea, but I would not say that the reason to avoid love spells is because they're powerless. I think they can have a certain power: a bad one. Suppose the other person finds out that you cast a love spell; they might now be repulsed when they might previously have been indifferent to you, and they might be so disturbed by this knowledge that they will have a difficult time recovering mentally. Conversely, if the other person never finds out about the love spell but you cast it with the full assumption it will work, this may fuel even more dangerous obsession on your part than if you left well enough alone. So as far as I'm concerned, love spells should be avoided because they can psychologically harm the subject and the caster alike.

This brings me to a "hot topic" in some ritualist circles. Do I believe that any so-called baneful magic like a curse is bad because putting so much negative energy out into the world will result in it being reflected back upon you threefold? Not really. I'm sympathetic to arguments that sometimes we must deal out harm to defend ourselves. But I do have reservations about curses in the same way as love spells. In the case of a curse, the spell will probably not do much if the recipient of the curse doesn't know you put the curse upon them, and then they still have to believe in curses as something that can affect them; this does make them dangerous, though, insofar as the caster should be willing to accept the possibility of lasting psychological damage to the recipient. From a self-defense perspective, again, I think this is acceptable. However, it still shouldn't be undertaken lightly. If nothing else, whether the person knows you put a curse upon them or not, I think it's worth reflecting closely on the choice to curse them, asking if performing the curse will release any negative fixation you might otherwise develop about them, or if it might instead cause you to obsess over them in hope that the curse worked?

I am someone who prefers not to harbor grudges. Not to spend most of my time thinking about how terrible any specific people have been to me. I cannot even fathom the amount of anger that would have to mount in my heart for me to feel like a curse were the acceptable method of release. Perhaps one day I'll curse an oil executive or two, but I'm not interested in speaking about curses in a cavalier manner. The psychological space that one must enter to starting working that way — this is risky. And I'm sometimes concerned by the number of present-day ritualists who think it's just "love and light" ideology to counsel as much. I'm nowhere near "love and light"; I'm just not a fool. Or so I hope.

But that's about as far as my thoughts on spells can go for now. As I practice more, I may post revisions or addenda in months and years to come.

[1] In case anyone has wondered based on my other writings so far, I prefer to spell magic without the k. Although I know magick is a Renaissance-era spelling that enormously precedes Crowley's influence, and although I have no issue with friends' and acquaintances' choice to use that spelling, it's not intuitive for my own idiolect. I even sometimes enjoy erasing the potential distinction from stage magic, since for me "real" magic and stage magic are often two sides of the same coin — seen through a rather different lens, however, than what the likes of Penn & Teller would use.

[2] I believe that when this happens it's usually because of the placebo effect, but in my opinion that's exactly what makes it magical.

[3] Some people will say this about magic as a whole, as Crowley himself did, but the spectrum I've created above ought to show how that might become confusing.

[4] Whatever we want that to refer to.

[5] No one has so far critiqued my use of this phrase, but I recognize that it can sound at odds with principles I otherwise try to respect around different experiences of reality, especially now that I've had a window into temporary psychosis through psychedelic use and subsequent flashbacks. Be that as it may, I find that my experience of certain psychological phenomena is very much detrimental to my quality of life, and would be even if I experienced these phenomena while living in a better society (leaving aside whether a better society would make it less likely for those phenomena to arise). So I find mental illness a totally suitable term in reference to myself. It is not a statement about other people's minds.

[6] It never is, so far.

Thank you for reading, and I would be even more curious than usual to read responses to this piece from fellow practitioners. Next week, there will be a post for Occult subscribers only, but after that I'll return with an overdue kinky post on the topic of ordeal by bondage.