Is magick a shortcut or a journey? It can be either, but we’ve found a way of mixing up your rituals that can get things to work in surprising ways.
Most people get into magick because there’s something desperate that needs fixing. Weird thing is, that first ritual might appear to fail, but you sense something, you know there’s something to this and so you keep going. And then later you find that first ‘failure’ actually worked; it just took longer than expected, or it wasn’t as good as you wanted, or maybe you just didn’t notice it at the time. Sometimes you find out you were lusting for result, and then you learn to get around that.
Reality shifts, and that is astounding. The results start coming to you, and then you see there’s more to life than just solving one problem.
When people first get hold of magick, there can be this rush of excitement. We often see this. You perform six rituals in two days and then on day three you wonder where your result is. Nothing happens in twenty-four hours so you feel conned and you hate magick forever. It’s not an exaggeration. Some people give up at this point, and that’s a real shame.
Easier Than Juggling
Magick is not as difficult as juggling, but it can require a certain knack, and it’s worth being cool about the rituals that don’t work. When a juggler drops a juggling ball, imagine if she gave up and walked away. Failed rituals are just one failure, not the end of magick.
If you see magick as a journey, a way of improving your life and finding out what you want and how to get it, then life becomes easier. For some it’s fast and for others it’s more gradual.
Magick works, most of the time. If it doesn’t there are often clear reasons, and all of that is explored in these pages. You can get better at it, and anybody who persists does get better.
Magick Gets Easier
The other side of this is that you can end up with so much magick, so many techniques, that you get magickal fatigue. The journey becomes tiresome because you don’t want to be doing rituals every day. That’s how I feel about people who use Law of Attraction visualization to find parking spaces. It’s just too much effort. Parking spaces already exist – all you have to do is drive around and find them. You don’t need any kind of visualization or magick. OK, I’m being a bit cynical, and I love working magick, but I want to be in charge. I don’t want to feel that I have to perform thirty-six rituals this month or else life will go to hell.
In the past few years we’ve published so much that we’ve heard people say, ‘Please, no more angel books.’ It’s weird for us, because we didn’t get it all at once. For us, finding magick, deciphering it, finding what worked, that was a long process. Decades! For you lot, it’s like a suitcase of knowledge is emptied out on your bed, and you’re supposed to deal with it. We know that it can be overwhelming. And that’s why people sometimes ask if there’s just one ritual that could solve everything.
The Ultimate Ritual
It’s tempting to ask for the One Ultimate Ritual that solves all problems, but it can’t really be done. I mean, in theory, you could create a really, really long ritual that calls on so many entities that your problem will be covered. But the easier solution is to take a few minutes, or even hours if you need to, to find the right magick for you and the problem. That gets it solved faster.
We positively encourage this sort of deep connection, where you become familiar with the various angels and rituals and what they can do – this means that when a complex problem arises, you know where to turn. Targeted and precise magick is way better than blunderbuss magick. Otherwise we’d write one ritual and go home, because that would mean magick was as simple as that. Magick is a journey that involves finding what works for you.
Combined Magick
But there is a way to bring an overall improvement to your life, that’s in line with your goals and dreams. Here’s one of the secrets that we’ve been hinting at for years, and that Gordon Winterfield recently made quite plain. There is a way of working magick that really opens up its potential, often producing unexpected and wide-ranging results. First of all, your requests should be genuine. That is, ask for what you really want, rather than something that just seems like it might be ok. Put some thought into it before you start. Then this is what you do:
Perform magick for results that are quite likely to happen, or just beyond ordinary possibility.
At the same time, perform magick for requests that are much less likely to happen.
And every now and then, put in a request that asks for something almost outrageous, something that seems quite impossible. (No, not a lottery win, but a genuine desire that seems quite far out of reach.)
If you do this, using any mix of magick, and if these three approaches are sincere, you create a force of change that can push reality a long way. And the beauty of this combined magick is that you might get many additional results that aren’t quite what you asked for, but that get you the feeling you were looking for.
We’ve often talked about not overdoing magick, not just throwing everything you can at a problem. That still holds true. Piling on magick to force a result does not help. But if you’re on the journey, if you’re looking for changes, then what I say above can be a good way to work. Gentle requests, speculative requests, and wild requests. Combined, sincerely, and with true patience, these can stir reality in the most exciting ways.
– Adam Blackthorne
Sigils of Power and Transformation gives you 111 sigils to work on health, luck, money and much more. There are no angels, demons or any spirits in this direct magick. It is proving to be our most well-loved book.