Why is magick sometimes so easy, and other times things don’t want to change? It’s all about how ready you are for a reality shift.
If you do a ritual and you get a result within ten minutes (which does happen) we can’t boast and say that the magick we shared with you was super-strong. Usually, it means the reality you wanted was already quite close to becoming real, and it just needed a small push to make it happen. Magick made it faster and easier. The question is, how can you get closer to a reality shift?
Sometimes, massive changes happen out of the blue, and you think, ‘I can’t have been close to that reality.’ It means that on some fundamental level, you were close. You’d been building up to the change. You were ready for it. When you’re ready for a result and willing to accept it into your life, it can happen fast. At times like that, magick feels like a miracle.
But you might work hard at magick for weeks, and if things still aren’t going the way you want, it looks like the magick has failed. When that happens, you can bet the magick isn’t faulty, but the reality you’ve aimed for is too far from where you are now.
Cracking Reality
Somebody once said that you don’t get a castle to fall by sitting on top of it and chipping away with a chisel. You go to the foundations and remove one or two carefully chosen bricks and then tiptoe away. Down it comes.
With magick, you’re trying to make one reality collapse to be replaced with another. Aim your rituals at the weak points, at the foundations of your reality, and everything falls into place.
That’s what happens when you choose the right magick for whatever it is you want to change. We often warn against launching every magickal method you know, because that sort of overkill can make you feel desperate. You don’t want to pile rituals on top of each other until you’ve got a thick, grimy soup of muddled energies. But when some rituals take eleven days and others take seconds, how do you decide what’s going to suit your current situation?
A while back, in The Magickal Shortcut, I explained how it’s great if you aim for a range of magickal goals; some easy to achieve, some a bit more unlikely, and some that are outrageous. And another process we’ve repeated, over the years, is tactical magick, where you aim a small but precise selection of rituals at all the things that need to change. You can combine these two approaches when you’re working on something important. This is called creating a magickal spectrum.
A Spectrum of Magick
In this process, you aim a small range of rituals at three levels of reality, working on the big picture, the inner dream, and the practical details. When used in this way, magick can be unstoppable.
I reserve this approach for bigger dreams because most of the time, you don’t need to do this much to get a result. Mostly you can trust your intuition to choose whatever magick you like, and it works, so there’s no need to complicate things or do too many rituals. But when something’s important, when you’re dealing with big dreams, you might want to try this.
Let’s say you want to be a successful artist. You want to paint beautiful paintings and get an exhibition at a prestigious gallery, and then sell lots of art and become well-known, sharing the art that you love all over the world. That’s a cool ambition. But are you a good painter? Can you even draw? It’s great to have ambitions and distant dreams, but unless you work on the basics, the dreams won’t become real. But without the big dreams, you’ll just be doodling.
Things might change easily, even if you’re new to magick. If you’ve been painting for years and pushing to get into the gallery scene, you’re only going to need a few carefully placed dollops of magick to get that result. If you haven’t learnt to draw yet, it’s going to take longer and many more rituals. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s a common mistake. People aim to change something that’s just not ready to change. But you can make things much more ready to change by creating a magickal spectrum.
The Three Steps
It works like this:
Step One: Start with the big picture. In the past, I’ve talked about asking for something outrageous, because it can push you in the right direction, and sometimes (if you’re ready for the reality shift) the outrageously good happens. When using the magickal spectrum, you don’t aim for something that’s wildly impossible, but you aim for a big, long-term dream. In this case, you would aim for a significant improvement in success as an artist over the coming years.
Step Two: Perfect your internal reality. Most people experience resistance, doubt, feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and even a fear of change or success. It sounds a bit harsh, but this is why magick can fail. Even when everything’s set up in the real world, if you fear money, or feel that the rich are evil, you’ll push money away no matter how many money rituals you perform. And it’s not just about money. As you work with magick, it becomes obvious that these inner blockages and areas of resistance are sometimes the only things stopping you. For a lot of people, this is the last magick they try (because it seems so boring!) but so often this is the first magick that makes a huge difference. Without it, you may leave yourself vulnerable to the influence of your past and your fears.
Step Three: Work on the details. This is where you solve problems, deal with competitors (or enemies), influence important people, and generally do the magick that gets you where you want to be. The difference now is that because you’ve performed Steps One and Two, you’ll make much better choices when it comes to selecting the right challenges and the right magick, and everything will work more powerfully.
Creating Your Spectrum
How exactly do you use these steps? Which books, which spirits, which processes, and how long should it take? Do you perform all three steps at once, or do you have to do Step One for a month? What I love about this is that you can use whatever you want in whatever way you want. There are no right or wrong answers.
I could say that you should use a certain book for two weeks to set up Step One, and then another book for a month to deal with Step Two, and so on, but it’s never the same twice. It’s all going to be much more effective if you use your intuition to come up with your own spectrum. That way you’ll choose what feels right, using magick you’re comfortable with.
If you only own Archangels of Magick, you could do everything with that one book. Or you might prefer to use Demons of Magick if you’re into that kind of ritual.
What most people will do is use a book like Archangels of Magick for Step One, with a book like Mystical Words of Power or The Angels of Alchemy to work on the underlying issues in Step Two. For Step Three, books such as Sigils of Power and Transformation or The 72 Angels of Magick help solve problems and achieve goals along the way.
You can work to any schedule you like, and you don’t need to tell the spirits that you’re combining this magick. If you know, they will know what they need to know. You don’t need more guidance than that, except to say that this doesn’t mean you should create a stack of rituals. Like I said at the beginning, overkill is not required. Keep it as simple as you can.
Magick makes life easier, so if you’re doing two hours of rituals a day, something’s gone wrong. When you think carefully and plan imaginatively, you can achieve all those steps with a small handful of rituals. As always, overkill is never as good as some calm, confident magick. But if you use a spectrum of magick, covering three levels of reality, I think you’ll love the way it works.
Magick can knock years off the process of reaching a goal, and that’s why even if it takes a year or so to get good at magick, it’s still a big time-saver. Most people get good at magick as soon as they use it, and it all gets easier when you see a few results. By using the magickal spectrum, even if you’re a beginner, you should see results in several areas of your life, so you’ll know that your dreams are being supported by this magickal work.
Our next book is coming soon. Damon Brand is sharing a highly advanced form of magick that is easy enough for beginners to use, but with the scope to inspire and direct your whole life. The magick is unlike anything you’ve seen from us, and possibly unlike anything published before.
(UPDATE: It’s out now. See Success Magick with Enochian Rituals.)
Get the ebook here (read on any device)
Get the paperback here.