Every so often, someone asks me whether magick can change the colour of their eyes. Or make them taller. Or reshape a nose, a jaw, some part of their face they’ve never been able to make peace with. And the answer, every single time, is no.
I don’t say that to be unkind. I say it because it’s true, and because you deserve the truth rather than hopeful fiction. Magick isn’t going to turn brown eyes blue. It won’t add three inches to your height or carve you a new chin while you sleep.
Magick is real, and I’ve spent decades watching it do remarkable things, but it doesn’t rewrite the body you were born with, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a story.
Now, I could leave it there and move on. But this question comes up often, and it ties people in such knots, so I want to say why the answer matters, because it matters more than you’d think.
When you picture magick as the thing that hands out violet eyes and a brand new face, you’ve quietly turned something real and valuable into a cartoon. A wishing jar. And the trouble with the wishing jar is that when it doesn’t cough up the impossible, people decide the whole business is nonsense. They asked for the one result magick was never going to give, watched it fail, and walked off certain that none of it works. When all that really happened is they pointed a real tool at an impossible job.
I know the forums are full of people who swear blind they know somebody whose eyes changed, or who shot up three inches in their thirties. There’s always a friend of a friend. The impossible travels well online, because it’s a better story than the truth. But I’d rather give you the truth, since that is the part that can actually change your life.
Magick is only ever one factor in a situation, and it works best on the parts of your life that are open to change. Your eye colour isn’t open to change. But nearly everything that made you wish for different eyes almost certainly is.
You can’t reshape your face, but you can become the sort of person people are drawn to, and that isn’t a trick or a mask. It’s the slow and rather lovely shift where you stop fighting who you are and start being the best of it. You can’t add height, but presence and confidence have a way of making people forget to measure you. The thing you thought you wanted was never really the violet eyes. It was the way you imagined people would look at you if you had them. And that, magick can absolutely do.
This is the whole craft of it, really. You don’t aim magick at the impossible. You aim it at the next reachable step, and you let it carry you there. Do that for a year, one sensible target after another, and the change can feel close to miraculous, even though not a single part of it broke the laws of nature.
There’s a second way people lose sight of what magick really is, and it runs the other way. The wishing jar crowd ask for too much and feel cheated when the impossible never turns up. Plenty of others get a real result and then quietly explain it away, because it reached them through ordinary means.
A while back, I had a pain in my jaw that wouldn’t shift. I did some magick. What happened next was that I found a good jaw doctor who knew exactly what was wrong and sorted it out. Most people would file that under coincidence. I found a doctor, the doctor fixed it, nothing mystical about any of it. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know better. The magick didn’t reach into my face and move the bone around. It did something far more useful. It put the right person in front of me at the right time. And that’s not trivial. There are so many doctors that can waste your time. Finding a good one is golden.
That is how magick works more often than not. It rarely arrives in a flash of light. It arrives as the friend who happens to mention a job, the plan that falls through and frees up the evening you needed, the doctor who finally listens. I’ve said it before. When ordinary life hands you the result you were chasing, that ordinary life was shaped by magick. If you only count it as magick when something impossible happens, you’ll miss nearly everything magick actually does for you.
The clearest way to show you what magick really does is to step back and let other people tell you. Years ago, we set up a page of success stories at galleryofmagick.com/magickal-success-stories. We stopped updating that page a long time ago because there were thousands and thousands. While they were all greatly appreciated, it was too much to share, so we left the page as a snapshot in time. But I thought it would be good to get an update.
I’m always a bit reluctant to share success stories because I was around in the era when fake stories were all over the occult like a rash. In the eighties, all the magick pamphlets that were for sale were advertised with stories along the lines of, “J. Brown of Kent won the lottery after using our magick spell jar just once.” They weren’t remotely plausible and made me distrustful of such advertising. But people do have good stories to tell, and hopefully what follows sounds a bit more real and recognisable to you.
The few below illustrate how well magick can work through ordinary-seeming results. They make my point better than I can, because not one of them is about the impossible. Every one is magick working on a life that was open to change, usually through the most ordinary doors.
One man had carried guilt over a relationship for four years. He’d ended it badly, hurt someone he cared about, and no amount of apologising had ever settled it.
‘I was tortured by my guilt for the past years. I had this feeling of having to go back and fix something I could no longer fix. I apologised over the years and she was always kind in response, but my guilt never vanished, and I still felt small and pathetic, like I had to beg for forgiveness.’
He read Angels of Love and began working with the angel Orpaniel, expecting it to take several rituals before anything moved.
‘After the first time working it, my guilt was about 99% gone, my feeling of being small and pathetic was gone, my need to reach out and reconnect to make up for the damage done was reduced to calmness and the wish for the best outcome. I see now that my need was mostly my desire to heal the damage, and not necessarily to have this relationship again. It’s so freeing to have it gone so easily.’
Nothing about his past had changed. He had changed, and that was the whole point.
Then there’s a man in Switzerland who had spent more than thirty years certain he was worthless.
‘I’ve been living since I was 13 with the fundamental and ontological idea that I was inferior to everybody else, and therefore undeserving of being loved, appreciated or desired. No matter how many well-explained reasons the therapists gave me, I was completely convinced that I was an inferior being by nature.’
He tried the Echo Dampening ritual from Time Distortion Magick and more or less forgot about it. The change crept up on him over the following weeks.
‘For the first time in over 30 years, I saw my concept of myself as an enemy to beat and not as a truth to accept. It was as if my subconscious mind was pushing me in that direction and driving everything. It was exactly what I needed. Now, there is still work to do, but for the first time in three decades I’m convinced I was wrong about myself.’
No bolt from the blue. A quiet push that got him moving, through ordinary, difficult, human effort.
A woman wanted a salaried job, the kind her industry almost never handed out. She worked with Archangels of Magick and Words of Power, and approached the whole thing without straining for anything.
‘I approached the magick as an experiment, thinking it might help, but couldn’t hurt. When doing the magick I just concentrated on following the instructions. I didn’t think about whether or not it was going to get a result.’
At work she went the extra mile. Within weeks her manager moved to another role, and her director began passing her bigger work.
‘Even though there weren’t any salaried roles posted, our director decided to offer me a salaried position. To do so, he had to go through a process to create a role for me. The salaried role was perfect for me. I was amazed because magick got me the opportunity I needed.’
No lightning. A run of perfectly ordinary events that lined up exactly the way she needed.
Another reader works in tech, in a job she called lucrative but volatile and constantly at risk for reasons beyond her control. After a poor performance review and hints she might be let go, she used the ritual from Magickal Protection to hold on to it.
‘Within a matter of weeks, the situation turned around dramatically. One of my teammates quit the company abruptly, and the team suddenly needed me to cover her responsibilities. I took on the work, and was able to demonstrate my competence and value to the company at just the right time. A year later, I still have the job and my contributions have been recognised in a positive way.’
And there’s the woman who needed a permanent contract for the stability, and the mortgage that came with it. She was offered one, then left hanging.
‘In January I was offered a permanent contract, passed the checks and was waiting to start. And waiting. And waiting. My fixed term ended in April and still nothing.’
She performed the Unfreezing Ritual from Stillness and Light and petitioned Marchosias from Demons of Magick.
‘Sunday I had an email stating that their recruitment manager would be in touch shortly, and this morning I received a call from them to set a start date. I’m still slightly in shock but wanted to share.’
Every one of those is the jaw doctor again. The right person, the right opening, the right moment, arriving through doors so ordinary you could almost talk yourself out of being grateful. Almost.
So no, I won’t pretend magick can change your eyes, because the pretence would cheat you twice. It would set you chasing something you’ll never catch, and it would hide the real magick standing right there behind it. Magick changes you, and it changes your circumstances. When you accept that it can work like this, you’re finally free to use it for everything it can do, which, as those stories show, is a great deal more than enough.
Damon Brand
