After money questions, this is probably the second most common question I receive. Unrequited love has made thousands of people miserable through the ages and in today’s society, it can seem like your worth as a person is judged by whether you have a mate. Take a look at Metafilter. Virtually every day, someone is asking a question about relationships.

I find that in many cases, whenever someone asks me if magick can help them find a mate, they seem to suffer from low self esteem. They can’t talk to girls. Feel like they aren’t interesting. All their relationships so far have ended badly. They have intimacy problems. The list goes on and on.

Magick won’t help you recover from low self esteem. Sorry. That requires the courage to look into yourself and confront your own fears. As long as you hold onto the belief that you aren’t worthy of having a genuine relationship, you’ll sabotage everything that may come along.

Going back to my previous post on the purpose of rituals, if you are conflicted about what you are asking for, you probably won’t find what you think you are looking for.

That said, if your goal is to attract a mate and you have a relatively healthy self esteem, using magick should be pretty successful. Remember, that magick is about focusing on your intention. If you are very specific about the kind of person you want to attract (notice, I said ‘the kind of person’ rather than ‘the person’), you’ll be much more in tune to opportunities that will help you find that person.

Now, let me say something about attracting a specific person. If you are in love/lust/infatuation with someone who doesn’t return your feelings, it’s, imho, absolutely wrong to try to impose your Will on them. How would you like it if someone told you that you should change in accordance with their Will? You’d hate it. So why in the world would you want to do that to someone you claim to love?

There are generally three things you can do in this situation:

1. Ask him/her out - If your love is one from afar, what the heck are you waiting for? Get over your fear, swallow your pride and go ask them out. If they reject you, at least you know.
2. Get over him/her - There are plenty of other people out there. The more you dwell on this person, the more you’ll be miserable.
3. Wait and see - If you’ve been rejected but you’re still willing to risk putting your love life on hold indefinitely; you can always take a wait and see approach. There’s always a slim possibility something may work out in the future. But don’t hold your breath. This will probably be a long, painful wait.

I get asked this question from time to time. My answer is that while there’s a slim chance it may happen (as there’s always a slim chance you could win the lottery), don’t hold your breath. Why? Because even though may be your intention and will to win the lottery, it’s also the intention and will of millions of other people.

Let’s face it - we live in a world of instant gratification. Everyone wants everything and they want it now. If they don’t get it, they feel depressed, sad, and frustrated. They look around and say thing like ‘Everyone else has it - why can’t I?’ or ‘I deserve it.’

Going back to my post on What is Magick?, I explain that you are where you are because of all the decisions and choices you’ve made up until now. If you really want this thing (a new car, house, money in the bank, etc), why don’t you have it now? If you’re like most people, you have a series of excuses ready and waiting. Sorry, but excuses won’t help you achieve your goals. The better answer to the question is ‘it’s on its way.’

Now, let’s rephrase the questions a bit. Instead of wanting to ‘win the lottery’ ask yourself why you want to win the lottery. How will that make you happy? For most people, it doesn’t actually matter if you win the lottery. You just want money. It doesn’t much matter how you get it (I mean legally, of course).

Instead of focusing on winning the lottery, which millions of people are hoping and praying for as well, it’s better to ask for a specific dollar amount and focus your intentions on that. Focus on prosperity and increasing your net worth rather than your current debts. The more you focus on these positive things, the more opportunities will creep into focus. You’ll start to find coins whenever you walk somewhere - and by all means, you should pick them up and be grateful that you’re getting a portion of what you wanted. Too many people won’t waste the effort to pick up a nickel. If that’s your mentality, you’re overlooking opportunities and will soon fall back into the status quo. Business opportunities will pop up when you least expect it. You’ll receive unexpected checks in the mail - a birthday check from grandma or a rebate check you forgot you sent for.

It’s amazing how when you start looking for opportunities, they are all over the place. You just have to start focusing.

Just reciting some words, lighting candles, or going through the motion of a ritual is not enough. You still need a strong focus and belief that you will get what you want. Most people do a ritual and when they don’t see results within a day or two, they start to doubt its effectiveness.

There are a couple of reasons why you may not be getting the results you want:

Your intention or focus wasn’t well formed or clearly articulated

Most people ask for things but what they are asking for is not what they actually want. When this happens, your subconscious mind doesn’t buy it. You start sending mixed signals and your intention gets lost. Before you do any ritual, ask yourself, what is it that I want? Why do I want it? How will this make me happy?

Your intention or focus requires another person to change

Requiring someone to change means imposing your Will on others. Just like you have intentions, your target also has his/her own will and intentions. If the two are in conflict, you’re not going to get what you want. Let’s put it this way, if you really want to make someone love you, trying to put a spell on them (or exposing them to red kryptonite or a hypnotic stone or whatever else you see on tv or in books/comics/games) is a sick way of doing it.

You give up too soon

Some things take time and effort. If you’ve asked for a million dollars, chances are, you’re not going to get it tomorrow and it’s going to require serious work on your part to make it happen. As mentioned in a previous article, the purpose of doing rituals is to make your unconscious mind focus on your clearly articulated goal. It will then help you find ways to achieve your goals - maybe better paying job opportunity, another income stream, an inheritance you didn’t expect, or some other source of money - but it’s still going to take you a long time and extremely good financial skills to make, invest, and save that much.

Usually when people start out, they’re very self conscious about doing rituals. They think it’s silly to wear a robe, have a magic wand, light colored candles, chant in Latin, etc. The truth is that all of these things are just tools. They aren’t required to perform magick successfully.

Look at it this way, when you perform a ritual - any ritual, which may include saying words aloud, writing out an intention, meditating on a thought or image, lighting candles, displaying certain colors, burning incense, going through elaborate ceremonial rituals, etc - what you are doing is telling your subconscious mind that this is what you want and to make it happen.

It’s a lot like method acting. If you’ve ever studied the methodologies of Uta Hagen, you’ll know that method acting focuses on using props and re-creating scenes and emotions as if you’re experiencing them in real life. If you need to eat a bowl of cereal on stage, you should have a bowl of cereal (or something similar) in front of you and eat it during your performance. If you need to emote a certain emotion, you should think back to a time when you felt that way in real life and use that experience to make your current scene real to you.

Your subconscious mind must believe in what ever you are asking for at that present moment in order for magick to work. That’s why newbies must go through the motions of performing the rituals. If you need proof, try the method acting approach. Ask your friend to eat a bowl of cereal WITHOUT actually having a bowl, spoon, cereal, or milk on hand. Watch them pretend. Then observe them eating a real bowl of cereal with a spoon. It looks more natural, doesn’t it?

That’s because when your friend has the tools (bowl, cereal, milk, spoon) present, they are more fully present in the moment, understand exactly what their goal is, and can take the appropriate action. Without the tools, they are just improvising. They’ve probably never thought through every motion that goes into eating a bowl of cereal even though them may do it every day. So when they perform the act without the tools, it will look fake.

Just a simple ritual of writing down your goal can be very effective. The classic example of this is the 1979 Harvard study which asked its MBA graduates ‘Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?’ 3% had written goals and plans. 13% had goals but not in writing. And 84% had no specific goals at all. Ten years later, the researchers found that the 13% with goals not in writing were making twice as much as the 84% with no specific goals. And the 3% with written goals were earning on average 10 times as much as the other 97%. (See Brian Tracy’s Goals)

Rituals help you create clarity in the present moment while telling your subconscious mind and the universe that this is what you want. Make it so.

This is a continuation of What is magick?.

A second common theme that goal setting and motivational books and audio explain is called the ‘Law of Attraction.’ The Law of Attraction states that you attract what you focus on. Most people focus on negatives and what they don’t want. Try, for instance, to get through a day WITHOUT complaining about anything. People complain because they want sympathy. And the opportunity to vent - ‘you think that’s bad, wait until you hear my story.’ Negativity is all around us. Just turn on the news or listen to the water cooler gossip at work.

Of course, if you’re always focused on negative things, you train yourself to see negative and bad things. You look at the world with a pessimistic point of view. If you’ve ever seen Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant movie, Pi, one of the takeaways is that the more you focus on something, the more you find it in life.

Going back to our working definition of magick, ‘any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will,’ all of the negative things in your life are occurring because you attracted them. Now, imagine if instead of attracting negative things, you attracted the positive things you want. Instead of attracting debt, you attract money and net worth. Instead of attracting loneliness, you attract love.

No one wants to be around people that complain all the time or put other people down to make themselves feel better. Remember the last time you were in a room with someone like that? It changed the room’s atmosphere and made everyone feel worse. Now, remember a time when you were with an upbeat, positive person who did something nice for you out of the blue or made you laugh. Didn’t that cheer you up?

The point is that you can choose to look at the world with any lens you’d like. You can be a pessimist or an optimist - but note that what you train yourself to see on a regular basis will determine what you attract to yourself. Pessimists, for instance, are suspicious when good things happen. They assume that their string of luck will run out - and sure enough, it’s not long before it does. Optimists, on the other hand, can be happy even if bad things happen because they know things will turn around and they’ll get back more than what their putting in.

Of course, while positive thinking is powerful, it is possible to delude yourself. If, for instance, you’re certain that you are destined to win the lottery so you can retire early and life will be smooth sailing, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

Let me first say that I am not a member of any magickal group or coven nor do I have any desire to join one. I have studied religious and occult texts for the last 10 years and have a degree in Religious Studies. My understanding of magick comes from lots of reading, introspection and application.

With any discussion of magick comes a lot of misconceptions. Most people think of video games, Hollywood movies, or various tv shows where practitioners can teleport or fly, throw fire or lightning, have super strength, or summon spiritual entities or demons to appear in this world and fight for you (ala Buffy or Charmed). This is all Hollywood special effects and fantasy.

My definition of magick is based on the writings of early 20th century mage, Aleister Crowley. Crowley has a notorious reputation because he liked to push boundaries at a time when society wasn’t as open about homosexuality or religious tolerance as it is now. He was heavily into numerology and often associated himself with 666, the number of the Beast in Revelation. This, of course, led many people to believe he was a Satan worshipper. I don’t buy it. He was a very eclectic character but if you’ve ever read his writings, he’s quite passionate and articulate about his dedication to the magickal arts.

Anyway, his definition of magick is simply ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.’ In his magickal handbook, Magick in Theory and Practice, he writes in Chapter XIV

What is a Magical Operation? It may be defined as any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will. We must not exclude potato-growing or banking from our definition. Let us take a very simple example of a Magical Act: that of a man blowing his nose.

What he’s saying is that anything you bring about because of your Will or intention can be considered Magick - supernatural or not.

I’m not going to discuss contacting spiritual entities here (see the excerpt from the Goetia). Instead, I’m going to try to explain magick in terms of modern goal setting and motivational terms. I think that both philosophies take a similar approach to getting what you want. However, magickal language tends to be a bit more confusing and cryptic to newbies. There’s so much to learn and read that it can be overwhelming. With goal setting literature, the language is much more clearcut and easy to understand when they discuss empowerment, intention, and focus.

Of course, there are big differences. Magick has a mystical/spiritual component that you don’t find in most of the self help guru genre. And, a lot of self help gurus come off as arrogant bastards (although you can probably say the same for many magicians.)

Anyway, if you’ve ever read any books on goal setting or learning to become a millionaire, a common theme that pops up is about accepting responsibility for where you are right now, figuring out exactly what you want, and then taking steps to get there.

Most people, however, don’t want to accept responsibility for where they are right now. They blame their parents or family members, lack of money, their significant other (or lack of), their job or boss, or just about anyone else they can for where they are right now. This causes a ‘victim’ mentality where people start to say ‘I would be happy if only [I got paid more, I liked my job, my spouse/family/friends would change, I had a life partner, etc].’ The key to all of this is to be able to take a step back and ask yourself ‘why is my happiness dependent on these things? Why can’t I just be happy now?’

It’s a different state of mind because it requires you to take a hard look at yourself and reflect on why you don’t have the things you want and why that is undermining your ability to be happy. When you start looking at your life as a series of choices you’ve (not anyone else) made up to this point, you start to see that because of your actions, you’ve ended up where you are.

That’s the mentality of a magician. Magicians see life as a series of choices and events that they have some control over.

You always have a choice - even if you say you don’t, no one is holding a gun to your head and making you stay in that dead end job or lousy relationship. At any point, you can choose to walk away. Perhaps that’s not your ideal situation, but it is a choice.

HistoryOfMagick.com is a spinoff site of DeliriumsRealm.com. Right now, virtually all articles on the site were once published there but that will change.

I tried to sum up the purpose of this site in the Purpose section of the About page as well as clarify why I’m using the word ‘magick’ rather than ‘magic’ for the site.

My main reason for starting this site is that DeliriumsRealm was covering too many topics (imho). By giving the topic of magick its own site, I feel like I have so much more freedom… or at least a lot more organization.

You’ll notice a lot of old dates on the articles. That was when I first published them on DeliriumsRealm (more or less).

It seems there is an increasing number of cases in Fiji where communities are taking matters into their own hands and attacking or vandalising the property of those they suspect practice witchcraft, says a recent news article.

The article focuses more on the vigilante aspect - noting that witchcraft is not illegal in Fiji. Those that are suspected of witchcraft can be charged with disturbing the peace…

That’s not good enough for some people. Local Magistrate Syed Mukhtar Shah recounts an incident with a carpender who entered an elderly man’s house and threatened to kill him.

Rusiate Vulaono, 28, of Matavolivoli, Nadi, pleaded guilty to criminal trespass by night.

In mitigation, Vulaono said he was angry because his father-in-law died and he went to “fix the man up”. Mr Shah asked him who was the tevoro and Vulaono told him it was Moro. “I’m the biggest tevoro here, Mr Shah.”

Some commonly mentioned tevoro (devil) names are Moro, Tatanasui or Dakuwaqa. Dakuwaqa was the fierce Shark God of Fiji. Dakuwaqa was eventually defeated by a large octopus, who made him promise never to harm any people from Kadavu. (source)

Journalist Bamuturaki Musinguzi recently talked to Dr. Nelson Musoba, a programme consultant with the Private-Public Partnership in Health (PPPH), about the African government’s decision to regulate and protect traditional healers. Because community members often see a traditional healer before they seek out medical treatments, the government has decided to train and educate these healers on safe and sanitary medical best practices.

The problem is that traditional healers are often mistaken as practicing witchcraft and victimized and/or killed so they’re taking preventative action to distance these healers from witches. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

What is the difference between witchcraft and traditional healers and how will the law draw the boundaries?

Witchcraft is a very negative practice and concentrates on doing bad to a person while traditional and complimentary medicine looks at bringing good health to an individual.

There is the Witchcraft Act, which spells out clearly how the trade should be dealt with.

The draft policy lays down who a traditional healer is, the accreditation, licensing, control, regulation and how one gets into healing. And the purpose of the policy really is to ensure that a statutory council comes into place so that it is able to stamp out the current bad practices of human sacrifices and mutilation, many of which we get to know of from the media.

Why is it that witchcraft has painted the entire practice as evil?

It is common that negative things are over pronounced and one bad thing will destroy all the good done and that is why witchcraft has taken a large share of the bad advisement of the industry.

There are many good things that healers do but they may not have been very strategic in marketing themselves because it is believed that over 60 percent of the population will either contact healers as the first point before going to a health facility or resort to them when they have failed to get a cure from the health facility. And if indeed the practice were bad, then we would not be having such a large number of the population relying on traditional healers.

How is the government going to bring traditional medicine on board the main health delivery systems?

First of all, the traditional healers are found in the communities so they can be trained on methods of hygiene, used as conduits of other community health programmes (pass on messages that do not need a high level technical knowledge), offer safe practice and discourage them from things that endanger health.

The intention to work with traditional healers is both to strengthen them in what they are doing and also to get them to work on the government programmes.

Here are a couple of recent articles here that show that the belief in witchcraft is still prominent in certain parts of the world.

The Islamic Republic News Agency reports that another man was lynched for practicing witchcraft in India’s northeastern state of Assam. Over the last 4 months, there have been 55 deaths related to witchcraft in the area. According to the article “about 200 people are killed every year in Assam by mobs who accuse the victims of practicing witchcraft or sorcery.” Here’s a snippet from the article:

“It is shocking that even in this age you find about 200 people killed each year in the region, inspired by superstition. The primitive practice of so-called witchcraft is common among the tribal people and is a cause of concern,” district magistrate of Kokrajhar, Hemanga Kishore Sharma told IRNA by telephone.

“We need to get rid of these practices and beliefs, to save innocent lives being lost.” The majority of tribal Bodos, who practice an indigenous faith called Bathow, worship trees. But superstitious beliefs, black magic and demonology form an integral part of tribal customs.

“Most of these bizarre killings are taking place within the Bodo community who believe in witches and their apparent supernatural powers that can be used to both cure ailments and cast spells on adversaries,” said Kanan Basumatary, a college teacher and rights activist in Kokrajhar.

In other news, there was a rather lengthy article in the The Independent on Saturday about witchcraft in Africa in light of a recent murder of an elderly couple.

African witchcraft - the belief that certain natural objects such as plants and animals, dead or alive, and even human body parts can be manipulated to produce an adverse effect showed its ugly face again this week when an elderly couple, Robert Myeni (86) and his wife Nomathamsanqa Qola (85) were attacked by an angry mob while sleeping in their two-room shack in the early hours of Sunday morning.

They were stabbed, wrapped in garbage bags and petrol was poured over them and around the house before being torched. Their terror-stricken grand-daughter, Zandile Sukude, fled and was only found on Wednesday.

One of the points the article makes is that it’s tough to police accusations of witchcraft. How do you prove the supernatural intervened and caused misfortune or death? The police can’t do anything unless the witch/healer has actually killed someone - either during a ritual or for their body parts. So, locals take it upon themselves to seek justice. They form vigilante mobs and go after the suspected witch.

Judge President of KwaZulu-Natal, Justice Vuka Tshabalala, said: “The question we need to ask ourselves is how do you prove that someone has cast a spell on you. It is an allegation that is usually cooked up in the community.

“It would be impossible to prove that a witch is responsible for your bad luck. That is the reason that these claims do not reach police and are dealt with by the community.”

On the other hand, when people believe so strongly in a set of beliefs in the supernatural, it’s difficult to break that belief. And because supernatural belief is so common among these people, lots of people end up involved.

Essay writer Richard Petraitis says “necklacing” of witches in South Africa’s Limpopo province was often caused by an accusation where someone says: “My neighbour caused the lightning which killed my cow during the thunderstorm last week. I know he is a witch, because once when he did not know I was watching him, I saw that he had no shadow.”

“In many cases, the victim’s entire family will be subjected to the same punishment, whether or not they attempt to protect him.

“Observers suspect that jealousy sometimes lies behind accusations of witchcraft: a disproportionately large number of victims of “necklacing” (defined) recently have been the most prosperous or successful or well-educated in their communities,” writes Petraitis.

The article lists a number of cases involving African witchcraft that have made the news in the last year.