Magic: Practical Glimpses

down the Rabbit Hole

Reality is never defined by science alone.

And fantasy is not fake.
In between the two lies change.
This was and always has been magic.
The science to change reality to our fantasy
Therein lies beauty and our highest art.
Magic.

David Barth
Falling down the Rabbit Hole

One little funny little situation I always find myself in, whether it’s a date or introducing
myself to a new friend, is if I should tell them about my “other side”. Knowing me, I am
absolutely horrible at keeping myself in check and so it usually ends up being a matter
of “when” rather than “if”. Because at the end of the day, I know how passionate I am
about magic (or magick) and the true mysteries of life. But the issue always remains -
how do you tell someone that you live and breathe something that is so commonly
judged as wrong and taboo by society? Truthfully, I do not have an answer to this
question, but the fact remains: ​magic is a living reality for me.

And it is almost an irony; I am a computer programmer with a background in the

natural sciences and yet, I find myself addicted to the world of the occult. The outside
observer could call this contradiction absolute madness or utter hypocrisy, but I believe
it could not be further from the truth. All of my experiences in reading and practicing the
rituals and spells of magic led me to expanding my perception of the world we live in.
The sad irony is that science, while powerful and beautiful, is painfully limited in
describing the beauty of the universe we live in. I won’t lavish people with a poetic
description of what magic seems to be; we already have enough Aleister Crowleys and
Golden Dawn occultists in the world. And yet, I cannot simply leave out some of that
pristine beauty that is magic like the Bardons of history; there is much more to it than
practice and moral dogma. Instead I would like to start with a small story.

My story is about how I ​got thrown​ into the world of mystery traditions and hidden
practices. It is not uncommon for people to be born into a world of magic; Lon Milo
Duquette definitely was. It is also easy to stumble upon the occult as if it were an oddly
shaped rock on your life path. Many come into wonderland for any number of reasons
and for many, the occult somehow finds you and invites you into its bizarre embrace.
This is how my story falls into place. I was thrown into it through nothing more than a
dream, but technically it was a nightmare more than a simple dream. Yet, what follows
from that nightmare is a journey; it is one of loss, gain, and expansion. My losses were
those of friendships which were weakened at the roots and cut away. My gains were
many: knowledge, new companions, and perspective. And my expansion is one of
deep note: the expansion of consciousness and of the spirit.
Grimoires and Psychology
​ rimoires and psychology. I know it’s a rather odd title to preface my own “awakening
G
story”, but it is accurate. I never really believed in the occult 2 years ago; my scientific
mindset and upbringing forced me to believe in the concrete. The concrete is always
that which is there in front of us, sensed by our own sensations and proven to us by our
attempts to measure it. In fact, the most immaterial thing I could believe in was our very
very concrete minds. Namely, I believed in our hearts and thoughts and little more. So
my most spiritual side was actually steeped in psychology; for me, psychology always
had value and utility, which were always key determinators in how I walked my life. But
what really lies at the bottom of my affair with psychology was the aspect of control.

The concrete dictates that it is easy to control the things we can sense. Detect
something with our senses and suddenly we can manipulate it as we fancy. At first, it
seems like the human mind, with all its fluid and ghost-like qualities, is not something
we can directly grasp or control in any fashion. Psychology, in all its fluidity, is still
somehow concrete enough for us to grasp and use in a sense. It provides the keys and
the knobs to work with the human mind. The point in my little deviation here is that
psychology represented the interface between the material and the immaterial. It
represented my belief in the concrete and my desire for my own control. By no means
am I a control freak, but the truth is that we scientific and logical types are obsessed
with controlling every aspect of our lives if we can. Yet our fellow human being is not
scientific and logical in the slightest (including me); so we yearn to learn and better
understand how to control ​our halves​ of the interactions with these unpredictable
creatures.

My own dive into the journey of control and mastery started with self-help books. My
first one ever: ​How to Win Friends and Influence People ​by Dale Carnegie. Even the
first 3 chapters alone held the keys to understanding and better controlling my
interactions with people. Books like these provided all the necessary pop psychology
and tools needed to travel further down a winding road to micro-management and
control. But the key things about us, these micromanaging types, is that we hate
uncertainty and chaos in life. We like plans and total predictability in our lives.
Ironically, life is never so providing for us. Circumstances are always unpredictable and
changing. This drives us mad sometimes, especially when life slaps us with the
unknown. Wouldn’t it be natural to want to jump from people to reality itself?
 After some months reading all the wonderful books of the self-help domain, I
meandered to other stranger topics. The most interesting one was about the
psychology and techniques of propaganda, the keys of the concrete human mind
applied en masse. ​Propaganda ​by Edward Bernays, proclaimed “Father of Public
Relations, is the book that got me started in this stranger turn. And curiosity drove it
even further; not even 40 pages into the books, my investigations into Bernays led me
on a goose chase that ended up with Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi party. The big
propaganda man of the Nazi party himself borrowed heavily from Bernays to power one
of the most effective human manipulation cults in history. Wondering where this is
going? The answer is simple: the Nazis and their occult ties.

Personally, I am never the one to buy too much into conspiracy theories and even
now, I still do not find much credibility to the whole Nazi / Occult ties. But what was
interesting was how heavily tied the Nazi Party was to propaganda as a literal mind
control tool, which ran in parallel to some of their supposed occult ties. What I should
really say is that I was fascinated by the occult’s ties to psychology, propaganda, and
control without all the Nazi stuff that comes out of it. And that’s where I will keep this
conversation going. At first, I was interested in my ability to control my own psychology,
then I was fascinated by being able to control my interactions with others, and now I
was interested in the occult’s ability to micromanage reality. Now, please don’t mistake
me for a megalomaniac, I swear I am not, but it is an incredible concept. This is what
led me to go and buy my very first grimoire off of Amazon: ​The Grimorium Verum ​edited
by Joseph Peterson.

Black Balls, Exorcisms, and Hallucinations

​ t this point, I should really pivot for a second and mention that the ​Grimorium Verum
A
is not a beginner’s grimoire by any means. The magic in this thing is powerful and the
spirits in it are very very mighty indeed. Now, is it dangerous? No, I do not think it is
dangerous. It is true that magic, angelic or demonic, can be dangerous or harmful if
directed inappropriately, but this is true for everything. A slice of apple can be
dangerous if we are stupid and swallow it whole, choking on it. Or, we could just chew
on it properly and swallow it properly and nothing bad happens. The spirit’s of the
Verum and the spirits of any grimoire are in fact not dangerous or evil themselves per
se. It is our intent and our ability (or inability) to petition and channel their power,
through our magic, that determines just how benign or dangerous they are. With that
said, humans are more dangerous in my opinion. Especially our own very fragile
psychologies and minds.
 When I ordered the ​Grimorium Verum,​ it had not arrived yet, but I told a friend of mine
about my order. My friend, Alex, had been in the world of spirituality and the occult for
longer than I had. To this day, I still don’t know what he experienced, but in retrospect, I
can at least say his psychology was a fragile one; it was rendered in brittle plastic and
more fluid than average. Upon telling him, he at first told me that I really was diving into
the deep end, because the ​Verum​ had a pretty shady reputation in the spiritual circles of
Western magic. But so far, he did not really try to blockade me and simply asked me to
be careful. And so I continued waiting for my little book of “black magic” to arrive. But
life is not so simple; something else happened first before I ever laid hands or eyes on
my book.

Some days pass and it’s now Samhain, ​ie ​Halloween. Samhain is commonly
considered the witching side to Halloween and how appropriate that my “pull” into the
occult starts here. I was asleep next to my then girlfriend (or romantic friends with
benefits) and I had an unsettling dream. On the surface this is not so scary or
particularly disturbing, but there was a sense of fear in it. Imagine a black ball or
sphere, bouncing in place, and then leaping at you. All goes black, but the word
“exorcism” rings constantly in your head. This was my nightmare, which woke me up in
a shock filled with fear. My partner wakes up and asks me “What is wrong?”. In my
shocked state, I screamed at her and she screamed at me. We were both panicked.
Oh and I forgot to mention it was 3 am, just shy of “witching hour”. Coincidences are an
interesting thing and certainly tell you a lot about things in retrospect. Was this event
supernatural? I don’t know, but it was a trigger for me.

What came next during November was a month full of fear and terror on my end. The
next day after the nightmare, my girlfriend said that I looked glassy eyed and I was a
little out of sync with reality. Most likely it was terror and exhaustion coupled with an
overactive imagination. But this is a pretty potent combination. During the next few
nights, I started seeing hallucinations, but nothing particularly supernatural or spooky
happened. One of my most memorable was about a blonde angel-like women whose
robes were torn and tattered just floating there and disappearing after a split second.
Another was a strange mutilated doll. But again, nothing happened. No one was
possessed and no one started floating like in the ​Exorcist m ​ ovies. Still for safe measure
I cancelled my order of the ​Grimorium Verum​ as this seemed to be a catalyst for the
nightmare in a psychological trigger sort of way. Still, something did happen to my
friend Alex.
Psychological Collapse and Immersion
During November, I desperately asked my friend to help me out with erasing the fear,
as if it were a supernatural attack. Initially, we bought a book of Christian prayers
designed to defend against occult threats and a smudging stick of sage. Two things
that were said to ward off negative spirits and bad energy. Operation smudging
occurred at night for 2 days where I went around my apartment walking around yelling
prayers with my smoking smudge stick. I yelled with more zeal and fervor than a bible
addled klansman, commanding my invisible enemies to depart in the name of a god I
still wonder about sometimes. Oh and I should mention my house had been utterly
fumigated with sage smoke, more so than any pest extermination process. So if any
ghoulies were there, I think they might have posted their move out date just out of sheer
annoyance of me, my prayers, and my smoke. I would have…

This period in November is also how I became acquainted with my first “magickal”
book. I bought ​Magickal Protection​ by Damon Brand and this marked my first true leap
into magic as a whole. I think I was more convinced about the ​Sword Banishing​”and the
Master Protection Ritual​ than I was about Christian prayers and sage. I started 33 days
of chanting and guided imagination, which helped to ease my fear a little with each day.
Did that mean I was beating true occult forces of evil? No. I just think it was
confirmation bias and time healing wounds. But this is how I got started in my own
journey to magic, with the Gallery of Magick’s work. From there, the Golden Dawn,
Goetia, and much much more comes into my life. For me, this was the start of my own
spiritual golden age, but the month of November 2018 was not without its casualties.

My friend Alex, at some point, started complaining mildly about nightmares and being
bothered by something. In a week, while I was chanting my little chants and waging my
own defensive spiritual war, he was slowly starting to become fearful, paranoid, and
angry at me. What started out as fears and nightmares evolved to what seemed like
legitimate panic attacks and episodes of psychosis. Psychosis gave way to hateful
delirium at one point, when he started to accuse me of “passing something” to him from
my initial experiences with the ​Grimorium Verum.​ He complained of Succubi draining
his energy, archangels condemning him while bathed in holy fire, and an imp-like
demon turning into a lotus flower while mocking him. At the worst point, he called me in
facebook voice chat, sounding like he had the life sucked out of him with a hoarse and
defeated voice. There is more, but let’s say it devolved from this point. The end result
was a minor psychological collapse and an abrupt end to a seemingly good friendship.
He cut contact with me at some point and it isn’t until later that I found out how things
turned out. Don’t worry, he’s alive and okay!
Our Fragile Minds
Reading this, I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking that this was a supernatural attack.
I got a nightmare, had hallucinations, and then started fighting back using legitimate
magical methods. Then whatever was plaguing me thought “Fuck this, I’m out. The
other guy is easier”. This is a tempting theory and the coincidences line up well.
Witching hour, Samhain, psychosis, psychological collapse, and massive doses of
supernatural fear. Yet, the beautiful thing about my current experience in the occult is
that I realize many things in hindsight. Lon Mili Duquette says that “it’s all in your head,
but you don’t know just how big your head is”. In a way, he is correct, but for the
magical theory he believes in. Instead, he is correct in how overwhelmingly powerful
our minds are.

Our minds shape our perception and our reality. The mind and imagination powers
reality and magic like a motor engine. Our thoughts can and often do become manifest
in different ways within our reality. Yet, even in the realm of psychology, our minds
shape our lives and our perception is colored by many many things. My friend Alex and
I are two very different people, with two very different minds. My mind is one of iron
determination, robotic rationality, and rigid skepticism. His mind was one of fluidity,
spirituality, kindness, and flexibility. Neither is better than the other in any objective
sense, but both hold different implications for our lives and for magic. Our supernatural
experiences are colored by the way our minds work; this has been the rule since day 1.
A mind of rationality and determination refuses to change or yield. A mind of fluid
creativity and spiritual flexibility is one that is easily swayed by life. My friend Alex had
this.

To understand why he underwent psychosis, one has to understand his life and
background. I will not say too many specifics out of respect for a former friend’s
privacy, but I will say some key things. He was born into the world as a paraplegic, to a
mother that was temperamental on a good day and a well meaning, but emotionally
distant father. His uncle, from the mother’s side, was a spiritual being in his own way,
but also a terrifyingly bad influence. This uncle led Alex down a road of spiritual
freedom, prostitution, and many more things, bad and good. All of this has its impact.
Being born with a disability is already a psychologically heavy experience to live. Add
emotionally withdrawn or abusive parents and you have a bad cocktail for growing up.
Finally, add an uncle who acted as a “bad father” and a terrible role model, and you
have a good recipe for someone with a rather fragile mind. His mindset up to that point
was one of kindness, acceptance, and compassion, but also one plagued by his own
literal demons and shadowy perceptions.
 I am no better in many ways. My parents are divorced. My father is, as of this time
writing, 3 times divorced and my mother remains the most emotionally confusing person
I know. I have been to the child custody courts more times than I can count, in one
sense or another. But my dad and my mother ultimately imparted better ideas to me
than Alex’s did when it comes to strength of mind. My father was a scientist by
background and my mother is the most rational person I know. Both gave me my
skepticism and rationality. My dad is stubborn and persistent; my mother is filled with
mental strength and determined iron. They also gave me these things. The result is
someone who is rigid, mechanical, analytical, and inflexible. But also someone with a
good base of resilience and a fighter. The differences between me and Alex reflect our
experiences in the world of magic and spirituality.

My ascent into magic was marked at the start by fear and superstition. But it was
continued by a desire to fight back and not give in to a runaway imagination. In time,
my mind tempered my beliefs so that I only believe what I directly felt and percieved.
Anything else, I left up to theory and time to resolve. My mind, as a result of who I am
and where I came from, decided to stay grounded in my reality to a strong extent. Alex,
however, was already a recipient to a strong imagination and a life more touched by
spirituality than mine ever was. He was more creative than me and he experienced
many more spiritual events. But the main problem with a mind forged by such a setting
is that it is subject to too much fluidity. This kind of mind is one that easily runs off out
of its own grounded reality into somewhere else. Is it somewhere real? Maybe. I do
not doubt that there is such a thing as delusional fantasy, but his mind was capable of
running in a direction that was not our immediate reality. This is a definitive conduit to
madness.

In magic, this is one way we interpret the term “grounding”. Grounding itself has many
different variations and interpretations. I take a very literal one; I believe grounding
literally involves dragging your mind back down to reality when we are too much in the
clouds. And sometimes we must also be in the clouds so that we can balance our own
interpretation of reality. This is also a way to view that very very canned hermetic axiom
“as above and so below”. Alex’s life led him to an imbalance where his mind was
naturally up in the clouds while my life was one where I was on the ground constantly.
Balance is one where we can exist in both. If you are always in the cloud, it is easy for
fear and paranoia to run amok in your mind and turn your own plastic and fluid beliefs
against him. This is why I genuinely believe that Alex had his own minor breakdown
when things spiraled. Our mutual fear of this event from Samhain affected us in
different ways because of our minds. There were never any demons, succubi or ill
intentioned archangels. It was in the mind, but the mind was bigger than we thought.
 This was my entry into magic. Psychology, grimoires, nightmares, and psychological
breakdown. It is still vivid in my mind 2 years later. I regret what happened to Alex, but
my entry into the world of magic was nothing short of magical in all the strange
extremes I experienced. It was all in the mind at that point I feel, but it was surreal.
Since then, I had more stuff backfire for me, many disappointments, and a stunning
number of successes. I have touched many things: evocations, angels, demons,
spiritual doctrines, theory, and more. My mind, my soul, and my heart were awakened
and expanded in different ways these last 2 years. But even so, I was pulled into this.
By what? I do not know. Perhaps it was because of my curiosity. Maybe it was a
legitimate supernatural calling. But the “why” is too complicated to answer now. All I
want to do now is talk about the various pieces of “what” in these experiences I have.
Somethings will truly be practical and analytical, meant to help the occultist or
practitioner. Somethings will be a little more esoteric and spiritual, which are perhaps
nothing more than my own musings. Either way, there will be a little of everything...
 Essay Collection I
Results Oriented Magic

We all have a thing we want in life.

Sometimes we get it, but other times we don’t.
Love, Money, Sex, Power, Status, revenge.
This is why we start magic.
But it is not always why we continue.

David Barth
What We Want in Life
We all know things we thirst for in life, but many such things are out of our reach.
These things can easily be things outside of our price range or a bombshell person we
feel that we could never attract. They can also be things like a job that we could not
ever get or a flow of wealth that we cannot generate. Let’s face the facts: many things in
life are indeed out of our reach and it can be painfully obvious. Life can spit it in our
faces and advertise our inadequate ability to get these things. It is our hunger for more
in life that drives us so instinctively to hunt for our desires. And for some of us, we can
get quite creative in our methods of hunting. This creativity is the reason why practical,
results oriented magic was born.

For many who start with magic, the Gallery of Magick and their collection of books is
devoted to providing refined magic that brings results. But the very human drive for
results oriented magic has existed for centuries if not longer. Books like the ​Ars Goetia,​
Grimorium Verum,​ and many more promise us spirits that can make our wildest dreams
come true. Want sex? Call the spirit ​Sitri.​ Want wealth? ​Bune​ and ​Clauneck​ have
your back. Wanna throw a curse? ​Andras​ could be your guy. All these spirits are listed
in the grimoires and are reputed to bring a staggering number of physical, tangible
results for the daring ritualist who calls on their aid. Also, just because I listed “demons”
does not mean that angels are not capable of the same level of concrete tangible
results.

Ritualists have been trying to hack reality for years now. The great part of living in
modern times is that we have so many books and authors who contributed to detailing
the nature of practical magic. The Gallery of Magic is one significant group, but we
have many others to thank. Jason Miller details much on results oriented magic in his
book ​The Elements of Spellcrafting​, which were the initial tips that helped me aim my
own rituals to achieve many things. If you read such a book, you will notice that I
include some aspects of these tips into my own reflections. But what follows are
actually directly from my own 2 years in the occult, trying to hack my own reality. I really
want to help provide even greater context and focus on the nature of results oriented
magic beyond just the typical things. Yes, the common aspects of practical magic such
as “result for result”, “don’t buy lottery tickets”, and so on will probably have to be
repeated, but there is so much room to expand on these things. What follows is my
take and my strategies on magic aimed at producing practical results for people.
Results Magic: Too Many Definitions
​ t some point, I will speculate and analyze my own take on what the true nature of
A
magic is. But I feel the nature of results oriented magic deserves a section of its own.
The first logical point that should be considered is a viable definition for magic. There
are several:

1. “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with
Will.” => Aleister Crowley

2. “Magick is the art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with the

Will.” => Dion Fortune

3. “Magic Is an Influence, Not a Cause” => Jason Miller

Yes, I lifted these straight out of ​The Elements of SpellCrafting​ (Jason Miller). Much of
what I say will echo what is already in the book, but I believe I can add a little more with
my own take on this concept. The first definition of magic (or ​magick)​ is easily the most
famous one by our own resident madman Aleister Crowley. In a way, he is not wrong
because the act of magic is trying to cause reality to bend in the direction that we want
it. But Jason Miller acutely points out that Magic is an influence, not a cause for
bending the universe to our wills. For the most part there is a lot of truth in this. But
results magic is more than just these broad and vague definitions.

Dion Fortune’s definition is perhaps more interesting than Crowley’s nearly

megalomaniacal definition. Her definition, being very based on the psychological model
of magic, focuses on how an act of magic will change our own minds to allow us to carry
out our own will. At least this is one way of interpreting her words. The wonderful
secret is that Crowley, Miller, and Dion Fortune are not wrong. Results oriented magic
is in fact all 3 of these things. In my eyes, the art of magic cannot be captured in any
singular definition, but rather we ​choose t​ he best definition for our situation and
perspective. We can translate these definitions into easier interpretations:

1. Crowley: Magic is an act that causes reality to go the way we want it.

2. Fortune: Magic is an act that makes our minds act the way we want.

3. Miller: Magic is an influence that helps reality to the way we want it.
 In Crowley’s definition, magic is something that can easily be ​external​ or ​internal​ to us.
An act of magic is something that can be applied towards the outer world and our own
inner world. And this act is something that can ​directly​ affect the outer world without our
direct involvement. Dion Fortune’s definition, however, can be interpreted very
differently. In her definition, one can infer that a magical act is something that changes
our mind / consciousness so that we may act upon the world to bring reality in line with
our desires. Personally, the big difference is that Fortune’s definition implies that we are
the ​only​ agents that change our reality after an act of magic. The spirits change us and
we change the world. Crowley’s definition allows for the spirits to be external agents
that directly affect us and the outside world. Both are completely valid interpretations.
In fact, different acts of magic are more fitting for one definition:

1. Crowley: Spiritwork, spells, rituals, ceremonies.

2. Fortune: NLP, Hypnosis, Suggestion.

The “acts of magic” for Fortune’s definition seem broadly different from Crowley’s at
first glance, but funnily enough they are equivalent. If you do not believe in spirits, then
a ritual or a ceremony can also qualify as a powerful act of suggestion or hypnosis in
order to create change in our own consciousness. Similarly, the use of ​neuro-linguistic
programming​ (NLP) can have many parallels to uttering a spell with the right intent. The
great thing about Miller’s definition is that it includes both things. Our own
consciousness is indeed an influence on the outside world through physical selves.
Sometimes our own selves are more effective than indirect spiritual influence and
sometimes it is the other way around.

All these definitions attempt to capture a picture that cannot be accurately described
by words. ​Magic​ was also defined in the past as anything that could not be described
by science. This by itself contains the most important clue of all; you cannot capture the
essence of magic in a sentence. Even if it is concrete results oriented magic. Instead, I
think magic is best captured as an intuition with a fluid almost art-like quality to it. With
an intuition, you cannot fully capture in a rigorous scientific way, but if you work hard
enough, you can still define it in a way that is useful. This is how I want to define results
oriented magic.
Results Magic: Influence vs Concern
The most important takeaway right now is that an act of magic is meant to have an
influence on the world. ​How​ and ​What​ mechanisms for this influence will never quite be
so clear. Previously, I defined many different possibilities as magic, ranging from
hypnosis to spirit work. One uses ourselves to influence our result, while the other one
uses a spirit to influence the result. Both ways are valid and both ways constitute acts
of magic. But again, both ways fail to be captured adequately by one overriding
definition. Instead, different ​mechanisms ​are best used to describe the influence of acts
of magic on our world. For mechanisms, we do need a ​model,​ which sadly will lack the
true rigor of a scientific model, but will be a great ​conceptual model​ for capturing the
“mechanisms” of magic.

For the conceptual model, I want to borrow a little concept from the self-help industry.
Stephen Covey is an author who wrote an amazingly effective and well known self-help
book called ​The Seven Habits of Effective People.​ Inside of this book, Covey
introduces the concept of ​The Circle of Influence vs The Circle of Concern. ​ These 2
circles are defined as:

1. The Circle of Concern: The circle that represents all the things in the world that
we cannot directly influence or impact through ourselves.

2. The Circle of Influence: The circle that represents all the things in the world that
we can directly influence and impact through ourselves.

In the self-help sense, Covey advocates that we proactively focus on our own circle of
influence rather than the circle of concern. After all, you cannot directly prevent war and
famine in the world; these actions are simply beyond your ​influence​ even though you are
concerned a ​ bout them. But, you can donate to a charity that aims to reduce war and famine in
the world. By doing this, you can ​influence t​ he world by giving a charity the resources to reduce
famine or war. Generally, Covey says that focusing on our circle of influence expands our
ability to influence the things that we are ​concerned a​ bout. The self-help sense of this advice is
extremely good advice and it really allows us to be more proactive individuals.

However, an act of results driven magic takes this concept a little deeper. Magic ​is an
influence​ and funnily enough it is an influence on a concern or problem we have. Covey’s idea
is actually broken by magic in many ways, depending on which ​form​ of magic is used. I will
explain a little further, but first consider the visual of the circle of concern vs the circle of
influence:
 I’m going to give 2 examples of magical acts that have different mechanisms in the context of
this circle model:

1. Spirit Work: You charge a spirit to make your crush fall in love with you.

2. Self-Hypnosis: You use some form of auto-suggestion to make yourself more confident
for your crush.

Using the circle model, you can separate the aspects of this situation as follows:

● Circle of Influence: You can directly control your interactions and your reactions with
your crush. By doing so, you maximize or minimize your presentation to your crush.

● Circle of Concern: Your crushes direct feelings for you. You might be concerned about
how your crush feels for you, but you cannot directly command their feelings.

Under this situation, it is very clear that you can do your best to present yourself as charismatic
and have sex appeal that makes Leonardo Di Caprio look like a slug. But you cannot control
how your crush will feel or react to your charisma and sex appeal. In normal circumstances, this
is your fundamental limitation. BUT, with magic things become a little bit more interesting. First,
I will consider the case of spirit work. In this case, you tell a spirit “Hey Man, can you use your
powers to make this person fall for me?” and the spirit says “Yeah sure bud, no worries”. Off the
spirit goes to do his thing. Now let us talk fit this into the circles of influence and concern:
 ● Circle of Influence: I sent a powerful spirit to capture the heart of my crush. I am still
responsible for how I act around my crush and my own efforts.

● Circle of Concern: I cannot control how the spirit will capture my crush’s heart. I don’t
even know if the spell or ritual will work, the result is in the spirit’s hands.

Assuming the spirit does succeed, something fascinating happens. Even though you cannot
exactly say ​How​ the spirit will interact with your crush, you now have a ​Bridge​ between the circle
of influence and the circle of concern. In an indirect way, you now have a “representative”
acting on your behalf in the circle of concerns. This means you have some level of ​influence​ in
an area you normally have no influence in. This is one mechanism of spirit work magic:

● Mechanism 1: ​Spirit work allows you to indirectly affect things outside of your direct
influence by having a spirit work as your representative for your concern.

This illustrates the power of magic. How do you affect the things you are concerned about, but
have no direct control over? You send a spirit or do a spell. This is a unique mechanism that
magic can do, which normal “mundane” means cannot do and it is the key advantage that acts
of magic have in life. If you take a look at case 2, the situation is actually closer to mundane,
but can still be consistent with magic. You probably use a self-confidence mantra, which you
may say 500 times in a day and let’s assume your auto-hypnosis works. For your date or day
with your crush, you are now a stud who is confident as hell. At the end you are doing
something different - you are still focusing on your actions by using the mantra. You are now
pushing your direct circle of influence outward towards your crush in the circle of concern. If the
circle of influence overtakes the circle of concern, you could call this a success. But this is still
consistent with Stephen Covey’s mundane mechanism:

● Mechanism 2: ​Mind / Consciousness work allows you to more powerfully influence

things directly by amplifying your own efforts in a way you control.

Please understand one caveat though. You might be tempted to think that you could use spirit
work to amplify your own actions, as in mechanism 2. The truth, however, is that you still have
no real control over how the spirit will amplify your own direct actions. This still means the
spirit’s actions are in your circle of concern and not your circle of influence. There are ways
around this, but this is the general case. So, these 2 mechanisms say a lot:

● An act of magic is capable of being mundane in nature.

● An act of magic can reach things out of our control
● Both types of magic can build on each other and complement each other.
 Of course, the most important mechanism by far is mechanism 1, where an act of
magic allows us to reach into our circle of concern and have some level of indirect
influence there. This is what is fully meant by Jason Miller’s definition of magic being an
influence. It is truly powerful in the sense that mechanism 1 means that we can add a
little “weaponized luck” to our side in a way where we can at least call some of the
shots. This is an added advantage to a situation we normally would not have. BUT,
there is a limitation to this mechanism. Though magic may be able to allow us to reach
out into our circle of concern without leaving the circle of influence, we cannot reach
Too Far ​out. This leads to a constraint on mechanism 1:

● Main Constraint: ​ There is a limit to how far we can reach from our circle of
influence into our circle of concerns via magic. If the circle of concern (things we
cannot influence directly) is too far from the circle of influence, our magic will fail.

This constraint is a key point that must be understood about results oriented magic. It
is for this reason why we cannot likely win a power ball lottery or mega millions by giving
a money spirit a stick of incense as an offering. It is also the reason why we cannot call
down a lightning bolt to strike down a politician we hate. This is another way of
interpreting Jason Miller’s definition that magic ​influences​ things but does not ​cause
things. To a certain extent, there are ways to bypass this constraint, up to a limit. But I
will be discussing these things in later essays. For now, I wanted to reshape what is
currently out there on how practical magic is supposed to be seen. Much has already
been written on it, but I believe this conceptual model should neatly and efficiently
summarize how we should look at results based magic. It says a lot on the true nature
of physical and concrete results.
Closer and Closer to Concern
​ reviously, the conceptual model of circle of concern and circle of influence was established
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as a way to see how magic affects reality. This model provides us with a unique and powerful
insight into how we may influence and engineer our reality a little more effectively. This model
also encapsulates the mechanisms by which we can work reality: ​reaching into our circle of
concern outside of the circle of influence​ and ​pushing our circle of influence towards our
circle of influence​. My concern in this section is to really delve into the former approach, which
is directly mediated by spirit work wherein the spirit acts as a way to manipulate the circle of
concern while being outside of our circle of influence. The main constraint of this mechanism is
that if the circle of concern was too far away from the circle of influence, then it would be harder
and harder to influence our reality. But now in this section, I wish to think about ways to budge
ourselves closer and closer to our circle of concern without pushing our circle of influence.

The main way to think about this is that the spirit also has a circle of influence, which lies
outside of our circle of influence, but exists in our circle of concern. This means that our circle of
concern is under the spirit’s circle of influence and thus our concerns are subject to the
influence of the spirit’s actions. However, concerns that are too far out of the spirit’s circle of
influence will yield crappy ineffective results. So we need to come up with ​a way to expand the
spirit’s circle of influence​. By doing this, we better enable the spirit to get us results that are
within our circle of concern. Now, there are several ways to do this and I will choose the
following most effective ones:

● Ritual offerings
● Linking rituals to ritual targets
● Choosing the right spirit

​ ach of these topics can be worth a book in its own right. In fact, at least the first one about
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ritual offerings is already a book called “Ritual Offerings: Feeding Your Spirits” by Aaron Leitch,
which is an incredibly helpful book for the subject and one that I highly recommend. Rather
than just go directly into topics related to sex / love magic, wealth / money magic, and general
influence magic, I want to really pin down the core fundamentals on how practical magic works.
Each of these things can be done with the circle of influence vs circle of concern model and I
will be attempting to use them to describe these aspects, but I will also do so in a more common
sense way too for maximum understandability. The most important takeaway, however, is that
each of these are particular aspects of spiritwork that affect your ability to manipulate reality in
different ways. Ritual offerings will affect the direct outcome of your ritual in a different way than
ritual linkings. Similarly, choosing a spirit whose power or office is wrong for the task will also
bring failure to a ritual. This is important to understand before I really dive into the particular
world of specific results oriented magic.

Ritual Offerings: The Battery for Spirits

 Ritual offerings are a common element of rituals in traditions ranging from the western
conception of “Goetia” all the way to African Tribal Religions (ATRs). The methods,
circumstances, and the offering types may differ, but the purpose of offerings will always be
quite similar across the board​:

● The main purpose of a ritual offering is to provide a battery source for the spirit to
use in our physical world.

​This is a lesson that I learned while reading the book “Ritual Offerings: Feeding Your Spirits”
by Aaron Letich and published by Nephilim Press. The crux of this lesson is very simple, as
explained by Leitch. Spirits exist in a plane higher than ours and less dense than our material
plane. We could say that they exist as energy forms or in less concrete matter than ours, but
the point is that they exist in a world or worlds that are separate from ours. This means that our
world is much harder for them to influence in a direct way than us, but the nature of a spirit’s
very existence seems to suggest that their indirect influence on physical reality can be more
powerful and widespread than our own. The mechanics don’t particularly matter, but I chalk it
up to the idea that spirits can affect chance and probabilities in ways we cannot. But, in order to
do this, they must have an “anchor” in our world to operate by, according to Leitch. This
foothold anchor is essentially an energy source that gives them more power to operate in our
physical world and affect things in a way that makes our results come true. This is the essential
function of ritual offerings.

Before going on to what this means in terms of the circle of concern vs circle of influence
model, I would like to briefly address why we should be more than willing to provide spirits with
offerings. There are many traditions which stress the importance of upfront offerings and there
are other traditions that stress leaving no offerings. In the latter case, the Goetia tradition (​Ars
Goetia)​ stresses that we command the spirits to do our bidding and that we are not obligated to
give offerings. In my experiences and the experiences of many others, this is an ineffective
practice that can be stopped and forgotten. None of us knows why specifically, but spirits like
offerings and it is a fairly well supported idea that leaving offerings will encourage spirits to do
what we want more readily and with greater power. On the other hand, it is also a fairly
common belief that we shouldn’t give an offering until we have seen our result happen. This is
viewed best as giving the spirit “payment” for its services which I do condone. But, if we
consider that an offering is a battery source for the spirit to operate on our request, then
perhaps it is smarter to take a midway approach like below:

1. Leave a smaller physical pre-offering to get the ritual going.

2. Give a larger, more valuable post-result offering as payment to the spirit.
 ​The benefit of this pre-offering approach is twofold. The use of a physical pre-offering is
something that will “jumpstart” the spirit’s ability to operate in the world towards our requested
result. The second larger payment offering is offered as “encouragement” to drive the spirit’s
efforts even further and to make it operate on your goal in the most effective way it can. This of
course assumes that a spirit is indeed an intelligent entity that feels encouragement or
motivation, but if you are here reading about spiritwork, then I will assume that! Overall, this
pre-offering / post-offering setup has been my most effective way to get successful results and I
found it far more successful than the other methods above. This two stage pre-offering method
is most effective for demonic work in my opinion, whereas angelic work doesn’t truly need this
type of setup. Still, even in angelic magic, it is helpful to have a complimentary “gift” such as
incense for the working in order to add a little more power to the ritual.

Now, I can start talking more about HOW the offerings actually target a spirit’s ability to operate
in our world. The clue is in the title of Aaron Letich’s book, specifically the part of “Feeding Your
Spirits”. Think about it like this: our ability to influence the world is fundamentally limited by how
much energy we have and we get our energy through food (and drink). We expand our circle of
influence in a very basic way if we eat enough food to get energy to directly work on aspects of
life. With less food, we have less energy and generally have a smaller ability to influence the
things directly around us and so our circle of influence shrinks. The exact same logic can be
applied to a spirit’s circle of influence. If we give an offering to our chosen spirit, we are giving
the spirit “food” to sustain and enhance its ability to affect our physical world from its own
spiritual world. The more food it has, the more it can influence our world with its own growing
circle of influence. Of course there are limits to this; you cannot offer an entire pig and hope for
the spirit to tear open a hole in spacetime. There is a fundamental limit to how much energy we
can give a spirit via offerings, but it generally helps.

So now comes the big question: which offerings are the best? The answer is that it depends,
which I am sure you saw coming. The truth is that it depends on your spirit, its nature, and even
what pantheon, cosmology or system it comes from. An African Tribal spirit will have a different
offering preference and set of offering protocols than a Kabbalistic angel or a Goetic spirit. But,
I will give you the answers that have worked for me in a western mystery context:

● Incense - Moderately Effective

● Semen - Extremely Effective
● Blood - Moderately Effective
● Alcohol - Moderately Effective
● Public Praise / Honor - Very Effective
● Food - Moderately Effective
● Specific Symbolic Offerings - Very Effective

​ hese are the typical offerings I choose to use in order to do my spirit work and power my
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results. Working from the bottom, we have incense, blood, alcohol, and food being marked as
moderately effective. In all instances except for blood, the other offerings in this category have
a moderate amount of energy that can be offered to the spirit, which allows them to do a
moderate amount of work in our world, so the results scale up nicely (in my opinion). Blood is
the odd one out because blood offerings are normally considered a “golden standard” in the
world of spiritual offerings, because they have the most energy to give to the spirit in theory.
But in my experiences, blood given as a pre-offering has not been so effective. Again, this is
my experience, as I have only tried a couple of times, but to very little success so far, so it is
something that remains to be seen.

In the category of very effective, we have specific symbolic offerings and public praise / honor.
The case of specific symbolic offerings contains a lot of nuance and complexity, but it can be
said that each spirit has its own set of preferences and correspondences. These preferences
are either found through personal experience of the practitioner, well established traditions or
derived from specific sets of symbolisms. Either way, these offerings are specific towards the
spirit in some way and are seen as being highly preferable to that spirit. For example, we have
a Venusian spirit wherein Sandalwood incense, a Venusian incense, would give it extra energy
and thus be preferred by the spirit. In the case of public praise and honor, I have had many
positive results come as a result of promising a post-result offering of lavish public praise. This
success has happened consistently whenever public praise is on offer, so it can only mean that
this is a great offering for spirits. The reason why is beyond me, but I can only guess that it
comes from the energy that is generated by the extra attention the spirit gets by people reacting
to the public praise or perhaps by the prospect of other people reaching out to the spirit. Either
way both of these offerings remain effective ways, especially for Goetic spirits.

Finally, we come to the case of semen, which is an extremely effective offering in my

experiences. I cannot tell why this is the case other than the fact that semen is almost as dense
with energy as blood is. But the only thing that I can say is that all of my most effective
successes have involved a combination of the above offerings and semen in some shape or
form. In fact, I would recommend that you use combinations of these above offerings or your
own offerings in order to best expand the spirit’s circle of influence so that it may best operate in
your circle of concern and get you a good result. Now, a lot of people from many traditions will
argue that I am insane for suggesting the use of blood or semen in rituals because these two
offerings can potentially bond the spirits to you and allow them to screw up your life. I am in no
position to judge these people; maybe they have bad experiences with this, but I personally
never have had problems with using these offering types. In some religions, such as African
Tribal Religions, there is perhaps a better argument to be made due to the nature of ATR spirits,
but for angels and most Goetic spirits, semen and blood offerings are more of a boon than a
danger when it comes to positive results. Let personal experience be your guide; don’t let the
words of dogma and traditionalists ward you away from what you find works for you because
everyone’s experience in spirituality is subjective.