WOTC Extra – Ritual and Magic

Ritual and Magic

The most exciting meaning of ‘ritual’ is connected to magic. There is an underlying belief that, if we do or say the right things in the right order, we will get what we want and open the enchanted door. Popular superstitions are connected to the belief that certain actions can bring about certain results by some means other than cause and effect – such as bad luck from walking under a ladder. Often there is some sound symbology underlying this. When we are young we more readily revert to ‘magical thinking’ – ‘everything will be all right as long as I don’t step on any of the cracks in the pavement’. As we mature we leave this behind in favour of the rational approach. Indeed, ‘magical thinking’ is considered by psychotherapists as a sign of mental or emotional instability.

However, if you take the view that we are architects of our own reality in a very real sense, magical thinking brings results. Not stepping on the cracks can be a little ritual to convince ourselves that we can indeed structure our lives. However, this is rather negative. It is a way of achieving an illusion of control, when we feel fearful and powerless, and in a sense we relinquish control in such a ritual, for it often turns into ‘I must not step on the cracks, or something dreadful will happen’. True magical ritual is a set of actions to convey intent, to focus the consciousness and to bring about change.

Magic, is the art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will. The change first takes place in the mind of the practitioner and extends into the ether, cosmos, call it what you will.

Metaphysicians in ever greater numbers tell us that it is we who create our own reality. Things don’t happen to us, they happen because of us, manifesting our conscious and unconscious beliefs and expectations. The only reason that we are able to ignore this, and argue with it is because of the time lag. Things take a while to happen and some take many years. In the higher dimensions, we are told, our visualizations take on immediate reality. Here, although it is a slower process, it is equally real. Scientific thinking, of course, rules this out. Science is the current tyrant, the sanctified dogma, although at the cutting edge, scientists are realizing that mind is present within all matter. One current joke tells how the most advanced and able scientists, when hauling themselves up the last few gruelling yards of the slope of Knowledge, come exhausted to a green and fertile place – and find that theologians and spiritual leaders have already been sitting there for centuries!

Sensible magical workers do not expect scientific laws to disappear, for the apple to rise from the ground and a fix itself back to the branch. They work within our reality perception, as it is at present, concentrating for the most part on changes within their own consciousness. Magic works in the direction of belief, not intent. It is what you believe that will materialize, not what you want and, if you don’t really believe that something will come into your life, all the spells and rituals in the world are most unlikely to have any effect. However, there is an exception to this and it arises with the unconscious mind. Symbols are powerful things, and despite conscious disbelief, if the inner you, your Younger Self, is convinced, you never know ….

Spells are a way of ‘spelling out’ what you want. You can achieve little or nothing in life without knowing what you want, defining it, being exact about it. Spells focus intent. Magical ritual alters consciousness, making change possible. The shift takes place, the call goes out. The results come back, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and often in ways we do not immediately recognize, but come back they do.

Spells and Rituals: A Beginners Guide To Spells And Rituals
Gabby Benson

Magical Thinking Or Magickal Living?

Magical Thinking Or Magickal Living?

Author: Stifyn Emrys

Do you believe in the tooth fairy?

Father Christmas?

Or yourself?

Children live in a world of magic and wonder, where knights rescue fair maidens from fire-breathing dragons, where witches command the elements with an incantation or a flick of the wrist. And we believe that somehow, somewhere we should be able to do the same.

We believe we should be able to keep mommy and daddy from fighting so much. That it’s within our power to stop our alcoholic uncle from drinking. That if only we could harness these magical powers, we could bring back the devoted puppy who played fetch for endless hours in our back yard and knew just when to wake us up with a playful kiss when it was time for school.

If only …

When I was 8 years old, that puppy – a Shetland sheepdog named Frisky – was hit by a car in front of our house. Mom told me she was dead, and no amount of wishing or hoping could bring her back. I shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. I shouldn’t have allowed her to get out of the house and now, worse still, I couldn’t bring her back. I remember calling her name again and again, but she simply wouldn’t come.

And I was convinced that it was all my fault.

Now, years later, I realize that it wasn’t. The world doesn’t revolve around me, and I don’t have the power to bring back Frisky with a wave of a magic wand. I’m simply not that powerful. But at the time, it was natural to believe that I was. “Magical thinking” is a psychological term that characterizes a certain stage of our childhood development (around the late preschool age) during which we believe we have control over our environment. We haven’t yet developed the capacity to differentiate between causation and coincidence, so we bemoan the fact that Daddy got sick because we threw a tantrum and refused to eat our peas.

As we mature, we leave that stage, but it can be tempting to return – especially if our lives are out of control. Our parents divorce, or Daddy hits Mommy, or we are sent away to school. We grow older, and we yearn for a simpler time, when the world wasn’t so complicated and (we imagine) there was magic at our fingertips. In individual terms, we seek a return to the playful innocence of youth; in a historical sense, we long for a golden age or Camelot, where magical forces were at work to ensure that all was right with the world.

But did such a world ever really exist? Was it ever really that easy? Or was it simply that we, as children, just weren’t ready yet to confront the harsh reality of life beyond our parents’ protection?

Magical thinking can be very seductive. And Pagans who fall prey to it, pass it on to their own children, taunting them with the promise that they can somehow control their environment through spellwork, visualization or mere force of will. If we do so as parents, we do our children – and ourselves – no favors. Have you ever tested a teenager’s will? It’s pretty strong already. Even without magical powers, teens are very much a force to be reckoned with.

But we fan the flames of this magical thinking with entertainment and literature that offers the illusion of control. We glamorize Witchcraft as a pop culture phenomenon on the level of the Backstreet Boys or Brittany. Teen Witches can use spellwork to achieve good grades – never mind cracking a book or studying for a test. And what about those so-called Witches on “Charmed”? That Book of Shadows works more like Aladdin’s lamp than a compendium of spiritual insight.

Pagans are hardly the only ones who indulge in such fancies. Christians cling tenaciously to such illusions as a virgin birth and a bodily resurrection, hoping by the force of their will to overcome their fears of sex and mortality. The greater the fear, the more severe the distress, the greater the temptation to seek shelter in that golden age that never was, in that Garden of Eden we never planted. People are afraid of death, of sexuality, of abandonment, of violence. So they hide behind a cloak of magic.

When we present the Craft as something out of “Bewitched” or “Charmed,” we dishonor our children as well as our tradition. (This is not to denigrate those series, which have value if viewed for what they are – pure entertainment.) The Craft is not something that can be mastered like a computer game or worn like a pentacle necklace or garb at a Ren Faire. To be a Witch, the word’s origins themselves tell us, is to be a “wise one.” And wisdom is not a commodity cheaply purchased or easily won. It comes, most often, with experience and trial. Do we therefore bestow this title too lightly? Do we forget that the wise women of the village were most often the crones, who had learned by hard experience to shed the cloak of magical thinking and walk spiritually skyclad in humility and oneness with their source?

The lesson they had learned was simply this: That to combat the temptation of magical thinking, we must move toward the practice of magickal living. What we must, in my view, accept is that the Craft is not about bending the environment to suit our will. That’s the kind of thinking that has produced global warming, rampant pollution, widespread starvation and mass extinctions. It is instead about honoring that same environment and coming to terms with it – and with our own true selves.

If we place ourselves at odds with our surroundings by seeking to control them, we isolate ourselves from the true source of all magick. Where then will be our power? If we, in our arrogance, declare war on Mother Earth, how can we prevail? Indeed, why should we wish to? It is only when we bring ourselves into harmony with the greater whole that we can achieve the truly wondrous. It is only when we connect with the source that we can transcend the narrow bounds of ego and step beyond the constraints of childhood fancy. No longer do we seek to control the source.

We manifest it.

We spend such energy tilting at windmills that we forget to ride the wind. We seek to compel the impossible, we deny the inevitable … but we dare not abide the unthinkable: That we are the magick we have spent our lives pursuing. We are the very change we strive in vain to manifest.

Father Christmas was your own dear father, placing gifts beneath the tree at midnight. The tooth fairy was your loving mother, who cared enough to leave a dime beneath your pillow. They were magick in these moments – and no less so if at other times they quarreled. If they lashed out at you in anger. If they left you when you needed them. If they divorced.

Magick is reality, affirmed in any moment.

We can’t mend our parents’ broken marriage.

Force an alcoholic to stop drinking.

Or a bigot to stop hating.

Or an army to stop killing.

We can’t bring a beloved pet back from the grave.

We can’t wave a wand and conjure up a happy ending.

Not by wishing or willing it.

But we can know our true selves, and be our true selves – secure in the knowledge that this, in itself, is enough. We won’t be able to foresee what wonders will be born of this; but wonders rich and bounteous are sure to manifest. The choice is ours alone to make: We can isolate ourselves in magical thinking …

Or we can empower ourselves through magickal living.

That, in my view is what it means to be a Witch.