What matters in magic, and what does not?
1. In magic, people often use rituals whose meaning they do not understand, yet they assume that the rituals must help. That is not so:
1.1. Anything that has no meaning for you carries no knowledge either. It is not enough to Will; you must also Know. A ritual therefore acquires significance when you fill it with meaning.
1.2. Every action should have a meaning: the movement of a hand, the recitation of an incantation, the names of an angel or a demon. If you do not understand a particular component of the ritual, it will have no significance for you within that ritual.
1.3. Anything you do during a ritual without understanding its significance contains the seeds of a cargo cult.
1.4. Unfamiliar ritual actions may be useful, at most, as a way of entering an altered state.
1.5. Some unfamiliar actions do have functional meanings, such as using the left and right hands in connection with the brain’s hemispheres. Everyone remembers that the left is associated with logic and the right with emotion, but not everyone knows that the right also represents the experience of darkness and negativity, a descent into the unconscious, while the left represents the striving for light and knowledge.
2. Every ritual should be either conscious and meaningful or spontaneous. These are two different ways of understanding symbols.
2.1. When we know the meanings of symbols, we communicate our intention to the unconscious through symbolism.
2.2. When we trust our “intuition” and perform a ritual in a witchcraft or shamanic tradition, carrying out actions that our conscious mind does not understand, we instead release the unconscious to bring about changes through actions, incantations or visualisations.
2.3. Combining the first and second approaches gives the best result. For example, we may prepare the altar and the ritual space in accordance with the correspondences of a book such as 777, but then perform the ritual spontaneously, surrounded by those symbols. In this way, by releasing the unconscious, we use the symbolism we have established to give instructions for change.
3. Symbols do not have the same meaning for everyone. Their significance depends on differences of sex, age, social group, culture and other characteristics.
3.1. To a person from the north, a piece of ice may be a symbol of power and a source of magical resources; to someone from the south, it may symbolise death. There are many such examples.
3.2. It makes little sense to learn the symbols of Quimbanda if our cultural background leads us to perceive those symbols differently.
3.3. Suppose you have been told that a love spell requires wine, but you or its intended recipient cannot stand wine. In that case, the wine will have no symbolic value.
If incense causes you aversion, but a book or a website tells you that it creates harmony, it will create no harmony at all! There may also be psychological trauma behind such a reaction, in which case the outcome will be very different from what you were promised.
3.4. Therefore, before performing a ritual, examine all its symbols and consider whether they suit you personally or the person the ritual is meant to affect. Otherwise, you will end up complaining about “rituals that don’t work” and repeating other such profane nonsense. Greetings to all the profanes who “test rituals.”
4. Cargo cults, physiology and psychology. Some things provoke particular psychological and physiological reactions in us.
4.1. Gibberish composed of incomprehensible names may be useful as a way of entering a trance.
4.2. Certain sounds affect our unconscious in particular ways or lull our conscious awareness. Intonation does the same.
4.3. Moving the left hand is better for working with the dark side, and the right hand with the light. This has to do with the cerebral hemispheres.
4.4. An acrid smell causes mild stress and thereby brings us closer to what we may call a “demonic” experience. A pleasant sweet or fresh scent, on the other hand, brings tranquillity or a sense of freedom, which may be compared to “divine” contact.
4.5. Music supplies rhythm and overwhelms our conscious awareness, helping to release the unconscious. There is no need to beat a drum; a good pair of headphones is enough.