The Elodrym - Essays - Nature of Magic

The importance of faith in the practice of Magic is often not described very well in books, if the concept is touched upon at all. The truth of it is however, that faith is one of the most important influences on the successful practice of magic. It can be said:

That in which we place our faith is made manifest within our personal perspective of reality. In this way, the reality in which we live, as we perceive it, is a reflection of our own faith.

Everything is perception. In fact, the only time magic fails to produce the desired result or effect, is when our faith that it will fail is stronger than our faith that it will succeed.

All of the prayers, rituals, chants, spells, songs, and ceremonies are merely dressing. They are there so that we have something to put our faith in, because we are taught to have faith that we are powerless. In putting our faith in something else however, we are able to bypass this and achieve the results without having to attribute it to ourselves.

Does magick reside in a wand? A staff? A stone? A branch? A symbol? No.

Magick resides within us, and is used whenever we have faith. The wand works because it is easier for us to have faith in the wand than to have faith in ourselves. The stone has power because it is simpler to believe in the stone than to believe in ourselves.

We have a horrible tendency to devalue ourselves and regard ourselves as powerless and weak. We do a very good job of convincing ourselves that we couldn’t possibly have the kind of power that some mystical seal or talisman is capable of producing. This is simply not true.

If you want to measure your faith accurately, look at the world around you. Look at your first, instinctive feelings and reactions to the people and events that occur. Do you immediately think “As if I would ever win!” when playing the lottery? Is it that you are afraid of what others will think of you when you go out, or are you in reality afraid of what you would think of you if you were someone else? This is our true inner perception of ourselves, and it is this that we send out to be manifested into the reality we experience. We do this every instant of every day. At no point in our entire lives from birth to death and beyond, are we not using magick.

Now that we have determined that magick always works, and that at no point are we not using magick, it’s time to start looking at what we are creating… what we are manifesting into our reality. If we put our faith in failure, as we often do, then we will be using our power to cause failure to manifest into our lives, but if instead we put our faith into success, then that is exactly what we will get.

So when you are learning (or using) magick, and it doesn’t seem to work, instead of blaming the magick or simply giving it up as a fairy tale, try asking yourself if maybe, just maybe, it didn’t work because you honestly didn’t believe it would.

So if this is really all there is to magick, then why is there such a fuss made about ancient secrets and mysteries of magick? Because though the principle of faith is really all there is to it, and though it can be learned quickly, it takes a long time to truly understand it. Because of this, most methods for teaching magick usually veil this within the lessons so that over time the student will realize it on their own. It is the need within us to build self confidence through longstanding and traditional methods that give rise to the creation of the veil of mystery and secrecy. We are able to place our faith outside of ourselves and within the methods themselves and slowly bring that faith back inward through practice and success, pride and learning, until we are able to shed the belief that we ourselves are incapable of having power.

In other words, the secrecy and mystery are tools commonly used as the building blocks for personal confidence and faith in oneself necessary for the effective and conscious use and working of magick. In this, they are like the wand, the staff, and the stone. They are convenient alternatives for our faith so that we can safely avoid having to have faith in ourselves. All of our world’s deity-worshipping religions exist for this same purpose. They create an image of a divine being which (whether it exists or not) allow us to put our faith in something that we perceive to be “greater than ourselves”. In short, it is easier to have faith in the power of a deity than to have faith in one’s own.

There is a simple test you can do to discover the truth of this for yourself. Look up the stories of very successful people. Ignore your biases. You will find that they all have something in common, regardless of their religion or culture. They all had confidence in themselves, the faith that they would be successful, and the will to make it so.

In the end, it is still only our own faith that causes results and intent to manifest, whether we attribute that success to divinity, ritual, or a specific tool or superstition. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the individual. Attributing the outcomes of one’s faith for instance, to a divine being, gives a person a way to alleviate feelings of guilt and disassociate themselves from the perceived need to take responsibility for an outcome, because they can attribute a “bad” event to divine will, rather than the application of their own inner faith. They can safely ignore the fact that they wanted the event to happen, because it is no longer attributable to their own actions. I.E. they did not outwardly cause anything to happen, regardless of whether they “prayed for it” or not.

Along with this is the problem that arises when that within which we place our faith is removed from us and we are left, in our own perception, “powerless”. A good example of this is, if you’ll pardon the reference to fantasy, the character of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien, who, regardless of his knowledge, can be rendered powerless simply by the removal of his staff.

Another example from modern mythology is the idea that if the priest were to lose his cross or bible he would be rendered powerless and be at the mercy of evil spirits or the devil.

If you put your faith in a stone, and so long as you have the stone you have great luck and power, what happens if you lose the stone? In your perception, you lose the “source” of your power, but in truth, you lost a rock. The source of your power is still with you because you haven’t lost you, which is where the stone’s power came from in the first place.

So where does this leave us on our journey towards mastery? It leads us to one of two directions, either mastery of self, or giving up completely. Let us hope then, and in hoping, let us assume, that neither you nor I will give up completely, since in doing so, we give up not only on magick, but on ourselves.

Who are you? Are you defined by your name? your job? Your car? Your style? Your clothes? Your achievements? Or perhaps your failures?

While these things provide an outward reference for others to use to determine who we are and help to separate us from others so that we are memorable and unique, they do not inwardly define us. When we ask ourselves who we are, we usually find it difficult to come up with a satisfactory answer, and find that maybe we don’t really know. But how can a person not know who they are? The concept seems absurd, and for a very good reason. It is absurd. What we often don’t come to realize until it is too late is that who we are is not so much a definition as it is a process.

The inward definition of who we are is not a verbal answer to a question, but is instead an active decision. Who we are, then, is who we choose to be, based on our own decisions, desires, and intent. So, instead of asking yourself Who you are, get out a piece of paper, and write down a small list of things you choose to be. Keep them simple and realistic. Things like “I choose to be an honest person” or “I choose to have good health” are good. Things like “I choose to scale the empire state building” or “I choose to be the king of Persia” are probably not good things to write down.

Here’s an example list.

• I choose to be helpful to those around me when I can.

• I choose to be as honest as I can be.

• I choose to not feel guilty for things I can’t change.

• I choose to feel worthy of my own respect, and earn the respect of others.

• I choose to be happy and make others happy when I can.

• I choose not to feel guilty when I cannot make others happy.

• I choose to be successful.

• I choose to not be afraid of what I think others will think of me.

Try to come up with as many as you can, but make sure that they are actually your choices. If you make them at all unrealistic or unachievable, then you would only be actively setting yourself up for disappointment. By making this list, you are actively defining who you personally choose to be. Now here’s the trick… You have to make these your goals. Work towards them, and don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t follow them perfectly. It is, after all, a process, and the only true failure is to give up.

When you have an active list of qualities and choices and personal goals, then you know who you are, because you have actively chosen who you will be. If you put down “I choose to be an honest person” then in doing so, you are actively choosing to not spread misinformation. This is of course the part that most of us have difficulty with. If I were to say “I choose to be good at math” and don’t work to learn math at all, then this simply becomes a delusion, and I end up trying to convince myself and others that I am good at something I am not. In short, it becomes a lie. However, if I say “I choose to be good at math” and I do try, but find that I have a lot of difficulty with it, that is not a lie, nor should I feel guilty in this case if I make a mistake on a math problem or forget a particular formula. So long as I make the effort to learn math and try to become good at it, then it is an accurate statement, because it is a statement of my own inner choice to become good at math.

This list is a list of choices of what you have decided to become, and so it is an accurate statement of who you are because who you are is the active process of becoming who you have chosen to be. Do not be afraid to amend, append, or edit, or completely recreate your list. After all, what you chose when you wrote it might not be what you choose later on, since we are always learning to see things in new and different ways, and our experiences in life help to shape the choices we make. We each have a long road ahead of us, and where we end up might not be where we at first set out to go, but that doesn’t mean we can’t end up where we choose to be.

Everything we do, say, and even think has an outward effect on the entire world. We are interconnected in extremely subtle ways. For instance, thinking that you are unworthy might lead to making a bad career choice. While in that career, you may do things you don’t like and be put in a position that goes against your moral code. The depression, stress, and anxiety you experience in this situation then effect your actions and reactions in your nonworking life. You may end up having a negative influence on those around you, which in turn affects their thoughts about themselves, which influences their actions, which influences those around them, etc, ad infinitum, like ripples in a pond.

The problem is that these ripples will continue to spread and influence others even long after we are gone. Imagine for a moment how an angry outburst today that causes a scene and upsets a small group of people might continue to have an impact decades, centuries, even millennia from now, and spreads across the entire globe. To many, this idea seems far-fetched and reaching, but those same people will admit they don’t believe it simply because they don’t want it to be true. Why?

Because it would mean that they have the burden of responsibility for their every offhand comment and unthinking action, not just on a scale of a few people, but on a global level. That’s a lot of guilt!

But it doesn’t need to be, because it also means that we have the ability, through compassion, kind words, and very small actions within our everyday lives, to influence the entire world to make it a better place! The point here is not to think of the past choices and decisions as “bad” but rather to think of them as something to learn from. If we do something that we end up regretting later on, be it from a change in our own perspective and belief, or simply because we didn’t fully understand the situation, this does not make a person “bad”. Instead, it helps them in the creation of their own future by acting as a guideline for their future choices and actions. A mistake is only a mistake if we continue to make it without learning from it.

So what does all this mean for someone who wants to learn magick?

·Everything we think, say, and do has a lasting global affect.

·What we think of ourselves affects our faith, which in turn produces an impact on the effectiveness of our magick, either positive or negative.

·Changing our perception of our self changes our confidence and faith.

·At no time do we not use magick, and at no time does it fail to work

·Who we are is a continual process of conscious self definition.

·Our individual perceived reality is completely unique to us, and is entirely the creation of – and based on – our faith.

To put it another way, you cannot see beauty until you first have faith that there is beauty there to see. So long as a person believes that there is no beauty or good in the world, they will never be able to see it. The same goes for wealth, love, and even happiness. So long as a person believes they cannot or will not have these things, they will not experience a reality in which they do, because the reality which they are actively creating is one in which these things aren’t present. Indeed many times, they will ignore the opportunities that are there because they can’t see them, because they don’t have faith that they can exist.

With all that said, what are you creating in your reality? What do you honestly believe?




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	The Nature of Magic by Myrddin Arkayne Magii The importance of faith in the practice of Magic is often not described very well in books, if the concept is touched upon at all. The truth of it is however, that faith is one of the most important influences on the successful practice of magic. It can be said: That in which we place our faith is made manifest within our personal perspective of reality. In this way, the reality in which we live, as we perceive it, is a reflection of our own faith. Everything is perception. In fact, the only time magic fails to produce the desired result or effect, is when our faith that it will fail is stronger than our faith that it will succeed. All of the prayers, rituals, chants, spells, songs, and ceremonies are merely dressing. They are there so that we have something to put our faith in, because we are taught to have faith that we are powerless. In putting our faith in something else however, we are able to bypass this and achieve the results without having to attribute it to ourselves. Does magick reside in a wand? A staff? A stone? A branch? A symbol? No. Magick resides within us, and is used whenever we have faith. The wand works because it is easier for us to have faith in the wand than to have faith in ourselves. The stone has power because it is simpler to believe in the stone than to believe in ourselves. We have a horrible tendency to devalue ourselves and regard ourselves as powerless and weak. We do a very good job of convincing ourselves that we couldn’t possibly have the kind of power that some mystical seal or talisman is capable of producing. This is simply not true. If you want to measure your faith accurately, look at the world around you. Look at your first, instinctive feelings and reactions to the people and events that occur. Do you immediately think “As if I would ever win!” when playing the lottery? Is it that you are afraid of what others will think of you when you go out, or are you in reality afraid of what you would think of you if you were someone else? This is our true inner perception of ourselves, and it is this that we send out to be manifested into the reality we experience. We do this every instant of every day. *At no point in our entire lives from birth to death and beyond, are we not* using magick.** Now that we have determined that magick always works, and that at no point are we not using magick, it’s time to start looking at what we are creating… what we are manifesting into our reality. If we put our faith in failure, as we often do, then we will be using our power to cause failure to manifest into our lives, but if instead we put our faith into success, then that is exactly what we will get. So when you are learning (or using) magick, and it doesn’t seem to work, instead of blaming the magick or simply giving it up as a fairy tale, try asking yourself if maybe, just maybe, it didn’t work because you honestly didn’t believe it would. So if this is really all there is to magick, then why is there such a fuss made about ancient secrets and mysteries of magick? Because though the principle of faith is really all there is to it, and though it can be learned quickly, it takes a long time to truly understand it. Because of this, most methods for teaching magick usually veil this within the lessons so that over time the student will realize it on their own. It is the need within us to build self confidence through longstanding and traditional methods that give rise to the creation of the veil of mystery and secrecy. We are able to place our faith outside of ourselves and within the methods themselves and slowly bring that faith back inward through practice and success, pride and learning, until we are able to shed the belief that we ourselves are incapable of having power. In other words, the secrecy and mystery are tools commonly used as the building blocks for personal confidence and faith in oneself necessary for the effective and conscious use and working of magick. In this, they are like the wand, the staff, and the stone. They are convenient alternatives for our faith so that we can safely avoid having to have faith in ourselves. All of our world’s deity-worshipping religions exist for this same purpose. They create an image of a divine being which (whether it exists or not) allow us to put our faith in something that we perceive to be “greater than ourselves”. In short, it is easier to have faith in the power of a deity than to have faith in one’s own. There is a simple test you can do to discover the truth of this for yourself. Look up the stories of very successful people. Ignore your biases. You will find that they all have something in common, regardless of their religion or culture. They all had confidence in themselves, the faith that they would be successful, and the will to make it so. In the end, it is still only our own faith that causes results and intent to manifest, whether we attribute that success to divinity, ritual, or a specific tool or superstition. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the individual. Attributing the outcomes of one’s faith for instance, to a divine being, gives a person a way to alleviate feelings of guilt and disassociate themselves from the perceived need to take responsibility for an outcome, because they can attribute a “bad” event to divine will, rather than the application of their own inner faith. They can safely ignore the fact that they wanted the event to happen, because it is no longer attributable to their own actions. I.E. they did not outwardly cause anything to happen, regardless of whether they “prayed for it” or not. Along with this is the problem that arises when that within which we place our faith is removed from us and we are left, in our own perception, “powerless”. A good example of this is, if you’ll pardon the reference to fantasy, the character of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien, who, regardless of his knowledge, can be rendered powerless simply by the removal of his staff. Another example from modern mythology is the idea that if the priest were to lose his cross or bible he would be rendered powerless and be at the mercy of evil spirits or the devil. If you put your faith in a stone, and so long as you have the stone you have great luck and power, what happens if you lose the stone? In your perception, you lose the “source” of your power, but in truth, you lost a rock. The source of your power is still with you because you haven’t lost you, which is where the stone’s power came from in the first place. So where does this leave us on our journey towards mastery? It leads us to one of two directions, either mastery of self, or giving up completely. Let us hope then, and in hoping, let us assume, that neither you nor I will give up completely, since in doing so, we give up not only on magick, but on ourselves. Who are you? Are you defined by your name? your job? Your car? Your style? Your clothes? Your achievements? Or perhaps your failures? While these things provide an outward reference for others to use to determine who we are and help to separate us from others so that we are memorable and unique, they do not inwardly define us. When we ask ourselves who we are, we usually find it difficult to come up with a satisfactory answer, and find that maybe we don’t really know. But how can a person not know who they are? The concept seems absurd, and for a very good reason. It is absurd. What we often don’t come to realize until it is too late is that who we are is not so much a definition as it is a process. The inward definition of who we are is not a verbal answer to a question, but is instead an active decision. Who we are, then, is who we choose to be, based on our own decisions, desires, and intent. So, instead of asking yourself Who you are, get out a piece of paper, and write down a small list of things you choose to be. Keep them simple and realistic. Things like “I choose to be an honest person” or “I choose to have good health” are good. Things like “I choose to scale the empire state building” or “I choose to be the king of Persia” are probably not good things to write down. Here’s an example list. • I choose to be helpful to those around me when I can. • I choose to be as honest as I can be. • I choose to not feel guilty for things I can’t change. • I choose to feel worthy of my own respect, and earn the respect of others. • I choose to be happy and make others happy when I can. • I choose not to feel guilty when I cannot make others happy. • I choose to be successful. • I choose to not be afraid of what I think others will think of me. Try to come up with as many as you can, but make sure that they are actually your choices. If you make them at all unrealistic or unachievable, then you would only be actively setting yourself up for disappointment. By making this list, you are actively defining who you personally choose to be. Now here’s the trick… You have to make these your goals. Work towards them, and don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t follow them perfectly. It is, after all, a process, and the only true failure is to give up. When you have an active list of qualities and choices and personal goals, then you know who you are, because you have actively chosen who you will be. If you put down “I choose to be an honest person” then in doing so, you are actively choosing to not spread misinformation. This is of course the part that most of us have difficulty with. If I were to say “I choose to be good at math” and don’t work to learn math at all, then this simply becomes a delusion, and I end up trying to convince myself and others that I am good at something I am not. In short, it becomes a lie. However, if I say “I choose to be good at math” and I do try, but find that I have a lot of difficulty with it, that is not a lie, nor should I feel guilty in this case if I make a mistake on a math problem or forget a particular formula. So long as I make the effort to learn math and try to become good at it, then it is an accurate statement, because it is a statement of my own inner choice to become good at math. This list is a list of choices of what you have decided to become, and so it is an accurate statement of who you are because who you are is the active process of becoming who you have chosen to be. Do not be afraid to amend, append, or edit, or completely recreate your list. After all, what you chose when you wrote it might not be what you choose later on, since we are always learning to see things in new and different ways, and our experiences in life help to shape the choices we make. We each have a long road ahead of us, and where we end up might not be where we at first set out to go, but that doesn’t mean we can’t end up where we choose to be. Everything we do, say, and even think has an outward effect on the entire world. We are interconnected in extremely subtle ways. For instance, thinking that you are unworthy might lead to making a bad career choice. While in that career, you may do things you don’t like and be put in a position that goes against your moral code. The depression, stress, and anxiety you experience in this situation then effect your actions and reactions in your nonworking life. You may end up having a negative influence on those around you, which in turn affects their thoughts about themselves, which influences their actions, which influences those around them, etc, ad infinitum, like ripples in a pond. The problem is that these ripples will continue to spread and influence others even long after we are gone. Imagine for a moment how an angry outburst today that causes a scene and upsets a small group of people might continue to have an impact decades, centuries, even millennia from now, and spreads across the entire globe. To many, this idea seems far-fetched and reaching, but those same people will admit they don’t believe it simply because they don’t want it to be true. Why? Because it would mean that they have the burden of responsibility for their every offhand comment and unthinking action, not just on a scale of a few people, but on a global level. That’s a lot of guilt! But it doesn’t need to be, because it also means that we have the ability, through compassion, kind words, and very small actions within our everyday lives, to influence the entire world to make it a better place! The point here is not to think of the past choices and decisions as “bad” but rather to think of them as something to learn from. If we do something that we end up regretting later on, be it from a change in our own perspective and belief, or simply because we didn’t fully understand the situation, this does not make a person “bad”. Instead, it helps them in the creation of their own future by acting as a guideline for their future choices and actions. A mistake is only a mistake if we continue to make it without learning from it. So what does all this mean for someone who wants to learn magick? ·Everything we think, say, and do has a lasting global affect. ·What we think of ourselves affects our faith, which in turn produces an impact on the effectiveness of our magick, either positive or negative. ·Changing our perception of our self changes our confidence and faith. ·*At no time do we not* use magick, and at no time does it fail to work ·Who we are is a continual process of conscious self definition. ·Our individual perceived reality is completely unique to us, and is entirely the creation of – and based on – our faith. To put it another way, you cannot see beauty until you first have faith that there is beauty there to see.** So long as a person believes that there is no beauty or good in the world, they will never be able to see it. The same goes for wealth, love, and even happiness. So long as a person believes they cannot or will not have these things, they will not experience a reality in which they do, because the reality which they are actively creating is one in which these things aren’t present. Indeed many times, they will ignore the opportunities that are there because they can’t see them, because they don’t have faith that they can exist. With all that said, what are you creating in your reality? What do you honestly believe?

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