Ceremonial magic began as the Great Work. The Great Work is not about getting a new Porsche, buying a house, or getting the perfect job. The Great Work is about transmuting your soul so that you can be enlightened. Drawing sigils, calling upon angels, and using your subconscious and spiritual power to manipulate the world around you is black magic—that is the definition of it—because the unintended consequences of trying to manipulate the field leads to other people and situations being displaced. It is a sort of spiritual violence. This is why magic has a very clear boundary: magic cannot be done entirely for your own good; it has to be done for the good of all, and you have to get clearance from higher sources. We are not here to play God; we are here to learn. Do as thou wilt is not the whole of the law.
Not only does manipulating the field displace other people, but it ricochets back to you—your desires and manipulations cause chaos in your own life. It leads to insanity, misinformation, and trickery. You open yourself up to all the negative forces of the universe, and no matter how much you try to protect yourself spiritually, the tiniest crack in your protection—letting down your guard for a second—can lead to illness, insanity, and even death, because you will eventually be taken out of the equation if you’re not doing your true work.
I’m not saying that people get sick and die because they’re manipulating the field; most of the time, it’s part of a greater karma you took on to learn. We have to stop blaming people and situations. These are all field experiences meant for learning, not manipulating energy. This is not to say you shouldn’t pursue goals you absolutely should; it’s just that you should pursue them by putting one step in front of the other. Walk the road. What comes across your path as you go is part of the edification process, and your lessons will appear along the way.
At first, this may seem confusing. Everything is intention, and the Universe responds to that intention. When you wake up, make yourself a cup of coffee and start your day by deciding what you will accomplish. You are, in essence, creating your reality. The Universe responds to that intention. The difference is you are playing by the rules that govern cause and effect. You are naturally allowing the Universe to respond as it should, bending and accommodating to the decisions you make.
The lines are blurry, which is why ancient traditions developed initiation systems. They weren’t always perfect, but they were an attempt to make sure the adept learned the rules and was aware of the consequences of tinkering with the material world.
So why are the intentions of daily life and the goals we set out to achieve different than chanting for that goal or making a vision board? A vision board is not necessarily a problem. It is how you make it that matters. The same goes for chanting. The difference is subtle, and it is in that subtlety that people accidentally cross over into trouble. I’ll try to illustrate the line as pragmatically as I can.
Let’s start by taking two men who have a crush on the same woman. The first man talks to the woman, gets to know her, and lets her decide whether she is interested in pursuing a relationship. The second guy, either out of fear of rejection, shyness, or intimidation, decides to make a vision board with pictures of him and her as a couple or to construct a poppet of the woman and perform a ritual. You can already see the difference because this disrespects the woman’s free will. It may sound crazy that people do this, but they do, and what happens when they do is not good for either party.
This is a true story. A friend of mine was the victim of a love spell. A roommate of hers, whom she didn’t much care for, made advances toward her, which she rejected for a number of reasons. This man decided he still desired her despite her obvious reproaches. He constructed a poppet (a magical doll) and cast a love spell on her.
Luckily, my friend was trained in the craft, and once she started feeling as if she were splitting in two, having intrusive, strange romantic thoughts, and dreaming about the man she didn’t like, she began to wonder what was going on. She still found him repugnant, yet she found herself going along with his advances. The way she described it was as a kind of psychic rape. He managed to get her into bed, and she said she found herself hovering over her body, wondering why she was going along with it.
As a practitioner herself, having seen others perform black magic, she became convinced then that he had done something magical. When he and the other roommate were gone one afternoon, she scoured the apartment and found the poppet of her. She destroyed it and put a binding spell on him, which released her from his love spell. She was livid, to say the least.
Another example of black magic came from a manager I had when I was in my 20s, while I was working as a psychic. He told me his wife had been extremely jealous and was constantly accusing him of having affairs. He wasn’t, but she didn’t believe him.
The wife went to a magic shop in Los Angeles and consulted with a Santería practitioner. She explained to the Santeria practitioner that her husband was a philanderer and wanted to keep him from being with other women. The practitioner gave her a spell. She was to set her intention of keeping him from sleeping with other women and bake her menstrual blood into a loaf of bread and feed it to him.
He remembered the day it happened vividly. He ate the bread, which he said was delicious. Immediately after that, he lost all desire to sleep with women, divorced her, and found a male partner. He never slept with a woman again. Shortly thereafter, he divorced her and dated men. This was clearly not what she wanted; it was the unintended consequence of her intention. The blowback in this case was the severing of their relationship. She got what she thought she wanted, but it also punished her in the process.
Here is my own example: despite my trying to stay on the light side, it still had repercussions. I was 19 and in a traditional Celtic coven. I had seen the miraculous nature of magick. I was staying with Mary and her sister, both of whom were in the same coven as I was. Together, earlier that summer in Chicago, we had healed their mother of her 30+ years of Lupus (it hadn’t returned yet). I had just gone through a turbulent relationship in which I had tried to break up with someone whom I was supposed to move in with when I returned to CalArts.
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