Simplified Spellcasting

If you are reading this article, you obviously have a desire to cast spells. Fantastic. This article won’t teach you spells. It will, however, teach you about spells so you can create and cast your own.

At its most basic, a spell is a wish, a HARD wish, sent with energy into the universe. It is desire, with energy tacked on to it. That package is then “fired” off into the universe to set up a vibration like a homing beacon. This vibration attracts energy with similar vibrations to it, making that vibration greater and greater, pulling more and more of that similar energy to it. This has the effect on you of making your wish more and more likely to occur.

Congratulations, that’s the most simplified version of a spell. At its base form, this is what ALL spell-casting and prayer is, a vibration that attracts like to like and makes situations more likely.

As an example: you want to curse someone because they hurt you. So you get a real head of mad on, you think about how hard you hate them, how much you will love seeing them in a bad situation, you do the chanting, burn the incense, move the ways the curse spell says and dance, then call upon gods of destruction to aid you, then you take all the energy, add your anger and your desire onto it, then send it off to do your dirty work. When all this is distilled down, you have 1) desire and 2) energy.

Another example is: you want to pass a test that is important. You have done the studying and done the reviews, now you want to make random chance be a bit more in your favor, so if you guess, you guess right on the test. So you invoke the Gods, you beg Their assistance, you sing songs, you do hymns and the drum circle, you draw the sigil for memory, and you do a long guided meditation where you open parts of your brain to remember correctly. Once again, you have at this spell’s core 1) desire and 2) energy.

Why does this work? The leading theory is that the Universe is about vibrations. With String Theory added into this, and Quantum Theory, vibrations are even more important. Everything vibrates to different wavelengths. It really doesn’t matter what you are talking about. Want to shatter a diamond? Find the vibration the molecules of carbon are moving at, bombard that item with the same vibration intensely enough, and the diamond will crumble into dust. Want someone to go away from you? Find a “don’t come near me” vibration and send that out of your body, and see how many people come near.

The energy you raise in the Circle, that you amass with your chanting and dancing, with your sexual energies, with your foot stomping, with the instruments you play, and your general attitude of self, all have a vibration. Not just the sound, but the feeling you give off too. Think of the “bad vibes” you get off some people, and then realize that pop culture knows about this too, as can be shown in the Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations“.

With spellcasting, any spellcasting, for any reason, it is recognizing those vibrations and using them to our end. It is changing those vibrations to reflect what WE want, rather than what they are naturally. How do we do this? With our Will.

Aleister Crowley said that “Magick is the Art and Science of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will”. In other words, you use your Will (defined as your desire, your wish, your stubbornness, your I-know-it-will-happen) to force what you want on the universe. If you guessed we do this through the medium of Vibrations, you are right.

Since all of the Physical world is vibrations, it makes sense that all the Otherworlds are vibrations as well, correct? So if that’s true (which it is), setting up a vibration here with our desire tacked into it, should set up resonating vibrations in all other places, correct? (psst… the answer is ‘yes’.)

EVERYTHING else in the spell casting process is a tool to get you to focus on your desire.

Let’s look at a basic friendship spell

Simple Friendship Spell
Help improve your friendships with this little bit of witchcraft. This simple friendship spell can help bring two friends closer together again.

Keyword: candles, essential oil, friendship, jasmine, lavender

Ingredients

1 cup or bowl of water
1 blue candle
Lavender or jasmine essential oil
A gift given to you by your friend. This can be a lock of hair, a photo, or some other gift. Make sure it is waterproof.
Something that you intend to give to your friend, again it should be waterproof.
Instructions

1. First and foremost, since this spell is about improving a friendship, you should get the consent of your friend to perform this spell. Friendships are based on trust, and subtly manipulating your friend behind their back isn’t a good idea.
2. Put two drops of your essential oil in the water, and mix it with the bottom of your candle. Then light your candle. Place both objects in the bowl with the water and essential oil, then say the following:
I call the power of water to bind these two objects together, as it will also bind (friend’s name) and (your name) together in harmonious friendship.
3. If you don’t like that sentence, feel free to make your own based on your intention
4. Leave the bowl of water out under a waning moon for one night, then take the objects out. Keep yours near you, or cling to it during a fight. Give the gift to your friend and tell them to do the same.
Borrowed from https://eclecticwitchcraft.com/simple-friendship-spell/

From this spell you can see we need a bowl of water, a candle in blue, Lavender or Jasmine, a gift from a friend and a gift for your friend. The blue color is associated with a platonic relationship with another, and the Lavender and Jasmine both tend to bring associations of peace and friendship to your mind, even if you don’t know it. Some of this is because Lavender is blue, but not always.

Then we have the instructions. Can you see how each step of this spell is about making it clear to you and your mind that this is about friendship? It’s odd to take some water, and drop oil into it. The oil doesn’t go into the water well, in fact, they mix like… well, oil and water do. Which is not at all. So you mix it with the blue candle, also something odd to do. Then you put the gifts in the water, again oddness. Chant the words, stating out loud what you want, and focusing your desire or intent. Then leave the whole shebang out under the moon for one night. Then give the gift and hold the other gift when you are fighting.

Doesn’t seem like a lot of intent and focusing will power or energy raising, right? But what it’s doing is making your entire mind pay attention.

The purpose of all the above is to get into your subconscious and force it to pay attention. The Subconscious speaks in the format of symbols. A symbol for this, and a meaning for that. This dog in your dream represents your fear, and the larger male person that feels like you do is your big-brother protector. Symbols are the bread and butter of the subconscious, and how it makes associations and connections, and how it files things away, through those connections. Your dreams are the subconscious filing away the day’s activities in your brain. But there is a problem with access to the subconscious. That problem is your conscious mind.

See, the Conscious mind is a skeptic. “Show me” is something that it says all the time, and that is proven by the fact that all input into the conscious mind is through the medium of the senses, Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, Touch. Take them away, and all you have is the subconscious yelling at itself. So just saying out loud that you want to be good friends with this person is a decent starting point, but to get the subconscious mind on board with this, we need to bypass the medium of the conscious mind and speak in the language of symbols to the subconscious.

And this is why you have the items and words and movements in the above spell. You have the sensory mediums that you are using and that your conscious mind can pass off into the subconscious, but the subconscious mind sees
“BLUE!friendship”
“LAVENDER!friendship”
“ODDACTION!payattention”
“DOINGSOMETHINGWEIRD!payattention”
“FRIENDGIFT!ohhhh,yeah,hesagoodfriend”
“GIFTTOGIVE!ohhhgoingtoafriend.”
“PUTTINGTHINGSTOGETHERANDTYINGTHEM!peasinapodFRIENDSHIP”
*filefilefilefilefile*
TOTALFRIENDSHIPANDSTUFF
and once it’s gotten to this point, the subconscious is paying attention and providing you with even more intent for your spell, as well as adding in a substantial part of energy to what you are doing.

What does this mean to your spell? Well, if the point of doing this ritual is to get your subconscious mind and your conscious mind to cooperate and both to focus on the intent of the spell, so as to all be pulling together in the spell, rather than one believing and one disbelieving, then you have to use symbols that have meaning to YOU.

I want you to keep this point in mind right now. It is something we will come back to.

So you have the spell, you have the symbols you need, you are doing the actions. You are raising the energy from various means, and you are tacking your intent on that energy and sending it off to be a homing beacon of vibrations, to pour their likely little situations down on you. Well done. This is all spell casting is. EVERY spell, no matter how simple, how complex, or how High Episcopagan it is, will have these elements in it, and they can be modified at will.

(FYI, “High Epispopagan” is a term from a while back describing those super ritualistic rituals and practices that take tons of time, lots of esoteric items and words, and things that aren’t necessarily understood by the participants. It’s easier to say “High Episcopagan”, hoping that it’s understood that this is a comparison to the Episcopalians who use a lots of high long ritual.)

Each magickian (here defined as a person who casts spells) has their own methods of raising energy. They have their own tools. They have their own processes during ritual. They have their own superstitions. They have their own set of rules that affect their magick. And for that magickian, those rules are iron clad. They have decided on those rules, and for them, they don’t change or alter. Why? Because they have worked out with their Subconscious that this action means this, this tool is the same as that, that if this items is messed with in any way then this won’t work, and so on. They do this through trial and error, and practice and using their magick. They do this over and over and over, and they practice. And this is how you become a magickian. You simply do it. You do this a little at a time, and you find what works for you, the symbol language that YOUR subconscious needs to get things in to pay attention to what you are doing.

Now we come to the symbol language. Each language of symbols is unique to each person. You know your symbol language, and while it may help to know the symbols of others to have a “starting place” for yours, they will never be the same. This is why Dream Dictionaries, Symbols of Nature, and all those others charts will never be 100% accurate.

I like to use the example of a dog. In most dream interpretation books I’ve seen, a dog is the symbol of protection, of loyalty, of friendship and help. But if you dream about a dog and you were bitten by a dog when you were little, it may be something that terrorizes and frightens, and then something that hurts you. THAT is not a protector, that’s a monster. For me, bees are my “dog” in this example. For most, bees are industrious, they work hard and provide honey. I had been badly stung while I was young and had a massive phobia of bees, and saw them as something to be killed without mercy and in no way associated with hard work. That was MY symbol language, and it took me ages to get past that.

So when looking at a spell like what is above, if your best friend and you would play outside in a bush near a creek, then your association with friendship may be wet earth, the sound of a stream, the sight of dappled green leaves, and nothing blue at all. You should feel ABSOLUTELY CORRECT in replacing the blue candle with a green one, the smell of lavender with newly torn ground (using some moss oil perhaps). The water can come from a creek near you now, and maybe you hide the whole thing under a bush for the school hours, because that’s where you used to hide when you both cut school.

I dare any experienced Magickian to tell you that you did it wrong. Because you didn’t. You used the language of symbols that had meaning for you, and you put your own associations to work for you, rather than using the generic tables that someone else said was good. In the process you got your entire mind cooperating with itself to focus on what you want. Which is the entire point here.

Once you have focused your intent through the medium of the spell process and the symbols that are important to you and your associations of them, then it’s time to raise energy through various ways. How you raise that energy is entirely up to you. There are multitudes of books out there talking about using energy, moving energy, grounding energy, raising energy and what to do with it. In basic, the energy you are calling upon is the very energies of your being, the energy given to you by eating. It is the energy you feel in the Sunshine, the peace you feel in the Moon, the life moving under your fingers when you touch a tree, the nerves that make your hands shake when you are anticipating something. It is the beat of your heart. In other words, it’s the magick of Life.

You gather that energy up, chanting, dancing, collecting it at a concert, or however you collect it. You use that energy and make it vibrate the way your intent vibrates. You get that whole little package of intent+energy all buzzing at the same rate and way, then you throw it up into the universe like a baseball or a grenade. It will get where it is supposed to get to, and it will stick up there with all the other threads of energy that make up our multiverse. But it will keep buzzing to your desire. And that buzzing can be felt by others.

Just being there, buzzing, your spell will send out those same vibrations around it. Like any vibration, the further from the source, the weaker it will get, but for those in range, they can feel that buzzing, and if it causes a return buzz in them, their energy will go toward it too, and so will energy that is just hanging out without someone holding it. So you little spell ball becomes a homing beacon calling more and more energy like it to it. And that changes the probabilities of the energy around it.

I don’t want to get too far into multiverse mechanics, but the idea is that every possible situation exists out there someplace. The spell attracts like to like. So it would make sense that it would attract a reality in which your desire is manifest to it.

To use a comic analogy, if the Scarlet Witch puts out a spell saying there’s no mutants of any kind, then that energy there keeps going and going, and as a homing beacon, the reality of the multiverse in which there are NO mutants is drawn to it like a magnet, and thus her desire of no mutants is made manifest around her. It’s literally that simple.

Your spell goes out, it vibrates, it pulls similar energy to it, that energy collects, and then it pulls the reality in which what you want happens to itself, and to you.

And spellcasting is really as simple as that.

All the rest in EVERY spell book you will see are shortcuts and symbols and tokens to make the same thing occur. If it’s a physical thing, then understand that it is there to trick your subconscious into thinking “OHNOSHE’SGETTINGOUTHESACREDKNIFE THISMUSTBEREALLYIMPORTANT!” and “THISSMELLREMINDSMEOFTHEWASHBUCKETOUTBACK” and focuses its attention on what you are doing. They also start vibrations occurring in your subconscious to go with the intent you have of having XYZ happen. Then that vibration is carried over into the energy you raise during the casting, the focusing, the singing, dancing, chanting, and all that vibration gets packaged together, to be a little annoying spell grenade to magnetize itself to the reality where you get what you want.

This is why those of us who do magick seem to have things going our way. We know how to energize our thoughts into what we want, and they just seem to come. It’s also why there’s so much emphasis on manifesting energies around you when you first start out, and why we can’t give you a spell to fix X in your life, or cast a spell to bring you X. What do I care if you pass this test? I have mine, and my subconscious doesn’t give a flip about anyone else’s achievements, because they aren’t mine. And if I write down my spell, what I used, how I spoke things, what I said, and how I moved the candles, that’s great for me, and it may give you an idea of what to do, but it won’t work for you since my spell (symbol) language is going to be different from yours.

All that being said, are spells and spellbooks useless? No. They are a starting point, one that can be a springboard to a long discussion with your own subconscious about what symbols work and which don’t. They can be a primer showing you that this knife is indeed special for special uses, so when it comes time to get it out, your subconscious goes “SHE’SGETTIN’THEWITCHKIT” and pays attention and works with you.

Finally, with enough practice, you can get to a point where all you have to do is pull some energy from the Moon, or from yourself, add into it your desire to have a lifemate, bundle it all up and force it into the universe (not dispersed like some say), and reliably get what you want to come to you, without all the symbols and colors and tools and chants and so on.

And then, in a few years, you will be trying to explain how to cast a spell when it’s as simple as sending your desire with some energy out into the universe.