I have always had a carefree attitude to life and I’ve always been like that. This prompted me to try and make magick work by throwing out various rules and regulations just to see what worked. Nowadays I’m more sensible, more innovative without the wrecking ball effect. When I was young, I would try just about anything, both with magick and in my personal life. Wild times indeed, but that in turn made me reckless, very very reckless.
Obsession with my own emotions, and how deep I thought I was, I performed a ritual to see the sum total of my life’s emotions. One thing I have learned about magick is that it works best when your need is real. But sometimes, when you ask for something really stupid, magick turns up the goods anyway. And what a mistake that was. Getting a glimpse of the sum total of your life’s emotions is not pleasant. It was a hell of an experience, in the worst sense of the word.
Consequently, I developed a pretty severe anxiety disorder that took years to conquer, and I was emotionally fragile for a long time. In previous thought, it was understood that there were six distinct human emotions - happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. But scientists have now found that the number is as many as 27. What a conundrum!
Magick is safe enough if you use it wisely. If you play with it for the sake of a thrill, it can get unpleasant. I should mention that, even at that tender age, I had access to some pretty potent magick, so I wasn’t just casting a spell. It was pretty serious stuff.
The magick worked all too well and I wish it hadn’t. Well, I did learn that you shouldn’t do magick for a result you don’t need. If you ever find yourself seeking these flash-bang results, it’s usually because you’re avoiding something else, something that needs dealing with. That was all too true for me... And after I caught a glimpse of that exploding supernova of emotion, my focus was well and truly back on who I really wanted to be, what was it that I wanted from life. That’s a success in the end, but there are much easier ways to get what you want.
I could give you a long list of magickal failures in my teenage life. When we started out with magick, we relied on obscure books with less-than-accurate instructions. And we made things up as best we could, got hold of the best materials that we could, and tried to find magick that worked. In those early years, we saw enough to know that magick was real, but most of what we tried didn’t work. Partly that’s because, being teenagers, our focus was on being attractive to people we liked, and all the things we shouldn’t really have been too bothered about. It was not for a couple more years that I would come across my mentors that harnessed the potential in me and taught me how to use it well. Consequently, in years to come, following the death of my daughter, it would be the abyss to swallow me whole and regurgitate me out the other side to set me on the path I travel today.
If you think I sound like a very unruly young man, it is a long, long time ago, and I was from a country that wasn’t exactly nurturing to young people interested in magick. I feel lucky that magick gave me some hope because most of my peers went from school to the world of employment and that was the end of that. Boring!
But the failure I’m talking about was something more personal. I wanted magick to help me end a relationship. I’d been going out with a young woman for some time and the relationship had become a friendship. I wanted to end it, but I cared for her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I now know of magick that can help to ease a relationship to its end, but back then all I could think of was magick that made her dislike me. So that’s what I tried. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
It didn’t work because even though my heart was in it, I was being a coward, and I think I knew that. My ritual re-vibrated with sympathy and empathy, so all I did was fill this woman with a mix of confused feelings. The ritual did nothing but make her suffer more confusion as the relationship came to an end.
Lesson learned, moving on rapidly, the gist being that if you don’t need magick, don’t use it! I should have had the confidence to know that she’d be mature enough to accept things and move on. Which turned out to be very true. When I used common sense and broke up with her in the normal way – by talking – she moved on remarkably fast, way faster than me. All I’d been doing was giving in to my fear and using magick to patch up my shortcomings...
Magick should lead us on bold journeys, not shield us from experience. But the Magus in me was forming and emerging … albeit my trials and tribulations at the time seemed to generate substantial cause for amusement in my Spirit Guardian.
Em Hotep -
I have always had a carefree attitude to life and I’ve always been like that. This prompted me to try and make magick work by throwing out various rules and regulations just to see what worked. Nowadays I’m more sensible, more innovative without the wrecking ball effect. When I was young, I would try just about anything, both with magick and in my personal life. Wild times indeed, but that in turn made me reckless, very very reckless.
Obsession with my own emotions, and how deep I thought I was, I performed a ritual to see the sum total of my life’s emotions. One thing I have learned about magick is that it works best when your need is real. But sometimes, when you ask for something really stupid, magick turns up the goods anyway. And what a mistake that was. Getting a glimpse of the sum total of your life’s emotions is not pleasant. It was a hell of an experience, in the worst sense of the word.
Consequently, I developed a pretty severe anxiety disorder that took years to conquer, and I was emotionally fragile for a long time. In previous thought, it was understood that there were six distinct human emotions - happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. But scientists have now found that the number is as many as 27. What a conundrum!
Magick is safe enough if you use it wisely. If you play with it for the sake of a thrill, it can get unpleasant. I should mention that, even at that tender age, I had access to some pretty potent magick, so I wasn’t just casting a spell. It was pretty serious stuff.
The magick worked all too well and I wish it hadn’t. Well, I did learn that you shouldn’t do magick for a result you don’t need. If you ever find yourself seeking these flash-bang results, it’s usually because you’re avoiding something else, something that needs dealing with. That was all too true for me... And after I caught a glimpse of that exploding supernova of emotion, my focus was well and truly back on who I really wanted to be, what was it that I wanted from life. That’s a success in the end, but there are much easier ways to get what you want.
I could give you a long list of magickal failures in my teenage life. When we started out with magick, we relied on obscure books with less-than-accurate instructions. And we made things up as best we could, got hold of the best materials that we could, and tried to find magick that worked. In those early years, we saw enough to know that magick was real, but most of what we tried didn’t work. Partly that’s because, being teenagers, our focus was on being attractive to people we liked, and all the things we shouldn’t really have been too bothered about. It was not for a couple more years that I would come across my mentors that harnessed the potential in me and taught me how to use it well. Consequently, in years to come, following the death of my daughter, it would be the abyss to swallow me whole and regurgitate me out the other side to set me on the path I travel today.
If you think I sound like a very unruly young man, it is a long, long time ago, and I was from a country that wasn’t exactly nurturing to young people interested in magick. I feel lucky that magick gave me some hope because most of my peers went from school to the world of employment and that was the end of that. Boring!
But the failure I’m talking about was something more personal. I wanted magick to help me end a relationship. I’d been going out with a young woman for some time and the relationship had become a friendship. I wanted to end it, but I cared for her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I now know of magick that can help to ease a relationship to its end, but back then all I could think of was magick that made her dislike me. So that’s what I tried. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
It didn’t work because even though my heart was in it, I was being a coward, and I think I knew that. My ritual re-vibrated with sympathy and empathy, so all I did was fill this woman with a mix of confused feelings. The ritual did nothing but make her suffer more confusion as the relationship came to an end.
Lesson learned, moving on rapidly, the gist being that if you don’t need magick, don’t use it! I should have had the confidence to know that she’d be mature enough to accept things and move on. Which turned out to be very true. When I used common sense and broke up with her in the normal way – by talking – she moved on remarkably fast, way faster than me. All I’d been doing was giving in to my fear and using magick to patch up my shortcomings...
Magick should lead us on bold journeys, not shield us from experience. But the Magus in me was forming and emerging … albeit my trials and tribulations at the time seemed to generate substantial cause for amusement in my Spirit Guardian.
Em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero
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