More than a wish, more than a prayer.

It didn’t take long for me to see that magick works. But why? I didn’t believe it was all down to angels and divine forces, even though they worked well for me. Some of my magick involved nothing more than sigils and scribbled thoughts, with no spirit forces being invoked. But it worked, and I felt that whatever method I used, something supernatural was happening. Magick isn’t just about the results you get, but about using a power that most people don’t even believe is real.

Performing magick is like taking a step to one side of reality, bypassing the normal rules. It takes courage to do that, to hold your dream aloft and use supernatural means to make your dream come true. There are still rules and methods and ways of working, a system of reality, but it’s not the same as the everyday world. You reach for the supernatural and it responds. This is more than a wish, more than a prayer, and it works in thousands of ways.

In everyday reality we breathe in and out, consume food, dispose of waste, go places, move things around and try to make life enjoyable through our basic actions. With magick, there’s a decision, an action or a pure thought and the emotion that comes with that thought, propelled into the fabric of existence. Magick is our deliberate interaction with reality. We’re not playing the game, but rewriting the software.

What makes magick different is the supernatural. Whether you get to the supernatural through trance, ritual, invocation or by calling for the help of an angel, you are passing on your imagined future, presenting it to the forces of reality, so that reality will shape itself to match what you imagine.

This is all true, but although magick can do so much, our bare hands can also perform miracles. If I hold a lump of clay and want to form it into the shape of a ball or a person or a ring, I can get something that looks almost right in just a few minutes. My bare hands translate my imagination into physical movements and shift that clay to represent what was merely in my mind. With a few thoughts and intentions, I reshape the fabric of the physical universe. It may only be clay, but it was changed and shaped by my mind being formed into actions. This is so ordinary to us that we don’t even realize how miraculous it is. Thoughts change the world all the time.

But if you tried to reshape that clay without your hands, by calling on angels, nothing would happen. I have seen some strange and powerful wonders, and some strong physical effects caused by magick (such as blasts of cold air, flashes of light, shifting of objects), but I don’t know of a single occultist that could form a lump of clay into a human shape with magick alone. Why use magick for something when you can just pick up the clay and shape it with your fingers?

And the point is that magick works best when it echoes what we do with our hands, what we do in the real world, the ordinary world, and how we live. Do magick to be a better writer, then you had better write. Do magick to make more money, then you had better read about money and start looking for opportunities. Do magick to find peace, then you had better take the time to notice the peace when it comes.

Magick takes you further than you can go without it. Magick that’s in harmony with your desires and the movements and actions you make in the real world, is magick that works easily and rapidly.

If you’re feeling stuck, not sure what you need or how to solve your problem, try this. Find an hour and sit with my book. Think about your problem or problems. Imagine how great it would feel if an angel could solve those problems for you, in harmony with your actions. Then read through all the powers listed in the book. Do this without expectation, without hunting for an answer. Some of the powers will suddenly seem relevant, useful, more important than the ones you thought you should work with. It’s an easy experiment and helps to guide you on the best path to solving your problems. After scanning through the book like this you’ll probably know what you need to do in the real world, and which angels can rewrite the patterns of reality to make it all work easily.

– Ben Woodcroft

My next book will be all about magickal protection. I hope to offer something safer and more practical than anything else that has been published.