Magic Ain’t Real (and Ain’t Ain’t a Word)

I’ve wished that magic was real since my childhood. I used to play witches with my cousins, and make potions in my backyard out of mud, water, and mint leaves. Maybe this is why I’ve always been so curious about metaphysics and the occult.

I’ve typically sought these things out for fun. There’s something seductive about receiving the answers to a great mystery. But if the answers are truly out there, how does the mystery prevail?

In my quest, I’ve found that the big answers are not necessarily available to me just yet, but a lot of other really fun and awesome things ARE. One of them being: Magic! Living with this information has transformed my worldview and made my life better in so many ways.

Magic is Easy

I’ve always been a skeptic about magic because in my tween years I experimented ineffectually with money spells and jars of moldy rosewater. I now know that there’s levels to this ish. 

There are processes and systems of initiation into some versions or traditions of magic. My spells didn’t work because I had no idea what I was doing. I was attempting things beyond my level of initiation at that point.

If there are “levels” to magic, the easy levels are the most powerful because beginning magic takes the biggest leap of faith. Easy magic is accessible to everyone. There’s an abstract way to look at the world of magic, but that understanding can develop naturally through time and practice. 

Magic (some people say “magick,” but that’s another conversation) is the art of directing energy according to your will so as to accomplish a desired goal.

Easy magic is about taking action with intention. Easy magic is about ritualizing mundane tasks to infuse them with deeper meaning in order to strengthen your will and attune yourself to your goals. It can be way simpler than it often looks.

Magic is Universal

While magic can be spiritual, it doesn’t have to be. Secular and atheist witches can and do exist, and they still wield magic even without a religion, a higher power, or even a belief in metaphysics at all. 

For some, magic is a fun way to solidify intentions and live life with a certain flare or flavor. For others it’s a “neurohacking” technology, using the placebo effect to help change our thought patterns and behaviors.

Nevertheless, mysticism and magic are often connected, and many religious and spiritual practitioners utilize magic in one way or another. Still, magic itself is inherently a-religious. It is available to anyone with the will to tap in, and no specific belief system is required to try it.

When we use magic, we cut out the middlemen and connect to the universal source energy of creation directly. We say, “I will consult my direct connection to Source, and I’ll create whatever comes from that place.”

Magic scares people because there is so much audacity in the act of taking back our connection to source in this way. This is especially terrifying to those in religious opposition to magic, because they gatekeep divinity (and magic), using it to harm and control people, and to profit.

Many people say that the ancient texts at the centers of our dominant religions on earth right now all say a lot of the same things, or that they are slightly different keys to unlock the same door. If I had a key to some amazing and mysterious door (not sayin I do, just sayin if I did), I’d leave the door unlocked for the empowerment of all people.

Magic is Living as a Creator

Magic often looks like so much lore and information to memorize, and for some people that is exactly what magic is. For me, modern magic is about breaking the information and lore down into archetypes. Through this lens, I view magic as a form of storytelling. With magic, we become creators in our own right, and it gives new meaning to the idea that we were made in God’s image. 

Many of us start our lives following a path or storyline that’s set by other people. Magic is that urge inside of us to choose our own paths. The very first step in successfully practicing magic is to dare to want something different for yourself. Magic is daring to imagine a new story, and then daring to live that new story out.

Beyond our ability to literally achieve the goals that we lay out for ourselves, we must also remember that our perception is our reality. If I feel motivated to write by lighting a candle, I have the right and the ability to perceive that as magic (even while someone else might not see it that way).  In the beginning, magic does start out with the placebo effect in this way, but fake it til you make it.

With time, I figured out that practicing magic is really about cultivating a very specific energy state, to align us with whatever it is that we want to connect to, or goals we want to accomplish. When we are energetically aligned, we can draw in the experiences that we want for ourselves. 

This can be done in many ways. For some it requires sacred regalia like robes or crowns, for some it is done with body movement, breathwork, chanting, prayer, or music. Visualization, spells, rituals, or symbolism is what works for others. Through these practices, we are strengthened and aided in our journey towards the goal. By cultivating the exact subtle energy, we envision our desire and so it is.

Magic is Our Heritage and Our Birthright

When you make your way down western occult rabbit holes, you find yourself in interesting and familiar places. On the top layer there’s Crowley and the mystery schools and esoteric societies of the 19th century, and a little further back you of course would find the witch trials and legends about Tituba. Only when looking at the history of black and brown people do you finally start digging into the truth about magic in the west. 

The truth is that magic didn’t originate from the European men who wrote books about it in modern civilization. Magic comes from all of us, and is given to us as a divine gift. Our ancestors knew this. The ancients knew this, and they lived their lives with it, and a lot of magic was passed down, changing shape overtime to look like silly little songs and family recipes, and morning and bedtime rituals. Magic is our birthright, and to reclaim it, we can start simply by remembering that our magic is always there, at our center.

Tips and Simple Practices

Setting Intentions:

• Setting intentions means to become clear on your objective, and to try to align with that objective in every way that you can.
• There’s a lot of debate over whether or not setting intentions is all there is to magic. The truth is that there are many traditions of magic which have set processes which were created by people very experienced in successful magic. 
• These processes and traditions do exist, and some are initiatory, in that you need to be taught the system and work your way up in order to understand and perform these processes correctly. Some are closed practices, in that you can only properly perform these traditions if trained by members of this specific lineage. 
• These elaborate systems exist because there is a subtlety to magic that takes time and practice for most people to learn. That subtlety has to do with our intention, and whether or not we are doing magic with “perfect feeling.”
• If it takes time and practice, you might as well start practicing now with basic lifestyle magic that’s accessible and easy to experiment with.

Easy Protection Magic:

• The easiest way to protect yourself from scary or “bad” things is to disempower those things through non-belief or fearlessness.
• If you’re just on a whole entirely other wavelength, you will not be affected by “hauntings” or anything like that. The ultimate protection is to know that you’re divinely protected by your higher power, or if you don’t believe in that, then you likely don’t believe in the scary stuff either. Either way, you pay it no attention. 
• If you believe in magic, you might believe in the scary stuff, so just in case, you should know that you are very capable of casting protection over yourself. You can absolutely perform rituals like the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, also known as the LBRP, or, you can simply allow the light within you to shine bright and surround you in protection (just like they do in the movies). Simple tactics work just as effectively as complex ones if you’re resolute in your intention.
• Other easy protection magic includes any prayers or movements you grew up doing, as well as wearing protective colors, symbols, stones, or jewelry.
• Change the vibe through laughter, singing, or meowing like a cat (thanks to my cousin for teaching me this one). 
• Keep things as clean and tidy as you can, some wicked things can thrive in filth.
• If you feel very worried or afraid, and that you’re in need of more security, hold off on practicing any magic until you’ve done plenty of research on protection magic first. You don’t want to practice with fear in your heart. Focus on resolving the fear first. 

Easy Kitchen Magic:

• Light a candle and invite your ancestors to come cook with you. Make sure you put a portion on the altar for them when it’s ready, in thanks.
• A burning candle also wards off tear-inducing onion fumes.
• Stir your coffee, tea, soup, or stir-fry in alignment with what you desire. 
• Stir clockwise to call in what you want, like energy, excitement, peace, health, nourishment, money. 
• Stir counter-clockwise to banish what you wish to release, like apathy, jealousy, anger, tension, fear, or an unwanted guest.
• Did you know that nearly every plant-based kitchen ingredient has an element of healing, magic, or symbolism attached? You can look up specific ingredients and set intentions to turn your meals into a magical concoction of nutrition, energy, and healing.

Easy Folk Magic:

• Any folk practices or remedies that have been passed down to you from your elders are sacred magical practices. These traditions can hold a lot of power. Tune into your own belief system and notice the magic in what you learned growing up. 
• You can integrate these folk practices into your modern life, this is how you begin to create a spiritual or magical system of your own.
• Folk Remedies include: Displaying sacred symbols to ward off evil, spitting to ward off evil/the evil eye, The Sign of the Cross, Lighting a Candle for Prayer, Sana Sana Colita de Rana, kissing an “owie” or a “booboo,” bedtime tuck in rituals, and lots more.
• Prayer, Dance, Singing, Chanting, and Meditating can all be simple forms of magic. Decide what you want or need to feel and then use these practices to get you to that feeling.
• Anytime you are in connection or devotion to “God/dess” or “Spirit” (whatever your beliefs or higher power may be), you are in a magical space where you can connect to the possibilities available to you. For me it was important to realize that I can connect to that at anytime, no matter what. Nothing can ever disconnect you from Spirit, and you do not need a third party to facilitate that connection.

Easy Color Magic:

• Look up the meanings or magical associations for each color. You can use color magic to support intentions within your daily life. This can be done by burning candles, decorating a space, or even selecting foods and other items in a color that supports your intentions.
• Sacred adornment is the act of selecting to adorn your body with intention or in devotion to your higher power. If an affirmation is a magical statement or assertion, sacred adornment is making that magical statement symbolically through how you decide to adorn yourself with certain clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics.
• Create outfits or wear items that make you feel the way you’d like to feel when you’ve reached your goal. An example of this is “dress for the job you want.”

Live Magically

Live the life you want to live. Tell a story that aligns with who you really are and were born to be, even if it sounds like a fantasy to other people. Living our fantasy is how we awaken the ability to fantasize in other people. 

No one can prove what magic is and how it works, so it’s open to anyone who wants to try it, including you. There aren’t rules on what magic is, so there aren’t rules to what it can look like. You can try the easy things I’ve suggested, and you can create your own experiences too. 

Even if you don’t want to call it magic, being creative and intentional with your life is very magical, and it’s fun, and when you live your life in this way you start to notice something very interesting, the magic actually works!