When Magic Doesn't Look Like Magic
A while ago there was a discussion on how magic often manifests in such subtle and mundane ways that doesn't look like magic at all. This leads a lot of people to doubt their magic actually worked. They did the working, they got the result, but they still feel they are fooling themselves into believing that it was the magic that created that result.
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I am familiar with this problem because a long time ago, I had it myself.
I knew magic was real, I had seen some miraculous things manifest, but when it came to small and mundane things, things that didn't manifest with fireworks, there was an inner voice that kept saying:
"Oh,come on! This looks very unmagical! I bet it was a mere coincidence that you did that working and this result manifested! It surely doesn't look like magic to you, does it?".
Back then I had been led to believe that my faith in a working was what determined if it manifested or not.
That if a working failed, it was because I didn't believe in it enough, so I essentially stopped it from working (my experience since then has shown that belief doesn't have much to do with whether magic produces the desired results or not, though it does play a role in the form of someone's set point/havingness level).
So I summoned a spirit that could teach me about abundance and manifestation.
"I feel that I am blocking my magic from manifesting because I don't believe in it enough. I don't know what's wrong with me. I know magic is real, I have seen it working in miraculous ways, yet every time I do a spell, I kinda don't expect it to work. I need to fix this. I don't know what's blocking me from having more faith that my magic will work. Can you help me?"
My success log
The spirit instructed me to get a small notebook, something that would fit in my handbag so I can always carry it with me. In that notebook, I was instructed to write everything I had asked for in any way (full rite, simple tealight with a petition underneath, wish I directed to any helpful spirits listening, anything I mentioned in prayers, even things I was planning to do magic for but hadn't done the magic yet) that had manifested.
He called it a "Success log" because unlike magical diaries, this wasn't supposed to document detailed methods and their results. Just what I wanted and what happened, and how long it took. *
An example would be:
"I lit a green candle dressed with attraction oil to manifest an extra $200 to buy X. 6 hours later I got a surprise $200 bonus."
or it could look something like:
"I had been thinking of doing a spell to attract free occult books and before I had a chance to actually do it, a friend told me they have double copies of some occult titles and asked if I wanted them for free."
I didn't know how that was supposed to help me -it's not like I didn't already notice when my magic worked, right?- but I did it anyway.
I got a notebook and started writing all the things I had recently done or asked for that had manifested. Then I thought "let's go through this process for the past few months. There are many things I still remember clearly and can note down".
And that's when everything changed.
It was like someone had turned on a switch in my head, and I could suddenly see how different spells I thought had failed to produce results had actually manifested.
Not in the way I expected them to manifest, which is why I hadn't even noticed they had produced results, but very clearly, in a way in line with what I had asked for.
I was so surprised by this realization that I felt compelled to think about every spell or ritual I had ever done (that I could still remember) and think back about that period of my life and what had happened after I had done the magic.
Very much to my surprise, the vast majority of my workings had produced very obvious results- and I hadn't even noticed!
See we often have very specific ideas about how the result will look like, especially when it comes to influencing other people.
Let's take the example of a woman who wants her boyfriend to show his love and affection for her more often.
She knows he loves her, so it's not a love spell she is working on. She just wants him to show this love more often. So she does a spell for that. Now if you ask her what that looks like, she says:
"He actually tells me he loves me every day. he texts me multiple times a day just to say how much he loves me".
Yet for him, showing love looks more like waking up 30 minutes early to make her breakfast and leaving the last cookie for her even though he truly wants it for himself.
So she does the spell, and he starts waking up early to make breakfast for her. And she gets disappointed, because her spell failed to produce results, since he obviously hasn't started texting her to say "I love you!" every three hours.
In addition to that, most people don't use the best statements of intent when they are just starting out.
"More money" drives the point across, but finding $10 on the street is "more money". If by "more money" you meant a raise, then you won't even make the connection between the spell for more money and the $10 you found.
When you can recognize how your magic manifested, you can more easily see how to modify your request to get what you actually wanted. Like a raise, or -in the case of the imaginary woman above- your boyfriend to show his love for you in ways that you can recognize and appreciate.
So what the Success Log did for me was draw my attention to all the ways specific workings had produced specific results that I had until then completely missed.
And that dispelled any doubt I had about future workings, because the success rate had been really high after all!
It also allowed me to see similar manifestations I would have preciously missed for every spell I cast from that moment on. This was very important, because:
When you know from experience that something works, and you also know it usually works to produce a specific type of outcome, you will know that you have specific spell/ritual etc that actually works to produce that result. So next time you need that same thing, you won't have to try 5 different spells and hope one of them works, because you already know which one has consistently worked well for you in the past.
You know which spells/rituals aren't likely to produce the result you're looking for (just because something worked doesn't mean it created what you had in mind). If you have used the same spell 5 times to find love and 5 times it resulted in a one-night-stand that lead nowhere for example, then that means you have a very reliable spell for one-night-stands but you'd better try something else if you want to find lasting love, because that is not what how this spell manifests for you.
If you know that a spell reliably manifests a specific result for you but it's not what you want, you can experiment with different elements in it and see how that changes the result and if the new version gets you what you want.
Another very important thing that happened because of that -though this one I cannot promise will happen for you if you try that, but it's worth a try- is that I was suddenly able to directly know if something was the result of magic or if it had coincidentally happened and wasn't connected to a magical working or a spirit. I could directly experience the link between the magic and the thing, which also allowed me to do stuff I previously thought impossible, like tweaking a spell after it's cast, linking a new working to a previous one etc.
Have you tried keeping a magick success journal? How did it help you? Leave a comment below or shoot me a message and let me know!
* He also told me to read Jason Miller's book "The Sorcerer's Secrets" and join his Strategic Sorcery course.
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