Magic 101: Magicians and Judgement

I’ve done a fairly extensive 101 series for topics and concepts in vodou. It’s time to branch out into topics in being a magician. My specialty, as it’s evolving, is magical work. That work has its own set of fundamental concepts, ideals, and topics. It also tends to be interesting to people.

I’m going to list a standard warning here: you should not be practicing alone. Practicing magic alone is a great way to end up being eaten alive by something nasty. If you intend to practice magic, you need to have a mentor, someone to check you over, help you if you get in over your capacity or knowledge, and preferably someone with the experience and capacity to ‘decontaminate’ you if you make a mistake. Find a teacher first.

One of the more major handicaps in magic is judgement—the idea that there is a way things should have to be, that you know what that way is, and that you should be experiencing that way things should be. There’s a ton of ways this is a problem for magic, from preventing you from seeing or noticing certain things in spiritual or astral spaces to causing you to be easily frightened or exhausted by what you experience in those spaces. Weird, nauseating, violent, frightening, or mind-bending things happen in spiritual or astral spaces. Things that violate every possible expectation.

It goes without saying that people tend to approach magic in the same way they’d approach something that happens here on the physical plane. They expect their astral body to stay more or less the same, that distance and perspective work the same, and that things which would distort or pierce their astral body follow the same rules as they would in the physical world, particularly that things which distort, pierce, or change that body would be as damaging in the astral space as they would be to a physical body. They also tend to believe that their consent is necessary for things to happen to them, that concepts of good and evil are more or less governing ideals in those spaces, that things which would harm them are easily able to be recognized, etc.

These misconceptions and the judgements they come from can hurt people fairly badly in magic. Something which is hostile to you cannot be easily identified by things like appearance (and in fact, many very hostile things do not appear hostile). Ideas about good and evil have no place in the astral or spiritual planes, not even as shorthand for things which might not harm you. Various distortions of your astral or spiritual form are fairly commonplace, and the laws of physics are drastically changed in those spaces.

Losing that judgement is not easy, and I might do a few posts or podcasts on that topic for aspiring magicians.

Podcast on this topic, with discussion of physics similarities: link