Magic 201: Ambition and Other Poisons
Reminder: magic and vodou do not allow self-initiation, nor are you intended to be alone if you are a vodouizan or a magician.
Magic tends to attract people interested in a power that lets them get around the normal ways of getting power. They don’t need the charisma for politics, nor the connections for it. They don’t need the detail mind to be a lawyer. They don’t need the right clothes or complexion or gender. They don’t need the sexual orientation of the majority, nor its cultural background, and a surprising number of them think that they can escape consequences or accountability via magic. After all, it doesn’t look to anyone else like you’re doing anything—the legal system isn’t prepared to prosecute magic, and you can do almost all of it without physical witnesses.
These people are and aren’t right. Magic does not necessarily need a lot of the previous qualities. It requires sufficient innate force, some permissions of the spirit, and a teacher. It also requires an absolute willingness to do something that the previous list ignores. It requires the absolute willingness to change. The more force someone has, the more malleable they are and will need to be. Powerful might be something you can be, but it has a cost.
The cost is simple enough to say: for power, you must not be.
People are often ambitious, when it comes to magic. They wish to accrue enough power to defend themselves, to be able to do as they wish, to be able to do some specific goal, etc. They may perceive themselves, accurately or otherwise, to be surrounded by enemies or obstacles to be overcome in the form of their environment, the way they are understood, or who people think they are. Their ambition is in the context of self-preservation and self-expression, which does not make it ‘bad’ or problematic. Ambition is always in the service of not changing, and whether or not it’s right simply does not matter.
What matters is that ambition prevents access to power, because it strives to prevent growth which might challenge whatever ambition seeks to protect. If your ambition is to ensure, for instance, that you will almost never be the subject of physical attack, you will categorically avoid any change you feel challenges your physical well being or safety.
It’s not uncommon for your safety to be challenged by the kind of change that power requires. Ambition and its motivations will always serve as a limiter on the ability of the magician to use magic.
Ambition is damn hard to get rid of, too. This is another thing which benefits from the guidance of a teacher.
