Magic 201: Clarity and Intent

Reminder: magic and vodou are not something you can do alone. You need a teacher and a community.

There are few topics which make the need for a teacher clearer than the topic of clarity and intent. The magic in vodou is not manifestation, intention, nor will based, nor is it all about intent, but it does require a focused mind and will, and the ability to know your intent.

One of the most common mistakes people make with our tradition from the outside is the idea that their intent makes a vital difference in how their actions are perceived, as if intention is the real reason something succeeds or fails. Intent is a piece of your action, and not the most important part of the action. The other common mistake people tend to make with vodou is to believe that a lack of clarity (or knowledge) will protect them from getting in trouble, should they happen to do something they shouldn’t. Neither of these things is sufficient to prevent a magician from getting in trouble. A lack of clarity and confused intent are seen in vodou as a personal problem that you have deliberately chosen—if you are intended to be in vodou, you will be directed toward a teacher who can cure you of it—and not something which you can rely on to protect you from anything. To be able to have a focused mind and will, to be able to know your intent, and to be given permission to do certain things in magic, you need a significant amount of personal healing, growth, and elevation. If you have the capacity, you are expected to pursue training it and yourself.

Clarity, in magic, is the ability to accurately perceive (and hopefully, but not necessarily, understand) the situation. If you have clarity, you can accurately perceive yourself, your intentions, the situation you’re being faced with (at least your part of it), and typically you can use this information to figure out what to do next. Of all the qualities or disciplines associated with magic, clarity is by far the most desirable. It is also typically a temporary state and one which people tend to do magical work to get. You cannot have much, in the way of clarity, even with magical work to induce clarity, without work on the elevation, healing, and growth of the magician.

Intent is simply the result you would like to get from the magic, that you express during the process of doing magic. When someone is unclear about what they want, that lack of clarity will muddle the result (or make the magical work useless). It’s not uncommon for people to think they intend one result but actually desire a different result, much more strongly than their intended result. This, again tends to happen without work on the elevation, healing, and growth of the magician.

Without clarity, your intent will always be muddled and your results will always be hit or miss. You can be a magician without clarity and with muddy intent, but it will tend to put you in a cycle where you aren’t getting the results you want. This will often make you doubt your capacity, which has a dulling effect on your capacities. The cycle creates diminishing results and can lead to you doubting yourself enough to make you completely incapable of magic.

Neither clarity nor unified intent are even possible without a teacher.