Magic 201: The Hand Not The Tool

Reminder: magic is not something you can teach yourself, nor is it something you can really practice alone. If you have the capacity for magic, you can often get the attention of something, but you cannot tell what you’re talking to without help and getting rid of what you got in touch with before it tries (or manages) to ruin your life requires a lot more than a basic capacity for magic.

One of the most common misconceptions about magical practices online, coming directly out of the cultures around the religions of the book (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), is the idea that once you have secret knowledge, you can use it. All you need to do is learn the secret, any way you can, and it now belongs to you. If you get enough secret knowledge of some tradition, the tradition is now yours. You don’t need to get permission, nor do you need any functioning relationships with anyone in the tradition, all you need is the ability to lie, cheat, steal, purchase, or connive your way into knowledge.

It takes a really passive conception of the divine and a shallow understanding of the way the spiritual world works to think that all you need is knowledge. There are plenty of people who have extensive knowledge of herbs in some culture who cannot use those herbs magically despite their knowledge. There are plenty of cultural anthropologists trying to study vodou or whom have tried to study vodou who cannot get the attention of the spirits involved or do anything with the information they gather but write books and papers.

The divine and the spirits know their own, and more importantly, know what you are allowed to do.

Vodou, unlike many other practices, is based not on knowledge, but on the individual. Your ability to do magic depends on your capacity, but also on the things the spirits and the divine are willing to allow you to do. You, your development, the place you have reached in your elevation: all these things are a part of those permissions. Permission (passaj/passage) to have and use knowledge is granted directly by the spirits, which are an active part of your life. The spirits have no problem enforcing boundaries against trespassers and no problem punishing people who pry into things they shouldn’t. They are not passive.

We say it is the hand which makes the tool. It means exactly this: it is the permissions, the knowledge, the capacity, the elevation and development of the magician which makes the magic effective.

This is one of the reasons I can write this series. I could give a lot of knowledge to people, and am in this series, without any fear of these people becoming magicians. If a reader has that capacity, they still have to have that permission. Without it, these are just words.

Permissions are granted by the spirits, often via a teacher.