Over the years I have gotten a lot of questions about Magick. All from different people with different lives, struggles, and outlooks, but funnily enough, pretty much all with the same question: what’s the smartest magical approach here?
And the thing I noticed straight away—because I recognised it instantly from my own early days—was that the goals were usually way too big. Like, wildly, unrealistically big. Which is the best way I know to set yourself up for failure, deciding Magick was utter bullshit all along, and then promptly giving up on it.
So that’s what I want to talk about in this post, that when you first get into Magick—or indeed, if you have been doing it for decades with varying results, then you should probably have much smaller, and more realistic goals than you think you should. Which is much less exciting than we all hoped, but it seems to be what works.
And yes, I can hear your objection: if Magick is Magick, shouldn’t it be able to do whatever I want? Well, sadly that’s just not how Magick works. It’s not a panacea, silver bullet, or Holy Grail. To the point that I have often found myself saying that “Magick doesn’t actually work like magic!”
A Course in Miracles suggests that there is no order of difficulty in miracles, and that the small miracle and the enormous miracle are equally likely to happen. And look, I just don’t believe that. Whatever the theology says, it doesn’t seem to play out that way in real life. Alan Chapman has a better stance on it in Advanced Magick for Beginners where he suggests always making sure your Magick has a realistic way of manifesting. If there’s nowhere for it to actually connect to the world, chances are that it will show up as a dream instead, or it lands in somebody else’s lap, or it never arrives the way you wanted.
So, let’s say, someone sets up a new online business, and the very first place their mind goes is the finish line. I’ll launch on Tuesday, and I’ll be a millionaire by Friday, and it’ll be the most successful thing anyone’s ever built, no hassle, no snags. And I get it, you do hear the odd story like that, occasionally some people are an instant overnight success, but not often. If you want to put all your money on that sort of outcome, go for it and see what happens, but I would suggest that by Friday you very likely won’t be a millionaire. That’s not to lower your expectations or to say your dreams aren’t fulfillable; just don’t go for the big thing straight away. The gap from nothing to everything is far too wide for you to jump across.
The other classic Magick target is the lottery. Instead of a wee fifty-euro scratch card win fledgling Wizards go straight for the multi-millions life changing jackpot! People want to go from wherever they are on the money ladder to Elon Musk overnight. And the reasoning is always well, Magick works, so why can’t I just have it? Well, clearly you’re not the first person to get into Magick. How many people who are into Magick do you know who are millionaires? Well, there is certainly a few, and there are even more quite well off Magicians, but if it were the case that you can get anything you want with Magick, then there’d be a lot less broke Wizards. Which tells us that there’s more going on than drawing a sigil and waking up rich.
Grant Morrison made this exact point in that Disinfo speech, and I’ve never forgotten the line:
“First thing you do is, you write down a desire. Make it something easy that’s likely to happen. Something possible, rather than say, y’know, “I’m going to be king of the moon” – which you may want to be, as we all do, but… it’s kind of hard to be king of the moon. You’re gonna have to get a rocket and go up there.”
So chunk it down. Make the goals smaller and far more doable than feels satisfying.
I once spoke to someone whose Magick goal for their website was: I will never have a single technical problem with it, ever, it runs perfectly forever. And sadly, that’s just not likely. Technology is a living, shifting language. It updates, it breaks, things go wrong, that’s just the texture of building anything. You’re going to try something that’s going to mess something else up, and then you fix it, and then you learn for next time. Trying to pull yourself out of that system by saying you’ll never have issues is not an ideal way to approach it. Also, it’s probably not going to happen, and you’ll set yourself up for frustration.
So instead of trying to be the first human being in history who never hits a snag, why not aim for: any technical issue with my website is easily and quickly resolved, without stress or much work. See the problems coming and get better at dealing with them. That’s a goal Magick can actually say yes to.
Because that does seem to be the deal here. You can dodge some problems, sure, but there’s always going to be something else. There’ll always be a challenge that asks you to rise to it. That’s the nature of this place we find ourselves in, like it or not. Using Magick to pretend the problems aren’t there is less effective than using it to get good at facing them. Build the system that handles trouble when it comes, instead of betting everything on trouble never coming.
It’s the same with relationships, by the way. Saying, “My marriage is the best in the world, we never argue and everything works out flawlessly,” is unrealistic, its just fantasy. When two real people collide there is going to be friction, and if there genuinely isn’t, somebody’s performing, playing a part, or massively compromising themselves to keep the peace. Far better to aim for: when challenges come up in our marriage, we’re brilliant at talking them through. Same move every time. Stop trying to abolish the problem. Get good at the problem.
These are the types of things I used to do at the beginning, and it caused me utter frustration—and I still do, when I forget to practice what I preach. I want to leap from right here to miles over there in a single bound. If Magick is probability enhancement—and that’s as good a definition as any of them—then the odds of going from no money today to Musk-level wealth are staggeringly long. You might nudge that probability with Magick, but it’s still improbable. Whereas going from no money to an extra fifty a week? That’s way more likely. And then, when you hit that goal, your Magick momentum builds up, and you’ll have gotten a bit of Magick proof, and the next bigger Magick target seems much more achievable.
One of my biggest influences, Stuart Wilde, has a small little book called Miracles. In it, he says that you should “shoot for the moon” when it comes to asking the Universe for what you want, but I disagree with him on this one.[1]
For me, when you shoot for the moon, and you invariably don’t get it more or less immediately, it disperses your entire energy and enthusiasm. It makes you feel that the whole thing is fake. I know because I did it. Back when I was doing webcomics and getting deep into Chaos Magick, I had affirmations running like my webcomic gets 20,000 views a day, but in reality I was only getting six views. A month later, still no 20,000, and I felt distraught, honestly, out of all proportion. If I’d just aimed for 200, hit it, and moved the marker up from there, I’d have saved myself a lot of grief and probably got further quicker. [2]
That’s how I work now. I chunk down the big goals into much smaller targets. And funnily enough, I’ve also noticed that when you give up running towards these massive goals and instead just walk, it all seems to flow much better.
Back in my webcomic days, I’d draw a new strip every day, post it and then sit there refreshing the stats, watching people arrive or not arrive, getting completely obsessed with the numbers. It destroyed the joy of it all.
These days I put up the PVlog, or a blog post, or whatever, and then I leave it alone. I genuinely don’t look. A while back I clocked that some random YouTube video of mine had quietly gone off and done 65,000 views, and the only reason I’d kept my head was that I hadn’t been hovering over it. Because I wasn’t obsessively following it, I kept my authenticity. If I had chased those numbers, I might have changed my whole channel to farm views, which was never the goal of doing any of this.
This ties into the whole “lust for result” concept. Do your part, and leave the rest alone. Let things do as they do.
And if you’re getting into anything creative purely for the money—do something else, honestly. Do anything else. It’s far easier to make money in a hundred other ways than through YouTube, comics, fiction, podcasting, photography, art, or music.
By all means do the creative thing—do it, the world needs you to—just don’t do them in the hope they will immediately let you escape your current life. That’s a mistake I made. People want out, right now, and when the fifty thousand views or the million sales don’t land on week one, or month one, it leaves them feeling more trapped than before, like success is being deliberately held just out of reach.
And that feeling of being hard done by usually comes from losing sight of where you actually are versus where you’re trying to leap to. So don’t leap from no money to a million. Go from no money to fifty euro. Put your attention there. Build the momentum. You’ll get to the big numbers eventually, or you might find somewhere along the way that you no longer even want the million euro—because it only ever stood in for freedom, sovereignty, self-reliance, and the ability to make your own decisions.
You could describe Magick as the attempt to take the reins of the world rather than be dragged along behind it. So when you’re starting out, get yourself small, achievable, realistic goals and walk toward them. Have your overarching long-term goals, but don’t bet all your money on black. Don’t decide that this one project has to be your total escape, or an absolute success, by Friday or else it’s all over.
Expect that there will be problems, and rather than trying to avoid them, attack them. It’s like putting an alarm in your house rather than just deciding your house will never be broken into. You set up a system so that when problems arise, you have the ability to solve them and learn from them. Become anti-fragile, in the sense Nassim Taleb talks about. Become something that gains from disorder rather than falling apart and being destroyed. As a Chaos Magician, that’s a beautiful thing to aim at.
Don’t ask to be spared the chaos, instead enchant to have the ability, and skill, to become empowered and enlivened by it.
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- It’s funny that two of the major influences on my Magical outlook are so opposed to each other when it comes to matters of having the Moon as a Magick target.
- Just to note that a couple of my strips from my comic Something Wonderful did end up getting over 20,000 views a day for a period.
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This blog is based on a Vlog I did a number of years ago which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNyDJvP8Wg4
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And that’s it for this time, I hope you got something good from it. If you’d like to chat about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Bluesky, though I’m not terribly active over there.
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So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!
Tommie