Patricia Telesco - Magick made easy: charms, spells, potions & power

PART ONE
OFF TO OZ

PART TWO
THE COMPONENTS

The real magic is enthusiasm.
NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

M agick: the word conjures images of an enchanted time filled with court mages and mythical creatures. Although it seems that our technologically driven society has all but lost sight of magicks bewitching spark, I am happy to tell you that the god/dess is still alive and magick is, indeed, afoot! All around the world right now people just like you are casting spells, making amulets, meditating, and performing rituals to improve finances, ease troubled relationships, spice up their love lives, and tone down negativity.

Everyday folks, in all walks of life, have rediscovered magickal ideals and practices as a way of coping with chaos and satisfying their spirits, and you can too. Now, before the idea of working magick puts you off, relax. Think of spells, charms, and rituals as similar to detailed prayers to which you add some old-fashioned willpower, symbolic components, and actions to emphasize your desire. By so doing, you put your needs and goals before the Sacred Powers, then support that prayer with magickal energy and concrete efforts. This combination encourages active participation in making your present and future happier and more fulfilling.

Sound complicated? I promise that by the time youre finished reading this book, it wont seem that way at all. Magick is quite natural, and its something we all have available to us. If youve recently discovered an interest in magick, Wicca, and other emerging metaphysical lifestyles, Magick Made Easy can answer a lot of those nagging questions that come up in the light of a whole new way of thinking.

In fact, the main goal of Magick Made Easy, and particularly Part One, is to do exactly what the title saysto make magick easy for you! How? By familiarizing you with the basic art of folk magickits methods and toolsand then helping you feel more at ease with those methods and tools. And why folk magick? Because, by its nature, folk magick is pragmatic, simple, straightforward, and unassuming and therefore well suited to our busy lives.

See, our ancestors didnt have a lot of time for complex or meaningless procedures. Instead, they brought spirituality together with daily living, using creativity and inspiration to make magick out of everyday circumstances and objects. To me, this seems like the perfect combination for modern magick too.

Part Two is a list of potential components you can use in developing your own spells, meditations, rituals, pathworking exercises, charms, and visualizations. This list includes no Shakespearean elementsno tongue of dog, no eye of newt, and no toil and trouble. Instead, Magick Made Easy lives up to its claim by listing components found readily in and around the sacred space of home, including your coffeepot, various edibles, the telephone, pantry spices, your computer, and even the toilet! These items become the ingredients for your magickal recipes. Better still, they are already saturated with personal energy and meaningfulness, so they work better for any type of magick you hope to create.

In a society in which everyone juggles several responsibilities at once, this approach holds tremendous merit. It advocates looking at our personal environment differently, seeing the magickal potential and possibilities in everythingmost important, seeing this potential in yourself. See, even without the bells and whistleswithout the trappings or any components whatsoeveryou are the magick. Spiritual energy lies inside each one of us just waiting to be expressed. This book will help you find the right mediums and methods through which to express your own form of magick.

Think of Magick Made Easy as a course in mystical cookery. In the pages of this book you can examine various ways of baking up magickal energy just right, considering the implements and components you have available, your tastes, and the goal at hand. By measuring this information against your personal vision, then mixing and mingling these things in personally meaningful ways, the outcome is bound to be more satisfying, more transformational, more life-affirming, and more powerful. So make life and magick a little easier, beginning right here and now. Put on those ruby slippers and turn the page!

The visible is, for us,
the proportional measure of the invisible.
OLD MAGICKAL CREED

A lthough science seeks to unravel the mysteries of the universe, magick practitioners revel in them. We perceive these gaps in concrete data as the perfect opening through which spiritual truths can sneak and touch our reality. The world of the modern metaphysician is, after all, like Oz to our mundane Kansasa place filled to overflowing with wonders, potential, and possibilities. One of them is the very viable possibility that humans are much more than simple flesh and blood, that we are, instead, beings of soul, and power, and magick!

Some people think such talk is nothing more than superstitious prattle. Others regard the human soul and magick as part of the supernatural world, and as such seemingly separate, inaccessible, and incomprehensible to most humans. I, and thousands of other people in the world today disagree with both of these outlooks wholeheartedly. We see both the soul and its inherent magick as a birthright and as an important part of humankinds makeup. Magick Made Easy builds on this premise, recognizing that this birthright affects different people in very different ways. Exactly how it transforms each individuals present into a more fulfilling and empowering future depends a lot on personal vision and how he or she perceives this enigmatic thing called magick.

For those of you who have already been exposed to the world of magick, some of the information in this chapter may be a review. I suggest you scan it anyway. I think youll find some fresh perspectives in here that will augment or facilitate your continuing studies.

For the newcomers reading this who might be anxious to dive in headfirst and get started on spellcraft or other processes, Im a great advocate of testing the waters. Consequently, this chapter focuses on the abouts rather than the how-tos of magick. In the following pages you can get your astral feet wet by examining the answers Ive given to the most common questions people ask about magick and how the whole thing works.

As you read, please know that my vision of magick and spirituality is not the only way to approach this topic successfullyits just the way that works for me and one that seems to have helped my students over the years. To embark on this adventure with me as a teacher, however, you must first be willing to follow some rules I give to all my students: