One of the significant challenges is shifting the view of magic from something you do for deficient needs to integrating it into the pursuit of aspirational needs. Typically, this connects with having to sophisticate the approach you are taking and the level of effort (see Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path on that) you are working from.
The key at this point is learning to match your aspirations with the kinds of circumstances needed for them to come into being via your efforts and enchanting towards that.
One of the other things that often happens to people in the deficit/aspiration transition is a sense that things aren’t important enough to warrant a magical emphasis. Dr. Aquino mentions the notion that you wouldn’t serve a hot dog on your fine china in “Black Magic,” but there is a reverse issue that is even more common. Like many houses with “fine china,” there never seems to be an event important enough to take them out of storage and use them, making them either purely decorative or, worse, superfluous.
The same with the practice of Greater Black Magic.
If you have goals in a few areas, and I recommend people have them at the physical, interpersonal, and professional levels, you can start to see where fulfilling those goals could benefit from a magical intervention. Additionally, the “added value” to the efforts you take that have been granted magical significance should not be overlooked. What may seem mundane can be transformed into something heroic by these means.
Something from Ipsissimus Flowers’ dissertation may be helpful.
In his theoretical chapter, he outlines the various ways or reasons for people engaging in magical behaviors as:
a) protection from destruction, forces, beings, etc.
b) restoration of disturbed natural order, health, etc.
c) preservation of natural order, health, etc.
d) attraction of desired forces, beings, persons — invocations, evocations, love-magic, etc.
e) destruction of intrusive forces, beings, persons — curses, etc.
f) transformation of forces, beings, persons — initiation, shape-shifting, etc.
g) perception of hidden reality — divination
When looking at developing Operant Workings, the key is looking at both your desired outcomes and the current external conditions (Ecology, Community, and Culture) and seeing what needs to be attenuated in terms of those possibilities you want to become more likely, and also those possibilities you want to restrict or diminish.
One way to visualize this is to draw on Steven Hawking’s “Light Cone” analogy.
The moment of the Working itself represents the “Event” in the image, with the cones below representing all of the possibilities that could lead to this “Event” and above it representing all of the possibilities that can arise out of it. The purpose of the Working is to align outcomes with Desire.
Note: Probabilities are rarely so neatly organized, nor are all outcomes of the cones as likely as the other. If you want a real head wrecker, especially if you haven’t taken a chemistry class in a decade or so, consider the probabilistic models of where electrons might be in atoms.
One of the places people can falter is in failing to respect their actual Desires. This can come as dismissing them as “too trivial” or “not worth” magical intervention, though obviously, there are other versions. In many ways, these represent defense mechanisms both around Desire and around the practice of magic itself.
P.S., If you carry a trace of Protestant Work Ethic issues, feel free to swap “Desire” with “Task” or “Purpose.”
Setemheb 