I often see questions come up around the role of faith versus skepticism in occult practice. Do you need to believe in your results for them to manifest? How do you know any of this is real, rather than all in your head?
I’ve personally struggled with this question for decades. A huge part of my personal journey resulted from dissatisfaction with the idea that faith played a central role in magic, and my desire to find systems that worked irrespective of my doubts.
To be entirely transparent, the answers to questions around the importance of belief depend a lot on who you ask and what paradigm of magic they subscribe to. For a practitioner approaching magic through a psychological or manifestation model, belief is paramount; any doubt about the result will introduce a barrier to its manifestation. To quote Henry Ford, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
I tend to come down on the side of spirit and energetic models of magic. They fit my experiences better. Here are the perspectives I have arrived at though my own work, which may perhaps shed some light.
I’ve come to believe that, as with most things, a healthy balance between extremes is the right place to be. If you’re starting from a place of such extreme skepticism that you’re not willing to entertain esoteric ideas, then you won’t ever find the room to learn. Starting from a place where you assume that the occult is all bullshit and snake oil, without any plausible causal mechanism, and is therefore not even worth considering, will prevent you from ever getting off the ground. You need enough belief to be open minded. Enough to test things out for yourself.
Similarly, there’s a lot of value in being able to temporarily suspend skeptical analysis during an operation. A lot of meditation and ritual techniques are about building up to an altered state of consciousness. If you’re constantly second-guessing and analyzing your experiences as they unfold, it’s hard to reach the desired state of mind.
After an operation, however, I think skepticism is both healthy and desirable. Any system where you are trying to manifest something through sheer, sustained belief is a recipe for cognitive dissonance. It’s hard to believe without doubts in something you know won’t happen unless you believe in it. So don’t.
You should be questioning your experiences and looking for alternative explanations. Magic is a field in which it is really easy to become unmoored from anything real. Part of the reason I place as much emphasis on real-world results as I do on theurgy, is that it provides a kind of checksum on magical development. It’s much harder to bullshit myself that I’m a powerful-and-enlightened mage if I try to conjure up a real-world result and can’t. That seems safer than taking the position that I could change the world if I wanted to, but that doing so would be somehow dangerous or immoral or wrong.1
Let’s look at some of the most common questions.
I don’t believe in this particular paradigm/power/god. Can I still do magic with it?
I would argue yes. A good magical system should function irrespective of your belief in it. You should be able to get results without any prerequisite of faith. That’s how you arrive at the faith in the first place.2
I’m seeing results, but I’m still unsure. How do I prove to myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is real?
You have to decide this one for yourself.
Magic works through the manipulation of probabilities. Virtually every success will come about through what looks like natural chance. It’s just a matter of frequency.
If you do a spell to get a new job and get a job offer two days later, that’s a data point. If you do a spell to find love and meet someone exciting the same week, that’s a data point. None of those proves the existence of magic on its own; any of them could be due to random coincidence. But after a couple dozen “once in a lifetime” coincidences in a year, you get to a point where you stop doubting.
Will that be enough to convince someone who hasn’t had those same experiences? Probably not. And that’s fine.
I did a spell and I haven’t seen a result yet. How do I know if it worked?
At some point you cut it off and call it a failure. Maybe you included an explicit timeframe in the operation, maybe you didn’t. Either way, there is a time scale beyond which results aren’t valuable. If I need money to pay my bills, and it doesn’t show up for two years, that’s not a useful outcome.
Don’t bullshit yourself. Ask for something concrete, with a clear criteria for whether or not it has happened. If it hasn’t happened within a month or six weeks, move on. That particular operation was a failure.
I tried something and it failed. Why?
This, I think, is what the systems that emphasize belief are ultimately trying to explain. If magic is a real thing that consistently works, how do we explain the cases where it doesn’t? It’s convenient to be able to say “well, it only consistently works if you have faith it’s going to work.”
But ultimately, I think this is unnecessary. Magic is a skill, and like any skill it takes time to develop. Think about running: let’s say I’m out of shape and have never done any cardio in my life; the first time I try to run a 400-meter dash, I may not make it all the way around the track. That’s not because running isn’t a real thing, or doesn’t work consistently, it’s because I’m bad at it. Grifters and social media influencers notwithstanding, magic is hard and most people suck at it.
After training consistently for a year, I’m going to be much faster and more consistent in my running. But even then, there are limits to what can be accomplished. I’m never going to be able to run that 400-meter dash in five seconds. It’s not because running doesn’t work, or even that I’m not good at it, it’s just an outcome that is off the table. Even for the best runners in the world.
When magic doesn’t work, the calculus can be the same. Is what I’m asking for so unlikely that the magic can’t find a path to make it happen? Are there other factors at play that are counteracting the magic or preventing it from taking full effect? Do I need to get better at magic generally, and come back to this in a year? Faith has nothing to do with any of those.
Ultimately, the interplay between belief and skepticism is a nuanced one. You need to be able to keep enough of an open mind to be willing to experiment with things. You need to be willing to set aside your skepticism long enough to engage deeply with a meditation or ritual in the moment. But considering your practice with a critical eye is essential. Doing so should not detract from your ability to generate change in the world. If anything, it will spur you to further growth.
- If all you’re getting out of your magic is a vague sense of wellbeing, then I would argue that you are leaving a lot on the table. The right answer is to get better at magic, rather than convince yourself a sense of wellbeing is what you were really after all along. ↩︎
- See the discussion here about using Christian conjuration frameworks as a non-Christian. ↩︎
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