Magic is hard. It takes study, and practice, and repeated experimentation to get it right. And while that can lead to a lot of frustration at times, in many ways it’s also a blessing. You have a chance to develop judgement in a lower-stakes environment. Wisdom has the opportunity to grow alongside capability.
I see newcomers to magic ask, with distressing regularity, questions that go something like this: “I did a spell for a thing, and it worked, but now I’ve decided I don’t want that thing, how do I undo my spell?” And the short answer to this question is, you don’t.
It’s easy enough to unmake a spell – snuff the candles, disassemble the components, scatter the materia. But that just stops new energy from flowing into the spell. Undoing the effects of spellwork is a much trickier proposition. The effects of magic, by and large, come about through natural processes. Once that process is set in motion, it’s in motion. The universe has inertia, even when you stop pushing on it.
Outcomes may be reversed, but their history is not erased. A broken bowl can be mended, but the cracks are still visible. It takes much longer for scars to fade than it did for the original wounds to heal. Don’t assume that spellwork can be easily rolled back. If you set out to reshape the world to your will, you damn well better want it reshaped.
This goes double for spirit work. That’s what originally prompted me to write this post. You invite a spirit into your life – by invoking, conjuring, or petitioning it – to accomplish some goal. In accomplishing that goal, it will reshape you and your life. It must. That is very explicitly what you are asking it to do. And it’s sometimes hard to predict what the side effects of that reshaping will be.
Let’s say I conjure a Jupiterian spirit and ask for wealth. Not just a little wealth, but a vast wealth. If I’m a ho-hum cubicle worker in a stable-but-dead-end job, there is no pathway to achieve that wealth with the way my life is currently structured. Odds are pretty good the magic just fails; I can’t put enough power into it to make anything substantive happen.
But let’s say I keep on. I keep pouring power into this working with single-minded intensity until finally something gives. There’s a decent chance I’m going to get fired. Because there existed no pathway to vast wealth in my current job. I was demanding a dramatic change in circumstances, and accomplishing that required… well… a dramatic change in circumstances. And someday maybe I will look back fondly on how I was fired, and that forced me to get creative with my income, and that’s what started my journey to success. But in the short term it’s going to be a shock.
There’s an idea that we’re all constantly becoming an amalgam of our five closest friends, that we gradually become more like those people we interact most with. I’d posit that’s true of the spirits we interact with most as well.
If I pal around a lot with Martial spirits, and ask them for help in vanquishing my enemies, I am myself going to become more Martial in character. I’ll start to look at interactions with other people more as conflicts to be won or lost, even interactions that are not inherently adversarial. My assertiveness and self-discipline probably go up, but so does my irritability. I vanquish my enemies but also, if I’m not careful, set myself up for a life where I am never short of enemies to vanquish.
The same is true of other classes of spirits. The Mercurial spirits that make you wise and well-spoken can also make you cerebral and anxious. The Venusian spirits that make you attractive and charismatic can also make you decadent.
None of which is to say you shouldn’t do magic, or shouldn’t deal with spirits. This isn’t some monkey’s-paw situation where your wishes are granted, but they are all twisted so that you get no joy from them. Magic is great. I highly recommend it. It’s just that you should be going into things with your eyes open. You should think about what side effects you’re willing to accept, and how you’re going to mitigate the ones you’re not.
People like to say magic always has a cost. I’m not sure I agree. At least not in the sense they seem to mean it. I don’t believe there is some cosmic balancing force that extracts from us in proportion to the good we receive. But I do believe that actions (including magic) have consequences. Some good, some bad. By setting out to change the world, we shoulder the responsibility for the consequences of that change, whether we intended them or not.
That’s the cost at which magic, and I suppose free will more generally, comes.
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