The first time I did a magical ritual, it was exactly by the book.
It was so by the book, in fact, that I wrote down all the instructions and words to say on a piece of paper and brought it in with me into the ritual. I would pause and break my concentration every 50 seconds or so in order to read what I had written verbatim, I brought the exact offerings I needed, and I flawlessly followed the text’s instructions.
Needless to say, nothing came of that ritual. None of my wishes came to fruition, and the whole thing felt very stale. I was so focused on “getting it right” that I forgot about a lot of the more subtle aspects of magic that actually matter.
After years of studying magic, I have corrected these mistakes and had a lot of success using magic to get the things I want.
…And as the years have gone by, I’ve seen a lot of other would-be magicians making similar mistakes. This is totally understandable, as nobody really talks about them.
To help my friends, allies, and students along the path, I’ve compiled a list of four major mistakes I see people making that took me a long time to even recognize.
Once I identified these errors and started correcting them, my whole magical practice really took off, and it became a lot easier to use magical ritual to manifest what I want. I am absolutely certain that the same thing will happen for you.
1. Choosing the Wrong Spirit for the job
You don’t summon Saturn, Astral God of Death, to bring you a lover. You don’t summon Venus, Astral Goddess of love and harmony, to give you victory in battle.
This is a no-brainer, but I see people making this mistake all the time - even some fairly well known magicians and authors who should, quite frankly, know better. Make no mistake - the ancient texts are very clear on this point: you can never summon a planetary spirit to do something contrary to its nature. Saturn will not raise the dead, and Venus will not separate lovers or help you win a lawsuit.
If you doubt me, have one person summon Jupiter twice a week for 5 months to bring in wealth, abundance, and significant business growth, and have another person summon Mars. Let’s see who’s richer at the end!
To solve this problem, you must deeply familiarize yourself with the significations of each planet. Read source texts like the Picatrix, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Vettius Valens’ Anthology, and Abu Ma’shar’s Great Introduction for starters. This will give you a much deeper sense for the topics of each planet, and how specifically they can help you.
Once you have done that, engage in a thorough analysis of what you are trying to accomplish. Be diligent and exacting to determine who will help you the most, and what you need the most. If you are a business owner who wants more money, maybe what you really need help with is marketing and sales. That’s Mercury’s domain, not Jupiter’s. But if you are trying to win a lawsuit, Mars alone will give you the drive necessary to overcome your opposition, not Mercury or even the Sun.
2. Overemphasizing The Structure of the Ritual
This one’s for you, oh sacrosanct, holier-than-thou ceremonial magician who has stumbled upon my blog.
Look, I get it. Structure is important. In fact, it’s crucial. You need some kind of structure, order, and consistency with your magical practice in order for rituals to work. Certain chants, prayers, images, gestures, etc. performed in a certain order will objectively aid in opening the doorway for certain celestial entities, and some won’t.
HOWEVER. You can format, structure, and order magical rituals in a thousand different ways. I have read and studied at least six different approaches to summoning astrological deities. They all differ tremendously, but they all work when done consistently.
Take an example: based off of your run-of-the-mill neo-pagan or Golden Dawn magical practice, you might consider magical circles indispensable. But far more ancient grimoires such as the Picatrix make no mention of them in the standard methods for summoning planetary deities.
So do you need a magical circle? All I can say is that I’ve cast powerful spells with and without one.
Structures are necessary, but they are not sufficient. This means that you cannot operate an effective ritual without some kind of structure and order, but they do not contain any power in and of themselves to actually manifest what you desire. Many people get the structure down, and then they think they’ve mastered magic. Structures are not the end in themselves – structures are only the beginning.
To overcome this issue, you need to pick a structure (a relatively simple one, ideally, unless you have been doing this for over a decade), use that same structure consistently, and then move on to the aspects of magic that actually give you results. And this leads me quite naturally to the third mistake people make….
3. Not using your own power.
What actually makes magical rituals extraordinarily powerful is…well, it’s power! To get the juices of your ritual really flowing and coursing through you, you need more power. The ritual structures merely channel and guide that power, and without it they’re like dead electrical wires or lakes that have totally dried up, leaving just a cracked hole in the earth.
You have the power. You can change your reality in the blink of an eye. Within you is the vast power of your own spirit, which dwarfs the power of any other spirit that you could call upon for help.
Unfortunately, most people don’t actually use their own power in ritual. They follow the format they read in some book, call in the spirit, make offerings and exchanges, and then close out. Now just reading that description, you can already tell that such an approach won’t be very effective or noteworthy. Quite frankly, it doesn’t even sound that magical.
Most people never enter into trance, they never turn on their astral sight, they never call up their own energy, and they certain don’t channel all that power into manifesting a desired outcome through magic.
Many don’t even know that you can do that!
But it’s totally possible, and totally accessible. It simply requires things that most people don’t have patience for: dedication, discipline, and practice.
You need a daily meditation practice where you are watching your breath, settling into stillness, detaching from your thoughts, and sinking your presencwe into your body. Such a practice will put you into a light trance, open up your astral sight, and deepen your awareness of the vast reserves of energy that are coursing through your body.
The vast majority of magicians and conjurors I know do not meditate every day. I find this shocking, and I cannot in good conscience allow people who visit my site looking for information and guidance to make the same mistake.
In fact, this is something that we will be practicing and working with a lot in my upcoming course, GNOSIS, and the practices of meditating and cultivating your connection to your own power will form the bedrock of your astrological ritual.
The best part about this is that you will get better and better at summoning up your own power and casting from that space the more and more you practice it. The sky’s the limit. Fast forward to three decades from now and your power will be unstoppable.
4. Forgetting who you really are
Has anyone told you that you are a God lately? No? Well let me do that now: You are a God.
You’ve simply forgotten and lost touch with your divine identity. But fear not, dear reader, for if you are reading this post then you are already in the process of waking back up to your true self, and have probably been doing so for a long time.
Many people I know see themselves as somehow subservient to or lower than the spirits and deities they summon. They placate and prostrate before higher beings from the vantage point of a poor, lowly human.
Now, one of two things will happen if you take this approach. First, the spirit will be uninterested, do nothing for you, and move on. In brief, nothing will happen.
Second, the spirit will be interested, and will take advantage of you. They’ll answer your petitions, but they will make you work for it. You will find yourself overwhelmed and at the service of someone else. The spirit starts getting what it wants more than you get what you want. And then they’ll start asking for more and more of you in exchange for what you are asking of them. It’s unsustainable.
I want to shift your thinking with this. You are equal in dignity and power to every being that you summon. Arguably, you have greater dignity and power because you’re the spirit that consciously chose to come down into this messy, gritty world of material existence and make a difference. You’re the front line, they’re the reserves.
Think of yourself as a powerful being who is summoning contractors and allies to aid in the enactment of your will. You are the manifestor, you are the one in charge, you make the final decisions. But you can’t do Jupiter’s work as well as Jupiter does, nor can you “Venus” as effectively as the planet Venus. So you call upon them to help you out, not unlike homeowners contacting a contractor to fix and build things they cannot do themselves.
Related to mistake number three: it is your power that makes the change. The spirit simply adds its own power in addition to yours to make more change happen. You are using their power to help you, instead of being at the spirit’s mercy.
The next time you cast a spell, spend some time in meditation beforehand feeling into your true identity as a microcosm of the total macrocosm. Once you feel connected and reattuned to your absolute self, perform your magic from that space.
So to sum up: aspiring magicians will very commonly summon the wrong spirit to help with the job, focus way too strongly on the structural format of a ritual, fail to tap into and access their own power, and forget their true identity.
To correct this, you need to dedicate yourself to rigorous research to determine the proper spirit, memorize and integrate a ritual, dedicate yourself to the daily practice of power cultivation, and cast from an awareness of your true, absolute identity.
If this approach sounds more difficult than reading a passage from a book out loud with some candles burning around you, that’s because it is! Real magic takes work, effort, diligence, and patience. No one becomes a master overnight, not even at a weekend intensive.
And more often than not, it requires a teacher. This is another reason why I am offering a new course on astrology and astrological magic, because I know from experience how hard it is to try and walk this path alone.
But all of this work is well worth it. I guarantee you that if you adjust for these four mistakes, your whole magical world will completely transform.
You will know who exactly to contact, you will stop breaking your concentration in the middle of a ritual to take a peek at what line to say next, and you will cast with the awareness of your highest self while drawing on the power of your spirit as you watch the energy fill the room around you and the space within you.
It is at this point that you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are a genuine magician, because you can see and feel the magical power from an altered state of consciousness. And then you can see your life transform around you in real and tangible ways.
There is nothing more exhilerating than this. You will never go back.