‘Aren’t you a little old to believe in magic?’ The punchline to an old joke reminds us of the common struggle with doubt that afflicts many beginners to magic, and probably many longtime magicians too. The nagging back-of-the-mind suspicion that you really have been wasting your time with this nonsense.

Beginners often turn up on the Internet with the unhelpful heading ‘A Question,’ or perhaps trying to turn their discomfiting doubt back onto others to solve, using subject headings like ‘So, how many of you have actually made stuff happen?’ The beginner can come across as a bit of a troll when all they actually want is reassurance that if they get deeply into magic they’re not going to get suckered into the punchline of the old joke.

Thread after thread gets filled by magicians answering enquirers’ doubts but in the end, no matter how clear and well-informed the answers, no matter how honestly researched in experience, no matter how fully the question is addressed, the enquirer’s doubt remains.

‘Have you had a spell come true? Tell me.’

‘Yes. I did this. It came to pass.’

‘Prove it.’

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‘Pics or it didn’t happen.’

and so on.

To add to their discomfort, the field they’ve chosen to explore has no universally agreed starting point. Wittgenstein commented that a philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about.’ And this pretty much sums up the confusion of the beginner to magic, a bit like being dropped off at a random point in a big city and being told to ‘head for the secret meeting place.’ And the rest of us disagree about where the secret meeting place is.

We naturally seek to lessen the ‘where the hell do I start?’ feeling by getting more information. Some trusting souls commit to a teacher or teaching which appears to supply the comforting certainties. Some less trusting souls dither forever, fatally curious but unwilling to commit so much of themselves to such an unreliably signposted path. So they keep asking us That Question.

Unfortunately, asking That Question gets you nowhere and I do wish that Internet enquirers would believe me on this. The doubt remains and it always will, okay? No amount of tyre-kicking will stop the nagging until you pick up a wand and do some magic. Take it from a practicing magician that only the regular practice of magic will transport magic from rumour into your own experience.

We don’t so much observe our experiences as interpret them. And we tend to head for explanations that make it all simple, cover all the bases and hang together nicely to help us to get on with our lives undisturbed by nagging doubts. We generate beliefs.

Belief, in this sense, means an understanding which governs one’s behaviour. This sort of belief seems habitual. Philosophical adolescents arguing about whether the world is ‘real’ don’t shift uneasily in their armchair while they do so. Apparently, without having to think about it they believe in the reality of the armchair that supports them. It’s a habit. We expect the ground to be there underfoot every time, and if the ground should give way underfoot we’ll feel shock and erm, let down.

Belief, in this sense, drives behaviour, and corresponds to some extent, it seems to me, to what Austin Spare had in mind with his term ‘organic belief.’ In contrast, the ‘belief’ of which he disapproved would have had no behavioural driver, and amounted to no more than a verbal commitment to a particular point of view. Such disapproval stems from the uselessness of the merely verbal form when it comes to making magic work, as opposed to the ‘driver’ nature of the organic belief.

For example, let’s say I want a new wossname but can’t afford it. I’ve read a book on candle magic and I try it out with, say, a candle spell for wealth. Right colour candle, some words out of the book, light the candle and let it burn out, as per instructions.

Fuck all happens.

If I’m not feeling shocked and let down that nothing happened, that means I never really expected it to. I had no organic belief in candle magic. I had produced empty words and empty ritual.

Now I either give up on candle magic or I cast around for a larger explanation that might convince me why candle magic should work. Maybe a large system of correspondences, like Qabala. Maybe some research into ‘proven’ instances of psychic phenomena. Whatever, I’m now engaged in a search for an explanation in which the belief ‘candle magic can work’ might fit. Here’s some help with the search.

Picked one? Good. Now…

You can’t take on a world-shaking new belief all in one gulp. It’s not gonna go down. So start small. Nibble the edges of the big new belief. Start with the borderline acceptable ideas and play with those for a bit. I said play. Don’t get all serious on yourself.

How might you play with a belief you don’t have? Well, you have surely watched a movie or something where you actually got into it, identified with significant characters, got excited, scared, turned on, saddened, at all the right places, and felt at the end that you’d been through an experience. You know it was made up but you went with it anyway. We call it ‘suspension of disbelief.’ Games aren’t possible without it.

Anyway, you settle down, relax, maybe close your eyes, and use your imagination to suggest to you what it might be like to have such-and-such a belief. What if, for example, the runic writing systems of Northern Europe encoded a magical system? What if the simple practice of scratching marks in stone and wood allows deep and primeval forces to manifest? Then maybe cut or draw a few runes and feel what they’re like. Play ‘What-if?’ daily until your mind finds the ‘What-if?’ ideas less difficult to swallow. It learns to live with the new ideas and they become ‘As-if.’ Then move on to something less easy. What if the runic writing system has transmitted a means of contact with ancient deities and spirits? Imagine if that was true. Just sit with the idea. Imagine gazing at the Ansuz rune and seeing Odhinn squinting back with his one eye.

Often a new belief won’t take while an old one stands in the way. So identify the form of any beliefs you have against magic. You may frame it, for example, as ‘Magic is just a misinterpretation of things the mind does.’ Loosen the old one with ‘What-if?’ That is, ask ‘What if that belief wasn’t the case?’ Relax and imagine your life without it. Get used to such a possible state of affairs. Explore the consequences from the safety of your imagination. Do this many times or until your mind becomes comfortable relaxing its death-grip on the old belief.

Once you feel the old belief is loosening, start acting ‘As-if’ it were not so.

Prepare its replacement by the above methods and in time ritually embody it. Act it out in a magical setting. There you go. Give it time. It will grow.

The following techniques of Metamorphosis will change your identity, your belief about who and what you are, to support your newborn belief in magic.

Become a magician.

To do so:

Do your homework on magic. Know some stuff.

Hang out with successful magicians if you can find some decent ones (not easy).

Dress like a magician. Yeah, that usually means wearing too much black. A significant bit of jewellery might be enough.

Acquire or create a few magical objects and either:

hide them obsessively or show them off proudly in your living space.

Describe yourself as a magician, especially to yourself and to people you think can handle it.

Write down your magical insights and experiences, and show some (but not all) of these writings to understanding others.

And most of all:

Pick up a wand and do lots of magic. Your new belief will ring hollow (especially with the rest of us, heh heh) if you’re not actually doing magic.

All in all, your actions will convince yourself. Behaviour drives belief until belief drives behaviour, yes? By these means, create yourself as the kind of person who Makes Stuff Happen.

We might ask whether we’re kidding ourselves with these psychological ploys and we’re installing more bullshit ideas? Well, as unbelievers, sceptical magicians, we should indeed ask that question, and the answer lies in our magical record.

We have, haven’t we, been building up a track record of magic done and results in. We’ll have noticed how the early slew of repeated failures began to change to more successes. This suggests that it wasn’t so much that magic didn’t work as that we were crap at it. Until we began to get the knack of it. And now when some doubting beginner asks ‘So how many of you have actually made stuff happen?’ you can thumb through your magical record and tell them. But knowing their doubts, you won’t expect to be believed, so instead you tell them how to prove it to themselves: ‘Get practicing, pilgrim. There is no other way.’

You could even send them here to the Cradle.