I’ve said that magic has two basic purposes. The first is to understand through experience our fundamental unity in the Universe. Call it Illumination. And the second is to make that Universe a little more to our liking. Changing things. That’s what most people call ‘magic.’

This article, worked as a procedure, enables you to put together clear ideas about what you actually want. All magicians should have a way of doing this, as it makes little sense to enchant without knowing what you’re enchanting for.

In practice, you will rarely need to go through all this palaver, but it is particularly helpful to run it as an exercise if:

you’re new to the idea of creating Statements of Intent and need walking through it;

your magic has been mostly unsuccessful lately and you need to review your methods. This procedure runs a diagnostic on your Statements of Intent.

A general form of the Statement of Intent:

“I DESIRE THIS DIFFERENCE FOR THIS PURPOSE.”

DESIRE. You needn’t bother enchanting for something unless you actually want it. The magician part of you just won’t go for stuff it feels pointless or trivial. Many series of psychic experiments have started promisingly but then actually deteriorated to worse than chance presumably because the sheer boring repetition killed it off.

Face your desires. There’s a great movie called Stalker in which the Stalker of the title is a guide to a place where your deepest desire comes true. He tells of one person he guided there, who got his wish, and killed himself afterwards. Why? Because he’d wished for the return of his dead brother but he kept getting money instead. He couldn’t face the truth that he really loved money more than his brother. No need to panic: just be told that when you fish for your deepest desires you may pull out some ugly ones you didn’t know were there. Don’t throw them back in disgust: accept what you find and learn from it.

Being wholehearted. This is not about ‘force’ of desire or how ‘badly’ you want it. Desire is not some sort of muscle and the arena of magic is not a gym or a playing field. It’s just that if you feel yourself in two minds about what you want, the division will ruin the magic. So come to some agreement with yourselfs over what you really want, and desire it wholeheartedly.

Asking for stupid stuff: I’m sure you know that Harry Potter magics are all made up, nor are you ever going to fly like Superman. We know. We all have a common sense chip that most of us don’t use enough. Instead, think of spellcasting as the art of arranging useful coincidences. Check that you genuinely feel that whatever you’re asking for seems a real possibility, or your magical mind will just dismiss it. This is your belief in magic in this circumstance . If you are lacking in that belief, then fix it first.

DIFFERENCE. Clarify exactly what you want to get, not just ‘better,’ or ‘more money’. How much more? A penny? How specific do you need to be here? On the other hand, do you need to specify £20.99 at 1305 hours on Saturday week, including clean new notes and coins?

EXTRA: THE MEANS WHEREBY. ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ This is a short story by W. W. Jacobs, often cited as a cautionary tale against those who would- ahem, monkey with fate. That would be you and me, right? It’s a horror story, revolving around the nasty premise that magical wishes get granted in horrible ways.

Well, the good news is that it’s fiction written by a non-magician, who perforce knows nothing. The magical universe doesn’t function like that. You don’t need a lawyer to draft a Statement of Intent (although it’s wise to be quite precise when dealing with, say, goetic demons). Just remember that magic is as childishly literal as your own unconscious mind. Most of us have stories to tell of how we got a result in accordance with what we said but not what we meant, as with a colleague of mine whose love-spell included the clause ‘a prick of greater girth.’ You can guess what sort of a guy she pulled. But I digress.

Anyway, if you wish to control unwanted side-effects or ‘collateral damage’ as some like to call it, then add to your Statement of Intent a Means Whereby. For example, if instead of simply enchanting for £200, the people with the monkey’s paw had specified that they gain £200 by selling an item for more than they paid for it, it would have been a really boring story but better magic.

Also, the magician in you doesn’t understand negatives; ‘no’, ‘not that’, ‘don’t want,’ and may only hear what you ‘don’t want.’ So express your desire in the positive only. Instead of saying “I don’t want that bastard in my life anymore” enchant with “that bastard has left my life for ever.” (see also below: ‘Stating the Desire As If It Has Already Come to Pass’)

EXERCISE: WALKING THE DESIRED FUTURE: Describe to yourself what you would see, hear and experience happening as your desire comes to pass. Enter into this experience, use this exercise to check out whether you really want it as much as you thought. Also, reviewing this experience at a later date will let you know when you’ve got your desire.

EXTRA: CONTEXT. While doing the exercise above, just ask yourself, where would I like to see this? When? Time limit? Around what people? In what surroundings and in what event? What does it do?

As well as being part of your previewing your desired future, the context check helps you to screen for those pesky unwanted side-effects.

PURPOSE. Distinguish between means and ends. It’s all very well saying “I will invoke the god [insert godname here],” and it counts as a result to get the Invocation, but what are you doing it for? Let me explain.

There are means and there are ends. You do something so that something else can happen. The first is the means. The other is the end. You get a car so that you can transport yourself where you want, when you want, reliably. The car is for getting you there fast, as doorstep-to-doorstep as possible, plus all your stuff and the kids if you have them. Convenient transport is the end, the car is the means.

But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Ask what a car really makes possible for you and words like ‘independence,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘control,’ ‘power’ may well enter the conversation. These short descriptions are called ‘values’ and they’re the buttons that advertisers and politicians are forever pressing on you. Because they’re important. That’s why they’re called ‘values’ and not ‘couldn’t-really-give-a-shit-abouts.’

You have your own set of values which will be as unique a set as your fingerprints. Trouble is, they lurk, as it were, below the conscious surface of your mind and like everything else that lurks down there they can be difficult to identify and fish out for scrutiny. They are something to do with emotion rather than conscious reasoning. And emotion calls the shots in our lives, not reason. Sorry if you thought that humans are essentially rational, but no. Just look around and … well, yeah, you see?

STATE THE DESIRE AS IF IT HAS ALREADY COME TO PASS. You are not enchanting for your desire, you are enchanting for its fulfilment. If you enchant merely for the desire, well … you’ve already got the desire, so nothing else is likely to happen. We enchant for the desire having come to pass, having happened, for example “I have x-many pounds/euros/dollars/yen/etc.” So your Statement of Intent general form now changes to ‘I HAVE this DIFFERENCE for this PURPOSE.’

EXERCISE: GOING FROM MEANS TO ENDS TO ULTIMATE END.

Okay, so imagine you’ve selected that desire as your means. Now ask, ‘If I already had the money’, what would that make possible in my life?’ Get an answer, like ‘security’, for example. Call that an end. Then go, ‘If I already had security, what would that in turn make possible for me?’ And so on, until you quickly hit a point where words fail you but you feel something deep and amazing. Scribble a sigil, quickly, before the feeling fades. Really, just a quick doodle, no thinking. This symbolises what is really important to you in this act of magic, so call that your ultimate end. This is what your magic is for.

Now your Statement of Intent is good to go, to be symbolised, sigilized, acted out or whatever it is you want to do to make it so. When you do the magic for whatever it was, more money or whatever, you can if you like use or incorporate that sigil you doodled when getting at the values involved. Getting your desire in line with your values helps to make you wholehearted. Time to get enchanting.