When you have your list of qualities that you feel satisfied with, think about yourself. If you are seeking good qualities from someone else, do you offer similar qualities to the one you are in relationship with? Relationship is always about balance—give and take. If you have a clear intention about what you are seeking, of what you want to receive, do you have a clear intention of what qualities you possess and what you are willing to offer?
exercise} List of Qualities in Yourself
Repeat the previous exercise but this time, focus on making a list about yourself and the qualities you bring to the table. If your potential partner, out there somewhere, was making his or her own list, what would be on that list that would describe you? Refine the list as honestly and objectively as you can.
Upon reflection of your own list, are you a balanced match for what you are looking for, or are you expecting the moon and offering nothing? Do you want that kind of relationship? You could get it, but it won’t be very satisfying for your partner, and therefore it won’t be very stable for you. Are there things you feel you need to change about yourself to make you a better potential partner? If so, begin making plans to improve yourself in whatever ways are necessary, and seek outside help, outside facilitation if need be. Your personal work might be physical, such as exercising more, eating better, and getting into more attractive physical shape. It could be emotional balance and require a therapist or life coach. Everybody’s situation will be different, so find the help that you might need.
The Intention of Love
Intention is such an important part of life. We must balance intention with a balance of being open to unplanned blessings, but intention gives us a direction and impetus forward in the adventure of life. Some people think relationships and romance just happen to them, and it does, yet they keep attracting people who are not balanced and correct because they have never taken the time to think about what kind of person would be right.
My friend Rowan in California is a very loving, very giving person, but after a series of bad relationships with abusive men, she told me that it never occurred to her to ask for what she wanted in a relationship. She is a very magickal person who uses ritual and prayer in all other areas of her life, but she felt like she couldn’t be specific with love. For some reason, she felt the universe would send her what was right, without any intention on her part. But she can use magick in love, both for a potential partner and for herself. Her experience in love magick led to a major crisis and healing, working through the issues of self-love and self-acceptance. She performed a ritual for love using a potion I had made specifically for her (see chapter 7’s Love Potion No. 13). During the course of the ritual she spilled the potion, and her intuition guided her to anoint her whole body with the entire potion. While she felt great during the ritual, she immediately became very ill in the days and weeks that followed and was bedridden. Throughout the healing process, she was forced by time and solitude to look at all her issues around love and relationship, family and home. She literally couldn’t distract herself or run away. Her illness baffled the doctors, and she mysteriously recovered just as she had taken ill but now was in a much clearer, healthier, and happier place, feeling ready for a healthy, balanced relationship. She is still very open to what the universe has to show her, but her boundaries about who she lets into her life, and her intention on the types of men she wants, have become much clearer.
Part of aligning the steps of magick in our ritual space with the follow-up work of life outside of our ritual space is to make sure that our thoughts, words, and actions are truly in alignment with our intentions. Rowan’s example was extreme, but we need to get clear in our intentions and follow up those intentions, making sure our actions reflect them in our day-to-day life. Many people say they want something specific, and then their actions do not support their intentions. It’s much like lying to the universe, even when we are unconsciously lying to it. Lying to the universe, to ourselves, and to others devalues the power of our words and diminishes our magick.
The universe understands symbols and actions much easier than words. When we say something in private or in ritual or in our journal, and then our actions are contrary, or out of alignment with what we say we want, the universe doesn’t know what to fulfill in terms of intention. Our energy is not clearly attracting what we want, because we are mixing our signals.
Many people will have a clear intention of what kind of relationship they want but then settle for relationships that are obviously not correct for them, not what they are looking for. While we must be open to unexpected blessings in our life, when we settle for a relationship because it’s better than being alone, even when it is unhealthy for us, we are not receiving a blessing, we are cursing ourselves. Our self-inflicted, self-chosen jinx is blocking the way for a good relationship to come to us. If we close the avenue of a good relationship, it will never appear.
I have another friend who has been in an unsatisfying relationship for years. This one has turned into a friendship living arrangement with sex but none of the romance he wants. Their relationship is open to other sexual partners, meaning each partner can have sex with someone else without any sense of betrayal. He figures when he finds someone better, he’ll just leave. While technically it could happen, this betrays the spirit of his arrangement with his partner. Any truly romantic potential partner who hears about this unhealthy situation will run screaming in the other direction until it all gets settled out. So though he’s technically open to finding someone else, he really is closed off to what he wants.
I’ve had many friends, clients, and students who say they are longing for a life partner, a truly committed person who is their equal, and they put energy into magickal rituals to manifest this. Then they go out and have sex with casual partners right afterward and bemoan the fact they haven’t found their partner. While there is nothing inherently wrong with casual sex if it’s the right choice for you, it does send mixed signals to the universe. After telling the universe exactly what you want beyond the physical in a partner, you casually pick up and invest a lot of energy in someone who is nothing like for whom you just asked. While it is possible to do love magick for a partner and find that partner through a casual one-night stand right afterward, I’ve only seen it happen successfully twice; most often I’ve seen people become miserable when taking this course. There is not an alignment of action and intention.
Love and sexual energy are all different parts of life force, and when you are focused on a goal, you have to focus your energy on the task at hand. That is why many magickal orders and mystic traditions have restrictions on sex. While some are due to politics and a denial of sexual energy, many apply the sexual energy in the pursuit of enlightenment directly with the Divine, rather than the pursuit of enlightenment through the physical world and a relationship with it and others.
Thankfully, Witchcraft is a mystery tradition that doesn’t require celibacy on any level. But if you have a specific goal in mind, you should be careful in how you use your life-force energy. If you want to focus your romantic and sexual energy on a partner, and you tell the universe this but take actions to the contrary while you are waiting, scattering your energy in many directions, you are self-sabotaging the working. It’s like telling the universe you want to be in shape and healthy immediately, yet eating lots of potato chips while you’re waiting for it to magickally happen. There is nothing immoral about eating potato chips, but it does run contrary to your stated goal. The waiting period is what helps shape your internal world to create a change in your external world. Now, if you have no romantic-partner goal in mind, you can have sex with whomever you want, whenever you want. It’s just a matter of applying the right energies to the goals you have.
Learning to apply this principle to my own life was very profound and effective. After doing many love spells and having a profound experience during one ritual (see chapter 7’s Rose Wish), I sti
ll wasn’t manifesting a good partner, and I was distracted by someone sexually who I knew was not and would never be my life partner. But I was lonely. We would break things off and then get back together. When I made the clear and final decision to break off all sexual contact with this man, as we were both settling for something less than what we both wanted, and focused on finding the right partner, my future husband showed up three days later. Once I was truly clear in what I wanted, my magick had the energy and space to manifest.
A friend of mine, after a long search for his life mate, was told by an ancestor spirit during a Samhain ritual that he spread his power around too much. He spread his ability to attract around too much, sharing his energy with too many people sexually. By doing so, he couldn’t attract “the one” because he was not shining brightly, he was wasting his energy on other tiny flames in his life, thinking he was just killing time and having fun until “the one” showed up. People don’t just show up. It’s a complicated interplay of forces that brings two people together. Both have to be ready. If you keep telling the universe you are just playing, just “killing time,” you continue to attract people who reinforce that status of waiting, killing time. Before you know it, your life has passed before your eyes. Many pop culture self-help approaches to magick sum it up nicely: “You attract whatever you focus on.”
exercise} Sexual Black Fast
One technique to clearly focus your energy in the direction you want is a variation of the black fast. Traditionally, the black fast is a curse. One curses another individual and then vows to eat nothing but bread, water, and salt until that curse comes true. The idea is that your psyche, pushed to such an extreme with these physical conditions, will work day and night to fulfill your malignant will. Now, I am not suggesting cursing anyone to get the relationship you want, but the principle of forcing your psyche with extreme physical conditions is an interesting and effective magickal technique.
I am suggesting a form of sexual black fast. When you truly decide you are prepared and ready for a long-term relationship and have a clear intention of what kind of relationship you want, abstain from casual sexual encounters. You can still have food normally, so this isn’t a food fast. Focus your will and the energy of your body on the goal you have. I’m not saying don’t date. Please, do date. Get to know the person, and determine if this is a potential partner. If so, then you break the fast. But if not, don’t get tied down or engaged in any romantic or sexual relationship with the person. You can be friends, but let go of any romantic notions and continue your quest. We can get bogged down with people who are nice or take months to find out that a person isn’t right for us. A good, clear, and level-headed magician will be able to quickly determine if a person comes close to matching their intention and has the same intentions toward you as well. If not, don’t settle because you’re lonely or you think you can change the person into an ideal partner. A magician knows that lasting change must come from within. A person can change if they want to change. You can change yourself. You can’t change someone else into what you want them to be. Even when they appear to conform for a time, it won’t be a deep and lasting change.
Making sure you are in total harmony with your intentions is key to any successful magick. Love is messy, and love magick also is messy and difficult. The clearer you can be in yourself, and the more centered you can be in all aspects of your life, the more successful your love magick will be.
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The Ethics of Love, Lust, and Romance Magick
One of the most important aspects of love magick, and one of the reasons that it is so complicated and controversial, is the issue of ethics. I come across quite a few people open to magick and Witchcraft, but aghast that you could use spiritual powers for money, love, or sex. To such people, these are selfish pursuits and are not spiritual at all. Some naively assume that spiritual powers do not work for selfish pursuits, so they don’t understand how such magick could work. Due to the fallacies of many television shows about Witchcraft, they believe some sort of cosmic laws prevent it. Those that do believe magick can work for personal gain usually assume that “good” people wouldn’t do such a thing because it is somehow evil or harmful to themselves and others.
Yet in my experience as a public Witch, I’ve found a small percentage of this group who believes love magick is wrong will still come to you in times of desperation and ask you to do something in clear violation of their proposed ethics and your own, and they feel perfectly justified doing so because their love is “real.” Love can make us crazy at times and warp our view of what is right and wrong. I think it is truly important to reflect and discuss the ethics of love magick, and decide what is right for you far before you get into the situation of casting a love spell. You should clearly define your own morality regarding love magick before you really need it. You can always change your point of view, but at least you will be putting thought and reason into it, rather than basing your decision solely on blind lust, fear, or raging jealousy. Extreme emotions can prompt us to do extreme things. It is important to develop the intellect and reason, the logical mind, to balance the emotions. In the magickal tradition of the Qabalah, the mind is literally balancing the emotions, and the proper proportion of both is needed to be successful in life and magick.
figure}Tree of Life emphasizing Hod (Mercury—Intellect) and Netzach (Venus—Emotion) with the path of the Tower card from the tarot’s Major Arcana. This image can be meditated upon to balance our logic with our feelings.
In qabalistic magick, each realm of consciousness, seen both as a spiritual world and an aspect of ourselves, is visualized as a sphere on a glyph known as the Tree of Life. The tree contains ten spheres, properly called sephiroth (sephira, singular), describing both the universe and our own soul. The sphere associated with Venus, as the sphere of love and primal emotion, is called Netzach, and it is directly balanced by a sphere on the other side of the Tree of Life named Hod. Hod is ruled by Mercury and embodies the linear mind. The qabalistic tradition teaches us about the balance between our intellect (Hod) and our emotions (Netzach). For those of us who tend to emphasize one over the other, an understanding of this system can be helpful. It’s particularly helpful to rely on the powers of Hod when we feel we are running wild with our Netzach passions and need to find balance.
Each of the spheres on the Tree of Life are connected by a “path,” a line originally associated with one of the twenty-two Hebrew letters and then later associated with the Major Arcana of the tarot deck. Each path represents the shift in consciousness that must occur to move from one sphere to another. Climbing to the top of the Tree of Life is the climb to our spiritual source and the experience of enlightenment. The path that traditionally connects Netzach and Hod is symbolized by the tarot card known as the Tower. The Tower’s lesson is about how things come crumbling down when we build our life in an imbalanced way. We have to start back at the foundation. When we don’t have harmony and balance between emotion and logic, Netzach and Hod, we will soon experience the Tower’s lessons and have to rebuild again.
Think about times in your life when your passions regarding relationship are out of balance. When you can’t find stability, it truly feels like the world is collapsing; that’s the lesson of the Tower. While qabalistic magick is a complex art in itself, the pattern of the Tree of Life can be a good guide to anyone. When your Netzach is out of control, look to the logical mind, Hod, to counterbalance it. Ask yourself the logical, linear, rational questions about the situation. It’s hard, but when you do, the process can point out when you’ve gone a little crazy emotionally and help balance and center you and your actions. Likewise, when you are too intellectual, ask yourself how you feel about a situation. Tap into the powers of Netzach for balance.
Famous Love Archetypes
Part of our own process of building a strong, balanced foundation in regard to love magick is to explore the
archetypal wisdom of the Witch through history as it relates to love magick and ethics. Some of the images are steeped in lore and history, the territory of Hod, while others bring up emotional and visceral responses, the realm of Netzach. The Witch’s association with love and love spells, both for good and ill, are part of our fascination with Witchcraft and magick. Not all of the mythic and historic figures listed here are role models, but they are teachers. Sometimes they teach by showing us what not to do. Both sides are necessary to understand where we as a tradition have come to before we decide where we are going with our magick and ethics.
The Enchantresses
Witches have always had an association with love magick. In fact, it might be one of the reasons for our vilification in Western culture. While we might be most familiar with the image of the Witch as the old hag, the stereotypical Halloween image of the green-faced, crooked- toothed, hooknosed Witch riding her broom and scaring children, the oldest images we have of mythic Witches, coming from ancient Greece, are of beautiful enchantresses and deadly sorceresses.
Two of the most powerful, if not the most ethically flattering in their classic stories, are Circe and Medea. Both are presented as beautiful women, a far cry from the ugly crones of popular European lore. Circe, though portrayed as a Witchlike figure, is actually considered a goddess, the daughter of Helios, a Titan, and Perse, an Oceanid. She has the power of transformation, changing men into beasts. She is most famously known for her love affair with Odysseus and for changing his crew into pigs. Before he set out on his rescue mission, Odysseus was advised by the god Hermes to use the herb moly to block Circe’s magickal powers. Circe was so surprised by his immunity to her magick, she fell in love with him and, according to some mythic reports, bore him three sons. She was able to keep Odysseus as her lover in her home for an entire year. Because of her love for him, she eventually assisted him in his quest to return home. She was vilified for seducing Odysseus, a married man, and is portrayed as one of the villains of the story. Did she use magick to seduce him, or was it his own free will? He could certainly blame her magick when rationalizing his immoral activities, but we don’t know if it’s true.
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