Autumn is good.

If preparing for spells makes you feel good, go ahead. No reason to expect witchcraft to work, though.

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"We eat gods for breakfast!" -- Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster

No reason to expect it not to work either.

Witchcraft works for me all the time and has for the 20+ years I've been a Pagan and a witch and it works for literally thousands of other people around the world. Although, just like anything else of a "mystical" nature it works best if you believe in your own abilities to perform it properly.

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Actually, there are quite a number of good reasons to expect it not to work. But you would no doubt find the reasons unconvincing at best, annoying at worst.

But now I'm curious. Just what does it DO when it works? And does it work whether you believe in it or not?

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"We eat gods for breakfast!" -- Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster

Actually, there are quite a number of good reasons to expect it not to work. But you would no doubt find the reasons unconvincing at best, annoying at worst.

Everyone is entitled to their beliefs.

But now I'm curious. Just what does it DO when it works? And does it work whether you believe in it or not?

When it works you get what you were working magic for. Now, does it work like on TV or in fantasy books? No, of course not. Magic works in conjunction with the laws of physics, not against them or outside of them. Magic isn't going to cause things to just plop into your life. For example, if you cast a spell to help you get a new job, but then just sit on your butt instead of filling out applications you're not going to get one. But when you cast a spell for a new job in conjunction with actual job hunting, magic can help you land a better job faster than you would on your own.

A couple of examples of successful spellwork:

When my husband and I started looking for a house to buy I did spellwork to help find the perfect house for us as quickly as possible. Within 6 weeks of casting the spell, not only did we find the perfect house, but the paperwork required for a VA loan... which normally can take 6 months to a year... was completed and approved, the mortgage papers were filed and approved, the housing inspection done without a hitch, and a closing date set, and we were moved in.

When we were looking for a new "used" truck, I cast a spell to find a good, reliable vehicle within our budget. Driving home, that afternoon my husband spotted an SUV for sale in a car lot for $5900 (average price for it's make and model). When he stopped to look at it they were in the process of dropping the price to $4000. They were selling the truck for a friend of the family who was moving to Spain by the end of the week and needed it sold before they left. They told my husband if he could pay cash the owner would take $3000 for it. We had the cash in savings and drove it home that night.

Could all of that have been coincidence? Sure. But with successful magic such "coincidences" happens with amazing regularity.

Now, does magic work whether you believe in it or not? Not generally, but sometimes yes. The reason is when you work magic you are directing energy towards a specific goal. If you don't believe the energy actually exists or that you have the ability to tap into it and direct it then you are not going to be very good at it and your chances of success are small. And even if it does work you are likely to blow it off as being "just coincidence." But like I said... if you keep at it you will find those "coincidences" happen far too often to be... well... coincidental.

A lot of people compare spell work to prayer: you have to believe "the powers that be" can hear you and are willing to answer your prayer. The difference between magic and prayer is with magic you are not asking deity to do it for you. You are setting energy in motion yourself in order to accomplish a specific goal. However, magic, like prayer helps those who help themselves.

So, why work magic at all if a prayer will do? Because the gods are busy. They have an entire universe to manage and take care of, after all. Why should I bug them to do something for me when they have already given me the ability to do it for myself?

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"Could all of that have been coincidence? Sure. But with successful magic such "coincidences" happens with amazing regularity."

They also happen with amazing regularity WITHOUT magic. Good things happen all the time without magic, and bad things happen all the time without magic. For magic to "work within the laws of physics," it needs to reliably and repeatably CHANGE THE PROBABILITIES of these things happening, and you would need to SHOW convincingly that the probabilities HAVE been changed and by how much.

It may be tempting to say that these good things "would not or might not have happened" without the spells (or prayers or whatever). But that would only make sense if good things NEVER (or only very rarely) happened without the spells or prayers. In fact, they happen all the time, and far more often than most folks assume. It just takes a bit of courage to realize that you don't need the magic or the prayers for them to happen anyway. And to say that: "But with successful magic such "coincidences" happen with amazing regularity" doesn't help. You are assuming that "successful magic" = "good things happening," but don't realize that the reverse ("good things happening" = "successful magic") isn't necessarily the case (since good things happen on their own anyway). How do you tell the difference between the "good things happening" that happen WITHOUT magic and those that happen WITH magic?

There are, so far, only two things I see your spell-casting accomplish. One is that it gives you confidence and a positive view on life, events, and your chances of succeeding in getting what you want. In short, while it does not change the actual PROBABILITIES of events, it does change your ATTITUDE towards those probabilities. Second, it focuses your attention on what you want and need. While this is no doubt useful -- it is hard to get things done without having some kind of explicit goal -- there are far easier ways to do this than by using magic (or prayer or whatever).

There is of course a third thing that your spell-casting does, and that is you find it fun to do. If fact, it might be so much fun that you might continue doing it even if you could be convinced that it served no purpose whatsoever (except for the two I have outlined above). I myself am lazy, and have no interest in spending the effort on such stuff, though.

Finally, my comments: "Actually, there are quite a number of good reasons to expect it not to work. But you would no doubt find the reasons unconvincing at best, annoying at worst." aren't really so much a matter of belief on my part as they are of hard-won experience (my own experience and that of others). I "believe" them in very much the same way that I "believe" 2+2=4, or that the sky is blue, or that Paris is in France. Unless you want to mess with the mathematics or change the conventions of the system you are working on, experience shows us that two and two generally do make four, they keep making four no matter how many times you add them up, and they do so whether you believe the equation or not or whether you WANT them to or not. Same with the sky being blue or Paris being in France. It's just they way things are, as best as we can understand them though our normal, day-to-day experience. Sure, you can mess with them if you like -- change the definition of "blue," for example, or decide that in some way Paris is not really "in" France, but there is really little use in doing so.

At this point you can interject, "Fine. In MY experience magic works. Too bad it doesn't in YOUR experience." And most folks would leave the discussion at that, agreeing to disagree (after all, maybe it's prayer that actually works after all, not magic). But, if we live together in the same world, and if "Magic works in conjunction with the laws of physics," then the physics that works in your universe and the physics that works in mine should be the same, yes? And indeed, if magic is part of physics, you should be able to study it the same way you study any other kind of physics. In particular, you should be able to measure its effects the same way you measure heat or light or electric charge. If doing magic is "directing energy," then this energy should be detectable by SOME physical means. After all, I am assuming you are sure that YOU can detect whether or not you are directing that energy, so a good physicist or engineer should be able to build a little gizmo to measure not only the energy, but the direction it is flowing, and perhaps even give a hint as to what it is accomplishing.

Of course, if that energy cannot be detected by science, you have four possible explanations. The first is that science is not sophisticated enough yet to measure magical energy. The second is that magical energy only exists if you believe in it. The third is that this energy cannot be measured by science, as it is metaphysical or supernatural in nature. And the fourth is that magical energy does not, in fact, exist at all.

There is an old joke about a guy who is in the subway waiting for a train. He's bored, the train is late, there's no one around. He notices another guy off in the distance wandering around. This second guy has a large, brown paper bag with him, and every once in a while he reaches in the bag, grabs a small handful of paper strips out of the bag, and scatters them around. Then he walks a little further, looks around, and then does it again.

After a while curiosity gets the better of the first man. He goes up to the second man and asks, "Why are you doing this?"

The second man says, quite seriously, "I'm keeping the elephants away."

"But there AREN'T any elephants in the subway!" the first man snorts.

The second man beams with pride. "See how well it works?"



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"We eat gods for breakfast!" -- Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster

Like I said we are all entitled to our own opinions... No one is forced to agree with anyone else.

Yes, I believe magic works in accordance with the laws of physics. But we have yet to discover what all of those laws are or exactly how they work. Maybe magic works in accordance with laws quantum physics and probability, not Newtonian physics. Also, just because science can't measure and study something doesn't mean it's not there. Science can't measure and study dark matter or dark energy, but it is taken as a given that both exist and make up the vast majority of both matter and energy in the universe.

90% of the stuff we take for granted today would have been magic a couple centuries ago. The attraction of certain stones to iron was once considered magic until we finally came to understand it was magnetism. Doesn't make the power of a lodestone any less effective simply because we NOW understand it and can measure it. Maybe one day science will advance to the point where they can measure magical energy and explain how it works. And when that day comes, magic will become as commonplace a tool as magnets are today.

As for why magic works for some people and not others is the same reason some people can draw and others can't: personal belief in their own abilities. Anyone who is willing to work at it and study can, barring physical limitations, learn to draw or paint or sculpt or anything else. They just have to belief in their own ability have and the confidence, that yes, they CAN do it. And anyone can learn to work magic if they are willing to work at it and study. And like drawing, the more you do it, the better you become and the more effective your magic becomes.

From a science point of view, magic's efficacy can be looked at like medicine: not all medicine works for every patient, and not all medicine works every time. There are so many variables that can affect the outcome. You and you doctor can do everything right and "by the book" and still have a complete medical failure. Some medicines work without the medical community understanding exactly how it does what it does (just look at any psych med where the party line is "we don't know how this works in the body, but it is believed to do this or that"). The fact that it isn't understood does not change the fact that for some people it works or that for others it doesn't.

At least if a given spell doesn't work it's not likely to kill me, make me suicidal, or turn my skin all blotchy

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My point in all this is much deeper than "what people believe." I am more interested in the question, "What is the universe ACTUALLY like, rather than what we BELIEVE it is like?"

If "magical energy" doesn't exist, there is no way science will ever be able to measure it -- whether we believe it exists or not. Fooling yourself into thinking something like magic actually exists (or the supernatural, or gods, or whatever) when in fact it doesn't is far easier than you might suppose.

But it seems clear that you want magic to be real so much as to not to be interested in figuring out how to live in a world where it does not exist -- or even to entertain the possibility that you do live in a universe where it doesn't.

Which makes you like most folks. Which is all right, I guess; it makes me the oddball.

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"We eat gods for breakfast!" -- Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster

But it seems clear that you want magic to be real so much as to not to be interested in figuring out how to live in a world where it does not exist -- or even to entertain the possibility that you do live in a universe where it doesn't.

Or it seems clear that you can't fathom living in a world where things are not so easily quantifiable and are not interested in the possibility that there may be things in the universe... quite natural things as opposed to "supernatural" which is something I do not believe in as strange as that may sound... that are beyond current levels of human understanding, and things that may always be. That, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, absence of current proof does not constitute proof of absence. But for you, f you can't see it, touch it, weigh it, and measure it, it does not exist.. nor are you open to even the possibility that it very well may.

Which makes you like a great many folks. Far more than you may imagine. Which is perfectly alright, and I guess it makes *me* the oddball

How about we just say we're both oddballs in our own way and leave it at that. Just think how boring the world would be if everyone held the exact same view on ever single issue? Gods... what a drag!

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If you can see it, touch it and weigh it enough to be able to USE it you should be able to study it scientifically.

And "beyond current levels of human understanding?" If you understand it enough to use it, then it ISN'T beyond current levels of human understanding.

And no -- "most folks" don't CARE enough to WANT to understand the universe on its own terms. They would rather have magic.

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"We eat gods for breakfast!" -- Egon Spengler, Ghostbuster