Thoughts on Magic to Effect the Public

Diana Branton gave my philosophy on this in a nutshell: “The trick is finding the sweet spot and pushing it to scale. I hope she doesn’t mind me expounding a bit on it.” 

To expand a bit on that, in my head magic is all about levers, boulders, and placement.

What’s the Lever? Well, the lever you have is the magic you are doing. Obviously, some magic is better designed than others, but we will assume that you are pulling out the big guns for something like this. Now, what “the Big Guns” are can differ. For broad strokes we can say its either:

  1. You can give a lot of people something very simple that requires little in the way of skill like the cone of power against the Nazi’s or one of the Stop Trump efforts that are publicized.
  2. Something very powerful that requires skill and experience that is done solo or with a small group of people that are well-trained.

Then we have the Boulder we are trying to move. It has been noted that magic always works, and it does. If you take a stick from the woods and put it under a boulder and apply force, force is applied to the boulder. That doesn’t mean the boulder budges. It was simply not enough to overcome resistance. When dealing with public events what is the resistance?

  1. Size of target. Rituals to heal the world can be amazing for the people doing the ritual. You feel an overwhelming suffering and tap into a source that moves through you and spreads out from you. It feels cosmic, and ego shattering which is why Buddhists love stuff like that. It does fuck-all for healing the world though. Efforts are best targeted at an individual, a small group of people, or a small mass of land. This is why when I do election magic with a small group we find an important county and work on the political offices in those counties.
  2. Protection and Pushback. The assumption that yours is the only magic in play is a fatal error for many a Sorcerer. As is the assumption that magic needs to be labelled as such. Yes, the individual ritual of a Witch is probably more effective than the prayers of an individual evangelical. It is not however equal to the prayers and petitions of a million well-organized evangelicals. If you want to effect the POTUS, you need to get past the POTUSshield. Google it.

Finally we have placement. Where you put the level matters. In terms of magic I tend to think in terms of:

  1. Angle of Influence: Lets say you are trying to stop a war. Do you? Curse the people starting it, or bind them, or confuse them, influence them? Or maybe you empower the generals on your side and confuse the generals on the other side? Or maybe you enchant for one side to get what it wants quickly so the conflict ends sooner? This is the angle of influence.
  2. Links to target: Even if someone is famous, they are still just a person. What are your links? If you can’t get good links to that person, maybe you can get better ones to the people around them. If you can’t get a link from the target, perhaps you can plant the spell somewhere that you know they are going to be. I don’t give details of this work, but I have had success with a seal on a mirror that was positioned do that the sunlight reflected into a certain office every day. The dead are links as well. You might not be able to get access to a particular office or person who holds that office, but you can probably work with the shade of someone who once did.