Four Stages of Sorcery Development

When I teach on Financial Sorcery, the first thing I tell people is to know which of the four stages you are at, as this will determine the focus of your magic. In terms of finances, I label these as:

1. Stuck- Not having enough income to pay your living expenses.
2. Solvent- Having just enough income to pay your living expenses with a little left over.
3. Solid – Paying living expenses easily with enough left over for investments and acquiring assets.
4. Sovereign – Having so much that your main consideration is how to disseminate and distribute it all.

Knowing where you are determines the type of magic you need to do. For instance if you are broke you need to put all your effort into making more money. That sounds obvious but its not. I see advice for Stuck people to focus on saving money all the time. Having been broke, my question is always: “Saving what?” If you are broke and you want a Latte or Avocado Toast once in a while GO HAVE IT. That is not what is keeping you down. Spend your efforts on increasing income, because you cannot save your way out of poverty. Once you become Solvent however, now you need to save money, because the first thing people do when they reach that stage is start spending more. Its habit: they are used to living on just enough. Anyway, excellent advice for one stage can be toxic for another stage. Travel reward Credit cards are great for someone at Solid, but risky for people at Sovereign and downright poison for people that are broke.

Anyway, this lens has got me thinking about how these four stages apply to areas other than finance, and even to the journey of a magician overall. I think we do go through similar stages in terms of handling shit with magic.

1. Fixing Shit – Life is below par, and so magic gets used to try and fix the shit thats wrong.
2. Building Shit – After you get what’s broken fixed, you want to start building something extraordinary. The life that you imagined for yourself.
3, Managing Shit – Once you have started your new career, found the person (or people) you want to spend your life with, found health regimines that work for you, etc you don’t want to find new stuff to start, you want to tend what you have already built, keep it growing, and making it better,
4, Sharing Shit – Once all that shit is solid, you want to share it. This could mean teaching magic, or it could mean being of service in some other way.

The magic you do at each stage looks very different, and I am lucky to have been teaching long enough for students to have moved from one stage to another. This can sometimes result a a feeling of “what do I do now?” or even guilt that you aren’t doing as much magic as you used to.

Fixing shit takes a lot of magic, and so does Building shit, but what you are doing looks very different. You know what needs to be fixed because its that needle in your brain screaming at you that something isn’t right. All your being goes into fixing it.

Building shit also takes a lot of individual magic operations, but there is nothing particular that is calling you to action; nothing clearly screaming FIX ME! There is a clarity that comes from pain – you know that your priority is to stop it! Once you have, the world is wide open. You have to make decisions over what to build and how to build it, the parameters are mostly all up to you and this freedom is disconcerting.

When you move into the managing shit stage, magic starts to look even more different, There is nothing to fix and nothing to begin. Not even a lot to get rid of. Just maintaining the life that is unfolding before you. Sure there are some hiccups along the way, but for the most part you know who you are and where you are headed. Someone in my Hekate course asked me this week about the middle Fate, Lachesis. They understand the Sorcery of beginning things (Clotho) and also that of cutting things away (Atropos) but Lachesis threw her for a loop. What do you ask of the Goddess that draws lots and measures? My answer is: “what gets measures, gets managed”. This is it the Sorcery of upkeep. The Magic of mediating. It’s literally everything that happens between the beginning and the end.

What this means practically is that you are no longer zipping around with this and that spell. You settle in to daily practice, and focus more on becoming who you want to be rather than what you want to have. You grow into your purpose and inhabit it. Thats when people will start asking you to share.

Anyway, this is not earthshattering stuff, just something I have been thinking about. It’s probably worth asking youself though: what stage am I at, and does my practice match the needs of my stage?