Freestyle Practices.

Starting Out.

What we call "luck" is shorthand for what Peter Carroll has called "the momentum of the universe." Will is what drives you. Magick is how well you can bring your will in alignment with that momentum, getting it to roll your way, or positioning yourself within it, to become "lucky."

The most significant scientific breakthroughs and artistic inspirations come from coincidences, little details, accidents. Magick is learning to navigate these coincidences like signposts, being receptive and paying attention to this stream of subtleties, filtering the useless from the important. That's why meditation is good for you – giving yourself space to still the mind and make a space away from everyday life just for dreaming, because it's not your rational self that will recognize all of this – it's your dreaming eyes, your second sight.

Never underestimate the power of belief. Belief is the food that makes the spell "go." Belief is what gives strength to a person, or idea, and brings power. A politican cannot get into office, if voters do not believe in her/him. Con artists cannot make money, if they do not have the talent for getting people to believe in their falsehoods. There would never be any great art, if painters and musicians didn't believe in going along with where their visions compel them. Belief feeds gods, belief feeds systems of religion. Belief is power. (It is especially necessary when you're striking out on a chaos path of your own creation -- you face trampling down that first trail in the wilderness alone, as there's no pre-existing belief system which has had thousands of years of footprints to smooth out a clearly-marked direction.) Use it with caution, and pick the objects of your belief carefully.

After you read through the Grimoire, you can start choosing the things you'll be using. BTW, I never could understand why so many how-to books introduce altar tools with a wisp of historical context, but few natural laws of how things work. Determining what affinities run between you and natural law -- "going with the flow" of what calls out to you -- is how to establish the foundations of your strengths. Do you feel an affinity with flowing water? Cool breezes? Just simply knowing what element you identify with the strongest can tell you what herbs, colors, and ritual types that will be the most effective for you. (Don't sweat the Zodiac -- just go with what feels right to you and don't worry too much about things aligning with your sign. Start with the elements before you begin fine-tuning.)

One key point to always remember: Be as you as you can be. Do what makes you most individual, and work with what nature gave you. (This is why burlesque has made such a raging comeback in a Barbie-doll world.)

The Altar.

Your altar is the place you'll act out your visualizations with sympathetic sculptures and displays, created from contagion and natural/traditional materials. A drama in miniature, as Tarostar once called it. I consider it something like "knickknack magick," where all the sentimental trinkets and rememberances of your life enhance the standard altar tools and personalize them with your own experiences. You could think of your altar as a sort of game board, and these are the pieces that get moved around towards your goals. Or like an ongoing work of assemblage art. Dollhouse altars have the added bonus of feng shui, and the repainted-Barbie industry, full of fairies and warriors, has some incredible potential for beautiful alternative statuary. (Feng shui can also be used as a way of making your home into one big altar that you live in.) Kitchen witchin' makes lighting the candles and incense and mixing herbs in the mortar akin to cooking, and each compass point could be seen as burners on a stove, or delicately arranged plates of haute cuisine. Or you can go minimalist to concentrate on only the most important casts, one at a time, with everthing else safely stored away on a shelf or mantle.Whatever your metaphor, altar setups are a good way to get yourself spiritually organized and figure out what's most important to you, and keep the most precious mementos of your life together in a potent place, instead of gathering dust on a shelf. It's also helpful for when you run into problems -- if you get stuck somewhere out in the world, you can think back to an actual, physical representation to help you focus.

It's good to have an altar with each of the major tools upon it, although you can take some liberties here. My chalice is a Mad Hatter-ish oversized teacup printed with purple flowers that's been in the family since before I was born. I also remember from my early online ramblings someone's grandmother using a meat cleaver as her athame. Be creative, and use things that you're drawn to. The more rare and sentimental, the better.

You can even make up your own tools. I created something I call the Chaos Bowl which is for working with chance and increasing fortunate coincidences. Dancing with the Wyrd, as it were. Sitting within it is an oyster shell from a dish I was served one night in a Japanese restaurant. When I finished my dinner, for some reason I felt an impulse to turn the shells over. Attached to the underside of one of them was a teenytiny scallop. Another item I have in the bowl is a tiny fairy bell I found while cleaning up a campsite after a week at Pennsic. The bowl is a way to "catch" small details that are easily missed, as the universe does its thing.

Home Altars of Mexico by Dana Salvo is a fascinating picture gallery that shreds the myth of the "perfect, pure" altar. It features picture after picture of homemade altars to Catholic saints and Jesus, many of them inadvertently chaotic, as traditional items are mixed up with emotional symbology. Along with the standard religious figurines and votive candles appear family photographs, flowers(in almost every picture), and common household objects frequently represent relatives: baby dolls, stuffed animals, kitten wallpaper, Christmas lights, and ad-hoc candleholders made from soda bottles or coffee cans. The obvious poverty of many of the devotees, judging from the scratched paint, or battered concrete of the walls in the background, doesn't stop them from arranging their altars as they see fit, constructing imaginative, beautiful displays of spirit. Neither does the unfortunate placement of wall sockets or hanging electrical cords, as TV sets make appearances here and there.

This is a very "now"-centered type of magick in that you're working with it every day, sensing where the momentum is, interpreting the specific changes and signs in your life, and where's the best place for you to be in regard to it. When you stop seeking this place, and its constant shift, is when you fall down and get stagnant or rest on your laurels or write crappy songs or whatever. This goes along with the whole principle that you can never stop learning, because the world will keep moving forward. Your altar will help you keep up.

There's this pervasive tendency to come to the altar "clean," meaning everything must be pure, perfect, untouched by human contagion. While it's a good idea to give everything a good sea salt/rosemary/olive oil rubdown -- you never know whose hands may have touched that mail-order candle or flea-market incense burner -- I prefer to embrace a spirituality where I come to the altar as I am for daily workings. The stresses of the day, the subtle dirts and sweats on the skin of my hands, they're part of my life. I believe that trying to be "pure" blocks your subconscious powers from coming forth. It's also not honest, if it keeps you from truly being yourself. Although if you plan on calling deities and making a special occasion out of it, it's good manners to go through all the same preparations you would going out to a nice dinner.

There are people who like to "do it all from the mind" and claim that ritual is nothing more that "psychodrama" to get the mind into the magickal state, but I like the idea of setting up a physical altar for a few reasons. First of all, it's like setting the table for a cherished friend who's coming over. It's a gesture of hospitality and respect…creating a beautiful place for a "conversation" to happen. And if you're asking your friends to come over and help you move, they're going to come a lot faster if you've got a few boxes of pizza and bottles of cider waiting for them. Second, it's a language: by arranging the proper colors, herbs, and elements, you're communicating what you want to happen. The heat of the candle, the flow of the water, the rising of the smoke, is nature talking back to itself, relaying the message. Third, it's a material base to set up the exchange of energy, from material to intangible. Incense has been said "to carry one's prayers up to heaven," so this could be extended to the candles melting, the oil wearing off your skin into the air, energy taking on a different and directed form. Fourth -- and this is debatable depending on how much you believe in reincarnation -- we're only in these bodies, and using these senses, for a short time. Let's enjoy them!

The Casting Structure.

Start with the Statement of Intent. Define what you're looking to get out of the working. Don't set yourself on just one thing -- leave the possibilities open so that something better, probably something that never crossed your mind, can happen. Chaos means infinity, and infinity means that if one path doesn't work, there will always be another. (This is a great thing to remember in the midst of deep depression.)

When you have a casting in mind, determine which element it falls in as a starting point. This will give the background for the image to emerge, and answer a lot of questions quickly: which energies to use, the color of the candle, the placement on the altar, etc. The various elements of a spell can leap into your hands the way words in a story or notes in a song are "channeled" with little conscious thought – the ideal state for the witch. If you find yourself on a roll, just go with it.

Fashion a sympathetic image so the cast exists in reality, as art. Put together a diaorama or different mementos or finds, devise if you'll have the figures act out an outcome, decide if you'll involve an elemental energy like burning, pouring, etc. Symbols are a very powerful aspect of magick, just as they are in art to express emotions, and psychiatry to sort out problems. A strong image can be used as a tool on the mental altar, a visualization to keep in the back pocket of your mind for when you smack up against challenging circumstances. Social anxiety, for example, can be charmed by imagining an astral cocktail with you wherever you go. Think about each aspect of your cast, if it's made up of several different pieces, and put a sympathetic image on the altar to represent each one.

Find a taglock so you are connected through contagion. This gives a tangible element to your cast, making it much easier to get your belief going with a piece of the real world on your altar. Clifford Bias has a list of suggestions ranked according to strength in The Book of Ritual Magic. Frequently taglocks are the same as sympathetic images: ex., a flyer from a band you want to play a show with, stained with beer from the bar you want to play in.

Oils, herbs, incense, candles, and other witch-shop supplies bring tradition into your space, adding you as a descendent into the long line of practioners, and the waters, salts, leaves found on the ground, etc include the force of nature in your workings. The nightly elemental actions you perform at your altar are the "fuel" that keeps it going: the candle melting into wax, the incense dissolving into smoke, etc. Walk in the woods - it's a vast library of natural materials to help you. Keep in mind when you can't get something specific to cast a spell that there's room to improvise -- say you're looking for Double Action Reversing black and white 7-day candles, which you want to pair with a green 7-day to reverse a debt, and the local botanica's out of them. Don't freak out -- just think of the closest things to what you're trying to do and seek out an alternate source, like a supermarket or drug store, and maybe you can instead dress a white votive candle in rosemary oil, while burning a green patchouli-oiled candle alongside it, just buy 7x the amount to last you the week. Think of it as using different words to speak the same meaning of a sentence.

Poking around in the New Orleans and pagan texts is a great start, but rethink the world around you and look for meanings that are concealed by our well-packaged "modernity." Example: sugar is commonly used in love spells to "sweeten" someone's disposition. Sugar is in bubble gum. Bubblegum makes a great binding agent. You can take it from there. (although, regarding bindings, it's not a good idea to go messing around with someone else's free will. Do this and it means someday, someone will mess with yours.) One of the people I worked with in the shop advised his customers who needed to get to a graveyard for a particular working, but were kind of aghast at the idea, suggested they substitute their freezer as the place to do it. (Dead meat from the butcher's shop…)

If you want to use something that has no place in the texts of yore -- say, a floppy disk, or a piece of rubber -- you'll be facing a challenge of the chaos magician, blazing that first trail alone. Some find this unnerving, some find it liberating. But it opens a lot of interesting doors to experiment. Say you have a skateboard that's your constant companion. No inherent occult properties to a skateboard. But wait -- these things are meant to move. Motion is a quality of the element Air, which breezes by your face as you coast down a hill. It might be interesting to chalk a figure on the ground, and run your board over it while visualizing your intent, and keep at it each day until the rain washes it away. That sort of thing.

Runes can strengthen your working, find one that best embodies your cast -- or, if two or three of them together best express what you want to happen, sigilize them -- and use as a symbolic language to carve into candlewax or draw with oil onto the skin, charging your stuff with writing. Symbols.com is also an excellent reference for the creation of artistic messages. The day I sat down and put all the "like" runes together to figure out each unique meaning, was like God's car keys falling into my lap.

Set up as many mundane routes as possible for the cast to manifest. The more, the better -- not only will you have more control over how it will manifest, but you'll lessen the possibility of it coming back in one big bad way that'll bite you.

Phil Hine has a great page on the basics to construct your own banishing rituals to clear your space prior to casting.

Choose your trance state. Art? A child's game? Skateboarding? Stilling quietly with a cup of tea and visualizing? If you're an artist, you'll have a much easier time of magick. Art and magick are two sides of the same coin, as they originate from the same subconscious waters. The subconscious manifests as lucid dreams, flashes of creativity, random impulses and images. The will directs these manifestations to finished artwork -- each piece of finished "art" could be seen as a spell completed. Therefore, if you're having problems concentrating or getting yourself in the proper mood at the altar, art can be a useful door to magickal states. It gives your mind, notorious for wandering, something to grab onto: the act of drawing a picture, or writing a poem, and letting yourself get caught up in the moment of inspiration, makes for a good trance state. It also strengthens the sympathetic image on your altar, if the symbol was born of your handiwork. Practicing your art makes you a stronger witch -- when you look at the world with pen or brush in hand, you're much more open to opportunities, chances, seeing things you'd normally pass by.

Art is a constructed reality - it's made up of boom mikes and printer cartridges and tubes of acrylic paint, but's it's a reality nonetheless, and creating the mirror-image of life as you want it is the first step towards bringing it into existence. This is why the sympathetic image is the most important part of the cast. Incense, runes, taglocks, elemental energies, etc. are there to help the cast along, but none of it works without an image to center on -- art is the heart of it, and why visualization is constantly stressed as the key to spellcraft.

As a writer, I see the written word as a way to heal the past, explore identity, practice magick, and create art all that the same time, channeling my impluses, dreams, demons, and wishes into my horror fiction. Being creative does bring the vision into reality, by existing as art – real, in a different way. Think about how many times we've quoted movie lines, or thought "what would Morticia Addams do?" It's jumping on that strong underline that books, movies, music, etc. provide to our lives, when we get into the same bands or cult films. Instead of the experience unfolding in reality and remembered by only the ones who were there, it's a constructed memory, shared between the writer and the readers, or the filmmaker and the audience. So what if you never really did get to storm a castle/sing opera/boink Nikki Sixx? You did on the page, and you also got the luxury of controlling the parameters of the situation.

To evoke a very well-worn but totally accurate cliché, hitting the moment to cast your spell is a lot like surfers "catching a wave." It's all about the flow. It's the moment where you have to get right on top of it, at the exact moment before it curls over -- the momentum of the universe -- that will propel you alllll they way back to the beach. Your instinct will be the best guide to let you know when the time is right, and when it's not -- it's better to walk with your senses open and see what attracts you within a certain moment, then force something that doesn't work.

What about casts that need to keep going beyond the seven-day candle or half-ounce bottle of oil? One way to keep them going is by sheltering your altar dioramas within shadowboxes, where all the sympathetic images are housed together with bits of fabric, broken jewelry(gemstones!), found objects, and the like, fleshing them out into potent pieces of art.

And how does one dispose of altar leavings? Candle stubs, incense ashes, and such? I don't throw these out with the rest of the trash, instead I keep a small paper bag by the side of the altar to collect cast refuse, and when it's full I walk it out separately and throw it in a public trash can - sending it out among the world. Sometimes it might seem more appropriate to bury your leftovers, or drop them into a river. But don't throw them out with the rest of your garbage, and always, always recycle.

Beyond the Altar.

Get creative with places to practice magick -- while dancing in a darkened forest is wonderful for a sabbat, and standing in the middle of a perfectly consecrated circle is a very, VERY good idea for workings that may leave you vulnerable, it's not necessary to have these conditions present if you're just doing simple, low-magick types of workings. One notable working I read about in a now-deceased chaos site involved a Mercyful Fate concert and someone opening a vortex in the mosh pit, playing off all the aggressive energy. A self-described "ghetto witch" friend of mine used cheap lighters for last-resort fire magick. The possibilities are endless.

A Few Words about Love.

While I was working in the shop, the #1 request was love spells. And I'm going to write down here what I told all of my customers about that.

First of all, never limit yourself to one person. Not only do you want to stay out of the unethical shade of being manipulative, but it's smart magick: why throw all your energies at winning the affections of just one person, when there could be someone even more enchanting that you haven't met yet? Don't worry about influencing the feelings of others – concentrate instead on heightening your own attractions and loving yourself.

That's the whole key, right there: light these candles not for anyone else, but for yourself. Be attractive to yourself. This is especially important in breakup situations, where it's so excruciatingly common to twist and try so hard to please someone else. A solid sense of loving yourself is essential to face down the gut-wrenching prospect that a paramour may not be infatuated with you anymore. Loving yourself no matter what happens will not only give you the strength to make it through the pain, but allow you to see the situation in a clearer fashion. If there's been coldness, gameplaying, and other bullshit, instead of being so fast to blame yourself, you'll end up thinking, "Damn. I deserve better."