Do anyone of you believe in magick or practice it? I am interested but am afraid cause of black magick. I was looking some stuff in the search engine and typed in black magick and came up with allot of results. Should I try it or not? I wish i didnt search for it. You know how sometimes you wish you didnt find that out? I like hiding and not knowing the trusth sometimes. Then you dont have to worry and wont get scared.
I don’t know much about it, but I bet it’s at least as powerful as the belief and emotion that is invested in it. Which can, I’m sure, be very powerful. You know the old saying … “Whether you think you can, or you think you cannot, you are right”? That’s the kind of thing I’m getting at. With what sounds like a willingness to believe, and a certain fear, I think you’d find it will live up to your expectations. Again, this is without knowledge of Magick and without judging it.
Remember, being superstitious is bad luck.
Are you serious, Kriss?
Please tell me that you are not, and that the OP was a joke… otherwise, I may have to… uh… uh… (insert generic non-threatening threat to do self-injury here)!!
Kriss, just trying to help you out since you’re new, so don’t take this the wrong way. The General Questions forum is not for all questions you have. GQ us for questions that have a factual answer such as, “Who said, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes?’ during the Revolutionary War and why did he say it?”
That question has a straighforward answer that can be proven or disproven.
A question such as your OP is open to a lot of opinion, which goes in the In My Humble Opinion forum, this is where you would go to poll the board (such as asking if anyone has practiced black magic) and ask other posters of their opinions. You should also go to IMHO or to MPSIMS when asking for advice from the other posters.
As for the OP, I agree with Zenster.
Ok thanks man
I treat this subject with a healthy bit of skepticism.
IMHO, I think that magick is as potent as a sugar pill. If it works for some people, it is because of the “placebo effect”.
At one point, a year or so ago, I also did some research. I looked up various beliefs and ideas, and came to the conclusion that magick wasn’t for me. I chose not to practice it or look any further into it. I do have friends though that have practiced it, and many of them that have stopped say that it wasn’t a good idea because they got so into it, that it took control of their lives. My advice to you would be to talk to people that are into it, or were at one time, and decide what you think is best.
~Lisa
It’s spelled “magic,” darn it. Magic magic magic magic.
Off to IMHO.
Kriss-
You may want to try looking up the Wicca religion. Yes, Wiccans are “witches,” but contrary to popular belief, they don’t ride around on broomsticks and turn people into frogs. (Most of the dopers are intelligent enough, I know, to understand that…didn’t mean to insult anyone 
) The Wiccan belief focuses on nature as a diety of sorts. Perhaps looking into the basic practices of this belief can help you to explore magick without, for the most part, encountering too much of it’s “black” counterpart. Hope this helps a little bit.
Kriss…I do believe in and practice magick. Toonerama and Just A Girl gave some good advice. I believe that if you think you can really change something with magick you can but if you have doubts it’s not likely to work.
There are a lot of good sites about magick and witchcraft that do not deal with “black” magick. Most of them are Wiccan sites. My suggestion would be to check out http://www.witchvox.com If you want you can email me and I’ll send you a list of sites that may interest you.
RickJay…the spelling magick with a K is used to differentiate between the slight of hand/illusion magic with the spell casting magick. I can’t perform magic at all, but I can and do perform magicK quite often and very well.
According to the magickal* theory commonly used by the members of my religion (I’m a Wiccan), magick is a way of focusing the energies existant throughout nature and yourself to needed ends. You can do this yourself directly, eventually, but the problem is that most people are really not skilled at it.
This is where ceremonial magick comes in. Ceremonial magick (any magick with what you might call “props” - athames, chalices, herbs, string, what have you) uses these kinds of symbols to keep you focused on what you are doing.
We don’t attribute magickal power to grinding up a bunch of herbs: that just gives you a pleasant-smelling powder. What you do is you attribute meaning to those herbs: you give each one a special significance based on tradition or a particular system. Then, when you are using that herb, it helps you to focus your thoughts onto that particular meaning. So it is with everything we do in ceremonial magick. It’s like using an abacus rather than doing the calculations in your head.
For example, I worked a spell recently to help me out in my election campaign. I wrote the spell myself (with some consultation with my roommates and friends in the Craft).
I decided that I should focus on five planets. I like working with the number five because it lets me work with five elements (air, fire, water, earth, and sacred sound), with a symmetry I find pleasing. So I focused on the Sun (for clarity, charisma, to “let my light shine through” the clouds that could otherwise block my message); Venus (which being related to Libra is associated with balance, social justice, and compassion); Jupiter (luck); the Moon in her Maiden aspect (a symbol of youth and growth); and Pluto (for deep convictions, the cycles of history, and for the kind of social change I am in this campaign to accelerate).
Then I chose my herbs, three each associated with the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter, as well as an incense associated with each planet. I added some timing magick, finding a system of “planetary hours” relating to Pluto, as well as performing the spell during the waxing moon to produce increasing rather than decreasing effects. Over the course of nine nights, I ground each herb in turn with my mortar and pestle and added it to the pot. At the end of that time, I performed a ritual to seal up the spell, bind the herbs in a sachet with red cord (for Pluto), keep the spell from doing any harm, and protect myself.
To repeat myself, none of this by itself did anything. I could have merrily ground herbs till the cows come home if that is all I was doing. But what it did was that since I attributed every action with a meaning - and since I imbued so many of my actions with meaning (the definition of ritual, essentially), I was able to focus much tighter on the needed effect and shape the energies within myself to that task.
Whether there’s a universal life force that I was tapping into (I believe so) or whether I was getting myself psyched up or whether it’s the placebo effect, I don’t know. All that matters is that it works for me.
It’s also not something I expect others to accept. We are all sentient human beings with slightly different perspectives on reality, and this is one I find helpful, not to mention that it accords with my own experience of the world up to this point. Understanding that absence of proof isn’t proof of absence, and knowing there are lots of things in the “ordinary” world that science doesn’t claim to be able to explain, I tolerate it if people claim to find this kind of work ridiculous. Personally, I find limiting your worldview in such a way ridiculous. I also find the thought of sex with women odd and offputting. It’s just different perspectives and meanings brought to bear on a world whose infinite complexity cannot possibly be explained one way.
*Witches spell magick with a “k” to distinguish what we do from what stage magicians/illusionists do. Canadians spell colour with a “u”. Deaf people capitalize the word “Deaf”. Deal with it.
Oh, and why do you think I had to change my name from BratMan007 to Crunchy Frog?! Damn witches, that why! It has it’s upside, though. Women love the things I can do with my tongue now.
My name is Shiva, but it’s pronounced “throat warbler mangrove”. Deal with it.
I think the OP got it right with the title. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to fee the tiny pink unicorn that lives in my backyard. :rolleyes:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C Clarke
Hmm…is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Well, since you ask for opinions, mine is that you would be very well advised not to go anywhere near magic of any description. There seems little doubt that there is some kind of force operating in and through it, not necessarily a beneficent one, and I have often heard people who have been involved in one or another branch of it, even something as apparently innocuous as the Tarot or the Ouija, let alone ceremonial or cultic practices, say that very soon the experience is of the force using you, not you it - and that the longer you are involved, the more difficult it is to stop. So my advice would be: don’t touch it.
I see I should have been referring to “magick” with a K. Even magic in the sense of conjuring is not risk-free, judging by the number of films about possessed ventriloquists’ dummies…
IMHO, whether you spell it “magic”, “magick”, “majick”, or “magik”, it all boils down to pretending. If it makes you feel better about yourself, go ahead and chant, boil leaves, apply “ointments”, or dance in a circle singing neo-wiccan happysongs. It cannot effect the weather, health, or your personal situation, outside of the fact that your bank account has been decreased significantly by the amount you’ve blown on the accessories your game requires.
But she turned me into a newt!
[sub]I got better.[/sub]