[QUOTE=Tristan]
It was always my understanding that most groups that practice spellcasting would frown on anything designed to counter the will of others…
Doesn’t this do that? The Marine recruits volunteers, so they are attempting to counter that free-will decision.
[/QUOTE]
It depends how they’re doing it. Yes, most Wiccans (and I’m using the term very loosely to encompass a lot of Wiccan-influenced neopagan paths, and remember that we’re a “religion” of loose cannons, and if you ask 12 Pagans anything, you’ll get at least 13 answers, but…) MOST Wiccans follow what they call The Wiccan Rede. There’s a lot of it, but the most oft-quoted part is “An it harm none, do what you Will.” (“An” means “as long as”, in this context, and Will means what’s in accordance with the goals of your Higher Self, not “whatever you want”.) Most of us feel that infringing on someone else’s Free Will counts as “harm”, so we won’t do binding spells or love spells to make someone else fall in love, or what have you.
But it’s perfectly acceptable to do a love spell on yourself, to make yourself more open and more observant - so you notice the attraction someone else has for you. It’s acceptable to do a spell in which that asshole of a coworker finds the perfect job for himself at another company so he can, of his own Free Will, decide to leave your office. You can create opportunities, in other words, as long as you’re not binding anyone’s decision making process.
It’s also worth noting that The Rule of Three (whatever energy you put out will come back to you threefold) is rather widely disregarded by most people past the Cunningham stage of witchcraft. Yes, in a nebulously general sense, it’s absolutely true, and not just on a magickal level. Go outside today and smile at people and see how they treat you. Then go to the same places and scowl, and see how what you get back is the same as what you project. But “threefold” is just poetic nonsense - how do you measure something like that?
Finally, even knowing that what you get is what you put out, there are some circumstances where the Magickal practitioner will make the fully aware and conscious decision to take that feedback willingly. On a mundane level, if there were a serial rapist in your neighborhood, would you consider putting yourself at some risk, say, by posing as bait in a police sting, in order to stop the rapist? Some people would, and some wouldn’t. Same with magick. There are some times when the harm being done is so great that it’s arguably worth it to take the consequences of binding the person doing the harm, even though you’ll feel the repercussions of doing that binding spell.
So there are certainly ways to organize a Working that don’t violate the Wiccan Rede, and there are times when it’s worth it to violate the Wiccan Rede. I’m not sure exactly what these folks have planned, so I can’t answer to the specifics of their working, but in theory it’s possible either way. If I was the one organizing it, I’d do a Working to make the potential recruits aware of other job opportunities in their area and the actual dangers of military life. Nothing to prevent them from signing up, but making sure they were really going in with informed consent.
No. The Rule of Three states that the energies you put out will come back to YOU. So if they did a binding on the recruiter, they’d find themselves forced into a corner in some aspect of their own lives - perhaps a foreclosure on a house, or their promised raise or promotion would fall through. Somehow their own Free Will would be thwarted, as they’ve thwarted the recruiter’s Free Will.
(When I lived in Minneapolis, I actually applied to work at Llewellyn (it’s in St. Paul)…never got a callback.)