By Lady Saoirse
Bright Blessings,
When I was a kid, my favorite movie was one called Little Big Man, starring Chief Dan George as Grandfather. At the end of the movie Grandfather sang a beautiful death song and told his god that he was ready to die. He lay down to die, but instead of dying, a beautiful rain swept the landscape. He sat up and asked his grandson if he was on the other side and his grandson told him no. Grandfather he said, “Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
It’s true. Just because you cast a spell doesn’t mean it’s going to work. Why would magic fail? What things could cause a spell to not work? There are countless reasons why magic doesn’t work. Sometimes, what you’re asking for isn’t yours to ask for and other times the powers that be are telling you no. Sometimes, your intentions are wrong.
Because It’s Not Meant to Be
If you’re like me, you have a lot of ideas and a lot of things that you want to try. Using magic to try and accomplish things is natural for a witch. Just because you use magic doesn’t mean that something is yours to ask for. Love spells for example include other people and their will matters just as much as yours does. If you’re using magic to try and get a job that isn’t supposed to be yours, magic won’t help. If you’re using healing magic on someone when they’re meant to die, you won’t be allowed to heal them.
A lot of us believe that successful magic depends on the power of will. If you want something badly enough, your magic should make it happen, right? Not necessarily. Some people believe that we are subject to destiny and immortal beings who we will never fully understand weave the web of our fate. Other people believe that we weave the web of our own fate. None of us have proof whether the powers that be decide what will happen for us or not. But we still go after things that aren’t ours to go after sometimes. Magic will not change that.
Because You Are Being Told “No”
I cannot tell you how many people I have seen do magical operation after magical operation for decades for something that never comes to fruition no matter how hard they work for it. Christians use magical prayers to try and accomplish their goals. That is a form of magic too. If everything that you try over a long period of time fails, take a step back and talk to your higher power. It’s possible that things just take time. It is also possible that your higher power is telling you no. No amount of magic overrules the will of the divine.
Because Your Intentions Are Bad
If you are like me and you like to eat cake and drink wine, but you want to be skinny, casting a spell is not going to make it happen unless you change your diet. If your intention is to use magic instead of actually putting in the work to make a goal successful, the magic is not going to work. If you want to use malevolent magic against innocent people, sometimes their guardian gods and spirits won’t let you. Revenge spells and curses are known to fail, most especially if you sling them in the heat of anger without proper focus or thinking whether or not the person deserves the consequences you intend for them.
Sometimes magic fails because we are too lazy to put in the work. We think that we can just spend an hour and $20 on supplies to do a spell and then go off and forget about it and the universe will hand us the result that we expect. I don’t know of any god or goddess or guardian spirit that I have met who respects laziness and will do the work for us. Using a spell to get a job instead of actually looking for jobs and applying for them is not respected by the powers that be. Trying to hurt innocent people is also not respected by the powers that be. It can make spells fail.
Human beings are a magical species in general and magic is at our disposal but magic won’t accomplish everything for us. Sometimes, we have to accept that we can’t have what we want and other times we have to accept that we have to use a means other than magic to accomplish them.
I knew a magician who told me that he believed that if a magical operation failed it meant that you didn’t use the magic properly and that you should try again. I disagree. Sometimes we’ve done everything right and the magic isn’t working just because it’s not supposed to. In that situation, all we can do is accept that is the way things are and move on and do something else. Adaptability is one of our most magical qualities and understanding that we need to shift our focus to something that’s more well suited to us is sometimes the most magical operation of all.
Blessed Be
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Lady Saoirse has studied magic and lore for most of her life but started walking her own magical path after being spiritually reborn in the desert. Today she is a High Priestess for The Temple of the Goddess, she is a psychic advisor and spiritual counselor, she is a member of the spiritual family at the Magical Druid in Ohio, and she shares her gifts as a Psychic and Content Writer for SpiritualBlossom and Mysticsense and she writes for PaganPages.Org emag.