How to Cast a Spell Like a Christian Witch | Part 2: Organizing a Spell's Direction
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Hello, friend, and welcome back.
In our last post, we discussed what I consider to be the building block of all magic: the spiritual energy of your own self, and the spiritual energy of allies you might call upon to help you in your task of casting a spell. However, while the concept of energy work might help you in small, short-term things, there is much more to crafting a spell than simply offering gifts to your allies or conjuring your own life force.
In fact, when we look to antiquity, and we see the spells of ancient texts like the Greek magical papyrae, what we find is that what unites both Christian and non-Christian magic alike is supplication: in essence, the ritualistic pleading to a god (or God, or His angels) for assistance. And then, it is through their divine power that true change is effected into the world. For the γόης, or goes, sorcerer, this effect is instead achieved through smaller spirits: daimones, who would later become to the average Christian a "demon." (These words, however, once meant two very different things to two very different groups.)
Nonetheless, in the fifteen years I've struggled philosophically with what it means to actually craft a spell, I believe I've finally found a framework suitable to share with others: one that helps you conceptualize what spellcrafting is, and what it's doing, and what it entails. To that end, I'll remind you of the definition of a spell that I gave you in my last post:
Spell:
a structured request or demand made of either the Universe, one's God (or gods or other spirits/allies), or oneself.
Now, with this definition, there are a lot of ways to go. A request and a demand are two very different things. Which one you use depends on who it is you're talking to:
Yourself?
A deity?
A smaller spirit?
And is that spirit able to be bound and directed (like a demon)? Or does it have other allegiances (like an angel)?
Does it need to be appeased and enticed (like a nature spirit)? Or will it require riddles and tricks and vigilance to not end up worse off than you started (like a fairy)?
The very current of life that flows through the Universe?
Depending on who and what you're appealing to or working with/through, your approach to a spell will change. In this blog, we will focus on creating a minor charm: a spell that requires only your own energy and the ingredients you choose to direct your energy. This is the very next step above energy work, where we aren't petitioning any deities just yet, but are simply taking our base energy from a raw form into something more specific. First, though, let's talk about what you can do with plain old energy work.
What Magic Can I Do With Pure Energy?
With the energy ball exercise you did last time, you hopefully got acquainted with what the force of life within your own body feels like. Maybe it feels fluid and cool, like water, or maybe it feels sharp and crackly, like a hearth fire. Maybe it looks glittery like starlight, or lush as leaves. Whatever the case may be, when you understand your magic—how it feels, how you visualize it—you can get some hints of how you can make the best use of it when it comes to raw energy work and spiritual defense/offense. If your energy is more green and vine-like, for instance, then it probably wouldn't make much sense to try and treat it like lightning or fire and get it to zap or burn things up. More sensible to try and whip, overgrow, or tangle things up.
However, one of the things that I think about when I visualize energy work is, in fact, the many types of magic I've seen in video games. For example, in Skyrim, the Lesser Ward is a bit of defense magic where the caster projects that energy in front of them into a glowing shield to absorb/deflect magic attacks. It's not as complicated as the ritual table used in enchanting, with all the symbols and geometric organization and skull and candles and all that (that's part of organizing ritual that we'll get into in a second), but it is still effective in those moments where you don't have the time to whip out all the bells and whistles to effect change.
Still, your energy in its pure form is something that needs to be visualized and directed without any tools, and is generally something that affects only your personal sphere. Your direct body, or the direct body of those around you (human or spirit). This means the magic you can do is going to be pretty direct, straightforward, and without complex effects. There isn't exactly any chain reaction or advanced directive, like getting a certain amount of money or job in a specific time, or tripping a specific hex on someone that does more than just hit them. Think about the difference between punching someone and setting up an elaborate, painful Saw trap for them to fall into when they least expect it. Energy work is the punch; the actual spell is the Saw trap. Energy work, therefore, is for the much more straightforward, immediate effects rather than long-term spells that need to be maintained regularly or repeated.
When Would I Use Pure Energy Work Instead of a Spell?
This is another important point. As I said: there are times where having to pull out the whole kit and caboodle just isn't practical, and the most obvious of those are times where you are actively in some kind of spiritual danger.
For example: say you feel a nasty energy around. Could be that you're in a place that is spiritually funky from years of other people's negativity (which is... a ripe spot for a poltergeist to appear, honestly), or you're in a place where there is some kind of spirit lurking around. Could be a human spirit, could be a nature spirit, could even be a minor demon. Whatever the case, this is a place where doing something like Lesser Ward is helpful: you can visualize your magic rising up from yourself, the way you did in your energy ball exercise, and creating something like a shell around you so that whatever's around doesn't get too close or do serious damage.
Another place you might use energy work is to boost your own energy up to do a task. A lot of people do this intuitively, actually. They might take deep breaths, flex their muscles, and speak to themselves to hype themselves up. This is energy work. It reminds me of the Pokemon moves, Psych Up or Focus Energy. This helps you get more "in the zone" and buffs you mentally and emotionally to get things done. You don't need to do a massive ritual for it; you can just spend a couple minutes focusing, raising your heart rate, and thinking about what you want to accomplish. Adding something in the background, like certain songs that make you feel powerful, will also help you call that energy to the surface.
But these aren't the only places. Maybe someone around you is being really aggressive or unpleasant. Your energy could be used to either cloak you and make you less visible to them, or to reach out and sooth their energy. Or maybe you're trying to attract something to you quickly, like a spirit or a general boost in luck. Then you might use your energy like a flare to signal to the world or to the spirits, here I am! Come here!
These aren't the only times you can use energy work, of course, but they're some. Where you use energy work to get things done vs. a spell is entirely up to you.
How Do I Visualize Raw Energy to Achieve an Effect?
You may have noticed I've mentioned several video games in this section, and that's because we can get a lot of inspiration from all kinds of fantasy media when it comes to imagining the movement of energy. This imaginative bit is important, as it's the building block of organizing larger spells and rituals later, because it's telling yourself the story of how your magic is making change in the world.
This is huge. The reason magic doesn't work for a lot of people is because they make demands of powers that be (whether deities, the Universe, or their own life force) without actually understanding how the process is going to come together. Imagine if someone told you to "get $500," but they gave you absolutely no parameters for how, where, why, when, etc.? That demand could be achieved in five thousand ways, by five thousand timelines:
Collect one penny a day until you have $500?
Rob a bank?
Take $500 out of your own bank?
Get a loan?
Commit insurance fraud with your car/house?
Sell cookies on the side of your main job until you hit $500?
Wanting an end result is only the beginning of magic. The rest of it is telling that magic or that spirit how it's going to accomplish its goal. With energy work, this means thinking in metaphor and imagery. If you want protection, what things are protective? Look to nature. The turtle's shell, the porcupine's spikes, both are defensive, yet they defend in very different ways. Are you trying to be able to weather an attack (turtle shell)? Or are you trying to dissuade something from attacking you to begin with (porcupine spine)? Whichever one you want, imagine your energy taking that shape around you, and there you go.
And we can look to more than just nature for slightly more complicated energy work. Just like I mentioned Lesser Ward, you can also use things like Pokemon moves or other video game magics, like in Elden Ring or other games in the Souls series, to visualize how your energy is manifesting. One sorcery I really like in Elden Ring is called Ambush Shard. It's where one conjures a blade that appears behind an enemy and backstabs them. (Fun fact: in my vampire x witch romance, This is My Blood, that's what Elias uses after Nadia shows him sorceries in Elden Ring.) But you can imagine your energy as something attached to you, or you can imagine it like detaching from you like that energy ball and taking whatever shape you want: thorns, daggers, rocks, bullets.
Your imagination is the limit when it comes to energy work—but don't be afraid to get some help from your favorite media and their pre-existing ideas of magic.
What is the Point of Creating a Bigger Spell, Then?
Technically, you never have to do any kind of bigger spell or ritual. In the (loosely paraphrased) words of Damien Echols in his book, Angels and Archangels, a really good magician should be able to do perfectly legitimate magic even if he were to be dropped off on a remote island, buck naked, with no tools or items available. However, this is really hard for the beginning magician, precisely because the beginner has not yet grasped what is actually being done in a spell.
I'll remind you of what I said earlier: spells in antiquity weren't just waving a wand and making magic happen. They were petitions. Some of the earliest spell formats we have are rituals in which the magician appeals to deities to intervene in the world on their behalf, with offerings of incense, honey, wine, and/or milk, and with long prayers and incantations calling on the specific epithets of deities or angels, heaping praise on them, recalling times in myth where they'd acted similarly on others' behalf, reminding them of their qualities and virtues and sense of justice or mercy, etc. It's a whole process for a reason: why should a divine being extend their hand for one human out of millions and millions, out of billions? It starts with relationship and reciprocity, especially for certain pantheons like the Greek one, where mutual exchange was important.
In Christianity, however, a similar thing happens every single Sunday. For the liturgical traditions that believe in transubstantiation (the literal transmuting of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ), or at least the Real Presence (in which they stay physically bread and wine but take on the spiritual reality of Body and Blood), what is happening is an hour-long build up of energy, reverence, and belief before the priest then offers the bread and wine up, along with all our prayers and praises, to God, who then flows down His miracle to transmute the mundane offerings into spiritual food that unite the congregation to His Son. A spiritual collect of everyone's attention, four readings of Scripture (Old Testament, New Testament, Gospel, and Psalm), the sermon, the affirmation of faith (in the form of the Nicene Creed typically), a litany of prayers for the people, prayers of absolution (repenting of sin), the exchange of peace with each other, and then the Eucharistic Rite all build up into that moment.
And the purpose here is to achieve a specific effect, much more specific than you're getting with energy work, and to achieve it with someone else (like a deity or spirit) or to essentially convince yourself of the effect to come by focusing your attention and building up the belief in your intention. Think of the people whose entire jobs it is to write grants to the government for funding, or those who need to convince their peers to go for a certain business or marketing strategy, or to secure deals and partnerships. It's similar in magic, in which we're convincing another party to work with or for us, to subsidize us, to support us, etc. Through ritual and spellwork, we essentially become the conduit through which these beings can flow down their miracle or blessing into our lives.
I often compare it to a laptop charger. Your charger comes in two parts: the cable that plugs from the wall into the adapter box, and the cable that runs from the adapter box to the laptop. The reason this adapter box exists is so that you aren't taking the raw voltage from your house (which is high) and plugging it directly into your laptop's little battery. If one were to do that, you risk frying the battery, or potentially even overheating it and catching it on fire.
In this analogy of the laptop charger specifically, your soul is the adapter box. Because when you invoke Divinity, that voltage is high. Think about how poor Semele got convinced to see Zeus in his true form and just burned to ashes, forcing Zeus to sew the still-developing Dionysus into his thigh to finish gestating. Think about how when God moved His power directly in the Bible, with no prophet to channel the miracle, it usually ended in grand calamity (like with Sodom and Gomorrah, or any of the times the Israelites got their shit rocked by natural disaster or war). Divine power unbridled is rough, and it is therefore our job as magicians to channel that power that the Divine offers us, and to do it in a way that we don't accidentally blow up the whole town.
Of course, your laptop can function just fine without being plugged into anything higher, but not forever. This battery-operated time is what I think of as energy work: it gets the job done, and it doesn't need any outside help to do it, but it might need to be in power saving mode, or it might not last as long as you need it to (especially if you have an old battery and it's just shot). But when you plug it in, it can work forever, and do much more with more efficiency, because it doesn't have to worry about conserving itself. Likewise, your energy work is perfectly functional, but it won't go as far as it could if you plugged into a Greater Will, like God, and successfully petitioned a miracle down.
How Do I Organize a Spell?
Finally, we're here. And I tell you: how you organize a spell depends on what you want to do, and what style of magic makes sense to you!
Personally, I'm not that much of a fan of labels in witchcraft. Not anymore. Sea witch, kitchen witch, green witch, techno-witch... why bother putting yourself in a box like that, or trying to stick to one aesthetic or system, when you can make use of anything at any time? I use liturgical ritual, kitchen witchery, techno-witchery, pop culture magic, and more, all in one craft, because what matters in magic isn't so much the theme of your magic as it is making use of what you have available to you. And, of course, it matters that your magic makes sense to you.
I have an entire YouTube video on how to find your specific witchcraft style that you can check out for tips on that, but to borrow from that video: I am a writer. A storyteller. I tell stories! It's what I do! And my spells reflect that. When I was doing an experiment with two of my magician friends, in which we tried to hit each other with minor hexes to see their effects (in which we talk about the results in this YouTube playback), I used a lot of different symbols, metaphors, and objects to symbolize the story of what I wanted to happen to my opponents, and it worked! So I use the ritual format of Christian liturgy, along with my love of storytelling, to organize not only my petition (in the form of a more Catholic style prayer), but also to structure the "beats" and pacing of my spells, and to visually tell the story of what I want to happen through the tools, ingredients, or other items I incorporate into the table setting.
You might organize a spell by thinking of these very specific things:
What do you want to happen?
How do you want it to happen?
By when do you want it to happen?
Some spells have specific due dates. Some are indefinite ones. It depends on how long you want the effect to go on.
What does it look like in the beginning of the spell?
What immediate effects will occur? What immediate opportunities or doors will open to you? What commitment of time and energy will you put down to aid it?
What does it look like in the middle of the spell?
What is the sign of progress? Where is the midpoint in the process of achieving your goal? What is the turning point?
How will you know when the spell has reached its end?
And through this, you might think of a spell like a plant. It starts with its baby leaves, then grows tall and makes true leaves, then makes flowers, then makes fruits. The fruit is your goal. What are the signs of your spell growing towards that fruit? What shape will your magic take to bring that progress to you? Breaking up a big goal into smaller goals is one way to organize your spell and make clear your petitions to your spirits, and a great way to get your own mind aligned with belief that the goal can actually be reached, too. A lot of magic is entirely mental in that way.
There are certain types of spells that have a built in progression, too. For example: in kitchen witchery, you're building a meal. You might focus on your intention through the whole process of cooking it, select your specific herbs and spices that match your intention, and call on their spirits to pray with you for a certain effect before offering those prayers up to God and flowing that miracle down into the final, completed meal. That hour of cooking mirrors that hour of Mass in that way, and all the more so if you select certain scriptures beforehand that match your intention. In other ways, you might use the liturgical format to structure a spell to have a beginning, middle, and end.
My money spells always start with prayers of thanksgiving for previous months' abundance, a request for further care and a reminder of God's knowledge of our needs via Matthew 6:24-34, and then prayers for the people to ask God to show mercy and care to others who need help, as well, lest I forget that I'm not the only one needing help. Three parts, simple goal, easy structure to flow into in order to get into the zone and not have to think so hard about each piece.
What Do Tools and Ingredients Actually Do for Us in Magic?
I should pause here to make a very important point, and address another place where people repeatedly mess up their magic: your tools and ingredients are not the main source of your magical power. Acting like they are means throttling your actual energy and not letting it flow the way it wants to, and essentially tying your hands if/when you don't have a specific item on hand to do ritual with.
What ingredients and tools do for is is create tangible symbols of intangible/abstract concepts. Internalize this: the core activator of magic is the faith in yourself and whatever spirit you're calling on to help you. It is the belief that the magic is real, and that it works. Like fairies, who in some folklore die if people don't believe in them, and like in Naomi Novik's Scholomance series, where magic doesn't work as well in front of non-magic users because of their disbelief (and where the school they're learning in quite literally falls apart if they stop believing in the illusion of its impossible construction), if you do not believe in your magic, it will never fucking work.
But sometimes it's hard to conjure that belief if we can't conceptualize what it is we're trying to achieve. For those who don't have the kind of imagination where you can so clearly picture things in your head and see exactly what's going on in the fabric of the universe, tools and ingredients are helpful to stand in for things and become physical representations that you can more clearly manipulate.
For example: wealth is an abstract concept. It can mean anything, and it has meant many different things to many different people over the ages. Symbols of wealth therefore vary widely: everything from grains (like barley, corn, or wheat) to coins to even plain green leaves (or the simply color green itself) invoke the idea of wealth based on centuries of their close association with wealth. You stay alive by the grains you harvest and eat. You purchase means to live by the coins you possess. You know that the color green in a plant means that it is alive. To be wealthy is to be secure in your resources, and therefore able to maintain your life and thrive, in some form or another. It would make sense, therefore, to use things like grains, coins, and the color green in a money spell.
But the actual magic is not coming from those items. Even in an animistic context, where we consider the spirit of the herbs or stones we use to be active participants, they are only helping. They are contributing, but they are not the source of the power. They, like our friends or family, or the Saints in Heaven, might pray with and for us as we do our incantations, but they are not the source of the miracle or the blessing, nor are they the ones who properly channel down the Divine essence. That is your spirits. That is you. Paying attention to all kinds of details, like the moon phase, planetary hour, astrological sign, etc. can all help you, because it's furthering your confidence and belief in the efficacy of your spell, but it isn't required to consider.
And for now, I think that's a good place to leave this lesson. Follow along (or join my newsletter!) for updates as this series progresses!
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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