Invoke the Powers

 who will aid you in your work.

One approach is to enlist the aid of a Goddess or God who is likely to be  interested in the specific work at hand: Aphrodite for a love-spell, for example, or Brigid for healing.

Or call a Deity with whom you have a personal relationship.

Or call one of the Deities whose business is to aid workers of magic: Hecate in her aspect of Queen of Sorcery, Hermes who is opener of the way and patron of magicians, or Isis who won the arts of magic from Ra.

If you call more than one Deity for a particular spell, give some though to how and if they will work together. 

When you speak invocations and intentions in magic, it is important to speak them aloud, even when working alone. The difference between disembodied mental language and concrete, audible words can be the first step in bringing your intention through to manifestation.

The best approach is simple and direct. Tell the Goddess or God what aid you need, and why. Welcome the Deity with things known to give pleasure to that Power. A little research on mythology will go a long way; seek out traditional stories and images of the Deity in question for ideas about what they like.

And Now, the Circle is Cast

C

Back to the spell.

There are at least three reasons to cast a Circle.
One of the foremost rules of Witchcraft is to pay attention to what you are doing. The Circle has the psychological effect of focusing your awareness and calling your full attention to the work at hand. 

A well-cast Circle contains the power that is raised within it. You cast a Circle for the same reason that you close your windows of your house when you turn on the heat--to contain the energy you will raise so that it is given to  the work you plan to do, and not dissipated into the surrounding environment.

Finally, the Circle alerts the Powers that you will invoke that you are ready to receive them. 

There are as many precise ways to cast a Circle as there are Witches. Witches who work together on a regular basis, with specific Deities, will generally have a certain way that they always cast the Circle. Whether you work with others or alone, it is best to establish your system and keep with it again and again over time, to build its power.

The Robert Glass number that you hear in the above YouTube video is based on a Circle-casting taught by the great sorcerer Victor Anderson (although Glass does not credit, or perhaps did not know, the source). If you need instructions, this provides is a good way to start:

Face North and say: BY THE EARTH WHICH IS HER BODY,

Turn or walk around to the east while you visualize a veil of light falling around your working space, saying: BY THE AIR WHICH IS HER BREATH,

Continue around to the South, still visualizing the veil of light and saying, BY THE FIRE WHICH IS HER BRIGHT SPIRIT,

Around to the West, saying: BY THE LIVING WATERS OF HER WOMB,

And return to your starting place in the North, saying: THE CIRCLE IS CAST.

Once your circle has been cast, do not break it or your concentration until your work is done, except for a bona fide emergency. 

Bobby, here.

This is how I look when I come back from the groomer. Mrs. D. likes me to look like this. The way I look is of no consequence to me, however.

Going to the groomer is a real drag. You sit in a cage for hours and listen to other dogs complain. They give you a bath. You sit in the cage some more. By this time, you really have to pee, but they are not done yet. You have to stand on a table and get brushed and combed and trimmed and brushed and combed and trimmed and brushed and combed and trimmed, all this time you have to go pee and the other dogs are whining and carrying on. What a waste of a day.

This morning Mrs. D. got on the phone, and I could tell what she was talking about. Now I am under the sofa. Way, way back, where she can't reach. I am not coming out.

Third, Think the Process Through

Decide what powers you will invoke, how you will raise power and construct your magical image. 

Determine the precise act and/or words that you intend to use to bind the spell, that is to say bring the magical image into manifestation on the material plane. 

Assemble all the materials you will need so that you won’t have to break the circle or your concentration in order to go fetch things.

As you become more practiced in the art of magic, you may find that this planning stage becomes less conscious and more automatic; but in the beginning you should pay careful attention to it.

Second, Mind Your Language

Whatever your goal, state it in declarative and specific terms which have the power to evoke non-verbal images in your mind. 

When you work magic, you are speaking to the unconscious mind, your own or another's, and the unconscious mind is linguistically primitive. It may be confused by negatives, passive constructions, sentences with more than one clause, or generalizations. 

For example, in the case of the stolen wallet, to say that “the important documents that were in my wallet will be returned to me” will not work as well as, “I will get back my license, my Visa card … " listing the items and seeing them in your mind's eye as you speak.

It also appears that the English-speaker’s unconscious mind is Germanic, and that words of Latin or French origin generally have less psychological impact than ones which come from Old English; “get, stop, go back,” for example, are stronger for magical purposes than “receive, cease, return.” 

Also, be careful in stating your purpose and talking about the spell to choose words which are appropriate to your intentions. 

For example, if you mean to contain a trouble-maker in a mirror box in order to control the damage they can do, do not even jokingly refer to the box as a “coffin” if you have no intention to do bodily harm. In magic, as in dreams, the unconscious mind tends to use language very literally.

First, Define Your Goal:

Focus and meditate before you begin. Generally the more specific you can be about what you really want to achieve, the better your results are likely to be. 

Consider the possible implications of what you think you want—be careful what you ask for. What happens when you get it?  

Stick to one simply-stated goal per spell. Diffusion, generalization, and complexity will weaken and confuse the outcome. If, for example, your mother needs relief from depression, and you are working with someone whose mother is recovering from a hip replacement, and another person whose elderly mother is probably dying and needs whatever spiritual support she can be given, there you have three very different spells. Do not succumb to any temptation to save time and energy with one spell for everybody's mother.

Also, in order to focus your will to the extent needed to succeed in a spell, you have to care about the outcome. I was once with a group of people who were discussing the way to respond magically to a rapist, and the suggestion was made that one should focus on healing the rapist so that he would stop committing crimes. 

This is noble and generous, but probably of little efficacy for the simple reason that, in a case where someone you care about has been raped, the welfare of the rapist is probably low on your list of concerns. You probably care about stopping him somehow, and helping your friend recover from the trauma. That makes two spells--binding the rapist, and a spell of healing and empowerment for your friend--probably enough work for one night.

But it is also possible to inhibit the power of a spell by wanting something too much. This is why many witches can do more effective spells for others than they can for themselves. One possible explanation is that, when wanting something terribly, you inadvertently create mental images of the thing you fear--that it won’t come to pass, and these images may contribute the the failure of the spell.

In most cases, baneful magic is discarded when you really become specific about what you want--for example, you probably don’t care what happens to the person who took your wallet so much as you want to get the contents of the wallet back. 

Sometimes bargaining seems to work in magic--let go of the money that was in the wallet, but work to recover the documents in it, for example. 

Many Witches arrange with their cars not that they will never break down, but that any breakdowns will occur at times and places when the problem will be manageable.

How Do You Cast a Spell?

Spellcasting, as Witches practice it, is a creative and intuitive process. No two Witches work in exactly the same way, and rarely will a Witch use exactly the same procedure twice.

Often an effective Witch, like a good cook, is reluctant to share her recipes.

All Witches, however, put spells together from a supply of techniques which can be collected over time and honed with practice.

In the coming days, I will be discussing common elements of spells.

Are you a good Witch, or a bad Witch?

I try to behave myself.

Most Wiccans follow the Wiccan Reed, “An you harm none, do what you will.” The most cautious practitioners refrain from any spell, even a well-intentioned one, which interferes in the affairs of others without their knowledge and consent.

I am not that cautious.  Perhaps because I am old, and have always made my living as a teacher, I tend to comfortably assume that I know what is best for other people. 

I let go of the rule about knowledge and consent many years ago, when my father, a Quaker librarian, was struggling through the challenges of old age and declining health. If I told him anything about magic, he had to get worse in order to prove it was all nonsense. If I didn't mention my healing spells, they often worked.

Witches are actually quite selective in their spells. As someone once said of Catherine the Great in another context, you have to remember that there were millions of men in Russia whom she never even met.

Similarly, every Witch has daily opportunities to cast spells that she never even considers. 

One of my first teachers explained to me long ago that there are no rules about what a Witch should or should not do--only the fact that what you do will sooner or later rebound on you. "If you want to take the heat, go ahead and do it."

This is not so much a high-minded ethical consideration as a principle of nature that unfolds surely though slowly, in this life or another. It applies to all acts, not just specifically “magical” ones.  Another way to express the situation is to say that with every act you take, you are helping to create the universe in which you have to live. 

And some of us believe that Witches are souls who have voluntarily bound themselves to the Wheel. We will cycle through incarnations as long as there is an Earth for sentient beings to inhabit. This thought, if anything, tends to make me a bit less timid about my karma. I figure that I am here for the long haul, and I might as well keep things interesting.