Exploring the power and limitations of money and magic PART 1
It’s important to acknowledge that I speak from the perspective of a witch with a mostly European heritage who lives in Australia and is influenced by Aboriginal Australian cosmologies as well as Root Work. I work pagan magic mostly within the tradition of Western European green witchcraft and hedge witchery. I acknowledge there is a multitude of witchcraft and folk magic traditions and that not all of them agree on how offerings function within magic.
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A note before we begin
It is part of many folk magic traditions to give sacrifices to a deity in order to gain favour with them. The quantity or size of the offerings is sometimes thought to lead to better outcomes for those petitioning for help. My tradition of witchcraft does not highly prize elaborate sacrifices like this but does involve giving humble offerings to spirits as part of building a relationship and favour with them. I acknowledge and respect that there are different ways of doing witchcraft and that there are different views on what offerings to deities and spirits can achieve and should look like. My focus here is on the modern consumer capitalist belief that money sways the spell itself and that more money thrown at a spell will guarantee a greater outcome, or greater success. I am also speaking in reference to the experiences I have had working as a witch-for-hire and the common attitudes I encountered doing this work.
Many witches in the European traditions that work with spirits believe that it is the depth of knowledge that a practicer has that commands respect and authority with spirits. I fall into that camp of belief. I do not discount the practice of giving offerings or sacrifices (even elaborate ones) to spirits or deities. I think it wise though to look at some of the possible outcomes of giving without established boundaries and to test our beliefs around the power of money.
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The power of money in magic
We're all seeking better outcomes. We're all looking for the best way to improve our lives. And fair enough; life can be tough and our circumstances unfair. Things get tricky though when it comes to knowing how to best go about changing things. Throw into the mix an undefined or muddled worldview around energy work and magic, and it gets complicated fast!
In the years working as a witch-for-hire I have found that a lot of folks seeking spell craft didn't have a clear worldview of how magic worked. They often had a wildly cobbled-together set of beliefs taken from many traditions. It was through this set of competing worldviews that they viewed magic. This is common for people who weren't raised in and embedded in the folk magic or indigenous traditions of their culture and land. So many of us are cut off from the native beliefs of our culture because of colonialism and Christian supremacy. This accounts for so much of the fear, confusion, muddled beliefs, and misinformation about the realm of magic and spirits.
Often modern people who are unfamiliar with magic confuse practices that come from different parts of the world. This conflation of practices and the influence of capitalism can combine to create a view that a bigger sacrifice will impact the spell’s ability to achieve its intended outcome. They assume their witch-for-hire will be giving an elaborate sacrifice to a deity as part of casting a spell for them, and that a bigger offering of money will mean greater favour with their spirits. But not all traditions believe this is necessary, or operate in this way. Some folk magic traditions do believe that large offerings are necessary for a good relationship with the divine and feel that big sacrifices create greater sway with their petitioned deity. Other traditions give small libations alongside emphasising that people should have boundaries and realistic expectations around what they can reasonably offer to spirits or deities. Some traditions of witchcraft actively caution that giving too much can lead to exploitation and that to give beyond your capacity is putting your (financial) well-being in danger. Jason Miller, author of many well-regarded spell-crafting books, cautions against working with any deity or spirit that endangers your financial well-being. And advises not to continue in the service of any spirit that demands huge tributes and doesn't respect boundaries around what you can offer them.
To read more on working with spirits as part of modern spellcraft, consult: Consorting with Spirits by Jason Miller.
Many of us haven’t yet assessed what we believe about magic and how it works. That is okay but it leads to some unique issues for modern folk who are pursuing magical solutions.
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The influence of worldview
There's a real danger for capitalist notions to heavily influence how we see magic working, especially if there's a patchy understanding of magic's mechanics in the first place. Capitalism has co-opted many spiritual paths and packaged spirituality as something that can be bought and consumed. It sells us the idea that we can buy our way to deep spiritual experiences. But not only does this trivialise the spiritual experience, but this worldview also cheats us out of authentic spiritual experiences and practices. Because it's not how much you spend on yoga retreats or how glamourous your witchcraft tools are that brings about real, personal spiritual growth. It's the time spent in your craft, in meditation, in considering your beliefs and practicing them that creates a strong spiritual awareness.
But we can get caught up in the beliefs of consumer capitalism and end up thinking that how much money we slap down on the table will dictate how powerful and life-changing the outcomes will be of a spell. But it's how invested you are in self-reflection that creates powerful outcomes. But that's neither a fast nor sexy solution. We have to actually engage with the magical process, assess our lives, our choices, our self-sabotage, our self-made blocks, and maybe even our greed and ways of thinking in order to align ourselves with the spell results we are after.
It's way more seductive and pleasing to think that we can just pay for results and nothing else is required of us. And sometimes it is just a matter of paying your witch well and the spell is able to manifest good results. But more often than not people get stuck with no discernable results from spell craft and are frustrated as to why this is. They believe it should just be a matter of paying a high price to get results. But the eternally stuck and frustrated clients are the ones neglecting the other factors that go into making good magic - the factors that aren't about money.
You can learn more about the commercialization of spirituality via this video essay that critiques the Eat Pray Love phenomenon. Skip to part 4 of the episode to start learning about capitalism and spirituality.
Magic is not purely transactional like services are within consumer capitalism; magic is not guarenteed to be a straight line from what you want, to getting what you asked for. Magic works but it is not a tame beast - it is wild and it flows how it wills. A spell will move what it can move, and change what it can change. That's it.
A spell will do what it is designed to do if it’s possible for the energy to be shifted and circumstances brought into the client's favour. But beyond that, a huge factor that people often neglect, but is powerful when working towards crafting powerful magic, is the ability to take on feedback. This looks like being open to working on aspects of your life or yourself if it looks like this is what is blocking the spell from creating strong results.
An adept witch will gather signs to see how the spell manifested and from there be able to figure out if the spell did what it was designed to do. Sometimes the goal a client is looking to achieve can’t be made to manifest yet, or there’s work to be done in the client's psychological, environmental, or emotional realm that would bring about stronger magical outcomes in the future. If a client can do this work on themselves then incredible things can happen.
Witches are invested in getting feedback so that they can adapt what they are doing in order to create better results in the future. If a client is open to doing this too then powerful change can and does happen once the issues in their internal or external world are addressed. Not all clients are open to this step being part of the spell process. They often want results and if they don’t get exactly what they asked for in the way they recognise then they call the spell a failure and move on to seeking out a new spell caster.
Clients who are open to magic being a reciprocal relationship and to the idea that getting a spell service might involve self-reflection, have a huge advantage over those unwilling to do this work. A witch tweaks her practice and her desires so as to eventually bend towards being wholly aligned with what she is calling in. Then if it can come to them, it flows in easily. If a client can also work on themselves in a similar way then whatever may be blocking them can be worked through. This is the path to successful magic.
When a witch is open to feedback from the astral realm about how the spells went, then they can work out what can be tweaked and performed again, what needs repair, and what can’t be achieved with magic. This is crucial to creating strong results, and it can’t be substituted with money.
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What money does function to do
I have found time and time again that magic doesn’t conform to the rules of capitalism. Money affects the witch-for-hire, in that if you pay her well she has the time to do the work as well as funds for the spell materials. If she’s well paid for her time and expertise this helps your witch do her best when it comes to crafting a spell for you. But it has been my experience that money does not primarily fuel the spell, it affects some of the aspects that go into the good set-up of a spell, but money does not touch the spell its-self. I found that other factors had a far bigger impact on how well the spell was able to do what was asked, and that large sums of money couldn’t guarantee outcomes. I kept finding that money its-self did not power my spells. Money just doesn't substantially affect how well a spell moves circumstances in a client's favour. But how can this be? Isn’t money just energy?
Money does not primarily fuel the spell, it affects some of the aspects that go into the good set-up of a spell, but money does not touch the spell its-self in a huge way.
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But money is energy!
Money is a difficult energy. It is very unlike the free-flowing energy within the earth that is equally accessible to all.
If we say that money is energy, then it's a complicated energy. Money has huge, life-changing significance within capitalism. It is set up this way and reinforced by many factors, one of them being a lack of universal health care (in many countries) so that people literally live or die depending on their access to money. Each individual has a different amount of ease or trouble when it comes to accessing money - and the system is designed to restrict most people’s access to money so that the ruling class can live off the exploited labour of the middle class and especially the working classes. So money is a difficult energy. It is very unlike the free-flowing energy within the earth that is equally accessible to all.
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The dream that money is everything
Sometimes I think we fixate on what money can do because money has such power in our daily lives and this is what we have to bargain with. Especially if it is not within our awareness that having a personal relationship and established communication with our ancestor spirits, a patron deity or the spirits of the land is possible and a way to access reciprocal assistance (without the need for big, expensive gestures), then money appears to be of primary importance.
Seeing money as a solution to one's problems is a very limited way of viewing the issues at hand and what it will take for any of us and all of us to have a better quality of life. And while spells can and do help with all kinds of issues created by capitalism and other forms of oppression (and beyond), our collective liberation won't come through the accumulation of more wealth.
Yes, magic can help with attaining more money and life satisfaction, but it's important to keep in mind that capitalism doesn't offer us solutions to the suffering it has created. It offers us the illusion that any of us can get rich at any time (and then no longer suffer), alongside consumption as a means of temporary relief from the harshness of our living conditions. Capitalism and colonialism in tandem, as a structure of living and organising communities, actively blocks us from accessing healthy interdependence with others, and sustained connection to the land and the traditions of our ancestors. We need to fight to have access to these things as part of establishing true, deep safety and contentment. Spells alone can't change the oppressive conditions that we need to alter through collective action.
I think too there is a focus on money being able to dictate outcomes because it aligns with the idea that we can buy our way out of the suffering caused by capitalism. And then it just becomes a matter of throwing lots of money at a spell-caster to get what we need and want within the system.
So don't confuse the way that money operates in your daily life for how it might function in relation to spell casting. Also, it's worth looking at what kinds of solutions you are looking for through magic and what worldviews you are ascribing to when it comes to money and liberation. This will help you have more successful outcomes in the long term.
If you're unsure what capitalism is and how it functions, have a read of Helen Razor's Total Propaganda.
A future that isn’t thwarted by bigotry is what so many of us are seeking when we are looking for magical solutions. Magic can be a part of liberation but it depends on how you approach it.
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Looking for a solution to capitalist oppression through money and magic.
We have many ways and means to fight for what we want and desire. This is complicated by the fact that success within capitalism is not based on merit, it’s primarily based on class, race, and other privileged states that people were most often born into. Privileged people are deliberately rewarded for being who and what they are (white, university educated, upper class, cis, heterosexual, monosexual, etc.) so as to gatekeep who has the power within this system. Some are able to climb up the class ladder leading to greater money and rewards within capitalism, but capitalism is designed to keep the majority at the bottom of the pay scale so that they have to continue to work in order to survive (which the upper classes benefit from). So we can see that spells are often working against huge forces of engineered inequality. We ideally need to weave this understanding into our spiritual approach and methods.
Frequently clients come to a witch-for-hire with intentions of big magic but don’t realise that the magic they want is weighed down with the hope of a spell solving their oppression within capitalism. Now magic can and has moved the unfair into fairer, and unfavourable outcomes into more favourable ones, but magic alone hasn’t defeated capitalism. There is a lot we need to do to change the structures of society. And in the meantime, many of us are using magic to make the conditions of our lives more bearable. Magic can make your life more bearable, and fairer. But there’s also so much that has to be done through practical means in order to shift the powerful forces that we are looking for magic to help with. Spells alone can't change the conditions that we need to collectively fight against.
I highly encourage you to seek out the perspective of those that can speak better to the hopeful possibilities within magic. I’m an earth witch and a shadow worker so I can best speak to grounding spirituality in the material, and how having realistic expectations of magic can best serve us.
Practitioners of Voodoo, Hoodoo, Vodun, and root workers are some of the great knowledge holders on using magic to undermine oppressive systems and lift up suppressed minorities. I encourage you to read books on these magical practices written by Black experts within these traditions.
I recommend these books if you want to explore how magic is being used to change the world:
Ceremonies in Tower Time
By: H Byron Ballard
A Witch's Handbook to Magical Resistance
By: Laura Tempest Zakroff (Editor)
Hoodoo, Mojo and Conjuring with Herbs
By: Stephanie Bird
A Guide to Hoodoo Folk Magic
By: Hoodoo Sen Moise
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If it’s important to you to make a large offering of money to the spirits or deity, here's my advice for staying safe.
If it’s important to you to make a large offering of money to the spirits or deity that the witch performing your spell-casting works with, then keep a few things in mind so that you are less likely to be exploited. Have a set amount you will give as a gift to a deity or spirit and don’t go over that amount even if the witch who is working for you says you need, or should give more. That way you will limit the risk of exploitation. Don’t give more than you can afford and don’t be talked into giving more than you can. Have your own back and take responsibility for your finances as well as your well-being.
If you want to learn more about the types of spirits that you can work with and how to go about that pick up a copy of The Encyclopedia of Spirits by Judika Illes and pay close attention to the introduction. Using an e-reader to learn more about magic is a good way of doing so discreetly if you don't live in a safe environment that allows you spiritual freedom.
I honestly think it can be hard to find someone that will pass on your gift of money to their deity and not just hold onto it themselves. It’s so seductive to think that big money guarantees big outcomes. It makes magic manageable, safe, and straightforward. But with all that said, there are folks who pursue pacts with entities in order to get their desires met. And you can explore this if you feel passionate about the possible outcomes. Just work out what you believe is necessary and reasonable to offer in exchange for asking for help. If you keep paying a lot for spells to be performed on your behalf and not much happens this is a good time to review your beliefs around money and sacrifice. In part 2 of this look at money and magic, I will be going in-depth into the attributes of scammers and how they operate. I suggest you take a look if you keep getting no results from hired spell-casters.
It’s important to realise that not all witches work with a deity as part of their spell craft, and depending on the tradition they work in, their chosen deity or spirit team that helps them with their spell craft may not respond to the number of offerings or the amount of money given but their heartfelt nature. So going forward I recommend you figure out for yourself if you believe in giving large money offerings, and what you believe about the power of money. Get clear on this, and if you aren’t sure then just pay what you can and don’t be tempted to pay large sums of money in hopes of grand outcomes. Don't do this unless you are certain of what you believe in and you know the spirit/deity you are making offerings to, intimately.
- Rachael the Omen Witch
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Want to learn more about spirits? These are my best resource recommendations:
Your Guide to Working with Invisible Allies
By: Jason Miller
The Ultimate Guide to the Magic of Fairies, Genies, Demons, Ghosts, Gods & Goddesses
By: Judika Illes
How to Investigate, Communicate, and Clear Spirits
By: J. Allen Cross
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