freestyle practices.

starting out.

What we call "luck" is shorthand for what Peter Carroll has called "the momentum of the universe" - the tidal forces of nature, culture, technology, and the like - colliding with your individual will. Magick is bringing your will in alignment with that momentum, getting it to roll your way, or positioning yourself to where it will be, to become "lucky." It's learning to navigate coincidences, synchronicities, accidents, paying attention to the little details like signposts, being receptive to this stream of subtleties, being flexible enough to recognize and follow a totally unexpected path opening up. Throughout history, this has often been the basis of significant scientific breakthroughs and artistic movements. And it's why meditation is good for you - giving yourself space to still the mind and make a space away from everyday life just for dreaming, art and play, and getting lost, because it's not your rational self that will snap to this recognition, it's your instinct.

Never underestimate the power of belief. Belief is what gives strength to a person, or idea, and brings power. A politician cannot get into office, if voters do not believe in her. Con artists cannot make money, if they do not have the talent for getting people to believe in their deceptions. There would never be any great art, if painters and musicians didn't believe in going along with where their visions compel them. Belief feeds gods, belief feeds systems of religion. Belief is power. Belief is the food that makes the spell "go." And it's especially especially necessary when you're striking out on a chaos path of your own creation - you face trampling down that first trail in the wilderness alone, as there's no pre-existing belief system which has had thousands of years of footprints to smooth out a clearly-marked direction.

Use belief with caution, and pick the objects of your belief carefully.

You'll also need to do the active mundane work needed to back up your casts. So don't expect your dream date to come along when you're passively sitting on your couch visualizing away, but you haven't bothered to shower or make yourself any kind of appealing.

However, some circumstances are going to be easier than others - not everyone gets born with the same friends, resources, kinds of access, privileges, etc. Some problems are institutional and much bigger than what one person can change. But, happily, you may have much more at your command than you realize. Maybe you don't have a lot of money, but you have a ton of friends. Maybe you're lacking in a specialized area of knowledge, but you're charming as hell. It's best to start by taking inventory of the things you do have, internal and external. Don't take things for granted and overlook hidden advantages; even the most mundane things, like having a supportive family, or owning a car, or living near the woods, are things that someone else doesn't have to help them. Then, start filling in the gaps with what you need. The internet is invaluable for research and networking. Do what you can.

Be realistic about your goals. Making rent for the year is a lot more possible than becoming a billionaire.

Determining what affinities run between you and natural law - "going with the flow" of what calls out to you - is how to establish your foundations. Are you attracted by flowing water? Cool breezes? Just simply knowing what element you identify with the strongest can tell you what herbs, colors, and ritual types that will be the most effective for you. (Don't sweat the Zodiac - just go with what feels right to you and don't worry too much about things aligning with your sign. Start with the elements before you begin fine-tuning.)

Be as you as you can be. Do what makes you most individual, and work with what nature gave you. (This is why burlesque has made such a raging comeback in a Barbie-doll world.)

the altar.

Your altar is your workspace. Lots of ways you can set it up.

You might go the traditional route and act out your visualizations with sympathetic sculptures and displays on a small stage, created from contagion and natural/traditional materials. A drama in miniature, as Tarostar once called it.

Kitchen witchin' makes lighting the candles and incense and mixing herbs in the mortar akin to cooking, and each compass point could be seen as burners on a stove, or delicately arranged plates of haute cuisine.

You could think of your altar as a sort of game board, and these are the pieces that get moved around towards your goals.

Or, maybe it is like an ongoing work of assemblage art, a living shrine to your dreams.

You can do "knickknack magick," where all the sentimental trinkets and souvenirs of your life enhance the standard altar tools and personalize them with your own experiences.

Dollhouse altars have the added bonus of feng shui, and the repainted-Barbie industry, full of fairies and warriors, has some incredible potential for beautiful alternative statuary.

Feng shui can also be used as a way of making your home into one big altar that you live in.

Whatever your metaphor, altar setups are a good way to get yourself spiritually organized and figure out what's most important to you, and keep the most precious mementos of your life together in a potent place, instead of gathering dust on a shelf. It's also helpful for when you run into problems - if you get stuck somewhere out in the world, you can think back to an actual, physical representation to help you focus.

It's good to have an altar with each of the major tools upon it, although you can take some liberties here. My chalice is a Mad Hatter-ish oversized teacup printed with purple flowers that's been in the family since before I was born. I also remember from my early online ramblings someone's grandmother using a meat cleaver as her athame. Be creative, and use things that you're drawn to. The more rare and sentimental, the better.

You can even make up your own tools. I created something I call the Chaos Bowl which is for working with chance and increasing fortunate coincidences. Dancing with the Wyrd, as it were. Sitting within it is an oyster shell from a dish I was served one night in a Japanese restaurant. When I finished my dinner, for some reason I felt an impulse to turn the shells over. Attached to the underside of one of them was a teenytiny scallop. Another item I have in the bowl is a tiny fairy bell I found while cleaning up a campsite after a week at Pennsic. The bowl is a way to "catch" small details that are easily missed and mind the gaps in the universe where new possibilities can manifest.

There's this pervasive tendency to come to the altar "clean," meaning everything must be pure, perfect, untouched by human contagion. While it's a good idea to give everything a good sea salt/rosemary/olive oil rubdown - you never know whose hands may have touched that flea market incense burner - I prefer to embrace a spirituality where I come to the altar as I am for daily workings. The stresses of the day, the subtle dirts and sweats on the skin of my hands, they're part of my life. I believe that trying to be "pure" blocks your subconscious powers from coming forth. It's also not honest, if it keeps you from truly being yourself.

Home Altars of Mexico by Dana Salvo is a fascinating picture gallery that shreds the myth of the "perfect, pure" altar. It features picture after picture of homemade altars to Catholic saints and Jesus, many of them inadvertently chaotic, as traditional items are mixed up with emotional symbology. Along with the standard religious figurines and votive candles, family photographs, flowers(in almost every picture), and common household objects frequently represent relatives. There are profusions of baby dolls, stuffed animals, kitten wallpaper, Christmas lights, and ad-hoc candleholders made from soda bottles or coffee cans, a glorious bricolage of whatever works. And if a TV set or wall socket happens to get in the way, so be it. It just gets assimilated.

However, if you're doing a higher sort of working, you definitely want to tidy things up. It's like setting the table for a cherished friend who's coming over. It's a gesture of hospitality and respect, creating a beautiful place for a conversation of sorts to happen. And if you're asking your friends to come over and help you move, they're going to come a lot faster if you've got a few boxes of pizza and bottles of cider waiting for them.

It's good to center yourself at least once a day, to suss out where the momentum is, interpret the specific changes and signs in your life, and figure out where's the best place for you to be. It changes daily, so when you stop seeking this place, and its constant shift, you risk stagnation, outdated information, resting on your laurels or writing crappy songs or whatever. This goes along with the whole principle that you can never stop learning, because the world will keep moving forward. Your altar will help you keep up.

There are people who like to "do it all from the mind" and claim that ritual is nothing more that psychodrama to get the mind into the magickal state, and that's fine, but I like the idea of setting up a physical altar for a few reasons. First, it's a language: by arranging the proper colors, herbs, and elements, you're communicating what you want to happen. The heat of the candle, the flow of the water, the rising of the smoke, is nature talking back to itself, relaying the message. Second, it's a material base to set up the exchange of energy, from material to intangible. Incense has been said "to carry one's prayers up to heaven," so this could be extended to the candles melting, the oil wearing off your skin into the air, energy taking on a different and directed form. Third, and this is debatable depending on how much you believe in reincarnation - we're only in these bodies, and using these senses, for a short time. Let's enjoy them!

the casting structure.

Start with the Statement of Intent. Define what you're looking to get out of the working. Don't set yourself on just one thing - leave the possibilities open so that something better, probably something that never crossed your mind, can happen. Chaos means infinity, and infinity means that if one path doesn't work, there will always be another. This is a great thing to remember in the midst of deep depression.

When you have the wish in mind, determine which element it falls in as a starting point. This will give the background for the image to emerge, and answer a lot of questions quickly: which energies to use, the color of the candle, the placement on the altar, etc. The various elements of a spell can leap into your hands the way words in a story or notes in a song are "channeled" with little conscious thought - the ideal state for the witch. If you find yourself on a roll, go with it.

Fashion a sympathetic image so the cast exists in reality, as art. Put together a diorama or different mementos or finds, devise if you'll have the figures act out an outcome, decide if you'll involve an elemental energy like burning, pouring, etc. Symbols are a very powerful aspect of magick, just as they are in art to express emotions, and psychiatry to sort out problems. A strong image can be used as a tool on the mental altar, a visualization to keep in the back pocket of your mind for when you smack up against challenging circumstances. Social anxiety, for example, can be charmed by imagining an astral cocktail with you wherever you go. Think about each aspect of your wish, if it's made up of several different pieces, and put a sympathetic image on the altar to represent each one.

Find a taglock so you are connected through contagion. This gives a tangible element to your cast, making it much easier to get your belief going with a piece of the real world on your altar. Clifford Bias has a list of suggestions ranked according to strength in The Book of Ritual Magic.

If you want to use something that has no place in the texts of yore - say, a CD, or a piece of rubber - you'll be facing a challenge of the chaos magician, blazing that first trail alone. Some find this unnerving, some find it exhilarating. But it opens a lot of interesting doors to experiment. Say you have a skateboard that's your main mode of transport. No inherent occult properties to a skateboard. But wait - these things are meant to move. Motion is a quality of the element Air, which breezes by your face as you coast down a hill. It might be interesting to chalk a figure on the ground, and run your board over it while visualizing your intent, and keep at it each day until the rain washes it away. That sort of thing. (No, you don't have to do everything on the altar. But it's an occult desk of sorts that holds all your spiritual paperwork. More below.)

Last night's rainwater, leaves found on the ground, a piece of bark from a tree that was struck by lightning, etc. include the force of nature in your workings, especially because they're "found". Walk in the woods - it's a vast library of powerful materials to help you.

Oils, herbs, incense, candles, and other witch-shop supplies are other elements to use. If you can't get something specific to cast a spell, there's room to improvise. If you're looking for Double Action Reversing black and white 7-day candles, which you want to pair with a green 7-day to reverse a debt, and the local botanica's out of them, you could get white votives from the drugstore and dress them in rosemary oil, while burning a green patchouli-oiled candle alongside it, and buying 7x the amount to last you the week. Think of it as using different words to speak the same meaning of a sentence.

Runes can strengthen your working. Find one that best embodies your wish - or, if two or three of them together best express what you want to happen, sigilize them. Create a symbolic language to carve into candlewax or draw with oil onto the skin, charging your stuff with writing. Symbols.com is a good reference for the creation of artistic messages.

Set up as many mundane routes as possible for the cast to manifest. The more, the better - not only will you have more control over how it will manifest, but you'll lessen the possibility of it coming back in one big bad way that'll bite you in the ass.

Phil Hine has a great page on banishings to construct your own space-clearing rites prior to casting.

What kind of trance states suit you. Art? A child's game? Skateboarding? Stilling quietly with a cup of tea and visualizing? If you're an artist, you'll have a much easier time of magick. Art and magick are two sides of the same coin. The subconscious manifests as lucid dreams, flashes of creativity, random impulses and images. The will directs these manifestations to finished artwork. If you're having problems concentrating or getting yourself in the proper mood at the altar, art can be a useful door to magickal states. It gives your mind, notorious for wandering, something to grab onto: the act of drawing a picture, or writing a poem, and letting yourself get caught up in the moment. It also strengthens the sympathetic image on your altar, if it was born of your handiwork.

Practicing your art makes you a stronger witch - when you look at the world with pen or brush in hand, you're much more open to opportunities, chances, seeing things you'd normally pass by.

Art is a constructed reality - it's made up of boom mikes and printer cartridges and tubes of acrylic paint, but it's a reality nonetheless, and creating the mirror-image of life as you want it is the first step towards bringing it into existence. Think about how many times we've quoted movie lines, or thought what would Morticia Addams do? Books, paintings, music, etc. connect our lives with a strong underline, when we get into the same bands or cult films. Instead of the experience unfolding in reality and remembered by only the ones who were there, it's a collective, manufactured memory, shared between the writer and the readers, or the filmmaker and the audience.

This is why the sympathetic image such an important part of the cast. Incense, runes, taglocks, elemental energies, etc. are there to help the cast along, but none of it works without an image to center on - art is at the heart of it, and why visualization is constantly stressed as the key to successful spellcraft.

In addition to setting aside a certain time for practicing of magick, you can also bring it into your daily routine. Working out, painting, writing code, you can have a candle burning alongside you on the desk. Find the spots in your day where you know you'll be in some sort trance state and bring a working into it, to harness those energies.

Watch for places in your day you can tweak your surroundings to bring them more in alignment with your wish. So you're burning red candles and burning love incense to bring someone special into your life, that's good - when you're getting dressed, search among your jewelry for something that has corresponding gemstones, like amethyst or silver, or sympathetic like a big red heart. When deciding on lunch, get the love herbs involved - sprinkle some dill or ginger into your food, or eat a fresh juicy apple. The next time you need to buy shower gel, again, call upon the love herbs - get something with lavender or mint in it.

To evoke a very well-worn but totally accurate clich�, hitting the moment to cast your spell is a lot like surfers "catching a wave." It's all about the moment where you have to get right on top of it, at the exact moment before it curls over - the momentum of the universe - that will propel you alllll they way back to the beach. Your instinct will be the best guide to let you know when the time is right, and when it's not - it's better to walk with your senses open and see what attracts you within a certain moment, then force something that doesn't work.

Not everything has to be done formally on an altar, with lots of pomp and ceremony - more intimate casts could include feeding an heirloom jewel or childhood doll with your body heat while you sleep. Sometimes it's best to work spontaneous and simple.

What to do with spell leavings? You scatter them to the winds, burn them in a candle flame or fireplace or bonfire, you can place them in a river or in the ocean, you can bury them in the earth, or at a crossroads. Again, it comes back to the elements. If it's a positive working where you want the energy to hang around, you can make it into a potent piece of art or jewelry, or bury it in your yard. If it's something that's still useful or special, but not to you anymore, you can leave it in the streets for the next person to find.

What about casts that need to keep going beyond the seven-day candle or half-ounce bottle of oil? One way to keep them going is by sheltering your altar dioramas within shadowboxes, where all the sympathetic images are housed together with bits of fabric, broken jewelry(gemstones!), found objects, and the like, fleshing them out into potent pieces of art.

a few words about love.

While I was working in the shop, the #1 request was love spells. And I'm going to write down here what I told all of my customers about that.

First of all, never limit yourself to one person. Not only do you want to stay out of the unethical shade of being manipulative, but it's smart magick: why throw all your energies at winning the affections of just one person, when there could be someone even more enchanting that you haven't met yet? Don't worry about influencing the feelings of others - concentrate instead on heightening your own attractions and loving yourself.

That's the whole key, right there: light these candles not for anyone else, but for yourself. Be attractive to yourself. This is especially important in breakup situations, where it's so excruciatingly common to twist yourself into painful shapes and try so hard to please someone else. A solid sense of loving yourself is essential to face down the gut-wrenching prospect that a paramour may not be infatuated with you anymore. Loving yourself no matter what happens will not only give you the strength to make it through the pain, but allow you to see the situation in a clearer fashion. If there's been coldness, gameplaying, and other bullshit, instead of being so fast to blame yourself, you'll end up thinking, "Damn. I deserve better."