How to Study and Practice Magic

There are a range of differing suggestions for how to approach magic as a field of study and a practical skillset. Following is the loose structure I recommend for aspiring magicians and that i have used myself.

Ample room remains, once this overview is applied to make adjustments and integrate helpful suggestions from elsewhere. Whatever approach or system you are to use, please be consistent, meaning study and practice often, push yourself with goals you can measure (learn this technique by that date, etc.) and keep a journal for the rest of your days on the path.

Magic Studies

The main category for my books on Amazon is “Magic Studies”, and I tend to kick this term around allover creation since learning that. I love it. The key is right there in the term itself, and it’s that second underlined word.

It all begins with a little studying, which inescapably means some reading or listening, or both, and then some thinking over what has been read or heard. Only after some quality study time can the practice begin, because first you must learn the very things you will later need to practice.

Binge reading or watching is a fine way to start. Absorb as much information as you can tolerate but stop short of taking on more info than you have the ability to process.

Comprehension is key. Reading 3,000 words is no good if all you can soak up is the first 800. Better to stop there and start piddling with some hands-on practice.

Once you reach the point where you have a couple of techniques to learn, split your time up between studying and “book learning” and actual skills practice. The ratio depends on you and how you operate, but make sure you are always learning new things, improving understanding of old subjects, and practicing your basic techniques regularly.

Schedule and Structure

These two approaches are of equal value but are different applications.

Schedule

If you want best results, (and why would you want anything else?) put yourself on some sort of schedule and stick with it. This can be loose or rigid based on your needs and capabilities. If you tend to be laid back and in the flow don’t set yourself up with something that resembles magical bootcamp. If you are more of a machine than a person, working long days and exercising three times a week, then treat your magical study thr same way and push yourself. What matters most is set a timeline and do it, consistently. Don’t half-ass the study plan.

This could mean reading in the morning before work or for a while each night after the shower. It could be practicing magic circle casting each morning at sunrise.

Daily work is best but if you can’t or won’t just stay with whatever you set up. Maybe you need to experiment to find a routine to stick with and that’s fine. Onward and upward.

Structure

It’s fun and can be productive to just play around and read or piddle with whatever technique you want. Do this sometimes for sure. I think you need structure to really drive improvements, so be sure to build a routine or two to intersperse between periods of play-study.

Structure might mean 30-minute reading intervals followed by 15 minutes of hands-on practice. Hands-on could mean sigil sketching, working with a wand, divination with Tarot or any other magical acts.

Somehow or another people disagree with what I will say now: Basic technique drills are critical for skill building. In other words you learn a magical technique (how to cast or raise a circle, clear negative energy, check your ESP for insights, ground yourself, etc.) and then you practice it often through attentive repetition to be sure you are making proper movements, showing good form, and so forth.

New skills should be ridden hard or at least steadily for a couple of weeks to a few months, whatever it takes to earn basic proficiency, before moving on to something else. Learn well before trying to learn fast.

Look at each day you study & practice and form a structure that gives you reading and comprehension plus skills work. Then look at each week and each month to link sessions together and build on logical next steps.

Here is an example to help give you a picture and make some sense of my rambling.

Bonnie reads in the morning before work most days, missing only when she goes in really early or has other obligations. She works her way through a candle magic book first, then subsequently reads articles online about sigils and elemental magic (two different topics). She has a notebook filling up quickly from this effort.

In the evenings, again most days, she mediates as soon as she gets home, before other things distract her. After her evening shower she spends some time in her quiet space or study working on circle casting and simple incantations.

She tries to do an actual candle ritual every week for some purpose or another. She has a sigil project or two ongoing much of the time and at least once per month she combines these disciplines for one major operation, either practical or esoteric based on her needs.

Improve by Doing

The best way to learn and get good at any activity is the performance of that activity on a regular basis. Doing things that sort of resemble the activity or that share some qualities with it is never as good as just doing the thing you want to excel at.

You wanna be great at MMA? Sparring is better than smashing giant tires with a sledge hammer.

If the plan is to become an amazing guitarist, then you should play music in the genre you love more often than performing rote finger drills that do not result in musical output. You should do your warm-up exercises and drills, but playing music is more important and should take up most of your time.

Excelling at magic is best pursued by enacting lots of magic. Banishing rituals are great for banishing but you can’t be a great magician if all you do is the LBRP every day.

You will certainly never be great if all your time is spent reading and talking about magic yet you never try to perform any. Such folks are affectionately known as armchair magicians and their existence is a baffling mystery to me.

Cast spells. Write incantations. Doodle sigils everywhere. Raise various circles and sit in them until they fade. Try to make it rain. Try to make her love you. Perform rituals, make charm bags, summon spirits, and holler at your dead ancestors on Saturdays.

Mighty magicians make more magic and more magic makes magicians mighty.

Progress-Based Goals

Based on how you are progressing, where you have trouble, and the like, set your magical goals based on reasonable and logical progress. Instead of arbitrarily saying you want x number of dollars by this date, maybe start with an amount of cash that is just beyond your current typical earning period or gig? This might include an initial goal of getting good at the technique you will use for the money magic by using it to nail a couple of very mall goals.

Try to move forward always, but accept you may sometimes either have to move sideways or stay put a while longer. If that makes no sense to you now it will when you need it to.

Progress-based goals example:

Laird is digging planetary magic in a big way, enacting rituals and creating natural magic amulets to nice effect. He wants to conjure a particular intelligence within the next month or so and is working on prerequisite operations as recommended for this purpose, all with the understanding that a successful conjuration of the intelligence will elevate his work with that planet tremendously and improve his planetary magic across the board.

Dana is struggling with her divination work but still feels intuitively she can excel at it once she finds her groove. Returning to basics, she engages some ESP card drills every day for two weeks, then begins re-learning a basic incense and crystal divination spell she was having issues with. Her goal is to complete the spell twice over the next week or so without concern for her results, but rather to enact good form and then record results for later analysis.

Coming Into Your Own Magic

For the first year I urge you to read everything you can get your hands on and attempt anything that is within your aptitude. Just load up on knowledge and get a versatile experience of hands-on effort.

After around a year some picture will begin to emerge regarding what ideas and methods you gravitate towards and take naturally to. At this point you can, making sure first to have a well-rounded baseline supported by a routine of practice, begin tailoring the study and practice towards your preferences and inclinations.

Given more time and work this preference will become a specialization. A few years on you will be working towards mastery of your own system, assembled not from window shopping and guesswork but from what you know you are best suited for.

The Makings of a System

A system of magic is how you do things broadly speaking. Inherent within this framework will be why you do what you do as well, because you will end up arranging things not arbitrarily, but to serve the most efficient ends and best outcomes.

A system covers all you do within magical work and it stems from your magical philosophy of what is possible and how magic operates. The philosophy of course emerges from your magical paradigm.

So you have

Paradigm
- Philosophy
  - System
    - Methods

Your system will be built on the methods you choose to work with. Some methods will be learned and adopted from others and some of your methods will be uniquely your own creations or arrangements.

If a system is how do things overall the methods are how you string operations together, how you form operations from acts, and so forth. Method is also the basis for putting operations themselves together. Here is another list to make sense of some of my jargon:

Methods
- Operations
  - Acts
    - Techniques
      - Fundamental movements and intentions

Ok let’s climb this one from the bottom up.

We begin our practice leaning fundamentals of movement and intent. For instance the idea of pressing your intention into something you trace with your pointer finger and the movement of tracing a pentagram are two fundamentals. The first is the focusing of intention in a certain way and the second is drawing the correct form of the pentagram.

Put these two together and you have the technique of drawing a pentagram in the air in front of you. Add some more fundamentals to make another technique, i.e. piercing the pentagram with your hand or wand to activate or charge it, often visualizing the pentagram as flame or light in the process, and suddenly you have a magical act.

This act is a stand-alone unit of magic that can produce a result. Depending on how you traced the pentagram, along with other factors (direction you face, time of day, etc.) and your intentions, this act might remove energy from an area or person (including you) or it might conjure or bring in a certain energy. The energy worked with could be elemental, planetary, or something more specific or general.

Placing additional acts with this first one will establish a magical operation. For example the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram involves four pentagram acts (and more), with one pentagram for each cardinal direction.

Maybe you build you own version of the LBRP. You might use this to open larger operations, or you may use it by itself. Here we begin to get into methodology. Actually we started methodology when you decided, in our example scenario, to engineer your own version of this traditional operation.

See how this works? Your methodology or methods eventually become a standardized, coherent system you can use to guide your practice and even teach others if you are so inclined.

You may want to check out the Kinds and Classes page to learn more about how magical operations and methods can be derived from various magical approaches.