Making Magick
by Edain McCoy

Magick!
The word conjures up images of Witches murmuring over bubbling cauldrons,
fragrant herbs drying near old stone hearths, country wise women and
cunning men carrying their healing brews to sick children, and covens
joyously dancing under the moonlight while chanting their spells into
manifestation. Modern Witches still use magick in much the same way,
and for many of the same reasons, as our ancestors did. We use what
nature has provided to help us cast spells for health and healing,
for love and fertility, for prosperity and strength.

One of the two root words for the modern word Witch is the Old English wyk,
which means "to bend or shape," as in the shaping of energy. The other
origin is the Anglo-Saxon wit, meaning "to have knowledge or wisdom."
These roots imply that those who best made magick were people who
studied and worked with their art, all the while gaining the wisdom to
perfect it. By using this wisdom they could shape or bend the
physical world to reflect their will. This skill is still vital to the
successful practice of Witchcraft whether we are using it to make magick,
to astral project, to meditate, to create a ritual, or simply to
assist us in paying honor to our deities.

A magickal journey is not an easy one. Magick is work, much more so
than many who embark upon this path realize. Its techniques can be
learned and mastered, but it requires commitment. If magick were
as easy as merely reading a book, then going out and instantly getting
what we wanted, we'd all be rich, famous, successul, and beautiful.
We can have what we want if we really do want it badly enough
and we make the effort to obtain it.

Natural Magick and How It Works

Magick is what makes things happen. When we make magick, we actually
alter the landscape of our reality. Magick has always been a part of
Witchcraft, a natural force drawn on for thousands of years to help shape
lives for the better. Magick heals, comforts, and gives hope in the
face of despair. It offers us a positive focus for our thoughts while
working toward our goals, and permits us to recognize that we have control
over ourselves and our realities.

Contradictory to what the church and its cohorts would have the public
believe, magick is not evil. It does not draw on a devil or
anti-God as a catalyst for its success, and it does not thwart the
natural laws of the universe. These ideas were planted in people's
minds in a concerted effort to take away personal power and replace it
with groveling loyalty to the church and state that, at one time,
were inexorably linked.

Magick is wholly natural, its operations driven by the Witch's inborn
willpower. Or as coined by the infamous ceremonial magickian Aleister
Crowley in the late nineteenth century: "Magick is the science and art
of causing changes to occur in conformity to will."

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