Short answer, yes.  Just try it.  You need not know exactly how it works to make use of it, just like driving a car.   Women and men down through the ages have found that invoking the divine is a useful way to make things happen in their favor.

Long answer, yes.  But if you’re like me you need to know that magyc is not only possible but plausible.   This next section is long and involved so you may want to do it in a couple of sitting, like chapters in a book. I just don't know how to say it any shorter, or less logically. I guess, because that's what "real" means: logical.

So, click to bookmark this page. And perhaps, if a section is hard to read (I'm sorry. I'm doing my best to make this clear) you might want to come back to it when you've given it some though. If I can understand this stuff, you can too. Just takes time and effort. I told you the journey was not easy. Oh, but the rewards . . .

In addition, I have included a few of my favorite books on the subjects touched on here and links to sources for those who want to delve deeper into the mystery of the physical realities of real magic or question where I get my information from. Just click the book's title link. You may also find many of the non-witchcraft books in libraries. *

For your long answer then, I direct you to the Universe at large and the sub-atomic Universe within.  (Wasn't expecting that, huh? science generally being opposed to the idea of the spiritual, the occult, the secret powers of the earth, the Gods and Goddesses, etc.)

But let me take you back to the point in time when the spiritual and the physical sciences agreed perfectly. A time when everything was possible. The one and only time that this condition actually existed--now everything is finite except the infinite. Back to the beginning of everything. The birth of the physical Universe.

Everything was possible because nothing existed yet--nothing physical, that is. Energy was ALL.

That energy pervades everything even today--right now--but now it sometimes comes wrapped in a molecular package: us and everything around us, as far as the eye can see and the senses detect . . . .

So? Ready? We will have to travel at the speed of light.  That’s as fast as anything we know travels-- 700 million miles an hour in the vacuum of space. That means light can travel around the world 7 ½ times in a single second. 

Imagine how far light could go in a minute (448 times around the world), in an hour (26,889 times around the world) in a week, a month, and finally a year.  This last time span, a year, is  known as a “light year” and it is not a measure of speed but rather distance: the distance light can travel in one year.  Of course we can no longer use the circumference of the earth as a yardstick, the numbers become meaningless.  Instead, to give us an idea of cosmic scale we can say that the nearest star is 4.3 light years away. That’s a lot of miles away. 

To get a little better idea of the scale of the real universe, the Milky Way, our galaxy, is 100,000 light years across.  Light would need 100,000 years to go from one side of the galaxy to the other.  But that’s nothing compared to the size of the universe at large. 

Scientists believe that the universe is 18 billion years old.  How do they know?  Because they can only see bright objects out to 18 billion light years in every direction.  That means that what we can see of the universe is 36 billion light years across.  Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? 

Well, hold on because that's only what we can see because light hasn’t had time to arrive on earth from further away (and why they can estimate the universe is 18 billion years old)  Beyond that lies the vast majority of the universe, almost everthing.  It’s estimated that if what we can see of the universe were shrunk down to the size of a quarter the part we can’t see would be the size of the earth itself.    

Add to that the fact that even the total package. potentially detectable but unseen, is calculated to be 5% of what’s really out there—the rest being Dark Matter.  No one knows what that is.   But it's there.

If these concepts are as fascinating to you as they are to me, a great book on the subject is: The Nature of the Physical World by A. S. Eddington (I've set up all the important book titles on this page as link directly to the best source to own them)

If this is all Greek and totally boring, maybe you'd be more interested in going in the other direction: inward, when things get smaller and smaller on the same mind-boggling scale, until the smallest theoretical  particles are the size of nothing.  This, however, is the same nothing the universe was created from.  When my mother, a Catholic, hears someone say that the universe was created from the Big Bang, she always asks them who created the Big Bang.  If you don’t have an answer she will say you can’t create something from nothing, only God can do that. 

Okay, but like I said, the universe may not have been nothing in the beginning.  No thing but not nothing.  In the 60’s a physicist, Peter Higgs, theorized that the entire universe was actually pure energy (perhaps science may come around, yet.) 

Anyway, this energy apparently can weave itself into subatomic particles.  He even named the as yet to be found subatomic particles the “God Particles”.  This Universal energy pervades everything at all levels from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic and everything in between. 

Here's a link to the book where I learned about this phenomenon: The God Particle : If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

Energy?  Like in a battery or running through the wires by which we now communicate?  Yes, and every other form of energy going--all energy. 

And while we know energy well on a daily basis-we're using it now-- none can say what it really is.  Oh, we have equations to predict how energy will behave, hundreds of them, but they don’t say what energy actually is.  Einstein’s E=MC² is just such as equation that says there’s a great deal of energy locked up in very little matter.  It’s why a couple of pounds of uranium can blow up a whole city.   

So let’s call this Energy" God", for lack of a better word.  Now imagine the Energy at the very roots of all matter weaving together to form various subatomic particles that in turn form electrons, protons, neutrons and the like, which in turn form molecules of matter, which form the cells of our body and all life.  We are litterally made of Energy. 

“Let there be light” may have been a metaphor for the Dawn of Creation but an apt one indeed.   And when we say as witches that we accept the "Charge" it's the essential truth. 

Another interesting fact is that the atoms that everything is made up are mostly made up of nothing.  By that I mean, that the center of the atom is the nucleus with its protons and electrons and around the nucleus you have an electron shell.  If we were to enlarge the nucleus to millions of times its actual size, say the size of a grain of sand, the electron, in proportion, would be several miles away.  In between, nothing we could touch or detect.  The truth is that everything we see is mostly nothing.  Nothing but pure Energy.

Now you know why you can see through glass but you can't see through most other solids.  The energy fields that make up the glass pass light rays, also energy—they just slip through the vast spaces—but don’t pass "solid" energy fields (without breaking).  

Another interesting fact (to me, at least) is that when scientists began investigating the atom to look for the electron they found it right away.  There it was the first place they looked.  But then they looked another place and there it was again.  So they looked back to the first place and it was back there too.  So they looked all over and everywhere they looked there it was!

The fact that it's impossible to pin down anything on the sub-atomic level is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and it's one of the building blocks of Quantum Theory.  Fact is, no one understands the intricate workings of the energies that create and sustain the Universe.   Theories abound.    Don't worry; we're not going to delve into the intricacies of Quantum Theory.  It's really too much work.  Besides, if you think you understand Quantum you don't understand quantum, as they say.  So what's the point in of getting bogged down in other people's theories.  What I can tell you that it works a little like this:

Imagine that you want to hook up with someone that's already in a relationship.   Every time you're in a group with this person you  observe how they are, how they relate to their partner and others.  From this you believe you know what kind of a person they are and how they would be in a relationship with you.   But if and when that actually happens you find that everything is different.   This, as everybody knows, is because you can't tell what someone is going to be like in a relationship until you're actually in it with them.  Yes?  So now you understand Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (as applied to relationships) and you know as much as the world's most brilliant scientist knows about Quantum and the entire microcosm--for sure.  Nothing is certain.

Here's my best source for these ideas: The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar

 So don't let anyone tell you there is no God or magyc is impossible.  It isn't.  It's very possible.   And there very possibly is a God.  It's all Energy. 

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure if this Universal Energy is actually sentient, whether it thinks.   We may never know.   

In fact, that’s generally the line most scientists take. ‘Okay, everything is made of energy. so what?    That doesn’t prove there’s a God.'

 No, no it doesn’t.

However, here we are.  You and I. 

But don't worry, science has an explanation for this miracle too.   Our lives are explained something like this: a fortuitous series of events t started us up the evolutionary ladder to you and me.  Somehow, inorganic chemicals started combining in self-reproducing arrays.  Over millions of years these pre-amino acids became bacteria and the bacteria became single celled creatures, up the evolutionary ladder to human beings. 

And that’s surely what happened, give or take a few details. 

An interesting book is Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable.  And on the subject of what begat whom: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.

But that’s just the mechanism of how we evolved from inanimate matter to the crown of creation, not why it happened, the purpose of all this living and dying and struggling to evolve. 

If there were no driving force behind evolution we would still be bacteria. Nor does Darwinist rede, survival of the fittest come anywhere close to explaining why we would even want to survive so badly just to pass on our genes, why should we care as humans or amebas? The purpose of our survival instinct: the spark of life, the will to not only exist but to transcend. That remains unexplained. No, science needs to look a bit further, a bit deeper. 

And does it really matter exactly how we got here? Isn't it more important to learn why we are here and where we are going? And--most important--can we control our destiny?

We believe, as spiritual beings, that we can control the outcome of our life, that our consciousness is more than a skull full of neurons trying to figure out a better way to procreate.   Oh, it’s that.  But it’s something so much more.  

Consciousness is sentient energy.  Right?  When you die that energy goes out of us.  But while you are living, you are that energy being within your body much more than the clay figure of our body alone.  Perhaps the very reason matter has come into existence in the first place is to provide a vessel for that Universal Energy.

Given that the entire Universe from the unimaginably tiny subatomic particle to the unimaginably vast reaches of the Cosmos—all made of pure energy--is it so hard to believe that the energy of our consciousness can influence the energy of the universe at large?  That's what energy fields do: influence each other.

There’s a fascinating study done by two researchers, Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn: Margins Of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World in which they attempt to prove once and for all if it’s actually possible and provable to order chance with the power of the will.

  They start with just such a concept, a coin toss. But to limit variables they developed a black box to electronically flip a digital coin and record the results over thousands of trials. Then they would take anybody, the kid that delivered the coffee and donuts, the wife of a friend, as well as some who professed to have telekinetic ability and sat them down in front of the black box and had them will either digital heads or tails, one way or the other.  

Their theory is that if the ability to control chance exists it's intrinsic to the human condition and everyone must have it to some extent.  This produced a wide range of results from people who couldn’t influence the outcome at all to people who could and some who influenced the result in the opposite way they willed.  After literally hundreds of thousands of results, all cataloged electronically so there wouldn’t be any bias slipping in to cloud the results--as so often is charged in parapsychology experiment--they tabulated the result. And yes, there was a small but statistically significant correlation: people could actually influence outcomes with the power of their mind.

What stuck me was that there shouldn’t have been any correlation at all.  The rigid manner in which the data was collected and analyzed over such a huge number of trials should have washed out any chance occurrence and resulted in a perfect 50/50 split.  I reread the book several times and gave it to a friend who works as a statistician. She was equally impressed with the team’s rigorous approach. 

Nor did it surprise me that the result wasn’t greater.  People have to learn to focus their wills.  A great help is a rite or spell that has undergone a spiritual evolution since before recorded time to produce a higher state of consciousness, what Wiccans call Journeying Between the Worlds. That’s why we do ritualistic magyc and cast spells.  The best of us would be at a disadvantage if you put us in a room with a black box and told us to make heads come up.  Reminds me of those old Masters and Johnson experiments where they would wire people up in a laboratory and tell them to have sex.  I don’t know about you, but video cameras and wires would tend to spoil the mood for me, handcuffs, maybe. 

Human Sexuality by William Masters , Virginia E. Johnson , Robert C. Kolodny
This is a pricey book but used copies are available and you can probably get it from the library.

Another example of will making quantifiable changes in reality come from the renown Japanese scientist Dr. Masaru Emoto. You can read about his beautiful ice crystals at: http://www.masaru-emoto.net Again, the changes are not great but to be expected considering the parameters of the experiment and the fact that no special training or workings were used, just undisciplined will.

That magyc is possible we have seen.  But is it doable by you?  That’s the next question.   

The answer:
It’s hard to tell for a given individual. 

But it’s a good sign that you have come looking.  Perhaps your path has led you here.

And we can be pretty sure that great men and women in the past did work magyc.  Religions are usually founded on them.  Viviane, the Merlin, Buddha, and the Christ spring first to mind.  Of course there are those who would count Buddha and Viviane as mythical and Jesus as real but there’s exactly the same amount of physical evidence in all three cases—none.   At the very least, the Buddha is a great spiritual teacher; Viviane a great sorceress;  Christ a healer.  Whether the legends are completely accurate is of little importance. They are ideals. What matters is what we can learn. 

Recommending Books on these subjects:
Six great teachers of morality: Gotama Buddha and Jesus, Moses and Mohammed, Confucius and Socrates; a classified arrangement in twenty parts for the study and comparison of their teachings by Lawrence William Faucett

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (this one is fiction based on legend but a great read)

Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? by Morton Smith This book is a must have for anyone intending on working real magic. Jesus and his disciples worked miracles (magic) why not you?

In addition, there are recent well documented cases of what we call by the shabby name of "faith healing". Faith healers are just not as famous as the ancient healers because in our day sorcerers are presumed to be either deluded (at the very least) or fakers.  Science has ordained it so.

Divine Healing: A Scriptural Approach to Sickness, Faith and Healing by Andrew Murray. Not only examples of faith healing but methodology and techniques to aid in your personal healing spells.

 

All righty then, what we have learned so far is that science doesn’t have a clue to what’s really going on behind the scenes in the Universe.  But something surely is.  The Universe, as mentioned at the beginning of this journey of the mind you are taking with me tonight, is a really big deal, the biggest.  It’s a wonder we—all of us—know anything at all, or think we do. 

But don't get me wrong; science has accomplished great wonders.  The likes of which would seem truly magycal before they come to be known facts. 

Magyc too has great success stories.  Especially in areas where science is totally helpless, like chance: the ability to evoke and bend the possibility to ones will.  That’s magyc at its essence: the power to sways outcomes in our favor. 

No, for some reason you can't use it to win games of chance. Or maybe you can? There have been some amazingly lucky gamblers, over time. I just never tried. I'm involved in healing. You have to go with your heart on what you do with your power. If you want to light a fire use a match.

Nor does magyc violate the laws of nature.   Magyc is, has always been, and will always be the laws of nature as they unfold before us, though we may never understand them fully. 

The source of many of these concepts--I'm not smart enough to come up with them on my own--is a remarkable book by the trio of: William Tiller , Walter Dibble , Michael Kohane called: Conscious Acts of Creation

The main differences between science and magyc--though they are both the same thing when they are both true. Science firmly believes that if it doesn't understand a phenomenon the phenomenon doesn't exist. 

Or, if science allows for knowledge beyond its scope, it is simply assumed that the universe obeys set laws that will be eventually unraveled.   And it's true: science has done pretty well unraveling the easy laws of nature--like Newtonian physics and the movements of the heavenly bodies--until they discovered that all the laws they were discovering tended to interact in the real world in completely unpredictable ways.  This is generally where science is now: smack up against a brick wall called Chaos Theory.  Which briefly stated says that infinitesimally small actions have the power to spread out in time like an avalanche started by a single snowflake or a nor’easter getting its start from a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking (hence the name Peking Effect).

What science is saying now is that most everything since the beginning of time is too complex to formulate--other than in tentative theories and instances of probability.  This tells us nothing of the inner workings of reality and how to make it work for us.

If you want to delve deeper into the emerging field of chaos check out:
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by Mitchell M. Waldrop

We, as witches, believe magyc is real and that we can sometimes harness its power for our own uses, that people can be spiritual butterflies flapping their astral wings--and that by so doing direct the course of future events.   

What remains to be done is to make magyc more reliable.  But that may not happen for thousands of years.  A time when they may look back and say ‘That’s before they really discovered what they used to call "magyc".’   Though we who live now know that some of us knew it all the time.  

But let's keep it to ourselves, magyc being so incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands (where it has surely fallen in the past).  Fortunately for all of us, magyc has a way of destroying those whose hearts were not true, or maybe magyc is just difficult to do with ill intent.   Why?  I doubt we’ll even know.  The occult is just that: occulted, that which is not known.  We don't know how it works and we don't know why it works.  We just know that it does work . . . sometimes.

read: Hitler and the Occult by Ken Anderson

What we know is that our world rushes headlong in near total chaos.  So total that we have invented games to prevent us from the certain knowledge that we are continually plunging headlong into an unknowable  future.   We think we know.  But we don't

Besides the fact that the sun always rises--somewhere--we don’t know much for certain about tomorrow.  Next week is even more a problem and the year after next is a blur.  We may think we know what will happen but a short trip down memory lane—that's what a journal is good for—will remind us that five years ago you thought something entirely different was going to happen than what actually did. 

We just don’t think about it, like the fact that we’re going something like 25,000 miles per hour, all of us right now, spinning madly in space on a cooling ball of mostly rock and water orbiting a burning sun so massive that it could consume us in a second if we ever stopped spinning.   

And since none of us knows what’s going to happen, isn’t it sensible to do what we can to try and take the helm of our own lives by willing our intent on random fate at large? 

And how do we do that?   You guessed it: magyc!   

Forget the fact that we don’t know how or why magyc works .  All we think we know, probably, is that it certainly seems to work sometimes.  And if that statement  damns with faint praise it’s the most truthful I can summon.  It's enough for me.

I'll keep on casting enchantments, sending the tiniest astral wave into the void in fond hopes of having things  go my way.  And if my excellent good fortune is mere good luck then let me have more good luck.  And if those I have healed would have gotten better anyway, good!  And if those I have cast protection about were never in real danger, great!  And if my wonderful lovers would have come to me anyway, fantastic! Whatever it is I’ll take it!

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” –from Hamlet 

How true; how very true. 

Wow, this has been a long and deeply involved presentation--especially if you took some of the side trips in the form of books from where much of this information originates.

Thank you for staying with me.

But it's essential that we know that magyc is not only possible but doable--by you and me.

Now go, work your own magyc, perform your own miracles.

so may it be 

              Reni

*If you find a better source for the books I've noted please let me know. Thanks.