Phrasing Magical Requests: How To Get The Spell Results You Want

I’ve blogged before on how to help get your magic working and why intentions alone in spellwork are not enough. The one topic that I keep touching on but haven’t had a chance to cover in depth is on phrasing your spell requests and making them as specific as possible.

First things first: how does one make a spell request? There are a number of ways this is done: petitioning a spirit, daemon, or deity, writing it out, stating it during the ritual, any and all of the above. Some make bindrunes or sigils that signify their intent and simply it for the sake of focusing on something more abstract to represent their cause.

But how do you best get your point across? I’ve said before that magic is about establishing that connection and then getting that communication going, but once you have that connection, what makes that communication?

Here are some good tips:

1. Be specific on WHAT you want. Make like you’re talking to someone who’s extremely literal or better yet, you’re giving directions to a computer. Leave no room open for creative interpretations, especially ones you do NOT want. Spell it out to the letter. Think of how a trickster might be able to get away with “colorful” ways to read into what you’re trying to request. I’m not suggesting being paranoid; this is more like “make that legal contract as loophole free as possible”.
2. Don’t restrict the hows to the point where the spell will not work, but know that a spell with conditions will both protect and bind you. A simple “harm none” won’t do it. What is “harm”? How do you define “harm”? What is “harm” to you may not be intuitive to whatever or whoever you’re making the request to. Yes, it’s good to leave a clause in a spell for fitness and weight loss that you don’t want to get here by “harm” but you need to define what you mean by that. Yes, you may want to leave your job but you may not want to leave it either by being fired or having the building burn down. Little things like that.
3. Write down what you want before you make the request. Seeing it on paper may make you think harder and get the focus a bit sharper before you do the spellwork. You’ll find sometimes you’ll go back to it and think of other things, different phrasing, etc. It’s one thing to know what you want, but to have it written down helps bring it to fruition in addition to figuring out anything you want to fine tune or tweak.

Here’s a good example: say you want to generate enough money to pay off a debt. You’ve gone through the trouble of acquiring whatever you need pertaining to money and finances for the spell, you even have an idea of what force you want to invoke for it, now you’re getting to the part where you want to make the specific request.

Thoughts you’ll want to consider are wanting an actual gain of money, not a shuffling from one resource to another and leaving you in the same financial position you’re in now. In short, you don’t want to owe any additional money through the settling of this particular debt. You’ll also want to include the possibility of getting even more money than the amount you have in mind. And of course, there’s the ever present “No, I don’t want someone to die and gain this as an inheritance” as that’s obviously a very crappy way to earn it.

Writing it all down, thinking about it very hard, and then getting the request as concise as possible is your absolute best bet. If it’s wordy with too many conditionals, it won’t be focused enough to get the job done. Your spell request will essentially be sent back to you with the comment “tl;dr”. You definitely want to avoid this!

Striking the perfect balance between being focused and expressing what you want to have as your spell request is really key.  With patience and practice, working on this pays off.