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The Dangerous Magic of Believing Too Much - Why Your Spells Don't Work


There’s a certain point in nearly every magical worker’s life where they brush up against the conspiracy crowd. Sometimes it’s harmless — a weird neighbor who asks whether mercury retrograde is real or just a NASA cover-up. But sometimes it isn’t harmless. Sometimes it’s your friend of ten years, who used to burn candles for clients and make decent oils, suddenly insisting that the Federal Reserve is a front for reptilian soul harvesters and that he won’t use peppermint anymore because it’s “coded” by shadowy authoritarian forces who want to end ESP.

It’s not just fringe weirdos, either. You can be reading a totally respectable book about herb magic and hit a sentence like: “This formula predates Big Pharma and therefore cannot be patented.” That’s fine, until the next paragraph explains that the AMA was founded to suppress ancient Egyptian energy frequencies. And it gets printed because — let’s face it — most of the magical community doesn’t vet sources like academics or scientists do. We're often working in folk traditions, where knowledge comes from oral transmission, old paperbacks, or just what someone’s aunt said back in the 70s.

But magical practitioners have always lived in a gray area between experience and evidence, which is part of what makes it powerful. You don’t prove a spell worked by running a double-blind study — you know it worked because the result came. And that, unfortunately, can make people vulnerable to a particular kind of thinking: if it “feels” true, it must be. If someone sounds confident, they must know what they’re talking about. If the authorities say otherwise, they must be hiding something.

And then suddenly your old spell buddy is telling you the moon is fake and all the presidents are clones.

One of the more frustrating elements of conspiracy theory overlap is how it leans on real history to justify invented nonsense. A friend of mine — who I no longer speak to for reasons that will become obvious — once told me approximately: It’s proven that conspiracies are real. Watergate and MK-Ultra happened. So that proves democrats being ruled by literal Satan is true.

That’s the leap. Because a conspiracy happened, all conspiracy theories must be true. There’s no regard for the difference between a well-documented historical event and a rant on YouTube. The idea that the word “theory” in “conspiracy theory” might mean “unproven speculation” is treated as nitpicking — because deep down, the appeal isn’t about logic. It’s about powerlessness, and trying to make the world make sense.

You’ll see this thinking all over magical subcultures. Someone asks what’s going on in their life, why are they unlucky, and instead of a mundane answer — like that they have a health issue, or are experiencing normal amounts of bad luck, or God help if the answer is something complicated like that technology innovations caused stock market changes that altered the housing market meaning their landlord decided to unload property leading to an eviction etc. etc. — the answer becomes instead a satisfying “you’re under psychic attack by the Deep State.” These aren’t just linguistic errors. They’re magical errors, too. Once you start believing that all bad things must be deliberate acts by a malicious actor, you lose sight of personal responsibility. Even old time hoodoo believers could fall into this trap — in Hyatt, one informant tells a story about tricking a guy who thought he was "cursed by enemies" into just making some lifestyle changes under pretext of magic, that cured his troubles.

More than that — such notions are isolating. Conspiracy thinking breaks down trust. People stop helping each other because they think everyone else is “asleep” or “part of it.” Even the other witches. Even their own students or mentors. It becomes spiritual solipsism.

Don’t mistake me. There are real injustices in the world. Some very real conspiracies have existed. People with money and power do collude to keep it. But a real conspiracy like the Tuskegee experiments, MK-Ultra, or COINTELPRO has a paper trail. It leaves in its wake victims and whistleblowers. It takes years to come to light and is usually unearthed by good old-fashioned investigative research.

That’s not the same as watching a TikTok about how the WiFi router in your house is a ritual altar for Moloch.

We can’t stop people from believing what they want. (Like Government = Govern + Ment, meaning Mind Control as if "ment" is even an English word with a sense of a mind. (It's in fact a common suffix of Latin origin for forming nouns from verbs.)

But as magical practitioners, we do have a responsibility to think critically — not just about science and media, but about ourselves. What are we afraid of? What do we want to be true? Are we letting paranoia substitute for actual discernment? Are we telling ourselves stories because they’re more comforting than uncertainty?

Magic is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used to heal, or to harm, or to dig a hole so deep you lose all light. If your practice has stopped making you feel connected and started making you feel like the world is closing in, it’s not magic anymore. It’s fear, disguised as wisdom.

And that’s one of the oldest tricks in the book — magical or otherwise.

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